Paul Stanley arrived in Los Angeles with a guitar, and within a day it was gone. The guitar was stolen on the first day of his stay in Los Angeles, just as Kiss were setting up to record their second studio album, Hotter than Hell. That record came out on October 22, 1974, and the theft set the tone for a project that seemed cursed from the start. The band had left their home state of New York for the first time, booking time at The Village studio in Los Angeles. They had even toyed with calling the album The Harder They Come, a title that would have been painfully accurate.
Overdubs and a drunken cover shoot
Hotter than Hell was meant to build on the band's debut, but the ground kept shifting. The producers Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise, who had worked on the first album, wanted to capture the live energy of Kiss. Instead, the sessions filled up with overdubs, far more than on the debut, and the final sound felt flat. Wise admitted as much in a 2013 interview, taking the blame and pointing to the move from New York to California and a lack of time. The band's own chaos did not help: during the cover shoot on August 18, 1974, many members reportedly got drunk.
Six days later, Ace Frehley crashed his car. The guitarist showed up the next day with half his makeup on because of stitches on the left side of his face, and the cover is thought to mix shots from both sessions. John Van Hamersveld designed the sleeve in the style of a Japanese ukiyo-e print, with the character 力, meaning strength, at the bottom and the phrase 地獄のさけび, or cry of hell, in the right upper corner. It was striking, but the album behind it was already fighting for attention. Casablanca Records had just ended its distribution deal with Warner Bros., so Hotter than Hell was promoted far less than the debut.
Darker songs and Frehley's silence
The music itself was darker and heavier than anything Kiss had recorded before. Watchin' You, a song about a voyeuristic stalker, became one of the heaviest tracks the band ever put on tape. Ace Frehley wrote two songs and co-wrote another but sang none of them, too unsure of his voice to step up to the microphone. That uncertainty did not stop his playing from shining, but it left the album's vocal duties in other hands. Despite the rough edges, several songs proved durable: Parasite, the title track, Let Me Go, Rock 'n' Roll and Watchin' You all became live numbers.
Watchin' You, a song about a voyeuristic stalker, became one of the heaviest tracks the band ever put on tape.
The only single, Let Me Go, Rock 'n' Roll, arrived the same day as the album, on October 22, 1974. It was pressed in a small run and missed the charts entirely. Without a distributor's full muscle behind it, Hotter than Hell stalled. The album eventually crawled to number 100 on the Billboard 200, a modest showing for a band with big theatrical ambitions. A television commercial was made to push the record, but it could not overcome the distribution mess. Kiss were pulled off tour just four months after the release and sent back into the studio to record the next album.
The strange thing is that Hotter than Hell refused to die. For all the stolen gear, the car crash, the drunken photo shoot and the weak promotion, the songs kept working on stage. The title track and Parasite became concert numbers, and Watchin' You gave the band a heaviness their makeup and pyrotechnics sometimes hid. Kiss had made an album under conditions that would have broken a less stubborn group, and the record's flaws became part of its legend. The cover alone, with its Japanese characters and half-hidden stitches, told a story of a band holding itself together by force of will.