‘Detroit Rock City’: the real-life tragedy of a 1976 Kiss classic that has nothing to do with Detroit
Detroit may well be best known by its ‘Motor City’ moniker that inspired the names of Motown Records and the MC5, but for fans of Kiss, it will always be ‘Rock City’ thanks to their 1976 crowd favourite.
Obviously, Kiss are well-known for being from New York City, but that shouldn’t stop them from writing a song as a tribute to a city they enjoyed playing in. The places that bands visit on tour can quite often provide significant inspiration for material, and so many other acts have chosen to write hits that mention different locations they’ve encountered on the road, so Kiss’ decision to do this with Detroit, a city with a significant musical history, was no different.
Kiss weren’t exactly hugely popular until the release of Alive!, the live album that came out in 1975 and introduced them to the mainstream, so Destroyer, which featured ‘Detroit Rock City’, was the first album of new material that was going to be hitting a wider audience.
However, according to a 2023 interview with Paul Stanley on an episode of The Howard Stern Show, the reason they went to Detroit was that they started getting attention in the Michigan city long before anywhere else. “‘Detroit Rock City’ is an interesting one, because Detroit really embraced us before any other city,” he explained. “We were an opening act everywhere else, and in Detroit we were a headliner.”
For this reason alone, it’s a perfectly sound reason to want to pay tribute to the city, but when you dive deeper into the lyrical content, you’ll realise that something isn’t quite right about the way in which they’ve opted to pay their respects. In actuality, the song itself is based on a rather tragic true story, and one that, despite its title, actually has nothing to do with Detroit.
In the intro on the album version, you can faintly hear Gene Simmons taking on the role of a newsreader as he tells the story that inspired the song, which is about a Kiss fan who unfortunately lost his life in a traffic accident on his way to see Kiss in concert. Simmons sets the scene by saying, “A head-on collision on Grand Avenue this morning, the youth was reportedly driving on the wrong side of the boulevard when he struck a delivery truck and was catapulted through the windshield of his car,” before Stanley turns it all into a song that is sung from the perspective of the victim as he meets his fate.
But, despite Simmons’ intro referencing Detroit landmarks and Stanley explicitly using Detroit in his lyrics, in actual fact, this horrifying turn of events took place over 600 miles away in North Carolina. Stanley further elaborated on this during the same 2023 interview, stating that it was a somewhat unexpected diversion that they hadn’t anticipated taking at the time.
“It started as a tribute to Detroit, and then it kind of took a left turn,” he explained. “We played Charlotte once, and somebody coming to the arena was killed in an accident, and I thought how bizarre that somebody on their way to something so life-affirming loses their life. So there’s a juxtaposition in that song about singing about how great Detroit is, and actually about someone going to the show who doesn’t make it.”
Perhaps it would have been a little insensitive to use the actual location and turn it into entertainment, and the people of Charlotte, North Carolina, probably wouldn’t have been too delighted having their name attached. However, if Kiss were really going to pay tribute to Detroit, then their own citizens probably would’ve wanted it to be more about their musical heritage than a tragedy that took place five states away.
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