“Blood and guts”: the disastrous moment a country icon opened for Kiss
Of all the unlikely musical collaborations we’ve had in the world – Aerosmith and Run DMC, Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, Dappy from N-Dubz and Brian May – Vince Gill and Kiss are two artists at completely opposite ends of the spectrum.
Gill, the mild-mannered country blues star, is certainly not the person that you would pair with a bunch of hardcore glam rockers like Kiss, but stranger things have happened – indeed, it was in the process of traversing the musical landscape and finding their feet that the two crossed paths, but as the fallout ensued, it transpired that they would never meet again.
To make one thing clear, this was not a time in his life and career when Gill was known as the country behemoth he would go on to become. He was merely a tender 18 years old at the time, and making his first foray into the performing world through a series of outfits. One of those happened to be a lesser-known band by the name of Mountain Smoke.
It probably goes without saying that Mountain Smoke were not exactly the biggest names on the block, and certainly not the ideal candidates for supporting Kiss. But as luck – or curse – would have it, when the New York hard rockers pulled up in Oklahoma on their 1976 tour, their original support act had to drop out.
Mountain Smoke happened to be free that night, and so, without any knowledge of which band they would be opening for, they turned up to the city music hall and were bemused by the headline name on the banner they were met with. They thought there must have been some mistake, but no, it was the raging, face-paint-clad rockers who were the clients in need.
You can likely already guess how the night went: not that successfully, to put it mildly. It was best to hear the recollection of the man in the firing line himself. “They’re ready for blood and guts and rock ‘n roll,” Gill recalled. “And we get out there, ‘Deedle leet deet dee!’ So we didn’t last very long. The first song finished, and the whole place started booing. And not just lightly booing, but angrily, like a bad football game ending where the ref blows the call to cost the game. It was intense.”
Despite the pretty inhospitable environment, however, there was just a small part of Gill that kind of revelled in it. “I enjoyed hearing that many people pissed off,” he smugly remembered, before delivering his true pièce de résistance. “On my departure, I hung them the bird, and bent around and grabbed my ass and said, ‘Kiss my ass!’”
By this point, the crowd has descended into more of a circus mob than a group of gig-goers. The boos were roaring, the beer bottles were flying, and it was hardly the place where Mountain Smoke could safely carry on, so they had to cut their set short. It was one of the more memorable experiences for the short-lived band, to say the least.
When Gill eventually made it to the big time on his own, it probably wasn’t without any thanks to Kiss, even though it taught him a thing or two about working towards his target audience. Hard rock and country blues are pretty much the chalk and cheese of the music world – and if you need any better example to prove it, you just need Gill to recount the tale of that terrible night in Oklahoma.
