Wicked Lester: The failed album that formed Kiss
Before the 1970s ‘Piano Man’ and 1980s pop sensation stormed the soft rock charts, Billy Joel was playing keys for far-out hard rock duo Attila, a duo Joel swiftly dubbed “psychedelic bullshit” once his solo career had taken off. Before studded leather and biker homoeroticism, Judas Priest were a billowy, long-haired, bluesy hard rock outfit far removed from the future new wave of British heavy metal they’d go on to pioneer—their hippy presentation on their 1975 The Old Grey Whistle Test performance was Judas Priest in name only.
Glam rock cartoon characters Kiss, too, had their roots in the 1960s counterculture, which bled through into the 1970s. Before greasepaint, elevating drum kits, and a sea of official merchandising deals, feline drummer Peter Criss was playing in New York’s Chelsea, and starry-eyed Paul Stanley and demon-faced bassist Gene Simmons headed the folk-infused rock outfit Wicked Lester.
A five-piece including guitarist Steve Coronel, Brooke Ostender on keyboards and Tony Zarella behind the drums, Wicked Lester sought to combine a love of Free, Buffalo Springfield, and latter Beatles for their eager race to stardom.
Rather than slogging it around the city’s and East Coast’s live circuit, Wicked Lester dedicated their efforts to cutting numerous tapes of material in their Chinatown rehearsal loft to entice the major labels for a record deal. Grabbing the attention of Electric Lady Studios’ engineer Ron Johnsen, Wicked Lester was offered the opportunity to record at Jimi Hendrix’s famous studio, spending the following year cutting a prospective demo LP during the studio’s downtime, lacking the funds to hire the facility themselves.
Having cut enough numbers for their proof of concept tape, the mish-mash of prog, baroque pop stylings and generic folk rock failed to impress Epic Records, which had signed them for their provisional debut LP. Released from their contract by A&R director Don Ellis, the future glam stars knew they had to change course on all fronts. “Paul and I weren’t happy with the record,” Simmons confessed. “It had a West Coast American hippie sound. We looked at each other and decided to form a new group, which was Kiss”.
Reducing the line-up to a trio, a focused pursuit of direct, hard rock brought guitarist and later ‘spaceman’ Ace Frehley to the fold, and taking cues from the emerging glam bombast seizing the pop world on both sides of the Atlantic, the Kiss behemoth was born in 1973 and would endure as one of rock’s biggest and most lucrative names.
Plastered all over the bedroom walls of many suburban kids across the 1970s, Kiss’ animated superhero quartet would find an exhaustive commercial presence across bedsheets, lunchboxes, and even their own 1978 TV movie for NBC.
Yet, Wicked Lester remains an important footnote in the band’s ‘Kisstory’. The chorus of their ‘I Wanna Shout’ Hollies cover would later inspire Destroyer‘s ‘Shout It Out Loud’, and Dressed to Kill would feature rerecords of ‘Love Her All I Can’ and ‘She’. Otherwise, for years, their prior band’s material would languish on various bootlegs, including Epic’s The Original Wicked Lester Sessions, a compilation Kiss bought out for $138,000 and buried. Finally, in 2001, three Wicked Lester numbers officially saw the light of day on the five-disc The Box Set collection.
