Free Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal by Jon Wiederhorn Page A

fine-tuned their craft, KISS again invited Epic vice president of A&R Don Ellis down for a showcase. The band performed their best new songs, including “Firehouse,” “Strutter,” and “Deuce,” but Ellis was used to the pop-rock sound of Wicked Lester (whose record he had previously rejected), not the pedal-to-the-floor adrenaline rush of KISS. The dramatic embellishments only added to his lack of interest, and Ellis opted out for the second time.
GENE SIMMONS: We played “Firehouse,” and at the end of the song we start ringing this bell, and Ellis thinks it’s a real fire. So Paul runs over to the corner and grabs a red pail with the word fire on it and throws it at Don, who freaks as a bucketful of confetti goes all over the place. He gets up and starts to walk out, saying, “Okay, thank you, I’ll call you.” As he’s heading for the door, he trips and falls. Then, Peter [Criss’s] drunken brother, who was sitting behind Don, throws up on his foot. We never heard from him again.
PAUL STANLEY: Fortunately, Ron Johnsen, who did our Wicked Lester album, still owed us $1,000 for some backup singing Gene and I had done for him. So we called him and he said he could pay us in studio time. We agreed, and we knew Eddie Kramer hung out there and produced. He was the best. He had worked with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, you name it. So we said to Ron, “We’ll take the money you owe us in recording time, but only if Eddie Kramer produces our demo.” After we did the demo with Eddie we got signed by Neil Bogart and ended up on Casablanca Records.
    While KISS knew how they wanted to look almost from the start, it took Judas Priest some soul searching—and shopping—to find the leather, studs, and roaring motorcycles that became a template for metal in the early eighties. In the meantime, they honed their sound to a razor sheen.
IAN HILL: In the seventies, we wore velvet and satin and tried to squeeze our girlfriends’ shoes on. The way people dressed was still very hippie-based, and that flowed over into our stage clothes.
GLENN TIPTON: If you look at what Hendrix and Cream were wearing, we weren’t far from that. We had flares and there were a few Cuban heels on the old boots. Very dangerous onstage, I may add. Fortunately, we all managed to get through that era without snapping our ankles.
ROB HALFORD: There were tremendous things happening with Priest in the seventies. We got our record contract. We release Rocka Rolla [in 1974], which was a good first effort. Suddenly your music is available around the world, which is tremendously exciting. We had great tracks like “Never Satisfied” and “Cheater.” But I think a lot of people say it’s a band’s second release that becomes very, very important to them, and that was certainly the case with Sad Wings of Destiny in 1976.
MARTIN POPOFF: It felt like that Jimi Hendrix moment where something just descended from the skies—a bunch of nobodies not even on a major label making a record that just wiped the slate clean with everybody. One of the interesting things about Sad Wings of Destiny is that it arrived at a time when all the big dinosaur bands of the era seemed to be faltering somewhat. Judas Priest had very dramatic cover art, very religious and serious-sounding names of songs, this operatic singer that could out-Plant Robert Plant, and above all, the riffs on that album were the best riffs anybody had written to date in heavy metal, and there were twelve of them in every song.
IAN HILL: Unfortunately, our label back then, Gull Records, didn’t have enough money to promote and produce their artists. They were waiting for us to make the company [famous] rather than the other way around. They couldn’t afford to send us to America and you do have to make it in America to become successful, so we remained unknown there for a while. The thing is, when you’re starting up you’ve got nothing, so when someone hands you a record contract, no matter how