My First KISS

And an observation about memory and sound

My earliest childhood memory of music is of KISS. I’m not proud.

This actually might be my very earliest memory of all as this was October of 1978 and I had just turned four years old. At least it is the earliest memory I can conjure without the help of photographs. As I remember it, my mother and father were laughing in the dining room of a friend’s house. There were several adults and they were all playing cards. I recall the scent of cigars, as my father was fond of them.

The kids — there were several of us — were in a small room. There was a television, and thinking back on it we actually must have been in the living room as this was the late 70’s. But in my memory, we’re in a small room and the television is as big as a silver screen.

Enter our heroes, KISS, as they prepare to meet the Phantom of the Park.

I don’t know just how impressionable you are at four-years old, but based on the decisions that I’ve made ever since that fateful evening, I’m going to hazard a guess that you are pretty darned impressionable.

Funny thing is I never really liked KISS. I didn’t find them as creepy (and therefore as cool) as Alice Cooper. And I certainly didn’t find them as rocking as AC/DC — the first band I’d ever see on MTV (an afternoon following a Little League game spent over my friend Tommy’s house because my father refused to pay for cable). I didn’t find them as fun or as exhilarating as Van Halen. And I definitely did not find them as lyrically interesting or as eloquent as literally any band that has ever existed.

But they were the first.

I’ve got a KISS garbage pail that used to be in the kitchen but long since has been relocated to the basement where it provides storage for a collection of baseball bats, hockey sticks, and wooden swords. And I’ll still occasionally pull up a song or two just to remind myself of what they actually sound like. And that’s where I notice a phenomenon that I’ve occasionally recognized with other music… namely, that KISS’s music sounds better in my head than it does coming through the speakers of the stereo in my car.

That is in no way meant to slight what they produced. Rather, I’m impressed by this idea that a piece of music can be so ingrained in one’s head that the memory section of the brain seems to improve the mix. Because objectively, those early recordings are pretty thin. But in my head, they are huge. They are the biggest, baddest, scariest songs that the four-year old me has ever heard.