At the end of 1974, Kiss were in trouble. Their self-titled debut album had shifted just 75,000 copies. The follow-up, Hotter Than Hell, had stalled at No.100 on the US chart. Kiss needed a hit, and they needed one fast.
Their label boss, Casablanca Records owner, Neil Bogart told frontman Paul Stanley, in precise detail, what kind of hit this should be, using Sly & the Family Stone's euphoric I Want to Take You Higher" as a model. “He said, ‘You need something that your fans can rally behind – a song that embodies what you’re about,’” recalled Stanley.
The singer chose the right place to write it – in his room at the famous Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard. This joint became known as ‘The Riot House’ after all the wild parties that had been staged there, one of which involved Led Zeppelin’s hard-drinking drummer John Bonham riding a motorcycle along the corridors. Paul took out an acoustic guitar and within a few minutes he had it.
“Right away I had the lyrics: ‘I wanna rock and roll all nite and party every day,’” he said. ‘It was very primal in that it really wasn’t anything that I pondered. At that time I don’t believe people talked about wanting to party. It was just a one-word description of a way of getting loose. Rocking and rolling all night and partying every day isn’t so much a physical action as much as it’s an attitude. It’s a way of looking at life. It’s a mindset – a mindset about liberation and celebration of the individual.”
The song was completed with a verse from a work-in-progress Gene had, Drive Me Wild. “I never had the chorus,” Gene said, “but I had this notion of a car as an analogy to a woman, the idea of, ‘You drive me wild, I’ll drive you crazy.’ So the pieces were basically stuck together. Take my verse and attach it to Paul’s chorus and you’ve got a song.”
When Neil Bogart heard Rock And Roll All Nite, he was ecstatic. But for all its populist genius, Rock And Roll All Nite, only made it to No.68 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in April 1975. But it took on another life when a live version was extracted from the blockbusting Alive! album later that same year, reaching No.12 in the US. Just as Neil Bogart had instructed, it was the anthem that defined the band. For the members of Kiss – and for rock’n’roll partiers everywhere – things would never be the same again.
"Rock and Roll All Nite is astounding, in that every night we play it, it brings on a euphoria and a feeling of abandon in the crowd, everything that it was supposed to do," Stanley told Classic Rock. "It was meant to be a rock anthem that would sum up the philosophy and common point of view between Kiss and our fans."
It's done more than that. Rock and Roll All Nite has become part of the cultural furniture, referenced in everything from The Simpsons (in the famous Homerpolooza episode, Homer says, "I used to rock and roll all night and party every day, then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.") to the Winter Olympics (where Katarina Witt and Kristi Yamaguichi skated to it at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City).
It's also become a soundtrack staple, featuring in the movies Dazed And Confused, Why Him?, The Nice Guys, Gulliver's Travels, Role Models and Less Than Zero (where it was covered by Poison), and in the TV series Family Guy, Friends, The Dangerous Book For Boys, Ugly Betty, Dharma & Greg and Full House.
Tellingly, it was also referenced by Kiss themselves, on their 1976 album Destroyer. During the intro to Detroit Rock City, after a newscaster (played by producer Bob Ezrin) reports a tragic automobile accident, Rock And Roll All Nite can briefly be heard playing on a car stereo. Kiss needed to set the scene for what would become their first platinum album, and they knew just how iconic the song had already become.
