Kiss – Love ‘Em And Leave ‘Em

Gene Simmons wrote it for Destroyer, it didn’t make the cut, and eight months later it opened side two of the next Kiss album.

Eight months separated Destroyer from Rock and Roll Over, and Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em spent them waiting. Gene Simmons had a version of it ready for the first record, a demo called Rock and Rolls-Royce, and it did not make the album. He kept working on it. By the fall of 1976 the reworked song opened side two of the next Kiss album, made with a different producer and a plan to sound like a band in a room again.

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Recycling was how Simmons worked that year. Three of his four songs on Rock and Roll Over grew out of earlier demos: Calling Dr. Love came from Bad, Bad Lovin’, Ladies Room from Don’t Want Your Romance, and this one from Rock and Rolls-Royce. The before and after is now public. When Kiss reissued Destroyer for its 45th anniversary, the band released the Rock and Rolls-Royce demo officially, so the song that missed one album can be heard next to the one it became on the next.

The new album meant a new approach. After Bob Ezrin’s elaborate production on Destroyer, Kiss went back to Eddie Kramer, who had produced Alive!, and set up in the Star Theatre in Nanuet, New York, a theater-in-the-round, with a Record Plant recording truck taking the signal. Between September 28 and October 17, 1976, Kramer used the whole building to chase the band’s live sound. Simmons wrote Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em alone and sings the lead, and it was one of four Simmons songs on a record that, for the first time, carried no writing credit for Ace Frehley.

A week in a Massachusetts armory

Casablanca released Rock and Roll Over on November 11, 1976, with Hard Luck Woman already out as the lead single and Calling Dr. Love still to come. Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em stayed an album track. Days after the release, between November 15 and 21, Kiss moved into Camp Curtis Guild Armory in Reading, Massachusetts, to rehearse the stage show for the Rock and Roll Over tour, and cameras filmed them there. That footage became the song’s official video.

Kiss premiered a newly remastered HD version on the band’s channel on October 23, 2026, restored by Andrew Sgambati, following an earlier restored clip of Hard Luck Woman from the same week in Reading. The timing lands a few weeks before the album’s 50th anniversary. The film also carries more weight than it did. It shows the original four-man lineup on the eve of a tour, and Ace Frehley, one of the four, died on October 16, 2025.

The song never had a chart career, and it didn’t need one to last. It is a clean example of how Simmons built the 1970s catalog: nothing discarded, every idea kept in a drawer until a record had room for it. A demo that lost its place on the album that made Kiss stars became the side two opener of the album that followed, and the clip filmed to promote it has outlived the tour it was rehearsing for by half a century.