Kiss – Makin’ Love

Kiss shelved their Tokyo live album as unusable in 1977, and the man who recorded it just went back to the tapes

The multi-track tapes from Kiss’s first concerts in Japan were meant to become the band’s second live album. Eddie Kramer recorded the shows at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan in April 1977 and finished a mix, and then Casablanca and the band decided it couldn’t be used. The reels went back on the shelf, Kiss went to work on Love Gun, and Alive II came together later that year, largely from three nights at the Forum in Inglewood. Kramer has now returned to those same tapes. This performance of “Makin’ Love,” from the afternoon show on April 2, 1977, is part of what came back.

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“Makin’ Love” closed Rock and Roll Over. Paul Stanley wrote it with Sean Delaney, who also shared his credits on “Take Me” and “Mr. Speed” on the same record, and Stanley sang it. Kramer cut the album in the fall of 1976 at the Star Theatre in Nanuet, New York, a theater in the round he turned into a studio by hiding the guitar amplifiers under the stage and putting Peter Criss’s drums in a bathroom. Casablanca released it on November 11, 1976. It reached No.11 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum, carried by the singles “Hard Luck Woman” and “Calling Dr. Love.” “Makin’ Love” was never a single. It earned its place on stage.

Tokyo, April 1977

The tour behind the album opened on November 24, 1976, and finished in Tokyo the following April with Kiss’s first performances in Japan. The band played four shows at the Budokan between April 1 and April 4, two of them on April 2. Manager Bill Aucoin wanted Kramer to record that evening’s show for a live album, and the Budokan run became the session that would have produced it.

The evening show on April 2 became the familiar one over the years, the footage fans knew from the band’s own Kissology DVD series. The afternoon show was the other half of the day, and it stayed in the background. Its setlist ran close to the evening’s, with “Makin’ Love” in the first part of the set alongside songs from the new album. The band on stage was the original four: Stanley on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Ace Frehley on lead guitar, Gene Simmons on bass and Criss on drums, a few months into a run of albums that had made them one of the biggest live acts in America.

The official upload carries its own description, and it is worth quoting as given. The footage has been “newly remastered visually in HD by Andrew Sgambati with brand-new audio mixed by Eddie Kramer from the multi-track analog tapes.” The same afternoon-show performance of “Makin’ Love” leads the April 2 section of Live in Japan 1977, a previously unreleased disc in the Rock and Roll Over 50th anniversary Super Deluxe Edition that Kiss scheduled for November 6, 2026. That disc draws on all four Budokan shows, newly mixed from the original analog tapes by the engineer who recorded them.

Frehley died on October 16, 2025, a year before this footage reached the band’s channel, and that gives the clip a weight nobody intended when it was filmed. It also settles an old judgment. In 1977 Kiss and their label heard the Budokan tapes and decided they were not good enough to release. Nearly fifty years later, the same reels anchor the anniversary of the album they were recorded to promote. “Unusable” turned out to be a verdict about one moment in the band’s schedule, not about the music, and Kramer, the man who set up the microphones in Tokyo, was the one who went back to prove it.