Wicked Lester (Self-Titled) 1972 - Pre-KISS

Wicked Lester (Self-Titled) 1972 - Pre-KISS

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Wicked Lester. This was the band that Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were in for a couple of years in which they recorded their Self-Titled debut, before dissolving it and then morphing into KISS soon after. The album to this day has never been released. It's a must sought-after bootleg within' the KISS circuit. Well, it was till YouTube came along. The first time I ever actually heard the album was maybe 20 years ago. A friend of mine, who was way into bootleg this and bootleg that, somehow got his hands on this. I think he paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $45 for a copy on an audio cassette.

So, needless to say, I begged him to make me a duplicate. He did. When I got my copy and gave it a whirl, the quality was so piss poor you couldn't really make anything out of it with all the hissing and noise. He was saying that his copy was no worse than a 2nd generation loss. Mine sounded like it was 20 Gens. He let me listen to his copy at his house, and the quality was only slightly better. I gave him back my shitty copy. And that was the last I ever heard anything from the album.

But I remember liking some of the songs, especially She and Shout It Out Loud. The version of She was pretty much intact when it made it's way onto Dressed To Kill. But the version of Shout It Out Loud is nowhere near the same as what eventually made it's way onto Destroyer. The version on here is a hippie, flower power song. And for some strange reason, I like this version of it as well. This album is trippy to say the least when it comes to this very uneven and un-KISS-like project, even though technically there wasn't a KISS yet to make it "un-KISS-like".

Fave Songs: She and Shout It Out Loud

Rating: 3 Stars out of 5

Review By Chiprocks1