KISS pairs Eddie Kramer’s new ‘Mr. Speed’ mix with an unreleased ‘Hard Luck Woman’

KISS has put out a two-track digital single that pairs a brand-new Eddie Kramer mix of “Mr. Speed” with a previously unreleased outtake of “Hard Luck Woman”, the first audio from the super-deluxe reissue of Rock and Roll Over. Kramer produced the original album, so this is the man who first engineered these songs going back to his own tapes, not an outside remixer putting a stamp on a classic.

That matters because Rock and Roll Over is the record where KISS pulled back from the highly polished sound Bob Ezrin had built for Destroyer, cutting much of it at the Star Theatre in Nanuet, New York, instead of a conventional studio. It gave the band two Top 20 hits in the US, “Hard Luck Woman” and “Calling Dr. Love”. Putting a fresh mix next to an unheard take frames the whole box: the album as its producer hears it now, beside the album before it was finished.

“Mr. Speed” is a Paul Stanley song from the original second side, and the new mix runs just over three minutes. “Hard Luck Woman” is the acoustic-tinged ballad Stanley wrote and drummer Peter Criss sang; the outtake runs a little under four minutes. Earlier this month the band also shared the song’s original promotional video, filmed at the Camp Curtis Guild Armory in Reading, Massachusetts, during tour rehearsals and newly remastered in HD by Andrew Sgambati.

The box behind the single is large. It spans four CDs and a Blu-ray Audio disc with 130 tracks, 100 of them previously unreleased. CD one carries the original mix, remastered by Bernie Grundman from the original stereo analog tapes. CD two holds Kramer’s full new mix. CD three gathers 22 demos, outtakes and alternate mixes, including nine Gene Simmons demos, sessions from Davlen Sound Studios and the unfinished instrumental “Queen For A Day”, which was meant to become Ace Frehley’s first lead vocal on a KISS album. CD four collects Kramer’s new mixes of the band’s first shows in Japan, at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, recordings once intended as KISS’s second live album. A 104-page hardcover book by Ken Sharp draws on new interviews with the surviving members.

The caveat is in the pitch itself. The label describes Kramer’s work as giving the album a more modern rock sound, and the appeal of Rock and Roll Over has always been its blunt, room-sized crunch; a modernised mix risks sanding off exactly what fans prize. Two tracks also say little about how revealing the other 98 unreleased recordings will be, and day-one Last.fm figures show only a handful of listeners so far. For anyone who wants the new mix without the full box, standalone LP and CD editions exist, but the vault material sits behind the premium set.

The single arrived on October 16 via UMe, a year to the day after Frehley’s death at 74. The super-deluxe edition follows on November 6, close to the 50th anniversary of the album’s original release on November 11, 1976. The Kramer mix also gets its own LP and CD in a gold, red and black variant of the original cover, and the Blu-ray includes Dolby Atmos and 5.1 mixes of both versions, with the original-mix surround work by David Frangioni.

Tags: classic rock, hard rock, KISS, Eddie Kramer, Hard Luck Woman, Mr. Speed