ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, September 7, 1996 TAG: 9609090110
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
If you ever owned a "Disco Sucks" T-shirt, you probably owned a Kiss album.
And if you still have your old bike with the banana seat or your red skateboard - the thin kind, that left your toes hanging over the edge - you probably still have those albums, tucked safely away with your Kiss Army membership card.
And you were probably in line Friday morning at the Roanoke Civic Center, waiting for concert tickets.
Afterall, we're talking the original Kiss here, in full makeup. We're talking explosions.
"When I saw them in '79, they hit some wrong notes on the guitar and the music wasn't so good," said David Pruett, a Roanoke accountant. But the show? "The show was great," he said. "It was like going to the circus."
In the '70s, the group's simple lyrics (``She's hot, hot, hotter than hell '') and simpler guitar riffs showed us that rock music didn't have to be hard - or difficult, anyway.
The band inspired some of the '90s' best-known musicians.
Garth Brooks, for instance. Nirvana. Lenny Kravitz.
Roanoke's Bill Crews.
"Ace Frehley influenced me to get a guitar," said Crews, 27. "I, um, think I've mastered the three-bar chord technique. That's about it."
The band's taken him full circle, he said. "Childhood to manhood."
Kiss - with makeup - was the first concert ever for a number of the 300 people who braved Tropical Storm Fran to stand in the ticket line at 7 a.m. Friday.
"My mom took me when I was 7 or 8," said Scott Elliott, 26 of Roanoke.
Kiss with makeup again - on Oct. 3 - will be the first concert ever for Stephen Calls, 5, who waited pretty darn patiently next to his dad, Dwayne.
Stephen, who is not shy, said he's never seen a real live band before. "But I went to the theater and saw `The Lion King' And we go hiking and fishing." He made a muscle. "See how tough?"
As the valley's most ardent Kiss fans - most of them men, in their late 20s or early 30s - waited for the box office to open at 10 a.m., they reminisced about watching Kiss play. In '76, in D.C. In '79, right here.
"They were my first favorite group," said William Abell, 30 and a brick mason from Roanoke.
Bob Chapman, civic center manager, expects the concert to sell out - in fact, he had expected to move as many as 5,000 tickets Friday. Fran changed all that, but not by much. By 4 p.m., 4,165 of the 8,500 available tickets were gone.
One of them was in the pocket of Jody Fernatt, 30, who drove in from Blue Ridge. "It's in my blood," he said.
And one of them was in the purse of Angela Webb, 26, of Roanoke.
"I used to take their records to day care," she said. "I would've floated here."
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB