Behind every kid with a love for rock and roll is a parent that lived through it all. In my case, that’s my dad, Mike Kennedy, who grew up in blue collar Hoboken, New Jersey and lived out his teen years in the sensational 70s. We covered his two core bands, with essential albums and songs that he identifies with most years after the decade has come and gone.
My dad saw the hottest band in the world, KISS, during their 1977 Love Gun tour. He crossed the Hudson and scalped tickets to catch the band at Madison Square Garden at just 17 years old. “I think every KISS fan would say KISS Alive! was their best album…it was like their launching pad…no more trials of orbiting in space. They went to the moon,” he told me. It’s true, the band’s live album blew their first three records out of the park, projecting the band head-first into stardom.
As for his favorite song off the album, he said, “the obvious ‘favorite song’ would be Rock and Roll all Nite…too easy. If you listen to She, the song is a 7-minute potpourri of choruses, interludes and semi-solos, crescendos and outros, whatever you want to call them.” My dad also mentioned the explosions, cheering audience, and whooshing sound of pyrotechnics. “I think the song is unique and demonstrates that KISS isn’t a one trick pony.”
Another Dad Kennedy essential band is Jethro Tull, prog-rock icons fronted by flute-wielding singer Ian Anderson. His all time favorite Tull album, Songs from the Wood, sits fondly in his memory along with the title track.
“WNEW Radio, in the late 70s, would play a whole album side [from different bands] occasionally. I was listening at home with my headphones and never heard anything like [Songs from the Wood] in my short rock and roll history.” He describes Tull’s songwriting as “more than songs,” and that they could “stand alone as poems and short stories of medieval folklore. And the flute!…it took rock and roll to a different dimension.” His favorite tune off the album is the title track, describing it through the words of Ian Anderson: “it makes me feel much better than I could know.”
My dad also claims their best selling 1971 album Aqualung as a close second, along with the title track and its “iconic guitar solo.”
Other Mike Kennedy essential bands, which I gathered from our conversations and memories in the back of his old Subaru listening to Q104.3 New York’s Classic Rock, include Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, The Rolling Stones, and, of course, The Beatles.
Even if you didn’t grow up with a classic rock parent, music is like a generational heirloom: one way or another, it gets passed down, through old memories, car rides, and conversations. Growing up on KISS evidently took me down a black hole of rock and roll obsession (judging by the tattoo of the band on my thigh, sorry Dad), and it would be a shame not to share the direct source in which it came from.
