Fifty years is a long time to sit on a tape, but some nights are worth the wait. On August 20, 1976, Kiss took the stage at Anaheim Stadium in front of more than 42,000 fans, the biggest crowd they’d played to at that point in their career. It was peak makeup-era Kiss, full pyro, full theatrics, and a band that had just started to realize how big this whole thing was about to get.
That night was captured live by Eddie Kramer, the engineer behind Alive! and records ranging from Hendrix to Zeppelin, and for decades it sat mostly unheard outside of bootleg circles. Now, to mark the 50th anniversary, Kramer has gone back into the original multi-track tapes and remixed the whole show from scratch. The result is Destroys Anaheim ’76, a 60-plus minute document of Kiss at their most explosive, finally sounding the way it should.
The pressing is a 2LP set on 180-gram black vinyl, which is the right call for a live record this dynamic, you want the headroom. It comes with an insert pulling liner note highlights from the Deluxe edition along with unreleased photos and memorabilia imagery, so even folks who already know the bootleg will find something new to dig into.
We don’t see a lot of straight-up arena rock live albums come through the shop with this kind of pedigree behind them. Eddie Kramer remixing his own tapes half a century later is the kind of reissue story that actually means something, not just a repress with a new sticker on it. If you grew up on Alive! or Alive II, or you just want to hear what a Kiss show sounded like before the band became a caricature of itself, this one’s worth setting aside.
Destroys Anaheim ’76 is up for pre-order now at $36.99, with a release date of August 21, 2026. Copies are limited, so if you want one, don’t sleep on it. Stop by the shop or grab yours online below.
- Available on August 21, 2026
