1974 saw the release of debut albums by three young rock bands that went on to become legendary.
On their self-titled album, Canadian power trio Rush channeled Led Zeppelin on riff-driven tracks such as Finding My Way and Working Man.
British band Judas Priest played heavy rock – not yet full-blown heavy metal – on their cheekily-titled album Rocka Rolla.
And on another self-titled debut, Kiss, face-painted rock warriors from New York City, combined rock ’n’ roll swagger with British Invasion-inspired pop smarts.
The Kiss album featured songs that would live on in the band’s live set for decades until the final End Of The Road tour in 2023 – dynamic rock anthems such as Deuce, Cold Gin and Black Diamond.
It is one of rock’s classic debuts.
And in the early 2000s, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, the leading figures and main songwriters in Kiss, were asked to name the debut albums they consider to be the greatest of all time.
Inevitably, as two committed Anglophiles, they both looked across the Atlantic.
Simmons picked The Beatles’ US album Meet The Beatles! – a counterpart to the UK LP With The Beatles (which was the band’s second album released in their homeland).
Among the classic songs on Meet The Beatles! are I Want To Hold Your Hand, the band’s first US No 1, I Saw Her Standing There and All My Loving.
The cover of Meet The Beatles! proclaimed it “the first album by England’s phenomenal pop combo”. In fact, its release on 20 January 1964 came 10 days after the release of the group’s US debut proper Introducing… The Beatles.
However, due to the message on the cover of Meet The Beatles!, Simmons considered it their debut, and stated: “Here, for the first time, was a band that played its own instruments. There was no backing band. They wrote their own songs, they sang all the parts. And everybody in the band was a star.”
He continued: “This album was sort of a hybrid of anything and everything that came before it. Paul McCartney could do the Little Richard stuff and Lennon could do the Chuck Berry stuff.
“The Beatles combined of all the great things in rock ‘n’ roll, from Motown to country to rhythm-and-blues to soul, and they put it together in a way that had never been done before.
“Today, still, they’re the hardest band to replicate. It’s easy to be the Stones – you have a singer, a guitar player, and so on. It’s tough as nails to be The Beatles. You not only have to play drums, you also have to sing. You play lead guitar and you gotta sing and write songs.”
Simmons concluded: “The Beatles is the pre-eminent, iconic rock band: the template for what all rock bands, in my opinion, should aspire to.”
Paul Stanley is also a Beatles fanatic, but chose a debut album from 1969 by a British band of a heavier nature.
“The first Led Zeppelin album was an amalgamation of American blues and British sensibilities,” Stanley said. “It took a music form that had already existed and created something new.
“Nobody was singing like Robert Plant before he was. Sure, you had Terry Reid, you had Steve Marriott, you had people out there, but Robert just took it to a whole new place.
“And Jimmy Page, besides being a fiery guitar player, is a brilliant arranger.”
Stanley declared: “To me, Zeppelin was the equivalent of great classical music – it’s Beethoven, it’s Mahler, it’s bombast! And yet they had incredible subtleties and variety in what they did.
“It certainly wasn’t – to coin a phrase – heavy metal. To call Zeppelin heavy metal is at the very least absurd and at worst a sin.
“Zeppelin covered more ground than most bands could ever hope to. And I’d say that first album is the defining album. The first time I heard Good Times Bad Times on the radio, my jaw just dropped!”
