January 1997 I bought myself a Windows computer, for two reasons, first to get access to the internet, the other to build my own website. May 17, 1997 an early version of KISS Related Recordings was launched online.

During the first 3 to 4 years it wasn’t easy to keep the site online, too many providers quitted their services, and each time I had to find myself a new service provider with new (highly) costs a month, still asking myself if it’s all worth the time. Time changes everything, and for the last 10 - 12 years it all looks pretty stable.

Nowadays the (ex-) members of the band KISS are involved with over 400 official releases besides the band's own discography, which all are listed on the KISS Related Recordings website. Beside the official releases hundreds of (unreleased) demo songs are recorded by KISS or some of its members, which are (nearly) all listed on this site. 
If that’s not enough, a little over 100 KISS Tribute albums are released (incl. the bigger digital download projects by KISSfaq and KISS Sweden). Besides the KISS tribute albums, over 1000 KISS songs are covered and officially released by other artists and bands with a wide range of music styles … from Monk choirs to Death Metal, from Hardcore to Jazz …. You name it, it’s been done ....

How this  all started  1977  - 1981 :
Remember the time when you’ve bought a new album, reading the credits while spinning the vinyl ?
On September 18, 1978, Kiss did something that no other band had ever done: they released four records on the same day, one solo-record from each member. As a young teenager my vinyl KISS collection wasn’t complete yet, so it took me some months before I had all of them. 
I was impressed with the long lists of guest musicians, especially on the Gene Simmons’ and Peter Criss’ albums, the latter even had a paper insert with all the credits ….
Some were familiar from previous KISS albums, like producer Eddie Kramer, co-writers Sean Delaney , Stan Penridge. Others I already have heard of, like backing singers Cher and Donna Summer… also a friend of mine had a BOB SEGER live album. Spring 1979 I learned that Rick Nielsen was the guitar player of CHEAP TRICK, who had u huge hit back then with their live version of “I Want You To Want Me”.

I discovered KISS late 1977, when I heard a live recording on the radio, probably “Rock ‘n’ Roll all Nite” or “Let me go, Rock ‘n’ Roll” (from Alive!) and the beat, the participation of the audience, as well as the intro rap, got my interest. It was so different to the other Rock music (like Deep Purple or Stones) I’ve heard before.
When the DJ said it was Kiss (easy to remember) I went to a record store the same week and found out how they looked. A few weeks after I bought my first Kiss vinyl “Destroyer”, simply because the cover sleeve looked the best.
At the time most of my friends were into Queen, E.L.O. and Status Quo, while the girls liked ABBA, Saturday Night Fever , Grease …. or David Bowie’s “Stage” live album.

My first concert was KISS at the Groenoordhal, Leiden, the Netherlands October 5th with Iron Maiden opening. During that period most of my (new made) friends were into New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, while I was ‘discovering’ American Hard Rock , AOR, and even P-Funk (Rick James). In 1981 I bought the album “Sheer Greed” by UK band GIRL, which was released a year earlier, simply because they had covered KISS “Do You Love Me” ….

How this  all started  1982  - 1984 :
When I was 18, Summer 1982 I rented a 12 x 12 foot room on an attic. I had to share the kitchen, bathroom with my neighbor. That neighbor was in his late twenties and collected all Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin related vinyl’s, demo- and live tapes. His room was the same size as mine, but it was filled with records, tapes and ashtrays all over ….  I had two thoughts, wow this is Hard Rock Heaven and the other "how did he ever get a nice girlfriend accepting this ?"
He was the first world-wide tape trader I ever met, If he didn’t like it, he gave it to me, like METALLICA’s TDK 7-track demo … I also remember getting a bunch of TWISTED SISTER live tapes ….
That time I was looking forward to anything of WASP. When KISS “Creatures Of The Night” album was released, UK magazine KERRANG wrote that Ace Frehley was producing W.A.S.P.
Around the same time I 'discovered' NEW ENGLAND's 1979 album which was co produced by Paul Stanley.
Because of Russ Ballard’s credits on Ace Frehley (1978), Peter Criss “Let Me Rock You” album, as well as for his credits for Rainbow and Samson, I started buying Russ Ballard albums, the first one I bought was “Into The Fire”.
Between summer 1982 - January 1985 I’ve bought hundreds of vinyl's, including Wendy O'Williams, Bryan Adams, Was (Not Was), Black Jack, Michael Bolton, Stevie and Black 'n Blue.
Of course I didn’t know back then that the guitar player, Tommy Thayer of Black 'n Blue, would join KISS later on.

With the release of KISS “Animalize”, followed by their European tour with Bruce Kulick in the band, there was a sort of basis to start collecting KISS Related releases instead of KISS merchandise and toys. When Bruce Kulick joined KISS his name was familiar to me, simply because of Michael Bolton’s solo debut and the Stevie album.

Another person who took my interest was Jean Beauvoir. In 1980 I had bought PLASMATICS “New Hope For The Wretched” to find out what this band is all about. That year someone from a Dutch TV station was fired for inviting The Plasmatics to perform a couple of songs at TOP POP (Dutch version of Top Of The Tops).  Because of the mess the band made during their performance in the studio, the song(s) were never broadcasted on TV.
Just before the release of KISS “Animalize” (Jean Beauvoir co-wrote "Thrills In The Night"), I saw an incredible live performance of LITTLE STEVEN & THE DISCIPLES OF SOUL at German television,  which band includes Jean Beauvoir , David Rosenthal (Rainbow) and Gary Tibbs (Adam and The Ants).
The same year Maria Vidal (Backing vocals on Paul Stanley 1978 album) had a hit single with “Body Rock”.

How this  all started  : collecting all Kiss Related releases, incl. demo bootleg albums and tapes
I don’t have a clue if this already existed before, but from 1985 I started attending record conventions, and in a very short time I came home with KISS bootleg vinyl’s, like ACE FREHLEY "Back In The Groove", demo bootlegs of KISS "Fancy Fair", "Fancy Mix", "Music From The Elder", "A Black Diamond" (from the "Lick It Up" Right Track Studio sessions), as well as a bootleg vinyl of WICKED LESTER and VINNIE VINCENT.

In the meantime Gene Simmons started producing albums for KEEL(1985), BLACK 'n BLUE (1986, which features Peter Criss), Peter Criss was touring with BALLS OF FIRE (1986), while Mark St. John released his WHITE TIGER  debut album, and Vinnie Vincent his solo debut the same year.

Prior to the internet, Dutch Hard Rock and Metal magazine ‘Aardschok’ and Belgium Melodic Rock magazine ‘Rock Report’ during the nineties, made it easy to get informed about releases which are related to one of the current and previous members of KISS.





Computer skills and discovering internet :
Early nineties I bought myself a 2nd hand Commodore 64 computer. With “Easyscript” that thing was useful for making lists of my audio and video collection. Besides working with a DOS at work I wasn’t much into computers.
During August / September 1995 I was on holidays in New York during the week MS Windows ’95 was launched. The whole campaign on the streets and television took my interest. Sure, I was aware of (Apple) Macintosh computers using icons on the desktop, my brother bought a small expensive one a couple years before….
But hey’, "This looks easy to me" …
Back home, during the summer of 1996 I visited a nearby newly opened internet-café a couple of times, to check the latest updates on KISS OTAKU about KISS 1996 reunion tour. From that moment on I wanted my own personal computer. At the time I had some shares on the stock exchange, and by the end of 1996 it was worth enough to buy my first personal computer. Halfway January 1997 I got the money and bought a 2GB computer …
I wanted to build my own website as soon as possible. Looking back it’s hard to believe, but a 1MB (!!)sized website including the connection (by phone) costed me about $ 18,- a month at the time.

Between February - April I was checking the internet to find out how to build a website, and find myself a topic for a website. A friend of mine had some original cinema promo pictures of “KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park”, so I considered a website about the 1978 movie. Soon after I realized that when the website is done it’s probably finished forever …. meaning, not a good option on the long term.
The best option than was to do a website about the stuff I already collected myself and knows best’.
With the KISS reunion going on there was a big chance Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer start their own projects just like Peter Criss, Ace Frehley, Vinnie Vincent and Mark St. John. So Kiss-Related-Recordings was born.
With about 10 tribute albums in my collection (1997) there also was a start for a Tribute album section as well as for other Kiss cover versions.
Except for the very first version of KISSfaq (which at the time merely summed up bootleg albums, starting with Wicked Lester) there was no website which had a pure issue on Kiss Related Releases.

MAY 17, 1997 : KISS Related Recordings launched online vs. The Early Days of The Internet
The site was originally named MAINLINE with the subtitle ‘Kiss Related Recordings’, which gave me the opportunity a short email address mainline@tip.nl and a cool URL www.kiss.club.tip.nl.
I don’t have a clue where ‘club’ came from, probably my provider would suggest TIP (The Internet Plaza) was a sort of club.
In 1997 KISS Related Recordings was no more than an index page leading to 9 sub pages with the discography and demo’ songs of each (past) member of KISS, and one extra page listing KISS Tribute albums and KISS cover versions. Each page had its own font color, red for Gene Simmons discography , purple for Paul Stanley discography, and so on.  Because of the small space (1MB only) there was only text left to mention the info of the particular song on an album related to any of the (past) Kiss members, and each time the site was growing I had to remove the already resized 8kb scanned photo’s of the album covers. I was able to get some free internet space at Tripod/Lycos and Geocities. Putting my html pages there gave me Pop Up ads, but soon I found out that these ads didn’t show up when I stored my images there … so by the end of 1997 I had KRR’s html pages uploaded on TIP and all used images were uploaded and stored at Tripod/Lycos and Geocities ….

Click the 1997 banner below to check the 1997 online version of KISS Related Recordings.


Still 1 MB html space was not enough, so September 1998 I switched from TIP to Get2Net/Tele2 , a Swedish provider that had just started their business (for the first time) in The Netherlands and who gave me 10MB web space for roughly the same amount of money.
At that moment the KISS-Related-Recordings website had grown to 7MB spread out over various services and providers. Tele2 Dutch internet services didn't last long. March 11, 2000 I received an email from Tele2 that they quit their provider service in The Netherlands March 25, 2000 !!!

Between May 1997 and March 2000, I had a made a lot of new friends world wide.
Many of them helped me with news updates, missing details, suggestions, including Jean Beauvoir (who was the first artist to contact me late 1997), Mitch Weissman, Rosetta Stone (Rozetta), Tod Howarth, a.o.
I especially want to mention Mike Ruzek, Jiri Falka, Zoran Mstitel and Urban Fagerholm. In the very beginning of KRR these four people sent me vinyl's, compact discs, tapes and detailed info I didn’t know about ….



Mike Ruzek was very dedicated to help me out with the KISS Related Recordings, and from one moment to another (November 1999) he suggested to collaborate on a new online project entitled KISS-Land.com.
The main plan was to have put 3 separate sites together, Mike’s “KISS-Media-worldwide” (Czech Republic), Kiss-Related-Recordings (Netherlands), with Derek (USA) handling the mp3 radio stream .
During December 1999 we worked hard and launched KISS-Land.com on January 1st 2000. Because the site was registered in the USA Mike and I didn’t had a clue that payments were done by the parents of a teenager, which we found out a month later. It didn’t feel right, which made us decide to quit and start over again.

All in all this meant that by the end of March 2000 both versions of KISS-related-recordings (the original one on Tele2) and the refreshed one on KISS-Land.com where offline. When I started Mainline / KRR early 1997, costs for a real domain without webspace / hosting was about $ 600,- to $ 1500,-.
Now 3 years later the price was down to $ 100,- to $ 200,- a year for hosting a domain with webspace.

March 28, 2000 I had my own ‘real’ domain www.kiss-related-recordings.nl for $ 130 a year.
I still needed a standard provider instead of Tele2 to have connection to the internet which was still by phone.
For that service I choose for MyWeb.nl. Between 2000 and 2016 MyWeb.nl was taken over three times, first by Wanadoo.nl., then it changed to Orange.nl and finally to Online.nl. So, in the end I’m glad I had chosen for a ‘real’ domain in 2000. Funny story is that www.kiss-related-recordings.nl was originally hosted through freehosting.nl (Netherlands). One year later freehosting was merged by LaDot (Denmark) and a couple years later by Active24 (Scandinavia, which recently moved their business to Czech Republic), but without the trouble I had during the 90’s ….

While all files were moved to the new domain www.kiss-related-recordings.nl, Mike Ruzek and I still kept our plans to have our own KISS related online radio-station. After the KISS-Land.com debacle by the end of February 2000, Mike and I joined forces with US based Stephen of the popular "KISS'n KOUSINS" mp3 streams.
Together we started a single large web site related to our favorite rock group, KISS.
May 24th, 2000 www.WeGotYourRock.com was officially launched, again with Mike’s “KISS-Media-worldwide” (Czecho Republic), Kiss-Related-Recordings (Netherlands), and this time Stephen handling the KISS and Kiss related radio stream.
Luck wasn’t on our side, within a month we received the news that Mike Ruzek died during a carcrash on his way to Prague June 16, 2000 …. After the shock of losing a good friend wore off, we decided to continue with the site as planned. However, with KISS starting their "Farewell Tour" around the same time, we decided to make some slight changes in the plans for the site.
 

With the original KISS Related Recordings website, many people from the US e-mailed me to ask where to purchase the European Kiss related releases, such as Crown Of Thorns, Garbo Talks, Mystic Healer and Stream. With the increased interest in Kiss related recordings, as well as an article that appeared on the MelodicRock.com site, we thought the time was right to start a new radio station, one that would promote Melodic Rock music in an effort to help bring this type of music back to the USA. So, during summer 2000 it was decided we would do two more stations: one for the AOR/Melodic/Pop rock, and another for Hard Rock & Heavy Metal !
With three Internet radio stations -- AOR/Melodic/Pop Rock, Hard 'n' Heavy, and KISS'n KOUSINS -- there was no doubt that WE GOT YOUR ROCK !!!! …..

Out of respect to Mike, we kept the unfinished KISS Media section on the WeGotYourRock site.
Besides KISS related recordings a new section was added with album detailed pages, including (small) reviews of albums from which we played a song or two on one of the radio streams. Aside from our regular daytime jobs it was fun to do, but very time consuming. It was clear that we needed new people to get involved …. By the end of 2001 about 8 more people joined with our WeGotYourRock.com project, but from there it went wrong. All our communication about goals and targets was done by email. With people from different US states, and me from Europe, it was impossible to meet eachother in person. From the moment I had been outvoted, and saw our site moving to country- and independent Rock, including our streams, the time was right to pull the plug.
I kept the domain for future (radio) plans, but in 2005 I decided to use www.wegotyourrock.com to sell some of the stuff I’ve collected over the years.

In between www.kiss-related-recordings.nl did well. From February 2001 a full Spanish version of KRR translated by Gabriel Ravarini was added. Gabriel kept doing 'the job' for about 5 years until his personal life asked for more time to spent with his family.

June 2001 Michael Brandvold asked me if I would be interested to maintain the KISS cover version section on KISS’ new website kissonline.com, which I did of course. Even Gene Simmons ‘came in’ with a couple of rare KISS cover versions I didn’t know about. It didn't take extra time, simply because I was allowed to use the similar layout as was used on Kiss Related Recordings KISS cover versions section. A few years later kissonline.com web design changed, and various topics, including the KISS cover version section, were removed .

June 1st, 2005 ‘Kiss Related Recordings’ and ‘Kissfaq’ joint venture :
Instead of competing and repeating much of the same information, Julian Gill of KISSfaq and I thought it’s much better to work together to inform our visitors on all Kiss Related Releases and rare solo and related demos.
Julian Gill : “I’ve long been a fan of Jelle’s "KISS & Related Recordings" website, and the information it contains, and respect and understand the hard work that has gone into compiling and organizing the information. A big "thank you" to Jelle for all of the hard work he’s put into site in the past, and for moving it over onto the KISSfaq”.
Since June 2005 KISS-Related-Recordings can be found and is backed up at www.kissfaq.com/krr/ as well.


Future plans ?
The last 12 years www.kiss-related-recordings.nl is pretty stable.
It’s still time consuming, but I still get a lot of help from people who are
truly interested in any KISS related releases.
I especially like to mention Ole Sørensen and Thorbjörn Brorsson, whom both are always quick to inform me when something new or rare is found on the net ….
I’m still thinking about changing the whole site to a new and more fresh design, but with near 1.000 pages that would take a lot of effort …. I once planned to make a Flash version of KRR, I’m glad now that I didn’t do that.
For now let’s see what happens in the upcoming five years …

Jelle Jansen.