Kiss - She (Demo) (Wicked Lester) Lyric Video

Next Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of Kiss's third album, Dressed To Kill. To celebrate, I will be posting some lyric videos for the officially released demoes for Dressed To Kill, made available on the 2001 boxset.
I have high hopes that Kiss may release some anniversary merchandise which may include a boxset of demos and a remaster. While I wait for an announcement, I will be making lyric videos for the two Wicked Lester recordings that would be used as blueprints for two songs on Dressed To Kill. This week, I have the Wicked Lester version of "She."
I am aware that this is not technically a "demo" as this was recorded for the unreleased Wicked Lester album. The title is formatted as it is for simplicity's sake as well as making the video more discoverable.

Gene said: ""She" was written around the time I was thinking of putting a band together with Steven Coronel. Steve and I had been school friends and had played in bands all the way back to eighth or ninth grade. So I must have been around fourteen. Steve was a big fan of Mountain and Cream and Eric Clapton in particular, he would start noodling with various riffs. When I originally heard the signature riff to "She," I stopped him in his tracks and told him I wanted to write a song around that. That's where "She" got started.
There's almost an Indian motif to it. And I have no idea where "she walks by moonlight" came from. A lot of the lyrics were very stream-of-consciousness stuff. The lyric would start, and somehow it would all fit with the music. But we did that song as the Long Island Sounds and then it was eventually recorded by Wicked Lester with Coronel in the band.
This version is the one that was going to be for the Wicked Lester album, produced by Ron Johnsen. The flute player was Brooke Ostrander, who played keyboards in the band. Somehow when we were recording it we didn't think very much about continuity or whether or not it made sense to sing in three-part falsetto harmonies and stick in a flute. Later on when KISS re-recorded "She," it all made sense once the fat was cut away and the song was stripped down to its bare essence.
The lead guitar work originally was done by Steven Coronel. But by the time Epic Records got serious about signing Wicked Lester, they were only willing to do so if Steve was not in the band. They wanted another guitar player. So I unfortunately had to be the one that would have to tell Steve that he was going to be replaced. It was heartbreaking, but it had to be done.
A guitar player by the name of Ronnie Leejack was brought in. Leejack said that he had played with Cactus and was a strange fit with the band.
I remember in one of the auditions he insisted on sitting down and not standing up to perform. He called himself a musician, not an entertainer, and refused to jump around and perform. Needless to say, he didn't last long in the band.
Ron Johnsen, who was the chief engineer at Electric Lady Studios, the recording studio Jimi Hendrix built, produced Wicked Lester, and so a lot of the three and four-part harmonies were arrangements he came up with. Some of it, in retrospect, feels very jazzy, it certainly sounds like another band.
Brooke Ostrander, the keyboard player, was a music teacher from New Jersey, who played a number of instruments--flute, a horn instrument called a flugelhorn, which actually appears on some of the Wicked Lester stuff, and keyboards obviously. Jethro Tull was just coming out at that point. And so everybody must have unconsciously shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, that's right, flute." The drummer was Tony Zarella.
Originally, when KISS got together, we had no intentions of re-recording any of the Wicked Lester stuff. It simply felt like a different kind of a band--keyboards and flutes and flugelhorns. But as we were constantly on tour, we barely had time to write songs. And so by the time of Hotter Than Hell and Dressed To Kill, we were actually short for material. So we went back and revisited some of the songs. Most of them didn't feel like KISS. But when we played "She" together, it immediately fit. We changed the vocal style, trimmed away all the fat and the song would later become a staple in concerts for decades."