Nearly 50 years ago, the rock band Kiss made an unlikely appearance on a Halloween TV special. The iconic glam band featuring Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss, and the late Ace Frehley headlined The Paul Lynde Halloween Special in 1976. And it was a strange night indeed.
At the time, Lynde was best known for his self-titled sitcom and his appearances on Bewitched and as a center square on the game show Hollywood Squares. Kiss were fresh on the heels of their hit album Destroyer, which featured the hits “Detroit Rock City” and “Beth.”
The powers-that-be at ABC conjured up the idea to collide Lynde’s comedy chops with Kiss’s hard rock for a variety show special. The Paul Lynde Halloween Special aired on Oct. 29, 1976, and featured cameos by Tim Conway, Florence Henderson, Betty White, Roz Kelly, Donny and Marie Osmond, Billie Hayes, and The Wizard of Oz star Margaret Hamilton, per IMDb.
During the special, Hayes’ H.R. PufnStuf character Witchipoo and Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West gave Lynde three wishes for Halloween. But first, they called out Kiss to play some “peaceful” dinner music. The band played their hard rock hit “Detroit Rock City,” and Frehley ended the segment by pointing his guitar to explode the amplifiers on stage.
In a later segment, Lynde introduced the band to play “Beth,” which he called “a monster of a hit.”After their performance, the band joined Lynde and Hamilton on the stage, where Lynde cracked, “Just what I always wanted. Four Kisses on the first date.”
Hamilton then introduced Lynde to her friends. “This is Ace, this is Gene, this is Peter, and this is Paul,” the actress, dressed in her green face makeup, said.
“Oh, I love a good religious group,” Lynde replied before telling the band he could take one look at them and tell them how they came up with the name for their act. “You had a fight, and your mothers told you to KISS and make up,” he said as the Kiss bandmates remained stone-faced.
After telling an annoyed Simmons to “push the down button” on his elevator shoes, Lynde cashed in his last wish, which was for Kiss to perform one more song. The rockers obliged and went into “King of the Night Time World,” concluding their very first mini concert on primetime TV.
In a Q&A years later, Simmons said the band didn’t do a dress rehearsal with the exploding amplifiers for the Paul Lynde Halloween show. He added, “We were so off center because we’d never done TV before. And I was flipping out because Margaret Hamilton, the original witch from the Wizard of Oz was there.”
Simmons also referenced the TV moment in his 2001 memoir, Kiss and Make Up. He noted that after “Beth” became a hit, everything “exploded” for the band. “We were invited to do The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which meant national television exposure,” he wrote.
This wasn’t Kiss’s first national TV appearance. On March 29, 1974, they appeared on Dick Clark’s In Concert. The concert was recorded at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles one month prior, per Ultimate Classic Rock. But the Paul Lynde Halloween Special was definitely a first for the band in a variety show format.
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