“Detroit Rock City” by Kiss

Kiss built "Detroit Rock City" for their 1976 album Destroyer out of a riff Paul Stanley already had and a hunch that it belonged to Detroit, the town that treated them as headliners while everywhere else still had them opening. Stanley finished it with producer Bob Ezrin, and along the way the valentine turned darker: after a fan on the way to a Kiss show in Charlotte was killed in an accident, it became the story of someone headed for the concert who never makes it.

That tension is the whole kick of the thing, a strutting salute to a rock town with a funeral hidden inside it. Gene Simmons plays against type with a bass line borrowed from R&B, something he saw as a break from his usual approach, Stanley takes the lead vocal, and Ezrin himself turns up with a spoken part. Jay Messina and Corky Stasiak engineered.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.