Detroit Rock City (3:57)

Detroit Rock City is a song by the American hard rock group Kiss featured on their 1976 album, Destroyer. The song was written by Paul Stanley and Bob Ezrin and is about a real Kiss fan who was killed in a car accident on his way to a Kiss concert (in the intro you can hear a report on a car accident, narrated by Gene Simmons). The song, recorded and released as a single in 1976, was the third single off of Kiss’s album Destroyer and was planned to be their last in support of the album.

As a single, it did poorly in sales and radio play (other than in Detroit), and failed to chart in the U.S. even though it would prove to be a fan favorite. It came as a surprise that the B-side “Beth”, a ballad sung by drummer Peter Criss, wound up catching on in different markets in the United States, so the single was reissued with “Beth” as the A-side and “Detroit Rock City” as the B-side.

During the Love Gun/Alive II tour, Paul changed the lyric, “I know I’m gonna die, why?” to “I know I’m gonna die, and I don’t care!”

The song was #6 on VH1’s 40 Greatest Metal Songs, and is featured on the album Heavy Metal – The First 20 Years which was released on July 25, 2006.

The song’s title was used for a 1999 motion picture in which a group of teenage Kiss fans travel to Detroit to see the band in 1978.

The Detroit Tigers use the song when the players take the field, and also on various radio and television broadcasts of games. It is also sometimes played right before the first face-off in Detroit Red Wings games.