Kiss
Pull a thread
The Paul Lynde Halloween Special at 50: How the Wicked Witch of the West Put KISS in Prime Time
Fifty years ago, on October 29, 1976, America’s scariest band made its prime-time debut, summoned on camera by the same witch who’d been pulled off children’s TV eight months earlier for terrifying kids. The whole story fits inside one calendar year.
Where America was in October 1976
KISS is coming off the explosion of Destroyer, and “Beth”, the ballad sung by drummer Peter Criss, of all people, has just become the band’s first Top 10 hit. Four guys in demon makeup, breathing fire and spitting blood on stage, suddenly have a piano ballad on pop radio. Middle America is confused and slightly alarmed.
Deep Purple Broke Up in July 1976. Fifty Years Later, Bob Ezrin Just Produced Their 24th Album.
Deep Purple’s management announced the band’s dissolution on July 19, 1976. Almost exactly fifty years later, SPLAT! landed as studio album number twenty-four. The thread connecting those two dates runs through one producer, who spent 1976 in a studio with KISS.
The day the machine stopped
In the summer of 1976, Deep Purple was over, with none of the usual hedging about hiatuses or solo projects. The official announcement came through the band’s management on July 19, 1976, though the machine had seized up months earlier, on a stage in Liverpool.
Deep Purple Named Their Farewell Tour Ten Years Ago. They Just Refused to Finish It.
Deep Purple have a new album out, Splat!, released July 3, and an 86-show run across 28 countries and three continents booked behind it. That’s not the schedule of a band winding down, which is funny, because Deep Purple officially started saying goodbye a decade ago.
Asked about the end, bassist Roger Glover didn’t blink. “We’re not gonna have a final tour, a final gig and make a hoopla about it,” he told Paul Cashmere in a video interview with Noise11 (2026).