History of the Kiss Club: The Kiss Club was a show that featured club music that was mixed live by Chris Walsh. Originally it started out as a Saturday night show that originated from the Kiss 95.7 Studios at 10 Columbus Blvd. in Hartford. Chris Walsh would mix the show live from one of the studio rooms using two turntables and vinyl 12” singles (records). After the initial success of the show the decision was made to try a show “live” from a local nightclub. The music from the nightclub's mixing board was fed back to the station via special phone lines that provided high quality audio suitable for broadcast. This is when the Kiss Club truly took off as a phenomenon! The show was originally broadcast from Skidder’s nightclub in New Haven and it proved to be wildly popular, attracting hundreds and later thousands of partygoers from all over the state (and many from New York and Massachusetts as well)! Chris Walsh had an amazing talent for coming up with incredible mixes of the latest dance hits (and Chris would also toss in a "Kiss Classic" about once an hour). Due to the popularity of the show, it was necessary to bring in a co-host (in the early days Chris not only did the mixing but also the hosting, not an easy thing to pull off alone in a wild nightclub environment)! Kiss Club co-hosts included Sky Michaels, Robin King, John McMann, Jefferson, Michael Maze, Arty the One Man Party and Steve McVie to name a few. A board tech back at the station was the third member of the crew that helped make it all come together; the board tech would monitor signal levels, take phone calls, play sweepers and spots (commercials), etc. The result was a live show that also included the listener at home (callers would phone in for "Party Checks" that ran about once per hour). The Kiss Club grew to legendary status by around 1990. The Kiss Club was then expanded to both Friday and Saturday night. There were often very long lines of partygoers waiting to get in to a Kiss Club event. At Rumors Nightclub in Bristol the Kiss Club attendance reached numbers of up to around 3000 patrons per night at its peak. The Kiss Club was held at about a dozen different nightclubs in Connecticut. Rumors in Bristol was arguably the hottest spot for the Kiss Club for a good portion of the Kiss Club’s reign, followed by Club 2001 in Newington in the mid 1990s. However, other clubs such as Katie’s (Enfield), Club Safari (Waterbury) and NightLife (New Haven) also drew very large crowds. Working at a Kiss Club (either at the club or behind the scenes at the station) was in incredibly energetic, sometimes wild and always fun experience. One could feel the energy of the broadcast when listening to the Kiss Club while driving to the host club. The incredible mixes, the music, the lights and the people… the Kiss Club was like a gigantic magnet drawing in the crowds. The Kiss Club could not have happened without the incredibly talented people who made it all come together. The Kiss Club was an era in Hartford radio that is not likely to be duplicated in the future.
Did you ever wish you could relive some of the Kiss Club era? You can! Below are a number of audio clips from various Kiss Clubs. These clips are what are known as "air checks". Air checks are recordings of talk breaks, mixes, going into and out of spots, etc. Most of the air checks were recorded on 60 and 90 minute cassettes (I have a large number of these yet to digitize and post). All of the audio clips below are MP3 format, they should be compatible with virtually any Ipod or similar player. Be warned however that the files are big and will be painfully slow to download if you do not have a high speed connection to the Internet!
This page is part of the Kiss 95.7 Tribute Site.