Matt Ashcraft I accept your challenge and will connect D*A*D to KISS in six steps or less.
D-A-D (which is an acronym for the band’s original name: Disneyland After Dark) are a very cool Danish hard rock band. They have been quite successful in their homeland but are minimally known in the US even though they did have a brush with fame in the early nineties when MTV gave their videos for “Sleeping My Day Away” and “Girl Nation” a few spins.
If you haven’t figured it out by now there are usually a variety of routes I could take to connect these various artists to KISS but I have been trying to pick some of the more entertaining and/or enlightening ways to get where I need to go, and I’ve tried not to repeat links. So let’s see where D-A-D might take us.
Luckily for me D-A-D’s second album Draws a Circle contains a cover version of America’s annoying number one hit from 1972 “A Horse With No Name.”
So yeah, I could be done right here because Russ Ballard wrote a bunch of songs for America, including the band’s big eighties hit “You Can Do Magic,” but I’ve already used Russ Ballard as a link so that’s no fun.
A little research and I discover that America’s 1984 album Perspective includes a song called “Special Girl” which was written by Canadian singer-songwriter Eddie Schwarz. I know the song and I know that the same song also appeared on Meat Loaf’s 1986 album Blind Before I Stop.
Again I could be done right here if I use the Meat Loaf connection since I know that brothers Bob and Bruce Kulick were both members of the Neverland Express, Meat Loaf’s touring band after his Bat Out of Hell success.
But let’s see where else this Eddie Schwarz link can take us because I happen to know that Eddie Schwarz wrote the song “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” which was a big hit for Pat Benatar in 1980.
Pat Benatar came up in the very first installment of Six Degrees of KISS (ABBA) because I used her to connect Mike Chapman to Holly Knight since the pair co-wrote “Love Is a Battlefield.” But let’s see where else this Pat Benatar connection might lead.
Hmm, she did a John Cougar song, she did a Sweet song, she did a Kate Bush song. “We Belong” was written by Lowen and Navarro. Dave Navarro is Dan Navarro’s cousin.
Wait a minute, I know that Pat’s first album In the Heat of the Night includes her version of the song “Rated X” which originally appeared on Nick Gilder’s killer 1977 solo debut You Know Who You Are. I know that Nick Gilder links back to Holly Knight since Gilder and Knight co-wrote the song “The Warrior” which was a top ten hit for Patty Smyth and Scandal in 1984, but I also know that Nick Gilder can be used as a link to Bryan Adams since I know that Bryan Adams replaced Nick Gilder as the singer in the Canadian seventies glam rock band Sweeney Todd.
So as you can see there are several routes I could have taken using America as the first link to D-A-D and going from there but I think this is the most fun and circuitous route:
1. D-A-D to America via “A Horse With No Name.”
2. America to Eddie Schwarz via “Special Girl.”
3. Eddie Schwarz to Pat Benatar via “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”
4. Pat Benatar to Nick Gilder via “Rated X.”
5. Nick Gilder to Bryan Adams via Sweeney Todd.
6. Bryan Adams to KISS via “Rock and Roll Hell” and “War Machine,” two songs he co-wrote with Jim Vallance and Gene Simmons for the 1982 KISS album Creatures of the Night.
