Excerpts from: Chapter 24 – Alive/Worldwide Tour

Just fifteen days into the new year, a rumor began spreading rapidly throughout the KISS community.  It was the same rumor fans had been hearing in one form or another since the summer of 1987.

First, The Gossip Show on E! ran a piece on it on January 22.

Three days later, MTV News aired a segment.

Then on January 29, 1996, on a cold winter afternoon in Chicago, DJ Lou Brutus badgered his 46 year-old guest for information on the air.  Brutus groveled, demanded, and implored, but the guest would not budge.  Instead, he sang quietly: "Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you"

And with those words, the fuse was lit.

The foundation on which KISS's monumental 1996 reunion rested had nothing to do with Gene Simmons's faltering quote of "Young at Heart."  Instead, the pieces of the reunion's foundation had been connecting over a period of years, sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully, all to rapidly come together over the waning months of 1995.

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