The origins of Alive II go back to early 1977 when the band’s manager Bill Aucoin suggested that Kramer record a live album during the evening show at Budokan Hall in Tokyo, Japan on April 2, 1977. The plan was to release a live album to give Kiss some much deserved time off before recording the album that would become Love Gun later that autumn. Kramer finished work on the album, but Casablanca and Kiss deemed it unusable, and the band forged ahead with their Love Gun sessions.
Most of the live tracks on Alive II were recorded during the band’s August 26–28 shows at the Forum while on their Love Gun Tour. The 3 p.m. soundchecks at the August 26 and 27 shows were recorded, and later used on the album (i.e. “I Stole Your Love”) with crowd noise being dubbed in later. “Beth” and “I Want You” were lifted from the aborted Japanese live album and used on the finished Alive II. As the band did not want to duplicate songs included on Alive!, the songs chosen for the three live sides of the album were all drawn from Kiss’ three preceding studio albums: Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over and Love Gun.
On the original double album, the songs on side 4 (tracks 6-10 on the second CD) are studio tracks recorded September 13–16, 1977. Although Ace Frehley was originally credited for lead guitar on the studio tracks, the remastered version released in 1997 confirmed what had been speculated by Kiss fans for years: Bob Kulick actually played lead guitar on three tracks (“All American Man”, “Rockin’ in the U.S.A.” and “Larger Than Life”), not Frehley. Frehley’s sole involvement for the studio songs was “Rocket Ride” (originally written for a solo album[9]), on which he sang lead vocals and played both guitar and bass guitar. Paul Stanley played all guitars on “Any Way You Want It”, which was originally recorded by the Dave Clark Five in 1964.
Several early copies of the album’s cover featured a rare misprint of three additional songs (“Take Me”, “Hooligan” and “Do You Love Me?”) with a slightly altered song order. None of these additional songs appeared on the LP. On the misprint, “Take Me” is after “Detroit Rock City”, with “King of the Night Time World” appearing after “Ladies Room” on Side 1. Side two features “Hooligan” after “Shock Me”, which is placed after “Hard Luck Woman”. On Side 3, “Do You Love Me?” appears after “God of Thunder”, with “Beth” sandwiched between “I Want You” and “Shout It Out Loud”. “Hooligan” and “Take Me” were performed on the 1977 Love Gun tour, and “Do You Love Me?” was performed on the Japanese tour that same year, making their consideration for inclusion with the second live album possible
