Backstage Pass

by Paul Stanley

  Of course, when you operate that way, you’ll also make mistakes and face setbacks. But learning from mistakes fuels success. If you don’t give up, a mistake is just another step toward success. If something doesn’t work out—whether it’s in the kitchen, in our professional lives, or in a relationship—it doesn’t mean failure. It’s just more fuel for success. After all, we can either repeat our mistakes or use them to plot a change in course.

  I don’t regret any of the departures KISS made as a band. They were essential. They had consequences, but it was never going to be the end of the story. I needed to do those things, and to deny them ultimately would have denied the band and myself. I needed to write “I Was Made for Loving You,” for instance. I needed to.

  The premise of KISS, when we got together, was “no rules and no boundaries.” And that’s what people embraced about us. So it would be contrary to suddenly say, “I’m going to live within another set of boundaries that the fans set.” At the dawn of the 1980s, we started to experiment musically. I was willing to accept the consequences of what I did, but I also felt the fans had to understand that our premise of no rules and no boundaries was part of what they had accepted in the first place. As fans, they championed us because we did things our way. Thankfully, most of the time it also has been something they love. But I need the freedom not to feel handcuffed by their expectations.

  Don’t get me wrong. There were certainly troubles during the Dynasty era. Ace’s alcoholism and drug use were out of control, so he was no longer reliable. Peter’s drumming was substandard enough that the producer he had worked with on his solo album, whom we hired for Dynasty, didn’t let Peter play on the album. Gene’s focus was clearly on pursuing a career in Hollywood and left little room for making KISS his priority. I was more focused on serial dating and a never-ending shopping spree rather than writing the kinds of songs that celebrated a life I now saw only in the rearview mirror of my newly purchased Mercedes. The band was so splintered and dysfunctional that Dynasty was the result of all those components, good and bad.

  But I wasn’t manipulated, coerced, or strong-armed during the making of Dynasty, Unmasked, or The Elder. I made decisions based on my life at that point. I don’t think they were the wrong decisions. They were necessary at that time. I needed to do “Shandi.” We needed to make The Elder. After all, these decisions got me to where I am now.

  Even so, in anything we do—me or anyone else—we have to be able to take a breath, step back, and ask, “Is this good?” Which is not the same as asking, “Does someone else think this is good?” I’m talking about a gut check, an honest assessment.

  We lose the plot when we try to please other people instead of making it the priority to please ourselves.

  And in the case of The Elder, it was a desperate attempt to seek validation from people who would never give KISS that validation. So at some point after that album, I felt almost like when I’m in a car and mindlessly driving, only to find myself wondering, “Where the fuck am I? When did I take the wrong turn? How did I get here?”

  Perhaps The Elder proves that the most effective motivation has to come from within. When we do things to placate others, or for someone else’s agenda, it’s pretty hollow. If I’m going to fall on my ass, I’d rather do it while doing something I feel compelled to do rather than while doing something someone else wants to do.

  KISS was lost, and we had forgotten who we were and why we were. As we had with Destroyer, we looked to the producer Bob Ezrin to guide us, in part because he’d done a brilliant job on Destroyer. If he didn’t exactly abandon ship during the making of The Elder, he certainly took a lot of shore leave—meaning we were without a captain a lot of the time. Much like with Destroyer, we were in uncharted waters during The Elder, but this time we had nobody to guide us.

  We tried the best we could and were sincere, but we were deluded and tainted by our success. Our achievements didn’t spur us on to be better at who we were and what we were doing. Our achievements gave us license to do less. Success gives everyone the opportunity either to sit back and get fat or to grab the next rung of the ladder, and that’s where we failed.

  We began to get complacent and lazy, and we lost the hunger. I’m not even sure “hunger” is a good word, because hunger implies that you need to be starving to have desire. Hunger shouldn’t just come from starving; it should come from wanting more, wanting to raise the bar as opposed to sitting back and wallowing in your achievements.

  If someone becomes successful, that literal hunger is gone, but creative hunger and hunger for ideals and standards should never be gone.

  We were no longer in the first blush of success, and we had become complacent with success. I was dealing with having money to buy things, with security guys—and this changed the way I saw things for a while.

  People may sometimes lose sight of all the complicated elements that contribute to a situation. KISS not only had fame and a certain new desire for validation from our peers; we also had a need for validation from our little sycophantic support groups. For so many reasons we found ourselves leaving behind the music that had been made by four hungry guys who had wanted to take over the world. In a sense, we felt we had accomplished that and didn’t know what to do next.

  None of us had any desire to make a hard rock album, or a heavy album. Ace might say he wanted to at that time, but that’s like me saying I wanted to fly. We can’t fly without wings. Ace was totally inebriated, so, yes, he may have wanted to make a hard rock album, but he wasn’t capable of doing it.

  We shrugged our shoulders and got excited with something that, in some ways, was easier for us to do: use a very familiar outline, used a hundred times before, and go in a different direction with it, because we didn’t have the chops or the teeth to do what we needed to do. But, hey, even passive decisions are decisions. If you do nothing, you’ve still made a decision. Nobody should ever kid themselves. We took the path of least resistance, which is not that different from surrendering. It would have been more of a challenge to make a hard rock album. That would have taken a lot of effort.

  At the end of the day, we were half-assing the work. I’m all for exploring different avenues, but it’s important to do it from a position of strength and excitement, as opposed to being dazed. That’s just wandering onto a path. It’s just as easy to wander off a cliff.

  That being said, everybody’s vision was clouded, and what we did was misguided and of our own doing. For me to sing some pseudo-opera tune like “Odyssey” with a bogus Broadway voice reminds me of Alfalfa singing “I’m in the Mood for Love” in The Little Rascals. But anyway, it started from the wrong place. It started with the wrong reasons. There was no righting the ship.

  Our choices flow from always having a reason why we do things. We question ourselves, question our foundations. Why are we doing this? Is this the right thing to do?

  I guess one thing I can say in defense of The Elder is that we were not content merely to keep doing what we had already done. Nobody can re-create the past. The past is spontaneous and honest, whereas in any creative outlet, to try to re-create spontaneity is forced. It’s the antithesis of where we came from, which was a place of innocence, and oftentimes creating by what we didn’t know. Trying to fake that would have been impossible.

  All the things that turned out to be problematic or distractions were the things that went along with success: enablers, people to open the doors. We wanted bigger, broader success, though in the end, we found out that all those things were detrimental to the success of KISS. But we had to attain the success to realize that. We had to do it all. We were compelled to do it. We needed to.

  Besides, I couldn’t have written “100,000 Years” at that point. I was still searching.

  Fortunately, as my mom always used to say, “Nothing bad ever happens.”

  After all, Creatures of the Night couldn’t have happened if it weren’t for our no rules and no boundaries manifesto and an attempt to reclaim our id
entity—if not re-create who we had been, at least reconnect with the reasons we had been. Creatures was the pendulum swinging all the way in the other direction. That was change for all the right reasons. It was an amped-up, supercharged version of what KISS had done before.

  It took those missteps and that state of complacency and creative gout leading to The Elder to get us back on the right road. I don’t think I have ever wanted success and an outlet for my musical creativity any more desperately than when I saw it slipping away, when I saw complacency and the poisons of success breaking my connection with what had made me want to be successful in the first place. The past thirty-five years of KISS wouldn’t have happened had we not teetered so close to the edge.

  I have no regrets with KISS, none at all, because here I am, nearly fifty years later.

  A lot of people say they have no regrets as a way of being bullheaded. When I hear people say it, I get the impression that what they’re really saying is “I don’t make mistakes,” whereas I’m saying, “I make mistakes, but the mistakes are still valuable.”

  Mistakes got me here.

  What’s the saying?—“Communism is the longest and most painful route from capitalism to capitalism.” In the same way, that malaise we felt—or whatever was going on—was necessary to get KISS from where we were to here. It was a long route back to home, but we had to experience it.

  Why not?

  6

  Own Your Actions, Own Your Outcome

  When I was younger, I had a lot of dos and don’ts, rules about what I required of myself and others. During my teens and early twenties, what I regarded as acceptable behavior from people around me was so strict, so stringent. But I found that these parameters weren’t based on life experience. My standards were based on some crazy notions that, as a kid, I had set up in my mind, all rooted in my limited experience of the world beyond my home. The rules had all been established kind of arbitrarily.

  Turns out we can’t just conjure up those sorts of rules or parameters. We set ourselves up for misery or failure by expecting things of ourselves that aren’t realistic or that are based on fantasy. We have to experience life before we know what is and isn’t applicable and positive for us.

  I made my life difficult and made having friends and socializing difficult by holding everybody to a standard—an inflexible, almost mechanical perfection—that no one could reach. Any mistake somebody made or anything that somebody did that annoyed me was reason for expulsion from my circle.

  A girlfriend once said to me, “You’re never going to be happy because you’re too judgmental and expect too much from everybody.” She was right. I wasn’t happy. It’s a bad idea to set up—even unknowingly—a situation where we’re bound to fail. There’s a difference between setting a high bar and setting an impossible goal. That goes for everyone.

  One of the things I find interesting at this point in my life is to look back at times when I said things to friends and lovers and behaved in ways that, in hindsight, were appalling—but were very much in keeping with how my parents acted and spoke. It made it very difficult for some people to be around me, and it certainly affected some relationships.

  My mom sometimes said to me or my dad or other people, “Who the hell do you think you are?” It’s a horrible thing to say, but when I was young, I thought nothing of saying that too. If I was angry or somebody said something I didn’t like or behaved in a way I didn’t like . . . “Who the hell do you think you are?” It can be intimidating to hear something like that, and to make it worse, I said it like I was mad at the person.

  I knew that saying this was demeaning and dismissive. But I said it anyway.

  Another thing I remember saying in the course of arguments or conversation was “This discussion is over.” And it worked sometimes. Though just as often the person would look at me and reply, “What are you, crazy? This discussion is not over.”

  I should’ve looked at myself in the mirror and asked, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Part of the way I tried to establish a sense of security or safety was to hold people to my set standard, which was too rigid to be realistic. At the time, I felt there was safety in being able to decide boundaries, to decide how people could behave and what was acceptable and what wasn’t. It gave me a sense of control over situations—though of course it was a false sense.

  One of the earliest times I can remember being forced to examine my own behavior—my own shortcomings, really—was on a tour in 1979. A woman who was working backstage at the food service, where we could grab dinner, gave me an unexpected life lesson. I was with the band and some crew members, and we were teasing and making fun of some people as we ate. As this was going on, the woman became visibly upset. It was a strong emotional reaction: I would say she was truly aghast.

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “They don’t mind. They like it.”

  I guess I was trying to dismiss the cruelty as part of the usual backstage antics.

  “That’s not what matters,” she said. “You don’t treat people the way they allow themselves to be treated. You treat people the way they deserve to be treated. You treat people with the respect you would expect.”

  Her words were like a sledgehammer to my head, and to this day I’ve never forgotten them. The way she put it was so articulate and concise that I immediately got it. Not that I had ever seen myself as cruel, but I immediately realized that this behavior I had deemed acceptable was in fact totally unacceptable. And it took somebody pointing that out to me, pointing out my behavior, to give me an aha moment. The sentiment was, of course, something I certainly knew was right, but I’d never given it sufficient thought in the context of my own behavior. Me, the kid who’d been bullied in the schoolyard, making fun of someone? What the fuck was I doing? I wouldn’t want someone to do that to me, so why was I doing it to someone else? Once the woman voiced it in those words, I realized I had been wrong. It was valuable, constructive criticism.

  In a similar vein, it’s interesting to be able to look back and see that I wasn’t so innocent in dealing with girlfriends, wives, bandmates—whoever it may have been.

  On the 2017 KISS Kruise, I spent a little time with Peter Criss’s ex-wife Lydia. We had a Q&A panel with Lydia; Michael James Jackson, who produced Creatures of the Night and Lick It Up and helped us get back on track in the 1980s; and our first security guy, Big John Harte. It was terrific, and people asked great questions. I hadn’t seen Lydia in a long, long time. When she was married to Peter, we had a contentious or uncomfortable relationship at times, though certainly in hindsight it wasn’t one-sided. On the Kruise, it would’ve been easy to avoid contact with her because of experiences decades ago. But it also would’ve been a missed opportunity. I had, after all, played a part in those strained relationships.

  I hoped that she wasn’t the same person she was back then, and I know I’m not, so the idea of seeing somebody in a new light was intriguing. In the end, I wanted to see her—and it was indeed great to see her. It was rewarding and opened up far more avenues than living in the past would have. It’s always great to have a chance to celebrate with somebody where we are today, rather than steep ourselves in the discord of where we once were. There’s a coming together and a celebration of where the road has taken us.

  I almost wonder what I had been fighting about with people like Lydia. Sometimes we tend to get into the rhythm of doing something a certain way. To see her again and instead give her a hug and introduce her to my family was awesome—and I think we both felt that way.

  That was also very much what I hoped for when the KISS reunion happened with the founding band members in 1996. The idea, at least for me, was to take advantage of how we had grown individually so we could correct some of the mistakes and go forward. That hope turned out to be very short-lived. But I see a great potential for reward in revisiting old situations and old friends or people from our past after we have a new perspective. It can put to rest any doubts we have and all
ow us to reflect on what caused the problems in the first place. With closure, it’s possible to remedy, rectify, and move on; it allows us to move on without the what-ifs—and I don’t want what-ifs in my life.

  How I had seen Peter and Ace when they left the band was based not only on my perspective back then but also on how I had affected them with my own behavior. So I thought it was worth taking a shot at healing. Not to take advantage of that possibility—if only to resolve a lot of questions—would have been a shame. Though some people didn’t see the opportunity the same way. At the beginning of the tour, it felt like a new beginning, but that feeling didn’t stick around.

  Of course, in the case of a band, any reunion is complicated by musical factors too. When Peter came back into KISS, he was born again: he was a born-again KISS-tian. He was joyous in knowing that he was back, and he seemed cognizant of the mistakes he had made. At the onset, he said that he would never make the same mistakes again. So his musical shortcomings wouldn’t have been insurmountable if he had continued to be willing to work on his playing—which he was when he first came back. He was very open to adjustments. I don’t want to say “criticisms,” but let’s call them “helpful directions.” This was something he’d never been able to handle in the past.

  Unfortunately, things with Peter changed dramatically almost overnight.

  Back in the 1970s, Bob Ezrin, who produced Destroyer, had gotten Peter to play things that should’ve been impossible for him. But Peter pulled them off. It goes back to the fact that we know how much something is worth to us by how hard we’re willing to work for it—and once the reunion got under way, Peter wasn’t willing to work to improve his playing. It descended into a destructive situation. I remember thinking, If you’re John Bonham and you’re a prick, that’s one thing. . . . If, on the other hand, you can barely play and you’re a jerk, then what’s the point?