Backstage Pass

by Paul Stanley

  The joy of creating something tangible from the intangible is one of the most gratifying experiences I have in life. Any outlet that I’ve found for expressing myself has helped me to define myself. So from the very beginning, as soon as I picked up a guitar, I wanted to write songs. I wanted to express myself. If for no one else but myself, I wanted to hear my own thoughts. In writing books, I wanted to express my own thoughts. In painting, I wanted to see my own thoughts. All vehicles for interpretation.

  It wasn’t always that way for me—I rejected art as a path back in high school.

  From an early age, I sketched and drew at home, and quite honestly I couldn’t understand why nobody else could draw as well. I would look at something, and while I looked at it to draw it, my eye would connect to my hand. It was second nature. By the time I got to school, I was very comfortable with my artistic ability. When I was in grade school, we used to do an assignment they called a product map, which was a map of a state showing the state’s industries. It would be done on a large piece of oaktag—that’s what we called it—like poster board. The boards would be about three feet by three and a half feet, and every kid dreaded having to do them. But it took me only five minutes—I could just look at a map of a state and draw an enlarged version freehand.

  Despite my comfort with my artistic ability, over time I found myself not ultimately committed to it. I just wasn’t motivated enough, and I guess that goes back to not being excited enough. I wasn’t eager enough to put in the time. Hence, when I got to the High School of Music and Art—which I commuted from Queens into Manhattan to attend—I encountered people who were not only as good as me but far better. That only made me that much more committed to music, which is something I never stopped working at.

  I’ve never been good at taking direction. I’ve never been good at dealing with authority figures. I’ve never been good at working to someone else’s schedule. However, nobody works harder, is more motivated, or can deliver more dependably than I can. But outside of what I choose to do, I’m not very good at bending to other people’s rules.

  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the great modern painters, before they went into abstract phases, learned the techniques of painting realistically. For those artists, it was a calling. It was something they felt compelled to do. And the way for many of them, I guess, was they started in art school and under tutelage. I totally understand that, and it is probably what makes their work so timeless, deep, and great. That being said, I’m not of that school. While I find all those great artists inspiring, I don’t have the time, patience, or wherewithal to backtrack. I was not an aspiring artist.

  I’ve come back to art as a diversion, as a place where I can express myself without being judged or thinking about anyone’s expectations. So I’m coming to it now from a different place. Painting, untrained as I am, fulfills a need in me, and the creative outlet is satisfying as it is. I’ve never been somebody who does things by the book, and I’m also aware that I will never be a Picasso, which is just fine.

  This doesn’t mean that my art can’t affect somebody as much as a great artist’s work can. It’s definitely gratifying when someone connects to one of my paintings. But I don’t have the foundation or schooling that contemporary artists do now. When I started painting again, I had no guidance, and I liked that a lot. It may seem like I’m contradicting myself, but I’ve enjoyed the purity of figuring it out on my own. It’s important for each of us to know what we are and who we are, and not try to be something we’re not—it’s something that applies to all areas of life. I’m never going to be a master artist. It would be pointless to try. I can’t do that. And yet, doing it the way I do, putting in real effort and passion even while I’m aware of my limitations, works.

  It’s crazy to look for perfection or not settle for less than perfection—because we’ll always be unhappy. The truth is, we’re not settling for less; we’re dealing with reality. I realized in the past twenty years or so that nothing in life is perfect. If we accept the imperfection in life, we see things more realistically. Happiness comes from accepting imperfection and determining how to deal with it.

  It’s not negative to say that the world is imperfect, that relationships are imperfect, that life is imperfect. If we embrace this, we remove the desire for an ideal that will always leave us dissatisfied. We’re not lowering the bar. We’re accepting reality. That’s a good thing.

  The world is beautiful despite imperfection—or even because of it.

  Of course, life intervenes in other ways too. We’re all faced with deadlines to one degree or another, as well as obligations or responsibilities that are part of everyday life. For me, the idea of creating on a schedule or on demand—which was how it worked at the art school—seemed contrary to creativity. In part, that was due to my counterproductive pursuit of perfection. But certainly as an adolescent and a teen I didn’t want something that I did out of spontaneity and a sense of freedom to suddenly be harnessed.

  Over time, with music I found that spontaneity could work. But we can’t become prisoners to inspiration; we have to use it as a tool. If we just wait around to be inspired, we’ll probably do a lot less—and we’d be a whole lot less creative.

  Early in KISS’s career, our business manager told me we needed to go in and do another album—that I had to write songs, and quickly.

  I said, “Well, I’m not really feeling inspired right now.”

  And he said, “I’ll show you your bills, and you’ll get inspired.”

  The trick is to manage both inspiration and creativity without compromising either—I certainly want to be proud of whatever I do, but I also want to keep the creative juices constantly flowing.

  The reason I don’t have a lot of unrecorded songs around is because at some point in the creative process I didn’t believe they were good enough. Once I start to explore an idea, be it a riff or a chord pattern, if it’s worth pursuing, I’ll go on to a melody. But if it’s not, I’ll chuck it. In the course of writing the melody and lyrics, I’ll listen and think This isn’t good enough, and get rid of it. It seems pointless to complete something I know isn’t up to my standards when I could be spending that time doing something of value. I’ve become much better at it. In the early days, I would go further before abandoning ideas. They say “Old too soon, smart too late.” As we age, it becomes clearer that the time we spend on something is time we can never get back.

  Time becomes more precious as it marches on. This goes back to the conveyor belt of life. We never get back the time it takes to complete something that we know isn’t great—just as we never get back the time wasted on a dead-end relationship.

  What’s the point of pursuing something if it’s only an exercise in mediocrity? It’s a waste of time.

  In the old days, I had hours of tape of almost stream-of-consciousness applied to music, just letting my hands go and seeing what came out. But I would record over the tapes. Even now, when there’s basically unlimited capacity to record, I work the same way. Because more important than storage capacity is time.

  Time truly is the one thing we can’t buy.

  Everything I do creatively sparks my need and necessitates my taking the next step. So whether it’s songwriting or art or anything else, every piece I do spurs me to the next. And nothing that I’m doing today could I have done a year ago or five years ago or ten years ago. The excitement is the inspiration I get from something I did yesterday, which pushes me to what I can do today—often something that I couldn’t have conceived of or possibly created yesterday. It’s a constant process of evolution that builds on itself.

  There was a time when I felt let down at the end of a tour or at the end of an album because I’d worked so hard to open up those creative channels and then they were going to close and I would in some ways have to start from square one again. Once something is moving, once it’s rolling along, momentum will keep it going, and having to stop it for any reason means having to start it agai
n from being still. What I’ve found is that at this stage in my life, keeping those creative channels open almost accelerates the progress. When I ski, I have to be careful about gaining momentum and picking up speed, but nobody ever got a concussion from painting or writing a song.

  Once we open a faucet and let any undrinkable, rusty water run out, we have the opportunity to keep it flowing. And the more it flows, the less chance we have of going back to that stagnant situation. It’s all intertwined, and the same laws apply to everything. Creativity, sense of self—it’s all tied together, and it all builds on itself. Keeping my creative juices flowing, just like keeping my emotions flowing, affects my outlook and how I deal with people every day.

  When the taps are open, we can see things differently. We can let go of old notions, old opinions, old ideas. As our vision becomes clearer, the screen becomes bigger. What becomes important in relationships and what no longer matters changes, because when we are fulfilled in different ways, we place less importance on some of the things that had importance to us previously. Misplaced importance in relationships or misplaced priorities can recede and become irrelevant as we find outlets that enrich us and define us.

  As for the practical elements, to be our most creative, we need to be able to turn wherever we are into a solitary space. The substance of more creativity is always there because it’s within us. It’s within me. And the only variable from person to person is how much what goes on around us sabotages our ability to get to it. Some people need a cabin in the woods with birds singing and a babbling brook, but I don’t believe it has to do with location; it has to do with mindset. If we can immerse ourselves in what we’re doing and lose ourselves, then it’s just a matter of whether or not our environment allows us to do that. We don’t become inspired because we’re away from home, nor do I think we become inspired just because we’re home. Ultimately, any location can result in obstructions or roadblocks. We have to get rid of those as much as possible so we can lose ourselves and allow inspiration to come from inside.

  I try to put the same sort of effort and inspiration into everything. I’m not aspiring to become a professional chef, and I’m not aspiring to make painting my primary job; yet I still find value in putting energy into those things. It’s essential because what I’ve found and what has been reaffirmed over the years is that every time I find another means of self-expression, I’m that much happier—I find life that much more exhilarating.

  The reason I’ve gone back to painting, after initially rejecting drawing and other forms of visual art, is that painting is more multileveled: I’m dealing with textures and colors and different types of application. So it turns out to be a more fulfilling and all-encompassing sense of expression. Sketching became very one-dimensional, whereas painting—at least for me—feels like a much deeper means of expression because of the complexity.

  I paint with vibrant colors and I paint without any real foundation of color relationships. Does a field of wildflowers know anything about color relationships? No, but it all somehow works and affirms the beauty of harmony through diversity. I paint with spirit. Color affirms life. And the more I paint—the more that point of view manifests itself in my paintings—the more I see it as true. The more I paint and visualize how I see life, the more it becomes true.

  And as far as being able to conceive of things differently today than I did yesterday, I see the colorful aspect of my painting affecting other aspects of my life. I recently made amazing campanelle pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe and toasted panko crumbs. It was off the charts. For some reason, up to that point I had overlooked one of the basic rules of cooking vegetables: keep vegetables like broccoli vibrant in color. This time, after I blanched the broccoli rabe, I put it in ice water, and it retained its bright green color. Now my food looks like my paintings. And if and when I write songs again, I will bring to my music everything that I’ve done since last I wrote.

  I have absolutely no doubt that the music will have color.

  The beauty of creative outlets is that they allow us to make a tangible manifestation of our outlook, and when we do creative work, we validate that outlook. When we make beautiful music or beautiful art, the world is more beautiful. Though, of course, we have to start somewhere, and it’s not always from a beautiful place. When I first started painting, for instance, some of my early creations were almost like exorcisms—I needed to get that out to move on. The process of doing it was a cathartic way to move forward. I would want to hang myself if twenty years later I was painting the same images. But it was a way to purge, a way to acknowledge and face how I was feeling, a way to make a reality out of an emotion and look at it. It wasn’t how I wanted to feel, but sometimes we have to acknowledge and validate where we are to move on. Those early paintings raised a lot of hard feelings in me, and yet today, I see them as beautiful—because they’re a mile marker of where I was compared to where I am. Not unlike going to my old street in Washington Heights and seeing my old apartment. There’s where I was—look at me now. The downside, the hurt, is gone; I can see how far I’ve come.

  I can see similar examples when I look back at songs from the past. Generally speaking, I was uncomfortable with the KISS album Carnival of Souls. My issue with it was that I had never wanted to write songs reflecting dissatisfaction and unhappiness, or looking at the world negatively. Putting on a hat of misery felt fake and disingenuous—because of my belief in fighting through things, because of my fundamental optimism. In the midst of this artificial doom and gloom and the personal turmoil of my looming divorce, I did, however, have a creative epiphany I could apply. I realized that the only person I could swear I would always be there for was my flesh and blood: Evan. So there’s one song on that album—“I Will Be There”—that affirmed my commitment to my child and also pretty much acknowledged that although other things were going to change, that one thing wouldn’t. Now I can look at that mile marker and see that I kept that promise to my child—even through my personal trials and tribulations.

  My current musical side project, Soul Station, is another type of creative outlet—one of those why-versus-why-not scenarios. The original idea was to be able to hear some of my favorite music and to have a band unlike any I’d ever had before, with every possible ethnicity and every possible background, with horn players and singers and two keyboard players, and this great diversity all held together by a passion for the music—vintage soul and R&B. It’s been so invigorating, so joyous, and we love it so much. To establish this commonality in celebration together is another amazing affirmation of what we’re all capable of doing. These people have individually played with everybody. Getting to know these people, who under other circumstances I would never have met, and laughing and eating and practicing together—it’s a miracle.

  Of course, everyone has these sorts of opportunities in one way or another, and we either shut them down or take advantage of them. Not that everybody has to have a Soul Station, but everybody has desires, and either we live with later saying “I wish I had . . .” or we do it. It’s another example of how much richer our lives can be when we embrace and go for something.

  Soul Station offers the chance to hear songs that I love, that are so much a part of my foundation and musical fabric, played live and spirited and with such joy and commitment. It would be great enough just to listen to the music, but to be a part of it is incredible. To be a participant and to be a part of this creation is exhilarating. And not only are people blown away by it and the authenticity of it, but I’m blown away by the joy of being a part of it. Like in many other things I’ve done in my life, I didn’t understand the scope of what I could get back from attempting something new or from seeing it through.

  It not only gives me a validation of the beauties in life but also has given me a new village. It has given me band members I never knew, and their friendship and their support, and they look at me the same way.

  In life, we look for externals instead of trying to find ways t
o get to the internal. At the end of the day, the sense of belonging and knowing who we are and where we are, and that we’re loved and valued, is the core of a much more fulfilling life. We can experience that in so many different ways. This incredible band of musicians from diverse backgrounds, who joined me in this quest to pay homage to a music that’s so important to all of us, has become one way. And on top of that, we get to experience one another, socialize, have dinners together. I cook for them. We’re all embracing each other. We’re all getting something from one another that makes each one of us more fulfilled and more complete.

  If I hadn’t taken the steps leading up to the eventual creation of Soul Station, I would have never gained this experience. Everything starts with a first step, and where that first step takes us is what makes it so exciting. Originally I was doing a fundraiser for my kids’ school, and I had put together a great band doing classic rock covers. The following year, I thought I would love to do those songs—since my roots are as much in Philly soul and Motown as in British rock. I made some phone calls and put together a band. It was so much fun that over the course of a year or so, it developed into Soul Station—a bona fide touring band.

  So the first step was allowing myself to do something that people around me were skeptical about. When I told the sound people who worked with KISS that I was going to do a Motown-Philly R&B band, they said, “Who’s going to sing?”

  And when I said, “I’m going to sing,” they looked at me like I was out of my mind.

  Well, after the first show, they said, “Dude, we were wrong.”

  Rod Stewart said the same thing to me: “Who’s singing?”

  “Me,” I said.

  And he said, “You can handle those songs?”

  As I played Rod a live recording, his jaw dropped and he broke into a wide grin and said, “Wow!”