by Scott Ian
That afternoon our dad picked us up, and we went to Yankee Stadium for Game One of the 1977 World Series. I actually left my Kiss bubble that night. I’d been a Yankee fan longer than I’d been a Kiss fan, and for the moment my priorities changed. If the game had been on the same night as the concert, well, then, I would’ve had a huge problem. That would have been a conundrum that my young brain could not have solved, probably ending up with me having a stroke at thirteen. I didn’t have to worry about making that decision, although I almost had a stroke when the Dodgers tied the game 3–3 in the ninth, forcing the game into extra innings. The Yankees finally pulled it out in the bottom of the twelfth inning, Willie Randolph scoring on a Paul Blair single, and the Yankees won 4–3, going one up on the Dodgers in the best-of-seven series. The game was unbelievably exciting and it was only on the way home I remembered to ask him if it was okay for us to go to the Kiss concert. He was totally fine with us going to the show sans adults, and he even threw in some extra cash with our allowances so we could get T-shirts and snacks. Things were really coming together better than I could imagine, and if that wasn’t cool enough, we were going to Game Six of the World Series the following week.
THE NEXT TWO days flew by on a Yankee’s win and new Kiss album/concert tickets high. On the way to school Friday morning I thought about skipping school or cutting my first few classes so I could go to the record store when it opened and get Alive II early. I thought that through and decided it was definitely not worth getting caught and possibly getting punished—no Kiss concert for you, young man. I was so high on Kiss and the Yankees that school wasn’t even a buzzkill. When the bell rang to go home I ran, just like I did two years earlier, and Record-Store Guy! had a copy of Alive II held behind the counter for me. I devoured the record over the weekend. The live versions of “God of Thunder” and “Detroit Rock City” were my favorites on the record, and I liked the new original song “Rocket Ride” written by Ace, the best out of the four new tracks on side four. I listened to the record a few times back to back. And then around 11 p.m. I got into bed and set my alarm for six in the morning, even though I wasn’t going to sleep—I was too excited about getting on line for tickets. I didn’t think my mom would let me go to the record store right then and sleep over outside, so I squashed those thoughts and laid awake for hours stressing about the morning, worrying that there would be loads of people on line before us. I finally passed out at some point, and when I woke up I was sure I had slept through my alarm and missed getting tickets. It was 5 a.m. Cool. I got up, got dressed, and headed over to the record store, sure that there would already be people lining up. I was alone in the dark, sitting on the sidewalk in front of the record store until 7 a.m. when my friends showed up. I didn’t care, by any means necessary. Now that it wasn’t just me in line—well, there wasn’t actually a line, just me and my friends—we could send someone to the bagel shop for bagels and coffee. Breakfast taken care of, we killed the time talking about Alive II. At 9 a.m. Record-Store Guy! showed up in a Kiss T-shirt and opened the store. He said, “C’mon in, diehards. Got a bagel for me?” We didn’t want to get out of line in case anyone else showed up, but Record-Store Guy! said, “Don’t worry, I know who’s first.” We browsed around in the store, and then around 9:30 a.m. people started showing up. I ran to the front register and stood there in case anyone tried to cut. By 10 a.m. there were people lined up all the way down the row of stores that the record store was on. I was standing at the register and got the first six tickets he printed out as soon as the Ticketron machine would let him. There was a seating chart for the Garden, and we had floor seats toward the back of the arena. We were fucking stoked, running home like Charlie Bucket, golden ticket in hand.
Over the next two months I would play Alive! and Alive II back to back, creating an epic Kiss concert in my room for me and my brother to air guitar and head-bang to in preparation for the big night looming ever closer. There was just the small matter of the Yankees returning home for Game Six of the World Series to finish up, and then I wouldn’t have any other distractions from practicing Kisstianity. The Yankees were up 3–2 in the series and only needed to win Game Six to be world champions, and win they did, in dramatic fashion. Reggie Jackson hit three home runs, and the Yankees won their first World Series since 1962. Being a part of that victory at Yankee Stadium was an unbelievable moment, the absolute high point of my life, and I rode that October Yankee win all the way to Madison Square Garden where I would go even higher.
DECEMBER 14. K-DAY FOR ME and my friends. At school that day everyone was buzzing about the concert; seemingly the whole school was going. We actually had tickets to the first of three sold-out shows. Mine was safely tucked in my wallet, having already checked on it a dozen times that day. The plan was to go home after school, drop books, get some pizza at Jack’s Pizza in the shopping center across from where we all lived, and then take the bus up to the Long Island Railroad station where we would take the first train we could to Penn Station in Manhattan, which was right underneath Madison Square Garden. We wanted to get there as soon as we could so we would have more time to hang out at the Garden and be a part of it all. This was a big fucking deal for us. Six of us kids in the city to see Kiss with no parents. We’d made it!
The cold and windy train platform heading to Manhattan was crowded with people going to the show. It was a scene: teenage girls in hot pants and heels, hair feathered and eyes shadowed, leather jackets zippered tight around their bodies against the cold, smoking their Marlboros. Long-haired bell-bottom-wearing dudes in their green Army-Navy store military jackets, drinking Bud from brown paper bags. And there was us, three thirteen-year-olds, two twelves, and my ten-year-old brother hanging on the periphery, allowed to coexist in that moment with the teenagers. We’d even got a few head nods from some of the guys and offers of beer and cigarettes and even the opportunity to buy weed. We gladly took a couple of beers, none of us smoked cigarettes, and we didn’t have money to buy weed—all our cash was earmarked for Kiss swag.
We were enjoying our moment of acceptance by the older kids. The common denominator was that everyone was wearing a Kiss T-shirt. If this had been a normal day, someone would’ve already thrown an empty beer can at us and told us to fuck off, so we shared the three beers between us, none for my brother, and did our best to look cool. I had no intention of getting fucked up and ruining my night.
When the train pulled in, the cars were already crowded with people going to the show. Add in everyone who got on the train at Bayside station, and it was packed. We stood right by the doors, pressed against each other, struggling to even be able to raise a beer up to our mouths in the crush. The train car quickly filled with the smell of pot as we hurtled toward Manhattan, wide eyed and excited to be a part of this world we had only imagined. I felt right at home. When we got to Penn Station we hurried off the train to beat the crowd and ran up the steps from the platform and into the teeming madness of the station. There were thousands of people heading every which way, commuters trying to get home from work and, of course, all of us Kiss fans. The six of us made our way to a less crowded area of the station to figure out what we were going to do. We were very early—the show wasn’t starting for another two hours—so we needed to do something to kill the time. While we were standing around figuring that out, a guy carrying a big duffel bag came walking up to us, pulled a couple of shirts out of it, and said, “Youse guys wanna buy shirts? I got ’em cheapuh here than they are inside!” He was holding up a Kiss T-shirt that had the Love Gun album cover on it, and it looked pretty good. My brother and I decided we were going to wait until we got upstairs to the Garden to see what other options there were. My friend David bought one, and then my other friend Ronnie asked the guy if he had one in a large, and the guy said, “Yeah, yeah I do. I have to run over there”—he pointed off toward the crowds—“to where my udduh guy is and get one offa him. Gimme the ten bucks and I’ll be right back.” Ronnie looked at the guy and then he looked
at all of us with a What should I do? look on his face. We all looked back with the same look, afraid to piss the guy off. The guy said, “Wha’dya think I’m gunna do? Take your money and run? C’mon, kid. I’m just trying to earn a buck here. You want the shirt or not? Your friend likes his.” Ronnie pulled out his wallet and gave him the ten bucks, and the guy took off to get his shirt. Ronnie said, “He seems okay. He gave David his shirt, right?” I personally wouldn’t have given the guy a dime without having the shirt in my hand first, but I tried to make Ronnie feel okay about his soon-to-be fuck-up: “I’m sure he’s cool. Don’t worry. He’ll be right back,” I said, my other friends looking at me incredulously. We waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, and the guy never came back. Ronnie got robbed for the money he had for a shirt, and he was crying and saying he wanted to go home. We couldn’t let him leave by himself—our parents would kill us—and none of us were going to leave and take the train back to Bayside. We all decided we would chip in a couple of dollars each so Ronnie could get a shirt too. And we’d share whatever food and drinks we bought with him. Ronnie stopped crying and thanked us and said he was sorry for fucking up.
Ronnie getting ripped off was our cue to get out of the train station. We rode the wave of Kiss fans up the escalators and out of Penn Station onto 7th Avenue. We were immediately accosted by half a dozen guys selling shirts with every different Kiss album cover. They were practically shoving them in our faces. I bought a shirt with the Destroyer album cover on it and a big gold-colored Kiss logo. My brother and the rest of the guys all got shirts too. Shirts in hand, we made our way through the crowds and into the entrance to the Garden. Doors were open, and we figured we would go find our seats and get out of the insanity for a few minutes. I stopped at the merchandise stand and bought the Alive II tour program and then we headed to our seats. The inside of the arena wasn’t nearly as crowded as the train station or outside on 7th Avenue. Most of the people were outside partying, which was fine with me. I was happy to sit there for a minute and look at the pictures in the tour program. I was just settling in to do that when the lights turned off and a band started to play. I looked at my friends: “Who the hell is this?” I yelled over the band. Nobody knew what was going on. I had no idea there was a band on before Kiss. I didn’t want to see any other band, and apparently neither did anyone else already in the arena because between songs the crowd would chant, “Fuck this! We want Kiss! Fuck this! We want Kiss!” We all chimed in as well, although the band was actually pretty good. Turns out they were a band called Detective fronted by Michael Des Barres, and I bought their record the week after the show. Detective did their job, because I was all riled up from chanting to get them to stop playing, and now they were done and I was only minutes away from the definitive moment of my life.
The lights went out and the roar from the crowd was deafening. I was standing on my seat so I could see the stage over the sea of people in front of me. And then that giant voice from Kiss Alive! was booming all over the arena: “NEW YORK CITY!!!” And the crowd roared back its approval at hearing the name of the city where they lived. “YOU WANTED THE BEST! YOU GOT THE BEST! THE HOTTEST BAND IN THE WORLD—KISS!!!”
I was jumping up and down on my seat, hands in the air like I was riding a roller coaster, and then I saw them. I could see them on the stage: Peter behind his kit, Ace walking out onto stage left, Paul playing his guitar in the center, and Gene stalking stage right. I was in the same room as Kiss! I was screaming as loud as I could, in a complete frenzy. Paul was playing the intro to “I Stole Your Love,” but I couldn’t even make out what he was playing in the moment because I couldn’t hear it over my own screaming as well as the other eighteen thousand people doing the same thing. The band kicked in, and it wasn’t until the chorus of the song that I could even understand what song they were playing. I had never heard anything so loud in my life. The combination of the volume of the crowd and the band was deafening to me, and it didn’t matter one bit. After a minute my ears adjusted to the volume, like tuning in a radio station, and everything sounded loud and clear. From that point on I lost all sense of myself as I lost my mind, swept up into the mass consciousness of the crowd, all of us shouting it out loud as one. I’m not going to go into a song-by-song breakdown of the whole set—suffice it to say that they played all the hits and I sang every word to every song along with my brother and friends. Gene blew fire and spit blood. Ace’s guitar smoked. Paul smashed his guitar. They had massive walls of amps with steps climbing to the top of them. They had the giant Kiss logo flashing behind them. At the end of their final encore song, “Black Diamond,” Peter’s drum kit rose high up above the stage along with the rest of the band standing on hydraulic platforms as concussion bombs went off, and we screamed and screamed and screamed for more. The lights came up, and eighteen thousand people had the same delirious look of sheer satisfaction on their faces. We had all climbed the mountain and were found worthy. The concert was the culmination of having fanatically worshipped at the altar of Kiss for two years. It was everything I wanted it to be and more. I was filled with energy, a burning light inside my brain, my heart pounding, the power of Kiss compelling me, showing me my path, and as I left Madison Square Garden that night I stepped foot onto that path and have walked it for the last thirty-nine years, three months, and two days. And I will never stray from it.
Kiss has been the one musical constant in my life since then. They’ve been my longest relationship. They’re in my blood, literally: I have Gene Simmons tattooed on my leg.
If it weren’t for Kiss, I wouldn’t have started a band. I wouldn’t be writing this book. My life would’ve taken a different path down who knows what unknown roads. It was Kiss who sent me on the righteous path of rock. Sure, I got into much heavier music, but it was Kiss who opened the door for it all.
Thanks, Kiss.
FRUIT LOOPS
I’ve done a lot of interviews over the last thirty-three years. A LOT. It’s safe to say that the number is somewhere in the thousands, and of those thousands of interviews and tens of thousands of questions I’ve been asked there’s one question I’ve been asked more than any other:
“What is the craziest thing you’ve seen on tour?”
A man running down the street full speed taking a shit.
No, I’ve never seen that. That’s from a George Carlin bit about things you never see. My answer is crazier than that. You would sooner see the running dumper than the scene I am about to describe. It’s a scene I have a hard time believing actually happened, but it did. I was there. I bore witness to a game—or, better yet, a contest—that I couldn’t/wouldn’t have ever imagined, and I have a big imagination. I can only surmise that the idea of setting up this scenario was to create something that had never been seen before, a scene so original (that’s one word for it) that it may have never happened in the history of the world as far as I know. Or maybe it happened the night before on the tour I witnessed it on, or maybe it was happening every night backstage on that tour and it was all new to me. There are many questions I have about this event; they continue to pile up as the years pass. The main ones being: Who made the rules of the contest, and how did they get the participants to agree to take part?
And why Fruit Loops?
So what is the craziest thing you’ve seen on tour?
An enema contest.
Nine Inch Nails played Madison Square Garden in December of 1994 on their aptly named Self Destruct tour. Marilyn Manson and the Jim Rose Circus were the openers. The show was amazing, unlike any other rock show I had ever seen. Trent Reznor and his band played like they were on death row and their executions were the next day. The stage—at least from my point of view from the audience and as a fan and someone who does this for a living—looked like a physically dangerous place to be. It really seemed like they were working out some shit up there. It was a great show, and there’s so much more to say about it, but I’m not here to review the show. I’m here to answer my most asked question.<
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After the show I went backstage with my friend Jennifer Syme. She knew the Manson guys and was able to get us passes. She introduced me to Brian and Jeordie, aka Manson and Twiggy. I was already a fan, and it was cool to find out they were Anthrax fans as well. Jeordie told me a story about how he was a stagehand at a show we played at the Cameo Theater in Miami in 1987 and how he stole the NYHC (New York hardcore) button off my guitar strap. I remembered immediately, as I was actually pissed off at my tech at the time because I thought he lost it! Jeordie! He told me he still had the button and would give it back to me. I told him he had to keep it—it was his now.
I was talking to some guys I knew on the local Garden crew backstage when Jennifer came over and whispered to me, “There’s some weird shit about to go down in the Nine Inch Nails dressing room. Do you want to go check it out?”
I said good-bye to my friends, and Jennifer and I, always down for weird shit, headed over to the dressing room.
There was a security guy outside the door to the dressing room checking passes. Apparently you had to have a specific pass to get into the inner sanctum. We didn’t have the right passes, but we had my laminate face. The security guy recognized me and was a fan, so one handshake later we were on the inside. It was a large room, crowded with people all anticipating what the postshow festivities were going to be. There was a large high-backed throne-like chair set up against a wall facing into the room, and sitting there was Trent Reznor, drink in hand, surrounded by a gaggle of people in all kinds of altered states of undress, physical and mental. It reminded me of Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula surrounded by his sexy vampire minions. The king was holding court, and as if on cue, in walked his jester. Jim Rose came Joker-smiling into the room with three girls. Ever the ringmaster, Jim went into his patter, introducing everyone to these wonderfully adventurous ladies who were going to participate in an amazing contest for our collective enjoyment, all, of course, brought to us by and with the blessing of Trent. What kind of contest, you ask? With a glint in his eye and that mischievous smile on his lips, Jim told us, “Why, an enema contest. An enema contest, my good people!”
