Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  13.

  By the end of the summer of 1972, we completed the Wicked Lester record. We had recorded some of our own songs but also a lot of songs Ron brought in from publishing companies. Some of the songs had wah-wah pedal, others had horns. We had done what we were told, basically, and the result was awful.

  Gene and I both hated the album. We sat down together, just the two of us, and decided we didn’t want to release it. In fact, we didn’t want to play with this band anymore. It wasn’t working as we had hoped. So we decided to scrap the record and part ways with the other guys. That proved more easily said than done. Tony, the drummer, said he wanted to uphold his end of the record contract. So Gene and I quit the band.

  At that point, we had no band, no label, and virtually no gear. But what had made us start working together in the first place shined through at that moment, as we both had the same response to the setbacks.

  No band, no label, no gear?

  No problem.

  First off, Gene and I needed a new rehearsal space. We didn’t plan on replacing our gear and leaving it to be stolen again. We found a place at 10 East 23rd Street called Jams. We initially rented space on an upper floor by the hour. We didn’t have any gear to store there anyway—there was no immediate drawback to taking our acoustic guitars in and out with us. Soon, though, a space a few floors below became available to rent by the month. We took it.

  Our new space again had plate steel over the windows. It was a big empty room, and we lined the walls and ceiling with discarded egg cartons, thinking that would help soundproof it. Gene put a mattress in the space so he could sleep over on occasion, and we had a couple of rickety chairs. The overall effect was a bit claustrophobic, though that was also in part because we spent so much time there.

  Gene and I talked about the direction we wanted to go, and it became clear very quickly that we both wanted to create a new beast, something cohesive both visually and sonically. In a lot of ways, what we wanted to do was the antithesis of Wicked Lester. That band was all over the place musically, and we wanted to narrow things down. As for the look, Wicked Lester could have been just a bunch of random guys who happened to be waiting in line at the same bus stop.

  We knew we needed something like a mission statement in order to create the right kind of cohesiveness. I played him the concept album S.F. Sorrow, by the Pretty Things, and records by the Move and Slade. My first thought was to have two drummers, two bass players, and two guitar players—to make a sort of rock orchestra along the lines of what Roy Wood of the Move was trying to do after leaving the Electric Light Orchestra and forming Wizzard, to create a big wall of sound. I wanted to keep things tight, too. Much as I liked Led Zeppelin, I knew we would never be a jam band. We didn’t have the ability to stretch a song out for fifteen minutes. You need an extensive musical vocabulary to do that, and we just didn’t have it. It would have been pointless and boring for us to try to stretch out at that point.

  Much of the time Gene and I sat facing each other on the old wooden chairs, acoustic guitars in our laps. Among the first things we worked on were “100,000 Years,” “Deuce,” and “Strutter.” The chords of “Strutter” were from Gene’s old song “Stanley the Parrot.” Although the original song was a bit offbeat, I always loved the chords in it. We started trying to recast it in the vein of the Rolling Stones. And the words just came to me.

  She wears her satins like a lady

  She gets her way just like a child

  You take her home and she says, “Maybe baby”

  She takes you down and drives you wild

  The whole glitter scene was about style, and the girls looked fantastic. Of course, I wasn’t doing so well socially—I spent all my time rehearsing or driving a taxi, not hanging out in clubs. God knows, I didn’t have a girlfriend in fishnet stockings or satins. But I saw hip women walking around the Village, and I saw other bands with their girlfriends. For me, it was singing about an ideal. I was celebrating something I wasn’t really part of. But what the hell, Brian Wilson had never been on a surfboard, either.

  My songs tended to be very much chord-based, mainly because my ability to play riffs was fairly limited. So Gene would often supplement some of my songs with riffs. He had a better understanding of how to play notes and runs. On “Black Diamond,” for instance, he added a back riff that plays against the chords. The lyrics to “Black Diamond” were another example of creating a romanticized vignette about the life of the city. I mean, I knew about as much about streetwalkers as I did about Lilliputians.

  Gene and I fed off each other and filled in blanks for each other—lyrical and musical—as we worked. I remember the words to “100,000 Years” hitting me on 23rd Street: Sorry to have taken so long / Must have been a bitch while I was gone. On “Deuce,” the guitar figure that starts the song and then reintroduces it after the solo is mine. Even if both of our names didn’t appear on any given song, our fingerprints were all over each other’s songs.

  Gene and I also sparked each other with song titles. I had started a song called “Christine Sixteen,” but Gene was the one who ran with the title and came up with a really good song. “Black Diamond” started out as a title of his and I ran with it. There was no animosity or resentment, just the sense that we were working toward our shared goal. Each of us also had a few older songs in complete form that we needed only to slightly re-tweak to make them fit in the new repertoire— “She” was a leftover of Gene’s; “Firehouse” and “Let Me Know” were leftovers of mine.

  Together we consciously tailored the songs to fit our concept of the band instead of just cranking out whatever struck our fancies on any given day. I was excited. We were doing things that neither of us had been capable of doing on our own up to that point. And we now had built the foundation for success: a rock and roll manifesto in the form of a catalogue of strong, cohesive songs.

  Alongside our musical development, we molded ourselves into what we thought we should be. For the first time, I knew I was working with someone whose vision was as big as mine. I’d been around kids who could play their instruments before, but Gene seemed to understand the whole package, the fact that your music or your musical ability was just one part of making yourself an appealing musician. Like me, he saw the importance of marketing yourself—not in a Madison Avenue way, but in terms of appealing to people, being engaging, promoting yourself. Success wouldn’t happen by chance; it would happen by design.

  Toward that end, we made a conscious decision to lose weight. Gene started dressing cooler. And we both changed our names. Gene had already changed his name once, from Chaim Weitz to Gene Klein, so one more change, from Klein to Simmons, was no big deal for him. I had always hated my name and even told my parents as a little kid that I was going to change it. They said I could change it when I got older. Little did they know I was going to do it almost as soon as I was legally able.

  The chances of a rock star named Stanley Eisen seemed pretty slim. It just didn’t sound like Roger Daltrey or Elvis Presley. Stars were supposed to be larger than life. Why was there no Archibald Leach? Because Cary Grant sounded better. Ringo Starr sounded better than Richard Starkey. It wasn’t about hiding my ethnicity.

  I would just rather have been Paul McCartney than Schlomo Ginsberg. But I also didn’t want a stupid name like Rock Fury. I wanted a name like the people I aspired to be like, something easily identifiable. The question was, what sort of a name? Ozzy Osbourne’s nickname derived from his last name. Eizzy Eisen? Nah. Then it hit me: Paul. That was a comfortable name. There was Paul McCartney, of course, and Paul Rogers of Free, another band I liked. I didn’t want to completely give up who I had been, so when I thought about last names, I was happy that my thoughts went Daltrey, Presley . . . Stanley!

  Paul Stanley.

  Initially I didn’t change my name legally because I figured I’d go back to my original name at some point after our career took its course. In those days, bands ran their courses pretty quickly, and nobody t
hen had made it to ten years, though a few—like the Who and the Stones—were closing in on it.

  I hoped for five years.

  14.

  Now that we had the songs and the beginnings of a look and feel, we needed a band. We weren’t Simon and Garfunkel; we weren’t the Everly Brothers; we weren’t Jan and Dean. Our songs were built to rock.

  We made finding a lead guitar player our initial priority. I had never aspired to play lead. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. When I listened to people sing, I knew I could do something reasonably comparable. But I rarely heard a guitar solo and thought, I can do something like that. Unless somebody was playing slowly. Once in a while I heard a solo by Paul Kossoff of Free and thought I might be able to pull it off, but I just wasn’t a fast, flashy player. My gut also told me that this was an area where work might not pay off for me—that I might get only mediocre results regardless of how much time I put into it.

  Fortunately, Gene knew the perfect guy for the job. Unfortunately, the perfect guy for the job lived upstate—and Gene didn’t know exactly where. Or even exactly who he was. He had run across somebody when he lived up there, and this person—whoever it was—became our first target. So that fall of 1972 we started hitchhiking up to the Catskills in search of the mythical lead guitar player who apparently played in the bars and ballrooms of the low-rent resort circuit up there. We stood on the side of the Major Deegan Expressway with our thumbs out, me in lime-green high-heel boots and him in an antique woman’s fur coat.

  Inevitably, we hit the road without a place to stay. One night we met some people from a commune outside one of the towns, and they invited us to stay at their place. It turned out to be a barn, and we slept in the chicken coop. The people we’d met collected the eggs—that was their role in the commune. They offered us warm food, but the place was such a wreck that I was reluctant to eat. Later, in the middle of the night, I woke up famished. I went into the kitchen to see if anything was left in the oven. When I opened it, a mouse scampered out.

  Another time, two girls in a VW van pulled over and took us to spend the night at their place at the top of a mountain. It must have taken ten minutes just to get up the winding driveway. Their house was either not yet finished or derelict, and they offered us spots on the subflooring, alongside their dogs. As we were lying on the floor half asleep, one of the girls walked through the room stark naked. Gene opened his eyes, and I watched them follow her. I already knew that Gene tried to screw everybody and anybody. It was part of how he defined himself: possessed by and obsessed with pussy.

  “If you make a move on her and she’s insulted,” I whispered pleadingly, “they’re going to throw us out of here in the middle of nowhere. We’ll end up freezing to death at the top of this fucking mountain.”

  He held back. But the next morning he wound up trying it on with her—successfully. It turned out she wore a hearing aid, he told me, and whenever he leaned in close to her, he heard feedback.

  Another weekend we ended up in a town that had already rolled up and gone to bed. We stood on a desolate street until finally a car came toward us. We put out our thumbs and the car pulled over. Inside were four tough-looking black guys. “Where you going?” the driver asked.

  “Oh, us? We’re not going anywhere.”

  The driver got mad. “You had your thumbs out. Where are you going?”

  We told him we were trying to get to Grossinger’s, a big Borscht Belt resort. Gene knew somebody there we could crash with.

  “Get in.” It sounded more like a command than a welcome.

  The next thing I knew, we were winding down an unlit dirt road and I was starting to get scared. Then I saw another car pulled off to the side of the road up ahead.

  Great, they’re waiting for us. Two Jews served up on a stick.

  We pulled up and another group of tough-looking guys got out of the other car. My life flashed before my eyes. But it turned out that they just wanted to hang out and drink. When we got back in the car, we said, “You know, you don’t have to take us.” With a combination of anger and threatening annoyance, the driver hissed, “I said I’d take you.”

  And he did, all the way to Grossinger’s.

  We never tracked down that guitar player, but those trips were an affirmation of our commitment. Who else but Gene would have taken those trips?—thumbing rides the way we were dressed, having no place to stay, sleeping on floors, barely having any money in our pockets. Most people would have just put an ad in the newspaper.

  Which is what we did next. Or rather, we looked at the ads. Only instead of looking for a lead guitar player, we decided to seek out a drummer. Eventually we found an interesting ad in Rolling Stone and rang the number. We had one line of questioning: “Would you do anything to make it?”

  “Yeah,” said the guy on the other end of the line.

  “Would you wear a dress?”

  “Yeah.”

  We arranged to meet the guy in front of Electric Lady down on Eighth Street. He was dressed very cool. Cooler than us. He looked quite a bit older than I was, and he had about five names—George Peter John Criscuola, blah blah blah—but he went by Peter Criss. We walked to a pizza joint and sat down with our slices. We hadn’t been talking for five minutes when Peter blurted out, “I have a nine-inch dick.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Pass the cheese?

  This guy was very different from us. Peter could barely read or spell, and he wasn’t a thinker. Still, we agreed to go see him play a gig he had coming up in a bar in Brooklyn. The place was called the King’s Lounge, and the other two guys in his band looked like they should be making pizzas or cement shoes. Peter looked completely different from them, and he exuded an air of confidence. He had swagger.

  The crowd was sparse, but something about his performance struck me: he played that bar like it was a packed arena. He was into it. After that, we asked him to come to our rehearsal space the next day to try playing together.

  When he played with us the first time at 23rd Street, it didn’t sound particularly good. Peter didn’t know much about British music. He knew the Beatles. And he liked Charlie Watts of the Stones. But that was probably because he liked to believe he played like Charlie Watts—basic, not showy. As for any other drummers—the ones he couldn’t play like—he disliked them all.

  Peter also didn’t understand the basics of song structure. Verse, chorus, bridge—it all meant nothing to him. If I said, “Let’s pick up at the second verse,” he just sat there. He had to memorize a song from beginning to end, and if we stopped in the middle or he lost his place, he was fucked. Perhaps as a result, his playing was wild. You could call it unorthodox, but that wouldn’t be accurate—it was just plain erratic. His drum parts would change verse to verse. Still, for all he lacked in continuity, he played with fire and vitality. He was scrappy.

  We asked him back for another rehearsal.

  The next rehearsal went much better. Again, his playing showed personality and a real zest for life. Some of the songs developed a different feel than Gene and I originally might have had in mind—Peter just couldn’t play like the drummers we had in our heads as we wrote—but what he delivered still worked as a blueprint for the band we wanted to be. Looking back now, there’s no denying that a drummer like John Bonham wouldn’t have fit what we were doing, although if we’d had our druthers, Gene and I would certainly have gone in that direction. Back then, Peter was the right guy for the band. His drumming was brash and full of piss and vinegar.

  Peter instinctively played ahead. At times we had to catch up to him. In the best-case scenario, a drummer is like the back of a chair: you can lean back on it and know it’s there for you. It’s a foundation. But Peter ran alongside us, which was a different animal altogether. Even so, things just clicked. Even as a trio, we sounded very promising. So promising, in fact, that we decided to once again play for Epic Records to see whether or not they wanted to keep us under our existing contract.

 
By this point, Gene and I had scraped together the money to buy new gear. I’d bought two guitars: a tobacco sunburst Gibson Firebird and a guitar I had custom-made by a guy named Charlie Lebeau. I got to know Charlie when he worked at a little second-floor shop on 48th Street—it was the first shop I’d ever seen that specialized in vintage guitars. Dan Armstrong’s stocked sunburst Les Pauls from the 1950s—beautiful instruments that were always out of my reach financially. But Charlie, who specialized in repairing the instruments, had struck out on his own and started building guitars. I bought a walnut-colored double-cutaway from him. The Gibson Firebird started off as a standard. I liked it because it reminded me of one Eric Clapton had played in Cream. I sent it to work with my dad one day and asked him to have the guys at the furniture shop paint it black. It didn’t end up with the finish you might normally get on a piano or guitar, but it was black.

  We had also bought a Peavey sound system, with two big speakers on telescoping stands and a mixing board with huge Frankenstein dials. We needed it for the vocals. In our rehearsal space—and any small clubs we figured we might soon play—we didn’t need to mic our guitar amps. They were loud enough on their own.

  Don Ellis, who was head of Epic at the time, and some other execs came down to 10 East 23rd to see the band in late November 1972. We referred to ourselves as the new version of Wicked Lester. Of course, we knew this was a completely new entity, but we didn’t have a name yet. We played our new repertoire, which was basically the songs that made up KISS’s debut album. During “Firehouse” I took a fire bucket full of confetti and threw it over Ellis, who cringed, thinking the bucket was full of water.

  In the end, Epic wanted nothing to do with the band. They passed and waived any legal obligations that still might have been lingering from the Wicked Lester contract.

  I had never envisioned the band as a power-trio, anyway—I never wanted to try to sustain the band on my guitar alone. Jimi Hendrix could do it, Pete Townsend could do it, Jimmy Page could do it. I could not. And besides, I wanted to swing my arm and pose and leave the acrobatic playing to somebody else.