“I’m here because I’m drunk!” she laughed.
Sometimes I felt like a bull in a china shop; other times I heard a voice telling me that sex went hand in hand with fear and consequences. If you get somebody pregnant, you’re on your own. In other words, if you fuck the wrong woman, you’re dead.
No matter the fear, anxiety, or inner conflicts, sex was my drug of choice. And I always went back for more.
I had a few drinks now and then, but I didn’t need booze to screw up the courage to talk to women. I had no trouble making advances or starting a conversation. And anyway, I quickly learned that it didn’t take a lot of witty banter to interest a woman—I was in a band, and that was enough to make me desirable.
Drinking more heavily or doing drugs didn’t appeal to me. I never wanted to lose control. I was dealing with newfound freedoms and opportunities, and I wanted to remain lucid and remember it all. But drugs were around from the earliest days of the band. People showed up at the venues, at the motels, and at the radio stations and record shops where we did promo appearances and wanted to befriend us. The guys threw drugs at us, and the women threw their bodies; I had use for only one.
The road crew, on the other hand, picked up the various colored pills that fans threw on the stage and gobbled them down like Skittles. It freaked me out. “You don’t even know what you just ate!”
One morning I went to our pyro guy’s room and there was no answer. I pushed the door open, and he was huddled in the corner with a blanket over his head, looking green and unable to move. I didn’t see the fun in that.
The fact that nearly everyone in the rock world was high definitely contributed to my socializing less. Drugs were part of the culture, and not doing drugs set me apart. The fact that I wasn’t doing blow or taking pills made other people uncomfortable; the fact that they were uncomfortable made me uncomfortable. My interactions with groupies and other women, on the other hand, were purely sexual, and drug use rarely came up. I couldn’t imagine a better rush than having a woman want to go back to my room with me.
Ace was an alcoholic, but in the beginning he stayed sober until after the show—at which point it was normal for him to drink until he was unable to stand. It was still funny then. For me, the ultimate gauge of whether his drinking was a problem was whether he was doing his job—and he was. What he wanted to do offstage was his business.
One night I found him crawling down the hall of a motel on all fours, talking to himself. “What are you doing, man?” I asked him.
“I’ve got my little people with me,” he said, gesturing around himself.
As I tried to get past him, he said, “Oh! You just stepped on one!”
In some ways it was pathetic, but in other ways, I have to say, it was funny. We laughed at Ace a lot—and not in a demeaning way. He was amusing. He was an oddball. He constantly told jokes. Only later did it become ugly. Once he mixed in Valium and cocaine, it wasn’t as funny anymore. Initially, though, he was just a likable kook.
At one point, Ace got the nickname “the chef.” With the exception of Gene, who never took his clothes off or showered in front of anyone else, we often didn’t wear a lot in the dressing room before or after a concert. One night while we were sitting in front of our mirrors putting on our makeup, Peter walked up behind Ace and put his dick on his shoulder. Ace very nonchalantly turned to the side and gave it a kiss. So he became the chef, because he had to taste everything.
We also called Ace “Scraps” back then because he often reached across the table and took stuff off our plates. “Are you eating that?” he’d ask, and then grab.
We all had breakfast and dinner together on the road. The breakfasts at cheap motels were pretty much the same: scrambled eggs and toast and those little cups of grape jelly you peeled the top off of. Dinner varied. If someone had shrimp, Ace would eat the tails you left on the plate. Sometimes in motels he would rummage through discarded room service trays as we walked down the hallways.
It wasn’t unusual to spend ten or more hours a day in the station wagon together. Ace kept us laughing. One time Peter, who was older than all of us and had a long, mopey face, said, “I have the baby face in the band.”
Ace said, “Yeah, maybe a baby walrus.”
Another time in the car Ace said, “I could really use a drink.” This was not unusual for Ace.
“You can drink my cologne,” I said.
“Really?”
“Sure,” I said, “cologne is alcohol.”
So he screwed off the spray cap and took a swig of my Aramis. He spit it right out. We all laughed, including Ace.
I thought of us as the four musketeers and figured we’d be together forever. We were the Vikings, the Huns, the Mongols, wreaking havoc in every town we invaded. We were the Beatles skiing down the hill in Help!
We were KISS.
There was a genuine sense of camaraderie as we ate together, traveled together, got dressed for a show together, and played together—and onstage we were a unified force. It wasn’t real life, of course, and when we occasionally went home for brief stretches, we didn’t see each other at all. On the road, though, we were KISS. And it was fun to be KISS.
I knew we would work through and beyond this phase. There was almost a wistfulness—I was conscious that we were living this quaint rock and roll existence on the way to stardom. Because stardom was never a question in my mind.
We are going to make it.
Bill set up promotional appearances at local papers, radio stations, and record shops at every possible opportunity. After a few months, we began to get a little big for our britches, moaning about having to do appearances. One afternoon when we were supposed to get dressed and go to a record store, we decided we weren’t going to show up. Fuck it. Bill was out with us at the time, and he came storming to our motel rooms, gathered us together, and yelled, “Are you kidding me?”
We told him we didn’t feel like doing it—we felt it was a waste of time, and maybe even beneath us.
“You guys are acting like you’ve qualified for the Olympics or something,” he scolded. “You’re not even contenders yet.”
We looked at each other and said, “Oh.”
We put on our makeup. We went to the record store. We listened to Bill and he was almost always right.
Neil, on the other hand, approached things from an entirely different philosophy—learned during his Buddha days—and seemed to find nothing wrong with jeopardizing an act’s potential career longevity for the chance of a hit single today, no matter how trite or substandard. He got us into a recording studio in early spring of 1974 to do a cover of an old Bobby Rydell song called “Kissin’ Time.” He told us it was “promotional music” for a kissing contest—an idea that was contrary to everything I envisioned for the band. I thought it was tacky. The bands I looked up to wouldn’t do something like that. But Neil assured us our recording would be used for background music in a radio spot for the contest, nothing more. Of course, no sooner had we cut the not-particularly-great rendition of the song than Neil issued it as a single. He had a unique way of dealing with things sometimes.
After the single was released and the kissing contest was rolled out on some radio stations around the country, Neil scheduled us to appear at one of the contests being held at a record store. I walked in there, in full makeup, feeling very full of myself, and strolled over to a couple who had their lips locked. I bent down—we had our platform boots on—and the guy, while keeping his lips in contact with the girl’s, looked out of the side of his eyes and said, “Who the hell are you?”
They were just two kids in a kissing contest. They had no idea it had anything to do with us.
“Never mind,” I said, and made for the door as quickly as my studded heels would carry me.
22.
We averaged a little better than one concert every two days. At the end of April, Bill landed us another national TV appearance, this time on The Mike Douglas Show.
I coul
d tell this one would be different. It was a variety show, not a music show. We could just as easily have been monkeys on unicycles or spinning dishes on sticks. Ed Sullivan’s show was like that, too: “We’ve got Topo Gigio and the dancing bears, and for the kids . . . the Beatles.” Only on Mike Douglas’s show, the audience was just like Mike Douglas—older, to put it mildly. The crowd looked like moms and pops out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and we looked like aliens to them. We were clearly out of our element, and I had a feeling we would be not only treated as a novelty, but milked for laughs.
We had to win over audiences when we opened for other bands, and we relished the challenge. This, however, did not look like fun. This wasn’t an audience I thought I could win over, and I had no desire to go out and get ridiculed.
Bill asked, “Who wants to sit in the chair and do the talking during the panel discussion portion of the show?”
I said, “Not me, I’m staying backstage.”
Gene went out. He didn’t know what to say and described himself as “evil incarnate” and stuck out his tongue. Totie Fields, a comedienne who was also a guest that night, dismissed him as a nice Jewish boy, despite the demon getup. He came off pretty goofy. But his being the default spokesman of the band would lead to countless more episodes of him using “I” instead of “we,” subtly and not so subtly implying that he was the frontman, lead singer, and mastermind all wrapped up in one. He never attempted to clarify his role or refute media assumptions. Why would he? Those false assumptions were based on Gene’s own statements. Once again I found myself scratching my head at his refusal to be honest and his insistence on using every opportunity to discuss things from his own perspective rather than the band’s collective perspective. He was cheating.
Earlier that month we’d opened a show at the Agora in Cleveland for Rory Gallagher. When we walked out onto the stage, a girl in the front started elbowing her boyfriend and laughing.
You won’t be laughing for long.
We blew the place up. Smoke filled the entire venue. These places were not ventilated well. Back then our pyro guys had to make their own flashpots. Each day they built enclosures and filled them with explosives. One night the flashpots could be like kernels of popcorn being popped, and the next night they might blow a hole in the stage. We didn’t have to apply for permits or have a fire marshal inspect what we were doing—nobody knew what we were doing, and nobody had done it before. We just blew crap up and set off explosions with no oversight or expertise. It was intense.
On nights like that I might as well have turned over an hourglass and waited for the sand to trickle down. It was like clockwork. We always won over even the most skeptical people. We never failed to get a crowd on its feet. Of course, no show, no matter how big, could mask a crappy band. And KISS started with the four of us bringing it. You can have a beautiful car, with a sparkling paint job and loads of chrome trim, but if it doesn’t have a great engine, it isn’t going anywhere. We provided the engine, and we won audiences because of the power of the four characters and the music we made.
Another night we opened for a midlevel British blues band called Savoy Brown at a jam-packed ice-skating rink in Michigan. Some of the guys in the band had never seen us, and they came to the side of the stage as we started playing and laughed in full view of us. I was laughing inside, though, because I knew how tough it was to follow KISS. And sure enough, they may have been laughing during our set, but they were crying when half the audience left during theirs. They changed their tune after that.
Some of the musicians we met I liked as people, and we played with a lot of bands whose music I liked and respected, but our attitude as a band was always the same: We will annihilate you. When I reached the stage steps, it was no longer a Kumbaya moment. Even though it wasn’t conceived in hatred or animosity, we were deadly serious about the fact that we wanted to kill other bands when we hit that stage. Not the audience, the other band. We took huge pride in what we were doing, we were focused, we were driven, and we wanted to decimate them.
We are KISS!
We were missionaries for KISS’s brand of rock and roll, and we would not stop until we converted everyone.
Sometimes our missionary fervor took on biblical proportions. One night in Fayetteville, North Carolina, our bombs set the curtain on fire—the curtain owned by the headliners, Black Oak Arkansas. We got thrown off that tour.
In the Deep South, people loved us when we were onstage. We had a license to be freaks onstage and were welcomed as entertainers. But offstage, people wanted to kill us. As soon as we left the venues and were just guys in platform boots with big hair, wearing scarves, jewelry, and women’s blouses, we felt hunted. Outside of rock clubs, people had zero tolerance for guys who looked to them like “fags,” which people constantly shouted at us. I kept worrying we might end up squealing like pigs, like in the scene from the movie Deliverance, which I had seen the year before.
I realized I’d grown up pretty insulated in New York City, not understanding the kind of anger that looking different could elicit in other places. Still, I sensed the discrimination more than I saw it. That couldn’t be said for some of our crew members, like our road manager J.R. Smalling—the guy who came up with our stage introduction, “You wanted the best, you got the best.” J.R. was black, and for several days when we had a local driver in the South, the white driver kept referring to J.R. as “Leroy.” I also heard the N-word hurled around a lot.
We didn’t attract hecklers, though. For one thing, I think people who came to shows found us somewhat intimidating. And our willfulness was obvious, too, our commitment to what we were doing. When we ran into people outside the show calling us names, I wanted to say, “Hang on a minute—I’m the same guy you were clapping for. I put down my guitar and you want to lynch me?”
We stuck close to our motels in places where we didn’t feel safe. We ate at the motels, got in our car, and hit the road. We weren’t big on stopping at Billy Bob’s Diner or Bubba’s Barbeque. We got our asses from point A to point B.
We passed Graceland at some point along the road, and I was very disappointed. It just looked like an anonymous doctor’s house in the suburbs. I had expected a massive mansion. I opted to go off with a couple of women who owned a clothing store in Memphis instead of taking the tour of Elvis’s place.
Even in the South or in other conservative places like Salt Lake City, we found our fans or they found us. And, always, women. Girls waited in the lobby or out front of our hotel rooms until we were available. We could have had one of those machines you see at the motor vehicles department—take a number and wait for it to be called. Most of the time, I didn’t even know the girls’ names.
It still amazed me that the women I met on the road came to my room with barely so much as an introduction when I figured there were probably guys in town who had to date them for months to get anywhere. It all quickly became normal. And what a relief. I was now getting laid and felt desired without any fear of emotional connection, which was the last thing I wanted. I got what I craved without any of the dangers, as I saw it. Because of my insecurities, my ear, my hearing, and the defenses I had built up over the course of my life, emotional connection continued to frighten me. It meant having to open up and give something of myself, which I didn’t want to do.
We couldn’t afford individual rooms yet. I roomed with Peter, and we both hoped we wouldn’t be alone in bed when the other guy had someone there. We never had any privacy. But it was certainly nicer when both beds were filled rather than one of us having to put a pillow over his head. In those cases I hoped for a quick few minutes with Peter’s guest if he left the room. It made sleeping easier. Eventually Sean Delaney began to see it as his job to kick girls out of our rooms under the pretense that we needed sleep. Sean wasn’t fond of the girls, whom he often called “breeders.”
That first six months of touring in 1974 was a bit of a blur: long drives punctuated by stops in venues with names like Thunderchicke
n, Mother’s, and Flash’s. We played college auditoriums, gymnasiums, and even a jai alai stadium in Florida; we made it as far as Alaska, where we played outdoors at a drive-in cinema and the space heaters at the front of the stage kept throwing the metal strings on our guitars out of tune. Even during that first blurred year, however, we found places that became favorites—like the Electric Ballroom in Atlanta. Somehow we headlined blocks of shows there. We played four nights in a row in June; after we drew crowds for several more nights in July, they booked us for four additional nights in September. The parties and hospitality on all levels were never ending, and we got excited whenever we saw it on the itinerary. Any girlfriend or wife in New York didn’t.
KISS also clearly connected with Detroit from the get-go. People there got us. It was such a fertile area for rock that we loved, too—from Mitch Ryder to Bob Seger to Alice Cooper. Ann Arbor had the MC5 and the Stooges, Flint had Grand Funk Railroad. Michigan embraced us, and before the end of 1974, Detroit became the first place we could headline a theater. I would always recall it as the first city to open its arms, and its legs, to us.
Through all of this touring we didn’t have multiple sets of stage clothes, so we could always find the dressing room at a venue by following the stench; as the smell got stronger, I knew I was getting closer. Some days we did two sets, an early show and a late show, but even on days with just one, the clothes never dried. Putting on damp, fetid clothing made my skin crawl. Whenever possible, I took a hair dryer to my jumpsuit—at least then it was warm damp clothing. After my wardrobe malfunction at the Academy of Music, with the button popping on my homemade pants, I had bought a pair of Danskin tights. I took a lot of flak for them at first, but they turned out to be really practical and the other guys ultimately made the switch, too. Leather and satin got crisp and mossy after they soaked up enough sweat.
Face the Music: A Life Exposed Page 13
