Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  We had a couple of days off and flew to New York in the midst of things exploding. When I got home to my apartment in Queens, I found shotguns in the bedroom closet.

  Whoa, what the hell are these?

  My girlfriend, Amanda, had started hanging around with some unsavory types she’d befriended while I was on tour. They stashed weapons at our place. Great. I was just a Jewish kid from Queens—the only guns I’d ever seen were the kind you used to knock over a doll at the carnival to win a prize, the kind with a cork attached to the barrel with a string. She was descending into a completely different life.

  Amanda also told me that Joe Namath had given her a lift home from a club one night while I was gone. It was only after I thought about it a little that a lightbulb went off in my head and I realized Joe Namath wouldn’t drive girls to their doors and just give them a peck on the cheek. I had never lied about my activities on the road since I had told her my mantra of “Don’t ask me what happens on the road if you don’t want to know.” Somehow it had never dawned on me that the same would obviously be true of her: Don’t ask me what happens at home if you don’t want to know.

  I told her things were over between us, although it was clearly halfhearted on my part, because she came along just the same when I moved into Manhattan and rented a place on East 52nd Street. We never had any pretenses of being in love anyway—we were bed buddies. But it was time to change the sheets.

  The apartment was in a tall luxury building on a street that dead-ended at the East River. Construction on the building had just been completed. When I went to look at it, they offered two apartments. One on the twenty-first floor went for $510 a month; another on the twenty-sixth floor, with a beautiful view, cost $560. Despite our recent upturn, fifty bucks a month was a huge difference. I took the place on the twenty-first floor.

  My new apartment was tangible proof of my ascension. I went to Macy’s and bought my first real furniture—a big L-shaped green velvet couch and one of those huge ball-shaped lamps that hangs from a tall arching metal stand. I felt very cool.

  Another change brought about by the immediate success of Alive! was an upgrade in hotels: we graduated from Holiday Inns to Sheratons. At the Sheraton, the towels had embroidered “S” logos on them. Whenever we were about to have a break and return to New York, I would stuff a set into my suitcase. Soon I had a cabinet full of monogrammed towels at my new luxury apartment.

  Bill Aucoin liked to see us live an extravagant life on the road once things started to pop and he started to repay his massive personal debt. We enjoyed it, too, until we got a little wiser and saw the bills. In the dressing rooms now, people asked us what we would like to drink. It only seemed natural to ask for Champagne. How cool—Champagne! We ordered several bottles of bubbly, not realizing everything we ordered was charged to us. But it was fun—and, besides, who knew how long this all would last?

  We certainly weren’t born businessmen. Whatever the myth, we were totally green and not savvy at all about tour expenses or bottom lines. We trusted the people around us to have our best interests at heart. It took years for us to learn the ropes and to consider trying to change the way things were done.

  In the meantime, I felt newly flush, whatever the reality.

  One day off in New York, I went to 48th Street to pick up some things at a music store. It was a strange situation, because we had gotten quite famous more or less overnight, and yet very few people recognized us without the makeup. I could walk the streets or get a cup of coffee. I could even go to a newsstand and buy music magazines with photos of KISS in them. Of course, it was different on 48th Street. I didn’t look like everybody else. I had the blue-black hair and the street versions of my seven-inch platforms, which I wore all the time. I guess there among all the music aficionados, people could put two and two together when they saw a six-foot-eight guy with mounds of blue-black curls walk in. If that guy isn’t in KISS, the circus must be in town.

  When I went to check out, carrying a couple sets of strings and a few other things, the shop owner wanted to give it all to me for free. I didn’t understand. “It’s on us,” the guy insisted.

  The irony was not lost on me.

  “I can afford it,” I said. “I can buy it. Give it to the next guy who comes in and really needs it.”

  27.

  On New Year’s Eve 1975, we headlined the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. Exactly two years before, we had played another New Year’s Eve show, opening for Iggy and Blue Öyster Cult at the Academy of Music. This time, Blue Öyster Cult opened for us. Things were really cooking.

  Backstage at that show, we received gold albums, recognizing Alive! for surpassing five hundred thousand copies shipped since its release in September. Everything else we had accomplished that year had been the stuff of my fantasies—whether it was moving up to headlining status, climbing the hotel chain ladder, or getting a Manhattan apartment—but receiving a gold record fulfilled a childhood dream. Elvis had gold albums. The Beatles had gold albums. Now I had a gold album.

  The aftermath of the show was less rewarding. We had about two weeks off before starting the next leg of the tour, and I went home to 52nd Street and Amanda. Things with her had continued to go south, and this time when I got home I saw track marks on her arm. Another couple she had befriended trafficked drugs into the country—major league stuff—and I knew that even as a relationship of convenience this wasn’t going to work anymore. I didn’t want guns to start turning up again. I didn’t want to hear phone messages about shipments arriving. And I didn’t want a junkie around. “This is over and you’ve got to leave,” I told her.

  She didn’t want to.

  Ultimately I moved out for the final week of our tour break and stayed at an empty place Bill Aucoin had. I wasn’t quite sure why he maintained a spare apartment, but I didn’t care. Amanda and I had been fighting for several days when I left, and as I was going out the door of the building, the doorman called to me and said, “Mr. Stanley, she says she’s going jump.”

  “Tell her not to land on me,” I said, and left.

  Soon we went back out on tour. I called Amanda’s mother and told her to fly to New York and get Amanda out while I was gone.

  On January 31, 1976, KISS headlined Hara Arena, in Dayton, Ohio. Before the show I could hear a deep rumbling sound. The commotion of a big crowd. Excitement.

  Every night I asked the tour manager, “How’re we doing tonight?” The answer had been “good” for a long run now, since Alive! had taken off. That night, he said, “Sold out.”

  The four of us were celebrating, jubilant at the knowledge that we were taking it to that next level. We were now a credible headliner, a real headliner. KISS was becoming one of those bands, the type we had looked up to. We had graduated.

  A curtain always shrouded the stage before we went on. It wasn’t the elaborate kabuki we have now, but there was always a curtain. In Dayton that night I opened it a little and peered out. The place was packed. The energy of the crowd was almost frightening. I felt a nervousness in the pit of my stomach—the same feeling you get as a rollercoaster makes the long, slow climb up the initial hill. That’s what Hara Arena felt like to me.

  Then the next night when I asked the tour manager how we were doing, again he said, “Sold out.” And again the next night and the night after that—and all of a sudden we sold out everywhere. It was no longer an anomaly. KISS was a band selling out arenas every night. Once the floodgates opened, everything happened so fast. The pressure had been building up all this time, and then it exploded. There was no turning back.

  Ads with two of my favorites—Rush and Bob Seger, 1975–1976.

  And yet, I was just a kid. I was twenty-four years old and the depth of my comprehension was fairly limited. Yes, this was tremendous. Yes, it was unbelievable. Yes, this was how I had planned it and envisioned it. But as it started to happen, the success of the band was overwhelming. It was frightening.

  The rollercoaster f
eeling I’d had at Hara Arena became a more or less constant sensation: I was being pulled up the big hill, knowing we were going to reach the top at any moment and then plunge down the other side, falling, screaming, with no control whatsoever. I could feel the momentum, the process of being pulled up the hill. I could tell we had reached a point of no return. All I could do was hold on real tight.

  The problem was, What did I have to hold on to?

  Nothing. I had no emotionally meaningful connections in my life.

  God knew the guys in the band weren’t going to be any help. The world we operated in now was littered with casualties of fame. Drugs were offered as a sign of friendship. Every. Single. Day. People became self-destructive. People numbed themselves. People died. Because of my insecurities and self-doubt, I was scared I would fall prey to the same temptations. My sense of self-preservation kicked in.

  I’m going to need something to hold on to.

  This thing was going to careen down the hill at any moment, whether I was prepared or not.

  Then I thought of Dr. Jesse Hilsen.

  Back in those days people sometimes dismissed therapy as a “crutch” or considered it a sign of weakness. I myself had bought into that enough to stop going to Mount Sinai once life seemed to be going more smoothly, as Wicked Lester came together. I wanted to believe I was okay.

  But I wasn’t. I called Mount Sinai. Dr. Hilsen had left the hospital and gone into private practice. But I tracked him down. “My band is about to become huge,” I explained. “I don’t know if I can handle that world. I need a lifeline.”

  I was determined to survive.

  Perhaps therapy would be the way I kept my seven-inch heels planted on the ground.

  Part III

  I’ve been up and down, I’ve been all around

  28.

  Early in 1976, when we were getting ready to make our next studio album, Bill Aucoin said, “You can either use KISS Alive! as a springboard to take you to another level, or you can be a one-hit wonder that just goes right back to doing what you were doing before.”

  He had a point. To go back to what we had done earlier did seem stupid. After all, it didn’t work before Alive!, so why would it work now? The reason our first three albums didn’t sell was because listeners didn’t like the way they sounded—there was something intrinsically wrong with them, though I still couldn’t have put my finger on exactly what it was.

  Bill suggested we bring in Bob Ezrin to produce the new record. Bob was already known for the great records he’d made with Alice Cooper, and he proved to have a vast musical vocabulary. It turned out to be a brilliant move on Bill’s part. Bob was a gift.

  We may have had a huge album under our belts, but we still didn’t know anything more than we did before Alive! became a hit. Still, for a bunch of guys who thought they were hot shit, it was initially jarring to go into a studio with somebody who treated us like children. As we began work on what would become Destroyer, Bob made a point of letting us know he was the boss. He wore a whistle around his neck and referred to us as “campers.” He told us we didn’t know anything—which was true. He told us never to stop playing until he said so. Once, at the end of a take, long after a fade-out would have ended the recording, Gene stopped playing. Bob came out of the control booth and ran up to him, stuck his finger so close to Gene’s nose that it made his eyes cross, and said, “Don’t you ever, ever stop until I tell you to stop!” A trickle of sweat ran down Gene’s forehead. He never stopped again.

  It was humbling, particularly at a time when we thought we were God’s gift to rock and roll and finally had a record to back up our claim—Alive! was platinum by this point. But Bob clearly knew a lot more than we did. He was trained. He was worthy of respect. And he taught us a lot.

  One of the most significant things he did was challenge us not to write “fuck me suck me” songs. “No more ‘I’m a rock star, suck my dick,’ ” he insisted. And as we worked on lyrics, he had no problem saying very plainly, “No, I don’t like that.”

  I never would have written a lyric like “Detroit Rock City” without Bob upping our game. He pushed us far beyond our limits.

  During the process of making the record, Bob lived in an apartment directly across the street from my place on 52nd Street. He had a piano, and when we weren’t in the rehearsal space or studio, I spent a lot of time there. Gene and I also sometimes took amplifiers over to his place and worked. We wrote “Shout It Out Loud” at Bob’s apartment.

  The riff in “God of Thunder” reflected the way my limitations as a guitar player were key to what I came up with and probably helped make my songs identifiable and unique. That riff was a compromise between what I heard in my head and what I could actually play. Another example of that process was “I Want You,” which ended up on the next album.

  Sometimes at the rehearsal space Bob would have the four of us sit in a circle and he would say, “Who’s got an idea? Anybody have an idea for a verse? Who’s got a part?” Someone would play a snippet and he might say no. Then somebody else would play something and Bob would shout, “Okay, that’s good. Now who has another part?” A lot of the songs came together like that—pieces of this and that stitched together with input from Bob.

  Peter sat at his drums while we threw out ideas. When it came time to arrange finished songs, Bob often came up with parts. Once I saw him work with us, I understood Alice Cooper’s albums much more. I could see Bob’s point of view in them. Bob’s fingerprints were all over things like Billion Dollar Babies. Suddenly I could hear his drum parts and his bass parts. I knew them from our stuff—like the bass line in “Detroit Rock City,” which Bob created. That bass part is similar to the bass in Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead.” Bob even came up with the guitar solo on “Detroit Rock City.” He sang it to Ace and made him figure it out.

  Bob was brilliant at that kind of stuff.

  When it came time for the drums, we faced a real challenge. Bob spent many, many hours teaching Peter his parts. Bob came up with most of the drum parts on the album, and he would dismiss the rest of us for hours at a time to work with Peter. “Detroit Rock City” in particular had a very challenging drumbeat, and it took a lot of effort and patience for Bob to get Peter to be able to play something he couldn’t have learned to play on his own if his life had depended on it.

  Back then there were no click tracks, which allow a drummer to work with a sort of metronome to get a consistent tempo. But to get a track just the way he wanted it, Bob liked to be able to cut and splice from various takes we recorded, which necessitated a steady pace. That would have been difficult in our case, to say the least. So Bob created a human click track. He sat in the control room with a mic stuck into a hole in a cigar box and tapped the beat on the box and fed it to all of us, most importantly Peter.

  Bob also wrote the lion’s share of “Beth” using a few lines and a melody Peter brought in. Peter had a co-writer on every song he ever wrote because he couldn’t really write—song structure and concepts like making your lyrics rhyme were totally lost on him. In the case of “Beth,” Bob wrote most of it, even though the original idea Peter brought in had already been done with a co-writer. To get the vocal for “Beth,” Bob had to record Peter singing the song probably a dozen times and cobble together a single version from the passable parts of those takes. Peter’s chances of being able to sing a song off the cuff were about as good as my chances of throwing a penny and hitting the moon. It would be a challenge for him to carry a tune in a bucket. Even if we sang a note to him, he couldn’t find it. But since we had always presented our Beatles-based fantasy to the world—four band members all contributing equally—at some point Peter began to believe his own press. Perception became reality to him, despite the fact that we created the perception ourselves. We made it out as if we lived like the Help!-era Beatles—and all made music together as equals. But that was never the case—and who should know that better than the people who were actually there and not co
ntributing?

  Peter and Ace’s contributions were never as substantial as we made them out to be in the press. The fact of the matter was that two guys—Gene and me—were the engineers and motivators and did 80 percent of the work. Unfortunately, when we decided to create the Help! illusion, we never considered the possibility that Peter and Ace would start to actually believe it, and that their belief would bite us in the ass. But sure enough, their delusions started to create resentment and, eventually, fatal fissures in the band. Those fissures first started opening during Destroyer, as Peter struggled to record a song that was ostensibly his own, and we began to have to work around Ace, who spent much of the recording process with his priorities far from where they belonged. He sometimes played his parts with his rings and chains scraping against the fret board and pickups, and then wanted to quit for the day and take off. When I would ask him to remove the jewelry and do another take because of all the noise, he would say, “Hey, that’s rock and roll.”

  “No, Ace, that’s shit.”

  His alcohol abuse is well documented, but Ace also didn’t hesitate to just up and leave the studio to go play cards with friends. I could not wrap my head around that at all—leaving the job to get loaded and play cards, even if it meant having another guitar player handle his parts? Making music was my dream, and skipping out on that process was something I couldn’t fathom.

  Sonically, Bob Ezrin didn’t try to re-create the bombast of Alive! with its huge broken-up guitars and screaming vocals. He found power in other ways. He created an atmosphere of grandeur. He brought in elements of things I loved—liked the orchestral bells on “Do You Love Me.” He gave guitar chords heft by layering them with a grand piano playing the same parts. In some ways it reminded me of what I liked about Roy Wood and Wizzard—that big, chaotic version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Bob added things that really struck emotional chords in me.