Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  Part of the perception problem had to do with Neil Bogart and Casablanca Records. The label released Donna Summer’s disco anthem “Love to Love You Baby,” which became a smash hit over the course of 1976. Hit singles were Neil’s thing, and it altered the way he did business. He made Casablanca into a singles-oriented label and focused on acts like the Village People. He signed a rock band called Angel and positioned them as the anti-KISS, in all white outfits and ballet slippers instead of platform boots. Neil’s forte once again seemed to be novelty acts not that far removed from his bubblegum days. KISS went from being the signature band on Casablanca to being part of a sideshow label—part of a menagerie. Instead of being in the company of rock bands, we shared a label with a bunch of guys dressed up like construction workers and cops and a band that wore ballet slippers. People who wanted to see us as pap or contrived had only to look at the company we were in to reinforce their suspicions. It solidified any negative impressions people had of us.

  Part of the perception problem was due to simple subjective differences in how people saw things. If Bruce Springsteen slid on his knees, critics called it showmanship. If I did, they considered it some sort of scam. A circus trick. One guy was a showman and the other was a charlatan. But sometimes it had a darker side that corresponded to things we overheard—things about how we were money-hungry Jews or “kikes.” As if our entrepreneurial ability weren’t a positive trait, but rather a trait of deceit or manipulation—because that wasn’t rock and roll, that was what Jews did.

  The same sentiments infected the inner workings of the band, too. I think in Peter’s case it had to do with his upbringing and the fact that he wasn’t very bright. Ace owned a lot of Nazi memorabilia. Now, I’m sure there are people who collect that stuff who aren’t Nazis or anti-Semites, but Ace was not one of them. Barely below the surface of the band’s interactions was a simmering and ongoing resentment and anger directed at me and Gene. We ran the band and wrote almost all the songs and generated the ideas—not because KISS was a dictatorship, but because the other guys’ contributions just didn’t amount to much. Their jealousy and envy and resentment got focused on the most tangible thing they could pin it on—the fact that Gene and I both happened to be Jewish. It wasn’t that different from the core of society’s anti-Semitism: take Jewish immigrants out of their native soil and put them in a new country, and the next generation becomes doctors—that’s hard for certain people to take. And so it was inside the band. Ace and particularly Peter felt powerless and impotent when faced with the tireless focus, drive, and ambition of me and Gene. As a result, the two of them tried to sabotage the band—which, as they saw it, was unfairly manipulated by those money-grubbing Jews.

  But of course, we kept up the mythology: four guys running down the street, jumping in the air, living under one roof. Just substitute New York for Liverpool, and that was us.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah!

  Yeah, right.

  32.

  I always wanted a gold record, and I always wanted to play Madison Square Garden. I already had my gold album. On February 18, 1977, we headlined our first show at the Garden. And it was sold out.

  It had been four and a half years since I pulled up in front of the Garden in my cab to drop people off for Elvis’s show.

  I had seen the Stones at Madison Square Garden—forged a ticket for that show, in fact. I’d seen George Harrison’s concert for Bangladesh at the Garden. I’d slept outside Macy’s in Queens to get tickets for that show. I’d seen Alice Cooper at the Garden. I’d seen Ringling Brothers Circus at the Garden.

  Madison Square Garden was synonymous with success on a large scale. Playing there was big stuff. Really big stuff.

  I was so anxious before the show that I took half a Valium. The idea that I might be sluggish? No chance. The adrenaline high was so strong on a normal night, and this was homecoming in a sold-out Madison Square Garden. I probably could have taken several whole pills and still have gotten up onstage and then run a marathon in record time. Shows like this were still new—I wasn’t yet used to the idea that we were this big.

  Standing on the diving board is usually scarier than taking the dive, and sure enough, once onstage, I felt exhilarated. That first wave of force coming from people screaming and lights coming on is very powerful. Having multitudes of people focused on you and sending you energy creates an undeniable wave of force. That might sound like some sort of New Age concept, but the feeling is staggering.

  The entire show carried incredible emotional weight. But by the second song, I was home.

  I knew my parents were in the audience, and I couldn’t help chuckling about it: “Yep, that’s my boy—the one in eight-inch heels and lipstick jerking off a guitar onstage.” But I was proving something to them. They were wrong. This could be done. And I had done it.

  You see? I am special.

  And then a bottle came sailing out of the darkness and hit me in the head. I saw it at the last second and flinched just enough so it smacked into my head next to my eye instead of in my eye. The glass cut me. I bled for the rest of the show. In some ways it was cool, but I also felt hurt—not physically, but hurt that somebody would do that. And yet at the same time, I knew it wasn’t done maliciously. I’d seen the impulse before. Fans wanted to touch you in any way they could, and here was someone touching me with a bottle. Our road crew, as devoted as they were, found the guy and beat the crap out of him.

  Still, it was the first time I felt vulnerable onstage. There was always a dark mass of people out there while I was in the spotlight, and now I knew I really could get hurt. For the first time it occurred to me that the fourth wall could be knocked down by them instead of by me.

  We had about a week in New York around that gig at the Garden, and once again I was confronted with the fact that I didn’t have any real life outside the band. Most musicians I knew wanted to talk about equipment—stuff I could give a rat’s ass about. I thought there was so much more to the world, even if I was still learning what that could be. I liked to talk about music, but on a historical level, an emotional level—not a technical level. I spent a lot of time dissatisfied because I didn’t have friends to talk to about things that might be stimulating, educational, or enlightening.

  As far as the women I hooked up with, I knew it wasn’t about deep conversation. I chose them because of what I thought other people would think—and because of what I hoped I could convince myself: I must be somebody worthwhile because this beautiful woman wants to be with me. It was all about bolstering my sense of self. Being with someone to make myself feel better always meant being with a woman others wanted, a woman others envied me for having. Thankfully, I managed to meet some women who, besides being beautiful, were also smart, funny, and well-read. But even with those women I had little to offer in terms of a relationship. I wasn’t open, and I wasn’t going to give anything of myself. So it was more or less two people trading services.

  Though it was hard for me to articulate, all of this made me feel even more isolated than I already felt.

  I remember one woman coming to my apartment and starting to get itchy for cocaine after a while. She apparently had a major habit. She began to get dressed to go out and score some blow. “I’ll come right back,” she said.

  “If you leave,” I told her, “you don’t come back.”

  You can be with somebody and still feel alone.

  For me, actually being alone was worse. One evening I drove my burgundy Mercedes down to a hip restaurant and bar—one of those places that was known as a hangout. I pulled up to the curb near the entrance on Fifth Avenue and 11th Street and then sat in my car. I wanted to go in, maybe talk to some people, hang out. But I froze.

  You can’t go in there on your own!

  I didn’t know anyone. I couldn’t risk being in a situation like that. I couldn’t make friends. I couldn’t hang out. The Starchild? Yes, of course, he could. And even the version of the Starchild I could muster at parties put on by promo
ters or radio stations or our own management. Those were controlled situations. People in that context expected the Starchild; I depended on being the Starchild to interact with them. I depended on presenting a likable persona and hid my real self, the one-eared kid from Queens who still didn’t believe anyone could really like him and wouldn’t know what to do if someone did.

  Who am I? Where do I belong?

  I was supposed to be a big rock star, and there I was paralyzed in my car outside a restaurant, afraid to go inside. The contrast between how I was perceived and the reality of my situation could not have been more stark.

  Who would believe this?

  With a last look at the entrance, I pulled away from the curb, drove around the block, and steered the car back uptown to my apartment. I didn’t have the basic skills to function in a setting like that. Most people were petrified by the idea of going onstage. Not me. Whatever emptiness or insecurities I had waited at the side of the stage. I lived for those moments. I wanted the crowd to love me because I still hadn’t learned to love myself enough to get over the most basic social phobias I harbored offstage.

  When are we going back out on the road?

  Mercifully, we headed back out soon. And by March we found ourselves touching down in Japan in a Pan Am 747 amidst a Beatles-like furor over the band. In fact, it was the Beatles’ records we broke for attendance at the Budokan in Tokyo. The magnitude of our stardom in Japan was astounding.

  We had arranged to pass through customs and immigration in full makeup and gear. We had it all with us on the plane and got ready when we were within a few hours of landing. But we arrived late, and the official who was supposed to be there to smooth everything along had already left. Without him, we had to remove our makeup before they’d let us in the country. After they verified we were the people in our passport photos, we did the quickest makeup job we had ever done and then walked out to find thousands of fans waiting outside. It was pandemonium. Once we got into our cars, people swarmed over them like locusts. I got nervous and claustrophobic.

  “Smile,” Gene said calmly, through clenched teeth.

  We spent the next two weeks attending lavish parties and making regular visits to Japanese bathhouses. The bathhouses employed women who seemed to grow extra hands and limbs once your clothes were off. If I could do to myself what they did to me, I would never leave home.

  While in Japan I met with executives from Hoshino Gakki, the makers of Ibanez guitars. We sat in a boardroom and I explained my views on the sonics and aesthetics of guitars, which led to my first signature model. Having my own guitars sold in music stores around the world was a milestone for me—and any musician.

  After the last show, we flew back to Los Angeles. There we learned we’d been named the top band in America by the Gallup poll—over Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and the Eagles, among others. Soon, magazines were publishing similar results from readers’ polls. In Circus magazine we won a head-to-head poll versus Zeppelin. Now, I had a high regard for what we were doing, but I wasn’t crazy—I didn’t see us in the same league as Zeppelin. The same publications also ran votes on readers’ favorite players, and Ace and Peter both came out on top of some “best guitarist” and “best drummer” polls, fueling the increasing gap between their self-image and their actual abilities. If only Circus readers realized they were barely sentient beings most of the time who didn’t care and were often either too fucked up or too inept to play their parts on recordings without great effort or a nameless ringer filling in for them. I figured if we were going to disregard the critics who called us hucksters and dismissed our music, we also had to dismiss the people who called us virtuosos. Peter and Ace didn’t agree. The press reinforced what they wanted to think: that they were world-class musicians. Of course, Ace could really have been one, but he was killing his talent—and his body and brain—with booze and drugs. And Peter? From Destroyer on, what the band wanted to do pushed the limits of his abilities or simply outstripped them.

  We had a few weeks off in L.A. before we went to New York to start recording yet another album. One night I ended up going out with Lita Ford, who was then the guitar player in the Runaways. Lita and I had some fun times together. She was only nineteen, but her band had just released their second album and were about to head off for their own tour of Japan. The two of us went to a club called the Starwood for a show. The opening band, the Boyz, featured George Lynch, who went on to fame in the band Dokken. The Boyz played a cover of “Detroit Rock City.” The second band was called Van Halen. I was impressed. They had another show the next night, and I made Gene go with me to see them.

  Near the end of Van Halen’s set that second night, Gene got up and disappeared. Little did I know, he’d gone backstage and spoken to them about taking them into a studio to record a demo. He never told me. He didn’t mention it when he returned to his seat; I found out only later. It was funny, because I always thought of Gene as the one member of the band I could count on, and yet he still did secretive things like that. It was that old impulse of his—and he never felt the need to explain any of what I saw as sneaky or dishonest behavior.

  During that time in California I also met and started seeing Cher’s sister, Georganne LaPiere, who was then starring in the soap opera “General Hospital.” Georganne was extremely smart—a member of the high-IQ society Mensa—and I loved talking with her. Georganne and I saw each other off and on for more than a year, though after a while I told her I planned to see other people as well—there was no dishonesty about it. I realized phone relationships could go on forever. You talk to somebody, have a nice conversation, and then, when you say goodnight, you go off and do whatever you’re going to do.

  At the end of the time in L.A., I flew to New York. The song “Love Gun” came to me in its entirety on the flight—melody, lyrics, all the instrument parts—absolutely complete. It was amazing—and rare for me. I stole the idea of a “love gun” from Albert King’s version of “The Hunter,” which Zeppelin also nicked from for “How Many More Times” on their first album. By the time the plane landed, I was ready to record a demo.

  When I got to New York, I called a drummer I knew and went almost immediately to Electric Lady to record the song. By this point I didn’t need to do demos in less lavish studios—I could do them in top-end studios, and Electric Lady was my favorite. I used the same equipment and tape that other bands cut masters on. That worked out to be as much of a curse as a blessing. Sure, the demos sounded great. But with using quality studios for demos came the risk of demo-itis. You get so locked into the version you record as a demo that you lose all flexibility when it comes time to record the track. You’ve worked out all the parts, and it’s hard to erase them and let other people have creative input if they veer from the version you recorded on the demo. Then you’re stuck recording a stiff version of the thing you already did—it robs the final recording of spontaneity. You’re less open to suggestions for change because you already have a fully realized concept. Eventually, in the late 1980s, I stopped doing demos for all those reasons.

  The funny thing about “Love Gun” was that even though the album version was recorded as a facsimile of the demo, when we went to cut the album version, Peter couldn’t play the kickdrum pattern on the song. Once Peter cut the track, we had to bring in another drummer to play the extra kickdrum beats Peter couldn’t.

  We recorded the album at the Record Plant, another iconic New York studio. It was up near Times Square in what at the time wasn’t a great neighborhood. When you entered the place at the ground level, the receptionist was sitting behind a glass window and had to buzz you in through a locked door. The window had shutters, and once through the locked door, you saw that the reception area was separated from the hallway by another locked door. I can’t tell you how many times I left the studio to take a break and walked into the receptionist’s little office. She would close the shutters and lock the door and say, “Oh, Paul!” I didn’t fool myself into thinking I was the only on
e, but I was one. And it was terrific. Sure beat a coffee break.

  During our stay in New York, Gene came up to Bill’s office and played us finished demos by a band called Daddy Long Legs—it turned out that was a name he came up with to replace their original one, Van Halen. Bill and I listened intently and later spoke—without Gene—and agreed to pass on getting involved with them. Not because they weren’t great. Not because they didn’t have enormous potential. We passed to protect KISS, which needed our daily focus to continue building on all fronts. Gene’s wandering eye was clearly a potential risk to all we had accomplished and all we were working toward.

  For the Love Gun tour, which began in Canada in early July 1977, after the album was released, we had a private airplane for the first time. We’d flown private only one time before, when because of a scheduling conflict we had to take a tiny Learjet to get in and out of some out-of-the-way city. This was different. This was ours. It was a Convair 280, a propeller plane, filled with odd furniture—almost like a flying junk shop. The pilot and copilot were Dick and Chuck, and our flight attendant was named Judy.

  They showed up in drag and handed me a dress, in honor of my birthday; left to right: Peter, Gene, Me, Ace. Lincoln NE, 1977.

  Dick and Chuck fought regularly and often yelled at each other in the cockpit. “You asshole!” “Fuck you!”

  It wasn’t very reassuring.

  Once, at the end of a flight, we landed, got to the end of the runway, turned around, and immediately took off again. They had put us down at the international airport rather than the private airport. Another day I saw flames coming out of one of the engines midflight. I told Judy to bring Dick back to see it. He came back, looked out the window, and said matter-of-factly, “Don’t worry about it.” Then he returned to the cockpit. The whole operation was an accident waiting to happen.