Studio 54 was a den of iniquity; it was sordid—to a level and degree that I wasn’t completely comfortable with. It was hardcore debauchery—sexual relations between everybody and anybody and drugs everywhere. It was beyond me. But I loved going there to dance. Nobody at Studio 54 wore a white suit and danced like John Travolta. I could go down there in jeans and a T-shirt and dance. Sometimes I’d go there on a Saturday night and not leave until the next morning. I’d buy the Sunday New York Times and read the paper in bed after one last dance with a woman I took home.
The music at Studio 54 was all about living in the moment—about having a great time. And so my song began like that, too: “Tonight, I’m gonna give it all to you . . .” Desmond helped with the verses of the song, and eventually, when we went back into the studio to work on another KISS album, Dynasty, the producer of that album, Vini Poncia, helped with the chorus.
Bill Aucoin brought in Vini—who had produced Peter’s solo album—to appease Peter. By this point we were stuck in an ongoing yo-yoing process with Ace and Peter. Are they in or out? Can we keep this going? Bill and Sean Delaney’s relationship was fraying at the same time. Sean was sent off to work on a few of Bill’s other bands, and then he just disappeared. We basically never saw him again once he and Bill split up. So Bill needed Vini to be the peacekeeper.
We found out later that anyone hired to work with us at this time got briefed by Bill about what you could and couldn’t say to each guy. He made sure we were insulated in this artificial world where nobody ruffled our feathers. People were told what we each liked, what offended each of us, what we each needed to hear. People were paid to tell us what we wanted to hear, and it was hard to make a distinction between motive and heartfelt opinion. We were in an Elvis bubble. People literally held open doors for us. Someone opened the door at the studio, and there was always a catered meal. Bill knew us inside and out. He knew how to placate each one of us and keep us happy. That is a manager’s job, particularly when confronted with four people as volatile and combustible as we were at the time. But those people were enablers, too; nobody wanted the gravy train to stop.
To Vini’s credit, though, he didn’t want Peter to play on Dynasty despite their relationship. For Peter, Vini was a buddy. But for Vini, this was a job, and Peter was no longer capable of playing what was asked for and needed. So Vini brought in Anton Fig to play the drums. Anton had been in an Aucoin-managed band called Spider and had played on Ace’s solo LP. He later went on to play in David Letterman’s house band. We worked out a deal: Anton was paid well, but we weren’t paying for secrecy. Rumors did swirl that Peter wasn’t on the album, but we never felt the need to address them. We never thought about actually kicking Peter out—at least not yet. For now, it would remain the four of us, as always.
With Vini at the helm, the album wasn’t really a rock album. But then again, we weren’t really a rock band anymore. We were a bunch of rich guys who lacked a primal spirit. Of course, we also never felt we had to play by anybody else’s rules—what was musically acceptable to us broadened over time. For some people, it was fine that we did things our way—until we didn’t do things their way. That constituted a betrayal.
When I heard “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” being played back in the studio, I was blown away. Yeah, it wasn’t “Detroit Rock City” or “Love Gun,” but it was undeniable. Another band came into the studio while it was playing, and they loved it, too. It was universal, something that grabbed you the first time you heard it.
Was it calculated? Yeah. Was it calculated to succeed? Yes, ultimately it was. But was that a bad thing? It started as a challenge to myself to see whether I could write in that style instead of meat-and-potatoes rock and roll. It was no different from the challenge I gave myself with “Hard Luck Woman.” The only difference was the style. No apologies for a hit that people worldwide still want to hear and sing along to.
The show we mounted to support the release of Dynasty was no longer a rock show. It was more like “H.R. Pufnstuf on Ice.” It was something that perhaps in some ways we consciously maneuvered toward. Over time, the band had evolved to include a broader demographic than in the beginning, but the change in our live presentation was just one of many missteps made at the time. We wore ridiculous outfits for the Dynasty tour—like Vegas or Disney characters jumping around in our colorful outfits. I don’t consider what we normally wear to be costumes, but the clothes we wore on that tour certainly were. I had a layered lavender top—I guess the thought was that the black-and-silver look we’d always had was too hard-edged, so now we were going to add an individual color for each guy based on the halo color on each of our solo albums. It was horrible.
I had designed the stage—hexagonal with elevators that brought us up to stage level. We paid a fortune for a laser curtain to ring the whole stage. This was the early days of lasers, though, so they were very dangerous, and water-cooled, and big. It never worked properly. We spent years in court trying to get our money back for that laser curtain. We also had two complete stages built in anticipation of the need to leapfrog to alternating cities. We could add dates in one city while another crew erected the second stage at our next destination, allowing us to satisfy ticket demand in one place and then play the next place without an off-day to tear down and rebuild the stage.
Without Sean around, Bill brought in a choreographer named Kenny Ortega to try to tinker with the show. Kenny went on to work on stage shows for Michael Jackson and Cher; movies like Dirty Dancing, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and High School Musical; and the music video that some blame for killing Billy Squier’s career, “Rock Me Tonite.” Bill also brought in a guy named Joe Gannon to work as a stage manager and direct our show like a Broadway musical.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the tour was in trouble from the start. It wasn’t a good omen when our first show was canceled. We figured we would be doing multiple nights in most markets, but for the most part, that didn’t happen. We had already had a few two- and three-night stands on our last tour, in 1977, so what was next? More nights, obviously. Nope. Fewer. The bottom got pulled right out from under us. It was shocking and scary to see that instead of getting bigger, we were getting smaller, as it seemed people were having second thoughts about coming to see us.
Why aren’t they coming?
We had sanitized ourselves and were well on our way to extinguishing the fire that had propelled us so far. We stayed at a hotel opposite the Forum in L.A. when we played there, and I looked out the window and broke out into a cold sweat because I saw so many kids and families standing in line—which at that time could only backfire on us. The line could just as easily have been for the circus. There was an upside, though—I saw a lot of apparently single moms with their kids in tow. I could tell somebody, “Blond mom in row three,” have her and junior come backstage after the show, and then send junior off for a tour of the stage. But it was all wrong.
Peter was completely unmanageable. Whatever we did was never right. If we let him sleep late on a day off, he would get angry and say he wanted to travel on the off-day. If we traveled on an off-day, he would say he wanted to sleep. If he said it was too hot backstage, we turned up the air conditioning; then he complained it was too cold. One time he punched a mirror and got a serious deep cut on his hand that needed microsurgery and stitches.
It wasn’t unusual for Peter to throw his drumsticks at me or Gene or Ace if we stepped in front of his drum riser. Never mind that he was up on a drum riser—meaning we didn’t block the audience’s view of Peter even if we did pass in front of his kit.
If he wants to be at the front of the stage, he should learn to play the damn guitar.
But then one night near the end of the tour, in December 1979, Peter had been bingeing on drugs and playing particularly erratically. When I turned around during one song and let him know his tempo was too frantic, his reaction was to start slowing songs down and then speeding them up again, apparently out of spite. That crossed a line. It’s o
ne thing to sabotage things offstage—and god knows he’d done plenty of that. But this was different. This was in front of fans, people who had paid to see us.
Immediately after the show, Gene, Ace, and I spoke about it. We were all stunned by the betrayal. The unspoken rule had always been that you left your shit in the dressing room; no matter what was going on, when we went onstage, we were a band. The stage was sacred. Peter’s purposeful sabotaging of the show was the ultimate treachery.
We decided we wanted Peter gone.
Ace can say whatever he wants now, but he voted to fire Peter without any prodding or strong arming. It’s a tribute to Ace that he did. As far as my own vote, I didn’t think it was cold or calculated to dump Peter. It was just survival. Was I going to let his problems drag down the entire band—and me with it? No way. Gene felt the same way.
We called Bill and told him we had to get rid of Peter. We said we wanted to cancel the rest of the shows and go home. How could we go on? Bill smoothed things over enough to get us to delay taking action and continue the tour rather than fire Peter immediately. We had just a few dates left. Peter didn’t see the train that was about to hit him—but that was par for the course.
Immediately after the end of the tour, in mid-December 1979,
Peter married his second wife, Debra Jensen, a Playboy Playmate. The situation was weird. I couldn’t help but wonder: would she marry him if she realized she was marrying the former drummer of KISS?
Early in 1980, Bill had to break the news to Peter that he was out. But instead, Bill persuaded the other three of us that we should give Peter a second chance. So we didn’t finalize a decision, and after a few months—a period when we were off the road anyway, recording Unmasked, with Anton Fig on drums again and Vini producing—we agreed to have Peter come back and try playing with us. In the interim Bill had arranged for Peter to take drum lessons from Jim Chapin, a famous jazz drummer. The day of the audition or rehearsal or whatever you wanted to call it, Peter walked in carrying a music stand and sheet music. The first thing he said was, “I’ll have to have all your songs on sheet music because I read music now.”
Peter, Debbie, and me: Black tie in New York.
I whispered to Gene, “Are we on ‘Candid Camera’?”
Peter sat down, put his sheet music on the stand, and studied it for a while. Mind you, this rehearsal was of old material, not the new stuff we had written and recorded for Unmasked. We wanted to see whether he could even play the songs he already knew. The rehearsal did not go well. It was over.
My philosophy had always been that if somebody was drowning, you tried to save the person. But when they started to pull you under, you cut them loose. That’s what was happening. All the talking and advice and trying to get him help got us nowhere.
We shot a video for the song “Shandi” after the decision to let Peter go had been confirmed. He came to the video shoot knowing it was the last time he would appear with KISS. At the end of the day, he took his makeup case with him and left. It wasn’t tearful, but it was a big moment. Peter was leaving. We had fired him, and this was the last time we were going to see him in the band.
Oddly enough, Peter didn’t seem to care. He was likely in his own drug haze and saw this as his big opportunity. In his mind, he wrote the biggest song we ever had, and now he was free to go out and become the big star he should be.
Wow, Peter’s gone.
It’s the end of . . . something. But the end of what?
It was difficult to envision the band not being the four of us. Dysfunctional or not, we were the four musketeers. It was a scenario we had never contemplated. What if somebody no longer wanted to be there? What if somebody was no longer doing his job? Whatever tension there was inside the band, we had always remained a band. Then all of a sudden one person was no longer part of the band. It shook all of us to the core. What do we do? Do we break up the band?
The rules had changed. KISS clearly wasn’t going to continue as it had.
35.
As the drama with Peter was unfolding during the first half of 1980, we were also involved in a drama with our record label. Casablanca was absorbed by PolyGram, and for some reason the lawyers of the new company hadn’t checked Casablanca’s contracts with a fine-tooth comb. PolyGram assumed they were buying KISS and Donna Summer along with the label, but we had a “key man” clause, meaning that in our case, the deal was predicated on the presence of Neil Bogart. And from what we heard, the same was true of Donna.
Now, we may have been in some decline after Dynasty if you gauged things by the tour—when we’d had to cancel some shows and witnessed the changing demographics of the audience. But the way PolyGram saw it, Dynasty had been a huge hit, and in addition to making the charts at home, “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” had been our most successful single outside the United States by far, hitting the top ten all across Europe and topping the charts in Australia and New Zealand. The label risked looking like idiots if they let us walk away—which we were entitled to do once they canned Neil. The situation could not have worked out better for us. PolyGram ended up giving us a new and very lucrative deal as a face-saving move. Negotiating a new contract under these disastrous circumstances for them proved extremely advantageous for us.
The truth was that up to that point, we hadn’t made much money—particularly if you compared what came in with what came to us. We found out later that KISS brought in about $100 million in merchandise sales in the three years between 1977 and 1979. Of that, the band members together took home less than $3 million. The overheads of Bill’s operation were eating our lunch. But again, at that point we still didn’t know enough about business to realize it.
We had credit cards, but we’d never seen actual money. Still, the idea of having a gold credit card was a big deal. My parents had never had credit cards. And since the bills went to Glickman-Marks, who took care of paying them, the cards lent a sense of unreality to the act of buying things. I had a little magical piece of plastic that allowed me to take things out of stores.
Now that we suddenly had a chunk of money from the new record deal, I decided I wanted to buy an apartment instead of continuing to rent. You didn’t get anything out of renting—you didn’t build equity, so in a case like mine it was pointless.
At first I wanted to look at places overlooking Central Park along Fifth Avenue. When I explained this to a real estate agent, she said to me, “I can take you to the places you want to see, or I can take you to the places that will let you in.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She started talking about “nouveau riche” and being an entertainer. She paused. Then she said the buildings along the park were owned by “blue bloods and old money.” She might as well have said, “You’re a Jew,” which I would learn was indeed unspoken grounds for being rejected by many of the prime buildings I was interested in. My agent had been through this before and knew the situation all too well.
“You mean, I can’t live where I want?”
She explained the system of co-op boards. In New York City, most buildings were jointly owned by all the inhabitants, and a board created by the joint owners had to approve any new buyer. It was different from condos, where you just bought the unit from the previous owner. Co-op boards could—and did—block applications to buy from people they didn’t want in the building. Jews and blacks were often those people.
Eventually I settled on a place on 80th Street and Madison Avenue, one block away from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I finally owned my own shelter, my home, my sanctuary, my refuge. It felt very different from renting.
The apartment was a duplex with three terraces. I had a music room, and on one wall I had tall glass-front built-in cabinets installed where I suspended and backlit all my collectors’ guitars—like a cross between the Bat Cave and a museum installation.
The bathroom had a tub as big and deep as a small pool. One day I was paging through Penthouse magazine and liked th
e look of the woman on the cover. I called Bill Aucoin’s secretary and said, “Find her.” A few days later she was in that massive tub with me. Cliché or not, there we were with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Not long after, my mom asked me whether I was seeing anyone special. I smiled and told her to pick up the most recent Penthouse. Needless to say, she was speechless at some of the very revealing shots. I have to say I loved her bewilderment at the debauched road I had taken. Over time, my mom grew accustomed to the shocks of my lifestyle and began to view it all with a resigned sense of humor.
My bedroom was amazing, too. When you walked in you saw a black lacquered chest of drawers, and stretching from that all the way to the ceiling was plate glass etched with branches and birds, lit from below—it was a room divider. My bed was on the other side of the glass. And above my bed was a huge mirror that kind of flowed out of the etched glass. I spent a lot of time looking up at that ceiling mirror and remarking on how great life was. When I saw myself lying next to a beautiful woman, I thought, Hey, that’s me! That’s me in bed with that gorgeous woman!
One night I was lying in bed with the woman from Penthouse, watching a documentary on TV about the 1970 Kent State shootings during a campus demonstration against the Vietnam War. She started getting kind of frisky and I pushed her away. “Hang on,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“This is important,” I said.
“That really happened?” she said.
Since I was choosing the women I spent time with based on a single criterion—their looks—I had to expect them to act within the boundaries of who they were. And the fleeting sense of fulfillment I felt looking up at the ceiling did make it easier to be at home rather than on the road. For a time, at least.
Face the Music: A Life Exposed Page 21
