I started seeing a lot of women around town. At one point I was seeing two different chorus girls from the show Sugar Babies, a Broadway musical starring Mickey Rooney. I took my father to the show one time, and we went backstage to meet one of the girls. She was nearly six feet tall, exotic and ravishing. As we walked out I said to my dad, “She’s really hot, isn’t she?”
“She seems like a nice girl,” he said.
“She’s not a nice girl,” I said. “She’s just hot.”
For him, sex appeal and sexuality had to be tempered, sanitized, and neutered. I had found a different point of view and wanted him to know that I reveled in the raw honesty. I had come to grips with the fact that sometimes there was nothing more to it. This woman wasn’t nice. She was just very hot. And that was plenty.
One morning a woman called me, and after we had talked for a few minutes I said, “That was a really great time last night.”
And she said, “Yeah . . . who do you think this is?”
Oops.
Another time I went to pick up a former Playboy Playmate at a new apartment she’d moved into. When I rang the doorbell, a different woman I’d been seeing answered the door. They had moved in together and decided not to tell me. They thought it was hilarious. Believe me, if you saw these two, I was lucky to be the brunt of the joke.
I was seeing quite a few women at the same time, and went through a period of sending women flowers when I was screwing someone else. If I spent the night with one woman, I’d send flowers to another. It wasn’t insincere exactly, because I wasn’t making any pretense of being exclusive with any of them, but I wanted them all.
I was living a triple life. There was the Starchild. There was me without the makeup—the perceived me, that is. And then there was the real me, who, despite fame and adulation, still felt insecure. There was a reason I spent most of my time in my apartment, sometimes with women, often alone. Some people took me for snobby or aloof, but the truth was, I was still shy and insecure. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to people and make friends; it was that I couldn’t.
I still had just one ear and was deaf on one side. I still shrank back in social situations. I didn’t know what was going to happen with my band, which was the only support structure I knew.
Now what?
The neighborhood around my new apartment had quite a few shops and galleries specializing in art nouveau antiques. I had liked colorful Tiffany glass lamps since I was a kid. My parents used to buy old furniture at junk shops and refinish it. Some of it they kept, some of it they sold. And over our dining room table at home hung a glass lamp. It was just an ice cream parlor lamp, but people called any colored glass lamps Tiffany lamps back then. When I moved up near the Metropolitan I spent time enjoying the museum’s collection of real Tiffany glass.
One day as I walked past the Macklowe Gallery in my neighborhood, a Tiffany lamp in the window made me stop in my tracks. I still didn’t have any furniture in my place beyond the bed and my vintage guitars hanging in the glass-fronted cases lining the wall of the music room. But I went into the gallery to see the lamp up close. The price tag said $70,000. I bought it on the spot and carried it the two blocks home. When I got home, I put it down in the middle of the empty living room, on the wall-to-wall carpeting, and plugged it in. I lay down on the floor and stared at it for hours as the sun set and the stained glass glowed brighter in the gathering darkness. Here I was in my own place with this beautiful lamp.
Life is grand.
I became intoxicated by the idea that I could buy whatever I wanted.
Maybe buying fancy things can make me happy.
I would stroll Madison Avenue, see a pair of shoes in a shop window, and ask, “How many colors do they come in? Just give me all of them.” I was draping the scared little boy inside me in another image—projecting a big persona with a shell of fine clothes.
Once, I wanted to go in a jewelry store that had Rolex watches displayed in the window. At first, they wouldn’t buzz me in the locked door. Then, after they finally did, they were rude and condescending. After looking around for a little while, I pointed to a watch and asked, “How much is this one?”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” said the salesman, looking down his nose at me.
I pulled out my wallet—by this time we had that kind of cash in our personal accounts—and counted out that much in front of him. Then I said, “Guess, what? I’m not buying it. You shouldn’t treat people like that.”
36.
Unmasked tanked in the States and we spent most of 1980 inactive. We didn’t have a drummer anyway. The single “Shandi” was a hit abroad, however, and we booked a tour of Europe and Australia for the fall. But before we could play live, we needed a drummer. Auditioning people was very strange.
We didn’t want big-name drummers. We wanted somebody to come out of nowhere. It wouldn’t have made sense to have Anton Fig or some other known commodity dress up as a black-and-silver giraffe or whatever.
Bill placed a cryptic ad in some music magazines, and we also spread the word. Bill started to get tapes and photos and bios and lots of phone calls. He went through the materials, and we periodically invited groups of potential replacements he had filtered to audition with us. We decided we didn’t want a drummer who played like Peter. The ones who made the best impression on us played what you might call “English.” They played on the backbeat, and whether they were playing double bass drums or not, they revered the same bands we did. Peter had enough trouble keeping time on a single bass drum and snare, so the idea of him playing two bass drums was out of the question. It wouldn’t have made sense in the context of what we were doing anyway. Using a double bass drum in rock came about as a way to emulate what John Bonham of Led Zeppelin managed to do with one bass drum. His foot was so fast that it took most drummers two kick drums and both feet to mimic it. We didn’t set out to find someone with a double kit, but we also didn’t want to impose boundaries or limitations on a new member. As long as we were getting somebody new, we figured we should be willing to move forward.
One guy who auditioned was a little stove repairman from Brooklyn named Paul Caravello. He was tiny, with a huge head of hair and no airs or attitude. The first thing he did was ask for our autographs. At first, I wasn’t blown away by his playing, but everybody else in the room, including Vini Poncia and Bill Aucoin, thought he was great. We brought the guy back for a second time, and he turned out to have a good voice, with the same raspy quality Peter had. He was also a quick learner.
We had found our guy.
Paul wanted to change his name, and we wanted him to change it, too—we didn’t need three Pauls in the band, since Ace also shared that name. His first suggestion was Rusty Blades, which we vetoed quickly. Thankfully, the name game was short-lived when his second suggestion was Eric Carr, a name that sidestepped any obvious cartoon rock star moniker.
He seemed like a good soul. Some of the other people who auditioned had acted like rock stars, thinking they would gain points for that. Eric was sweet. He eventually proved to be tortured in his own way, but he certainly was a much-needed breath of fresh air in the wake of Peter’s departure.
He had told us stories about repairing stoves—going to an apartment and opening up stoves to find all kinds of bugs and beasts crawling around inside—and we wanted him to know he wouldn’t be a second-class citizen in KISS. So once we told him he was in the band, we did two things to welcome him. First, we bought him a silver Porsche 924. I somehow became the guy who was supposed to watch over him and groom him, teach him. He approached me after he got the car. “Can I have it painted camouflage?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. I didn’t think he should take a sleek imported sports car and turn it into a circus mobile.
Then I took him shopping at a place called the French Jean Store. They sold—surprise—French jeans. I helped him pick out a new wardrobe—he’d need it since we were leaving for a European tour soon.
It
took some time to figure out a character for Eric. Heaven forbid we put him in a character people already knew. That seemed too obvious to us, and maybe sacrilegious. Originally, he was going to be the Hawk. We had a costume built with a protruding chest and feathers all over it. He painted a beak on his nose. But he looked like the mascot for a high school football team—all that was missing were the big foam chicken feet. It was horrible. Fortunately, he came up with the idea of the Fox. He wore the same size boots as Peter, so we used existing boots and had the platforms built up even more. The boots ended up being like stilts, and he still looked tiny next to us.
Eric got thrown in at the deep end of the pool. We had become comfortable dealing with the world we operated in—basic stuff, like handling women’s sexual advances and the media, or acting properly in a restaurant. Eric had to learn on the fly.
The second night of the tour, on August 31, 1980, in Genoa, Italy, we heard a commotion outside the locker room that was serving as our dressing room at the sports arena where we were playing. Then we started to hear people chanting, “KISS Fascista! KISS Fascista!” Security started screaming, “Lock the doors!” Baseball bats started pounding on the door and smashing things outside. They wanted to kill us. It was bad enough that we were going to get killed for playing music, but worse still that I was apparently going to die in platform boots and makeup.
We consciously avoided espousing any political views, and yet to them we represented all the evils of American capitalism. That was the first tour where people asked us about politics—Europeans’ way of thinking seemed more tied into politics and world events. Gene took any opportunity to be seen or heard; his Achilles heel is his need for attention, regardless of the source of the attention. I had no intention of making political statements. At the end of the day “Love Gun” wasn’t about guns—I was just singing about my dick.
We had fun messing with Eric on that tour. It was like having a little brother around. One nickname we came up with for him was Bud Carr Rooney—because we joked that he looked like the love child of Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney.
The first night we were in Paris, Eric wore a brand-new white suit to dinner. His first. Not ten minutes into the night, he spilled a huge glass of red wine all over it. At times like that he would close his eyes and mutter, “What a schmuck.” He sent that suit to the cleaners so many times—hoping against hope the stain would come out—that when it finally came back white, the sleeves fell off when he put the jacket on.
He was impressed that we could get by on a little pidgin version of the local language on that first tour across Europe. In Paris, he decided he wanted to try. “How do you ask for butter in French?”
“Well,” I said, “s’il vous plait is ‘please,’ and what you want is fapouge.” The French word for butter is beurre. I made up the word fapouge.
The waitress came to our table, and Eric said, “Fapouge s’il vous plait.”
She looked at him and said, “Fapouge?” He did this thing we used to call “the Ronald Reagan,” where his head would start to shake from side to side when he got nervous. He did that now. “Fapouge,” he repeated, with his head shaking.
Another night he really liked the food we’d had, which had come on a sizzling hotplate. Eric was still like Oliver Twist in those days: “Please, sir, may I have some more?” The waiter brought another searing hotplate, carrying it with tongs, and Eric reached up and grabbed it with his bare hands. You could hear the sssssss sound as it singed his fingers. He just closed his eyes and said, “What a schmuck.”
Me and Ace in Australia, 1980 . . . I like remembering the great times.
Another night in France a guy at a nightclub started hitting on Eric, making him uncomfortable. He went over to Ace and said, “That guy over there is trying to come on to me.” Ace, in his inimitable logic, said, “Let’s make out so he thinks we’re together. Then he’ll leave you alone.”
And the kissing began.
Armed military personnel guarded the airports in some parts of Europe back then. One time, at an airport where security had AK-47s, Eric got pulled aside. He was wearing a camouflage jumpsuit and bullet belts. They took him through a door and out of our sight. But he was back surprisingly quickly. “What happened?” we asked.
“I told them I’m a musician,” he said. “So they took me to another room and had me play a piano.” Once he played a little piano, they let him go.
Though Eric was two years older than me, he seemed like a kid. His life experience had been limited, and he was naive and gullible. One night in England he took a female journalist to his room from the hotel bar where we were all hanging out. The next day we asked him what happened. “Well, we talked and then she wanted to take some pictures of me without my clothes on,” he said.
“What!?” I said.
“She said she wouldn’t print them.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Oh, shit, did I do something wrong?”
“You let her take pictures!”
“But she said they were just for herself . . .”
Sure enough, when the next week’s issue of the journalist’s magazine came out, there was Eric looking like an idiot, naked in the bathtub with his huge head of hair and a glass of Champagne.
He closed his eyes. “What a schmuck.”
37.
The atmosphere in the band was much better without Peter’s constant negativity to contend with. It was eye-opening what a difference it made—we had alleviated such a huge problem and so much uncertainty, strife, and hostility. It was as if the sun had suddenly come out—and that was only Peter. Ace was still in a downward spiral, but at least now we had half as much turmoil.
Ace had lost an ally, but he hadn’t lost a buddy. Whatever relationship he’d had with Peter was strictly mercenary. Ace was smart, and he manipulated Peter to help him vote for things he wanted. If he missed Peter at all, it was on that level, not as a friend. Now it was me and Gene and this other guy who didn’t have the same seniority or power as a full member. Ace was the odd man out as far as the decision-making process. I knew it bothered him, but it wasn’t an immediate issue while we were on tour.
When we arrived in Australia for the first time, in November 1980, it quickly became clear that things were going to be crazy. We’d been told KISS was massive there, but you never know what to expect. You can only comprehend things you’ve already experienced; Australia was like nothing we’d ever experienced. Huge here meant not being able to leave the hotel. It meant taking a helicopter from the hotel to the stadium we were playing.
Melbourne, Australia, in 1980, with 50,000 of my closest friends.
The phenomenon we witnessed became known there as “KISSTERIA.”
We had an entire floor of the hotel, with one suite devoted to our own Australian public relations staff. And no wonder, since we were on the front page of the newspapers every day accompanied by headlines like, “KISS in Midnight Cruise on Sydney Harbor.” We had to keep the curtains drawn in our rooms. The place was crawling with bodyguards, and there was a constant drone of screaming outside. “You’re not going anywhere,” we were told.
Thankfully, Australia had its own Penthouse magazine, and a number of Penthouse Pets came over to the hotel to keep us company. Paparazzi camped in front of the hotel, and whenever we went anywhere, we had to hide on the floors of vans. Every single night, the promoters threw parties, which were packed with models and actresses. Some parties were women-only. We would show up at a club or ballroom that had been taken over, and the place would be filled with beautiful women. Australia was one giant Chicken Coop.
Eric, however, would often leave the parties and go out and befriend some waif he met on the street. He identified with the fans. Maybe he felt more like them than like one of us at that point. He sometimes brought girls to his room who had been camping outside trying to catch a glimpse of the band. For his comfort, he chose women like that over models and Penthouse Pets. Issues shape personalities.
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br /> The first hints of Eric’s troubles started to come out, too. One day he rented a car and driver to spend a day in the countryside with a girl he’d met. He was so nervous, he told us, that he got awful gas and had to stop the car every ten minutes to go to the bathroom. He was depressed afterwards about what an idiot he felt like. He also went on about how he was losing his hair. His hair was so big that when he moved forward, it moved backwards—it was always moving in the opposite direction from the rest of him. And yet he constantly wanted me to look at his head. “Look, is it thinning here?” And strangest of all, Eric struggled with the idea that he wasn’t the original drummer of the band. I didn’t understand it. I mean, of course he wasn’t the original drummer. He was the second drummer. So what? There was no talking him out of his funk when he started obsessing over the fact that he would never be the first drummer.
Me, Bill Aucoin, and Elton John, out to dinner in Australia, 1980.
In Australia I began to seriously question Bill Aucoin. His cocaine use had become more extreme, and since splitting up with Sean Delaney, his general behavior had become reckless, too. One morning I went to his room and found a boy in his early teens eating a bowl of cereal in Bill’s bed. Another morning I found a different boy there.
Bill was out of control.
When we got back to the States, a boy who had won a contest had been flown in to meet us, along with a photographer from the magazine that had sponsored the contest. Bill was clearly hitting on the kid. The next day I said, “Bill, tell me you didn’t.”
“Yes I did. And the photographer.”
Bill had crossed a line into an area I saw as criminal and immoral. I was no longer laughing.
Back home, the band had more time off. Even though we hadn’t toured in the States for a full year, we figured we’d make another record first. We decided to work with Bob Ezrin again, the producer who had served as our captain and Svengali for Destroyer.
Face the Music: A Life Exposed Page 22
