One morning just before we left for South America for the last leg of the tour, I glanced at a copy of the newspaper and a small article caught my eye. The actress Donna Dixon has married her Doctor Detroit co-star Dan Ackroyd, newly discovered paperwork shows. The marriage license came to light in Martha’s Vineyard.
What? Martha’s Vineyard?
It turned out they had already been married for three months. I was stunned to realize that during the time that we had been talking again, she had been on the verge of getting married, and then in fact had gotten married.
Suddenly I felt like I was underwater. I could barely move.
I called her. “You were married when we were talking?”
She said something about how she hoped I would find what she had found. No explanation, no apology.
I hung up.
From then on, it was a struggle to do anything. Depression held me like a vise. I had to push myself every day: Get your ass out of bed.
Everything around me was caving in.
Just keep moving. Otherwise, you drown.
The press seemed to take delight in seeing KISS implode. After I struggled out of bed one day to get to an interview, the reporter asked me, “How does it feel to be on the Titanic?” Writers looked at us as a commodity and forgot that we were people. Another interviewer asked, “How does it feel to be dying?” They were so hateful. Their coldness and perverse joy was not lost on me. Still, I realized something when fielding mean-spirited questions like that, day after day.
Nobody is going to tell me when this is over.
Sure, everything around me had gone wrong. But what about me? What about my survival? That was up to me.
How does it feel to be dying?
Those pricks on the phone were not going to decide whether I got the thumbs up or thumbs down in the arena.
KISS was everything to me.
And right then I swore I would do whatever it took to keep my life raft afloat.
KISS will never die.
Part IV
Under the gun
41.
In June 1983 we flew to Brazil and played to 180,000 screaming fans in Maracanã Stadium in Rio. It was the biggest audience we had ever performed in front of. Taking the stage in the soccer stadiums of South America, I realized the stadiums we think of as big in the States were miniscule by comparison. Tiny. When you walk into a stadium like Maracanã, you feel like you’re in the bottom of an oil drum.
Another difference is the security. During the afternoon, when we were checking things out, armed militia milled around with dogs.
There’s no way to describe the amount of energy that a crowd that big puts out. And all the energy was directed at us up on the stage. You might say the air was electric or that there was a sense of anticipation, hysteria—call it what you will. But when it’s all directed at you, it’s like a huge wave that can consume you. The amount of power pushing at you is incredible. It can almost take you off your feet.
And yet, as exhilarating as it was to play those venues, the writing was on the wall. It was only a matter of how the dominoes were going to fall, not whether they would fall. We could still play the biggest stadiums in South America, but we were in a very shaky position in North America. We knew we had to build KISS from the ground up, all over again.
Back in the States, I once again urged Gene to agree to do the most radical thing we could do: take off our makeup. Some people saw this as a bold move; I saw it as our only move. Our U.S. audience hadn’t dwindled by chance. It had dwindled because what we were doing no longer rang true. People were tired of what KISS had become.
With the new characters, we were one step removed from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I mean, what the hell was Vinnie’s ankh about? Rather than keeping the original personas and images alive, we had become a ridiculous menagerie. What was next? Turtle Boy?
As we began to record Lick It Up, we thought about getting a manager to replace Bill. Up to this point, Howard Marks had taken over the business aspects of Bill’s job, and we were basically managing ourselves. So we went to see a famous manager in L.A. and told him that we had decided to take the makeup off. “Why don’t you keep it on half your face?” he said.
On half of my face?
That was when we realized how out of touch and out of sync most people were with KISS. After all, Creatures was a good album. The problem was that people were listening with their eyes instead of their ears. If people didn’t like what they saw, it was unlikely they were going to like what they heard.
Agreeing to take off the makeup was—understandably—much harder for Gene. It was easier for me to do than for the guy with a ponytail on top of his head spitting blood all over the stage. But when Creatures failed, common sense led us to the conclusion that we simply had no choice. Taking off the makeup gave us the best chance to continue.
Even so, Gene didn’t agree to jump until we were at the edge of the cliff. It was a leap of faith that was necessary for our own survival. We were going to have to find out whether we were a good enough band to exist without the makeup. If what people always said about us was true—that we were a gimmick—then I felt it was time to call it a day because we didn’t deserve to continue.
Was I nervous? Not really. I knew that what I did was from the heart, whether or not my face was white. It had become innate. I was going to continue to be exactly the same character.
When people gave us kudos or told us we had guts for doing it, I was the first to say that we didn’t do it for anything other than our own survival—there was no alternative. I don’t mind taking credit for things done in the spirit of risk-taking, but this wasn’t one of those moments. It wasn’t a brave or noble move because it wasn’t done from a place of strength. We were backed into a corner.
I was also still reeling from finding out about Donna’s marriage. I felt dazed and numb. I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time, and in the middle of a conversation one day he said, “The best thing to help you forget a woman is another woman.” That was one of the most eye-opening things I ever heard during a therapy session. I was like, “What? That’s not deep. Really?” I was looking for some Zen piece of advice, and this caught me totally off guard.
Well, okay, I guess I can go with that.
After that session I thought to myself that maybe one way to feel better was to write a song about feeling better. The best way to move forward might be to sing a song about moving forward. I read somewhere that when Beethoven wrote his second symphony in 1802, a piece that as a kid I’d found extremely uplifting, he was suicidal. Maybe I could write myself out of a funk, too.
Vinnie and I wrote the song “Lick It Up” in my place on 80th Street in the music room—with its now-empty lighted guitar cases. Before we wrote, we tried to figure out what sort of thing we were going to try to do, and the therapist’s words rang in my ear. We quickly came up with the title “Lick It Up,” which sounded great.
Life’s a treat and it ain’t a crime to be good to yourself.
It was a universal sentiment, and something that I still certainly believed, whether or not I was living it every minute. It sure felt better than singing a song about being sad. Plus, the act of writing a great song—regardless of its sentiment—made me feel good. That was part of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. That was part of working my way out of the darkness.
Creating was a way I was able to reestablish my footing.
Other songs on Lick It Up—like “A Million to One”—hewed more closely to how I was feeling. I think we all like to believe we’re irreplaceable in a relationship and that nobody will ever give the person we love what we did, and “A Million to One” came out of that sentiment. Of course, it was a bit unrealistic and self-serving, in addition to not being true.
Even though there was an excitement about taking off the makeup, it didn’t mean our music had to change. We had been happy with the production on Creatures and felt confident working with Michael James Jackso
n again, continuing to build on our return to rock and roll.
As the album neared completion, I felt excited when I saw the proofs of the cover. There we were. It was a declaration of sorts, and for all we were leaving behind, it was really saying something. I thought we were making a statement about the band and about the validity and credibility of it in our own eyes—taking off the makeup said something about how much we valued the band. We could have just thrown in the towel and gone home. Instead, we were willing to shed our armor.
I also realized that as soon as the record came out, I would no longer have that separation to cushion the impact—positive and negative—of success. The person who was famous would be the same one as the guy walking down the street. But that could be fun, too.
I was going to be much more recognizable and visible, so in that sense it couldn’t be bad—especially when it came to getting women. And anyway, I’d had years of adapting to fame, and all those years in makeup had provided a transition. So it wasn’t going to be like diving into a pool of ice water.
Up to that point, MTV had always ignored us. We had filmed one of those “I want my MTV” promos, and they never aired it. The video we had shot for Creatures— “I Love It Loud”—didn’t get played. They chose not to give us any exposure, even though we desperately needed it in the wake of The Elder debacle to show that we had recommitted ourselves to doing what KISS did best. We were considered uncool at a network whose taste was led by a bunch of college interns.
Suddenly, when we unmasked ourselves, all that changed.
MTV finally embraced us at some level. We came up with a made-for-MTV unmasking. If you think about it, it was really just the unmasking of me and Gene. The other two guys were pretty much unknown commodities—that’s not meant to disparage Eric or Vinnie, but having played on an album that barely registered in the pop consciousness, they weren’t much of a draw as far as unmasking went. To most people, KISS was still the Catman, the Spaceman, the Starchild, and the Demon. But the cat was already out of the bag, so to speak. As was the Spaceman. So in this case, to a certain extent, we sold a lot of sizzle without a very big steak.
Still, “KISS unmasking” made a great sound bite, and people bought into it. We managed to turn that into something of an event and get press out of it.
And it worked. I was convinced that Lick It Up wasn’t as good as Creatures of the Night, but the album sold way, way better—probably four or five times as many albums sold in just the first few weeks after its release in September 1983. It wasn’t the music the people hadn’t like. It was how the band had looked.
Once we took off the makeup, we no longer wore the platform boots onstage, and we adopted a more generic style: tight, colorful clothes, sexual and flamboyant. We slid into what was pretty much the common look at the time. I mean, Robert Plant had cut his hair and was wearing parachute pants for God’s sake. Nobody was impervious to what was going on—even the Who and the Stones were affected by what was considered the fashion of the time. We just kind of morphed into what became known as a hair band.
We looked like dozens of other bands. There was no place anymore to be different. We had gotten rid of our calling card. We had taken off what made us different, so pretty much all we could look like was a run-of-the-mill rock and roll band. MTV had opened up the opportunity for a band from Idaho to look like a band from L.A., which could look like a band from London. There was a more homogenized look, because every band suddenly realized they could go buy hairspray and tease their hair up high and wear their mom’s makeup and roll around on the floor with their guitars, just like they saw in somebody’s video. It was the current state of bands: big hair, spandex, jewelry, femme makeup.
A lot of bands with that look made a lot of awful music. It’s mind-boggling how bad some of that stuff was. It had no soul, no roots. I know it was aping a lot of British blues-based bands, but as far as I was concerned, you couldn’t play that type of music credibly unless you were at least aware of the likes of Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson. Jimi Hendrix didn’t start off playing “Purple Haze.” If you wanted to learn guitar, you had to go back.
Most of the hair bands were horrible, with noodling guitar players, tapping away without really being able to play. But we had to fit in with what was going on. So we did. And, for better or worse, it got us through a couple of decades.
Since MTV had covered our unmasking, we figured that this time around they would probably play a music video if we made one. We weren’t going to get a world premiere slot or anything, but we were hopeful it would get played. The video for “Lick It Up” was a bigger production than “I Love It Loud,” but we managed to keep the costs fairly low. Some artists were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on videos at the time, and that seemed crazy to us, especially in light of MTV’s track record of not playing us in the past. We wanted to make “Lick It Up” for a reasonable amount of money.
The video opened with an image of skulls, and if you watch very closely, you’ll see one of them wobble a little—they were made out of latex. We shot the video in a burned-out area of the Bronx. Aside from a few props, like the skulls, that was all real—we didn’t do anything but show up. It looked like Dresden in 1945, a postapocalyptic wasteland. But it wasn’t a stage set. I’d never seen anything like that before; I hadn’t spent much time in the South Bronx. The crazy thing was that it wasn’t just one small area. It was huge, like an entire bombed-out city or a massive movie set—broken down and decaying buildings as far as you could see, piles of bricks and rocks and garbage everywhere. It was the weirdest, most surreal thing I’d ever seen.
When I saw the complete edited video, I thought it was cool. It was an “MTV video”—it had girls, it had fire, it had weird hair-dos. It had all the things MTV videos had.
Eric hated it because he had these little drumstick legs, so he’s walking and you see these little feet with high pointed shoes and these thick legs. And people seeing Vinnie asked, “Is that a girl?” When we shot the cover for Lick It Up, Vinnie wore a wig, and it looked great. Afterwards he gave us a hard time and insisted on not wearing it again. But then his hair kind of looked like the Gerber baby. He was very odd-looking anyway, and in that video he looked extra odd as he tried to look sexy for the camera.
Lick It Up went on to be certified double platinum. That blew Creatures of the Night away and reaffirmed for me that my suspicions had been correct. It wasn’t that people didn’t want KISS. They wanted KISS to drop something that no longer seemed genuine. Losing the makeup forced people to focus on the band. And they embraced the music.
Lick It Up felt like a rebound in other ways, too, because shedding the makeup meant, in a sense, shedding an era, shedding a persona, and finally being out there, at least on the surface, as me. The person who was offstage was the same person in the videos.
I felt we had taken one very big step forward, and it meant that we could soldier on and continue to try to rebuild this thing I loved, KISS.
The next test would be playing live without makeup. Were we just a bunch of knuckleheads in spandex and grease paint who blew shit up? Or were we a band, able to go toe to toe with anybody else?
We were about to find out.
42.
The show—in Portugal in October 1983—started with our normal introduction: The hottest band in the land . . . And then, suddenly, there we were onstage without any makeup on. And we were in rock clothes instead of platform boots and batwings and the usual armored accessories. For the first time ever.
I looked over at Gene.
He looks just like he did during sound check—and there’s an audience out there!
The crowd didn’t understand what was going on. The show had been promoted as a makeup show. Posters all over town showed the old characters. It took a few minutes for people to catch on.
Did it have the same visual impact? No. I could feel the difference from the stage. But we had to leave all that behind to find out who we were
.
I wasn’t sick of the makeup—I was sick of what it had become. We had to give it up to save what we loved most—the band. This was exciting. And liberating, too.
I relished the chance to prove ourselves all over again. And not just to critics and the audience, but also to myself. On that tour, I realized that the most difficult part of taking off the makeup wasn’t performing without the star. It was adjusting to getting my picture taken. Since we had originally determined not to be photographed without makeup in order to enhance our stage personas, I had a neurotic sixth sense that allowed me to feel cameras anywhere, even if it was in my peripheral vision or far off in the distance. When we took off the makeup, I still reflexively covered my face whenever I detected a camera.
Vinnie continued to baffle me. He still refused to sign his contract. He kept promising to sign it, but he never did. And there was no way to make him. We were stuck with no choice but to continue.
We played in Oulu, in northern Finland, at the end of November 1983. It was the closest I’d ever been to the Soviet Union—maybe a hundred miles from the border. We traveled all day to get there, and when we arrived at the arena, it was bitter cold. I had to wear gloves and several layers of clothing in the backstage area. We were also starving after traveling all day and were very happy when a huge bowl of hearty beef soup was served. We sat around the family-style cauldron and ladled the soup into our bowls. It was so good—vegetables and beef in a flavorful broth, nice and warming. Vinnie ate part of his bowl and then, saying he was finished, dumped the leftovers back into the cauldron in the middle of the table. We all looked at him in disbelief.
“Where did you grow up? What are you doing? You just ruined our food!”
Things with Vinnie were getting worse and worse. He kept pushing his solos to more and more ridiculously epic lengths, stalling the show. The final straw came at a concert back in the States, in Long Beach, California, in January, 1984. That night he went on for so long that Gene and I just walked back onstage as he was still playing. I went to the mic and said, “Vinnie Vincent, lead guitar!” Solo over.
Face the Music: A Life Exposed Page 25
