Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  Eric and Bruce weren’t happy, but we told them we would keep them on the payroll while they took some time to figure out their next moves. Eric has always been a little cynical and has always seen himself as a hired gun. Even then, he was already a journeyman drummer who had played with lots of bands—he worked for everybody because he was just that good. And yet, in this instance, he was clearly hurt.

  We didn’t mean to hurt those guys, but I still felt bad. “They call it the music business for a reason,” Eric said, as a way of saying he understood the decision. “I appreciate the fact that you guys had the balls to do this face to face.” I guess it hadn’t always been that way in the course of his career. But that was something important to me. For instance, I would never break up with a girlfriend over the phone, and we had flown out to New York to end things with Bill Aucoin in person. It showed respect for someone. And these guys had made sizable contributions to the band.

  Bruce, as always, was a real mensch. “I get it,” he said. “A reunion seems obvious—it’s the way to go.”

  Not surprisingly, it took a lot of wrangling with Peter and Ace’s representative to get a deal in place. Ace insisted on getting more money than Peter because, as Ace put it, Peter wasn’t worth as much as he was. “Peter hasn’t done anything,” Ace insisted. “He hasn’t been playing—and I’m more famous than he is.”

  Of course, this was all behind Peter’s back. For all the times Ace threw Peter under the bus, he should have had muscles like a professional bodybuilder. And yet Peter still saw Ace as his teammate and buddy, no matter how many times Ace offered Peter up as a sacrificial lamb.

  In the past, people had told me, “The time to find out that you don’t want to be in bed with somebody isn’t when your clothes are off.” So we spelled everything out in the contracts with those guys—ground rules, consequences for not following them, all the things we would and wouldn’t do. And most importantly, we would rehearse and see how everyone responded to working together within carefully spelled-out parameters. We left nothing to chance.

  Part of that included hiring personal trainers—not just for Peter and Ace, but for me and Gene, too. We wanted the band to look the way people remembered us looking. The last thing I wanted was people to be disappointed when they saw a bunch of fat guys in tights.

  The trainers weren’t bodybuilders or anything like that—it was about cardio and basic strength. Even so, the guy working with Peter was aghast—not only at how weak he was and how low his endurance was, but also at how little Peter was willing to work. The trainer said it was like working with an old man. Peter had a tendency to explode at the trainer about nonsense because Peter didn’t like working out.

  Ace, as usual, was just lazy. But he put in his time.

  Alongside the physical training, we also started the rehearsal process. Or tried to. We convened in L.A. in March, planning to rehearse for several months. It was imperative to look and sound great for these shows—we were competing not just with our past, but with people’s recollections of our past. That was the challenge as I saw it. We had to re-create the impact our shows had on people at a time when nobody else did what we did. By the nineties, everybody had pyrotechnics, everybody had a show with KISS DNA in it—all it took was money. We had to blow away a new standard.

  Then Ace asked, “Why do we need to rehearse? I know these songs like the back of my hand.” It quickly became apparent that Ace didn’t know the back of his hand very well. And Peter? Peter was another story. There was no point to rehearsing as a band. Peter and Ace didn’t know the material, didn’t know their parts.

  I called Tommy Thayer. Tommy knew our music inside-out and would make a good coach. We wanted to be true to the original KISS Alive! versions of our classic songs. “Listen, Tommy,” I told him. “We need you to get together with Peter one-on-one in a rehearsal studio. Just you and him. You on guitar, Peter on his drums. You need to go through all the songs with him and make sure he knows what he’s doing.”

  After the first day of working one-on-one with Peter, Tommy called me. “Paul,” he said, sounding very serious, “I don’t know exactly how to say this.”

  Uh-oh.

  “I want to see this happen more than anything, for the sake of everyone involved,” Tommy continued. “But, well, I have to be honest with you: I don’t know how you guys are going to be able to do this.” He paused. Then I laughed. I assumed he was joking.

  “No, I’m serious,” Tommy said. “Playing with Peter is like playing with someone who picked up drumsticks for the first time today. It’s like he’s never played before. He doesn’t remember anything, and he can’t play.”

  Somehow this didn’t surprise me. Not only had Peter failed to grow musically or to hone his craft over the years, he had neglected it. I still hoped Tommy could bring him around. “Give it a few more days,” I said. “You can do it.”

  Tommy kept at it, recording their sessions on cassette and bringing them over to play for me afterwards or playing them to me over the phone. Listening to the tapes was frustrating. At times, Tommy would gently say things like, “Maybe that last bit wasn’t quite right . . . ,” and Peter would shout at him aggressively, “Don’t you fucking tell me how to play drums!”

  It was a thankless job, having to be so diplomatic, having to take Peter’s abuse. And for what? So Tommy—a guitar player—could teach Peter, supposedly a professional drummer, how to play his drums as well as a beginner again. In the end, Tommy taught Peter the parts like you would teach a dog a trick. It had nothing to do with music. But, lo and behold, after a few weeks, it started to click. Peter had learned his tricks. He could roll over—and play “Strutter.”

  We reconvened as a band. Now we realized Ace wasn’t there yet, either. I was shocked to see the full extent of the deterioration in these guys—the disrespect they had for their talents and gifts.

  I called Tommy again. Same drill. Tommy and Ace sat face to face in a studio for hours a day, two chairs, two Marshall amps, reviewing songs. Ace got up to speed much faster than Peter had.

  Again we reconvened as a band. Now things started to sound better. We obviously weren’t going to get to the level of the previous lineup, or any previous lineup, honestly, but there was now a bit of chemistry. We had a bit of that ragtag feel like we’d had in the early years.

  Finally the day came when we went over to Gene’s house and put on makeup and outfits together again for the first time, just to see how we looked. It was like time had stood still. We were those guys again. It was magical. I even let myself daydream about the possibility of not having just this moment, but of having a future—picking up where we had left off.

  When we got down to the business of planning the tour, Doc McGhee said, “We’ll start at Tiger Stadium.”

  “Are you nuts?” I said.

  I knew it was going to be a big tour, but I didn’t see it at that scale. This was well over the number ten thousand that I had pegged when I had called Gene to try to persuade him to consider a reunion tour. Here Doc was having us open at a venue that held four times that number of people. No testing the water on ticket sales. No warming up.

  It was chutzpah beyond anything I could muster. Doc clearly knew something we didn’t. He was coming off mega-tours with Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe, and he knew that perception would become reality if people bought into it. Luckily, we deferred to him.

  Soon we had offers from venues we had played at the height of things in the 1970s—and this at a time when many of our contemporaries, bands of the seventies and eighties, seemed on the verge of extinction because of grunge and the sea change in the music industry. Meanwhile, we had huge offers on the table. It was unreal. It was like hitting the lottery. Again.

  When the tickets for the reunion tour went on sale, usually early in the morning East Coast time, I would get on the phone with Doc in the predawn darkness of L.A. and monitor what was happening at Ticketmaster in real time. Tiger Stadium sold out in less than an hour. As the othe
r shows went on sale, it was the same. “Okay, New York just went on sale . . . okay, sold out, rolling into a second show . . . second show sold out.”

  The sun wasn’t even up where I was, and we had sold out four shows at Madison Square Garden. “Okay, we’re into Boston . . .”

  It was amazing. Doc had been right.

  52.

  Detroit rock city—back where it all began. Tiger Stadium, sold out, June 28, 1996. Gene, Ace, Peter, and me, together again. Magic. Electricity.

  Here we are.

  We had arrived ten days earlier—once again leaving nothing to chance—and had done seven rehearsals, including one full dress rehearsal. Ace was late for all of them.

  At this point in my life, there were certain perks and prerequisites I felt I had earned and were necessary to make the coming tour manageable. We booked the best hotels; I wasn’t going to be staying in hotels with a paper ring around the toilet seat saying SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. Ace and Peter hadn’t stayed in the upper echelon hotels in the sixteen years since they’d last toured with KISS. Peter in particular seemed completely lacking in world experience. I took him to Starbucks one day, and he was blown away by how good a biscotti was. Quite quickly both Peter and Ace came to resent the fact that they weren’t as worldly or savvy when it came to maneuvering in nice surroundings. Peter constantly felt disrespected by hotel staff, for instance, which was simply the result of his feeling intimidated by them—and almost anyone else for that matter.

  On the afternoon of the show, we did a sound check. As I stood on the stage, it was still hard to grasp that this baseball stadium would be jammed to capacity in a few hours. We took pictures, enjoying the moment. Peter, who had recently broken up with a girlfriend and was there on his own, seemed uncharacteristically open and grateful. His tendency was always to become dependent on someone and cut himself off from everybody else by using his girlfriend as a buffer—either a good buffer or a bad buffer, depending on the woman’s personality. Now, single, Peter let himself bask in the moment.

  That night, on our way to the stage, golf carts drove us through the mazelike bowels of the stadium. Suddenly we emerged from one of the access ramps to the area behind the stage, and the air was electric. You could hear the excitement, the anticipation. It was overwhelming. I realized I was suddenly exponentially more important than I had been just a few months before—because I was again a member not just of KISS, but of this version of KISS. I could hear the pent-up feelings of the people waiting for the show. People had made the journey from around the world to witness this night. It was deafening.

  When the lights went down, it was pandemonium. It seemed like forty thousand flashbulbs went off as people waited for us to emerge.

  I knew this show was pivotal. This show would reintroduce the band and the imagery and everything that went with it. This show could allow us to move forward. To continue. It felt like we were in the eye of a hurricane, everything swirling around us as we calmly watched from the quiet of backstage.

  As we took the stage—still behind the curtain—I felt an incredible wave of pressure. The sound of the crowd had a tangible force to it. And even as the place went quiet, the noise of forty thousand people breathing created a deafening kind of hush. I had never felt like this before.

  Alright, Detroit! You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest band in the world . . . KISS!

  The curtain dropped, and the force of the crowd reaction nearly lifted me off my feet.

  I had to fight to be in control of the situation, of myself, of my persona, of the band. I was worried about staying connected to Peter—there was going to be a lot of foot-tapping and hand signals, I knew, in order to keep him with us. Fortunately, he was happy to have the guidance. It wasn’t like him, to be honest, to be open to that sort of thing, but for the time being Peter was terrific—working hard, being cheerful and appreciative.

  The joy for me was being able to revisit something I’d experienced as a much younger person in a different frame of mind. When I was in the midst of it the first time around, I had the sense it would never end. No matter how thankful I was, I had still suspected it would be endless. Then it had died down. But there on that stage, with KISS reunited, facing that kind of energy again, I felt thankful in an entirely different way. It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about fame. I had those things already. This was the chance to read a book that I’d read as a kid, to see a movie that I’d seen when I was younger, to get something out of the experience that I hadn’t had the capacity to get or appreciate before.

  I was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude.

  As the tour continued, everyone seemed to share that feeling. At least initially. Peter swore up and down that he wouldn’t repeat the mistakes he had made the first time around. And for the first few months of the reunion tour, we voted Peter the MVP. He often joined us for dinner. He was upbeat and pleasant to be around. His attitude seemed to mirror mine—we were incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity.

  One of the things we had worried about on the reunion was Peter’s drum solo. He had wanted to play one from the get-go. In a perfect world, a solo was part of what we did—we had always had a drum solo during the Alive! years. Looking back, it wasn’t clear why we felt we needed to, but it had become a tradition. In the meantime, Peter’s abilities had greatly deteriorated. But since he wanted to do it, and it was part of the tradition, Gene agreed to help him put one together.

  Fortunately, by the nineties, you could hit a Coke bottle with a stick and make it sound explosive and powerful if you put enough effects on it. And that’s exactly what we did. We put triggers on each individual drum so that when Peter hit one, it activated a prerecorded drum sound. Although Peter had played with fire in the seventies, he was a shadow of himself now. On the reunion tour he hit the drums like he was worried his arms would snap if he did anything more than barely tap them. His arms hurt, he said. How hard you hit the drums determined the activation of the triggers, but fortunately they could be set to any level of sensitivity. We used to say we had the triggers set so Peter could play a solo by sneezing. I’d hear these huge drum sounds and turn around to look at Peter and see that he was barely moving his sticks.

  But we wanted to succeed. And succeed we did.

  For a time.

  Then came Gigi. She was a born-again Christian who by all accounts had been a dancer before—and I don’t mean she was in Swan Lake. When Peter got together with her, things started to change quickly. Peter reminded me of a small animal—when it’s afraid, it’s timid, but when it feels protected, it shows its teeth. Peter latched onto her and started to distance himself from everyone else.

  I was amazed that while he and Gigi professed a deep love of God and religion, they inflicted nothing but pain and suffering on all those around them. Suddenly, when I called his room to talk, she would answer and say, “What do you want?”

  “Is Peter there?”

  “What do you need him for?”

  Just get him to the damn phone. You’re a guest.

  She became a gatekeeper.

  The tour might as well have been printing money by this time. Everything was selling out, and we kept adding shows. We were living an amazing life, flying around in a large private jet with a flight attendant, staying at beautiful hotels—we were on top of the world. Peter and Ace made millions of dollars—and they hadn’t made squat in the nearly two decades they’d been out of the band. They had nothing before the reunion. And yet, as soon as their bank accounts began to fill up again, they changed.

  Peter’s hotel requests necessitated Doc printing a multipage handbook that was distributed to hotel staff wherever we went. It contained a set of complicated rules: if Peter put a sign on his door with one symbol, the staff could go in and vacuum, but they couldn’t touch the windows; another sign meant they could air the room out, but not touch the towels; he needed to be a certain distance from the elevators; he couldn’t be too high up; he made them cover certain
windows with tinfoil.

  Are you kidding me? This time last year you’d never been to a Starbucks!

  One afternoon I heard screams and crashing sounds coming from the hall. I opened my hotel room door and saw Doc running past toward Peter and Gigi’s room. Dishes were flying out of the room and smashing against the opposite wall in the hallway. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Doc shouted.

  “They didn’t clean my room!” screamed Peter.

  “But Peter, you put your sign on the door that means they can’t come in!”

  The cracks in the band were beginning to show—already.

  Some nights Ace nodded out while putting his makeup on—just slumped into his chair with a paintbrush practically stuck in his eye. His use of a variety of illegal drugs was again out of control. He would go through all kinds of contortions—he even managed to get a superficial gun wound in Dallas—and then demand prescriptions for more drugs. Doc would have to blow the whistle and tell doctors not to give him painkillers. As Doc used to say, “Ace has the willpower of a grubworm.”

  It was sad. And frustrating. This should have been four guys celebrating something miraculous. Instead, it became hard work just to make sure it came off every day—that Peter and Ace got out of their rooms, that we made it to the venue, that we got through a show.

  While I traveled with one rolling suitcase, Ace was now traveling with seventeen bags, including one that weighed more than a hundred pounds. In it was a projector and cables so he could run an image of his face and Elvis’s face morphing into each other on a loop in his hotel room.

  Ace brought along some interesting girlfriends, too. One liked to wander out into the audience with a clipboard and take notes—apparently, she was checking to make sure Ace was mixed loudly enough. Another one must have shot up on the plane, because she left blood all over her seat. She was in such bad shape, we sent a doctor into Ace’s dressing room to have a look at her. “If I were you,” the doctor told us, “I wouldn’t have her traveling with you, because she’s going to die.” Doc handled that situation, and she was never seen on the tour again.