Face the Music: A Life Exposed (14 page)

We plugged in to do a sound check and ran through “Deuce.” The atmosphere changed. The Brats suddenly became our buddies. Once again, we had found that our music broke down indifference, and even hostility.

We opened the show that night and then stuck around to hear Wayne County, dressed in drag, looking like a spoof of Phyllis Diller, and backed by twin brothers no bigger than Oompa-Loompas. Wayne’s anthem was “It Takes a Man Like Me to Be a Woman Like Me,” and the high point of the show came when he/she ate dog food out of a toilet. Not the prettiest sight.

All the cool people came to that party, though I don’t think they could make heads or tails of us. I talked to Sylvain Sylvain of the Dolls there. They had just signed a two-record deal with Mercury and were in the process of recording. “Hey,” I cajoled him, “why don’t
we
do a show together?”

“You guys would kill us,” he said.

By the time we went to pack up after the Brats’ set, my guitar—the walnut-colored one that Charlie LeBeau had made for me—had been stolen. I had to start using a black Les Paul reissue while LeBeau made me a new guitar: an asymmetrical Flying V, based on one Albert King used to play. I came to be closely associated with that Flying V until, many years down the road, I began to design my own line of signature guitars.

We played the same Bleecker Street loft a month later, followed by another batch of shows at the Daisy. By that point people literally broke the windows trying to get into the Daisy—it was total bedlam. But we began to encounter a Catch-22 when we tried to capitalize on what to us seemed like increasing buzz. Every time we called a booking agent to help get us more gigs, we got the same response: we couldn’t get a booking agent unless we had a record label. But whenever we sent demos to labels to try to get a label deal, they wanted to know who our booking agent was.

So we figured we’d just have to continue booking our own shows and hope for the best. But outside of the Daisy, we seemed to run up against a wall on that front, too. “Who’s your manager?” club owners asked when we rang them.

“We don’t have a manager.”

“Well, we need to talk to a manager.”

“Unless we play at your club, we can’t get a manager.”

“Sorry.”

Something had to give. Then we had an idea. What about the Hotel Diplomat, where the Dolls had played? It wasn’t a club, so we wouldn’t need to persuade a booker or manager to hire us. We just needed to rent the place out. It could be our way to bypass the roadblocks we kept running up against. Everything would be in our own hands.

I went to the hotel to inquire about renting the ballroom. It was five hundred bucks. That was a lot of money, but we decided to bite the bullet. We knew we couldn’t fill the place on our own, so we asked the Brats to headline the show. We agreed to pay them a few hundred bucks. We even wrote out a contract, like concert promoters. We were up to our necks now.

In order to draw a crowd and have any chance of recouping our outlay, we realized we had to advertise. We needed handbills we could post around town, and we needed to take out an ad in some of the local papers, like the
Village Voice
. This would all take money, too, but Gene and I were still working, and I had gotten Ace a job driving for the same taxi company I drove for.

We also wanted a band logo to make the ads and posters look good. Ace had jotted down a logo for the flyer for our Bleecker Street loft shows. He was a pretty decent artist. I took his sketch and used it as the basis for a series of KISS logos I designed, ultimately arriving at the one that has adorned all things KISS for the past forty years. I vividly remember sitting on my parents’ sofa while they were out of town and drawing up the final version on thick white stock using a straightedge and a drafting pen. The SS in the logo actually consists of one S that is thicker than the other, with different proportions, and they aren’t exactly parallel—because I just eyeballed it. Ace’s concept was closer to the Nazi SS. I certainly suspected that was his inspiration, and the fact that a few years later he bought Nazi memorabilia on our first European tour confirmed this in my mind. As a Jew, I was sensitive about the SS, and Gene’s family had survived the Holocaust. My father never liked our logo because he thought my version was still too close to the Nazi lightning bolts, but for me, it didn’t hit home until years later, when I learned our logo was banned in Germany because Nazi imagery was illegal there. When I drafted the logo, I certainly never intended to court controversy at the expense of victims of history. I didn’t want that on my conscience.

Once we’d taken care of the ads, we put posters up all over the city. We did it ourselves, at night. We’d take two posters, wrap them around something—like a signpost—and staple both sides together.

I also made logo T-shirts, cutting stencils of the logo from cardboard, laying them on black T-shirts, and then painting rubber cement on the fabric and pouring glitter onto it. Take off the stencil, and there was a sparkling metallic KISS logo on black. Peter’s sister made some, too, and we passed them out to friends of the band for the show.

We also made up rough-and-ready media kits and sent them out to people whose names we found in magazines and the credits of record sleeves—managers and producers and booking agents. You could find all sorts of information if you scoured publications like
Billboard
. Each kit had a folder with a bio featuring the logo, an eight-by-ten photo, and complementary passes to the Diplomat. Nobody was hustling like that back then. The show passes listed the set time for our show, not the Brats’ show, even though they were more the draw. We hoped that the industry types would show up, see a packed ballroom, and assume we had brought the crowd.

We had some additional ideas about our stage show, too. In June I saw Alice Cooper’s
Billion Dollar Babies
tour and the theatricality made a huge impression on me. He really opened my eyes to the possibilities of a rock and roll show. Although it was more staged than anything I wanted to do—it seemed quite choreographed, and the whole thing had a scripted feel to it—I liked the atmosphere and environment he created. I wanted KISS to do things as visually arresting as that, but I wanted the
band
to be the show, by itself, as opposed to something that was providing a soundtrack for a separate drama. I wanted KISS to command the same kind of attention without the use of dancers or giant toothbrushes. The question was,
how?

It would be a while before we fleshed out anything along those lines, but one thing we did immediately was buy a truckload of empty speaker cabinets. They cost next to nothing and looked like Marshall amps. We figured we could stack the empty speaker cabinets onstage to give our set-up the right image. We just had to warn the spotlight operator not to hit them with the light, because then people would be able to see that they were empty.

Early on the day of the show, July 13, 1973, I rented a van and we loaded in and inconspicuously set up all our gear before anyone else arrived. This was a ruse to make people think we had a road crew. When people eventually showed up, we wanted them to see everything ready for us to walk on to the stage, as if somebody had taken care of it all before we even arrived at the venue. Nobody would realize we had humped it all ourselves. In actuality, we had just one guy, a friend of Ace’s named Eddie Solon, who handled the sound on our PA.

After we had set everything up at the hotel, we went back to our loft on 23rd Street and got ready for the show, doing our makeup and putting on our outfits. Peter was up to his usual shenanigans, threatening to quit the band just as we thought we were on the verge of taking a step forward. In order to make him feel better, Gene and I arranged a special treat. When we all went downstairs to go to the hotel, a limo was waiting at the curb. It made all of us, not just Peter, feel special to show up in that car. I can’t imagine a limo had ever pulled up in front of that place.

The ballroom was nearly full. We realized immediately that we must have covered our expenses—there were probably four hundred people there, and at three bucks a ticket we would be in the black. We stomped through the audience in full regalia and took the stage.

At least one A&R exec showed up for the show, as we had hoped. His name was Rich Totoian, and he worked for Windfall Records, which was the home of the band Mountain—who’d had a massive hit with “Mississippi Queen” a few years before. “Listen,” he said. “You guys are great. But honestly, I don’t know what to do with you.”

It didn’t seem like a big mystery to me. If you thought we were good live, just put out a record. I didn’t think people needed to think about packaging us or marketing us. Just put it out. Of course, it wasn’t the last time somebody was taken aback by our makeup. But by this time, we had confidence—conviction, even—in what we were doing. And since we hadn’t lost money on the show, we also knew we could do this again and get more people to check us out. Maybe somebody would figure us out.

“This is who we are,” we told the guy. “We are KISS.”

W
e decided to stage another rock and roll ball at the Hotel Diplomat on Friday, August 10, 1973. This time we took a leap of faith and headlined it ourselves. We felt we’d done our apprenticeship and were ready to make a bombastic entrance onto the next level.

Yet, in many ways, KISS was still an unknown commodity. One day I ran into a girl I’d known at school and showed her the poster for our upcoming Diplomat show. “We’ll have three or four hundred people there,” I told her.

“What? No way.” She wasn’t joking. She really didn’t believe me.

In the grand scheme of things, KISS still didn’t really exist. We knew we had a small following, but filling the Daisy or even the Diplomat—what did it mean? Then again, did the Dolls have a much bigger following? They had a record deal, but they were still basically a local act. Did anyone know the Dolls in Portland, Oregon? No. And for that matter, did the people I grew up with in Queens know the Dolls? Doubtful.

Just to be safe, we still pulled in a couple of the “cool” bands to open—Street Punk and Luger, who, like the Brats, had shared bills with the Dolls. Again we took out ads in the paper, put up posters all over town, and sent out media kits to anyone in the industry we could identify and track down.

And again, mercifully, the same result: a full house.

But again we failed to land a deal for a booker, a manager, or a record label. There was, however, one person waiting to talk to us after the show. His name was Bill Aucoin. He mentioned that he had worked on something called
Flipside,
which didn’t ring a bell for me. I assumed it was a teen magazine, like
Tigerbeat
or
16
. Bill didn’t come from a management background, obviously, but here he was talking about how he wanted to manage us. He seemed to get us. Not only that, he seemed really into us. He’d heard us, he’d seen us, and he seemed to believe in us.

We agreed to meet him.

A few days later, Gene and I went to his office at 75 East 55th Street, just off Madison Avenue. He shared space with an ad agency called Howard Marks Advertising. It seemed like a friendly place all around. “Listen,” he said right off the bat, “unless you want to be the biggest band in the world, I’m not interested in managing you.”

That was quite a statement from a guy who had never managed a band. But as Bill talked, he struck me as the missing piece of the puzzle. I had the same feeling I’d had when Ace plugged in. Bill was a kindred spirit.

It turned out that
Flipside
was a TV show that took viewers into the studio with bands as they recorded. Bill had also been the director of photography for a Barbra Streisand TV special. Somehow, it seemed logical that an unconventional band would hook up with a manager who wasn’t a manager. What Bill did have was contacts that could take us to the next level. We weren’t going to find that in a rock club even if we landed a booking agent.

Maybe it wasn’t surprising, given his background in TV, that Bill had a lot of ideas about theatricality, too. One thing he suggested was that we never be seen without our makeup. I would never have thought of that. We would exist only as KISS. He thought beyond what any of us was thinking at that point—he saw a much bigger picture. He was definitely tuned in to what we were doing and what we could yet do. And his belief in KISS was striking. Maybe he wasn’t jaded because he’d never been a manager.

Bill made one other claim: “If you decide to sign with me and I can’t get you a record contract within two weeks, I’ll void the contract. You’ll be free.”

Two weeks
.
Wow
.

At that point, the only sniff we’d had from a label was the guy from Windfall. We said we’d think it over.

Outside his office, Gene and I agreed that we liked Bill and his ideas. But I asked Gene, “Do you care if our manager’s gay?”

“Why?”

Bill was fastidious and very well manicured. I read him as gay. But since Bill wasn’t overtly effeminate, it had gone right over Gene’s head, apparently. “Because this guy’s gay.”

“How can you tell?” Gene asked.

“Well, he was impeccable, too studied for a heterosexual. Everything was right—the tie, the jacket, the haircut. Even his shoes. You and I would never bother with all that.”

Gene shrugged his shoulders. Good. It wasn’t an issue for either of us.

Next we called Peter. “We met the guy who should be our manager,” we told him. We explained that Bill really understood KISS, he really got it. We talked about all the things Bill had said he could do for us. Peter was skeptical, as he should have been. When I told him that Bill didn’t want to work with us unless we wanted to be the biggest band in the world, Peter said, “Bullshit. People say shit like that all the time.”

“No, this guy is the real deal,” I said. “Get this. If he doesn’t get us a record deal within two weeks, we can leave.” That did the trick.

After chatting with Ace, who also got on board, we called Bill and said we wanted him to manage us. “Just one last thing,” he said. “You guys don’t have any contracts with anyone else, right?”