Face the Music: A Life Exposed (16 page)

We had our revamped show nearly ready to go. The forklift contraption would lift Peter’s drum kit up about seven feet. We had Gene fire breathing and the three of us swaying in unison. Just one last piece of the puzzle remained as far as our show was concerned: pyro.

Pyro had not yet become a science. We just “auditioned” a few maniacs who liked to blow shit up. We needed somebody who could make big booms. Bill eventually found our guy. God knows where. I don’t really know if there were any credentials at all for early pyrotechnicians. All they needed was a fascination with fire and explosives.

We probably saved lives and property by hiring these guys and keeping some arsonists and pyromaniacs off the streets.

O
n December 31, 1973, we glimpsed the future. Bill somehow got us added to a New Year’s Eve bill at the Academy of Music featuring Blue Öyster Cult and Iggy and the Stooges. We were fourth on the bill under a local New York band called Teenage Lust. Now, I
knew
it was just a matter of time before we started blowing everybody away. And that night, we certainly made an impression.

When we walked out on the stage in front of four thousand people, I was stunned. It might as well have been four
hundred
thousand. Not long into the set, I popped the button on my homemade pants and struggled to keep them up for the rest of the set, pressing my guitar awkwardly against my crotch to keep them from slipping down. Then Gene lit his hair on fire when he tried the fire breathing that the Amazing Amazo had taught him.

We were dangerous, alright—to ourselves.

Still, even before the end of the night, I realized I didn’t need to feel too bad. When it was time for the Stooges to play, the band took the stage and started playing—without Iggy. Crew members had to carry Iggy down a flight of steps, drag him to the side of the stage, prop him up behind the curtains dangling there beside the stage, and then basically throw him out onstage. Iggy could barely stand up, much less walk or jump. I suddenly realized why he did all those crazy contortions. Despite the hype and legend, I thought the Stooges were awful.

Even so, we now knew we weren’t ready to be headliners. Not yet.

Fortunately, we had one more small-scale tune-up show scheduled before we headed off to Canada to kick off our promotional tour. Unfortunately, Neil chose that moment to approach me about something bugging him about my Starchild character. “I was wondering if we could tweak your makeup a little,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Your makeup is . . . well, it’s a little . . . effeminate. Maybe you can ditch the star and try something else?”

To be a good sport, I agreed to experiment with a mask, something closer to Zorro or the Lone Ranger. After the show Neil said, “Can you also maybe lumber around onstage? You know, like a caveman or something?”

Fuck this
.

“Why would I do that? It’s not what I’m about.”

I just didn’t understand his objections. I was proud to be the Starchild, and I didn’t see how any of what I did had the slightest thing to do with my sexuality, or my perceived sexuality. If anything, I thought hints of androgyny demonstrated confidence and comfort with my sexuality. And besides, people were drawn to it, so who cared what they read into it? It was just the way of the world back then—a lot more people were afraid of anything that might be taken for gay. In fact, that would become more clear in the following years. In that regard, Neil was right about how my character might be interpreted. It’s just that I didn’t care. We didn’t play by the rules. And I wasn’t going to yield to received wisdom or irrational fear. My idealized vision of a frontman was definitely not a Neanderthal.

I went back to the star after that single show in January 1974.

I was still living at home, and my parents were raising my niece, Ericka. I didn’t have much money and sure as hell wasn’t going to spend what little I did have to rent a place of my own. I knew from this point on I wouldn’t be around much, but I loved the increasingly deep bond I shared with Ericka and loved serving as a big brother to her now that she was walking and talking.

Next thing I knew, my parents were driving me to the airport to catch a flight to Edmonton, Canada. Our album had yet to come out, but a musician I wasn’t aware of, Mike Quatro—whose sister Suzi was very popular in England—had canceled some dates in Canada, and Bill snagged them for us. Sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car on the way to the airport, I felt like I was being driven to summer camp. Little did my parents know, they were actually driving me to a residency in a traveling whorehouse. Almost as soon as we landed in Canada, I realized that girls wanted to sleep with me—though the sleeping part was not a priority and was definitely secondary to more strenuous bedroom activity—based on only one criterion: I was in a band.

I was
desirable,
and I could hardly believe it.

In addition to easy, random, nonstop sex, there were concerts to be played. The venues for those three shows were college cafeterias, and we didn’t have our full arsenal of tricks along for the ride. Peter’s drum riser stayed in New York, though Gene still breathed fire, and the stage—which on these dates was hardly more than some folding tables pushed together—was wreathed in dry ice fog.

Mike Quatro obviously had enough of a following to have those shows booked for him. And even though he couldn’t have been that big, given the venues, people were confused when we took the stage each night. They had no idea who we were. Hard to blame them, since our album hadn’t been released yet.

We had a few interviews on that first trip. We had no idea how to do an interview. We had no strategy on how to come across cohesively. The only thing we had discussed with Bill was the fact that we would never be photographed without the makeup. That strategy—while great in concept—turned out to be a bit of a bummer in practice when we were first faced with the possibility of at least the minor fame that could be said to go along with having your picture in a local newspaper.

Since we were to exist only onstage and in photos of us in full regalia, the journalists came to the venues and talked to us all together, after we were already made up. It became clear that the four of us had no idea how to discuss the particulars about things like how the band got together or what we were trying to accomplish. We hadn’t conceptualized those things individually, much less as a group. We tried to sound interesting or controversial but just came off like a bunch of idiots. We’d been thrown into the deep end of the pool and had no idea how to swim.

One thing that struck me, though, was that for a guy with a great vocabulary, Gene sure used the word “I” a lot. Whenever I tried to answer questions about the band, I naturally answered using “we.” But when Gene answered similar questions, he always cast it as “I.” That really threw me. The questions were about the
band.
This wasn’t supposed to be about him, it was about all of us—KISS.

Our idea had always been to present ourselves like the Beatles—the four guys all living in the same house, skiing down the hill in
Help!
or whatever. As an only child, Gene apparently didn’t feel he had to answer to anybody or explain himself. It pissed me off, but I said nothing.

Back in New York after about a week in Canada, Neil tipped us off that “Nothing to Lose,” which he had released as a single, was going to be played at 2
P.M.
one day on WNEW, the big local
FM
rock station. My parents and I crowded around their Harmon Kardon console and waited. Then Alison Steele said, “There’s a new band called KISS, and here’s their first song.” Then “Nothing to Lose” played in our living room. That moment—hearing my band on the same station that played Led Zeppelin and the Who—was monumental. I’d spent hours listening to my heroes on that station.

There had been a sense of unreality about the album until other people heard it. Even when I’d seen the finished cover in Bill’s office, it hadn’t seemed real.
Now
it was real. And the following week, when the album would be available in record shops and maybe even displayed in shop windows, and we would play a launch party in Los Angeles, it would be even more real.

We flew to Los Angeles in mid-February for the party, which Neil had organized at the Century Plaza Hotel. It was a coming-out party to introduce us to the industry—including Neil’s partners at Warner Bros. Records—and whatever celebrities Casablanca could rope into coming.

I immediately loved L.A. It was a different country—a world apart from the one I knew. Driving down Sunset Boulevard I saw billboards touting
bands
instead of cigarettes or beer.
Wow
. I hoped to see KISS up there one day. The city embraced music in a way New York didn’t. It seemed to revolve around music and movies. It also felt somehow healthier—the combination of the sunny weather and the way people took care of themselves struck me.

Casablanca put us up in the Chateau Marmont and rented two Chevys for us to drive around town. We would pile into the cars and go to Denny’s or McDonald’s. I roomed with Ace in a two-story bungalow off in a private section of the grounds. Gene roomed with Peter. Each bungalow had two levels and several bedrooms and bathrooms. The first day Ace went out for a walk, and I decided to take a shower. While I was in there, the bathroom started to smell horrible. I pulled open the curtain to see what it could be—and there was Ace sitting on the toilet taking a dump. He looked up. “What are you doing in here?” I yelled. There were other bathrooms in the place, after all. He just shrugged. Ace was odd.

Early in our L.A. visit, I asked a few people, “What do you do here? Where do you go at night?” One of the first places mentioned was the Rainbow, a bar and restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I had never heard of it, but as soon as I walked in, I knew I had found my synagogue. A new house of worship.

The people in there weren’t looking for anything more than a promise of tonight. It seemed to be a system of friends-with-benefits, or strangers-with-benefits for a newcomer like me. The very first night I met a great-looking blonde whose only criterion for going back to my room at the Chateau Marmont was that I was in a band that had a record deal. Being a musician and looking the part—I was in platform boots and rock star chic, as usual—got you pretty far on Sunset Boulevard. Which was fine with me. It was all so uncomplicated. In a way, she and I were both celebrating the same thing: the exaltation of rock and roll.

I had just gotten Led Zeppelin’s
Houses of the Holy
on cassette, and I put that in a cassette player next to my bed in the hotel room. That album will always be synonymous with my first foray into the appreciation society of the Rainbow.

When the woman left the next morning, I realized the scene in L.A. had no false expectations—in either direction. There was no judgment, no sense of condescension. We appreciated each other in a kind of wholesome way, as odd as it may sound.

That night—and the subsequent nights, all of which I spent at the Rainbow—was my rite of passage into rock and roll at a level I didn’t know existed. I had heard about a rock and roll lifestyle, but I didn’t have a sufficient idea of what it was like to even fantasize about it. My concepts of fame and rock and roll had been hampered by my limited experience. I expected the payoff to come in the form of a hot girlfriend; instead, it came in the form of being with a different hot girl every day, sometimes several in the space of one day. It was incredible. L.A. seemed like the Land of Oz.

On February 18, 1974, Casablanca officially unveiled us at a party that was a bit like a cross between a bar mitzvah and a C-list celebrity gathering. Neil got up onstage and introduced us and we started playing. Before we finished our first song, everybody cleared out of the ballroom. Too loud and too garish, they complained. Hey, we weren’t the Eagles. No comfortable volume or songs about being desperate in the desert. We were East Coast, proud of it, and thought the whole West Coast cowboy thing was a bit of a joke. I felt an odd sense of pride at having scared off these people. What did we care if they didn’t like us? They weren’t our type, either.

Alice Cooper came to the event that night, too. Afterwards he joked, “What you guys need is a gimmick.”

A few nights later we drove down to the Aquarius Theater, also on Sunset, to make our first-ever TV appearance. Dick Clark had expanded beyond
American Bandstand
and had a show called
In Concert
that featured three different bands playing a few songs live on each episode. The format suited us—just us doing what we did. And it felt like another milestone—a network television show, hosted by Dick Clark no less. Dick came to our dressing room when we arrived to get ready for the performance. I learned over time that a lot of people in similar positions weren’t nearly as cordial as he was. Bill Graham, for instance, a highly respected promoter who ran the Fillmore and Winterland, was anything but nice to us when we first met him a few months later. But Dick was special, and when I shook his hand, all I could think was,
That’s Dick fucking Clark!
For all those years he had been an inspiration to me as a kid, he had seemed as fantastical as Superman—but, no, Dick Clark really existed.

We set up on a revolving stage, and a band called Redbone played before us. Then the stage turned and the dim lighting suddenly became bright stage lighting. There we were in front of the cameras. But we were a machine by that point, and we played ferociously wherever we were. We felt good about the performance. We didn’t see it until six weeks later, when we hurried back to a motel after a concert in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to watch the broadcast on a crappy TV.

After taping
In Concert,
we flew back to New York to cool our boots for a few weeks before setting out on our first real tour in mid-March. I remember lying in bed in my parents’ apartment, thinking about my time in Los Angeles—women, restaurants, TV shows, fancy hotels, and all the perks and amenities that went along with success.