Face the Music: A Life Exposed (17 page)

And I prayed.

God, please don’t take this away from me now
.

That small modicum of recognition was so addictive—the fact that the chubby unpopular kid was being chased by women, purely because of how I was perceived differently now. And I was now being
paid
to do what I loved doing anyway. It had been okay before I knew it existed, but now that I had tasted it, I couldn’t bear the thought of having it taken away. I was fine before I had tasted the cake. Everything was different now. I prayed, fearful that it would be pulled off the table before I had made the most of it. The crumbs were so exhilarating. I wanted more. And I was terrified it would end too soon.

God, don’t take this away from me yet.

Please, God. Not now, not yet
.

N
ow that we had a record, we secured a national booking agency, ATI, to keep us on the road. ATI added us to bills as the opener and got us into clubs on our own. Our first show, on March 22, 1974, in Pennsylvania, we opened again for Redbone, the same band we had shared Dick Clark’s rotating stage with the month before. Then we did a couple of shows with the British band Argent, and we were on our way. During the course of the year we opened for ZZ Top, Blue Öyster Cult, Manfred Mann, and many other bands—even the New York Dolls.

When you went to a concert in a theater or arena in the early 1970s, you typically saw three bands. First, an unknown act—KISS, in this case—then a somewhat bigger band, often billed as “special guests,” and then the headliner. The goal was to work your way up the ladder.

The three-tiered system gave you a chance to hone your craft. And while we understood the need to hone our craft, we also took our full arsenal of explosives, smoke, and fire with us wherever we played, whether we headlined a tiny club or played to a half-empty ballroom before two other bands. A KISS show would always be a KISS show—breathing fire, waving our guitars in unison, blowing shit up. If we sometimes ended up getting Peter pinned to the ceiling when his drums elevated or we offended a headliner because our pyro filled the venue with smoke, then so be it.

We didn’t compromise, and fortunately, Bill Aucoin seemingly had no credit limit on his American Express card, because he funded the expenses of transporting and staging our show at a time when what we earned each night didn’t come close to covering those costs. We drove a station wagon from town to town, staying in fleabag motels. Sean Delaney served as tour manager and did the driving. He was like a den mother, making sure nobody got lost on the field trip and managing the personalities. Bill came along for parts of the tour as well—and when he wasn’t around, we each talked to him on the phone every day. He had a knack for making each of us feel like his favorite member of the band.

And, of course, we had a road crew to set up and tear down our stage and effects, to maintain our instruments, and, it often turned out, to fight with the headliners’ road crews when they demanded we tone down our act since we were just the opening band. The road crew drove a big truck with all the gear—except for the four Samsonite makeup cases, complete with mirrors. Those stayed with us in the station wagon.

When we played a few dates with the band Argent, their crew kept cutting our set short, pulling the power before we finished. They also fought us tooth and nail on all of our effects—it’s tough to follow a band that leaves the place filled with smoke to remind everyone throughout the rest of the concert that World War III had just been fought and won by four guys in eight-inch heels, black leather, and makeup. Then on the last night of our tour leg with them, we miraculously had a trouble-free show. Afterwards we found out why: our crew had locked the guy in charge of their production in one of the huge road cases we carted our gear in. Our road crew believed in the cause.

Another time, when we opened for Aerosmith—who were also an up-and-coming band at the time, but somewhat ahead of us—our crew showed up and found their crew had set up in a way that left us only a few feet of depth. We would have to have crab-walked onto the stage. Our crew told the Aerosmith crew, “You have five minutes to move your amp line back, or we throw everything into the pit,” and one of our guys pulled a knife, just to emphasize how serious they were. They quickly made room for us.

Of the initial few shows, one at the Bayou in Washington, D.C., on March 25, stands out. Everything was magical at that point—we were barnstorming around the country getting paid to do what we loved most. I didn’t really have any bills to pay back then, but the idea that in theory I could pay them by playing rock and roll was a terrific feeling. This was my occupation. This was how I made my livelihood.

The night of the show at the Bayou, I saw my first gang bang. I walked into a motel room where the crew was staying, and there was a young woman on the bed and a line of guys—our roadies and various other people—waiting their turn to mount her. I had never seen anything like that. It was as if they were waiting for the bus. And it was not something for me.

I did meet a woman that night, though. She was strikingly beautiful—she’d have been far out of my league a few weeks earlier. Somehow it made me feel a little paranoid. What if she had a boyfriend or husband who would want to kick my ass? Suddenly there was more to it than just whether she and I wanted to consummate and celebrate all things rock and roll. Other people might be connected to her decisions, people who might not be happy about her indulgences. To make things worse, I eventually connected the dots based on the things she told me and realized that her dad was a mobster. At some stage, as we lay in bed naked, I turned to her and said, “Are you here because you want to be here, or are you here because you’re drunk?”

“I’m here because I’m drunk!” she laughed.

Sometimes I felt like a bull in a china shop; other times I heard a voice telling me that sex went hand in hand with fear and consequences.
If you get somebody pregnant, you’re on your own.
In other words, if you fuck the wrong woman, you’re dead.

No matter the fear, anxiety, or inner conflicts, sex was my drug of choice. And I always went back for more.

I had a few drinks now and then, but I didn’t need booze to screw up the courage to talk to women. I had no trouble making advances or starting a conversation. And anyway, I quickly learned that it didn’t take a lot of witty banter to interest a woman—I was in a band, and that was enough to make me desirable.

Drinking more heavily or doing drugs didn’t appeal to me. I never wanted to lose control. I was dealing with newfound freedoms and opportunities, and I wanted to remain lucid and remember it all. But drugs were around from the earliest days of the band. People showed up at the venues, at the motels, and at the radio stations and record shops where we did promo appearances and wanted to befriend us. The guys threw drugs at us, and the women threw their bodies; I had use for only one.

The road crew, on the other hand, picked up the various colored pills that fans threw on the stage and gobbled them down like Skittles. It freaked me out. “You don’t even know what you just ate!”

One morning I went to our pyro guy’s room and there was no answer. I pushed the door open, and he was huddled in the corner with a blanket over his head, looking green and unable to move. I didn’t see the fun in that.

The fact that nearly everyone in the rock world was high definitely contributed to my socializing less. Drugs were part of the culture, and not doing drugs set me apart. The fact that I wasn’t doing blow or taking pills made other people uncomfortable; the fact that they were uncomfortable made me uncomfortable. My interactions with groupies and other women, on the other hand, were purely sexual, and drug use rarely came up. I couldn’t imagine a better rush than having a woman want to go back to my room with me.

Ace was an alcoholic, but in the beginning he stayed sober until after the show—at which point it was normal for him to drink until he was unable to stand. It was still funny then. For me, the ultimate gauge of whether his drinking was a problem was whether he was doing his job—and he was. What he wanted to do offstage was his business.

One night I found him crawling down the hall of a motel on all fours, talking to himself. “What are you doing, man?” I asked him.

“I’ve got my little people with me,” he said, gesturing around himself.

As I tried to get past him, he said, “Oh! You just stepped on one!”

In some ways it was pathetic, but in other ways, I have to say, it was funny. We laughed at Ace a lot—and not in a demeaning way. He was amusing. He was an oddball. He constantly told jokes. Only later did it become ugly. Once he mixed in Valium and cocaine, it wasn’t as funny anymore. Initially, though, he was just a likable kook.

At one point, Ace got the nickname “the chef.” With the exception of Gene, who never took his clothes off or showered in front of anyone else, we often didn’t wear a lot in the dressing room before or after a concert. One night while we were sitting in front of our mirrors putting on our makeup, Peter walked up behind Ace and put his dick on his shoulder. Ace very nonchalantly turned to the side and gave it a kiss. So he became the chef, because he had to taste everything.

We also called Ace “Scraps” back then because he often reached across the table and took stuff off our plates. “Are you eating that?” he’d ask, and then grab.

We all had breakfast and dinner together on the road. The breakfasts at cheap motels were pretty much the same: scrambled eggs and toast and those little cups of grape jelly you peeled the top off of. Dinner varied. If someone had shrimp, Ace would eat the tails you left on the plate. Sometimes in motels he would rummage through discarded room service trays as we walked down the hallways.

It wasn’t unusual to spend ten or more hours a day in the station wagon together. Ace kept us laughing. One time Peter, who was older than all of us and had a long, mopey face, said, “I have the baby face in the band.”

Ace said, “Yeah, maybe a baby walrus.”

Another time in the car Ace said, “I could really use a drink.” This was not unusual for Ace.

“You can drink my cologne,” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure,” I said, “cologne is alcohol.”

So he screwed off the spray cap and took a swig of my Aramis. He spit it right out. We all laughed, including Ace.

I thought of us as the four musketeers and figured we’d be together forever. We were the Vikings, the Huns, the Mongols, wreaking havoc in every town we invaded. We were the Beatles skiing down the hill in
Help!

We were KISS.

There was a genuine sense of camaraderie as we ate together, traveled together, got dressed for a show together, and played together—and onstage we were a unified force. It wasn’t real life, of course, and when we occasionally went home for brief stretches, we didn’t see each other at all. On the road, though, we were KISS. And it was fun to be KISS.

I knew we would work through and beyond this phase. There was almost a wistfulness—I was conscious that we were living this quaint rock and roll existence on the way to stardom. Because stardom was never a question in my mind.

We are going to make it
.

Bill set up promotional appearances at local papers, radio stations, and record shops at every possible opportunity. After a few months, we began to get a little big for our britches, moaning about having to do appearances. One afternoon when we were supposed to get dressed and go to a record store, we decided we weren’t going to show up. Fuck it. Bill was out with us at the time, and he came storming to our motel rooms, gathered us together, and yelled, “Are you kidding me?”

We told him we didn’t feel like doing it—we felt it was a waste of time, and maybe even beneath us.

“You guys are acting like you’ve qualified for the Olympics or something,” he scolded. “You’re not even
contenders
yet.”

We looked at each other and said, “Oh.”

We put on our makeup. We went to the record store. We listened to Bill and he was almost always right.

Neil, on the other hand, approached things from an entirely different philosophy—learned during his Buddha days—and seemed to find nothing wrong with jeopardizing an act’s potential career longevity for the chance of a hit single today, no matter how trite or substandard. He got us into a recording studio in early spring of 1974 to do a cover of an old Bobby Rydell song called “Kissin’ Time.” He told us it was “promotional music” for a kissing contest—an idea that was contrary to everything I envisioned for the band. I thought it was tacky. The bands I looked up to wouldn’t do something like that. But Neil assured us our recording would be used for background music in a radio spot for the contest, nothing more. Of course, no sooner had we cut the not-particularly-great rendition of the song than Neil issued it as a single. He had a unique way of dealing with things sometimes.

After the single was released and the kissing contest was rolled out on some radio stations around the country, Neil scheduled us to appear at one of the contests being held at a record store. I walked in there, in full makeup, feeling very full of myself, and strolled over to a couple who had their lips locked. I bent down—we had our platform boots on—and the guy, while keeping his lips in contact with the girl’s, looked out of the side of his eyes and said, “Who the hell are you?”

They were just two kids in a kissing contest. They had no idea it had anything to do with us.

“Never mind,” I said, and made for the door as quickly as my studded heels would carry me.

W
e averaged a little better than one concert every two days. At the end of April, Bill landed us another national TV appearance, this time on
The Mike Douglas Show.

I could tell this one would be different. It was a variety show, not a music show. We could just as easily have been monkeys on unicycles or spinning dishes on sticks. Ed Sullivan’s show was like that, too: “We’ve got Topo Gigio and the dancing bears, and for the kids . . . the Beatles.” Only on Mike Douglas’s show, the audience was just like Mike Douglas—older, to put it mildly. The crowd looked like moms and pops out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and we looked like aliens to them. We were clearly out of our element, and I had a feeling we would be not only treated as a novelty, but milked for laughs.