Face the Music: A Life Exposed (19 page)

Among the songs we recorded, some were leftovers—like “Watchin’ You” and “Let Me Go, Rock ’n’ Roll”—and some we wrote in the studio and never even demoed—we didn’t have an album’s worth of material when we started recording. We didn’t travel with acoustic guitars, and little practice amps weren’t common, either, so we hadn’t written much on the road that first year. Occasionally I would write down lyrics, but the creative key for me was recording the melody on some kind of device.

The title track, “Hotter Than Hell,” I wrote in L.A. It was an homage of sorts to “All Right Now” by Free and started with the same basic premise—meeting a woman. Gene brought in “Goin’ Blind,” a song he’d written with Steve Coronel. It sounded cool, and I knew what they were going for. I suggested the line, “I’m ninety-three, you’re sixteen,” which sounded very warped and knocked the whole thing a little sideways. “That’s weird,” Gene said. “That’s a really weird line. Do you think we should?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” I said. And with that one line it became a song about an old man in love with a young girl.

“Got to Choose” was based on a song I’d heard at Electric Lady. The facility had two studios, and they were often both in use nearly twenty-four hours a day. It was a round-the-clock fortress of creativity. One evening they had been running off copies on the two-track machine of an album by a band called Boomerang. They were a blue-eyed soul unit made up of Mark Stein from Vanilla Fudge along with a couple other guys. Boomerang had recorded a cover of the Wilson Pickett song “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” and that was the seed for “Got to Choose.”

We tried to get Ace to sing “Strange Ways” or “Parasite.” Again, he refused to sing on the album. Gene ended up singing “Parasite,” and Peter did “Strange Ways.” “Comin’ Home” was a road song Ace and I built around a damn good riff and some fragments of ideas he had. I wrote “Mainline” in L.A., too, and thought it had a great swagger to it. When we were working on it at Village Recorder, Peter said, “Either I sing that song or I’m quitting the band.”

I was astonished. Same shit. Different day.

Right from the beginning, Bill had pushed the idea of pooling the money we made off songs and sharing the revenue so everyone would feel equal. He figured that way nobody would demand to have songs on an album just for the financial reward, and we could determine the song selection based on what worked best in our eyes and the eyes of the producers working with us. We had done that. But with
Hotter Than Hell,
we saw the first signs that this wouldn’t always help stave off potential friction.

Maybe everyone in the band was just too different for us to be cohesive. Though I never saw Gene as like-minded, I did see him as a partner. But to me it was clear that Gene continued to see the band as a vehicle for himself as an individual. Gene was in it for Gene. Whatever the reasons, he didn’t share the collective mentality I had. I found security in the band—it provided something lacking in my life. I wanted to belong. I needed that sense of family, of camaraderie, of a support group. So for me it was always about the team, and I coveted the band above all else.

Ace was increasingly self-destructive in a way that chipped away at his talent. One night, he repeatedly drove his rental car down a steep winding road to see how fast he could go and still make the turn at the bottom. The ultimate outcome of the experiment would have been obvious to anyone but an inebriated Ace. And sure enough, he finally lost control of the car and wrapped it around a pole. We weren’t yet to the point where we had to desperately try to get a solo out of him before he passed out in the studio—although that would soon come—but he certainly wasn’t fully realizing his potential and giving his all.

Peter seemed to resent everything he was given. It was a no-win situation. The fact that he was given things further highlighted his inability to contribute. He began to vent his inner turmoil and feelings of insecurity by trying to make everyone else as miserable as he was inside. Peter also resented me for not “paying my dues,” as he constantly put it. As far as I saw it, Peter hadn’t succeeded before hooking up with us because he had no idea what it took to become successful or to sustain success. Now he was along for the ride and couldn’t help trying to hamper things and create strife.

I didn’t begrudge anybody’s limitations, but I definitely begrudged Peter’s attitude—the animosity and conniving.

I couldn’t wait to leave the studio each night around 9
P.M
. I went straight to the Rainbow. I was a convert from our first visit to L.A. in February. Now, in town for a month, I went to “mass” every night. We certainly weren’t famous, but in there we had rock star status. We had an album out. We were recording another.

I really hit it off with a woman named Karen who worked there as a hostess. She was a bit older than I was, and we instantly took a liking to each other. She befriended me. She had traveled on tours with various band members of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin—the upper rungs of the rock hierarchy. One of the walls in her apartment could have been in a music shop on 48th Street—rows and rows of signed eight-by-ten photos of bands. We remained good friends, and it never seemed odd to me that our relationship turned physical only later—after KISS took off and we became famous.

There was a purity to the system at the Rainbow. The women were part of the rhythm of rock and roll—they were essential to it. No possessiveness, no judgment.

And each morning, back to Village Recorder. One day I entered the studio and looked around. “Where’s my guitar?” I asked. “Wait, where’s my amp?”

“Oh,” one of the studio employees said, “they already came and picked up all the gear.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Yeah, they came for it already. They were here, said they had come to pick it up.”

Thieves had dispensed with any high-tech scheme and just walked in and said they were a shipping company and made off with all of our gear. The easiest way out was through the front door. We got reimbursed and bought new gear, but some of my guitars—like my Flying V—had been custom-made and could never be replaced.

Another day I was on my way to the studio in a rental car when a police car pulled up behind me and turned on its lights and siren. I pulled over. I was wearing my usual off-duty uniform of hip-hugger jeans—really low rise, with about a three-inch zipper—platform boots, ruffled woman’s blouse, and jewelry, with my hair tumbling in long curls over my shoulders. In New York this wasn’t a big deal at the time.

The officer walked up to the side of my car. “License and registration, please.”

“It’s a rental—I have no idea where the registration is,” I said, as I reached for my wallet. My wallet wasn’t in my pocket. “I left it . . . I . . . I don’t have my wallet,” I stammered. “I must have left it at the hotel.” In New York, not having my license with me had never been a problem.

“Well, then,” the cop said, “you’re going to jail.”

I nearly pissed my pants. I turned as white as a sheet. “JAIL? Look at me! You can’t take me to jail looking like this!”

The cop looked at me. He must have seen my terror. “Be sure to carry your license next time,” he said, and motioned for me to drive off.

Note to self: always carry wallet.

K
ISS had slowly climbed the touring ladder, and for some of the shows toward the end of 1974, we started to be “special guests,” the second band on a bill, rather than the anonymous third. You know, “Tonight in Cedar Rapids: REO Speedwagon and special guest KISS plus surprise third act!”

Part of becoming successful was getting your own hotel room. Part of becoming successful was traveling by plane instead of by station wagon or rental car. Sometimes when I was home for an off-day, still crashing at my parents’ place, a limo picked me up to take me to the airport. We had switched to flying commercial flights from gig to gig, getting picked up and driven to and from hotels, while the gear caught up with us by truck and met us at the venue. We had also moved up to Holiday Inns instead of roadside motor lodges. It was easy to think we’d won the lottery as I put another quarter in the vibrating bed each night.

At some point, in addition to having our own rooms, we even began to rent a spare room, dubbed the “Chicken Coop,” where we could party and girls could wait their turn instead of loitering in the lobby. After a show, we would retire to our individual hotel rooms to freshen up, and then the phone would ring. “The Chicken Coop is room 917,” the tour manager would tell us. We’d go down to a room full of girls, all of whom wanted to go back to our rooms. Some of them came from the concert audience, others were connected to a local radio station or knew somebody who knew somebody on the crew or at our label or whatever.

We had also managed to get additional clothes. We hired a guy named Larry Legaspi, who made clothes for the band Labelle, who had a huge hit at the time with “Lady Marmalade” and had a kind of disco-in-outer-space look. We also gave sketches of the new boots we wanted to the uptown New York bootmaker Frank Anania. An old-world craftsman, he couldn’t make heads or tails of the designs, but he made us boots that, unlike the street versions we had used up to then, were both more stable and more sturdy—all the better for all the jumping and running around we did onstage.

I met my first girlfriend in Atlanta in September when we returned to the Electric Ballroom. Or rather, she became my girlfriend at the end of that run in Atlanta. Amanda was a tall curvy blonde from Michigan who was traveling with one of our technicians. She flirted with everybody, and finally one night when the technician wasn’t feeling well, she slipped him a couple of Valiums and took off with me.

I took her back to New York since we had a few days off. I was still living with my parents. She and I slept on the fold-out sofa in the living room, which was where I slept when I was home. I didn’t have a room anymore because the one I had shared with my sister now was my niece Ericka’s room. The sofa-bed sat against the wall to my parents’ bedroom. One morning when Amanda and I were staying there, my mom came out and, just making small talk, I asked her, “How’d you sleep last night?”

“Not well,” she said. “The sofa kept banging against the wall.”

I knew it was time to get a place of my own. To be honest, I had known that for a while, but I hadn’t been totally comfortable with the idea of living on my own. Now, conveniently, I had found somebody to move in with.

We grabbed a copy of the
Long Island Press
and paged through the listings for apartment rentals. We found a furnished apartment on Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens, near the Long Island Expressway, that was cheap and available immediately. We took it. It wasn’t the Waldorf-Astoria, but it still made my finances very tight.

Our first day there, we sat around listening to
AWB,
the new album by the Average White Band. Then I was off on tour again, gone for weeks at a time. I was always above board when I left and told her not to ask me what happened on tour unless she wanted to hear the truth. She knew that world. But she didn’t care. She had worked her way up from a lighting technician to a band member.

Touring came with a certain amount of isolation. We had no contact with other bands at our level. With the exception of Rush, we didn’t socialize much with other bands. Even if we wanted to, we had two hours of makeup and wardrobe to deal with before each show. Since we traveled constantly, the only interactions we had with the few musicians we did know were secondhand—news we gleaned from groupies who had seen them when they passed through town the week before. “Oh, Queen’s coming through next week?” I remember saying to a female guest in Kentucky. “And you’ll be with Roger? Say hi for me.”

The demands on the road crew and tour managers were so extreme that they often couldn’t hack it for long—road managers in particular we shuffled through constantly. We hung out with those guys, but it was such a revolving door that few became real friends. Wives and girlfriends quickly became abstract realities because there were no cell phones, and hotel phones were expensive—nobody even had answering machines or call-waiting, so the chances of catching somebody were slim. We lived in a bubble.

Still, being back out on the road also meant less conflict within the band. For one thing, we were forced to function as a unit on the road. For another thing, despite whatever issues each of us was dealing with, the availability of women tended to replace the intraband friction with a much more pleasurable type of friction when we were on tour. And anyway, being onstage playing rock and roll was my dream. Sure, we were making only sixty dollars a week—that’s what Bill salaried us—but I was getting paid to rock.
This was my job
. Every week on the road was another week I wasn’t driving a taxi or working for the phone company.

Despite all the apparent progress of our career, sales of
Hotter Than Hell
leveled off quickly, selling only a little better than the first album. The situation was more dire than we realized.

One afternoon, back in New York for a day or two off, I went into Manhattan to see Bill at his office. I had decided to ask him for a raise. I thought we should get ten bucks more per week than the sixty dollars we had been earning for about a year now. I walked in and sat down facing Bill, who was sitting with his feet up on his desk. There was a hole in the bottom of his shoe and duct tape stuffed into the hole to keep it somewhat closed. He had a hole in his sweater, too.

On second thought, never mind
.

Little did I know, Bill was a quarter million dollars in debt on his credit card from financing our tours, and Casablanca was on the verge of collapse. “What’s on your mind, Paul?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just came by to chat,” I lied. When I saw Bill, it was obvious we were all in the same boat. He was making sacrifices for something he believed in, too. I stuck with my sixty dollars a week.

Fortunately, as the band began to climb the ladder, Gibson started giving me free guitars. All I had to do was call the company and ask. Then, whenever I was in New York, I would unpack them from their shipping boxes and get on the subway to 48th Street. I took the brand-new Marauders they sent me and unloaded them at music stores to put a little extra money in my pocket or to pay the rent.