Face the Music: A Life Exposed (20 page)

When KISS played at the Santa Monica Civic Center as Jo Jo Gunne’s special guest on February 1, 1975, Neil Bogart, who had relocated Casablanca to L.A., came to see us. He came backstage and told us, “Your album stopped selling.
Hotter Than Hell
is dead. You have to end the tour and go back to New York to do another album.”

We had one song finished that I knew was special. Weeks earlier Neil had said something with a sense of perception that was much clearer than ours. “You need a song that your fans can rally behind—that states your cause. Something like Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Dance to the Music.’ You want to get people pumping their fists and joining in.”

I had taken a guitar back to the Continental Hyatt House that night and went straight to work. Pretty quickly I came up with the chords and a few lines for a chorus: “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day.”

I knew this was the perfect battle cry.

I went down the hall and knocked on Gene’s door. “What do you think of this?” I asked, playing what I had.

“I have a song called ‘Drive Me Wild,’ but I only have the verses and no chorus,” he said. It went, “You show us everything you got, you drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy.” We coupled his verse to my battle cry.

As we got to work and finished the song, I could picture people pumping their fists and singing along.

This could be the rock and roll national anthem.

W
e flew back almost immediately to New York to record
Dressed to Kill
in early February 1975. Neil came, too, because he had decided to produce the album himself instead of using Richie and Kenny for a third time.

Some songs Gene and I wrote in the morning, and Peter and Ace came in the afternoon to record. We had very few leftovers—just “She” and “Love Her All I Can”—so we had little choice. We also hadn’t written anything on the road. When faced with the choice of noodling on our guitars or nailing a woman from the Chicken Coop, it was no contest.

When I wrote a song like “Room Service,” it was a musical diary—I was totally immersed in that life now. The cocksmanship was no longer just a fantasy the way it had been on our debut album. Life on the road was everything I had conceived of and more—hot and cold running women. Everybody and anybody, willingly, gladly, take no names. The joy in the vocal on “Room Service” is real—I was celebrating this life we were living. I was reveling in it.

“C’mon and Love Me” came to me quickly in my apartment—very organically, just stream of consciousness.

To be able to write something like that without laboring over it is a place you just can’t get back to. It’s writing without rules, without any thoughts of justifying or answering to anybody. I think that over time you can become a more technically proficient songwriter, but that doesn’t mean you write better songs. This was our third album, yes, but all three within barely a year, so we still had the freedom of not really knowing the rules, of not analyzing the lyrics under a microscope. The lyrics in “C’mon and Love Me” created such a fluid rhythmic effect. Later in life, I couldn’t write lyrics like that even if you put a gun to my head.

A guy in the studio who had worked with Bachman-Turner Overdrive told me that BTO used acoustic guitars in the mix to help sonically define the guitar sound. We tried that on “Room Service” and “Anything for My Baby.” We used acoustic guitar to pad things—to give additional clarity and definition. We were really grasping at straws at that point—anything to try to get something of the sound we wanted. It didn’t seem like it should be so difficult to get the sound we heard in our heads and onstage.

All we want is to sound the way we do live!

Neil didn’t do much. He sat in the room and tried to keep us from doing too many takes. Not because he thought he could capture something special in an early take—just to save money by getting the album done more quickly. I remember doing a sloppy take and Neil saying, “Well, that should do it.”

“No,” I told him, “we need to do that again.”

We recorded the whole thing in about ten days, and the entire album clocked in at something like twenty-eight minutes. Most of the songs were well under three minutes long. On the original vinyl version, the space between the songs was quite wide to try to make the album seem longer.

Casablanca pressed and released the record about two weeks after we finished recording it—the company’s situation was clearly getting desperate. A few days after the release of
Dressed to Kill
—on March 21, 1975—we had a homecoming show booked at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan. Fewer than two months after we had opened for Jo Jo Gunne in Santa Monica and were told to come up with another album, Jo Jo Gunne opened for us at the Beacon.

The Beacon represented a step up. A lot of the places we played during our first year of touring were converted movie theaters or vaudeville theaters—places like the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, the Paramount in Portland, and the Orpheum in Boston. (My old haunt, the Fillmore East, which had already closed by then, started life as a Yiddish theater, too.) They were grand theaters with terrific acoustics, but they were about half the size of the Beacon. The Beacon was so big that the New York promoter Ron Delsener agreed to do the show only if he didn’t have to put up any money in advance. He didn’t think he’d sell enough tickets to cover a guarantee. But when the tickets went on sale, they sold so quickly that the only way to meet the demand was to do two shows in one night.

We felt like returning heroes when we came back to the city to headline two shows. We’d gone off boys and come back men. We were a different band—with a lot more experience, and a following that a lot of people, including the New York promoter, didn’t realize we had. It felt like a victory parade.

Except in Queens. When I ran into people I knew out there, they often still had no idea about the band. With the Beacon shows, I thought of us as the biggest New York band, but that didn’t make us a household name by any means. We had a cult following, that was all. I was proud that many local celebrities and members of other bands came to the show—we were the big band in town now. They all came to see us now.

But the world still beckoned. I knew we had reached only one of the base camps on the way up the mountain. I never thought that was the peak. I planned for us to be superstars. But this was a chance for us to take stock and see how far we’d come.

I was so tired after the first show. I went up to the dressing room to retouch my makeup. I figured it would be easier to touch it up and dry my hair and outfit with a hair dryer than to start over. We didn’t have much time for reflection after the shows, as we left the next day for Ohio.

As the tour continued, we flipped the script on a lot of the bands we’d worked with the year before. Slade, Uriah Heep, and the James Gang were
our
special guests now, and we took out baby bands like Styx, Journey, and Montrose.

There was no consistency. One night in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, our opening act was a circus juggler. He rode a unicycle and people in the audience tried to knock him off by throwing coins at him. Now, I had seen strange bills in the late 1960s and early 1970s—things like Led Zeppelin and Woody Herman’s orchestra. That sort of thing was considered hip. But putting some poor soul onstage on a unicycle before KISS? It was tough enough for a regular band to open for us.

In the summer of 1975 we still opened some shows, too. We played as a support act for Black Sabbath and for Rare Earth. But in those cases the venues were massive. The first show we played with Sabbath was at the Baltimore Civic Center for ten thousand people. And again, just as the year before, whether or not we opened, we did a full-on KISS show. We had pyro and the big KISS logo sign behind us. That night in Baltimore, nobody took down or covered our sign—so Sabbath played in front of a huge KISS logo.

The next night we were scheduled to open for Sabbath again, this time in Providence, Rhode Island. Their people told us, “No pyro tonight.”

“Fine,” we said. “We’re going back to the hotel. We’re not playing. You know where to reach us if you change your mind.”

It was our way or no way. We felt committed to doing a KISS show, and we really were prepared not to do the show.

A little while later the phone rang at the hotel. “Okay, come back to the venue. Do your show the way you want to.”

By this point, Bill Aucoin had hatched a plan.
The
plan. We were building a rabid following as a live act—we had climbed to at least occasional headlining status, especially in the heartland—but this wasn’t reflected in our tepid album sales. With 120,000 sales,
Dressed to Kill
had done better than
Hotter Than Hell
’s 90,000 and
KISS
’s 60,000. But it was nothing when we considered the crowds we saw at our shows. Where was the disconnect? What was going on?

The albums didn’t sound like we sounded live.

And so Bill presented his plan: a live album, a sonic souvenir of our show, which now attracted people in droves. As a model, he held up a live album by Uriah Heep that had helped that British band establish themselves. That album had worked in Britain, but the idea of career-boosting live albums by rock bands was not yet established in the United States—this was all before live albums made the careers of Peter Frampton, Cheap Trick, and Bob Seger, to name a few.

Since the only thing missing, as far as the band was concerned, was an album that truly represented us, Bill’s idea struck a chord. We hired Eddie Kramer to produce the live recordings. Bill arranged to hire photographer Fin Costello, who had worked on the Uriah Heep album, and we used the title
Alive!,
from a live record by Slade. Through the summer of 1975 we recorded shows, beginning with a sold-out Cobo Hall in Detroit, where Costello shot the audience—twelve thousand people strong—for the back cover. We shot the front cover image in Detroit, too, but we went across town to the Michigan Palace, the site of some of our best early shows and our rehearsal space for a few days in the run-up to the live recording at Cobo.

People have argued whether
Alive!
is a purely live recording or somehow enhanced. The answer is: yes, we enhanced it. Not to hide anything, not to fool anyone. But who wanted to hear a mistake repeated endlessly? Who wanted to hear an out-of-tune guitar? For what? Authenticity? At a concert, you listen with your ears and eyes. A mistake that passes unnoticed in the moment lives forever when recorded. We wanted to re-create the experience of our show—whatever needed to be done, we did it. The flashpots were enhanced with recordings of cannons, because that’s what they sounded like in person. The audience was jacked up to immerse the listener in the crowd. It was the only way to replicate our concert-on-steroids. We figured the people who celebrated with us at a concert wanted to hear what they remembered, what they perceived.

We also made sure the audience could be heard throughout the show—just as you would experience it live. Most live albums in those days sounded like studio recordings until the song ended, when some applause could be heard between songs. But we wanted to portray the real concert experience. And the back cover paid tribute to those fans who made all that noise and turned our shows into such powerful communal events.

We couldn’t have picked a better person to do
KISS Alive!
than Eddie Kramer. His brilliance in the studio and his innovations in enhancing the recordings were not only ground-shaking, but groundbreaking. He had different audience sounds on tape loops that were sometimes twenty feet long, held taut on mic stands and going around so you would never hear a repeat of any fan response. He had all these mic stands set up in the studio with different lengths of audience participation tape running on them so we could bring in actual crowd reaction, whether it was a murmur or a roar. I certainly would never have thought of that—to create different loops of tape and have them going continuously so we could raise them and lower them and get different crowd reactions at will. It was brilliant.

One bone of contention as we put the finishing touches on the album was a long, boring drum solo. Soloing was not Peter’s forte. He often sounded more like Ricky Ricardo playing the bongos than a rock and roll drummer playing a legitimate solo. Plus a solo that might be riveting at a show—when combined with effects and an audience—could be mind-numbingly dull in record form. So we edited it.

“If you don’t put it back in,” Peter told us, “I’m quitting the band.”

Sigh
.

Same old crap.

The result—basically the entire show we were doing at that point—captured the sonic magnitude of KISS live. Finally, we had something that put the listener in the audience. We had made a quantum leap forward from the first three studio albums.

The package came out great, too, with the photo of the audience, the shot of the band with basically all our effects going off at once, and the notes from each band member to the fans. We wrote the notes to personify the Starchild, the Demon, the Catman, and the Spaceman. Certainly my character has always been flamboyant, and I wrote my note without making it gender-specific. It was written to the audience at large. When I wrote “Dear lovers, nothing arouses me more than seeing you getting off on me,” it could have been taken for heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual love. I wasn’t threatened by any implications of the superficial aspects of sexuality or style. I considered it a compliment to be found attractive by anyone and everyone, sought after and emulated by people regardless of gender or sexual orientation. It never felt like a threat to my sense of masculinity or identity. If I were gay, it certainly wouldn’t be something I would hide or be ashamed of, but I’m not. I was just comfortable enough with my sexuality not to attach anything negative to androgyny and vulnerability. At least, not while in character. Vulnerability was not something I showed offstage. I was still too insecure.