Face the Music: A Life Exposed (22 page)

Then I thought of Dr. Jesse Hilsen.

Back in those days people sometimes dismissed therapy as a “crutch” or considered it a sign of weakness. I myself had bought into that enough to stop going to Mount Sinai once life seemed to be going more smoothly, as Wicked Lester came together. I wanted to believe I was okay.

But I wasn’t. I called Mount Sinai. Dr. Hilsen had left the hospital and gone into private practice. But I tracked him down. “My band is about to become huge,” I explained. “I don’t know if I can handle that world. I need a lifeline.”

I was determined to survive.

Perhaps therapy would be the way I kept my seven-inch heels planted on the ground.

I’ve been up and down, I’ve been all around

E
arly in 1976, when we were getting ready to make our next studio album, Bill Aucoin said, “You can either use
KISS Alive!
as a springboard to take you to another level, or you can be a one-hit wonder that just goes right back to doing what you were doing before.”

He had a point. To go back to what we had done earlier did seem stupid. After all, it didn’t work before
Alive!,
so why would it work now? The reason our first three albums didn’t sell was because listeners didn’t like the way they sounded—there was something intrinsically wrong with them, though I still couldn’t have put my finger on exactly what it was.

Bill suggested we bring in Bob Ezrin to produce the new record. Bob was already known for the great records he’d made with Alice Cooper, and he proved to have a vast musical vocabulary. It turned out to be a brilliant move on Bill’s part. Bob was a gift.

We may have had a huge album under our belts, but we still didn’t know anything more than we did before
Alive!
became a hit. Still, for a bunch of guys who thought they were hot shit, it was initially jarring to go into a studio with somebody who treated us like children. As we began work on what would become
Destroyer,
Bob made a point of letting us know he was the boss. He wore a whistle around his neck and referred to us as “campers.” He told us we didn’t know anything—which was true. He told us never to stop playing until he said so. Once, at the end of a take, long after a fade-out would have ended the recording, Gene stopped playing. Bob came out of the control booth and ran up to him, stuck his finger so close to Gene’s nose that it made his eyes cross, and said, “Don’t you ever,
ever
stop until I tell you to stop!” A trickle of sweat ran down Gene’s forehead. He never stopped again.

It was humbling, particularly at a time when we thought we were God’s gift to rock and roll and finally had a record to back up our claim—
Alive!
was platinum by this point. But Bob clearly knew a lot more than we did. He was trained. He was worthy of respect. And he taught us a lot.

One of the most significant things he did was challenge us not to write “fuck me suck me” songs. “No more ‘I’m a rock star, suck my dick,’ ” he insisted. And as we worked on lyrics, he had no problem saying very plainly, “No, I don’t like that.”

I never would have written a lyric like “Detroit Rock City” without Bob upping our game. He pushed us far beyond our limits.

During the process of making the record, Bob lived in an apartment directly across the street from my place on 52nd Street. He had a piano, and when we weren’t in the rehearsal space or studio, I spent a lot of time there. Gene and I also sometimes took amplifiers over to his place and worked. We wrote “Shout It Out Loud” at Bob’s apartment.

The riff in “God of Thunder” reflected the way my limitations as a guitar player were key to what I came up with and probably helped make my songs identifiable and unique. That riff was a compromise between what I heard in my head and what I could actually play. Another example of that process was “I Want You,” which ended up on the next album.

Sometimes at the rehearsal space Bob would have the four of us sit in a circle and he would say, “Who’s got an idea? Anybody have an idea for a verse? Who’s got a part?” Someone would play a snippet and he might say no. Then somebody else would play something and Bob would shout, “Okay, that’s good. Now who has another part?” A lot of the songs came together like that—pieces of this and that stitched together with input from Bob.

Peter sat at his drums while we threw out ideas. When it came time to arrange finished songs, Bob often came up with parts. Once I saw him work with us, I understood Alice Cooper’s albums much more. I could see Bob’s point of view in them. Bob’s fingerprints were all over things like
Billion Dollar Babies
. Suddenly I could hear his drum parts and his bass parts. I knew them from our stuff—like the bass line in “Detroit Rock City,” which Bob created. That bass part is similar to the bass in Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead.” Bob even came up with the guitar solo on “Detroit Rock City.” He sang it to Ace and made him figure it out.

Bob was brilliant at that kind of stuff.

When it came time for the drums, we faced a real challenge. Bob spent many, many hours teaching Peter his parts. Bob came up with most of the drum parts on the album, and he would dismiss the rest of us for hours at a time to work with Peter. “Detroit Rock City” in particular had a very challenging drumbeat, and it took a lot of effort and patience for Bob to get Peter to be able to play something he couldn’t have learned to play on his own if his life had depended on it.

Back then there were no click tracks, which allow a drummer to work with a sort of metronome to get a consistent tempo. But to get a track just the way he wanted it, Bob liked to be able to cut and splice from various takes we recorded, which necessitated a steady pace. That would have been difficult in our case, to say the least. So Bob created a human click track. He sat in the control room with a mic stuck into a hole in a cigar box and tapped the beat on the box and fed it to all of us, most importantly Peter.

Bob also wrote the lion’s share of “Beth” using a few lines and a melody Peter brought in. Peter had a co-writer on every song he ever wrote because he couldn’t really write—song structure and concepts like making your lyrics rhyme were totally lost on him. In the case of “Beth,” Bob wrote most of it, even though the original idea Peter brought in had already been done with a co-writer. To get the vocal for “Beth,” Bob had to record Peter singing the song probably a dozen times and cobble together a single version from the passable parts of those takes. Peter’s chances of being able to sing a song off the cuff were about as good as my chances of throwing a penny and hitting the moon. It would be a challenge for him to carry a tune in a bucket. Even if we sang a note to him, he couldn’t find it. But since we had always presented our Beatles-based fantasy to the world—four band members all contributing equally—at some point Peter began to believe his own press. Perception became reality to him, despite the fact that we created the perception ourselves. We made it out as if we lived like the
Help!
-era Beatles—and all made music together as equals. But that was
never
the case—and who should know that better than the people who were actually there and not contributing?

Peter and Ace’s contributions were never as substantial as we made them out to be in the press. The fact of the matter was that two guys—Gene and me—were the engineers and motivators and did 80 percent of the work. Unfortunately, when we decided to create the
Help!
illusion, we never considered the possibility that Peter and Ace would start to actually believe it, and that their belief would bite us in the ass. But sure enough, their delusions started to create resentment and, eventually, fatal fissures in the band. Those fissures first started opening during
Destroyer,
as Peter struggled to record a song that was ostensibly his own, and we began to have to work around Ace, who spent much of the recording process with his priorities far from where they belonged. He sometimes played his parts with his rings and chains scraping against the fret board and pickups, and then wanted to quit for the day and take off. When I would ask him to remove the jewelry and do another take because of all the noise, he would say, “Hey, that’s rock and roll.”

“No, Ace, that’s shit.”

His alcohol abuse is well documented, but Ace also didn’t hesitate to just up and leave the studio to go play cards with friends. I could not wrap my head around that at all—leaving the job to get loaded and play cards, even if it meant having another guitar player handle his parts? Making music was my dream, and skipping out on that process was something I couldn’t fathom.

Sonically, Bob Ezrin didn’t try to re-create the bombast of
Alive!
with its huge broken-up guitars and screaming vocals. He found power in other ways. He created an atmosphere of grandeur. He brought in elements of things I loved—liked the orchestral bells on “Do You Love Me.” He gave guitar chords heft by layering them with a grand piano playing the same parts. In some ways it reminded me of what I liked about Roy Wood and Wizzard—that big, chaotic version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Bob added things that really struck emotional chords in me.

He was also the first producer we worked with who—finally—understood the subtleties we didn’t understand about using different guitars for different parts, or doubling a guitar with a different guitar, or slowing down the tape slightly and doubling the guitar over it to make the sound bigger because of the slight discrepancy in the tuning. Bob knew the essence of great production and great arrangements, and he brought it to bear on
Destroyer
in a way I thought was groundbreaking for the type of music we made.

Wow, this is what a real producer does.

Our first billboard, on the Sunset Strip in 1975. I can’t tell you how many times I went to see it.

From that point on, unless someone could tell us what was wrong with what we were doing and how to correct it—whether it was a problem with a song itself or with the sonics—I considered that person an engineer, not a producer.

With the album wrapped up, the
Alive!
tour continued. We had a few days off in L.A., and I got together with Karen, the hostess from the Rainbow. The band and I had reached a level of success that transformed my relationship with her into a physical one. I took this as a kind of validation: now I really was a rock star of a different caliber. It was gratifying, and it seemed like a normal and logical evolution. I was also now in a position to rent luxury cars for my use, so one of the days in L.A. I rented a two-seater Mercedes and picked Karen up at her apartment to go for a drive up the coast. After about forty-five minutes on the road, it started to pour. That’s when the reality hit me in the face—along with the oncoming rain—that I had no idea how to raise the top. We drove back to her place in the rain with the top still down, never speaking of the obvious. We were both soaking wet when we arrived, and I finally admitted the truth. After a quick laugh together, I got right to the most pressing issue: “Do you have a hairdryer I can use?”

Near the tail end of the tour, we stopped in Hawaii. None of us had ever been there before, and now we had a gig in Honolulu and a few days off to spend there afterward. The day after the show, our pyro guy and some others—including Rick Stuart, a security guard charged with looking after me—rented a catamaran. Now, right away, you should know not to do anything risky with a pyro guy. No offense to pyro guys, but they got a hard-on making things go boom—whether that meant making a living at it or winding up in jail. The line between pyro guys and arsonists was very fine back then.

I decided not to be a wuss and went along. Sailing a boat is something better done with people who know what they’re doing. Instead, I was out there with a pyro guy and Rick, whom everyone called “the Dobe”—as in Doberman—because of the studded dog collar he wore around his neck. I thought we would just parallel the shore—which was scary enough for me—but we wound up heading out to sea. As we headed out, another boat coming in yelled to us, “Be real careful! The tide’s tricky and we had trouble getting back in!”

Great
.

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, sitting on a cloth suspended between the two pontoons of a catamaran.

Things on shore kept getting smaller and smaller.

What the fuck am I doing?

I’d read enough
Reader’s Digest
stories about people stuck on rafts for a month, eating seagulls and trying to catch turtles.

It’s going to happen to me
.

I panicked and jumped off the boat.

I’m going to swim to shore.

As the catamaran continued to slice its way out and away from me, I yelled at Rick, “Do something!”

The Dobe jumped in and swam toward me. Now both of us flailed against the riptide, unable to make any progress toward shore. We made our way sideways to a pair of surfers bobbing on their boards.

“We can’t get in,” I said. “Can you help us?”

“Fuck off,” the guys said, catching a wave and leaving us out there.

After a few more minutes, I was struggling to keep my head above water, and every time I dipped down, my feet hit the spikes of sea urchins, which jabbed painfully at my soles. I looked at the shore and saw hundreds of people enjoying themselves. They weren’t very far away, but they were totally unaware that we were going to die.