Face the Music: A Life Exposed (24 page)

Ever since I’d haunted 48th Street as a kid, I had admired the vintage guitars that cost a fortune. Now, however, I was ready to start collecting them. I put the word out on that leg of the tour that I wanted to buy guitars. The first exotic instrument I bought was a Gibson SG double-neck, like the one Jimmy Page played. I bought it in Indiana from a guy who collected them and had a room full of double-necks. Most of them were cherry, but this one was sunburst. From then on, the promoters knew I was in the market, and often, a line of people with guitar cases would be standing at the truck entrance to the concert venues when we pulled in. It was terrific—you never knew what might turn up.

I bought my next one in Arizona from a guy who owned a store called Bob’s Bizarre Guitars. That was a sunburst Les Paul—exactly what I’d always wanted—and I paid $2,200 for it. I couldn’t believe I finally had one of those guitars! It had what are called white or cream humbuckers—the bobbins where the copper wire is wound were white. You don’t usually see the color of the bobbin because they are encased in a chrome or nickel case on the old guitars. But if you looked under the casing, the bobbins could be black, white, or what was called zebra, meaning it had one white and one black. Most of the guitars had all black bobbins, which was considered the least desirable set-up; the most coveted ones had two white bobbins.

I was over the moon.

Y
ou’re millionaires,” our financial advisors happily told us one day in late 1976. “Beth” had become a chart hit and crossed over to am radio.
Destroyer
had become our second platinum album. We had played our biggest show ever, to forty-two thousand fans at the California Angels baseball stadium in Anaheim, California, in late August. Our in-house merchandising business was booming.

Being told you’re a millionaire definitely sounds impressive, but it didn’t hit me with the same heft that getting that first gold album had. That was a true milestone that I could quite literally grasp. This? This was great, but it wasn’t the same concrete accomplishment. And it was also hard to figure out what it really meant, since the money was still something abstract. I still lived in my one-bedroom apartment.

But now we had two months off in New York to let the news sink in—and to record a new album.

I bought my parents a Chrysler. It was the first time they had ever owned a new car. I also bought them a house not long after, when my dad lost his job—and his pension. Instead of possibly being on welfare and food stamps, they were in a new house, with a new car. When Ericka started school, she lived in a nice suburban school district and did extremely well. (Many years down the road, she would ultimately get accepted to an elite university, and I felt blessed to be able to cover the costs for her.) Even so, my dad called me stingy for keeping the deed to the house in my name. I was afraid he’d just sell it if it was in my parents’ name.

My dad told me that my success was more luck than anything else. In my experience, people who dismissed the success of others as luck were people who had failed. It was a way to absolve themselves of accountability for failure and discount someone else’s role in their own accomplishments. And the idea that success was the result of luck also made other people feel entitled, as if the “lucky” ones should share their luck without reservation. After all, it could have happened to anyone. I saw this pattern in my family.

I bought myself a Mercedes—a burgundy 450SL with saddle interior. The first time I drove out to Queens in it, to see my parents, I pulled into a parking spot a few blocks away from their place and paused, sitting in the car with the motor running.

Should I really have bought this car?

I switched on the radio. “Rock and Roll All Nite” blared from the
FM
rock station. I pressed
AM
and spun the dial. I heard “Beth.”

Yes, it was okay to buy the car
.

During our break in the fall of 1976, we went back into the studio to record
Rock and Roll Over,
which was released in November. It was our sixth album in less than three years’ time. Our initial productivity as a band was all about keeping our heads above water. But just because we’d reached a certain level of financial security, I didn’t see any reason not to remain productive. It was fun to go into the studio. I’d spent my whole life dreaming of being in the studio. The studio was also a place where I could hide out when we were off the road. I still had virtually no social life, very few friends, and the studio was a safe haven—and one where we now had carte blanche. I could go there and not have to keep an eye on the clock. Those bills would be paid without so much as a raised eyebrow.

When
Destroyer
had come out earlier that year, the album had thrown some people because it didn’t sound like us live. But it did capture the essence of what we did—by creating a cinematic feel that represented the magnitude of our shows even if it didn’t re-create the sound of our shows. Bob Ezrin had enhanced and broadened our sound. He had magnified the four characters. But when we asked people around us what they thought of it, they sometimes said things like, “It’s different.”
Different
is not a good word in that context—it’s a word people use when they can’t make up their minds whether they like something or not.

The truth is the change scared us, too. Maybe we didn’t want to have a nanny this time around, either—someone telling us how to do everything and blowing a whistle in our faces. We figured we’d done our apprenticeship. And Peter and Ace certainly had no desire to work with Bob again. We decided to try a more meat-and-potatoes approach, go back to basics.

The first thing we did was contact Jack Douglas, who had produced Aerosmith’s three most recent albums,
Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic,
and
Rocks
. The problem was that Jack was friends with Bob, and he turned around and told Bob we had asked him. It wasn’t tactful on Bill’s part not to tell Bob first—the whole thing blew up, and we felt like we’d been caught hitting on a friend’s girlfriend.

Then came the idea of going back to Eddie Kramer, because
Alive!
had been so good. We rented the Star Theater in Nanuet, New York, outside the city but close enough that we could all go home at night. Eddie came on board and we retreated to familiar territory as fast as we could.

Even though Eddie was from South Africa, he had the air of an English gentleman. He was part of the heritage we all loved. One thing we hoped Eddie could fix was our drum sound—after all, he’d been a part of getting that big drum sound Zeppelin had. He had Peter set up in the theater itself while we played in a studio elsewhere in the building. We linked Peter in by video camera. In theory, even a chimpanzee beating on pots and pans could sound thunderous in the right environment. But still the drums sounded tinny. Soon, however, I came to the conclusion that in Zeppelin’s case, John Bonham was that sound—and Peter Criss would never be John Bonham.

Eddie didn’t function as a musical director or visionary in terms of arrangements the way Bob had, and we missed that leadership. No one was there to help us write or shape songs. I was having trouble coming up with songs, so I asked Sean Delaney to come over to my apartment for writing sessions. Those informal get-togethers at my 52nd Street place yielded “Makin’ Love,” “Mr. Speed,” and “Take Me” for
Rock and Roll Over,
as well as “All American Man,” which showed up on
Alive II
the following year.

“Hard Luck Woman” was an anomaly because I never intended it for KISS. I didn’t see song writing as an exercise, and normally I was good at self-editing—if I didn’t think a song had a place on a KISS album, I didn’t bother to finish it. But I was still fascinated by trying to figure out what made certain songs by other people tick. I had been listening to Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and “You Wear It Well” with that in mind and decided to try my hand at something similar. The lyrical spark came from someplace completely different—a song called “Brandy,” by Looking Glass, that was about a sailor’s daughter who worked at a bar. Once I finished the song, I couldn’t imagine KISS doing it. I planned to try to get it to Rod to see whether he wanted to record it. But with “Beth” doing so well that fall, Eddie Kramer and Gene both thought the song would make a logical follow-up for KISS. And since Peter had that type of raspy voice, like Rod’s, we figured he should sing it. I had to record a vocal for Peter to follow, and again, he took many takes to provide enough material to cobble together a finished version.

The situation within the band had deteriorated even in the space of six months since we’d made
Destroyer
. Peter brought in a cassette with a disjointed sketch of a song called “Baby Driver.” He always brought tapes with recordings he’d done with co-writers because he couldn’t play us a song any other way since he didn’t play any instruments. Peter lashed out when we worked on “his” songs. But the problem wasn’t that Gene and I rewrote his songs; the problem was that the things Peter brought in weren’t songs to begin with. The lyrics never rhymed, there weren’t any delineations between verse and chorus. They were scraps, not songs. Yes, the band was stronger when everyone participated, but somebody had to lay down the law when something simply wasn’t good enough. Bob performed that role on
Destroyer,
created “Beth” for Peter, and guided us all creatively. Now that it fell to us, it was futile to try to hold Peter to the same standard we insisted on for the rest of the material. There was leeway because, hey, we
wanted
a Peter song—that was part of the image of KISS. And now, because of “Beth,” Peter expected to write the songs he sang instead of singing mine, Gene’s, or Ace’s. But even with the additional wiggle room as far as quality, we couldn’t let his stuff undermine the integrity of a record.

Of course, for Peter’s co-writer, getting a song credit on a KISS album was a gravy train, so Peter always pushed his buddies’ ideas and made a stink if anyone suggested they weren’t quite up to scrub. Peter spent all his emotional energy worrying about his place in the hierarchy without the ability to be honest with himself about the quality of what he brought to the table.

Ace was a shadow of his former self. He had been a bright light that looked as if it could explode—he had the talent to be as good as he thought he was. The potential was there for him to have been one of the all-time greats. But the booze and Valium and coke and whatever else now left him incapacitated almost all the time. We prayed we’d be able to get a solo out of him before he passed out. He wasn’t funny anymore—in any way. When he tried to tell jokes, he had to stop and slur, “How’s it go again?”

The situation sometimes made me angry. I had busted my ass for the band, and I felt that these two guys were playing fast and loose with my future based on their irrational whims and inner conflicts. And yet, because the deterioration took place in stages, I found I accepted things that I never would have initially. If you try to bend a tree down to the ground, it breaks; if you bend it incrementally, little by little, you can get it parallel to the ground without snapping it. It just took time. That was me.

There was very little band mentality anymore. The other three guys drifted off to their own social circles, and we all had our own people telling each of us how great we were. Between their sycophantic friends and all the press, Peter and Ace began to believe they were world-class virtuosos, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. When we argued with Peter over his songs, he’d say things like, “You just don’t want me to do this because I wrote the biggest song” or “You don’t want me to do this because I’m the best singer.” And he constantly accused me of not having “paid my dues,” apparently because I hadn’t spent a decade before KISS playing in bands that went nowhere, like he had.

Both Peter and Ace were fucked up all the time. I’d seen plenty of functional addicts. Bob Ezrin had been doing a lot of coke and chugging Rémy Martin while we recorded
Destroyer,
but the quality of his work never flagged. Bill Aucoin, Neil Bogart, and much of the Casablanca staff were on a slippery slope, doing lots of drugs, too. Drugs and alcohol were like a Ferrari: there’s a split second difference between being in control and being wrapped around a telephone pole. You’re in control, and then you pass that line and don’t realize it until it’s too late. I hoped Bill would be able to save Peter and Ace. But that turned out to be foolish—Bill couldn’t even save himself.

If Gene and I tried to defuse unpleasant situations by saying, “Come on, man, that’s the drugs talking,” Peter and Ace would respond by insisting they knew exactly what they were saying. Peter’s insecurities got more and more crippling with the addition of drugs. The whole world was against him. One day in the studio he exploded about something and smashed my acoustic twelve-string guitar against the wall. There was a moment of deafening silence after that.

During another argument, Gene snapped at Peter: “Peter, you’re an illiterate idiot who can’t read or even talk correctly and never finished school.”

“Yeah,” said Peter, “and I’m in the
same band
as you.”

To this day, that remains the smartest thing I ever heard Peter say.

O
ne night in Texas in early 1977 a youth group attending a Bible conference gathered in the lobby of our hotel. Trying to be kind, generous, and Christian, one of them walked over to me and said, “I’m going to pray for you.”

“How
dare
you,” I said. “What would possibly make you think I need you to pray for me?”

Whatever judgments they had of me, it didn’t stop a group of them from pressing themselves against my hotel room connecting door to listen to this messenger of Satan strip a willing local of her clothes and inhibitions.

When we pulled into arenas now, we saw people brandishing banners and placards and carrying crosses. I was astonished. These people quoted the Bible and called our music satanic.