Face the Music: A Life Exposed (30 page)

It took some time to figure out a character for Eric. Heaven forbid we put him in a character people already knew. That seemed too obvious to us, and maybe sacrilegious. Originally, he was going to be the Hawk. We had a costume built with a protruding chest and feathers all over it. He painted a beak on his nose. But he looked like the mascot for a high school football team—all that was missing were the big foam chicken feet. It was horrible. Fortunately, he came up with the idea of the Fox. He wore the same size boots as Peter, so we used existing boots and had the platforms built up even more. The boots ended up being like stilts, and he still looked tiny next to us.

Eric got thrown in at the deep end of the pool. We had become comfortable dealing with the world we operated in—basic stuff, like handling women’s sexual advances and the media, or acting properly in a restaurant. Eric had to learn on the fly.

The second night of the tour, on August 31, 1980, in Genoa, Italy, we heard a commotion outside the locker room that was serving as our dressing room at the sports arena where we were playing. Then we started to hear people chanting, “KISS Fascista! KISS Fascista!” Security started screaming, “Lock the doors!” Baseball bats started pounding on the door and smashing things outside. They wanted to kill us. It was bad enough that we were going to get killed for playing music, but worse still that I was apparently going to die in platform boots and makeup.

We consciously avoided espousing any political views, and yet to them we represented all the evils of American capitalism. That was the first tour where people asked us about politics—Europeans’ way of thinking seemed more tied into politics and world events. Gene took any opportunity to be seen or heard; his Achilles heel is his need for attention, regardless of the source of the attention. I had no intention of making political statements. At the end of the day “Love Gun” wasn’t about guns—I was just singing about my dick.

We had fun messing with Eric on that tour. It was like having a little brother around. One nickname we came up with for him was Bud Carr Rooney—because we joked that he looked like the love child of Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney.

The first night we were in Paris, Eric wore a brand-new white suit to dinner. His first. Not ten minutes into the night, he spilled a huge glass of red wine all over it. At times like that he would close his eyes and mutter, “What a schmuck.” He sent that suit to the cleaners so many times—hoping against hope the stain would come out—that when it finally came back white, the sleeves fell off when he put the jacket on.

He was impressed that we could get by on a little pidgin version of the local language on that first tour across Europe. In Paris, he decided he wanted to try. “How do you ask for butter in French?”

“Well,” I said, “
s’il vous plait
is ‘please,’ and what you want is
fapouge
.” The French word for butter is
beurre
. I made up the word
fapouge.

The waitress came to our table, and Eric said, “
Fapouge s’il vous plait.
”

She looked at him and said, “
Fapouge?
” He did this thing we used to call “the Ronald Reagan,” where his head would start to shake from side to side when he got nervous. He did that now. “
Fapouge,
” he repeated, with his head shaking.

Another night he really liked the food we’d had, which had come on a sizzling hotplate. Eric was still like Oliver Twist in those days: “Please, sir, may I have some more?” The waiter brought another searing hotplate, carrying it with tongs, and Eric reached up and grabbed it with his bare hands. You could hear the
sssssss
sound as it singed his fingers. He just closed his eyes and said, “What a schmuck.”

Me and Ace in Australia, 1980 . . . I like remembering the great times.

Another night in France a guy at a nightclub started hitting on Eric, making him uncomfortable. He went over to Ace and said, “That guy over there is trying to come on to me.” Ace, in his inimitable logic, said, “Let’s make out so he thinks we’re together. Then he’ll leave you alone.”

And the kissing began.

Armed military personnel guarded the airports in some parts of Europe back then. One time, at an airport where security had AK-47s, Eric got pulled aside. He was wearing a camouflage jumpsuit and bullet belts. They took him through a door and out of our sight. But he was back surprisingly quickly. “What happened?” we asked.

“I told them I’m a musician,” he said. “So they took me to another room and had me play a piano.” Once he played a little piano, they let him go.

Though Eric was two years older than me, he seemed like a kid. His life experience had been limited, and he was naive and gullible. One night in England he took a female journalist to his room from the hotel bar where we were all hanging out. The next day we asked him what happened. “Well, we talked and then she wanted to take some pictures of me without my clothes on,” he said.

“What!?” I said.

“She said she wouldn’t print them.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Oh, shit, did I do something wrong?”

“You let her take pictures!”

“But she said they were just for herself . . .”

Sure enough, when the next week’s issue of the journalist’s magazine came out, there was Eric looking like an idiot, naked in the bathtub with his huge head of hair and a glass of Champagne.

He closed his eyes. “What a schmuck.”

T
he atmosphere in the band was much better without Peter’s constant negativity to contend with. It was eye-opening what a difference it made—we had alleviated such a huge problem and so much uncertainty, strife, and hostility. It was as if the sun had suddenly come out—and that was only Peter. Ace was still in a downward spiral, but at least now we had half as much turmoil.

Ace had lost an ally, but he hadn’t lost a buddy. Whatever relationship he’d had with Peter was strictly mercenary. Ace was smart, and he manipulated Peter to help him vote for things he wanted. If he missed Peter at all, it was on that level, not as a friend. Now it was me and Gene and this other guy who didn’t have the same seniority or power as a full member. Ace was the odd man out as far as the decision-making process. I knew it bothered him, but it wasn’t an immediate issue while we were on tour.

When we arrived in Australia for the first time, in November 1980, it quickly became clear that things were going to be crazy. We’d been told KISS was massive there, but you never know what to expect. You can only comprehend things you’ve already experienced; Australia was like nothing we’d ever experienced. Huge here meant not being able to leave the hotel. It meant taking a helicopter from the hotel to the stadium we were playing.

Melbourne, Australia, in 1980, with 50,000 of my closest friends.

The phenomenon we witnessed became known there as “KISSTERIA.”

We had an entire floor of the hotel, with one suite devoted to our own Australian public relations staff. And no wonder, since we were on the front page of the newspapers every day accompanied by headlines like, “KISS in Midnight Cruise on Sydney Harbor.” We had to keep the curtains drawn in our rooms. The place was crawling with bodyguards, and there was a constant drone of screaming outside. “You’re not going anywhere,” we were told.

Thankfully, Australia had its own
Penthouse
magazine, and a number of
Penthouse
Pets came over to the hotel to keep us company. Paparazzi camped in front of the hotel, and whenever we went anywhere, we had to hide on the floors of vans. Every single night, the promoters threw parties, which were packed with models and actresses. Some parties were women-only. We would show up at a club or ballroom that had been taken over, and the place would be filled with beautiful women. Australia was one giant Chicken Coop.

Eric, however, would often leave the parties and go out and befriend some waif he met on the street. He identified with the fans. Maybe he felt more like them than like one of us at that point. He sometimes brought girls to his room who had been camping outside trying to catch a glimpse of the band. For his comfort, he chose women like that over models and
Penthouse
Pets. Issues shape personalities.

The first hints of Eric’s troubles started to come out, too. One day he rented a car and driver to spend a day in the countryside with a girl he’d met. He was so nervous, he told us, that he got awful gas and had to stop the car every ten minutes to go to the bathroom. He was depressed afterwards about what an idiot he felt like. He also went on about how he was losing his hair. His hair was so big that when he moved forward, it moved backwards—it was always moving in the opposite direction from the rest of him. And yet he constantly wanted me to look at his head. “Look, is it thinning here?” And strangest of all, Eric struggled with the idea that he wasn’t the original drummer of the band. I didn’t understand it. I mean, of course he wasn’t the original drummer. He was the second drummer. So what? There was no talking him out of his funk when he started obsessing over the fact that he would never be the first drummer.

Me, Bill Aucoin, and Elton John, out to dinner in Australia, 1980.

In Australia I began to seriously question Bill Aucoin. His cocaine use had become more extreme, and since splitting up with Sean Delaney, his general behavior had become reckless, too. One morning I went to his room and found a boy in his early teens eating a bowl of cereal in Bill’s bed. Another morning I found a different boy there.

Bill was out of control.

When we got back to the States, a boy who had won a contest had been flown in to meet us, along with a photographer from the magazine that had sponsored the contest. Bill was clearly hitting on the kid. The next day I said, “Bill, tell me you didn’t.”

“Yes I did. And the photographer.”

Bill had crossed a line into an area I saw as criminal and immoral. I was no longer laughing.

Back home, the band had more time off. Even though we hadn’t toured in the States for a full year, we figured we’d make another record first. We decided to work with Bob Ezrin again, the producer who had served as our captain and Svengali for
Destroyer
.

That was it! We would make another
Destroyer
.

The problem was that the stuff we were writing was no better than the songs on
Unmasked
. In fact, it was probably worse. We’d lost the plot. My songs were nothing to write home about; Gene’s were no better. But then Bob entered the picture, and he floated the idea of a concept album—which really came out of left field. Gene quickly bought into it and came up with a generic, vague, typical concept: it was about a kid who was the chosen one. Bill got behind the idea, too. It would be our attempt to woo the critics.

“Let’s put out an album that makes a statement,” he told us. “One that shows everybody how talented you are.” Trying to show people how talented and bright you are is the best way to make an idiot of yourself, and we ended up doing that with flying colors.

Looking back, we wanted peer acceptance and critical approval and lost sight of the fact that none of that had mattered to us in the beginning. The people who so vehemently disliked us were more tied up in their own issues than in what kind of music we were making. The fact that the dislike and distaste was so pronounced, almost obsessive, throughout our career should have been a clue that it had little to do with us. If people wanted to waste their time wringing their hands over how much they hated my band, that was pathetic; what may have been more pathetic was that we tried to overcome it by pandering to those people. But we were clueless and decided to try to elevate ourselves, to separate ourselves from where we had started. We assured ourselves that we would impress a lot of people. Finally, we would make an album that garnered critical acclaim—our
masterpiece
.