Face the Music: A Life Exposed (32 page)

If musicians bored me with talk of gear and guitars, I soon found out that most of the actors I met wanted to talk about only themselves. They seemed to endure listening to their peers only so they would get a turn to talk—about themselves. Still, I welcomed the change of scenery for a while. I started going to the theater almost every week. I had a ticket broker and I’d call and say, “What have you got for tonight?”

I found it interesting that so many people in New York—myself included—talked about the culture of the city but never actually experienced it. Here was an opportunity to do it. I went to see whatever was playing—from the big-production British musicals like
Miss Saigon, Cats,
and
Les Miserables,
to more serious plays like
American Buffalo, Waiting for Godot,
and
Death of a Salesman.

I took some acting classes, too. I sat in on Lee Strasberg’s classes once or twice. At one class, a woman got up to do a scene in front of him and broke down crying before she started the scene.

This is nuts.

I thought you acted from joy, not torment.

Strasberg’s wife Anna took a liking to me, and I went to a few parties at their house. I came away with the impression that none of these people wanted to be happy because they feared it might compromise their acting ability. They had to be brooding and miserable, and hence everyone in the room seemed to be under his or her own personal dark cloud. I felt as if I should have taken an umbrella.

This is not for me
.

One night when I was out at a restaurant having dinner, the actress Donna Dixon and a model friend of hers walked in. Donna was staggeringly attractive—so much so that it was intimidating. So much so that I went for the woman who turned out to be her roommate. Donna was just too beautiful. But after I had seen her friend a few times, I admitted to myself and to her that I was actually interested in Donna. And somehow it worked—I started seeing Donna. I loved having such a gorgeous girlfriend. As superficial as it may have been, she was beautiful in a way that made me happy.

With hindsight, I can see that dating her was clearly another example of my trying to eradicate my own imperfections by being with someone seemingly perfect. Anyone who could date a woman who looked like that
must
be special. But at the time, I was very taken with her. When she entered a room, the room came to a halt. And I was with her!

Donna had landed her first big role, starring opposite Tom Hanks in the TV show
Bosom Buddies.
She shuttled back and forth to L.A. for that, and we continued to see each other.

During this time, Ace announced he wanted to quit the band. I drove up to his house in Westchester and spent the day with him. We went to the mall, drove around, talked. “Don’t leave,” I told him. “Stay in the band.”

“I need to go,” he said.

I found out years later that he didn’t remember I had been there. Many pages of Ace’s past are now blank. That’s how blasted he was. He was living in a constant state of blackout.

Bill worked out a deal to let Ace leave but have him make promotional appearances for the next album, which we planned to make in Los Angeles. In some ways I was glad Ace finally left—we couldn’t go anywhere with him the way he was. Everybody around the band seemed to be suffering from the same disease. It’s one thing to be useless; it’s another to be a detriment.

Bill had gone from sharing office space with Howard Marks Advertising to first having one floor and then two floors of a building on Madison Avenue plus a Los Angeles office. He had people developing film projects and dozens more people on the payroll—I had no idea what they all did. He had a huge luxury apartment near St. Patrick’s Cathedral that he’d spent a fortune decorating but that he rented rather than owned.

He was now making such bad decisions that I often followed up on meetings he had on our behalf. “What did he agree to?” I’d ask. Then I’d have to nullify things.

It was clearly the drugs. Eventually his drug habit became so all-encompassing that he could no longer go to the office. He was home freebasing, holed up with a pipe.

When things change incrementally, sometimes you don’t realize how far you’ve gotten from where you started. That’s basically what happened with Bill. When I looked at him, he still appeared to be the person I knew; when he was lucid, he still sounded like the person I knew. But he wasn’t that person anymore, even if it took me a long time to recognize that fact. Bill had gone from being our visionary mentor, our manager, a father figure, a fifth member of the band, to being a delusional, drugged-out whack job. It was so bad that heart-to-heart talks I had with him went nowhere except to confirm the worst.

“What are you doing?” I’d ask him. “You’re spending all your money.”

“I don’t care,” he’d reply. “I made it once and I can make it again.”

It was a reckless attitude. And it mirrored Ace and Peter—they all took things for granted.

Watching all these guys go down the tubes with drugs or booze, seeing their demise, I realized that it’s all a question of what people do with the freedom that success affords. There were times when Gene wanted to have company in his stance of “
We
don’t drink or take drugs.” But that wasn’t my stance. I had nothing against drinking, and I had smoked pot when I was younger. But when I saw what the Casablanca office turned into, what Bill turned into, or what Ace and Peter turned into, I didn’t think that transformation was just the luck of the draw. They made their own destinies.

Finally, after Gene, Eric Carr, and I convened in L.A. to start work on the next album,
Creatures of the Night,
Gene and I discussed parting ways with Bill. It was sad and scary to contemplate letting go of someone who had been so instrumental in our careers. It would be a monumental change. Not something to take lightly. We had worked with him for almost a decade.

Despite what was going wrong, all the good stuff during the formative years wouldn’t have happened without Bill. He was instrumental in our development, and he was the glue that kept everybody together. He knew how to press the buttons in each member to keep all of us happy. Each of us felt like his favorite.

But we realized we had reached a point where rebuilding KISS was going to mean getting rid of everything we had known. We were already rid of two members, and we had experienced such waste and coddling that it had taken away our autonomy and independence—which is in essence what it’s designed to do. Bill’s system had catered to our needs but cut us off from reality. It was life in a bubble, and it was killing us.

I even suggested we take our makeup off, to make a complete break with the past. In the end, Gene didn’t want to take off the makeup, but we did decide that Bill had to go.

We called him from L.A. “Bill, we’re going to fly to New York to meet you.”

I always believed you owed it to yourself and the other person to look that person in the eye at the end of a relationship, whether it was a business relationship or a romantic relationship.

When we arrived at his office, Bill said, “I know why you’re here.”

“It’s time,” we said.

He smiled wistfully. We shook hands, hugged, and walked out on a big chapter of our lives.

A
s we prepared to make our next album,
Creatures of the Night,
not a lot of A-list producers were knocking at our door. In fact, people weren’t even returning our phone calls.

Finally, in the summer of 1982, I scheduled a lunch in L.A., where we planned to record the album, with a guy named Michael James Jackson. We met at a restaurant called the Melting Pot, on the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Melrose. Michael, it turned out, had no real experience with rock and roll bands, though he had just worked with Jesse Colin Young, the founder of the band the Youngbloods, who had some hits in the 1960s. When we started chatting, Michael said, “What you guys need to do is write some hit songs.”

Gee, why didn’t I think of that? Fucking brilliant
.

But I liked him despite being momentarily thrown by that “insight.” He was very introspective and intellectual, and we began to hit it off. Also, even though I wasn’t sure what he had to offer musically, we needed
someone
. I knew that Gene and I weren’t at a point where we could be productive together because neither of us wanted to compromise our respective musical ideas. We needed an intermediary in the studio, somebody to be the swing vote.

Gene and I never wrote songs together anymore. Michael brought up the idea of bringing in outside songwriters to work on the record with us. I suggested Bryan Adams, who had written a minor hit called “Let Me Take You Dancing” together with Jim Vallance. Even though his voice was sped up and sounded like a girl’s on that track, I thought there was something there. When we flew him to L.A., though, Bryan ended up writing with Gene, and they came up with “War Machine.”

With Ace gone, we put the word out that we were looking for a new guitar slinger. Among others, we auditioned Steve Farris of Mr. Mister, Robben Ford, who was a great blues player, and Steve Hunter. Richie Sambora, who was in a newly formed band called Bon Jovi, flew in from New Jersey to audition. He wasn’t yet the consummate player he would become, and he didn’t get the gig. It’s funny, but years later I heard him say he hadn’t really wanted the job because he wanted to be in something more blues-based. First of all, it’s hard to imagine that he flew to California to audition for KISS just because he liked airplane food; also, Bon Jovi’s done a lot of great things, but they don’t sit next to Howlin’ Wolf in my record collection.

Another person I spoke to was a really sweet young kid named Saul Hudson. He told me his mom had been a seamstress for David Bowie and that his friends called him “Slash.” He was very well spoken and engaging, but he seemed really young. Finally I asked him how old he was. “I’ll be seventeen next month,” he said.

I had turned thirty earlier that year, and Gene was twice this kid’s age. “You know,” I said, “you sound like a great guy, but I think you’re too young for this.” I wished him well and always remembered him because he was so nice and unaffected.

In the end, a lot of different people played solos on
Creatures of the Night
. It was a way to try people out and to see who might fit the feel of a given track. Eddie Van Halen came to the studio one day knowing we were looking for a guitar player. He listened to some of the stuff we had, including a solo on the title track by Steve Farris. “Wow, why don’t you get
that
guy?” asked Eddie. He was blown away. The fact was, we had rehearsed with Farris, but the fit hadn’t been right.

Eddie was really unhappy at the time and called me at home a few times. He was pretty out of it, and he wanted to talk about the KISS solo albums. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “Why did you go off and do solo albums?” It was clear that this had something to do with his own band, which was in turmoil at the time, but he didn’t say exactly what was happening. He seemed to be looking to me for answers, but I was never sure what the question was.

I wrote the songs “Creatures of the Night” and “Danger” with a guy named Adam Mitchell who had been in a Canadian band called the Paupers. Adam had also written with a guitar player named Vincent Cusano, and even though Adam didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about Vinnie as a person, he said he was a very talented singer-songwriter and that his guitar playing might fit KISS. It was a scene that would play out often—people always talked about Vinnie’s talent and ability, but they never had good things to say about him as a person.
Hmmm
.

The first time Vinnie came to the studio, he started doing a solo and got down on his knees. I thought it was one of the goofiest things I’d ever seen. You just didn’t do that at an audition. He seemed wrong somehow—he was odd looking and shifty—but we were between a rock and a hard place, and Vinnie ended up playing on a lot of tracks for the album.

For us,
Creatures
was done with the shock and realization of how completely lost we had gotten. The album was a declaration of intent to get back on track. Eric was relieved, as this was what he had expected all along. He was definitely happier all through the recording process.

One afternoon a carload of little kids and what I presumed was one of their dads showed up at the studio, and Gene ushered them into the room where we recorded. They gathered around a microphone. They were there to sing background vocals on a song.

What the hell?

Gene, it turned out, had made a deal with a Hollywood producer—if the guy could send his kids and their friends to sing background vocals on a KISS song, Gene would get some brownie points for some acting work out of the guy.

Are you fucking kidding me?

I was furious. And not just because Gene hadn’t asked in advance for my okay. He was whoring us out and compromising our album for his own benefit. It offended me that he tried to get acting roles in that way. I had been studying acting long before he had the idea to get into movies—in fact, he had told me he had no interest in acting. To me, the path was obvious—you studied acting and then auditioned for parts. That was the “right” way to go about it. Gene didn’t see it that way. He just went out and brown-nosed his way in.

If you walk behind an elephant, you end up cleaning up the shit
.

I spent my free time in L.A. with Donna Dixon. Part of the reason I invested so much in Donna was because she still managed to keep me at arm’s length—no matter the closeness we had developed. That ignited my old compulsion to see the relationship as a challenge to overcome. Even though we were together, there was still something lacking—and I kept trying to get whatever that was. I was awed by her beauty and placed her on a pedestal, which quickly must become one of the most boring and unsexy places for a woman to be. My dad, though, would no doubt have approved.