Face the Music: A Life Exposed (39 page)

I thought back to the early eighties and a club I used to go to in New York called Trax. There was always an older guy hanging around there, with a telltale hairline. Back then I thought to myself,
I never want to be that guy
. Now, a decade later, I felt I was in danger of becoming that very same guy. I didn’t want to be the guy with the comb-over still hitting on young chicks. It was ugly, awkward, and embarrassing. I also didn’t want to be alone.

How was I going to fix this situation?

I know! I’ll get married!

I wasn’t shy about telling people about my new goal. I had finally relocated permanently to L.A., and I figured the best way to meet someone was to let everybody know what I was looking for. I put the word out.

Soon a guy I knew told me about a woman he knew—as a matter of fact, he had dated her. He said if she gave him the okay, he would pass along her number. She said no, because she had just ended a relationship. That piqued my interest. If something was unavailable, I wanted it. I kept insisting until finally she agreed to let him give me her number. She was an actress named Pam Bowen, who had made one-off appearances on shows like
MacGyver, Moonlighting,
and
Cheers
and was the spokeswoman character for a big computer company.

On our first date, she was late. When we finally got to spend a bit of time together, she told me that she hadn’t wanted to meet me because she was having a hard time getting over her European boyfriend, Claude, who had gone back to Europe to marry his other girlfriend. The other girlfriend was pregnant by him, and he felt it was his duty. I would later see firsthand that even duty had its limitations.

For our second date, I arranged to take her to opening night at the Los Angeles Opera, together with Bob Ezrin and his wife, Fran. My assistant told me confidentially that Pam said she didn’t have anything appropriate to wear. “No problem,” I said. I arranged a fitting for a rented gown, the way celebrities often do for award shows.

For some reason, she wanted to meet me at my house rather than have us pick her up. Twenty minutes before the curtain was to go up, Bob, Fran, and I were looking at each other in my driveway, wondering where Pam was and whether we could possibly make the show. Still no Pam. Fran turned to me and said, “Is she always like this?” I shrugged. Finally Pam pulled up in her car. “I followed a car up the wrong road,” she said through sobs and tears.

Huh?

We all climbed into the limo, and the driver managed the impossible, getting us downtown in record time, just as the theater lights were going down.

As Pam and I began to socialize more together, we spent our time with her friends because I had so few of my own. But I didn’t think much of her friends. One was Marla Maples, whose claim to fame was breaking up Donald Trump’s marriage. Not exactly a pillar of society. But Pam had a very charitable attitude when she spoke of a number of other people I found questionable. “They have a good heart,” she would say.

“For what—a transplant?” I answered.

It’s not about how good your heart is, it’s about what you do with it during your life. These people were bad based on their actions and life experiences. To me, you can’t discount that by saying somebody has a good heart. Even so, I told myself I was in a realistic, normal relationship that could lead to marriage.

There was also a lot of drama in the relationship. Right from the start we constantly sent cards and letters back and forth about being alternatively disappointed or sorry and trying to explain things. The problems definitely went both ways. But I always thought I could fix whatever was wrong—with me and with her.

I want a relationship. I want marriage. I want a family.

I want a life out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Then one afternoon in early 1991 Eric Carr called me at home. He had just gotten home from the doctor’s office. “What’s wrong?” I said.

“I spat up some blood, so I thought I’d go get checked out,” said Eric.

“Everything cool?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m really worried. They gave me some kind of scan and found a finger-shaped growth going in and out of my heart.”

“Did they say anything?”

“They said it could be cancer.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Everything always seems worse than it really is. There’s no reason to think the worst-case scenario is the one that will happen. The chances that it’s serious are so small. And even if it’s cancer, you’ll get it taken care of.”

Unfortunately, a few days later he called me again. “It really
is
cancer,” Eric told me.

Worse still, it was an extremely rare form of cancer. The number of cases of heart cancer every year is in the single digits. But I still thought everything would be okay.

He left L.A. for a hospital in New York City, and Gene and I flew out to be with him during his open-heart surgery. As far as I understood it, they took part of his heart out and then reconstructed it with what was left.

Not long afterwards, we were asked to record “God Gave Rock ’n’ Roll to You” for the movie
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
—with Bob Ezrin producing, trying to capture some
Destroyer
-era magic and erase the memory of
The Elder
. Eric desperately wanted to work on the song, but he was still very frail. “You have to pay attention to your health now,” I told him, “whether that means recuperating on a tropical island or just resting and focusing on yourself.”

If I knew then what I know now—I never thought this might be his last chance to perform—I would have let him play, but at the time I was sure he would beat the odds. So Eric Singer played that session, though Eric Carr came to L.A. and sat behind the drums for the video shoot. He had lost all his hair from the cancer treatment and had to wear a massive wig to replicate his natural puffball. He played like a man possessed during the video shoot, duplicating Eric Singer’s parts in take after exhausting take.

“God Gave Rock ’n’ Roll to You” came out really well, and we decided to try to make another album with Bob Ezrin. When Bob is in top form, he’s hard to beat, and I think he wanted to prove something—he, too, was embarrassed about
The Elder
—and he wanted to buckle down and create a hard-edged, quality album.
Hot in the Shade
had been a hodgepodge; it was obvious the band was fragmented. If Gene was going to reengage and we could get back to doing what we did well, I was all for it.

We told Eric Carr that we were going to record an album without him. We assured him we would pay all of his bills and keep his insurance going. I reiterated that in the grand scheme of things, the band mattered little. He had to focus on doing whatever he could to get well, without compromise.

Bob brought in a bunch of drummers to rehearse with us as we started working on
Revenge
. We played with Aynsley Dunbar for a while, who’d done stints in Journey, Whitesnake, and the Jeff Beck Group, among many others. He was a great classic English drummer, but he just didn’t fit. At some point, we brought Eric Singer back. Whether you work in a band or at a factory or in any other kind of job, you have to work together with other people, and that connection affects the overall quality of the work as well as the atmosphere. As fate would have it, Eric Singer fit perfectly. He really was replacing Eric Carr in KISS—at least for a few months in the recording studio.

Throughout it all, I never considered the possibility that Eric Carr might die. I figured he’d be weak for a long time—that the status quo would go on and on. That was how I insulated myself and protected myself against the worst-case scenario.

I was wrong.

That fall of 1991, as we worked in L.A., I got a call from my friend Bob Held in New York. What he was trying to tell me was confusing. Eric Carr had suffered a stroke. The cancer had spread to his brain. He’d been found in his apartment after calling 9-1-1. When the emergency responders showed up, Eric was already unconscious, so they paged through his address book and randomly chose someone to call—which turned out to be Bob.

But from that moment on, we couldn’t get any information. His parents wouldn’t talk to me. I called daily, to no avail. I didn’t understand why nobody would talk to me—or to Gene, for that matter.

A few weeks later, on November 24, 1991, my assistant called me and said, “Eric is dead.”

I called Gene and told him the news.

It was shocking—partly because we hadn’t been able to get any information about his situation.

Gene and I flew to New York for Eric’s funeral. It was an open casket funeral, which was ghastly. The body in the casket, which was holding a set of drumsticks, didn’t look like Eric. It didn’t look like a human being. It looked like a mannequin. Eric’s girlfriend, a
Playboy
Playmate he’d been with for several years, briefly took the drumsticks out of the casket for some reason, and Eric’s fingers moved as she did.

The scent of flowers was overwhelming. You could barely breathe. But I could also smell hostility all around us—people bristling at our presence. Peter and Ace were there. Peter, who everyone knew resented and disliked Eric, tried to tell me that Eric had been calling him all the time. Nothing seemed to make sense. Eric’s girlfriend was also filled with anger at me and Gene. It turned out that Eric had painted us as the bad guys—he said we’d booted him out of the band and didn’t support him, which simply wasn’t true. Everyone there seemed to have the impression that Eric had been cut off. But he hadn’t been cut off. Once we told him we were going to record
Revenge,
he cut himself off from us. I didn’t feel like the bad guy, and it was strange to be treated that way.

During the service, it was as if a switch had been thrown inside me, and I started sobbing uncontrollably—just bawling my eyes out.

In the wake of Eric Carr’s death, I continued to spend a lot of time wondering whether I had handled things correctly. Though I thought I had made the best choices at the time, I began to realize I’d been wrong. We
had
cut Eric off in perhaps the worst way, by denying him what mattered to him most—his place in KISS. That had been lost on me while we continued to do everything we thought was important, everything we thought we could and should do.

It was wrong to keep Eric from the thing he loved most, what for him was a lifeline. KISS. And I should have
seen
that, since the band functioned the same way for me, and I wasn’t even sick.

I should have
known
.

A
few months later, in January 1992, Pam threw a surprise fortieth birthday party for me at the Hollywood Athletic Club. I was caught totally off-guard and was thrilled to see a large turnout that included my parents, whom Pam had secretly flown out to L.A. She also hired a KISS tribute band called Cold Gin to play the party. Cold Gin had started to pack the Troubadour club doing classic KISS songs in makeup—at a time when tribute bands were not yet a big thing.

The guy playing Ace in the band was guitarist Tommy Thayer. I knew Tommy a little by then and had tried writing with him, too. He played the parts faithfully and knew every lick. I was impressed. He had clearly worked at learning those parts and put pride and persistence into it. It was also really fun for me to see a band doing what I no longer did.

Tommy told me that he had shifted his professional focus. Aside from the tribute band, he was mostly concentrating on producing and managing bands now. He didn’t want to be the oldest guy in a band still trying to make it, living with a stripper on Franklin Avenue. He didn’t want to be the oldest guy in the club, a sentiment I totally understood and that impressed me.

Listening to Cold Gin was also an interesting reminder that KISS had started out as a classic rock band. That early material sounded more like Humble Pie or the Who than the hair bands. It felt good to have
Revenge
in the bag, since it was a credible album on which we got back to doing what we did well. Music would always go through changes. We had thought that we weren’t current, but that had been a misjudgment. We didn’t need to chase trends; we needed to do what we did, and do it well.

Soon, we had to get ready to tour
Revenge
. Even though Eric Singer played on the album, we had never made any promises about his touring with us or, after Eric Carr’s death, joining the band. Now we had to decide what to do.

Gene and Bruce didn’t know Eric Singer as a person at all. They had crossed paths with him only for a few hours here or there in the recording studio. But I could vouch for Eric’s work ethic and his sense of responsibility as a result of working with him on my solo tour. Eric Singer had been a team guy when it mattered—during the long hours spent together on the road.

The next dilemma sounds silly in retrospect. Eric Singer had dyed blond hair back then, and Bruce, Gene, and I actually had a meeting to discuss whether we could deal with that. Everybody in the history of the band had had dark hair. Could we have a guy in KISS with blond hair?

Fuck it, we weren’t going to make a decision at this point in our lives based on the color of someone’s hair.

So Eric Singer—as Eric Carr had eerily predicted—became the new drummer in KISS. We rehearsed and played a few club gigs in April to break him in. One thing we quickly learned about Eric was that he also had an amazing voice. Even though he had toured with my solo band, I had no idea. As soon as we started rehearsing the classic material, Eric said, “Okay, which vocal parts do you want me to sing?”

I thought he was joking. Gene sang him a part. “Can you sing that?” It was too low. So Gene took that part and Eric tried a higher part. Eric was phenomenal at the high harmonies, and soon we shifted duties around so he was basically singing all of the high parts, which in KISS usually carried the main melody. I shifted down to one of the other parts. It was great, because it was tough to have to do it all—talk between the songs, sing the lead, and sing the main melodies of the harmonies, all night long. Having such a great background vocalist join the band was a godsend.