Face the Music: A Life Exposed (40 page)

As we got ready to go to Europe for the first leg of the
Revenge
tour, I was planning to ask Pam to marry me. And when she became pregnant, I knew this was the time to ask. I bought a beautiful engagement ring. I picked the stone myself and had it set in a band designed to look like a vintage ring she loved. I was very excited when I got it, very excited when I asked her to marry me, and very excited when I went home in June and we prepared for our July wedding.

With Pam pregnant and our wedding day fast approaching, we finally went to a meeting with separate counsel to discuss a prenuptial agreement. I had insisted on the meeting because of the vast discrepancy between what we were coming into the marriage with—both monetarily and materially. By this time, I was happily paying virtually all of Pam’s bills. But I still wanted to try to come to an agreement at a time when goodwill prevailed. Not five minutes into the meeting, she ran from the room hysterical. I ran after her.

When I caught up to her, she told me that we could have the baby without getting married. She said she wanted nothing from me if things didn’t work out down the road. “Where I’m from,” she said, “your word is your bond.”

Overtaken by the fear of losing her completely, I told her I still wanted to get married—without any agreement.

A few days before the wedding, Pam miscarried. We were both devastated, but we went ahead as planned. Everybody at the wedding knew what had happened, and the air of gloom was undeniable. The silence in the face of sadness was all too familiar to me.

When KISS headed out on a full arena tour in October, Pam never seemed to know where I was or whether I had a show that day or a day off. I would call her, and she literally had no clue about where I was and what I was doing. I began to waver back and forth, sometimes wondering what I had gotten myself into and other times thinking I had to do whatever it took to make it work.

I can make anything work
.

The European guy Pam had just broken up with when I first met her never stopped calling her, and she never stopped talking to him. Early on, Claude called her several times a week from Europe. I asked her why. I mean, I could understand his showing no respect for me or our marriage, but I didn’t understand why Pam didn’t seem to, either. Especially after I told her that the calls bothered me a lot and asked her to stop. She didn’t want to hear it. Making any concessions or adjustments wasn’t part of her concept of marriage. She saw anything like that as a loss of her freedom, as limiting her ability to be whomever she wanted, whenever and wherever she wanted.

Although it wouldn’t cure the core problem, I came up with what I thought was a sobering threat: “Why don’t I call Claude’s wife to see whether she knows you guys talk constantly, and see how
she
feels about it?” Pam looked at me with daggers. I was stifling her freedom, she said.

The contact didn’t stop, I would later learn—it just happened when I wasn’t around. I seemed to be back in a disappointingly familiar place—seeking approval or acceptance, and not getting it. Pam and I pushed each other’s buttons in a way that didn’t leave either of us happy. “You don’t let me be who I am,” she would say. “So you’ll never get to see the real me.”

We talked about issues like that until we were blue in the face. But I had chosen to be in the relationship. I had seen the signals from the beginning and chose to ignore them or dismiss them. I had no grounds for surprise now.

She went to Mexico at some stage to shoot a short-lived TV series called
Land’s End,
and I flew down during a break in the tour. When I got there, I found a message from Claude on her hotel phone.

Come on!

The calls persisted, and my continued requests that Pam stop talking to him were met with more angry refusals. I felt like neither me nor our marriage meant much to her. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the actions were speaking loudly.

Still, I wouldn’t quit.

We seemed to be at odds over just about everything, and I almost innately understood that our marriage was doomed. But I didn’t want to admit failure.

There must be a way to get this right
.

O
nce the
Revenge
tour ended at the end of 1992, KISS was in for an extended quiet period. The music industry landscape was changing dramatically, both because of grunge and because of a general downturn in the economy.

On the professional front, we spent the next two years on a couple of homegrown projects. Gene came up with the idea of a photo-heavy coffee-table book on the band, called
KISStory
, which Jesse Hilsen brilliantly suggested we create, print, and market ourselves. Gene also had the idea for a series of KISS conventions. For both projects, we turned to Tommy Thayer.

Tommy was from Portland, Oregon. His family owned office supply stores, and his father was a retired brigadier general. Tommy was bright and diligent, and despite tasting a little success with his first band, Black ’N Blue, he had moved on, cut his hair, and started working on the sidelines of the business. Tommy also
loved
KISS.

When work began on
KISStory,
Tommy started the months-long process of going through boxes and boxes of photos and clips in our archives. Not surprisingly, he bore down on the material. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of KISS, and in a pre-Internet era when every bit of minutia wasn’t readily available, his brain was a unique and genuine resource for a project like we had in mind.

Eventually, when the photo editing was done, Tommy moved to Gene’s guesthouse, where a computer had been set up to produce the book. Jesse figured out how to market the book through an 800 number. He figured selling directly would work better than using a traditional publishing company. And his hunch was correct. Once we finished the book and had it printed in Korea, we hired a telemarketing company to take phone orders and ship the books, and it was a huge success.

The conventions would be a traveling KISS museum of sorts, where memorabilia collectors and fans would congregate to celebrate the band. Concert promoters had no interest in acts perceived as hair bands, but we figured that, as with the book, we could do it by ourselves—rent ballrooms at hotels and put on the events without a promoter. Again, we needed someone to handle the logistics, and again, we turned to Tommy, who had proved so knowledgeable and hardworking during the making of
KISStory
.

The conventions were really Gene’s baby, and I had very little to do with them. I did help Tommy get custom mannequins from a shop in Burbank and then apply the makeup on their faces. Our original plan was to use normal store mannequins, but they didn’t look right. I remember being struck by how different the faces looked after the face paint was applied to them—even though they were all identical mannequin heads. The makeup seemed to change the whole structure of the faces.

We also had the four wax heads from the Hollywood Wax Museum. When I looked at mine, I didn’t think it looked like me. So I got out some sculpting tools and altered the face.

Gene, Tommy, and I started going through boxes at our storage space. We went through crate after crate and catalogued what was in each one with the help of a photographer. It was fun to pull out the old outfits and have a look at them again. Day after day we went through the stuff and slowly decided what to display and how to display it. Tommy and I drove down to a place in Buena Park, near Disneyland, to a workshop where they built custom-made Plexiglas enclosures. We designed a set of collapsible display cases and ordered them.

All along, we paid close attention to the budget, since we were paying for everything out of pocket and doing it all on our own, with no advances. It was a real education.

While the book and conventions were still in the planning phase, we also began to discuss a new album. Bob Ezrin wasn’t available, but it didn’t matter, because Gene had a bee in his bonnet. Music was different now, he said, and we needed to be current. I think maybe he was attracted to the grunge sound because it was dark—it fit with the persona he wanted to project. When I brought in a few songs early in the process, he was very dismissive. “You don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “You don’t know what music is like anymore.”

I just couldn’t picture KISS writing gloom and doom stories. “What are we going to write about?” I asked him. “That our housekeepers didn’t show up today? Our limo was late?”

It was ridiculous for me to write gloomy songs—and just as ridiculous for Gene to do it, too. It ain’t that dark in Beverly Hills.

I was also skeptical about what all the grunge bands would do on their second albums. There were a lot of great first albums, but what would they do once they were platinum acts instead of kids living in roach-infested garages? I mean, if they were so miserable, once they had money, they could all go see shrinks.

But Gene felt strongly about the project, so I agreed to the plan. He didn’t want to do it any other way. I could be proven wrong. Hey, maybe the album would come out and everybody would say it was a work of genius. I seriously doubted it. After all, it was us impersonating other bands, which made no sense. KISS
celebrated
life—we sang about how great life was and about self-empowerment. Now we had to mope and sing about how miserable everything was? That wasn’t us doing what we do well.

I started tuning my guitar down, but I struggled with writing songs I had no real connection to. Meanwhile, Gene reveled in the idea of trying to out-Metallica Metallica. There was already a great Metallica, and we sure as hell weren’t going to beat them. We were at our best a great KISS, and that fact seemed lost as we tried to hop on a train that we could never pull. We’d be lucky to be the caboose.

Fortunately, I eventually found a subject I felt connected to: I wrote “I Will Be There” for my new son, Evan. Pam had gotten pregnant again in late 1993, and in June of 1994 we went to the labor and delivery unit at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Pam was about a week past due, so we went there with an appointment for her to be induced. She wasn’t actually in labor, so I had plenty of time to set up my tripod and camera. I’ll never forget the last sonogram before Evan was born. The 3D technology was still pretty new, and when the doctor did a close-up of his head, Evan turned and faced the device as if on cue.
Oh, my God, that’s my face!

I’d always thought that having kids someday would be a terrific thing. But until I cut the umbilical cord, I didn’t realize the depth of it, the holiness of it, the sacredness of it. Up until that day, life never made much sense to me. You showed up on earth, spent a little time here, and died. It seemed pointless. But as soon as I held Evan in the delivery room and we made eye contact, I suddenly got it:
We don’t really die
. We were here on earth to leave the world a better place through our children. And through our children, we lived on. It was stunning to make eye contact with this little person who had just entered the world and to realize that I would continue. This was the cycle that had been going on since the beginning of time. I would live on through
him
.

As we were driving home from the hospital with this new little being in our car, I was absolutely terrified. I probably caused accidents because of how slow I was driving. When babies are born, their necks can’t support their heads, and if their heads lean too far one way or the other, they can suffer from lack of blood flow to the brain. I drove five miles an hour, constantly looking in the rearview mirror to make sure his head was upright in the car seat.

I had always considered myself the center of my universe; when Evan came along, I suddenly moved aside without even thinking about it. He became the center of my universe. And maybe he was a second chance for me to experience a childhood the way it was supposed to be.

His birth calmed me and answered a big question:
Why are we here?
We’re here to raise children and leave something better behind. The profundity of the moment took me back to Hawaii years before, when I had thought I was drowning. Back then, all I could think about was that it made no sense that the world would go on after I died. Looking into my son’s eyes, I went from being the center of the universe to being glad to move aside and cede it to him. It’s yours, son.

I am here because of those who came before. And I will go on because of those who come after
.

All of a sudden, I slept better.

T
he KISS conventions came to fruition in 1995, starting in Australia. Ticket presales were strong, so we weren’t anxiously waiting to see whether anyone showed up. The conventions worked because of the mythology of KISS—that was the drawing power. The concept was unique and people responded.

And responded in some unique ways. Some people, for instance, got married at the conventions. That might seem odd to some, but I saw it as a huge compliment. I never took it lightly that somebody chose to get married in KISS makeup at one of these events. The fact that the band meant that much to people was terrific. To have that kind of impact and be that much a part of the fabric of somebody’s life was a special feeling. I loved the looseness and informality of the format of the conventions, too, with the Q&A sessions we did and our acoustic performances. We were playing to the most hardcore fans and not being scrutinized for perfection—the acoustic shows became sonic snapshots.

When we held a convention in Burbank, just outside of L.A., Eric Singer suggested that we invite Peter Criss to come. It was a gesture of goodwill—to show Peter that he was part of the family. When he showed up, he was thrilled—grinning ear to ear, punching the air. Peter was older than us, and in the years since he had left the band, the age gap seemed to have increased—perhaps because of his lack of solo success or a dissatisfaction with life in general. I gave him a KISS motorcycle jacket to wear. The only one we had on hand was about four sizes too big, but he was pleased to be flying the colors.