Face the Music: A Life Exposed (41 page)

He joined us onstage and sang “Hard Luck Woman.” He couldn’t remember all the words—we hadn’t rehearsed—but it was a warm moment. He looked like a kid who had just gotten the keys to the candy store, and I was glad to see him after all the years.

We had about twenty-five stops across the United States, with the final convention held at Roseland in Manhattan. Alex and Roger Coletti at MTV, both big KISS fans, had gotten wind of our acoustic shows at the conventions and sought us out in New York to ask about doing an
MTV Unplugged
session. In the process of playing all the conventions, we had honed our ability to play the songs acoustically and sing them well. Electric guitars are very forgiving, whereas acoustic instruments have a crispness and clarity that gives you less leeway. The strings are also a heavier gauge, and bending them is challenging at first. We also sang without any effects, though the spaces often created natural ambience and echo. By the end of the long convention tour, the band sounded great. We felt confident about doing
Unplugged.

MTV wanted the extra hook of a reunion with the original guys. Peter and Ace were both being represented by an old road manager of ours named George Sewitt. He came in with lots of ridiculous terms and stipulations. We had to throw all of that out before we could get Peter and Ace into a studio in New York to try rehearsing together. George’s terms and demands kept changing, no matter what Peter and Ace had agreed to, but Gene did a great job of riding shotgun and keeping them under control.

Everybody had their guard up when Ace and Peter sauntered into the studio. Eric Singer and Bruce were both there, but clearly Peter and Ace were feeling the most uncomfortable. Everybody in the current band was approaching the situation from a place of strength. We never thought for a second about not having Eric and Bruce there. Peter and Ace were coming into our house, and Eric and Bruce were residents—they had earned their places.

I had seen Peter and Ace only rarely since the early 1980s. I had heard secondhand stories about how much Peter’s playing had deteriorated—how his various bands weren’t very good. But there was an exciting and surreal sense of nostalgia in the room when they entered.

Tommy Thayer had once revealed a perception of the original lineup that he probably shared with a lot of outsiders. “I always thought Ace and Peter were the rock and roll guys,” he had said, “and you and Gene were the business guys.” I had laughed then, and I laughed inside now as they walked into the room. It was true that Ace liked to portray himself as some sort of American Keith Richards, but I knew Tommy was in for a rude awakening. Gene and I had never stopped playing our instruments since the inception of the band. I’d become a much more proficient guitar player after fifteen years of working at it constantly. Ace hadn’t played nearly as much, and Peter hardly at all. When they had played, nobody was there to tell them when it wasn’t good enough.

Peter seemed to have completely lost it. He had become your slightly nutty uncle. He came in with some silly miniature tribal drums that he held in one hand and boinked with a stick. He wanted to hit them while he sang “Beth.” We nixed that idea.

We worked on about four songs with them. The rest of the show would be just me, Gene, Eric, and Bruce.

The studio where we did the
MTV Unplugged
taping was beautifully staged and lit. An audience of die-hard KISS fans packed the place, having heard the rumors of an original-lineup reunion. The floor was covered with a huge drop cloth printed with the
Rock and Roll Over
album cover. We had wax figures of us in makeup—swag from the conventions—set up behind us.

Ace kept gabbing on and on into the microphone, which was distracting and clearly about trying to reclaim more of the spotlight. That got fixed when the show and album were mixed.

When the show was aired in August 1995, it proved to be the second most viewed
MTV Unplugged
in the history of the show. Almost as soon as it aired, speculation about a full-on reunion started to brew. To me, there seemed to be sufficient good feelings to explore the possibility. In fact, I saw it as a logical next step. Also, given the well-documented car accidents and other brushes with death that Ace and Peter seemed to constantly have, the window for a reunion might shut sooner rather than later, as far as I was concerned. One of these guys was sure to kick the bucket, and if there ever would be a time to get back together, it was now.

I also thought a reunion might provide closure. When the band broke apart, we were all young and stupid. Maybe we could get back together having learned from life, and everyone would see the band for the gift it was. Maybe we could see it through to the end and ride off into the sunset together, a band, a team, one for all and all for one, until we called it quits on our own terms.

I started trying to get Gene on board.

He was skeptical, to say the least, and didn’t think it would be the financial juggernaut I was sure it would be. We had just done the conventions and sold tickets for a hundred dollars to a pared-down crowd of a few hundred fans in each city. The idea was to get a smaller number of people at a higher ticket price. We weren’t trying to sell out arenas. And since we didn’t need fifteen buses to move the show from place to place, the overheads were lower than a concert tour. In theory, the conventions could have been quite lucrative. As novel and fun as they were, however, they weren’t very profitable.

Given the way concert guarantees and tour merchandising had evolved—this was the era when concert ticket prices suddenly shot up—it was hard to imagine anything like the conventions competing with the windfall of a reunion tour in makeup. It seemed like a no-brainer to me.

Still, Gene was a hard sell. Even as I crunched numbers on the phone for him, his skepticism was unwavering.

I was 100 percent convinced the timing was right. When we went back to L.A., I called Gene and again went over hypothetical numbers based on a possible attendance of ten thousand people, ticket prices, and merchandising statistics for current tours. One example I used was the Eagles. They had reunited in 1994 and continued touring throughout 1995, playing to millions of people and hitting the Billboard charts with a live album. I had personally witnessed the long lines of people waiting to buy T-shirts and merchandise at one of their shows. It was an unprecedented financial success for a band who had also broken up around the time the original KISS lineup started to splinter. Those guys certainly didn’t reunite out of a newfound love for one another. And, hey, if
they
could get along . . .

You know how you wet your finger and hold it up to judge the wind? I felt it was now or never—the wind was right. No matter how successful we were in the present, without makeup, I knew there was nothing that could compete with what we had been. The myth. The legend. Once upon a time.

Gene finally agreed to talk with a few talent agencies about the possibility of booking a reunion tour. When we showed up for the meetings, we encountered a perceptible shift in the reception we got. In recent years we had become accustomed to beer nuts and sodas at meetings. Suddenly we were ushered into conference rooms packed with bigwigs. Elaborately catered buffets were laid out in front of us. “Please, gentlemen, help yourselves.”

Hot food?

Hmmm, maybe we really
were
onto something big. Gene now smelled the coffee. He was in.

The highway to heartache

B
ased on what booking agencies told us, it was clear that a reunion tour was going to be way bigger than we could handle on our own. We needed a new manager. We immediately thought of Doc McGhee. When Bon Jovi went to Europe with us in 1984, Doc was managing them. He took them to superstardom. He had also taken Motley Crue to the top. And we had encountered him even earlier, when he managed Pat Travers, who opened some shows for us during the original makeup era. If anyone would get it, Doc would.

We had our first meeting with Doc at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. He immediately started riffing—we would do the “Seven Wonders of the World Tour” and kick it off by playing in front of the sphinx and the pyramids in Egypt. He thought big. Ridiculously big, just like we had. Just like Bill Aucoin had.

Clearly, Doc was the right guy. It was a relief to find somebody who not only got it, but was capable of adding to it, of raising the ante. We didn’t take meetings with anyone else.

As the planning started, it became obvious this wasn’t going to be one year out of our lives, but rather a chunk of our lives—
years
. Doc was talking about everyone putting all their time and effort into a reunion. Even though Gene was mouthing his enthusiasm, I warned Doc, “I’ve seen this movie—I know how it ends.” Doc assured me that he could keep everyone engaged, but I knew the inevitable truth. I liked shooting for the moon, but it was also imperative for Doc to understand and accept reality.

The adrenaline was flowing, and we were all shooting sparks as we came up with endless ideas. One thing Gene kept bugging Doc about was getting KISS on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
magazines. Apparently, Bruce Springsteen had been on both simultaneously at the time of
Born in the U.S.A.,
and Doc now had marching orders to make it happen for us.

“Gene,” said Doc, “the only way you’re getting on the cover of those magazines is if you shoot the president with your makeup on.”

Doc is one of us
.

As a reunion became more and more concrete, we had to break the news to Eric Singer and Bruce Kulick. We scheduled a meeting at Gene’s house. I don’t think those guys thought a reunion was feasible because they had witnessed the state of Peter and Ace’s playing during the
MTV Unplugged
rehearsal and taping. I realized later that they expected the meeting to be a game-planning session for the release of
Carnival of Souls
. When we broke the news, they both seemed blindsided.

Eric and Bruce weren’t happy, but we told them we would keep them on the payroll while they took some time to figure out their next moves. Eric has always been a little cynical and has always seen himself as a hired gun. Even then, he was already a journeyman drummer who had played with lots of bands—he worked for everybody because he was just that good. And yet, in this instance, he was clearly hurt.

We didn’t mean to hurt those guys, but I still felt bad. “They call it the music
business
for a reason,” Eric said, as a way of saying he understood the decision. “I appreciate the fact that you guys had the balls to do this face to face.” I guess it hadn’t always been that way in the course of his career. But that was something important to me. For instance, I would never break up with a girlfriend over the phone, and we had flown out to New York to end things with Bill Aucoin in person. It showed respect for someone. And these guys had made sizable contributions to the band.

Bruce, as always, was a real mensch. “I get it,” he said. “A reunion seems obvious—it’s the way to go.”

Not surprisingly, it took a lot of wrangling with Peter and Ace’s representative to get a deal in place. Ace insisted on getting more money than Peter because, as Ace put it, Peter wasn’t worth as much as he was. “Peter hasn’t done anything,” Ace insisted. “He hasn’t been playing—and I’m more famous than he is.”

Of course, this was all behind Peter’s back. For all the times Ace threw Peter under the bus, he should have had muscles like a professional bodybuilder. And yet Peter still saw Ace as his teammate and buddy, no matter how many times Ace offered Peter up as a sacrificial lamb.

In the past, people had told me, “The time to find out that you don’t want to be in bed with somebody isn’t when your clothes are off.” So we spelled everything out in the contracts with those guys—ground rules, consequences for not following them, all the things we would and wouldn’t do. And most importantly, we would rehearse and see how everyone responded to working together within carefully spelled-out parameters. We left nothing to chance.

Part of that included hiring personal trainers—not just for Peter and Ace, but for me and Gene, too. We wanted the band to look the way people remembered us looking. The last thing I wanted was people to be disappointed when they saw a bunch of fat guys in tights.

The trainers weren’t bodybuilders or anything like that—it was about cardio and basic strength. Even so, the guy working with Peter was aghast—not only at how weak he was and how low his endurance was, but also at how little Peter was willing to work. The trainer said it was like working with an old man. Peter had a tendency to explode at the trainer about nonsense because Peter didn’t like working out.

Ace, as usual, was just lazy. But he put in his time.

Alongside the physical training, we also started the rehearsal process. Or tried to. We convened in L.A. in March, planning to rehearse for several months. It was imperative to look and sound great for these shows—we were competing not just with our past, but with people’s recollections of our past. That was the challenge as I saw it. We had to re-create the impact our shows had on people at a time when nobody else did what we did. By the nineties, everybody had pyrotechnics, everybody had a show with KISS DNA in it—all it took was money. We had to blow away a new standard.

Then Ace asked, “Why do we need to rehearse? I know these songs like the back of my hand.” It quickly became apparent that Ace didn’t know the back of his hand very well. And Peter? Peter was another story. There was no point to rehearsing as a band. Peter and Ace didn’t know the material, didn’t know their parts.

I called Tommy Thayer. Tommy knew our music inside-out and would make a good coach. We wanted to be true to the original
KISS Alive!
versions of our classic songs. “Listen, Tommy,” I told him. “We need you to get together with Peter one-on-one in a rehearsal studio. Just you and him. You on guitar, Peter on his drums. You need to go through all the songs with him and make sure he knows what he’s doing.”