Face the Music: A Life Exposed (43 page)

Needless to say, Doc was increasingly pissed off at Peter and Ace.

“You’re going to be changed out,” he told them. “This is a business. I’m not an archaeologist, I’m not here to preserve the past. I’m here to make this thing move forward and grow. If you’re a hindrance, you’re going to go. It would be a shame for you to miss this opportunity. You have a second lease on life—why can’t you just ride the pony?”

They hated Doc for saying that, but he was sick of having to drag them through everything and motivate them to do the basic things they needed to do for us to function as a band.

As things went south, though, a lot of the fallout actually landed on Tommy Thayer, who had to take over as tour manager of the operation about six months into the first year of the reunion tour. Tommy spent 90 percent of his time and energy dealing with things a person shouldn’t have to deal with—making new arrangements when Peter or Ace missed a flight or didn’t show up for a car pickup, making sure the hotel staff didn’t take the tinfoil off Peter’s windows, whatever it was. Ace was chronically late getting out of his hotel room when we needed to get to a venue or to our jet. For a while, Tommy just lied to him about departure times—pushing them an hour forward so there was a chance of Ace’s making the actual time. But when Ace realized that, he got bent out of shape.

At some stage Tommy came to me with the realization I had been waiting for. He admitted that the perception he’d had—of me and Gene as the tight-asses, the business guys, and Ace and Peter as the rock and roll guys—couldn’t have been more wrong. Being inept, unreliable, and marginally capable didn’t make you rock and roll. It made you inept, unreliable, and marginally capable. Ace was now, in Tommy’s words, “a fucking loser.”

In early 1997, we flew to Japan, where we were received like heroes once again, huge crowds awaiting us everywhere we appeared. We traveled between shows by bullet train. One afternoon, we went to board a train and an enormous crowd greeted us once again—kids gathered at the station to see us. We walked through the station surrounded by security people, and when we arrived on the platform, it too was mobbed with fans.

It was incredible—again, I felt blown away.

We should wake up every day and thank whatever God we believe in for what we are experiencing
.

And at that moment, Peter turned to me and said, “I’m sick and tired of this
Hard Day’s Night
shit.”

I was speechless.

I
n April 1997, before a show in Georgia, Peter started grousing that his hands hurt. “I can’t do the show,” he said, calling Doc from his hotel room.

“Fine,” said Doc. He then called Peter’s roadie, Eddie Kanon. “Shave your beard,” Doc said. “You’re on tonight.”

Peter heard about it and went ape shit. “The fans will never accept it!” he screamed. “You can’t put someone else out there in my makeup!”

“I disagree,” said Doc dryly.

Yeah, well, actually, Peter, we have a show to do
.

Eddie shaved and put on Peter’s makeup.

One, two, three, four, let’s go—we launched into the show. I introduced Eddie from the stage and—surprise, surprise—either nobody cared or nobody had time to care. This was the night and this would be the show.

We weren’t going to put on a show because Peter’s hands hurt? I don’t think so, pal. Because the show, as they say, must go on.

Ace started to get paranoid. He had rented an apartment off La Cienega Boulevard in L.A. and spent off-days there. But he was convinced the place was bugged—that he was
being watched
. So he pulled all the electrical wires and phone lines out of the place. The owners went crazy.

Ace also started studying our tour books, which contained the tour itinerary, site specifications—all sorts of pertinent info. He would bring the tour book to the dressing room and say, “How many people paid last night?”

Let’s say the answer that night was 18,700. “Bullshit!” he would scream. “It says right here 24,100!”

“Ace,” I’d try to explain, “that’s the venue
capacity,
not the number of tickets sold, and it’s not the capacity for a concert.”

“Bullshit!”

Part of Ace’s contract included a stipulation that he not get high. But he carried around a shoulder bag that might as well have been made of gold for the way Ace clung to it. He had pills tucked into the sleeves of his onstage outfit. The problem was, how could we enforce the contract? Stop the tour? Fine him?

During the tour Peter and Ace’s representative, George, demanded a meeting with the entire band to go over finances. His intention clearly was to show us and his clients that he was a force to be reckoned with. He came in wearing a blazer and tie in an effort to look businesslike, with Ace and Peter trailing behind him. He set up an easel and started pointing at numbers. His grasp of the business was not much better than Ace’s. After months of nonsensical requests and suggestions of poor budgeting, we’d finally had enough. We took him apart item by item. He was completely ill-equipped regarding finances or touring, and Ace and Peter were silenced when they saw it.

At the end of the tour, in July 1997, Peter and Ace demanded to be made full members of the band again. “We did things your way,” Peter said, “and we had a huge successful tour. Now we want to be equals.”

Being stunned by one of these guys was an almost daily occurrence, but this dropped my jaw.

Don’t you realize the reason it was a big success is because you had no input and no say?

We’d made a lot of money. And we’d made a lot of people happy. Peter and Ace were upset because they were now
rich
again but not
as rich
as me and Gene. There were people richer than I was, and I didn’t lose sleep over it. And anyway, I deserved more than Peter and Ace did—I stayed when they left. The door swings one way. I nurtured the band and kept it going. For that alone I deserved to be better compensated. In a million years, I would never have brought them in as equal members. Not a chance.

Peter and Ace were also totally unequipped to be involved in the decision-making process—they had no idea how the concert business and music business were run. And yet they seemed to think they had now earned the right to participate in decision-making in a world they knew nothing about.

It was sad to see. On the one hand, they sometimes acknowledged that they had made bad decisions in life. But on the other hand, they ultimately found solace in believing that they’d been taken advantage of—that they were victims, then and now.

When they’d struck out on their own after leaving KISS, they’d had tremendous advantages—name recognition, notoriety, industry contacts, money—but they could barely get arrested before the reunion tour. And they were broke. They’d been thankful at the start of the tour because they had found a way out of the miserable, marginal lives they were living. Now, just a year later, they were millionaires. But they were bitter. They were defensive. They were unrealistic about their own importance and abilities. They were, in their minds, victims. It was insane.

Ace kept grumbling that if he had retained the name KISS, the band would have been successful without me and Gene. He had another brilliant argument, too. “I’m actually responsible for the whole reunion,” Ace said.

Okay . . .

“If I had never quit, there wouldn’t be a reunion.”

Wow
.

“Everybody should be thanking me!” Ace continued. “This tour only happened because I quit.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that kind of “logic.”

Doc suggested we just get rid of Peter and Ace. He always believed we could do it without them. He saw no upside to continuing with them. “If you’re a good person, there’s very little I can do to make you a bad person,” Doc said. “But if you’re an asshole, there’s very little I can do to make you a good person.”

That was his way of saying there was no way around the dysfunctionality if we continued to work with Ace and Peter.

We had another idea: we would make a reunion record. I didn’t want to be plagued by thoughts of things I could have done. I didn’t want to have regrets about not giving this a real try. When we had put the band back together in its original form, I for one had hoped that could lead us to some spectacular places. I hoped that seeing what we had all learned and bringing all of our experiences to the table would be a winning formula. If nothing else, working together again would alleviate any lingering questions of culpability and show whether there were any mistakes that could be rectified. I was pretty sure I had the answers to those questions after the reunion tour: people don’t change, and we separate from them for a core reason. But I didn’t want to be wrong, I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to take it all the way.

To produce
Psycho Circus,
we brought in Bruce Fairbairn, who had been involved with some very big records from Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Loverboy, among others. He turned out to be ill-suited for the job. On his big records of the 1980s, he had worked with a team that included Bob Rock and Mike Fraser, both of whom went on to do tremendous things. Sometimes when a team splits and various members try things on their own, you get a better sense of who did what by who succeeds and who doesn’t.

Bruce chose awful songs from the demos to record for the album. The song that eventually made the most noise turned out to be the title track, “Psycho Circus.” Bruce wanted to leave it off the album. He was so far up Gene’s ass he not only couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear.

One day I finally had to say to Bruce, “This is your first KISS album. This is my eighteenth. You will leave here and go on to something else. I won’t. I have to stand by this record, so I’m going to do what I want.”

I went into the studio that weekend and recorded “Psycho Circus.”

Making the album was a disaster all around. Peter and Ace didn’t show up. I don’t think Bruce would have used Peter anyway, since he couldn’t play much beyond the dog tricks Tommy had taught him to get through the reunion set list.

Instead of working with Ace and Peter, we spent all our time talking to their attorneys. I wish their attorneys could have played on the album.

It would have been cheaper.

I
realized one day near the end of the tour that I had to use one hand to support the other arm when I reached up to grab something from a shelf. By the end of the tour, I couldn’t raise my arm. When I got home I went to see a doctor, who said I needed an operation to repair a badly torn rotator cuff. I told Pam I had to have surgery. When the day of the surgery arrived, she told me she had an audition the next day. She had already shipped Evan off to her parents’ place in Texas for a few weeks.

“I don’t want to compromise the audition,” she said, “so I’m going to stay in a hotel tonight and work on my scene.” Pam drove me home from the hospital and then left.

The doctor who performed the surgery sent me home with a prescription for Vicodin and a cooling system that pumped ice water over my shoulder from a bucket. I took my painkillers and refilled my bucket of ice water by myself throughout the night in a dark and empty house.

I can’t believe I’m alone
.
I can’t believe she did this
.

Pam wanted to believe she had given up her career for me or for Evan, when the truth was that her career had given her up. She just wasn’t getting work. I guess it was easier to blame me. Of course, I was to blame—but for different reasons. I had been intent on settling down, and even though Pam was a good person, she wasn’t the right person for me to do that with. I was bullheaded about making it happen and making it work in spite of things I saw from the very beginning that were contrary to what I wanted.

“Before I was married I could go to Europe whenever I wanted,” she said one day.

“Yeah,” I said, “ten years ago I was banging women whose names I didn’t know. Great. But that’s not now.”

Clearly, neither of us was happy.

Pam had become friends with an actress whose career suddenly surged when she was in her forties. She came to be seen as a symbol—her success represented a victory for middle-aged women against the stereotyping that many of them faced. I didn’t think she was particularly warm or particularly bright. Her husband, who struck me as a spoiled rich kid, didn’t make me feel any warmer about the couple. The actress had been invited onto Oprah Winfrey’s TV show as part of an ongoing segment on how various women managed to balance their independence with success and home life. In the run-up to her appearance, she said to me, “I don’t know what to say!” and asked me to help. So I wrote some pap for her that read like a bad episode of
Kung Fu.

If you think of yourself as a tree, your family are your roots, and the deeper your roots go, the more fruit the branches can bear
.

She actually used what I had written on TV. Oprah and the audience lapped it up. Wouldn’t it be hysterical if all the people watching realized that this liberated, intellectual woman had been spoon-fed her lines by that male chauvinist bozo from KISS?

At one point Vanna White, another friend of Pam’s, recommended that we go see the marriage counselor she and her husband were seeing. He looked like Curly from the Three Stooges and wore
Star Wars
ties and had
Star Trek
memorabilia around his office. Here we were sitting with Captain Curly on the Starship
Enterprise
and I was thinking it was all nuts. Vanna and her husband, incidentally, split up.

Pam and I went to another therapist during our first trial separation. She had us do exercises together—like pretending we had just started to date each other, or making gifts or drawing pictures for each other.

Great, when are we making pot holders?

Counseling with her went on for quite some time. But it struck me as a waste of time. The counselor may have meant well, but she should have been more direct. We didn’t deal with the core issue—the fact that we were on fundamentally different pages. If we had acknowledged that, perhaps we could have split up neatly. Maybe part of marriage counseling should be helping people to divorce well rather than having them make doodles for each other.