Face the Music: A Life Exposed (44 page)

During the separation, Gene generously offered me his guesthouse. I appreciated the offer and gladly accepted. When I first showed up, his kids, Nick and Sophie, greeted and welcomed me. It was a lovely gesture. My room felt like a college dorm, and it was the perfect place to reflect on my life.

A few months later, when the therapist suggested that Pam and I move back in together, I couldn’t see why and resisted. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been resolved. What was the point? Reluctantly, I agreed to move from the frying pan into the fire.

When
Psycho Circus
was ready for release, Doc booked us a Halloween show at Dodger Stadium on October 31, 1998, to kick off a tour to support the album. We put on a real spectacle, with circus sideshow acts on the huge stage. The Smashing Pumpkins opened the show and, in the spirit of Halloween, dressed like the Beatles circa 1964. As I got ready to walk to the stage, Pam let me know she was pissed off that I was distracted and not paying enough attention to her. I said my best bewildered apologies and headed out. It was another night of glorious pandemonium as the curtain dropped and the bombs went off.

We had booked rooms at the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood so we could all get ready together as a band and have a place to clean up afterwards. At the end of the show, we all hopped straight in a van in full makeup and costumes to return to the hotel. As we got near the Sunset Marquis, the streets became clogged. Soon, the van couldn’t move at all; thousands of people were out in the streets. Somehow, we’d forgotten the Hollywood Halloween parade. We were about seven blocks from the hotel when it dawned on me that we could get out and walk. “Come on, let’s go,” I said.

What? We’re in full gear!

“It’s Halloween. Everyone’s dressed up. It’ll be okay.”

We had no choice anyway. We climbed out of the van and started walking down the crowded street along with the costumed crowds. Soon, though, a few people stopped and stared at us. “Wow, man, great costumes! You really look like them!”

Me, Gene, Sophie, and Evan at the beach. Good times.

“Thanks a lot!” I said.

We kept walking. Other people gave us thumbs up.

“Cool costumes, guys!”

Nobody had a clue we were the real KISS, walking back from playing to forty thousand people.

As the
Psycho Circus
tour went on, it was clear to Doc, Gene, and me that we couldn’t continue. Ace wanted out to work on his fabled solo album—the one he had been working on since the 1980s. Peter had Gigi running interference for him and whispering in his ear.

The only way to keep the tour going was to talk about ending things. At some point I pulled Peter aside and told him, “You’re doing it again. You’re doing what you said you would never do again. You’re not the same happy guy who came to the reunion saying he had blown it the last time around. You’re doing the same thing all over again.”

Musically, we were regressing. At times Ace played songs in the wrong key without even realizing it.

Throughout the various reunion tours I had insisted on building in off-days to allow me to get home for visits with little Evan. He remained my priority—I thought the initial bonding time was critical. Once in a while Pam also traveled to meet me on the road. She was going to join me in Florida in January 1999, and I wanted to surprise her with a gift for her upcoming birthday. I had gotten her a Jaguar sedan a few years before, and the lease was coming to an end. She had always loved the two-seater Mercedes SL coupe, so I decided to buy her one for her birthday. I made some calls and arranged the whole thing. When she arrived on tour I told her, “I wanted to do something special for your birthday, but I didn’t want you to have to wait until then. You won’t get it until you’re back home, but I wanted you to know—I got you a white Mercedes 320SL.” Then I handed her the color brochure I’d been carrying around in anticipation of this moment.

“A 320?” she said. “I don’t want some
small
Mercedes.”

Oh, no
.

I wanted validation. Instead, I had to explain to her all the details about the car, how the 320SL was the same body and interior as a 500SL but that it had a six-cylinder engine instead of a V-8, which made no difference for the way she used her car around town. But as I began to explain all this, I suddenly changed my mind.

I could explain. I could apologize. I could change the order. But it didn’t matter. It was ruined.

“Forget it,” I said.

Happy birthday
.

On the way home from another tour leg where Pam joined me, she told me she had lost her engagement ring. I couldn’t believe she could lose a five-carat diamond, but she started sobbing. “Don’t worry,” I told her.

I’ll just get a new one
.

The day I picked up the new ring from the jewelers, I spotted Pam and her parents driving down Beverly Boulevard. I flagged them down. I couldn’t wait. I got out of my car and went over to hers to show her the ring.

She looked at it and said, “Oh, the setting isn’t what I expected.” I felt deflated.

Don’t I ever get the cookie? Don’t I ever get the pat on the head?

There was a lot of sexual temptation on tour, amplified by the way things were going with Pam. When it came to sex, I was an alcoholic, and touring was an open bar. But if my marriage wasn’t going to work out, I wanted to be clear on
why
it didn’t work. What was true of the band—and the reason I wanted to try to make an album with the original four guys—was true of my marriage: if I was going to walk away from something, the most important thing was to know I did everything I could to try to make it work. I didn’t want any lingering what-ifs. I didn’t want my marriage to end and wonder whether part of the reason was because I had cheated. So I didn’t. I would have hated myself. It would have confirmed my worst feelings about myself.

It was depressingly familiar territory. Dysfunction in the band, dysfunction at home, feeling lonely, and hating each day for the mess I had created.

A
t the end of 1998, I got a call from my agent at CAA, the talent agency that represented us. “Are you interested in theater?” he asked me.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Well, you would have to audition.”

“What for?”

“
Phantom of the Opera.
”

Wow! Phantom!

“Absolutely! Where and when?”

I realized immediately this was a case of “stunt casting,” that is, bringing in somebody from a realm other than Broadway or the legitimate theater world in order to spur ticket sales. My fame got me the audition. But I wasn’t insulted. This was
Phantom
! The masked musician whose hideous deformed face was revealed. The show that had taken my breath away in London ten years before.
Phantom
!

Even so, I wouldn’t have agreed to audition if there had been conflicting plans for the band. But we would have a big block of free time once the
Psycho Circus
tour ended, and it would be a long time before I would think about making another album. A very long time indeed.

The audition was for the Toronto production, which was then in its tenth year. If I made the cut, I would take over the role in May 1999. The
Psycho Circus
tour ran through the end of April, and then we were pretty much off until 2000, when we would go back out for a Farewell Tour that was already in the works. Who knew what would happen after the Farewell Tour? Musical theater was an avenue I now wanted to explore—I might need a second act soon enough.

KISS had the month of January 1999 off before playing the Super Bowl pregame show on January 31. The audition was scheduled to take place in New York, since all principals in the show had to audition and be signed off on by Hal Prince and his staff, who did the casting worldwide. Rock star or not, they weren’t going to jeopardize a billion-dollar franchise.

I spent weeks practicing the three songs that were required for the audition. Playing the Phantom meant so much to me that I also wanted to try to control the audition situation as much as possible to give myself the best shot. I realized the singing would be only one of the determining factors in getting the part.

When I finally went to the audition, I walked in and made small talk with the staff. I flirted a little with the woman who was there to sing the role of Christine with me. People were sitting at desks like judges at the Olympics, as if they were waiting to hold up numbers after I sang. I spoke to them, made some jokes, and, knowing I would get only one chance, waited until I felt comfortable and ready.

Don’t blow this
.

When I finished a full audition of songs and scene blocking, I knew I had nailed it. Sure enough, my agent called me soon after to tell me I’d been offered the role.

To make it official, I did a press conference after the
Psycho Circus
tour resumed. As I talked with reporters on the conference call, the same thoughts kept going through my head:

I’m fucked. I can’t get out of this now
.

It would be a trial by fire, because there was very little time between the end of the KISS tour and my
Phantom
debut. I had muscled my voice through the audition, but could I really do it night after night?

I had to learn the entire show while on tour. I memorized the melodies and lyrics during downtime and off-days, and I tested myself during KISS shows. I sang songs on the side of the stage whenever I had a break—like when the other band members had their solos. I figured that if I could still focus in the midst of complete bedlam and chaos, I really knew the material.

KISS wrapped up the
Psycho Circus
tour in Mexico City; right after the show I cut my hair and headed up to Toronto. Rehearsals started immediately at a studio used by theaters and the local ballet company. When I walked in the first day, the only person there was the show’s musical director. He seemed like a bit of a tight-ass, and it was clear we were from different musical backgrounds. I was pretty sure he saw me as somebody without any pedigree coming in to desecrate the theater. The first thing he said was, “Where’s your script?”

“I memorized it,” I said.

He looked at me like I was nuts. I told him, “I may be a mutt in a kennel of purebreds here, but if you tell me what you want, I’ll give it to you.”

He sat down at a piano and we started working, just the two of us.

It was the hardest work I’ve ever done. Six hours a day. I went home every night slumped in the back of a taxi, exhausted emotionally and—because of the demands of singing a different way and the physicality of the role and the staging—physically. I’d be damned if I was going to go in there and turn the show into the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
. This was a big, legit show with tremendous history, and I wasn’t going to do a rock version of it.

Almost immediately I saw some problems navigating certain vocal passages. I had to figure out the breath control to make it through lines I hadn’t written. I guess without thinking about it, when you write songs, you write what you can sing. Now I was singing lines that involved things beyond my experience, things that weren’t intuitive.

With just a few weeks to go before I had to take the stage, I decided I should reach out and get help. I had never had much luck with vocal coaches before, because they generally tried to completely change the way I sang—they used a cookie-cutter approach and gave rock singers stilted, pseudo-operatic voices, disregarding what anyone had built naturally. You often hear those voices in bands that sing about slaying dragons and other mythological pap. After meeting another one of those typical coaches, I asked the musical director of the show for a recommendation. He suggested Jeffrey Huard, the previous musical director of
Phantom.

Jeffrey was very encouraging and supportive. “They hired you
because
of the way you sing,” he said. “Your voice is terrific, and we don’t want to throw away the engine. We’ll just fine-tune it.”

From that point on, during the morning hours before rehearsals, I worked with Jeffrey on my technique and comfort. He took me through exercises and scales and helped me with the phonetics and word pronunciation of musical theater.

As I worked on scenes at rehearsals every day, I wore a T-shirt and jeans and a cape, and they handed me things to use as props. Here’s a broomstick—it’s an oar. Here’s a cardboard box—play it like it’s an organ. If I could turn those things into the objects they were supposed to be, that reality would only be reinforced once I was onstage with the actual props in hand.

The Pantages Theatre, where the show was staged, was a beautifully renovated space with an orchestra pit and a marquee out front—with my name on it. It was all about to happen! But days before opening, when we started to rehearse key scenes in the theater with the orchestra, I suddenly had problems because I couldn’t hear on my right side. I hadn’t realized my deafness would be so difficult to deal with. The orchestra was far enough away and I was singing loud enough that it was very hard to hear the monitors and stay with the orchestra. But I found I caught on pretty fast after I looked like an idiot a few times.