Face the Music: A Life Exposed (50 page)

I had sometimes worried during Erin’s pregnancy how I could love another child with the same depth and effortless commitment to giving my all with which I loved Evan. That fear evaporated as I held Colin and realized that we have an unlimited capacity to create and give love. I would dedicate myself yet again to another amazing little boy, and together we would find out all that we could learn from each other.

Outside my growing family, Gene and I still fought on occasion. His use of the KISS logo and makeup and his self-promotion in the press escalated throughout the late nineties and beyond. I saw the term “marketing genius” used in reference to Gene quite frequently in the wake of subsequent tours. It turned my stomach. Contrary to the notion that Gene spearheaded or maximized our merchandise empire, the truth is that over the years the vast majority of licensees have sought us out and all solicitations go through our product development team. Neither Gene nor I has had an active hand in any significant deals. He was no marketing genius. He just took credit for things. It was unwarranted, selfish, and hurtful, and there was no way to excuse it. Calculated strategist? Sure. Genius? No.

After the Farewell Tour I saw sketches of a concept for a cartoon series Gene had sold. The cartoon character was basically Gene in KISS makeup. It was about a guy in a band. “Hey, man, that’s a KISS entity,” I said.

“Oh, no, this is not a KISS image,” he said. “It’s totally different.”

That kind of stuff still riled me up. There he was sitting across the table from me lying about something that clearly fell under our partnership agreement, and he knew it. “Do you think you’re talking to one of the other idiots you’re in business with?” I asked him. “Are you kidding me?”

That got settled real quickly. Fairness prevailed, but not by Gene’s volition.

Beyond the anger I felt each time he showed such blatant disregard for our partnership, my feelings were also hurt that the guy with whom I had built all of this would treat me—when it served his purposes—with the same indifference I often saw him exhibit in his dealings with people I knew he didn’t care about.

Still, despite the hiccups, Gene and I have never gotten along better than during the past decade. We have very few points of contention these days. We’ve been friends for more than forty years and have built great lives for ourselves. I think that over time I came to recognize the fundamental difference in our personalities. I wanted to improve myself and remedy the issues that plagued me. But he chose to ignore his underlying issues and instead committed himself to creating an external façade and persona that, unfortunately, he felt required him to knock down anyone who threatened his singularity in the spotlight. Earlier, I could never understand why he didn’t want to resolve issues he had. I could never understand why someone so intelligent wouldn’t do something to make life easier for himself—and probably for me and other people around him. After all, I know the never-ending effort it takes to keep up a persona and maintain a front to shield yourself.

Somewhere along the line I came to understand that his attitude was, “Why bother?” Once I reconciled myself to how different we were in that regard, our relationship became easier. Gene and I are very different, and that chemistry and contrast continue to be keys to our success.

These days, we laugh at each other’s quirks.

Another thing that has changed is what I expect from Gene. I expect less; I’m more realistic. I’m very clear about what’s acceptable to me and what isn’t. I found the secret to a great partnership was knowing its limitations. If you don’t ask of a relationship what it can’t give you, you won’t be disappointed. Forty years on in an immensely fruitful and successful partnership, I express my thoughts regarding Gene with acceptance as opposed to animosity. He continues to have his meetings sitting behind a big desk in an office surrounded by wall-to-wall cases filled with KISS merchandise, never clarifying the fact that rather than being the creative force behind it all, he is in reality just one of the four faces on each box. This stuff still goes on, but I’m okay with it.

I still want credit for what I do and achieve. But in the wake of all the positive changes in my personal life, I have stopped caring as much. I now consider my life to be so rich that many of the other concerns that once were so important seem like a waste of precious time. What I have gained—inwardly and outwardly—from a happy marriage and family far outweigh whatever I might have been looking for as far as perceptions about the inner workings of KISS. Those perceptions were—and are—far more important, and perhaps fulfilling, to Gene. Life has to be about what you get in exchange for what you give up, and the things I now hold dear aren’t worth giving up for fleeting publicity hits. If you define yourself by deals and media coverage, you’re always searching for the next fix. That’s life on a hamster wheel. If you can’t stop running, you aren’t really free. You remain a slave if you don’t figure out something internal to make you happy.

The same is true as far as touring is concerned. We don’t have to tour all the time. We are our own bosses.

KISS is my work, and it’s spectacular and rewarding work in so many ways, but there is room for a life outside the band. Every week I spend on the road is a week I don’t spend with the people who matter most in the world to me. Those seven days are more precious to me now than ever before. After I married Erin, I began to put parameters on what I was willing to do and who I was willing to spend time with. There would be no compromises; life was too short for that.

KISS isn’t life. It’s a facet of life
.

At times, when Doc came to us with proposals for things, I began to say, “I’d rather be home.” Gene was always puzzled by this.

“You’re going to say no to money?” he would ask in utter disbelief.

“Yeah,” I said. “The question is, What’s more money going to get me? And what will I have to give up to get it?”

For him, it was simple. As Doc jokes, when Gene is ninety-five years old, he’ll be standing at the end of his driveway with his walker, flicking his tongue at passing cars. We all deserve to find happiness, and I hope Gene does, now and in the future.

But to me, there’s more to life. The money I lose by not doing a show won’t change my world, but being away from my family will. I weigh one against the other. How much do I need? Sure, I’d always like to have more—who wouldn’t? But I don’t
need
more if the sacrifice is too great—not just to my wife and kids, but to me. Sometimes what I would miss out on isn’t worth the money.

My children turned out to be the ultimate resolution to issues that plagued me my entire life. You can’t change your past, but you
can
change your life and the lives of those around you. I’ve come to terms with things about myself that I’ve had to wrestle with, and as a result I have more to give—because I know myself more. Having children allowed me a second chance at the childhood I never had. It’s cathartic to raise my kids in a loving and nurturing way that I myself never knew. I’ve been able to give my kids the life I didn’t have, by treating them the way I wished I had been treated, by helping them feel the way I wished I had felt.

Maybe not everyone is affected in the same way by what a family and a deep relationship can offer. As the things I missed most in life until very late, they mean the world to me. Truly sharing with somebody, baring your soul to someone, having someone know your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and fears—and doing the same for that person—offers a calm and a sense of refuge that no hotel, no matter how luxurious, can rival.

A
ll my feelings of love and pride for KISS were amplified by starting to tour with Tommy and Eric as permanent members. I quickly realized that I would rather not perform anymore than have to deal with people I didn’t want to be around. I could never go back to the drama, the lowered standards, the disrespect for the craft. It would be whoring myself.

It was amazing to have people in the band whose mentality was,
What can I do to make the band bigger?
instead of,
What can I do to make myself bigger?
You accomplish the latter by the former anyway, but if you make the latter your priority, it doesn’t work. With Ace and Peter, that’s the way it was. With Tommy and Eric, there was a work ethic—and it started with taking pride in what they did individually and what we did as a team.

Of course, a certain segment of the audience didn’t want the reunion era to be finished. People occasionally dismissed Eric and Tommy as imposters. But when I stood onstage with them, I had the opposite impression: if anyone had been imposters, it was Peter and Ace during the reunion tours. Whatever ability those guys may once have had was long gone—or rather, long discarded. They were a distortion of anything they had ever been. With apologies to anyone who doesn’t want to hear it, Ace and Peter simply couldn’t play their instruments by the end. And they didn’t care, which in my mind was perhaps an even bigger sin. If people want to talk about seeing the band as a meal ticket, they can’t point at me or Gene. We were already eating well. Only Peter and Ace treated KISS as a meal ticket, and even then, they couldn’t recognize their good fortune sufficiently enough to punch it.

The new lineup of the band was much more the band as I envisioned it—and the way people heard it in their minds. I always wanted the audience to feel that we surpassed their expectations, and it had been a long time since we had been able to do that. With Tommy and Eric, we did it. The band could sing so well, in fact, that people constantly asked us whether we used prerecorded background vocals. Nope. We just finally had four strong band members.

Through all of this, KISS wasn’t just surviving, it was thriving.

Once I rekindled my friendship with Bill Aucoin, he continued to come to occasional concerts. I loved the fact that we had both come to terms with personal demons; I loved where we both had ended up—both in stable relationships and peaceful mental states. In a way, I found with Bill what I wasn’t able to find in the band reunion. We were able to bring things full circle, put things to rest, and look back and enjoy what we had created together.

Then over lunch in Florida one afternoon, he told me he had advanced-stage prostate cancer. I asked what I could do to be helpful, and Bill told me he worried about his partner, Roman, and what would happen to him if Bill lost his battle. I talked to Gene, and we decided to buy the condo they were living in and give it to Roman.

At the end of a European tour in 2008, I rented a beautiful villa in Tuscany. The place looked like a three-story museum in the middle of the countryside. I made arrangements for Erin, Evan, and Colin to join me there, along with my parents, Erin’s mom, her mom’s husband, and my good friend and security man, Danny Francis. Erin and I had been holding off telling everyone some big news until we were all around the kitchen table eating a home-cooked dinner. We started our meal with a couple of bottles of lambrusco, a bubbly red wine with no pretenses of chic or airs of high society. Then we told them: Erin and I were expecting a baby girl!

Funny thing about choosing names. We just weren’t cool enough to name our children Pineapple or Astro Girl. We loved old-school names and chose Sarah Brianna for our first girl. Colin’s delivery had been an easy twenty-five minutes of pushing for Erin, and we assumed Sarah’s would be similar. No such luck. Sarah wasn’t in the proper position in the birth canal, and ultimately a C-section was needed. Watching it performed was shocking and certainly bore no resemblance to natural delivery, but at the end of it, there was Sarah—who was absolutely gorgeous. Everyone commented on her angelic face and perfect upturned nose.

There were some post-surgery complications that led to days of unspeakable pain and very real danger for Erin—including the risk of losing a kidney—and so I called some “big guns” I thankfully knew. A group of specialists descended on Erin’s room like a SWAT team, and a series of quick tests found the root of the problem.

Erin endured weeks of risky surgery to reattach things and reroute the problems. But thanks to a stellar team that included Dr. Stephen Sachs and Dr. Ed Phillips at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Erin made a slow but full recovery. Once she and Sarah were finally home, I got to experience a bond I had always heard was so unique—the bond between a father and daughter. Sarah melted my heart and awakened a spot in it that she alone owned.

In 2009 KISS went back to South America and found ourselves treated like visiting dignitaries. When we arrived in São Paulo, one of the world’s most populous cities, it was rush hour and the freeways were gridlocked. Suddenly about three dozen motorcycle cops shot ahead of our vans and cleared the entire highway between the airport and our hotel. The overpasses, on-ramps, exits—everything was blocked by the police so we four idiots could get to our hotel. It was unbelievable. Certainly the motorcade of the President of the United States of America wouldn’t have gotten better traffic control. At the end of the ride, we took photos with the cops. They were fans.

Despite the fact that the new KISS lineup proved an immediate success and also had long-term durability, it wasn’t clear we needed to go back into the studio. We certainly didn’t need to do it for the money. And besides, the experience of
Psycho Circus
had left a sour taste in my mouth and totally turned me off to the idea of recording. I couldn’t have articulated what exactly it would take to change my mind, but over time I began to figure out a set of prerequisites that might make it possible for me to make another KISS album.

For one thing, I needed to have final say. I wasn’t going to work on something I couldn’t be proud of. I was through second-guessing things or being second-guessed. At least if we did something I loved, there would be one big fan regardless of what else happened.

For another, I wasn’t going to work on an album unless everyone put in the same amount of effort. There wasn’t going to be any sense of entitlement or special treatment. Everyone would have to earn their place, and I wouldn’t put up with any mediocre songs just because of a sense of job tenure.