Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (9 page)

When Ron Johnsen presented the Wicked Lester demo to Epic Records, the label liked the songs, but thought Coronel’s afro-and-glasses look distracted from the band’s vibe. So Wicked Lester replaced him with session player Ron Leejack and continued working on their debut. A year later, they handed the album over to Epic, which hated it and dropped the band. Discouraged but not demoralized, Simmons and Stanley decided they needed a flashier presentation and brasher sound to succeed. So they fired Zarrella and Ostrander and finalized their lineup with drummer Peter Criss, who had run a “drummer seeks band” ad in
Rolling Stone
, and guitarist (Paul) Ace Frehley, who replied to an ad Gene and Paul placed in the
Village Voice
.

PAUL STANLEY:
The first time we played with Peter, it didn’t sound too good. But something made us try it again, and it sounded much better. It was pretty clear at this point that this was going to work. Plus, he totally looked like a rock star.

GENE SIMMONS:
Ace came in looking like a bum. He was wearing different-colored sneakers—I think it was red and orange. We were having a conversation with someone else we were auditioning and he walked right by, plugged in his guitar, and started messing with the amp. We said, “Uh, we’re talking to someone. Would you wait until it’s your turn?” He was totally oblivious to anything else that was going on—just totally rude. So we were like, “Let’s let this guy try out and get him out of here.” We told him we were going to play “Deuce” and that when we reached the solo part he should let fly. We weren’t expecting much. But we started playing and hit the solo part, and Ace blew us away. We could not believe it. We knew that was the sound of KISS.

PAUL STANLEY:
We looked like rock stars, we acted like rock stars, but if you had seen our practice space at the loft at 10 East Twenty-third Street in New York, you would have laughed.

GENE SIMMONS:
There was wall-to-wall humanity sleeping in the hallways of our loft, and you’d step over whatever needed a good night’s sleep to get to your practice space. We were paying $200 a month rent. The place was rat and roach infested. We covered the walls with egg cartons to muffle the sound so we could really play loud, but some of the broken eggs and the shells stuck to the cartons, and the roaches loved it. It was like an “à la carton” feast for them. After we hired Peter and Ace, we’d rehearse until one or two in the morning almost every day. When the lights went out you’d hear the roaches running all over the place. It sounded like a very bad drum solo. Once I had a girl in bed with me and when she woke up there was a dead roach under her. She didn’t appreciate that much.

PAUL STANLEY:
I was driving a cab, and I got Ace [a job] doing that too for a while. We’d drive around, show up for practice, and afterwards I’d get back in my cab and make some money. We wrote “Strutter,” “Black Diamond,” and “Deuce” in that place.

Inspired by makeup-wearing artists like the New York Dolls and David Bowie, KISS started painting their faces in early 1973, but realized almost immediately that the androgynous glam look wasn’t for them. So they went the opposite way, creating black-and-white kabuki-style designs that masked each member as a separate character. Simmons was the fire-breathing, blood-drinking demon; Stanley was the starchild; Frehley a spaceman; and Criss a cat.

GENE SIMMONS:
We knew we had to move away from the New York Dolls thing. So we bought some black T-shirts and some glittery pants that circus performers wore. Then we went down to the West Village—the gay section of the city—and bought leather items at a hardcore sex shop. I don’t know why we did it—as far as I knew, none of us had ever tried the S&M or gay thing. But there was something about the studs and the leather that seemed right to us.

PAUL STANLEY:
There were no I-wanna-be-a-rock-star-stores [like Hot Topic] back then. So we had no choice but to go down to the forbidden area of the city and buy our stage clothes. It wasn’t easy shopping in these stores, but we knew it would pay off.

GENE SIMMONS:
We loaded in for our gigs in the afternoon because we wanted everybody to think we had a road crew. They would show up and, lo and behold, there was our equipment, which consisted of speaker cabinets with no speakers in them, just to make it look like we had a Roland amp, and we would tell the guy not to put a spotlight on them, because if they did, you’d see right through them.

PAUL STANLEY:
We never wanted to play the same area too often because we wanted people to believe that we were busy. While the other trendy bands were hanging out at Max’s Kansas City doing a fashion show for each other, we were practicing.

GENE SIMMONS:
Today, everybody thinks there was this great rush forward and everyone was really believing in what we were doing. The truth is very different. One time, Paul left my bass under the bed before we left for the gig. Well, you know the old adage, “Is there a doctor in the house?” We went onstage and made an announcement, “Does anybody have a bass?” This kid in the audience says he’s got one, so he goes home and gets a hack-strung bass guitar no better than the box that you have at home with the rubber bands attached to it—the worst piece of shit you ever heard in your life. Somehow we got through the show.

Once they had fine-tuned their craft, KISS again invited Epic vice president of A&R Don Ellis down for a showcase. The band performed their best new songs, including “Firehouse,” “Strutter,” and “Deuce,” but Ellis was used to the pop-rock sound of Wicked Lester (whose record he had previously rejected), not the pedal-to-the-floor adrenaline rush of KISS. The dramatic embellishments only added to his lack of interest, and Ellis opted out for the second time.

GENE SIMMONS:
We played “Firehouse,” and at the end of the song we start ringing this bell, and Ellis thinks it’s a real fire. So Paul runs over to the corner and grabs a red pail with the word
fire
on it and throws it at Don, who freaks as a bucketful of confetti goes all over the place. He gets up and starts to walk out, saying, “Okay, thank you, I’ll call you.” As he’s heading for the door, he trips and falls. Then, Peter [Criss’s] drunken brother, who was sitting behind Don, throws up on his foot. We never heard from him again.

PAUL STANLEY:
Fortunately, Ron Johnsen, who did our Wicked Lester album, still owed us $1,000 for some backup singing Gene and I had done for him. So we called him and he said he could pay us in studio time. We agreed, and we knew Eddie Kramer hung out there and produced. He was the best. He had worked with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, you name it. So we said to Ron, “We’ll take the money you owe us in recording time, but only if Eddie Kramer produces our demo.” After we did the demo with Eddie we got signed by Neil Bogart and ended up on Casablanca Records.

While KISS knew how they wanted to look almost from the start, it took Judas Priest some soul searching—and shopping—to find the leather, studs, and roaring motorcycles that became a template for metal in the early eighties. In the meantime, they honed their sound to a razor sheen.

IAN HILL:
In the seventies, we wore velvet and satin and tried to squeeze our girlfriends’ shoes on. The way people dressed was still very hippie-based, and that flowed over into our stage clothes.

GLENN TIPTON:
If you look at what Hendrix and Cream were wearing, we weren’t far from that. We had flares and there were a few Cuban heels on the old boots. Very dangerous onstage, I may add. Fortunately, we all managed to get through that era without snapping our ankles.

ROB HALFORD:
There were tremendous things happening with Priest in the seventies. We got our record contract. We release
Rocka Rolla
[in 1974], which was a good first effort. Suddenly your music is available around the world, which is tremendously exciting. We had great tracks like “Never Satisfied” and “Cheater.” But I think a lot of people say it’s a band’s second release that becomes very, very important to them, and that was certainly the case with
Sad Wings of Destiny
in 1976.

MARTIN POPOFF:
It felt like that Jimi Hendrix moment where something just descended from the skies—a bunch of nobodies not even on a major label making a record that just wiped the slate clean with everybody. One of the interesting things about
Sad Wings of Destiny
is that it arrived at a time when all the big dinosaur bands of the era seemed to be faltering somewhat. Judas Priest had very dramatic cover art, very religious and serious-sounding names of songs, this operatic singer that could out-Plant Robert Plant, and above all, the riffs on that album were the best riffs anybody had written to date in heavy metal, and there were twelve of them in every song.

IAN HILL:
Unfortunately, our label back then, Gull Records, didn’t have enough money to promote and produce their artists. They were waiting for us to make the company [famous] rather than the other way around. They couldn’t afford to send us to America and you
do
have to make it in America to become successful, so we remained unknown there for a while. The thing is, when you’re starting up you’ve got nothing, so when someone hands you a record contract, no matter how bad it is, it’s hard to turn down.

ROB HALFORD:
We all had second jobs. I was managing a menswear shop. I would run home after work, jump in the van, and drive to a gig. We’d load the gear onto the stage, get changed into whatever we had to wear, do the show, break the stuff down, put it back in the van, and drive home, getting back at daybreak just in time to get ready for work.

IAN HILL:
I drove a van for five pounds a day, and it kept myself and my girlfriend, Sue, going. There was a time when Ken, myself, and our manager, Dave Corke, lived in a one-bedroom apartment with girlfriends. We couldn’t ever afford to get smashed.

ROB HALFORD:
We went to Gull and asked for 25 quid (about $38) each a week to live on so we could be professional musicians and not have to keep running back home after shows to our second lines of work, and they turned us down.

GLENN TIPTON:
We used to share bags of chips. That was a sheer luxury. I think that helped shape our character.

ROB HALFORD:
We’d get in the van and take the ferry to Europe and play any pub shows we could get, then we’d sleep in the van. There was never any question of, “Oh, fuck this. This absolutely sucks. I’m not gonna do it.” We were so excited to be on this great adventure.

GLENN TIPTON:
When Sony took us over and we left Gull Records, that was a big moment for us. Sony was very supportive and that helped us to address the world stage. In the States we did six weeks alone in clubs and bars, and we played with REO Speedwagon [and Black Oak Arkansas] just trying to get the word out. Then we were offered two shows on the West Coast with Led Zeppelin at the Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum. We got very little money and we had to hang around for two weeks in the cheapest motels with no air conditioning and very little food. But we stuck around and did these shows, and that actually helped to establish us. We had a great reaction. The combination of the deal with Sony and those two shows brought us to the attention of a lot of people. America really welcomed Priest with open arms.

Even though they were signed, Priest lacked the finances to mount an extravagant production. By contrast, even when they were eating ramen noodles and Chinese takeout, KISS looked and acted like rock stars. Finally after their fourth release, 1975’s concert album
KISS Alive
, produced by Eddie Kramer, KISS achieved mainstream popularity. To perpetuate their success, the band hired esteemed producer Bob Ezrin for 1976’s
Destroyer
.

BOB EZRIN (producer):
I was at City TV in Toronto doing an interview. As I was going up the stairs, KISS, having been on the same show, was coming down. We met in the stairwell and I said, “If you ever need any help, call me.” Within a couple months Bill Aucoin [KISS’s then-manager] reached out about doing their next record. I saw them play at an arena in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The place was half full, but everybody in the joint was on their feet from the time the band started until the show was over. The one thing I noticed, aside from the fact that everyone knew the words for every song and were all singing along, was that the audience was all teenage boys. I thought, “This is an opportunity. If they could just get to the girls, this would be the biggest band in the world.” I met them in New York and said, “I don’t want to make you into softies. You can still be the bad guys, but let’s be like Marlon Brando in
On the Waterfront
.” When Brando played the leader of the motorcycle gang he was dangerous, scary, and every mother’s nightmare, yet underneath it all there was this certain sensitivity and beauty that made him attractive. Every girl in the world wanted to mother, nurture, and fuck him. We went into
Destroyer
with that in mind.