Face the Music: A Life Exposed (18 page)

We had to win over audiences when we opened for other bands, and we relished the challenge. This, however, did not look like fun. This wasn’t an audience I thought I could win over, and I had no desire to go out and get ridiculed.

Bill asked, “Who wants to sit in the chair and do the talking during the panel discussion portion of the show?”

I said, “Not me, I’m staying backstage.”

Gene went out. He didn’t know what to say and described himself as “evil incarnate” and stuck out his tongue. Totie Fields, a comedienne who was also a guest that night, dismissed him as a nice Jewish boy, despite the demon getup. He came off pretty goofy. But his being the default spokesman of the band would lead to countless more episodes of him using “I” instead of “we,” subtly and not so subtly implying that he was the frontman, lead singer, and mastermind all wrapped up in one. He never attempted to clarify his role or refute media assumptions. Why would he? Those false assumptions were based on Gene’s own statements. Once again I found myself scratching my head at his refusal to be honest and his insistence on using every opportunity to discuss things from his own perspective rather than the band’s collective perspective. He was cheating.

Earlier that month we’d opened a show at the Agora in Cleveland for Rory Gallagher. When we walked out onto the stage, a girl in the front started elbowing her boyfriend and laughing.

You won’t be laughing for long
.

We blew the place up. Smoke filled the entire venue. These places were not ventilated well. Back then our pyro guys had to make their own flashpots. Each day they built enclosures and filled them with explosives. One night the flashpots could be like kernels of popcorn being popped, and the next night they might blow a hole in the stage. We didn’t have to apply for permits or have a fire marshal inspect what we were doing—nobody knew what we were doing, and nobody had done it before. We just blew crap up and set off explosions with no oversight or expertise. It was intense.

On nights like that I might as well have turned over an hourglass and waited for the sand to trickle down. It was like clockwork. We always won over even the most skeptical people. We never failed to get a crowd on its feet. Of course, no show, no matter how big, could mask a crappy band. And KISS started with the four of us
bringing it
. You can have a beautiful car, with a sparkling paint job and loads of chrome trim, but if it doesn’t have a great engine, it isn’t going anywhere. We provided the engine, and we won audiences because of the power of the four characters and the music we made.

Another night we opened for a midlevel British blues band called Savoy Brown at a jam-packed ice-skating rink in Michigan. Some of the guys in the band had never seen us, and they came to the side of the stage as we started playing and laughed in full view of us. I was laughing inside, though, because I knew how tough it was to follow KISS. And sure enough, they may have been laughing during our set, but they were crying when half the audience left during theirs. They changed their tune after that.

Some of the musicians we met I liked as people, and we played with a lot of bands whose music I liked and respected, but our attitude as a band was always the same:
We will annihilate you
. When I reached the stage steps, it was no longer a Kumbaya moment. Even though it wasn’t conceived in hatred or animosity, we were deadly serious about the fact that we wanted to
kill
other bands when we hit that stage. Not the audience, the other band. We took huge pride in what we were doing, we were focused, we were driven, and we wanted to decimate them.

We are KISS!

We were missionaries for KISS’s brand of rock and roll, and we would not stop until we converted everyone.

Sometimes our missionary fervor took on biblical proportions. One night in Fayetteville, North Carolina, our bombs set the curtain on fire—the curtain owned by the headliners, Black Oak Arkansas. We got thrown off that tour.

In the Deep South, people loved us when we were onstage. We had a license to be freaks onstage and were welcomed as entertainers. But offstage, people wanted to kill us. As soon as we left the venues and were just guys in platform boots with big hair, wearing scarves, jewelry, and women’s blouses, we felt hunted. Outside of rock clubs, people had zero tolerance for guys who looked to them like “fags,” which people constantly shouted at us. I kept worrying we might end up squealing like pigs, like in the scene from the movie
Deliverance,
which I had seen the year before.

I realized I’d grown up pretty insulated in New York City, not understanding the kind of anger that looking different could elicit in other places. Still, I sensed the discrimination more than I saw it. That couldn’t be said for some of our crew members, like our road manager J.R. Smalling—the guy who came up with our stage introduction, “You wanted the best, you got the best.” J.R. was black, and for several days when we had a local driver in the South, the white driver kept referring to J.R. as “Leroy.” I also heard the N-word hurled around a lot.

We didn’t attract hecklers, though. For one thing, I think people who came to shows found us somewhat intimidating. And our willfulness was obvious, too, our commitment to what we were doing. When we ran into people outside the show calling us names, I wanted to say, “Hang on a minute—I’m the same guy you were clapping for. I put down my guitar and you want to lynch me?”

We stuck close to our motels in places where we didn’t feel safe. We ate at the motels, got in our car, and hit the road. We weren’t big on stopping at Billy Bob’s Diner or Bubba’s Barbeque. We got our asses from point A to point B.

We passed Graceland at some point along the road, and I was very disappointed. It just looked like an anonymous doctor’s house in the suburbs. I had expected a massive mansion. I opted to go off with a couple of women who owned a clothing store in Memphis instead of taking the tour of Elvis’s place.

Even in the South or in other conservative places like Salt Lake City, we found our fans or they found us. And, always, women. Girls waited in the lobby or out front of our hotel rooms until we were available. We could have had one of those machines you see at the motor vehicles department—take a number and wait for it to be called. Most of the time, I didn’t even know the girls’ names.

It still amazed me that the women I met on the road came to my room with barely so much as an introduction when I figured there were probably guys in town who had to date them for months to get anywhere. It all quickly became normal. And what a relief. I was now getting laid and felt desired without any fear of emotional connection, which was the last thing I wanted. I got what I craved without any of the dangers, as I saw it. Because of my insecurities, my ear, my hearing, and the defenses I had built up over the course of my life, emotional connection continued to frighten me. It meant having to open up and give something of myself, which I didn’t want to do.

We couldn’t afford individual rooms yet. I roomed with Peter, and we both hoped we wouldn’t be alone in bed when the other guy had someone there. We never had any privacy. But it was certainly nicer when both beds were filled rather than one of us having to put a pillow over his head. In those cases I hoped for a quick few minutes with Peter’s guest if he left the room. It made sleeping easier. Eventually Sean Delaney began to see it as his job to kick girls out of our rooms under the pretense that we needed sleep. Sean wasn’t fond of the girls, whom he often called “breeders.”

That first six months of touring in 1974 was a bit of a blur: long drives punctuated by stops in venues with names like Thunderchicken, Mother’s, and Flash’s. We played college auditoriums, gymnasiums, and even a jai alai stadium in Florida; we made it as far as Alaska, where we played outdoors at a drive-in cinema and the space heaters at the front of the stage kept throwing the metal strings on our guitars out of tune. Even during that first blurred year, however, we found places that became favorites—like the Electric Ballroom in Atlanta. Somehow we headlined blocks of shows there. We played four nights in a row in June; after we drew crowds for several more nights in July, they booked us for four additional nights in September. The parties and hospitality on all levels were never ending, and we got excited whenever we saw it on the itinerary. Any girlfriend or wife in New York didn’t.

KISS also clearly connected with Detroit from the get-go. People there got us. It was such a fertile area for rock that we loved, too—from Mitch Ryder to Bob Seger to Alice Cooper. Ann Arbor had the MC5 and the Stooges, Flint had Grand Funk Railroad. Michigan embraced us, and before the end of 1974, Detroit became the first place we could headline a theater. I would always recall it as the first city to open its arms, and its legs, to us.

Through all of this touring we didn’t have multiple sets of stage clothes, so we could always find the dressing room at a venue by following the stench; as the smell got stronger, I knew I was getting closer. Some days we did two sets, an early show and a late show, but even on days with just one, the clothes never dried. Putting on damp, fetid clothing made my skin crawl. Whenever possible, I took a hair dryer to my jumpsuit—at least then it was warm damp clothing. After my wardrobe malfunction at the Academy of Music, with the button popping on my homemade pants, I had bought a pair of Danskin tights. I took a lot of flak for them at first, but they turned out to be really practical and the other guys ultimately made the switch, too. Leather and satin got crisp and mossy after they soaked up enough sweat.

Damp boots were another problem: mold or algae grew in them. The inside of each boot looked like its own little ecosystem—the only thing missing was frogs jumping around in there. We often had to scrape green crud off the outside of the boots, too. Still, nobody ever complained.

In my case it was because there was nothing that compared to the rush I got when the curtain dropped and the audience went crazy. The curtain might as well have been a fifteen-foot-thick concrete wall, and when that barrier was removed:
utter chaos
. I could be on one side of the curtain with a 102-degree fever and a sore throat struggling to sing the first notes of “Strutter” or “Firehouse” with some effort. But when the curtain dropped, I sang like a bird because the adrenaline kicked in. It didn’t matter how tired or sore or sick I was—when I got up onstage, I felt supernatural.

People wanted to surrender to us. Part of what made me feel powerful onstage was taking that license and knowing how far I could push it. That took time to learn. I realized that if I asked people to do things they already wanted to do, I came across as omnipotent. I was in control. People responded to that. People wanted to be told, “Get up!” or “Raise your hands!”

Did putting their hands up have anything to do with a song? Only in the same way that a church congregation raises its hands skyward to try to touch something holy. It was also fun—like riding a roller coaster without holding the bar.

It was all about what we could create together. It was all in the back and forth. Most of the people were willing to go, they just needed somebody to guide them. They needed
me
. I had to connect. I wasn’t just playing to the back row of a theater—I was playing to people. I had to make that person in the last row feel as important as the one up in the front. I wasn’t playing to a mass but to each and every one of those people.

I am talking to you
. You,
right there!

That was my job—to take us all to the rock and roll promised land, individually and collectively. “Some of you people are sitting down. If you want to sit down, go home and watch television. But if you believe in rock and roll, stand up for what you believe in!”

Each night we created something magical with the audience—and it was every bit as magical for me as for them.

I
learned a lesson early on. Bill Aucoin said at one point in the summer of 1974 that we needed to make another album. “But I don’t have any inspiration,” I said.

“I’ll show you the bills, and you’ll get inspired,” he said.

That may sound cold, but it rang true. Anybody could sit around and wait for inspiration. Talent was being able to conjure it up—to
get
inspired. Our first album,
KISS,
had leveled out at sales of about sixty thousand, and we needed new product.

We set up camp at the Ramada Inn in L.A. for a month in August to make
Hotter Than Hell
. We each got our own room this time. We felt like stars. Walking around one morning after breakfast, I noticed Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor on Sunset Boulevard. I walked in. I decided I would get one tattoo—I swore to myself that it would be one, just one, for life. I knew I didn’t want a skull with a top hat or a battleship or “Mom,” so I settled on a rose on my shoulder.

Back at the hotel with my new ink, I called home. I was excited and also wanted to ruffle my parents’ feathers, I guess. “Guess what, Mom? I just got a tattoo!”

“Oh, Stan,” my mother said, referring to a Jewish cultural taboo, “now you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery!”

“Cut my arm off, mom. It’s not going to matter to me.”

Again I found L.A. inspiring. The city revolved around music and the entertainment industry. I rarely met people who had grown up there. It was a place people went with a sense of purpose. Lots of New Yorkers lived there, having migrated to California and taken over businesses. The locals were so laid-back that New Yorkers could devour everything. L.A. was a destination for people with a career plan or an agenda. It was a rootless place where people went to chase dreams and follow their aspirations.

Neil rented Village Recorder out by the beach in Santa Monica and flew out Richie and Kenny. The studio was in a cool old building with a huge mural on one side of it depicting a postapocalyptic cityscape—crumbled buildings, collapsed highway overpasses.

We hoped to remedy some of the problems we heard on the first album. The main thing was to make it heavier. We did end up recording it “hot” this time—meaning, with distortion—but that didn’t work well, either. Once again, we didn’t get what we were looking for, and the result was an unpleasant distortion on the instruments.