Face the Music: A Life Exposed (27 page)

But as I walked up the steps to play the show each night, I shed all problems at the bottom of the stairs.

I needed the crowd to love me. Nobody else did. Not even me.

It can be very lonely walking offstage when you feel like that. When so much seems to be missing from your life. By December of 1977, when we got back to New York, we had sold out three more nights at Madison Square Garden. After the first two gigs, the other guys met up with family or friends; I found myself sitting alone at Sarge’s Deli on Third Avenue and 36th Street eating a bowl of matzo ball soup. On the one hand, now that I was a rock god playing a block of shows at MSG, I assumed I had succeeded in making people envy me and wish they had been nicer to me. But on the other hand, there I was having soup in a deli by myself.

That was a harsh reality to deal with.

After the final MSG show, Bill Aucoin threw a party at a swank townhouse. I flew in a girlfriend from Detroit. Santa Claus was at the party. And I had never seen so many lobsters in my life—hundreds and hundreds of them piled up on platters. They must have cleaned out the ocean for weeks. We still didn’t understand that we ourselves actually paid for such things.

George Plimpton and Andy Warhol came to the party. It was always interesting to see people from other scenes like that—artists, writers, entertainers.
Oh, that’s George Plimpton
. But I didn’t function well except in the most socially controlled situations. I didn’t want to risk getting shown up. I was too self-conscious.

I locked myself in the bathroom with a woman who worked at a radio station. When we finished, we straightened our disheveled clothes and I went back out. Andy Warhol approached me and said, “You should come down to the Factory sometime and I’ll do your portrait.”

I’m not cool enough to hang around people like that!

I never went. Big regret on that one.

After playing three nights in a row at the Garden, I knew one thing: what I had thought would fix me, had not.

If all these people look up to me and see me as special and a star, shouldn’t I feel that way?

Maybe in theory. Maybe while I was onstage. But success and fame and the change in the way other people perceived me hadn’t erased whatever was wrong behind the mask. I had reached what I was after, and it wasn’t the answer. Whatever was missing was still missing. The question was,
what
was missing?
What
was wrong?

And just then, as the
Love Gun
tour wrapped up at the beginning of 1978, a funny thing happened. At what seemed like the peak of our popularity—and when being onstage provided the only respite from my emptiness and my nonexistent home life—we stopped touring. In part, it was because we simply couldn’t. Ace and Peter were deeply into drugs and alcohol and alternated between hostility and incoherence. When they weren’t incapacitated, they caused headaches for everyone around them. We weren’t speaking to each other. We couldn’t stand each other.

We wouldn’t play a gig for more than a year.

What do I do now?

O
ne of Bill’s follies was the movie
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
. He thought that film was the next step for us. The Beatles had
A Hard Day’s Night
and
Help!,
and we should have our film. He sold it to us as
A Hard Day’s Night
meets
Star Wars,
which had come out the year before. It would have lots of cool special effects.

Nobody in the band had the slightest clue about acting. None of us read the script. We didn’t care. We trusted Bill’s judgment. When we started filming, it didn’t take an expert in the field to know we were in deep shit and there was no getting out of it. The director asked
us
after each scene whether we thought it was good. We had no idea what we were doing. For us, a good take was one where we didn’t blow our lines. If we said the right words, we moved on to the next shot.

Someone off camera fed us our lines. When we got ready to roll the camera, I yelled, “Line!” and someone said something like, “Gee, Ace, it’s time we get going.” Then I said, “Gee, Ace, it’s time we get going.”

“That’s a keeper.”

It was horrific—it didn’t remotely resemble acting.

In one scene we levitated a box using wires. We assumed the wires would be rendered invisible by special effects people. Not so.

Meanwhile, the four of us weren’t speaking unless we were delivering lines. Peter and Ace frequently left during filming. In one scene, we had to use Ace’s stunt double—who happened to be black—after Ace left without notice. It was clear as day in the final version that it wasn’t Ace.

We had to play a fake concert at Magic Mountain amusement park for another scene. When we were onstage, I turned around and saw some random old man in cat makeup and a wig playing the drums and chewing gum. Peter had taken off, and they threw this guy up there.

One bright spot about the production was that we had the Westmores doing makeup for us. They were the First Family of Hollywood makeup—George, the patriarch, had set up the first makeup department for a Hollywood studio in 1917, and subsequent generations became legendary for makeup and effects work. Over the years I had learned the steps and intricacies of applying the makeup to my face, and one of the Westmore sons watched as I did my own makeup one day on the set of the movie. “How’d you learn to do that?” he asked.

“I taught myself,” I said. “It was just trial and error.”

“Well, that’s exactly the way we would do it,” he said.

Cool
.

When the movie was finished, we saw it at a screening at the Screen Actors Guild Theater on Sunset Boulevard. If you thought it was bad on a TV screen, you should have seen it on the big screen! People openly laughed. I slunk down in my seat. It was humiliating. The finished film was absolutely awful, and to have to stand when the lights came up while various people who had been involved with it came over to lie to me about how great it was made it that much more humiliating.

Around the time of that “concert” at Magic Mountain, Ace had first announced he wanted to leave the band. We held a band meeting on the lot where we were shooting the movie. In response, Bill and Neil had almost immediately hit on an idea to hold us together. “You don’t have to leave the band,” Bill said. “We’ll do solo albums.”

That turned out to be our next folly.

Neil said we would release them all on the same day. He envisioned shipping a million of each solo album. Bill had the idea to maintain some cohesiveness by having one artist do all four covers. And he suggested dedicating each album to the other guys in the band—to keep up the mythology.

Despite the dedications, we wished each other anything but good luck.

So after wrapping up
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park,
we each went off to make an album with no knowledge of what the others were doing.

I had a lot of fun, actually. I didn’t want to stray far from what KISS did. But it was great to be able to work with no tensions, no egos, and surrounded by talent. I started cutting demos at Electric Lady in New York, then went back out to L.A. to re-record them. After we cut a few of the songs, I realized they just didn’t sound right. The demos might not have been perfect or the most fidelic, but they captured what I was looking for, so I decided to keep them and finish them. I liked the spontaneity and rawness. Then I cut another four or five new songs in L.A.—I had a band in New York and another one in Los Angeles. The only person who was in both was Bob Kulick.

As for the songs, “Hold Me, Touch Me” was about Georganne. I had flown off to see her frequently during downtime, and the song came from being away from her and hoping she was thinking of me when we weren’t together. Most of the songs, however, were about Carol Kaye, a stunner in Bill Aucoin’s publicity department whom I was seeing at the time and was crazy about. She was funny and smart and loved music, and the heat we generated at times could peel paint. Carol was romantically involved with someone else, too, and I had been trying my damnedest to get her to stop seeing him. I basked in the drama of that classic love triangle, but I was desperate to pull her away from him. “Tonight You Belong to Me” and “Wouldn’t You Like to Know Me” are about her. “Tonight” remained one of my favorite songs because of that tear-your-heart-out passion and pain that I knew so well.

Funny, though, because the night Carol finally said, “Okay, I’ll stop seeing him,” it was as if somebody had turned a hose onto the bed where we were lying. I was suddenly drenched in sweat. I had a full-on panic attack. I searched for the right words, mumbling, trying to backpedal my way out and come up with a plausible explanation for why I suddenly looked like I’d just gotten out of the shower. The truth was that so much of my life was about chasing approval, chasing acknowledgment, and chasing love, that when confronted with the chance to actually get approval, acknowledgment, and love, I was stunned. The reaction surprised me, because in my mind I really thought being with her was the answer. But it was safer to just chase things; I wasn’t equipped for the real thing.

Me and Carol Kaye. My first solo album tells part of our story.

Needless to say, she didn’t stop seeing her other guy after all.

I decided to mix my solo album in London at a legendary old-school studio called Trident. I wanted to fly there on the Concorde, something I’d never done. Somewhere over the Atlantic, it struck me that the plane wasn’t level—it was flying at an angle. But what did I know? Then the pilot came on the PA and said in a calm voice, “This is your captain speaking. Now folks, you may have noticed we’re flying at a slight angle. We’ve lost an engine.”

We’re in the middle of the fucking Atlantic with one engine!

“We’re on our way back to Kennedy Airport.”

If we’re flying on one engine, why don’t we go down to about five feet above the water instead of fifty-five thousand feet above it?

The captain came on ten minutes later: “We’re using more fuel than expected because we’re flying subsonic, so we’re not going to make it to New York.”

That’s not good
.

“We’re going to divert to Nova Scotia.”

I don’t like this at all. Why are we so damn high up?

Before too long, the same calm voice came on again: “We’re not going to make Nova Scotia.”

Where on earth are we going to go?

“We’re going to land at Gander Airport in Newfoundland—we need a long runway.”

We made it to Gander and landed. They paired people up and shuttled us off to a local motel. I said there was no fucking way I was bunking with someone.

The next day, a DC-10 made an unscheduled stop and picked us up. They kept us in a sequestered compartment away from everyone else. What should have taken three and a half hours ended up taking seventeen hours. But once in London, I enjoyed it this time. A few months later, when a band called New England that had just signed with a newly formed record label asked me to produce their record, I specified that I would do it only if I could mix it in London.

When the four solo albums came out in late 1978, you could see the glass as half-full or half-empty. Selling around five hundred thousand copies each was nothing to sneeze at—2 million records if you looked at them collectively as a KISS product. But since Neil had shipped a million of each, what was he supposed to do with the other 2 million copies? It was too much hype, and because of the leftover records, a financial disaster for Casablanca.

The solo albums did quell the need for Ace and Peter to leave. But they represented nothing more than a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. They put off something that was inevitable.

A
mong the people I worked with on my solo LP were three girls and a guy called Desmond Child & Rouge, who sang background vocals on “Move On.” Putting up flyers had become a big thing in New York by then, and I had seen one with a picture of these three hot girls and a guy. They had a few gigs around the city. I went to see one of their shows in a basement club that held a few hundred people—to be honest, I went because the girls looked kind of sleazy and cool in the picture on the flyer.

They sounded terrific. They had a great band, and the three girls sang their asses off, in harmony. It was sexy and vibrant. There was a Broadway element to their style, a little Brill Building, a little Drifters, and they echoed the romanticized ethnic sound of things like “Spanish Harlem.” Some of the songs—as well as things Desmond wrote later, like “Livin’ on a Prayer,” which he did with Bon Jovi—told stories about working-class life and had real emotion. We also shared a mutual love of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. I liked the vibe. I thought it was the best thing happening in New York. And I struck up a friendship with them.

When I first met Desmond in 1978 he was living with Maria, one of the backup singers. She was his girlfriend at that point. He had curly hair kind of like Peter Frampton. There was a sexual ambiguity about all of them that I wasn’t quite able to define. I remember the four of them being at my apartment one night and thinking,
This is all kind of vague—I’m not sure where everyone in this room stands
. Desmond and two of the three girls left; one stayed behind. I now had part of the answer. I had a little crush on one of the other Rouge girls and a few months later found out in the best way possible that it was mutual. The picture became even clearer when Desmond eventually came out as gay around the time the band put out their second album, in 1979. That album was clearly about the turmoil and conflict he felt over his sexuality. I saw the band at the Bottom Line again around that time, and I could see it was over. They all seemed to be fighting for position onstage. Their manager was a travel agent by day, and I remember saying to them, “If you need a doctor, do you call a plumber?”