Face the Music: A Life Exposed (37 page)

I called Gene. “Listen,” I said, “we’re in financial trouble.”

“Nonsense,” said Gene.

“Things are not as they appear, I’m telling you.”

I met up with him and tried to explain. He scoffed and acted dismissive and irritated. So I had him meet Dr. Hilsen, who showed Gene what was what in the statements. Gene was very defensive, even antagonistic. But the problems were all there in black and white.

Within a day or so, I told Gene that I was leaving Howard. He wanted to stay. “You can stay if you want,” I said, “but I’m out of here. You do whatever you want.”

He was stunned that I was jumping ship with or without him. It wasn’t going to matter. As it sunk in that I was dead serious, he began to waver. Eventually he said “I’ll go with you.”

I wouldn’t take Howard’s calls and never spoke to him again.

It was not a happy day parting company like that with yet another member of the team who had let us down. Howard was the last vestige of the original team to fall by the wayside, but there was no way to explain all that was there in black and white, filling countless files and documents. We got outside legal advisors and started trying to untangle the mess, which they agreed wasn’t as it should be.

From that day forward, we never let anyone else sign a single check in our names. I’ve used a lot of ink signing my own name since then, whether it’s for my monthly phone bill or the construction of a massive stage set. No matter how small or large, Gene and I kept everything close to the vest from then on.

Maybe we had finally learned our lesson—by taking our lumps.

But it certainly wasn’t a case of being brilliant. It was a case of being
resilient
and seizing an opportunity to rectify the situation once we recognized something was wrong. Interestingly, even though it was me who got us out of a situation that was a ticking time bomb and would have decimated us, Gene continued to be lauded as a savvy businessman. I guess people just look for simplistic distinctions—as in, “Gene’s the business guy and Paul’s the creative guy.” But it wasn’t Gene who realized the ship was sinking, and it wasn’t Gene who changed course.

As far as I was concerned, Gene’s most successful venture in business was promoting the perception that he was a savvy businessman. That has been an undeniable success.

But then again, given that he seemed to spend 24/7 promoting that perception, perhaps it was no surprise. I didn’t fault him—that was something he saw as a life accomplishment. For me to compete in that arena would have taken away from other pursuits and challenges in my life. Gene was about nonstop self-promotion; I was about ongoing self-discovery. I wanted to figure out how to be happy, and that was far more important to me than building a myth that wouldn’t change the reality of who I really was.

After all, just because you can get other people to believe something doesn’t mean that
you
believe it. Didn’t I know it.

Transitory external factors seemed to make Gene happy, and he wasn’t interested in looking inside. That may even be soft-peddling it—Gene resolutely resisted looking inside. For him, perception was reality. The surface was the all. That distinction summed up the stark difference between us.

And maybe that is also why any sense of unity created by our decision to break away from Howard was short-lived. That episode brought us together to fight what we both perceived as injustice, but as soon as we started to work on our next album,
Crazy Nights,
I found myself right back at square one.

Gene would stagger into the studio after not sleeping all night—he was too busy once again making movies or working with other bands, including one called Black ’N Blue who had opened for us on the last tour. Gene ended up writing some songs with the band’s guitar player, Tommy Thayer. Or he spent the whole time on the phone, working this or that angle.

The few songs Gene brought in seemed to have been written by other people, with Gene pasting his name on after the fact. Needless to say, once again the songs were not impressive.

His lack of involvement had become a running joke in the studio, but it wasn’t funny anymore. If anything, the confrontation with Howard only increased the sense I had that Gene was screwing me. In his own way, he had betrayed me as much as Ace and Peter had. At this point he was riding my coattails. If Gene wanted an equal share, he should have to do some of the work of keeping the band going.

I was seriously pissed off.

I can’t live like this anymore.

Outside the studio one afternoon, I asked Gene to get in my car. I took a deep breath. Whatever the consequences of what I was about to say, I knew it had to be done. I couldn’t go on like this, feeling like I was in a pressure cooker, dealing with everything to do with KISS on my own and still obligated to treat someone who was AWOL as an equal partner.

“This isn’t okay anymore,” I told him.

It wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d expected. In part because it felt good to finally let off the steam. “I’m done with this. You can’t expect to be my partner if you’re not going to hold up your end.”

That was the beginning of a heart-to-heart conversation that began there in the car and then continued over the phone for several more days. As I vented, I never raised my voice. I’ve always believed that the person who yells loses.

Quitting the band was never an option for me. I also did not relish the idea of taking over the band on my own. But if Gene’s reduced involvement was going to continue, I wanted to be paid and recognized for my ever-increasing responsibilities. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but apparently the talk resonated with Gene, because a few days later he approached me and handed me a Jaguar brochure. He said he wanted me to pick one out for myself. He wanted to buy me a Jag to show his appreciation for all I’d done to keep the band going.

It was a nice move on his part. But I had my eye on a Porsche.

When we shot the video for the second single from
Crazy Nights,
“Reason to Live,” the storyline involved a beautiful woman blowing up a car. It was a black Porsche 928.

And I drove it home from the video shoot, compliments of Gene.

T
he song “Crazy Crazy Nights” became a hit in Britain, and we played a European tour in the fall of 1988. At the end of the tour I stayed behind in London to hang out with the English singer and pinup girl Samantha Fox, whom I had started to see.

She and I went to the box office smash musical
Phantom of the Opera
that I’d heard so much about. I loved the big-production shows I’d seen in the States earlier in the decade, and
Phantom
promised more of the same. As I watched it, though, I could feel it affecting me in a way nothing else ever had.

In one climactic scene, Christine, the beautiful singer at the opera house, was alone with the Phantom, a dashing but mysterious musical genius who wore a tuxedo and a white mask over his face. It was a dramatic scene—and when she suddenly ripped off his mask and revealed his hideously disfigured face, I gasped. The drama touched a psychological nerve. The parallels to my own life should have been obvious—the tormented guy who covered himself in a cool disguise but was a shell underneath. But I didn’t connect the dots in the moment. A thought did occur to me, however, that showed I understood the parallels at least at a subliminal level:
I know I could play that role
.

Me, Mike Tyson, Samantha Fox, and rocker Billy Squire in 1988. Mike’s arm on my shoulder made it impossible for me to move.

Nothing in my background suggested I could do musical theater. But I
knew
it somehow. And I never forgot it.

I could play that role
.

After the show, Samantha and I went back to my hotel. We hadn’t slept together yet, but that night she said, “Would you like to take a bubble bath with me?”

“Yes. Yes, I would.”

Back in the States, all was not well inside KISS. Eric had stopped talking to me during the
Crazy Nights
tour. He sometimes got into ruts and shut down. He seemed mad at me about something, so finally, after months—months!—I had to sit him down and read him the riot act. “You just can’t pull this kind of shit for this amount of time.”

It might have sounded dictatorial, but the fact was he was there to play drums and be a member of the team. The silence and tension had become unbearable. “This noncommunicative bullshit stops today,” I told him.

And it did. It seemed he needed help to force his way out of a self-imposed prison.

Things with Eric were definitely getting increasingly weird. But they had always tended to be odd. Whenever we were both in L.A., I would invite him to come over and hang out with me. “Is anyone else there?” he would ask.

If I had people over, I told him, “Eric, they’re nice people, we’re hanging out. Come on over, it’ll be fun.” But if anyone else was there, he refused to come.

On the
Crazy Nights
tour he had started to obsess over not being the original drummer again. The whole thing was so irrational. What could I say? It was true, he
still
wasn’t the original drummer. He would
never
be the original drummer.

And then there was Gene. Despite the Porsche he bought me as an apology, Gene still hadn’t contributed anything of quality to
Crazy Nights
. More troubling than that was the fact that he didn’t seem
interested
in contributing. And when it came time to cut a few new songs to put on a greatest hits compilation—
Smashes, Thrashes & Hits
—I was once again left on my own.

At that point I thought,
Fuck this
. Grudgingly, I decided to take center stage. The way things were functioning, KISS had devolved into my band. I had never wanted it that way, but there we were. It was the reality of the situation. KISS records were in essence solo albums for me—again, a situation I definitely did not want. But I had no choice. On the cover of
Smashes, Thrashes,
I was front and center.

Fuck it.

And in the videos for the new songs, “Let’s Put the X in Sex” and “(You Make Me) Rock Hard,” I didn’t even hold a guitar. It was unambiguous. I was the frontman. KISS was my band now. Whether I liked it or not.

Aaaaahhhh, the videos. What can you say about those?

To begin with, the songs were horrible. “Rock Hard” was written by me, Desmond Child, and Diane Warren—a case of three great minds gone terribly wrong. “X in Sex” wasn’t much better. We brought in an extremely talented woman named Rebecca Blake to make the videos. She had been involved with a couple of Prince videos and also put out an interesting book of highly stylized fashion-fantasy photographs. We felt we needed a new look, and Rebecca had a vision.

She picked the women for the videos and dressed them and everything. When I showed up for the shoot, I said, “These women all look like they need a sandwich. They look like underfed pelicans.” They had no tits and no ass. And they strutted around as if they were in a Robert Palmer video—hands on hips, icily turning—like runway models, not eighties hair metal video girls.

Then there were my outfits. I wore a chainmail tank top and white tights while swinging on a trapeze. I danced around in a corset and licked my fingers while a bunch of emaciated women goose-stepped in the background. In the course of those two shoots, I wrote the textbook on what
not
to do in a music video. I mean, I didn’t walk around on the street in tights with bicycle reflectors sewn on them or Body Glove tank tops cut off just below my nipples. This was a whole new level of bad taste and judgment. Definitely not my finest moment.

With the
Crazy Nights
tour in the rearview mirror and
Smashes, Thrashes
set to take up the slack for a year or so, I had something else in mind: a solo tour. I was fed up with the situation in KISS and needed to flex my muscles a little on my own—and cut the cord between me and Gene.

A certain complacency had developed in KISS, especially once we had a stable lineup again for a few years. We played everything a million miles an hour—Gene equated that with excitement, but it caused a loss of groove. On the
Crazy Nights
tour we’d even had people on the side of the stage playing keyboard sound pads—to enhance the rhythm guitar so I could slack off and jump around more, and to fortify the background vocals for that big eighties “gang” vocal sound. Looking back, I can see there was no mystery about why the audience dwindled.

My inclination was to put together a band of people I had never played with—just for the sake of doing something different—even though I planned to play a lot of the same songs. After all, KISS songs were my songs, something I felt even more strongly over the course of the non-makeup albums. Those albums may have said KISS, but the parts of them people remembered were me. Why shouldn’t I play the stuff I wrote? I also figured playing on my own would probably bring something good back to the band—it was a chance to get out from under my frustrations, a chance to play with other people and think about things differently.