Face the Music: A Life Exposed (46 page)

When I got back to L.A. from Toronto, I had some questions for my dad, as well. There were pieces of the puzzle that seemed missing, and feelings I was unable to identify. As my dad got older, it became clear that a day would come when I wouldn’t have the option to ask him to fill in the blanks.

One day when he was visiting me, I told him that I had been thinking a lot about the past as I stumbled into the future, and that I wanted to ask him some uncomfortable questions. Thankfully, he said he was willing to try to help.

So I asked him about the time he had come home late smelling of booze, when my mom was out of town, and told me that we all did things we regretted. “What was that all about?” I asked him.

He paused. Then he said, “I was in love with another woman.”

I was floored. I couldn’t recall any instance when I had heard him say he loved my mother. He went on to tell me that he’d had a girlfriend for decades. He wanted to leave his family for her, but he couldn’t do it.

It suddenly flashed in front of my eyes: the time when my dad had spit his words at me for seeking psychiatric help— “You think you’re the only one with problems?”—it was because he didn’t want to be there and he was living a double life. A lie.

My stomach started to knot up, but I was determined not to let my face give away my shock and bewilderment. I wanted to hear as much as I could.

“She taught me the meaning of love,” he continued.

This was so far beyond the realm of what I considered possible. Skepticism flooded into my mind. Love was something you built over time through shared experiences with someone. My dad had never spent a night away from home, so it struck me as odd to place that kind of value—love!—on something that was never tested beyond years of trysts. Was my dad describing it this way to justify his actions or sanitize his desire for sex?

I felt that for my dad, his affair had to be sugar-coated, given redeeming value, as opposed to just accepted for what it was—sex, which under most circumstances doesn’t need any justification. Of course, in the context of a marriage, there are very few circumstances to justify an affair, though my dad seemed to be trying his best.

One thing was clear: this was tangible evidence of what I’d picked up at home as a child. The more he revealed, the more I understood that those unspoken undercurrents, conflicts, and tensions that I’d grown up with hadn’t been my imagination.

I did not tell Pam about that conversation. Yes, my dad had made huge and stunning revelations, but Pam no longer felt like my partner. It would have felt like a breach of confidentiality to tell her. I wanted to talk about it, but I couldn’t with her. If anything, that conversation with my dad spurred me on to avoid repeating the mistakes I’d witnessed as a child.

I didn’t want to get stuck in a loveless marriage.

I’d been on such a high when I came back from Toronto, but I’d arrived at a house while hoping to return to a home. Whenever I tried to talk to Pam, she blamed our lack of closeness either on some outside issue she was dealing with or on me, telling me all the ways in which I was falling short of her expectations. Most of the issues she brought up were everyday aspects of life, basic things that went along with living with someone—not things I felt were at the core of our problems.

Finally, I said something to her in a way I thought would be very clear, expressing as basic a truth as possible. “You can choose to be happy,” I said, “or you can choose to be gone.”

It’s funny. Even though we had separated before, I thought that if I made the choice as basic and clear as possible, the answer would be obvious: she would choose to be happy. I was surprised when ultimately she figured out that she’d rather be gone. In hindsight, with the exception of Evan, that was the greatest gift she ever gave me.

Celebrating the Fourth of July— “Uncle Gene” holding Evan in 1999, one of the times I was separated from Pam.

I didn’t want Evan to have to deal with a divorce while I was away, however, so while Pam and I agreed to end things, we also agreed to wait a year until I was home fulltime, after the conclusion of the imminent tour.

The clock was now ticking. Soon, both my marriage and my band would be finished. Everything in my life was suddenly in flux as KISS set out on the Farewell Tour in March 2000.

P
eter posted a sign every day counting down the number of days left on the Farewell Tour. He started painting a teardrop below his eye. I thought it made him look like Emmett Kelly’s famous Weary Willie character, the tragic clown who toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. And as for the rest of his makeup, it was as if he had forgotten how to do it. He started to look like a panda bear, with big rectangles around his eyes.

The tour was horrible. Constant drudgery and misery. We spent all of our energy trying to coax Peter and Ace out of their hotel rooms. Ace sucker-punched Tommy at one of the shows. Peter had his usual handbook detailing how hotel staff had to treat him and which windows had to be covered with tinfoil and all that. There was no reasoning with either of them. We never knew if we’d make it to a show on time, and once we got onstage we never knew whether we’d get through the show. I mean, if a guy has trouble putting on his makeup, how is he going to play? Not surprisingly, the shows could be pretty awful.

I was angry at Peter and Ace for being disrespectful toward everything we had accomplished and everything the fans were giving us.

I bought into the idea that this really was it. The end of KISS. There was no place to go. It was unbearable.

We were stuck in a rut musically as well—basically playing the same seventeen songs we’d taught them for the initial reunion. This was the third tour with the same set list. Peter and Ace just couldn’t master any more. The needle was already into the red. I had to come up with nonsensical interview responses to questions about why we were playing the same songs. I couldn’t just say, “Because Peter and Ace can’t learn any others.”

One night during a show Doc McGhee tried to get my attention from the side of the stage, gesturing up at me and holding his nose.

Huh?

“You stink!” he yelled. I walked over to him during a break between songs. “What did you say?”

“You stink!” he repeated.

“Fucking Peter is playing too slow,” I told him.

Doc ran around behind the drum riser and started making the same gesture at Peter. “Peter, you’re playing too slow!”

“Well, so are they!” Peter shouted back.

“What are you talking about?” Doc screamed. “You’re the fucking drummer!”

Another night Peter had a new problem. He stopped playing in the middle of a song and just held his sticks up and looked at me like a deer in the headlights. I yelled, “Play!” and started tapping my foot so at least he would start hitting the drums again. That happened on more than one occasion.

A well-known musician—who had seen the band many times—approached me one night and said, “I can’t come to any more shows. It’s just too painful to listen to.”

The worst feeling was reading reviews trashing the shows and thinking,
That’s spot on
. It was such a shame because the band could have been great and wasn’t. The drama offstage and the hostility and resentment and backstabbing were taking a heavy musical toll. And then there were the drugs. When Ace had an off night and made a lot of mistakes, we would joke that his mixture was off.

It would have been great to go out in a blaze of musical glory; instead, we were dragging our asses. At one point we put aside a few days to brush up on songs and tighten things up. Ace didn’t show for one of the rehearsals. He said he wasn’t feeling well because he had Lyme disease—an illness brought on by the bite of a deer tick. Peter, brainiac that he is, said, “That’s bullshit! He was never bitten by a deer!”

Am I living in an insane asylum?

On August 11, 2000, we had a show in Irvine, California, after a week off. Ace had spent the week in New York. We had a rule that if anyone was going to fly cross-country on a commercial flight to get to a gig, he had to get there a day in advance—just to be safe, in case there was a storm or a mechanical issue or whatever. We didn’t want to have to cancel shows.

The day before the Irvine show, Tommy had arranged for a limo to pick Ace up and take him to his flight. He always had the limo show up hours early because it was the same chore to get Ace out of his house as it was to get him out of a hotel. Then all of us sat around waiting for updates on Ace’s progress. Ace’s pickup was scheduled for noon East Coast time. At 1:30
P.M.
Tommy called the limo. “Mr. Frehley needs to get going.”

“Um, sir, he hasn’t come out of the house yet.”

Another half an hour passed. Tommy and Doc tried to get Ace on the phone, calling his house. No answer. After calling his house five more times, they finally got him on the line. “Ace, you have to get in the car—you’re going to miss your flight.”

“There’s a problem . . . uh . . . and I’m sick . . .”

Millions of excuses.

They kept rescheduling Ace on later and later flights. The limo went back each time. It got to be 7 and then 8
P.M.
“Passenger has not left his house, sir,” reported the limo driver each time.

Tommy managed to get Ace on the phone again. “There’s one more flight out tonight, last one.”

“Okay,” said Ace. “I promise.”

But again at the appointed time, nothing happened. “Passenger still not out of his house, sir.”

Flight missed.

The next day was the show. Ace started the day on the other side of the country. By some minor miracle, however, he made it to the airport in the morning, was met by the on-site rep, and was escorted onto his plane.

Traffic from LAX airport to the venue was going to present a serious problem. So we arranged for a helicopter to sit at Terminal 4, where Ace was arriving, and shuttle him to the venue by air. That way he could probably make it in time for the concert.

Then we got a call. “Well, there’s good news and bad news.”

Okay.

“The good news is that Ace really is on the plane. The bad news is that the plane has a mechanical problem and is delayed.” At that point Doc told Tommy to drop what he was doing and get to the venue. He was going to have to play the show.

We traveled with a Spaceman outfit custom-fitted to Tommy—as an insurance policy. A brand-new outfit, boots and all, tailored to Tommy always came along in one of the wardrobe crates. We knew Tommy could do it, but he had never actually done it.

“You guys are like superheroes,” said Doc. “So Tommy Thayer is playing Batman today? It’s still Batman.”

Tommy got made up and dressed. And meanwhile we were getting updates on Ace’s location as the start time of the show approached.
He’s landed . . . passenger is in helicopter . . . fifty miles away . . .

Ace walked into the dressing room about twenty minutes before the show was scheduled to start. He looked at Tommy—fully dressed and made up, with his guitar on, ready to go—and just said, “Oh, hey Tommy, how you doin’?”

We delayed the show an hour, Ace got into his makeup, and we played the concert.

The fact that we traveled with a costume for Tommy didn’t seem to faze Ace. He thought it was a ploy—something between a joke and an empty threat. But we were 100 percent ready to go on with Tommy. We didn’t have him suit up to teach Ace a lesson; we did it because we had a concert to play. The same reckless behavior that had led to a decades-long downward spiral was threatening to sink the ship. Here was a life preserver.

Still, Ace continued to think and act like he was irreplaceable. He continued to show total disregard for everyone else, continued to act as if we were blessed to have him. He congratulated himself on making it to the show.

“This will not do,” Doc said to me and Gene. “These guys are just terrible. I run a management company, not the Red Cross. They don’t send me into destroyed countries to rebuild things. I don’t save people. You have to make changes.”

But still Gene and I clung to the idea of the four of us being together.

“You’ve already given it three more years than I would have,” said Doc.

We decided to take the Farewell Tour to Asia in early 2001. Ace was on board. I personally offered Peter a million dollars to play eight shows in Japan in March 2001. He made the brilliant business decision to say no.

“Peter,” I told him, “I want you to understand: you get one million dollars or you get nothing and the train leaves without you.” Still no. Once again, what I was making was more important to him than the seven figures he would sock away. I told him I would call Eric Singer.

“The fans will never accept it,” said Gigi, who was now married to Peter. “Peter’s the most talented one in the band.”

I just said, “Okay.”

Initially, Doc’s talk about getting rid of Peter—and Ace, for that matter—had been wishful thinking. No longer. This time we’d all had it. It’s one thing to put up with somebody who’s a virtuoso and a prick. It’s quite another to put up with somebody who can barely play his instrument and is a prick.