Makeup to Breakup (13 page)

“Let’s kill them tonight,” he said in his deep monotone. “Once we’re done, nobody’s going to want to see these other guys.”

That was our beautiful arrogance. We were the opening act, but the other acts went crazy when they came to the venue and saw a ten-by-four-foot neon sign that lit up and said
KISS
. The sign was a surprise from Bill to us. I’ll never forget sitting in the back of the theater before the doors opened and just staring at that sign. I knew we were destined for stardom after seeing that.

But our rise to the top could have easily been derailed that night. and stormed offd ever Gene lit some flash paper and threw it into the crowd and, unfortunately, it hit a kid in the eye. This was a major lawsuit waiting to happen, and Bill could have lost his whole business. But we were such innovative con artists. Bill ushered the kid backstage after the show and we had him pose with us for a photo and then Bill gave him a lifetime pass to the Academy of Music.

That kid wasn’t the only thing Gene burned that night. During “Firehouse,” Gene unveiled his fire breathing for the first time in public. He spit out the kerosene and the flames went spiking into the darkness, but when he tried to put the lit torch down it accidentally caught his hair on fire. But Sean was quick to the rescue. He came running out onstage like a hero and, ta-da, he dramatically threw his leather jacket over Gene’s head, patting out the fire. Then Sean just as dramatically pulled his jacket off Gene’s hair and ran off the stage. That drama queen deserved an Oscar for that performance. Afterward, the other bands came up to us and said, “Wow, you guys burn yourselves, huh? That’s pretty heavy. You do that every night?” We had to tell them it wasn’t really part of the show.

“What are you talking about? or2">
I
don’t know why, but Paul and I suddenly decided to take off all our
clothes and go naked. This might not have been the smartest thing to do in the backseat of a station wagon hurtling through the backwoods of Tennessee to our next gig, but that’s what the road will do to you. We were on our first tour of America, and this was our first exposure to the Deep South.

“Whaddya want?” he barked.

Then he looked into the car and saw Gene wearing leather with studs. We were all dressed in our leather and platform shoes, and we all had tinted blue-black hair. Not particularly his kind of people.

“We need some gas,” Sean said. We all started laughing hysterically. Sean was getting angry now, thinking that we were trying to piss this hillbilly off, but we were really laughing at the white mound of shredded cotton atop his head. We didn’t let on, but after we gassed up and he drove away, he looked in the rearview mirror, saw what we did to him, and frantically pawed at his hair to get it out.

We drove deeper and deeper into what we thought were the backwoods. I was really starting to get paranoid, and my fear was contagious. Sean missed a turn and he slowed down to get his bearings.

“Don’t stop, Sean. Keep driving,” Ace said.

“Get us out of here. Quick,” I poked Sean in the back of his head. Sean was beginning to steam because he never liked it when we treated him like one of the crew. He was a great singer-songwriter, and he always saw himself as our equal.

All of a sudden, the car started to jog violently.

“Oh, God, the car,” Sean said as he pulled to the side of the road. The wagon sputtered to a stop. We were on some forsaken country road, nowhere near civilization, we thought.

Sean turned to me.

“We’re out of gas and I don’t know where we are,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you, but we may have to walk.”

Walk? More like run, I thought. And in seven-inch platform shoes.

“You got to be fucking kidding me, right?” I screamed. “We can’t get out of this fucking car. We’re gonna get fucked in the ass.”

By then it was getting dark. The heat became oppressive.

“Get, but then ” ayl in the back of the wagon and lay down,” Sean said. “I’m going to go look for some help.” He covered us up with a blanket, rolled up all the windows and locked the doors, and took off.

It was hot as hell under that blanket and we were sweating like pigs, but at the same time we were shivering from fear. We would find out later that Sean had staged the whole thing because he was pissed at our
attitude. He had cut off the ignition, flooded the engine, surreptitiously grabbed a six-pack, walked around the curve, and sat down and downed the beer. We weren’t even in the backwoods. We were driving through a new planned community.

When Sean came back what seemed like an eternity later, he said that it was the funniest thing to see all four of us lying in the back of the wagon covered by the blanket, with nothing but our teased hair protruding from one end and our platform boots from the other. He began to laugh hysterically and one by one, our heads emerged from under the blanket.

“How do you like it, you fucking bastards? How does it feel to get fucked with?” he said.

Gene and Paul and Ace were cursing Sean out as he revealed his prank and got back behind the wheel and drove off. But I didn’t curse him. I was so pissed I didn’t speak to him for two weeks.

But we were thrilled to be on the road. We had just finished our first album, and it was time to put our show together. We loved playing live and getting that instant feedback from the audience. So we were primed to get out there and conquer the world. We had started our first tour a few weeks earlier in Canada. Bill thought that Canada would be the ideal place to work out the kinks and get tight before we came to America. But Canada wasn’t quite ready for us then.

Our first gigs there were mostly college dates, and the audiences were predominantly hippies who were confused by us. In Calgary we did an interview with the local radio station and went to the studio in full makeup. The receptionist took one look at us and ran out screaming. When we came out onstage, I’d look at the audience’s faces and it looked like they were in shock, that they didn’t believe what they were seeing. Or hearing. Our objective was to be loud, and then even louder. We kept our amps up to ten. Eventually we’d fill the whole back of the stage with these great big Marshall amps stacked up, all lit up. What the audience didn’t know was that most of those Marshalls were just dummy cabinets with no speakers inside. But it looked great.

Some of the Canadian audiences got it and were appreciative. Other nights we’d get booed and they’d throw bottles at us. But nothing deterred
us. If they didn’t like us, we’d go, “Fuck ’em. We’ll blow their minds next show.”

A few nights into the tour, we got a chance to pull our first prank. Gene had picked up a chick and they were in his room. I was rooming with Gene then, so I went to Paul and Ace’s room.

“Let’s bust Gene’s balls. He’s got a chick in the room,” I said. “I’m going to get naked and tie a red ribbon around my neck and my cock and put my balls in a champagne glass and serve it to them.”

To my surprise, Paul wanted to join me. And he had a set of balls like a fucking elephant’s. So we tied the ribbons and put our balls in two champagne glasses and I slowly opened the door to the room. Gene quickly turned on the lamp, and there was Paul and me with our balls in the champagne glasses.

“Would you or your girl care for a as long as d ever drink?” I said.

Gene looked us over and then pushed us out and slammed the door behind us.

After playing three shows in Canada, we went to L.A. in February to play at a huge party Neil was throwing to celebrate the start of Casablanca Records. He took over the ballroom of the L.A. Century Plaza hotel and transformed it into Rick’s Café from the movie
Casablanca,
complete with all the gambling tables. Neil even borrowed Bogart’s actual white tux from the movie and wore it that night. The invitation to the party was in the shape of a vinyl single that said, “You must remember this, a Kiss is just a Kiss.”

Everybody who was anybody in L.A. came out that night. Rod Stewart was there, Alice Cooper, all these industry bigwigs. Again, we played so loud that most of the people didn’t know what to think of us. But Alice dug us. He came over to congratulate us after we played and then joked to the press, “What these guys need is a gimmick.”

Thanks to Neil’s contacts, we did Dick Clark’s
In Concert
TV show and followed it with an appearance on
The Mike Douglas Show
. Douglas had a daytime talk show that was for the housewife set, but we were excited to get the exposure. There was no MTV, no videos then, so you took what you could get. Johnny Carson wouldn’t have us on—he hated rock ’n’ roll. Right from the beginning, KISS was very polarizing: You either loved us
fanatically or hated us to death. I adored the fanatics, but the rebel in me didn’t mind being hated. I felt we must have been doing something well to be that despised.

So we were in the dressing room getting ready, and one of Mike’s producers came in and asked who from the band would come out to panel with Mike and his guests before we played. Of course it wouldn’t be me, because I was the Guinea from Brooklyn who talked like “dis” and “dat.” Plus I was too insecure to go out and talk then. Ace, forget about it: He didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was mostly squawking sounds that nobody could comprehend. Paul didn’t want to do it either. He felt that he was the star, and he didn’t want to lose his mystique.

So that left Gene. He always loved to pontificate to anybody who was around him, let alone to millions of people watching on TV. He jumped at the chance. He got introduced and walked onto the set in full makeup with his evil satanic winged costume on. Mike Douglas was flabbergasted.

“Are you a bat?” he asked.

“Actually, what I am is evil incarnate,” Gene said.

One of the other panelists was Totie Fields, an old Jewish comedienne, who was looking at Gene and just shaking her head.

“You know, Mike, your audience looks really appetizing. Some of those cheeks and necks look really good,” Gene said, licking his lips.

Douglas was just baffled. He didn’t know what had hit him.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if underneath this he was just a nice Jewish boy?” Totie suddenly said.

“You should only know,” Gene said.

“I do!” Totie countered. “You can’t hide the hook.”

We proceeded to play, and I kept looking over at Mike Douglas, who was sitting there watching with his hands on his head, like he was thinking, What a fucking mistake.

In retrospect, around the roomysayl we may have created a monster, letting the monster do the talking that day. When the show was over, we reprimanded Gene for his interview.

“If you’re going to talk, it’s not about being a monster,” Paul said. “We’re not a fucking horror band, we’re a rock ’n’ roll band. You gotta say the record’s coming out and we’re on tour.”

I think that Paul got jealous when Gene began to dominate the interviews. To be honest, sometimes I loved watching Gene hang himself with his babble. But Gene loved that role because he thought that it gave him more power and stature, and that was what was most important to him.

After that show, we went back on the road and toured the South. We had a little crew with a U-Haul truck drive ahead of us, and we would drive in the station wagon with Sean. Those were such great times. We’d stop at Howard Johnson’s because their clam chowder was to die for. We stayed at Motel 6s and tiny Holiday Inns. I’ll never forget rolling along the highway with Sean leading us in a sing-along of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

We didn’t have enough money then to have our own rooms, so at first I roomed with Gene. But he was boring. All he would do is bring home women, and I’d be in the next bed and have to listen to their grunting and moaning all night.

Even worse, Gene was a pig. I liked a clean, orderly room—my pajamas in the drawer, my fruit on the table, my medicine by the nightstand. Gene’s shit was all over the place. And his leather outfit just stank to dear hell. We even started calling him Stinky because he’d never dry his leather. After a show, he’d never shower. He’d wear that stinky outfit back to the Holiday Inn and chicks would freak out when they saw that monster walking down the hallway.

Gene was really delusional. He would always tell us that he could look in the mirror and believe he was better-looking than he really was. When Gene and Paul first met, Paul didn’t like him: He thought Gene was abrasive. Maybe that arrogance came from his mother always telling him that he was better than anyone else. That was one way to cope with the fact that he was getting the shit kicked out of him every day on the streets of Brooklyn.

I gave Gene the nickname Professor Dope because he’d talk to you as if you were a child in his sixth-grade class.

“Uh, Peter, you know, you have to lift your fork with your left hand,” he’d lecture me. Everything he knew he knew from reading it in a book—he had book smarts, but no street smarts. I’d tell him to take that fucking book and shove it up his ass.