Makeup to Breakup (15 page)

I didn’t like that idea. I had done heroin, but it seemed a little too down and dirty for that time in my life. Still, I didn’t want to ruin our reunion.

“All right, if it’ll make you happy, I’ll do a few lines with you.” in the toilets of Santa Monica everybu

Jerry went out to score, and I waited and waited and he never came back. The next day I saw him on the plane.

“What happened, man?”

“Ah, I met somebody and . . .” he trailed off.

I felt like I was back on the streets of Brooklyn hearing those junkie lies again.

I wanted to call him out on it, but I was too hurt. The guy sitting next to me was not the Jerry Nolan I grew up with and loved. He had totally changed, thanks to junk. I just sat there waiting to get off that plane. We finally landed and said our good-byes and I never talked to Jerry again. Eighteen years later, I got word that Jerry caught meningitis from shooting up and died. I didn’t go to his funeral. It would have killed me, but to this day, he’s still in my prayers.

The shows were great, but we just couldn’t get any radio airplay, so we had no choice but to keep scheduling dates and playing live. The road was grueling, especially with the show we were doing. It was scary being away from home in Brooklyn, so every night I would write postcards to Lydia, my mother, and my uncle George. Things like “Hey Ma, I’m in Duluth, Minnesota. Holy mackerel! There’s some strange people here, but I’m having a great time,” or “Unc, played last night and I did a drum solo and everybody went crazy. We’re still kind of struggling, and we’ll be in
another Holiday Inn tomorrow. Love you.” My family kept those postcards in a special box all through the years.

We were opening for Rory Gallagher in the Midwest, and Casablanca sent a few execs out to check out our show. They were in the audience with Neil and Joyce, and after we left the stage the crowd was going wild, screaming for an encore. But we didn’t come out. Neil sent Joyce back to see what was going on and she got backstage and saw that the back doors of the venue were open and I was on the ground, with J.R. standing over me, trying to revive me. There was a low ceiling in the club, and when they levitated me during “Black Diamond,” I started breathing in all the smoke from the flash pots that had risen to the ceiling and I passed out and fell backward ten feet. Lucky for me, J.R. was there to catch me.

On June 22, we were playing the final night of a four-night stand at a club in Atlanta when Paul collapsed and we had to rush him out of the venue and end the show. Well, that’s what it looked like to the audience. The truth was that we were on our third encore and had run out of songs to perform. We were in the dressing room, racking our brains to come up with another song, but we couldn’t.

“I got it—I’ll faint,” Paul suggested.

We looked at him like he was crazy.

“You can pull that off ?” I said.

“No problem,” Paul said.

We didn’t even tell our roadies because as great as they were, they all had big mouths and would have told the whole place, “Paulie’s going to faint.” So we kept it quiet.

We went out for another encore and I sat behind the drums. We went into “Deuce” for the second time, and I was just waiting for Paul to faint. Sure enough, he swooned and fell to the stage. Within seconds, J.R. was knocking people out of the way, rushing to the stage.

Meanwhile Paul was lying there, clutching his head in an Oscar-worthy performance. J.R. and Mick Campise carried Paul off to the dressing room, and the show was over. We laughed for hours after, but then ” ayl that one.

Touring nonstop was dangerous for me because the Catman lived a very wild life. He did a lot of drugs, drank a lot of booze, got a lot of
pussy. I actually wanted to get rid of him now and then and just be Peter Criscuola again. The Catman was killing me.

But Gene and Paul loved the road. They would be happy tohat audience c

I
knew that things were changing when I set eyes on our new set after
we returned from Europe in June of 1976. The money was flowing in, and Bill was funneling some of it right back into the show. I have to admit that I loved the two huge emerald-eyed cats that sat on either side of my drums. But the rest of the staging was a mess. They built a gothic castle for Gene to be a monster in. The Spaceman got his own lunar landscape. There was a modified Tesla coil that was supposed to shoot out electricity during “God of Thunder,” but it seldom worked. Neither did the tentacle tree that was supposed to undulate its branches.

“This fucking set looks like a fruit salad,” Ace said. I in the back of the headanNe, thought it was more like Disneyland. We wound up getting rid of half of it.

Just as the set had changed, so did the people who were responsible for the show itself. The changes started at the top. Bill was seldom out on the road with us. When he did come out, he’d take us all to dinner and then stand on the side of the stage and gloat over us. We felt like kids showing off for their dad. But those visits were so far and few between that we began calling him Good Gig Gui (Gui was his nickname) because he had a tendency to only show up to the larger, most prestigious gigs.

Bill decided that we needed our own business managers. He reached out to Howard Marks and Carl Glickman. Marks had worked with Bill for years and had an active hand in mediating the royalty disputes with
Neil Bogart. Glickman was a real estate mogul from Cleveland who had experience in turning around companies on the verge of bankruptcy. He also seemed to have friends who were “connected”: One of those guys was rumored to have acquired a small percentage of ownership in KISS, since he had provided Bill with a bridge loan to keep him afloat before all the royalties from the
Alive
album kicked in.

Then Marks and Glickman began flexing their own muscle. Most of our original crew got eighty-sixed. J.R., Moosey, Munroe, all gone, all replaced by Marks and Glickman’s people. Overnight, we weren’t a rock ’n’ roll band anymore. We had become a big business. All the heart and soul and spontaneity had gone out the door when Marks and Glickman took over.

I loved Bill to death and I never want to badmouth him in any way, but I think a lot of the problems we were facing were due to the coke clouding his judgment. Bill had been the hands-on arbiter of any disputes in the band in the early days.

“At the end of every week, I want all four of you to sit in one room and hash out whatever is bothering you,” Bill would tell us. And we did that for quite a while. Each guy would bring up what was bugging him about the others and we’d discuss it and say we’d change and then we’d all shake on it.

But we got away from that. Now there were all these new people around us, and they weren’t loyal people who had been through wars with us. Howard Marks didn’t know a fucking thing about running a band. All these guys were businessmen. Bill knew us backward and forward, but the coke was making him paranoid.

The only upside to the personnel changes was that we hired the greatest road manager we would ever have. Frankie Scinlaro was an incredibly endearing Italian, a roly-poly guy around five foot six inches with a beard and a razor cut haircut. He was a veteran of the road, having taken Alice Cooper out for years.

Frankie was tougher than any one of us, for sure. He had a way with words that was unrivaled, so it was never a good idea to try to outjab him. He was the “why” man. He’d preface all his comments with Why? If Paul had been giving him a hard time, he’d zero in. “Why, you don’t wish you
could grow a pussy overnight, next to your cock? Why, we don’t make little titties when we go in the shower?”

“Fuck you, fat Frankie,” Paul would counter.

“I may be fat, but I please all the girls. My dick’s not big, but I can make it spin. Can you?”

Frankie gave all of us nicknames. He thought Paul’s nickname, He/She, was perfect, so he didn’t change that. Ace was High Octane because he was bombed most of the time. Or Scraps, because he ate. Later she would tell mes” whatever was left over on everybody’s plates. He called me either Peter Loooong, because I would complain all the time, or the Ayatollah Criscuola because of my imperious attitude. Gene was Gene the Nazarene because he thought he was God’s gift to the world.

Frankie’s greatest salvos were always aimed at Gene. Gene actually had the balls to ask all of us to refer to him as God. He was dead serious. If I said something as mundane as “Gee, it’s a beautiful day today,” Gene would say, “Yes, I think I’ll leave it that way.”

So Frankie would go up to Gene and say, “I’m going to sit next to God. Is it okay for me to be near your presence, Sir Gene?”

Gene would say yes.

“Oh, thank you so much for talking to me,” Frankie would say, actually bowing and scraping. “I feel so honored, I can’t wait to be like you when I grow up.” How could you not love a guy like that who has the balls to put you in your rightful place? He made a jerk out of me many, many times, but I loved him. We all loved him. He would always say, “Why? Who’s better than us?”

Frankie would always scam the promoters. Every place we played, he would tell them that it was one of our birthdays that night.

“Hey, it’s Peter’s birthday tonight. Can you make something happen? You know, some women, some champagne?” Sure enough, after the show I’d walk into the dressing room and all these people would be singing “Happy Birthday” and I’d look all surprised.

Frankie worked the hotel managers as well. One time Ace and I tore a hotel-room door off its hinges. When the angry manager came up to complain, Frankie got irate, blamed it on crazy fans who found out our room numbers, and castigated the hotel security. One time Ace destroyed
his room and the cops were on their way over, so Frankie had Ace lie under the covers and told the cops that Ace had passed out and that it angered the people he was partying with so much that they threw all his furniture out the window.

I think Bill got a little jealous of Frankie. By then we had started chartering our own little private planes. One day Gene told me that Frankie was getting fired for taking kickbacks on the plane fees. I didn’t buy that at all. I think he was set up and they got rid of him because he got too close to the band. I got together with Frankie quite a few times after he got canned. We’d go for drinks and he’d say, “Peter, I never stole any of your money. I loved you guys. I gave you everything I had. Those guys were full of shit.” I believed him. Frankie died years after that. I cried in my room when I heard the news.

We hit the road with our new show on July 3 in Norfolk, Virginia. It didn’t take two dates before we had our first crisis. On July 8 in Richmond, a fan threw a live M-80 firecracker that landed on my drum riser and exploded with such force that it literally blew me off my drums. My drum tech had to cushion my fall and we both went down. Then I couldn’t hear a thing. They stopped the show and threw me into an ambulance and checked me out. We came right back to the venue, but I was reluctant to finish the show.

Sean would have none of that.

“You fucking go out there and you tell them, ‘Fuck this, the Cat has nine motherfucking lives,’ and then go right into a drum solo.”

I did just what Sean said, and the crowd went crazy. The noise was so deafening it felt like the walls of the coliseum would come tumbling down. The guys joined me hours a dayd ever at the end of the solo, and it was such a rush.

Two days later, we were back in the metropolitan area. We were playing Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. It was a real shithole. But we did have a great after-show party, and Linda Lovelace of
Deep Throat
fame showed up. Of course everyone wanted a blowjob from her, but it never happened.

This was the show where we met our new business manager’s tour liaison, Chris Lendt. Chris was a recent business-school graduate, a real clean-cut straight guy. It didn’t take us long to corrupt him. Chris and I
got along real well. One of the first things I had him do was go with me to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. That’s where my grandmother Clara was resting. Clara had been my second mother. I had undying love for her. She worked her ass off at three jobs to help support my family, all the time keeping the house where she and I lived clean and hospitable. She was my hero. One Sunday night when I came home from a date, she was watching Lawrence Welk as usual, but she was having a little scotch. She never drank scotch before—she was a beer drinker—but her doctor told her that she should switch to scotch now and then since she was a diabetic and there was no sugar in scotch. Now you know why I hated doctors then.

I went to my room that night and lay in the bed, and then I heard a thumping noise. I went into the living room and she was on the floor, unable to get up. I thought she had died and I ran to my mom’s house and she came back and we called an ambulance. Clara had taken a diabetic stroke. She couldn’t talk after that, she couldn’t walk. So my parents took her in and they had to feed her and wash her and give her her insulin injections.

It killed me to see her like that. She was such a strong woman. She was indestructible in my eyes. This was the woman who raised me, put the coats on my back, and helped me through school. But seeing her like that was too much and I just ran, right into Lydia’s arms and into our marriage. When my grandmother died, they put her to rest in the Bronx, where her parents and her twin sister, who had died at birth, were already interred. But there was no headstone for her. There was no indication that Clara was there with them. My parents didn’t have the money to get her a proper headstone.

But now I did. Chris and I went out and bought a marble headstone for my grandmother’s grave site. I think that little trip made a big impression on him. All the other guys were buying expensive clothes and fancy cars with their newfound wealth, and I was buying a gravestone.

After a few weeks with us, Chris Lendt was amazed by our appeal. It was like we had hypnotized the audience, he’d say. “You can go out there and say, ‘We’re going to lift the whole building up,’ and these fans would go and do it.” It’s true, we did have an unreal amount of control over the fans. It bordered on mania. After a concert in the Midwest, we discovered
that someone had broken into our dressing room and stolen my entire outfit. My boots, my costume, my gloves, all gone. The cops thought they might have a lead, so they tracked this guy to his home. Outside his door, the cops heard “Black Diamond” blasting from his stereo. He didn’t answer their knocks, so they busted the door down and there he was, sitting in a big chair, dressed in my costume and makeup, downing a beer and watching KISS videos on his TV.