Makeup to Breakup (35 page)

I loved the Bel-Air hotel. It had a lot of great history: Marilyn stayed there, Gregory Peck stayed there, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope. It was really exclusive. We rented a big, beautiful suite.

I didn’t invite the band. I didn’t want Gene and Paul there for sure, and I certainly didn’t want Ace to be there with some crazy chick, stoned and fucked up. It was Gigi’s and my day. The guys wound up sending two big diamond watches to show respect. Gigi invited Rachel, one of Gene’s longtime girlfriends whom she had gotten close to. I thought that she was just going to spy on us for Gene, but it was Gigi’s wedding, too, so she came.

I wanted a priest to officiate but you can’t get a Catholic priest if you’re divorced, which is bullshit, so we found a great minister through my doctor friend Terry Hammer. Gigi looked absolutely gorgeous in a simple
white dress, no big ruffles or flowers. She looked so classy she should have been on the cover of
Bride
magazine.

We exchanged vows and then had a sit-down dinner in a private dining room next to the hotel kitchen. They served a great dinner, soup to nuts, and some good champagne. I swore to Gigi that I wouldn’t get high, but I started knocking back that champagne and soon enough my jacket came off and my tie was loose.

That night there was a mix-up, and instead of a nice suite, they put us in a regular room. Normally I would have gone crazy over their screwup but now, all of a sudden, I just froze up, and the magnitude of what had happened just hit me. I went out and sat alone in the garden.

“Is this cool? Should you have gotten married again? You’ve been married twice already, and they were miserable failures,” I thought to myself. We had already bought a big house in Jersey and we were going to move in right after the wedding. “Now you’re married to a real straightforward woman who lives by God. No more hanky-panky and champagne parties,” I mused. It’s time to grow up and be a man.

Be a man? I had no idea what that meant. I had always lived in a child’s world: Keeping that childlike innocence was really important to me. So all these doubts were going through my head, and now I felt guilty that it was Gigi’s wedding night and we weren’t even having sex because I was so freaked out. Gigi was really understanding.

“You seem scared, Peter,” she said. “Do you regret marrying me?”

I didn’t know how to answer. Meanwhile Gigi was depressed because she felt that she was paying for all of the mistakes I had made with other women. She didn’t get a nice, elaborate wedding because I was concerned about having a woman who drains all my resources in my life. I was wrong. Later I’d feel bad that I denied Gigi the wedding she’d always envisioned.

The next day we flew home and I felt suffocated, sitting ,” Ace said. “ what ” ayisin coach between Gigi and her mother. Whoever made the arrangements had screwed up royally, because I always flew first-class, but here I was dying to have a scotch and soda, wedged between two people who were sober. “I can’t even have a fucking drink? What did I get into?” I thought. So I sat on my hands and white-knuckled it, counting the hours until we landed.
Ironically, they would have been fine with me having a drink. It was my hangup.

Later that summer, KISS was set to go into the studio to record our new album. Both the fans and I were really excited; this was going to be the first time the four of us had collaborated on an album in twenty years. Ace and I were both working on songs diligently. But then, once again, our hopes were shattered. We found out that they didn’t want Ace or me to play on the album. They were offering us $850,000 each not to play! I had heard that Paul once said he wouldn’t play in a studio with us ever again. I guess now that was confirmed.

That was a lot of money for nothing, but I didn’t want to just take the money and not play. It was never just about money for me, it was always about the music. Then Doc asked us to sign a paper saying that we played on the album. I told him I couldn’t lie like that. “But the fans gotta feel you guys did the album together,” Doc protested.

I sat down with Tommy Thayer (who would eventually play guitar on all of the tracks except for two) and wrote a couple of really good songs. One, “Hope,” was a ballad that I wrote for Gigi, and, since the tour was going to be called the Psycho Circus Tour, we wrote “Psycho Circus,” a cool tune that could have been the signature song on the album. Like they would have ever let me have that. I was set to come to the studio and play the songs for Gene and Paul, but that cocksucker Thayer snuck behind my back and brought them the demos before I could play them for them. Of course I was shot down, but I complained so much that they set up a meeting for me with the producer, Bruce Fairbairn. We met for lunch at the Bel-Air Hotel. He seemed like a nice guy, another Canadian like Ezrin. And he was also wired, I realized.

Bruce put the headsets on and listened to my stuff with his eyes closed, like he was into it. He already knew they weren’t going to use any of it; they just wanted to placate me with this meeting, and that’s what he did. He listened and said, “I like what I hear, Peter, there’s a lot of emotion here, but I don’t know if it fits in the KISS genre. I’ll get back to you, I got to get back to the studio, we have a session today,” he told me.

I’m thinking, “I should be at that fucking session. This is so disrespectful.” Instead of Ace and me, they had their road manager Tommy Thayer
playing guitar and a guy named Kevin Valentine playing drums. Now I was locked out of my own band’s sessions. But then I get a call that Paul wanted me to sing a ballad that he wrote with Ezrin. If I sang it, they could tell people that I appeared on the album. I listened to the song, “I Finally Found My Way,” and it was just a blatant attempt at another “Beth,” except it sucked. The lyrics were about this pitiful, pathetic loser who finally finds his way back to God or Bob Dylan or some chick, who knows?

Bruce told me that I could do the song any way I wanted, so I went in and sang it as if it was a Sam Cooke song. I gave it a bluesy feel, I sang my heart out, and Bruce loved it. Next thing I knew, Paul called me.

“We heard you were down there recording,” he said.

“Yeah, I wanted to get a feel for the song_ord ever ,” I said.

“Well, we listened to it and you sound like Jimmy Durante.”

This was Paul’s attempt at a joke.

“What do you want, Paul?”

“I’m going to the studio, and you come down and I’ll be right next to you in the room and make sure we do it the right way,” he said. There was one note on the song that I couldn’t really hit. So he wanted to come in and sing it with me so I could get it right.

“You mean your way. There’s no right or wrong way, there’s Paul Stanley’s way.”

I went back and sang the song and it was like going through a root canal. Paul stood there every fucking second: “No, Peter . . . like this.”

It was the same old shit.

Then Ace called me. He really wanted a song on the album and he was breaking balls big-time, calling Gene every hour—“I want my fucking song on the album. I’m going to quit the band if I don’t get a song.” So they finally caved. Ace had written something called “Into the Void,” which was perfect for the Spaceman, but it wasn’t really a good song. Ace insisted that I come over to his apartment and rehearse with him because he wanted me to drum on at least one song on the album. That’s what I loved about Ace. He always did seem to have my back.

So we went into the studio and Gene and Paul were standing there, like they’re the producers, and we cut the track. It was a nightmare, and
it was even worse when we tried to play it live, but Ace was appeased. He got a song on the album so he stood to make some money because it was going to sell well. Nobody was going to know that we weren’t on it. But in fact, the album was subpar. There was a bad song from Ace, I sang a song at gunpoint, they got a substitute in for me so they’re not getting that flaming fiery instinctual drumming that they had years ago, and the road manager is playing Ace’s leads.

In October of 1998 we started the Psycho Circus Tour. Right off the bat, things started going wrong. The big gimmick for this tour was that we were going to have a huge 3-D monitor in the middle of the stage. During the show there would be previously recorded segments shown in 3-D, so from the audience it would look like Paul and Gene and Ace’s guitars would be right in your face and my drumsticks would seem to be inches from your nose. But all that was based on the idea that you could get thirty thousand KISS fans to wear the cardboard glasses and that the glasses would work. Neither assumption was correct. The 3-D effects never seemed to work, and nobody wanted to be hindered from seeing the big picture of what was going on onstage. It made no sense. Why show some snippets of 3-D on a screen while the actual band was playing? So people just chucked their glasses, and we took a bath on that tour because the technology to do 3-D was super-expensive in those days. We worked hard to get it to work right to no avail.

Even though the 3-D effects hardly ever worked, I still loved being up on that screen. I began to get off on the power that huge image would have on the audience. One night I was playing and I was pointing my sticks at chicks in the audience and almost as if by magic, one by one, they lifted up their tops and flashed their boobs. So I started using it as a Harry Potter–type wand to get people to do things. Once this couple on the side of the stage were actually fucking and I pointed to them and the guy lifted his girl’s dress. He had been boning her from the rear.

The tour rolled on,” Ace said. “ what ” ayis, and we did a European leg, but when we got back to the U.S. we decided to pull the plug. Ticket sales were nowhere as good as the reunion had been. Besides, Gene and Paul were preoccupied with other things. Paul was up in Toronto playing the Phantom in a stage production of
Phantom of the Opera.
He was great. He should have stayed in
theater. Meanwhile Gene was busy putting the finishing touches on our next film,
Detroit Rock City
.

His
next film, to be more precise. In 1982, Tim Sullivan, a huge KISS fan, had befriended Gene when he interviewed him for
Fangoria,
a horror magazine. Ten years later, Tim was working with New Line, the hottest movie studio in California, so Gene pitched him a proposal for a KISS movie called
The Creatures of the Night
. It was the same old
Phantom of the Park
bullshit with talismans and superpowers. Tim and the New Line guys hated it.

At the same time, a few young filmmakers were writing a script that focused on the KISS fans, a much more creative idea. The main character was a drummer who was obsessed with me. It was like a Holy Grail story where the grail was my drumstick and the drummer had to retrieve it just like Lancelot had to find Excalibur. This script was called
Detroit Rock City.

The script was sent to KISS’s office for KISS to be a part of. Somehow Gene got wind of this and hijacked the script, made himself the producer, and got Barry Levine, one of our longtime photographers, to coproduce it with him.

It was such a good script that Tim got it green-lighted in two weeks at New Line. But for Tim to work on it, he had to get permission from Gene to be a producer. Gene gave it to him, but Tim wound up making a $50,000 producer’s fee next to Barry’s fee of $500,000. God knows how much Gene made.

Ace, Paul, and I didn’t even know about the movie until we read about it in the
Hollywood Reporter.
After we met with Tim and the producers, I was excited. This wasn’t some Hanna-Barbera pablum, this was a real movie with a director, Adam Rifkin, whom I had heard about and admired for his movie
Mousehunt
. I really wanted to work on it, but then Gene started fucking everything up.

He had them take out a scene where the kids meet us backstage because, according to him, “Ace and Peter can’t act.” Tim asked Ace and me to come up with some ideas for our own cameos. That idea got axed when Gene put down his big fat producer’s foot. Then he told the other producers and the director that Ace and I were like children and we needed to be
kept on a tight leash. But he also lumped Paul in with me and Ace. Word got back to Paul, and he got really pissed that he was being marginalized, too. By then I was used to being put on the same shitlist as Ace.

New Line started discussing the music for the film with Gene. He threw out any songs that weren’t written by him and Paul. If they used “Beth,” then they couldn’t use the vocal, because then they’d have to pay me. We wanted an original song for the movie, not something from
Psycho Circus,
so Paul said he wanted to write it.

As they went into production, the New Line guys were getting harassed by Gene, who was pitching them all these other projects. He was licking every New Line asshole he could find, he was so desperate to break into Hollywood. I remember we’_ord ever d all be in a limo and Gene would say, “Can we have some quiet in the car please? I’m expecting a call from Steven Spielberg.” Of course the call never came. It took years for Gene to get a call from Hollywood. He finally got a reality show. Only it was his reality.

Tim and the director wanted us to record a new version of “Detroit Rock City” to use in the finale of the film. But Doc and Gene tried to give them the recording of that song from
Alive II
. They told Gene that it wouldn’t work and, for the last time ever, the four of us got in the studio and recorded a new version of “Detroit Rock City.” I did twenty-one takes in one day. Not bad for an old man, right?

The movie was completed, and it was testing through the roof. Now it was time for the director and Tim to hear the new song Paul wrote for the end credits. Gene called them into the studio, and they were shocked to see just Paul there. Ace and I never even knew about this new song. Gene sat them down and they were expecting some kick-ass rock anthem to end the movie, and all of a sudden they heard violins and Paul singing, “Wherever you are, I’ll be there for you.” There were no drums, no guitars: It was Paul and a karaoke machine doing a bad imitation of Steven Tyler. The song may have been okay for a remake of
Romeo and Juliet,
but it wasn’t working here at all. The New Line guys didn’t know what to say. Gene later told them that he hated the song, too, but that he had fucked Paul over so much that he told Paul that the end credits could be his domain. So they had to keep the song.