No Regrets (20 page)

Last time I checked,
Alive!
had sold more than four million copies worldwide; it continues to sell well even today. The album’s impact was apparent not just to us, but to the whole record industry. A year later Peter Frampton became a superstar with the double-live record
Frampton Comes Alive!
And with the release of the live album
At Budokan
Cheap Trick became one of the biggest-selling bands in the world.

I’d like to think we had something to do with their success.

No one questioned whether the album was really live
or whether we sounded that good in person. People simply ate it up. Nearly a decade would pass (and I’d be on a prolonged hiatus from the band) before Eddie started talking about the making of
Alive!
and the amount of studio work that went into it. Some fans were angry; many
didn’t care. If someone asks me today whether
Alive!
truly is a “live album,” I’ll usually answer with a question and a shrug:

“Does it really matter?”

It’s a terrific album, true to the KISS spirit in every way. Nothing gives me greater pride than to hear some young guitarist say he learned how to play by listening to
Alive!
or a veteran guitarist (like my buddies Mike McCready of Pearl Jam and Slash of Velvet Revolver and Guns N’ Roses) tell me how inspired he was by the solos on
Alive!
In many ways that’s more rewarding than all the gold records in the world.
Alive!
is an iconic album, one that reflects as clearly as possible what it was like to be at a KISS concert in 1975.

Isn’t that what counts?

Is it possible to circle a date on the calendar—a
specific day or time—when you realize everything has changed? I’m not sure. In the year following the release of
Alive!
my life was turned inside out, to the point where I barely recognized myself or the life I was living. It happened gradually, and then all at once. I don’t know how else to explain it. You wake up one morning and find that you’ve traded a bedroom in your parents’ house for an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in the Connecticut woods. You’re no longer taking cabs or relying on your girlfriend for transportation. Instead you’re driving a Porsche (and three other cars are sitting in the driveway,). No more Ramadas or Holiday Inns. Five-star hotels all the way. No more Denny’s (not that there’s anything wrong with Denny’s, by the way), no more IHOP.

But the biggest change, for me—the most glaring reminder that KISS was no longer just four guys from New York with big dreams and weird ideas about how to make them come true—was when we actually went out to play at night. Not only were we headlining almost every show, but we were playing some of the biggest arenas in the country,
and soon we were touring in Europe and Asia. More often than not, the venue was sold out. The money is nice, of course, especially when you haven’t had a lot before. The money buys freedom, if not necessarily happiness, and it is a barometer of success. But if you’re a serious musician there’s nothing like playing in a packed arena, in front of twenty thousand screaming fans. That was my fantasy when I was a kid, and suddenly it wasn’t a fantasy anymore.

In the mid- to late 1970s KISS was as hot a ticket as there was in rock ’n’ roll. I remember playing three nights at Madison Square Garden, with my family in the audience, and thinking,
How the fuck did this happen?
Here I am, the black sheep of the family, and by the time I’m in my mid-twenties, I’m the golden kid. I can do no wrong. It really warmed my heart to see the reaction of my parents and in-laws and other family members when they would come to a KISS concert in New York. I’d call them up, give them the full treatment: limo ride, backstage VIP passes, meet-and-greet with celebrities. The whole nine yards. And it was wonderful to be able to do that for them. To be honest, though, I’m not sure how much everyone really understood the whole rock scene. The only thing they knew was that I was famous and there was a lot of money being made, which must have meant that I was successful. Everyone seemed proud of that, but it probably baffled them a bit. I mean, shit… it baffled me, too.

How do you prepare for something like that? You don’t. You
can’t
. Eighteen months earlier I’d been happily pocketing seventy dollars a week from Bill Aucoin. And making it last! Now we were breaking attendance records everywhere we went. We’d gone from freak show to household name seemingly overnight. All hell broke loose. Everywhere we went, it was KISS mania. We’d built a fan base prior to
Alive!
, but now everything was amplified tenfold.

In Cadillac, Michigan, the entire town celebrated its love affair with the band, hosting what amounted to a weeklong KISS festival. Bill Au-coin thought it would be great publicity to play along with the town, so we flew into Cadillac on October 9, 1975, and took part in the Cadillac High School homecoming parade; we even played a live show (a tamer,
more family-friendly version of our usual performance). We turned it into a big media event. I had a lot of fun doing that because it was kind of tongue-in-cheek and irreverent. We put makeup on the mayor and some of the other local officials. Everyone got into the spirit of things. I thought it was a terrific event, because it represented thinking outside the box; it deviated from the norm, which I always enjoyed. I like the unexpected. I don’t like to know what I’m going to be doing a year from now, or five years from now. I like spontaneity; that’s what keeps my creative juices flowing. That said, I can’t stress strongly enough how little involvement I had in the promotion, marketing, and merchandising of the KISS brand. I just went along for the ride.

A lot of the time it was fun, of course. It’s fun until… well, until it’s not fun anymore. I felt invincible for the longest time—

I think we all did. There was a rhythm to each show, and it began in the dressing room, while we were putting on our makeup. Like four chicks in a beauty parlor we’d sit in front of the mirrors and dab at our faces and gossip, never really looking at each other but carrying on an endless four-way discussion. The dressing room was completely off-limits to anyone but our innermost circle. Not even wives or girlfriends were permitted in the dressing room. Just band members, our road manager, and the wardrobe girls who helped us with our costumes. Later on we hired a hairdresser to apply wigs to those band members who needed a little help. We’d sit in our chairs, in full costumes, being transformed into our various characters, and we’d chat about what had happened during the day (or the previous night) or whatever little changes we had planned for the show. If someone had screwed up the previous night, or in sound check, this was the place where we’d talk about it. Sometimes the conversation could be blunt:

“Watch the tempo!” “Don’t fuck up again!” “Ace, don’t forget the fuckin’ solo!”

More often, though, the mood was light. Gene often showed us Polaroid snapshots of the girls he’d been with the night before, and that brought out mixed reactions from all of us. Sometimes to the point of hysterical laughter. We’d pump ourselves up, talk about putting on a
great show, and joke about how much fun we were going to have afterward. Even then, for me, the party had already begun. I started drinking before the show and kept at it while we played. Afterward we’d usually jump in a limo and head back to the hotel, where we’d shower and change and become acquainted with the more attractive members of the burgeoning KISS Army. If we needed to be somewhere right after the show, we’d use the shower facilities at the arena. Usually, anyway. Once in a while there would be a party at the venue, which allowed us to fulfill the wishes of fans who were more interested in having sex with the
characters
in KISS than in having sex with the men behind the makeup.

“Pleeeeeeease, I want to fuck the Spaceman!”

I sometimes accommodated. Different strokes, right?

More often, though, we retreated to the hotel and the privacy of a hospitality suite, where an assortment of beautiful gals would be waiting. We used to call it the “Chicken Coop,” for obvious reasons.

To any normal person living a regular life, this probably sounds completely bizarre. But it was normal for us. The hedonistic, aberrant behavior becomes a way of life when you’re at the top of the rock ’n’ roll ladder. If you want to have sex five times a day, with five different women? All you have to do is open the door. That wasn’t normally my cup of tea, but Gene loved every minute. It becomes a game, a way to pass the time (or, in Gene’s case, maybe an addiction?). You take advantage of it for any number of reasons, the most obvious being boredom and availability. Same thing with drugs. I have an addictive personality. I’m an alcoholic. I don’t want to minimize the damage that drinking can do, but for the longest time that’s all I was: a drinker.

When the money began pouring in, that all changed.

There was a time when cocaine absolutely scared the
shit out of me. Not in the way that it scares me now, which is basically the way any drug, including alcohol, scares me—a good, healthy “if I
start using again I will die” kind of fear. I’m talking about a gut-level fear. The kind you have when you’re a little kid; a fear of the unknown. Even though I started drinking at a young age and experimented with sniffing glue and became a casual user of marijuana, all by the time I got into high school, there was something about cocaine or any hard drug that scared me. As a kid I considered cocaine and heroin to be on the same level, and to be capable of approximately the same degree of devastation. I didn’t want to touch hard drugs, and in those days cocaine fell into that category. It wasn’t a chic drug; it wasn’t cool or hip. In my eyes, it was no different than heroin, which was the dangerous drug… the
loser’s
drug.

I never did get into heroin. In fact, aside from the one or two times when I suspect someone laced my coke with it, I never even tried heroin. But cocaine?

Oh yeah. Big-time.

Our next album,
Destroyer,
represented a departure for KISS, and not merely because of the cocaine and Courvoisier on the mixing console. The producer on
Destroyer
was Bob Ezrin, a studio wizard best known for his work with Alice Cooper, and a guy so widely acknowledged as being a production genius that everyone was basically willing to look the other way when it became apparent that he had a few vices of his own.

That was one of the things that bothered me most about Paul and Gene—they were very selective in their moral indignation. Bob was a brilliant producer, so they gave him a free pass, much the same way they did with Neil Bogart during the production of
Dressed to Kill.
I think the word
hypocritical
might be apropos at this point.

I remember the very first time I tried coke. It was during the recording of the
Destroyer
album, in December 1975. Watching Bob and others partake of the glittery crystalline powder during the recording and mixing process intrigued me and brought out my curiosity. I figured that if a genius like Bob did it, and he was very successful at what he did, then maybe it was the missing link I had been looking for in my life. I
asked Peter if he could hook me up with some since I knew he had a connection. He scored some coke for me and it changed my life from that day forward.

The first time I ripped a few lines of blow I felt like I’d discovered something almost as good as sex. My whole body came to life. It was a terrific buzz on its own, and in the beginning it gave me focus and clarity, but you know what I liked the most about coke?

It made me a better drinker.

I was already damned prodigious, but cocaine put me in a different league. It allowed me to drink longer and harder without passing out. I could party way into the wee hours, into the next morning and afternoon, maybe right on into the next night if I felt like it. If I had my blow I could keep on going—like the Energizer Bunny. Hour after depraved hour. What I discovered—what any connoisseur of cocaine discovers—is the remarkable ability of the human body to withstand abuse. Cocaine is a stimulant, alcohol a depressant. Used smartly (notice I didn’t say “intelligently”), the two chemicals balance each other out. It’s almost like a speedball, the alcohol (or, in the case of a speedball, the heroin) depressing the central nervous system and the cocaine jolting it back to life. Of course, I’d never done a speedball, never would have considered it. Mix heroin and cocaine? No fuckin’ way. Too dangerous. People I knew had died from that concoction. You’d have to be out of your mind. But cocaine and alcohol? Oh yeah. All night long, baby.

Once I started doing cocaine, there was no stopping me. It really was that clear a line of demarcation, and it began with
Destroyer
. For a while it didn’t even have an adverse impact on my playing. Cocaine can actually make you sharper. For me, in smaller doses, it was like guzzling coffee. I had tried speed a few times and didn’t like it—made me too jumpy. But coke worked beautifully, especially in combination with alcohol. I’d get comfortably numb, as they say.