And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (29 page)

PolyGram couldn’t have been happier that we were tussling with RSO over the top spot on the charts: they distributed
both
albums. From the careful-what-you-wish-for file, they soon became so swamped by the success of the
SNF
soundtrack that all they did for months was scramble to keep up with the orders. This indicates just how huge the album was—for a short time, the entire industry suffered a manufacturing logjam due to its enormous volume of sales.

With most of 8255 Sunset hip-deep in disco, Peter Guber and the FilmWorks division had begun work on their next project. Guber had acquired the movie rights to a 1977 book by Billy Hayes entitled
Midnight Express.
The book, which had topped the best-seller lists, was the true account of Hayes’s 1970 arrest and imprisonment in Turkey for attempting to smuggle hashish back to the United States. The first I heard of the movie was when I was invited, along with Giorgio Moroder, to attend a screening of it. Neil had done a sales job on Peter and convinced him to get Giorgio to compose the film’s score. Giorgio’s initial reaction to the offer was cool, but he eventually capitulated, and for his efforts he won the Academy Award for best original score. The book was adapted for the screen by a young ex-military man by the name of Oliver Stone, who won an Academy Award for his work on the film.

Christy, my sister-in-law, became good friends with one of the film’s producers, David Puttnam (she’d befriend just about anyone with a British accent), who for months sat downstairs at FilmWorks and edited the movie. During production, I often visited his editing space—a trailer parked in the employee parking lot—to check on his progress. I never had anything to say to him, but I was intrigued by the editing process, and when I needed to get away from the chaos of Casablanca I found Puttnam’s trailer to be a great hiding place. I’ve no idea how closely it paralleled actual events, but the story depicted in the film was harrowing. This was a far, far better product than
The Deep
, and there was zero comparison between it and the throwaway disco movie that Neil was making across town. Stone and director Alan Parker took
Midnight Express
to the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor. Guber’s first two FilmWorks films were a summer blockbuster followed by a critical darling.
Midnight Express
opened the door for David Puttnam, who would to go on to make
Chariots of Fire
and later run Columbia Pictures.

There had been so many new people added to the company, so many new acts, a merger, and a buyout—all in the space of a year. We were very fortunate that throughout it all, KISS, our premier act, had sailed on so smoothly with comparatively little attention from us. But by May of 1978, there were growing divisions between the band members. One of the advantages of KISS’s signature makeup was that onstage it gave all four band members more or less equal importance, and that helped keep egos at bay. However, KISS had always been (and always would be) the vehicle of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons: they wrote and sang almost all of the songs, and they were the dominant personalities. But now Ace Frehley and Peter Criss had begun to rebel. Their behavior was becoming more erratic, although most of it was of the drug-and-alcohol-related kind, which was still the acceptable standard in the rock and roll world. In May, the band began shooting a TV movie of the week called
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park;
we started hearing reports that Ace and, in particular, Peter were showing up late for shoots and were generally moody and difficult.

Most of these headaches fell under the purview of Bill Aucoin or Glickman/Marks, and we were more than happy to let them wage the war for us. Then, on the morning of May 27, 1978, Neil received an urgent a phone call from Aucoin, who explained that Peter Criss had been involved in a car crash. The circumstances surrounding the accident weren’t yet fully known, but what we did hear wasn’t good. Peter and one of KISS’s roadies, Fritz Postlethwaite, had totaled a Porsche on Sepulveda Boulevard. Fritz had been found in the burning wreckage; Peter had been thrown through the windshield onto the pavement. Both had been rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Marina del Rey.

The movie had wrapped that day, and the two had been up all night at a high-stakes poker game. As the sun rose, they had jumped into their rented Porsche and taken off, destination unknown. At around 6:00 a.m., they’d hit a tree at a very high speed. September 18 was the target release date for four new KISS albums, and the KISS movie was slated for an October premiere on NBC. Any negative news about the band at this point would be pure kryptonite. Again, I was not told what strings Neil pulled to keep the story quiet, but the lack of press coverage was impressive.

The specter of four new KISS albums was very troubling to me. They weren’t KISS albums per se, but solo records by each of the band’s four members. As far back as mid-1976, when Glickman/Marks had arrived on the KISS scene, solo albums had been mentioned in their contract. Under the terms of their agreement, one such solo effort would count as half an album; this meant that by releasing four solos at once, they would eliminate two full albums from their contractual obligations. For a long while, very little had been said about doing solo records, and the idea was largely forgotten, at least around our offices. Then, probably in the summer of 1977, the idea began to heat up and take shape, and by the beginning of 1978, Aucoin was pressing it hard. This may have been an attempt on his part to appease Peter and Ace, to soothe egos and repair the band mates’ relationships.

We hated the idea and did our best to stonewall Aucoin. Solo albums were a lose-lose proposition for a record company. They rarely did well, so financially they made little sense, but by saying no to your artists you ran the risk of fracturing the always-fragile act-label relationship. KISS wanted to do four at once? No thanks. It wasn’t until Bill implied that the band would break up if we refused that we finally agreed to it, but we were still skeptical about their motives. We thought that they might be attempting to fulfill their contract with us quickly so they could find a new record company or that they were trying to force us into offering them a sweeter deal.