Face the Music: A Life Exposed (33 page)

1982—life in the tabloids. You can keep it.

Once we finished recording
Creatures,
I spent much of the rest of the year going back and forth between L.A. and New York to see Donna. She came to New York a lot, too, and lived out of my apartment. After her TV show
Bosom Buddies
got canceled, she auditioned for a movie called
Doctor Detroit.
She told me after the audition that she thought Dan Ackroyd, the star of the film, was a genius. I thought that assessment was a stretch.

Donna was looking for a new financial advisor, so I introduced her to Howard Marks. Howard had a potbelly and always wore his pants below his stomach, using suspenders to hold up his trousers. Not uncharacteristically, the day we went to see him, he’d probably had a few stiff drinks beforehand. He was eating his lunch at his desk when we arrived. He gave Donna a big talk about saving for the future and how important financial planning was and, after this long dissertation, he stood up and started to walk over to a side table in the corner of his office with the remains of his lunch and his dirty napkins on a lunch tray. As he got up—it was as if it was happening in slow motion—I could see his suspenders dangling down. He must have taken them off his shoulders while sitting at his desk. As he started to cross the room, his pants began to shimmy downward until they dropped to the floor.

Howard looked down, threw his tray in the air, reached for his pants, and screeched, “Oh, my God!”

“Is this normal?” Donna asked me.

She landed the role in
Doctor Detroit,
and I visited her on the set in Chicago—and gave her a diamond ring. I didn’t call it an engagement ring. The relationship was stagnating somewhat; something was lacking for both of us. But I didn’t want to lose her, and I didn’t want to be left.

Sometimes, Donna would drop out of sight, and I wouldn’t hear from her for a few days. She was living out of my place when she was in New York, and just before Christmas I found a new fur coat in the closet. She said she’d taken it from the wardrobe department of something she was working on. It wasn’t too long before she blindsided me by suddenly talking about having never been on her own and needing space. I told her that I didn’t want to be just another guy dating her and didn’t want to share her. Although there were more unanswered questions now and more distance between us, we dropped the subject and didn’t bring it up again for a while.

Then I saw among her things a little T-shirt with “Martha’s Vineyard” on the front of it. Martha’s Vineyard? When had she gone to Martha’s Vineyard? She would explain her disappearances away—kind of. I didn’t ask too many questions, either, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the truth. And anyway, when someone was inconsiderate or dishonest, it reinforced what I thought of myself.

This is what I deserve.

If only I can get her to like me . . .

K
ISS shot a video for “I Love It Loud” with Ace. Then he went with us to Europe for some lip-synced promotional appearances at the time of the release of
Creatures of the Night
. He was very fragile, and in Europe he said to me, “I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I can’t do this anymore.”

When we flew back to the States, that was it. Ace was gone for good.

Ace, Peter, Bill Aucoin—all gone. People were dropping like flies all around us. Neil Bogart had died of cancer while we were making
Creatures;
even though he wasn’t involved with the record company anymore, his death severed another tie to our past. Richard Monier, a recent tour manager and one of my closest friends, was the first person I knew to die of AIDS—that same year. And Wally Meyrowitz, one of our booking agents in New York—another buddy and confidant—died from a combination of booze and barbiturates.

Where did everybody go?

Gene seemed fixated on Hollywood and spent as little time as possible on things related to the band. In his inimitable dismissive self-serving style, Gene liked to say, “Well, Paul only wants to be a rock star. I want so much more in life.”

I didn’t understand why everybody was jumping ship. We were still KISS. And I still looked at the band as my life raft.

WHERE DID EVERYBODY GO?

We had a tour scheduled to start on December 27, 1982, and we didn’t have a permanent replacement for Ace yet. I’d felt from the get-go that Vinnie wouldn’t work in the band. And in the interim, some nasty rumors had spread about him stealing equipment from the rehearsal studio. But nobody else was on the horizon. When the decision was made to bring him in, I said to Gene, “I just want to go on record saying that this is a bad move.”

With the
Creatures
tour coming on the heels of several financial disasters, we’d had to tighten our belts, so Vinnie didn’t get a Porsche.

Vinnie wanted to change his name to Mick Fury when he got the gig. Why did everybody come up with cartoon names? I just looked at him like,
Are you serious?
We settled on Vinnie Vincent. After playing around with ideas for his makeup, I designed the Egyptian ankh image.

As far as his knowledge of and understanding of the guitar, Vinnie was terrific. I’d written with him and heard him play and sing, and knew his talent. The problem was that he had no sense of what to play or when, and he had no ability to self-edit. His playing was like puking—it just came splattering out. He wanted to show how fast he could play, how many notes he could play—he didn’t think things out. This became more problematic when the tour started.

Onstage, Vinnie was hell-bent on using every solo as an opportunity to showcase himself. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s all about context. Vinnie never seemed to grasp that. He was intensely jealous of guys like Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee because he thought he was as good as them. He wanted his “just due,” and his solo spot in the middle of the show became ungodly long. We used to call it the high point of the show—because everybody in the audience left to go get high.

Not that many people saw his wannabe guitar heroics—the
Creatures
tour did horrendously in most markets. Before we went onstage, we’d hear “You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest band in the land . . .” and we’d walk out to find nobody was there. Sometimes there would be only a thousand people in an arena that could hold eighteen thousand.

We had packed the same venues a few years before, but now, if I threw my guitar pick too far, it sailed over people’s heads and landed on the floor. We’d pull into arenas that looked as if somebody had forgotten to turn off the parking lot lights after an event was long over. And then we’d get inside and hear the echo from the main hall and know for sure it was empty.

We left blood, as they say in the business. It was a death march for us and for the concert promoters.

At first, the instinct was to blame other people.
Oh, it’s the promoter’s fault.
But if people want to see you, it doesn’t take an incentive to get them to a show. And if they don’t want to see you, the promoter can’t make them buy a ticket at knifepoint. We had to face the fact that people didn’t come because they didn’t want to.

Obviously, we had to pay penance for
Unmasked
and
The Elder
. We got back on track with
Creatures,
but fans were not that forgiving. It was going to take years to win back our fans and make new fans. We had betrayed them. We had betrayed ourselves, too, and we weren’t going to be easily forgiven.

It’s shocking in hindsight what we had done. And we spent years making up for it. The people who turned off to us weren’t going to come back just because we said we were sorry. We had to prove it, and that took a lot of time.
Creatures
alone was not enough.

But nothing can prepare you for the shock of vast empty spaces. It was unfathomable that from one tour to the next, the audience just disappeared. The bottom had fallen out.

I loved the position that I had—I loved the stature of the band and how I was perceived. And losing that was horrible.
Horrible
.

I dealt with the depression by sleeping. It was my way of checking out. I was so depressed that I couldn’t keep my eyes open anywhere. It got so bad that I fell asleep in the dressing room before shows. Sometimes, I dozed off before I did my makeup; sometimes I dozed off in my makeup. The crew had a hard time waking me up.

I still looked to Donna for a sense of calm and security. I could spend hours talking to her on the phone every day. She was gearing up for the release of
Doctor Detroit
. She told me once again that she needed space. I told her I still wasn’t prepared to be one of several people she was dating, and that if she really wanted to break up, she had to face me in person. I bought her an airline ticket to our next tour stop. She flew in. And it was over.

My depression deepened.

I don’t know whether the tour situation or the overall band crisis affected Gene—he wasn’t fully vested in the band at that point. After all, he had brought in a carload of kiddies to sing on the album and was clearly looking elsewhere. He’s never been one to verbalize his feelings, so it wasn’t something we talked about, even though we were both certainly aware of what was happening.

Eric, for his part, didn’t understand the financial side—he wasn’t aware of how the disastrous turnouts related to our budgeting. He just loved being in the band and loved playing the material from the new album.

A few months after my all-or-nothing ultimatum to Donna, I decided it was just too hard—nothing and no one had filled the void. Anything I got from her was better than nothing. I took a deep breath and called her. She seemed stunned. I told her how I felt, and we started speaking frequently on the phone again. Talk of missing each other wasn’t uncommon. We even got together when KISS played a show in L.A.

One morning just before we left for South America for the last leg of the tour, I glanced at a copy of the newspaper and a small article caught my eye.
The actress Donna Dixon has married her Doctor Detroit co-star Dan Ackroyd, newly discovered paperwork shows. The marriage license came to light in Martha’s Vineyard.

What? Martha’s Vineyard?

It turned out they had already been married for three months. I was stunned to realize that during the time that we had been talking again, she had been on the verge of getting married, and then in fact had gotten married.

Suddenly I felt like I was underwater. I could barely move.

I called her. “You were married when we were talking?”

She said something about how she hoped I would find what she had found. No explanation, no apology.

I hung up.

From then on, it was a struggle to do anything. Depression held me like a vise. I had to push myself every day:
Get your ass out of bed
.

Everything around me was caving in.

Just keep moving
.
Otherwise, you drown
.

The press seemed to take delight in seeing KISS implode. After I struggled out of bed one day to get to an interview, the reporter asked me, “How does it feel to be on the
Titanic?
” Writers looked at us as a commodity and forgot that we were people. Another interviewer asked, “How does it feel to be dying?” They were so hateful. Their coldness and perverse joy was not lost on me. Still, I realized something when fielding mean-spirited questions like that, day after day.

Nobody is going to tell me when this is over
.

Sure, everything around me had gone wrong. But what about me? What about my survival? That was up to me.

How does it feel to be dying?

Those pricks on the phone were not going to decide whether I got the thumbs up or thumbs down in the arena.

KISS was
everything
to me.

And right then I swore I would do whatever it took to keep my life raft afloat.

KISS will never die
.

Under the gun

I
n June 1983 we flew to Brazil and played to 180,000 screaming fans in Maracanã Stadium in Rio. It was the biggest audience we had ever performed in front of. Taking the stage in the soccer stadiums of South America, I realized the stadiums we think of as big in the States were miniscule by comparison. Tiny. When you walk into a stadium like Maracanã, you feel like you’re in the bottom of an oil drum.

Another difference is the security. During the afternoon, when we were checking things out, armed militia milled around with dogs.

There’s no way to describe the amount of energy that a crowd that big puts out. And all the energy was directed at us up on the stage. You might say the air was electric or that there was a sense of anticipation, hysteria—call it what you will. But when it’s all directed at you, it’s like a huge wave that can consume you. The amount of power pushing at you is incredible. It can almost take you off your feet.

And yet, as exhilarating as it was to play those venues, the writing was on the wall. It was only a matter of how the dominoes were going to fall, not whether they would fall. We could still play the biggest stadiums in South America, but we were in a very shaky position in North America. We knew we had to build KISS from the ground up, all over again.

Back in the States, I once again urged Gene to agree to do the most radical thing we could do: take off our makeup. Some people saw this as a bold move; I saw it as our
only
move. Our U.S. audience hadn’t dwindled by chance. It had dwindled because what we were doing no longer rang true. People were tired of what KISS had become.

With the new characters, we were one step removed from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I mean, what the hell was Vinnie’s ankh about? Rather than keeping the original personas and images alive, we had become a ridiculous menagerie. What was next? Turtle Boy?

As we began to record
Lick It Up,
we thought about getting a manager to replace Bill. Up to this point, Howard Marks had taken over the business aspects of Bill’s job, and we were basically managing ourselves. So we went to see a famous manager in L.A. and told him that we had decided to take the makeup off. “Why don’t you keep it on half your face?” he said.