Kiss and Make-Up (16 page)

Our coming-out party for Casablanca Records at the Century Plaza, with Alice Cooper and Jan Walsh.
(photo credit 7.1)

Getting ready to perform on
In Concert.
(photo credit 7.2)

Neil loved it, but he realized we needed more exposure, and pretty soon he got us booked on a show called
In Concert
, which was hosted by Dick Clark. The other guests that night were Kool and the Gang and Melissa Manchester; that gives you some idea of how eclectic the rock and roll scene was at that time. There may have been bands who, before playing on these TV shows, mingled with the other bands and made friends. We weren’t one of them. For starters, we were defiantly out of step with the times. The other thing that set us apart, though, was our makeup. We had to apply it ourselves, and it took a few hours, so the ritual of getting ready for the show actually prevented us from having much contact with the other bands.

While we were getting ready for the show, Dick Clark came backstage to say hello to us. He shook our hands and wished us luck. To this day, he remains one of the classiest people I have ever met in the record business. I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to be a young band and have Dick Clark treat us with respect. Paul and I have talked about that occasionally over the years, and it’s been kind of a guide for us, especially in dealing with our fans. We try never to be rude, never to turn away kids looking for autographs.

Being polite backstage, though, didn’t mean that we weren’t going to tear the roof off the place when we finally got onstage. We played three songs, “Deuce,” “Firehouse,” and “Black Diamond,” and each one was more powerful than the last. The show was absolutely wild. At one point I went right at the cameraman while breathing fire, and on TV all you can see is my face approaching and then the ceiling, because the cameraman jumped off his platform and ran. We didn’t see the show until two months later. By that time we were back on tour, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. After the show we’d gone back to the motel to change before heading out for the night. Someone turned on the TV set, and there we were, on national television.

That whole first tour was a blur. We were making seventy-five dollars a week, which was nothing, although it seemed like all the money in the world since we were making it playing music. We opened for many bands: for Savoy Brown and Manfred Mann, for Foghat and Golden Earring. And we founded a proud tradition of being thrown off of tours. In part this was because we would leave the stage a terrible mess when we were through with it: there would be fake blood all over, and parts of the set would be singed. Once while opening for Black Oak Arkansas, I accidentally set a corner of their curtain on fire. Bands really wanted us off the tour, though, because they couldn’t follow us. In theory, we were the opening act and they were the headliners. But when we were finished with the crowd, they would have a stunned, uncertain look in their eyes. There was no way to go on after us.

We felt triumphant on tour, like we were on our way to the top. But we didn’t forget the people who helped us, particularly our road
crew. One guy named Paul Chaverria, my bass roadie, was a little tiny guy, no more than five-five, but he could be an attack dog. Once Paul Stanley was trying to get into the arena, and a security guard wasn’t letting him by, and Paul Chaverria just lit into this guard like nothing you’ve ever seen. Then there was Junior Smalling, a big black guy who worked as our road manager. A guy named Moose loaded Ace’s guitar, and another guy, one of our drivers, lost his life years later when he swerved to avoid a family on a bridge. They were characters, roadies like you’d expect to see in a movie. But they were amazing: competent, devoted, and uncomplaining. We couldn’t have done it without them.

For a number of shows we opened for Argent, a band led by Rod Argent, who had previously been a member of the great British invasion band the Zombies. Argent had charted with at least one huge hit, “Hold Your Head Up,” and the band had a number of albums under their belt. We were novices compared to them, and as the junior band, we had to follow lots of arbitrary rules, one of which was the no-encore rule. According to Argent, we could go out there and play only eight songs, and then we had to close up shop. The only problem was that the audiences wanted us for longer than that. Argent fixed that by shutting off our power after eight songs.

We’d be playing our hearts out, and the crowd would be screaming along, and then suddenly the lights would go dead. It was demoralizing. During one show our set went well as usual, and the audience was in a frenzy. We got to the end of our eighth song, and they were screaming as loud as they could, and we all braced for the lights to go dead—but they didn’t. They stayed on. So we played an encore, and the crowd was still screaming. At that point we didn’t really have any more songs, so we actually went back and replayed some of the songs from earlier in the set. Finally, after the third or fourth encore, we came off, drenched in sweat, completely confused about Argent’s change of heart. It turns out that we owed our good luck to Junior Smalling, who had gotten into a little argument with Argent’s road manager and pushed him into an anvil case and locked it shut. Needless to say, we were thrown off that tour too.

It was a wild time. Later in our careers we would fly first class or on our own jet, but in the beginning we flew commercial, with regular civilians. I remember talking to people about what I did. My hair was big and bushy. We wore platform heels with leather pants and studded belts with spiders encased in the belt buckles and black fingernail polish. “What do you do?” they would say.

“I’m in a band.”

“What’s the name of your band?”

“KISS.”

“Oh, really? That’s a strange name for a band.”

As the band became more and more successful, we got letters from people who were wearing our makeup. They started to get involved in the mystique. We soon realized that we had created alter egos. The fans wanted them, not us. They wanted Superman, not Clark Kent. So we started to hide our real faces, which only fueled the mystique.

The first album was selling okay—fifty to sixty thousand copies, thanks mostly to our touring. But Neil Bogart wanted to sell more, and he always had ideas for how to do it. One of his earliest ideas was for a kissing contest. This was an old radio and deejay gimmick, to sponsor a kissing contest and have a bunch of young couples come out to a mall or car dealership. They were marathons—the couples would kiss as long as they possibly could, with only five-minute breaks every hour. The way Neil saw it, we were perfectly positioned to capitalize on this phenomenon because of our name. He suggested that we rerecord that old Bobby Rydell song, “Twistin’ Time,” which would be changed to “Kissin’ Time” and used to promote a series of contests around the country. The winners would get two big prizes: an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii, and an appearance on
The Mike Douglas Show
, a daytime talk show on network television.

It wasn’t a song we would have chosen, but Neil was insistent: he was a real promoter, and he believed it would be a successful gimmick. We finally agreed, but only on condition that we rewrite
the lyrics. It would have been a death sentence to record the song with the lyrics from the 1960s. It wasn’t our style or our time. Paul and I sat down in the studio with paper and pencil and remade the song to fit our fans—mentioning the cities where we were big, the places people wanted to hear about. Then we recorded it. The whole process took about an hour.

All in all, I’d say that we went along with it reluctantly. It certainly wasn’t rock and roll, and we knew that, but we managed to do a decent job recording it, trying to get as much of our personality into it as we possibly could. We also extracted a promise from Neil that the cover version of the song would never appear on any actual KISS albums, that it would be a one-shot deal to promote the contest. Of course, it didn’t work out that way—the song later found its way onto some albums and rereleases.

As a promotional single, “Kissin’ Time” was moderately successful. At the beginning of May, it was released—“Nothin’ to Lose,” a real KISS song, was the B-side—and broke into the Top 100. Neil’s master plan called for us to follow the regional kissing contests and appear with the national winners on
The Mike Douglas Show.
Needless to say, we weren’t the show’s usual fare, and we played up our strangeness. One of the other guests was the comedienne Totie Fields, and at one point she said, “Who are you supposed to be?”

“I’m evil incarnate,” I said, giving my best scowl.

“No, you’re not,” she shot right back. “You can’t fool me. You’re probably some nice Jewish kid from Long Island.” She was a trouper; I later thanked her on my solo album.

Nice Jewish kids or not, we performed “Firehouse,” and it was a real spectacle: plenty of pyrotechnics, plenty of makeup, and so forth. As a performing group, we were hitting our stride.

We were exhausted from touring, but we had careers to build, so as soon as the first album began to lag, we went right back into the studio to record our second, which was titled
Hotter Than Hell.
In many ways it was a continuation of the first album. The songs were
drawn from the same pool of material, mostly written by Paul and me, with a couple of contributions from Ace. We had written some on the road and used some from the original KISS demo. The producers were the same: Kenny Kerner and Ritchie Wise, who had done a fine job on the first album and were easy to work with.

In fact, there was only one difference between the first album and the second. But it was a big difference, a three-thousand-mile difference. Because Kerner and Wise had moved out west to California, we had to follow them to cut the second album. The culture shock was tremendous. We felt out of place in a million small ways, because we were a New York band with New York attitudes. The record label rented us cars, but that was just asking for trouble. Ace and Peter drank too much and drove too fast and cracked up their cars, and I didn’t drive at all. The one benefit was the girls. While we were recording, we lived at the Ramada Inn, and it was a real rock and roll hotel, with girls going up and down the halls all day and a swimming pool stuffed with them. We didn’t spend many nights alone.

Recording was smooth, more or less, although Peter and Ace were a handful. Ace had his usual problems showing up on time, and Peter was, as Peter has always been, deeply insecure about his role in the process. There’s one song on there, “Strange Ways,” that was written by Ace, and while we were recording, Peter insisted on playing a long drum solo. It was the kind of thing that bands like Led Zeppelin were doing, but mostly in their live shows, and Peter was no John Bonham. It just didn’t work. When we heard it, we all thought it was ridiculous, and we insisted that it come off the record. Peter dug in his heels. If the solo went, he said, he would quit the band. This wasn’t the first time he had given us an ultimatum, and it wouldn’t be the last. We responded to it the way we always responded to his ultimatums: we ignored them, cut the drum solo out, and did what we knew was best for the band. He didn’t quit.