Kiss and Make-Up (21 page)

We were thrilled with our new-found fame; it was what we had spent years working toward. Our families were thrilled for us. But even at the peak of our fame, we were isolated from the rest of the rock and roll world. We never appeared on other people’s records. We never hung out. There was something solitary about us. This, too, was taken from the Beatles. When the Beatles played, nobody else belonged on that stage. If you were in the Stones, Tina Turner and whoever else could jump up onstage. But if you were in the Beatles, it was only the Beatles. That was how I felt about my band. If I went to see my band live, I didn’t want to see anybody else step up. So we were like that. And through the years everybody said, “Hey, let’s go jam.” We didn’t jam. We didn’t hang out before or after the show. For me, at least, it was always about chasing skirt. I couldn’t have cared less about another guy playing guitar. I wanted to know who would share my bed that night.

Also, at a time when movie stars often sat in the front row of rock shows, we never attracted any other celebrities. I have since learned that almost everyone in the world was a closet KISS fan. Jimmy Buffett wrote a song called “Mañana,” for example, where he said, “You have never seen anything till you’ve seen a sunset / You have never seen a rock show until you’ve seen KISS.” Cheap Trick wrote “Surrender,” about Mom and Dad rolling around on the couch with the kid’s KISS records. Every day of the week I meet someone who’s a fan, whether it’s Garth Brooks or Lenny Kravitz.

I have created a character named the Demon who is a WCW wrestler and uses the Gene Simmons makeup. Last year I got a request for an autograph from a five-year-old kid named David. His father requested it, actually, and asked if I would please make it out to David, from the Demon. “Do you want me to write Gene Simmons?” I asked.

“No,” the father said. “He doesn’t know who Gene Simmons or KISS is. He only knows about the Demon,” the wrestler. The monster had become the star!

When it came
time to go back into the studio to make our next album, we had to decide whether to work with Bob Ezrin again. Ace and Peter were pressing us to get back to basics, to being a four-piece rock and roll band without arrangements, ballads, or someone else telling us how to play. At the time a certain segment of our fan base felt that
Destroyer
was a very plush record. If you listen to it today, it’s one of our most consistent rock records, and it probably stands the test of time as well as any, but there were violins, so for some people that was a problem. Change is always difficult for the hard and heavy.

(photo credit 9.1)

So Ace and Peter wanted to get back to doing straight-ahead rock and roll, and we were sensitive to that. We rented out the Star Theater, a theater in upstate New York that Frank Sinatra actually had a stake in. (Later on it went out of business mysteriously after a fire.) There was a center stage and seats all around it. We brought in Eddie Kramer and started work on the next album,
Rock and Roll Over.
We recorded the songs that Paul and I had written on tour. Ace and Peter also submitted songs, most of which were, at least in our estimation, not up to par. The ones that survived wound up being on the record but rearranged and rewritten. There were plenty of things that Paul and I did without taking credit for, because we knew that the fans preferred to think that everybody in the band wrote and was as creative as everybody else.

It was a relatively stable time for the band. We were fairly happy. Still, talking about stability in KISS is like talking about freedom in a prison. It’s all relative. Ace and Peter continued to do the most bizarre things. Ace had a fascination with Nazi memorabilia, and in his drunken stupors he and his best friend would make videotapes of themselves dressed up as Nazis. At the time the mayor of New York was Ed Koch, who was Jewish, and Ace showed me a piece of tape where he and his best friend were making verbal threats against “the Jew in New York,” saying, “We’ll cook him up.” Of course, he was drunk out of his mind. Paul and I weren’t thrilled about that. But Ace laughed at how funny he was when he saw the tape.

Peter, too, was drinking heavily and using drugs. At one point he went into a club and allegedly demanded that a certain substance be put in front of him in a bowl. The owner of the club refused. So Peter tried to intimidate him, but nothing happened. Again, he was all bark and no bite. This was how he liked to do business—with intimidation and bluster.

Despite all this hassle, Paul and I stayed loyal to the band. No matter what the lunacy was, the band was together. In retrospect, it might have been a mistake. We would have saved ourselves a ton of headaches if, at the first sign of trouble, we had made changes in the band. Throughout this time Ace and Peter were begging us to do exactly that. Later, when Ace made his solo album, he went on record and said that if he hadn’t left the band, he would have killed himself, because he said he wasn’t allowed creative freedom within KISS. But once he left the band, he went bankrupt, filed Chapter 11, and became a bigger drug addict than he ever had been, I’m sorry to say.

Ace, God bless him, has told me he believes in extraterrestrials, ghosts, karma, and other bizarre things. He has a lucky number, which is 27. If he gets change from a cashier, and he’s got two pennies and a quarter, he’ll stare at them until you ask him what he’s
doing, and then he’ll say, “Look: if you add up these coins, they become 27.” Or if you’re in a restaurant, and the prices of the specials are on the board, he’ll add up those numbers to figure out what to order. If a number there interferes with his lucky-number theory, he’ll just discount it. At one point I told him, “Ace, I think you’d better pick another lucky number. You haven’t been so lucky.” But he doesn’t understand. He’s the kind of guy who will come back from Las Vegas and tell you about how much money he’s won, without saying a word about how much he’s lost.

Fame creates monsters, and I’m not just talking about Ace and Peter. I’m also talking about myself. At around this time, in 1977, we hired a new road manager, Frankie Scinlaro. He was on the shorter side and round, and we loved him. He missed his calling in life, because he constantly kept all of us laughing. Frankie had also been through the rock wars with other bands. He had heard all the drug and booze stories, and he was wise to Ace and Peter. He was also wise to Gene and Paul.

He gave all of us nicknames, once he got to know us. These names reached right down to the core of who we were and what each of our personal agendas was. One of Peter’s nicknames, for example, was Peter Long, because he was always complaining. He was also called the Ayatollah Criscuola and Mr. Misery. Ace was High Octane, because he was frequently tanked. Paul was the He-She, because of his androgynous appeal. I was Gene the Nazarene. Frankie thought, rightfully so, that I had an inflated sense of myself and that I thought everyone else was an idiot. He would often say, “Oh, thank you so much for talking to me. I feel so honored. I want to grow up to be exactly like you.” He kept bowing to me and scraping. It was humiliating, but I deserved it.

In the mid-1970s we were popular enough that teenagers and even younger kids were buying our records. And that meant lots of other KISS products were in demand—Halloween masks, lunchboxes, stickers for school notebooks, pencil erasers. Moving forward with the merchandising changed the complexion of the band. It changed
the size of the vision, the shape of our projects, everything. And it wasn’t greeted with universal support from the band. Ace and Peter didn’t like it, because they didn’t see the big picture. But even Paul was a little reluctant. Some things he saw as improper in a rock and roll context. Paul often would, and still does, shoot down ideas, because he’s more cautious—he tries to contain what we’ve got. Though I’m supposed to pick up the phone at all times and discuss new ideas with him, I often don’t. I just plow straight ahead and do it, whether it’s KISS My Ass toilet paper or KISSTORY books or whatever, and later on Paul and I have words with each other. They’re never fatal disputes, though. They’re spirited disagreements.

I would sit up and do drawings. In fact, I came in with an idea called KISSWorld in 1976 that had our lawyer’s trademark. I wanted ten flatbed trucks with everything inside them, designed so that when they pulled up to a state fair, the walls of the trucks would open up and flatten out so that all the trucks connected to each other. There would be stairs and in the middle a big tent. And all of a sudden you would have a facility. You wouldn’t have to rent out a venue. Instead, you would go to an open field, where you would sponsor KISS wet T-shirt contests, run concert film, host KISS tribute bands, and most important, sell KISS merchandise. I had it all designed, but the band decided not to do it. It was too big, they said, and too commercial. To this day I stand by it. Initially everybody thought these ideas were cheesy. But now, no matter who you are, you remember your first KISS lunchbox. Many people still have theirs.