Kiss and Make-Up (40 page)

For all the wonderful feeling that passed between the band and the fans, the old problems were cropping up again. You think people will change. You hope they will change. You expect them to mature, to learn from their mistakes. But they don’t. Ace would constantly ask questions about the number of people showing up at the concerts. These would be concerts in places we had played before, and the halls and stadiums hadn’t changed in size. But he wanted to know whether anybody was hiding any tickets. Astonishingly, Ace was oblivious to the fact that he had a flat deal. If nobody showed up or if it sold out, he still got the same amount of money for each show he played. If he didn’t play, he didn’t get paid. I kept repeating that to him, every time he asked. I didn’t understand why he was agonizing over it. Then I found out that he wasn’t just asking me. He would ask Doc, our manager, “How many people showed up tonight?” And Doc would say, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe fifteen thousand people.” Then Ace would produce a piece of paper from the concert hall, a schematic that showed the seating arrangements. On the bottom it would say “Capacity, 19,000.” And he would bring me the paper and shake his head and say, “See, more lies.” Keep in mind, it said “Capacity.” But it
was just like Ace to ignore that, or not to know what
capacity
meant. It seemed as if he didn’t understand the difference between capacity and attendance, or that because our stage show was so big we had to kill three or four thousand seats.

Peter, for his part, retained a frustrating inability to understand press coverage. Articles would appear about the band, and Peter would be furious at me. He’d come up and confront me and say, “What the fuck did you say about me here?” I would take a look, thinking that maybe I had been misquoted. I hadn’t: before the interview, the reporter had written his introduction, and maybe he would mention that Peter had known drug problems or had been bankrupt. This was the writer’s voice, not mine, but to Peter it was the same thing.

Now that the band had reunited and I was spending more time with Peter and Ace, I was starting to see the effect twenty years of heavy drug and alcohol use had had. Ace had lost much of his memory. He has been quoted in magazines and has said directly to me that he literally doesn’t remember entire decades of his life. I would like to think of that as a rock and roll exaggeration, but I have seen much evidence of memory loss. For example, Ace would come up and tell me a joke and then come by a little later and try to tell me the same joke again, but not remember how it went.

Peter also suffered from memory loss, but the difference between the two has been striking. There would often be moments of clarity on Peter’s part when we were on tour. He would tell me how he had gone wrong and that this would be the first day of the rest of his life. He was tired of fighting his demons. He was tired of trying to show the world that he was a badass. He had been through two divorces that broke him spiritually and financially. He would speak very openly about wanting to change, and for some of the tour it was fun being around him. He would aid us in trying to keep Ace on the straight and narrow, saying things to Ace like, “You’re a father. What’s your daughter gonna say? I’ve been through the same stuff you’ve been through. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to go back to playing clubs, do you? It’s time to straighten up.” Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

Later on, when Peter’s insecurities kicked in and he saw that he had made millions of dollars from just one tour, he started to wonder why he hadn’t made more, despite the fact that the contract he signed outlined exactly what, when, and how everyone was to be paid. When he got like that, he would team up with Ace and he’d be back to the Peter who had tortured me from the beginning.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when this happened. Peter was just too unpredictable. I had witnessed his unpredictability firsthand throughout our years together. For example, Peter once shot my television set. While he was trying to separate from his first wife, I let him use my apartment so he could hide out with his Playmate of the Month, whom he seemed crazy about. I gave him the key and the run of the house. When I came back, I noticed that my six-foot television screen seemed bigger and newer. It was. It was now a seven-foot television screen. When I looked behind the screen, I saw that part of wall had been repainted. I found out that Peter and this woman, who would become his second wife, had been watching TV. Peter, for some reason, had his 357 revolver out. When an actor’s face appeared on the screen and he heard his girlfriend had known the actor, he shot the screen. It wasn’t the first time he had done something stupid with a gun. When the band was on hiatus over the holidays during Peter’s first marriage, he shot the tree out from under his first wife as she decorated it.

Ace and Peter may have tended toward this kind of behavior, but their weaknesses were exacerbated by their management. Both of them were still managed by George Sewitt, and he was, more and more in my opinion, acting the role of the band’s management. I had, in no uncertain terms, told him not to do this. When we were playing the MTV Music Awards at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, I saw George give directions to some New York policemen. I went over to him and said, “George, stop it.” Unfortunately I think he was under the direction of Ace, who kept telling him do whatever he could to promote him, rather than the band. At the end of the day, Sewitt almost got Ace and Peter into a nightmarish financial situation. I urged Ace to get some help—although I’m not a financial adviser, in my opinion it looked like a sinkhole that would give out
and leave Ace holding the bag. When he did get some outside advice, they told him that it was the worst deal they’d ever seen. Ace and Peter parted company with Sewitt, and they soon sued each other. There are still claims pending.

After the split with George Sewitt, Ace and Peter started to separate. Peter, because he straightened up a bit, would often see how Ace showed up late or didn’t show up at all. He would sometimes turn to me and say, “Don’t get angry with him. He’s bombed.” Other times he would turn to Ace in a meeting and say, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. You’re high. I can see it in you.” A number of times I was surprised by Peter’s honesty and clarity.

As Ace lost Peter as his buddy, he withdrew. Despite Peter’s drug past, when he did come back to the band after 1996, he was for the most part straight. He showed up and tried to do his work, although his attitude was always that of a complainer.

Jay Leno did a bit on the
Tonight Show
where he was interviewing us about being a member of KISS—he was asking us if he could be the fifth member.
(photo credit 16.1)

In time KISS was called upon to deliver another album to the record company. When I say KISS, I mean Paul and me. We were the only real members of the band. Ace and Peter were not signatories to the contract. Bob Ezrin, who had been with us before in good times
(Destroyer)
and bad
(The Elder)
, started working on a new album, which we called
Psycho Circus.
But after a while, it became obvious to us, and to Bob himself, that he was too busy with his Internet company. During the initial rehearsals, he didn’t think his contributions were as good as they should have been, and he took himself out of the picture. Then Bruce Fairbairn, a producer who had been successful with bands like Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, and Loverboy, among others, came to meet with us in Winnipeg, Canada. We explained to him that it was going to be a nightmare. Needless to say, from the beginning to the end, he was tortured by Ace and Peter, who tried yet again to change the contract and didn’t show up for most of the record. We had to use Tommy Thayer, Bruce Kulick, Kevin Valentine, and others in their place. Bruce got us through the process and helped us to make a good, solid KISS record, one that debuted at number one in many countries around the world. Unfortunately, within the year Bruce Fairbairn was found dead in his house in Vancouver. That was the last KISS studio album, and it may be the last one ever. We have enough unreleased material to keep fans satisfied for quite some time, in the form of rarities, demos, and so forth, but it would take an earthshaking event to get us back into the studio. In the current market, there’s no real place for a new KISS album, and I’m not interested in making an album that doesn’t succeed.

During that
Psycho Circus
period, I had another once-in-a-lifetime experience when I hooked up with Bob Dylan and ended up cowriting a song with him. We weren’t put together by anyone else—I just looked up Dylan’s number, called his manager, and said that I had long been an admirer. I had never spoken to Dylan, never met him. He came to my guest house in Beverly Hills, and the whole experience was very cordial. I spent about two minutes telling him how important he was to music in general and to me personally. He’s a very easygoing guy, but he doesn’t say much. Then we sat down,
picked up acoustic guitars, and traded licks back and forth. He had something I liked, I had something he liked, and so on. When we recorded the demo, he was nice enough to come down to the demo studio. Since then I have been begging him to write the lyric, and he keeps telling me that I should do it. Can you imagine that? Bob Dylan is telling me to write lyrics.

The 1998
Psycho Circus
tour kicked off at Dodger Stadium, the first 3-D tour in history. You got your ticket and you got your glasses, which at various points in the show would make it seem three-dimensional off the screen at the back of the stage.

Between concerts we flew on our own Gulfstream jet with all the amenities. We stayed in the best hotels, and when we had a day off in Texas Ace decided to visit his Texas cousins. They actually resembled him but spoke with drawls, like the Beverly Hillbillies. They were nice enough and said that Ace would stay with them on their farm. I imagined Ace on horseback, but I didn’t want to think too much about it.

Later I heard Ace was in the hospital and word got out that he had shot himself. It seems Ace decided to go shooting—with an Uzi, an Israeli machine gun designed to shoot hundreds of rounds per second. There was a time when it was the fastest and deadliest weapon of its kind. Apparently, from Ace’s explanation, one of the bullets backfired and a piece of shrapnel lodged in his chest. When he felt better, I asked him why he went shooting with a machine gun in the first place, and he actually responded, in so many words, “Yeah, well, if you Israelis knew how to build a machine gun, this never would have happened to me.”

Ace generally needed diversions. He had flown in a bodyguard to keep him company. Ace’s reasons for companionship, be it girlfriend or bodyguard, were usually to get him ice for his drinks, pack his bags, or be his playmate when he was in the mood to cause mischief.

While we were at the same hotel where he had the machine gun incident, he bought paintball guns and he and his bodyguard shot
at each other inside the hotel suite. Afterward we found out that the suite was a complete disaster. The walls and furniture were covered with paint; a blanket had apparently been dropped in a bathtub full of water, for God knows what purpose. The hotel banned KISS from all Four Seasons hotels nationwide. It took some doing to explain to the hotel that only one of us had the mental capacity to actually conceive of having a paintball fight indoors and that that person would be most happy to pay for the damages. The hotel quickly gave Ace a bill of approximately ten thousand dollars. He countered by saying he would sue them for any number of reasons. This was classic Ace. Everyone was trying to get him. He was the innocent victim.

This feeling of persecution depressed him. He couldn’t understand why his domestic life seemed to be in such turmoil. He couldn’t understand why the government was after him for unpaid taxes. He couldn’t understand why Canada always made him go through such a ritual before they let him into the country. The fact that the rest of the group had to wait around for hours while we pleaded with the Canadian government that Ace’s drug busts were a thing of the past was completely lost on him. Ace always blames the government, or fate, or anything or anyone but himself when things go wrong.