Makeup to Breakup (14 page)

Eventually I couldn’t take Stinky anymore and began rooming with Paul. When we started up the band, I felt incredibly close to Paul. We would talk for hours on the phone, like chicks, sharing our dreams and plotting out how we were going to make it to the top. Unlike Gene, Paul seemed to be a really sensitive guy, and I related to that.

I began to think that I was going to find another Jerry Nolan in Paul. But it seemed that as we got closer, he started to back away. I began to realize that we didn’t have that much in common. I would want to go out and grab a few cocktails, and Paul would be much happier going shopping and looking at drapes or, later, as we made more money, Oriental rugs. Nothing really traumatic happened between us, we just sort of drifted apart.

Paul always had to be the center of attention. He could be incredibly cocky, especially for a kid who came right out of that we couldd ever his mommy and daddy’s apartment into the band. I had paid fifteen years of dues: That’s probably one of the reasons why I was so insecure and driven to make this band a success. I was twenty-nine years old and married. If this ended, what the fuck would I do? Paulie could have gone to college and moved back in with his parents.

Later on, Paul would say that I was volatile and insecure. Of course I was. Name me one rock star who isn’t insecure. Bill realized what a tough time I had growing up being abused by the nuns in Catholic school. We would talk about that. But if I was insecure, Paul was a thousand times worse. Since I’d known him, he had been seeing a shrink. Once we went on the road, Paul would call the shrink every night. He wouldn’t make a move without that guy.

Maybe some of what they talked about in their sessions was Paul’s gender orientation. I’ve been asked many times, “Is Paul Stanley gay or bisexual?” I would routinely answer, “No, not that I know.” But deep down I feel the man had issues. Ace and I would always goof on Paul’s femininity. We even dubbed him the He/She. And Gene would egg us on when we made fun of Paul, but he wouldn’t say anything to Paul’s face, the coward. There was plenty to pick on. Paul would keep his fingernails immaculate. He’d go to women’s boutiques to buy frilly blouses that he would wear offstage. He loved dressing up.

But Paul was a great front man. He and Gene were always in competition
for the stage, but Paul had the unique ability to get an audience up and keep them up until we left the stage. He worked his ass off onstage. I don’t know if anybody could imagine what it was like to wear those seven-inch platform shoes and jump into the air, land on your feet, and fly down those steps we used to have. He had that pizzazz onstage, and today I see many lead singers who are just slavishly copying Paul.

During the course of those early tours, I began to gravitate toward Ace. Gene and Paul were too tame, but Ace was trouble. There was drinking, carrying on, and pussy with Ace. Early in our touring we had a rare day off and Ace and I went to see
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Ace smuggled in a six-pack of beer and I brought a bottle of wine. The movie theater was empty, and by the time the opening credits were rolling, Ace had knocked off half of the six-pack. It was a scary movie. Ace was screaming and holding on to my arm, and we were both soused and laughing hysterically. That was a great experience, and I wound up falling in love with Ace. We became inseparable and started sharing a room and sharing girls. He was just so much fun to be around.

Ace and I were simpatico musically, too. I was a street kid from Brooklyn and I took those streets with me onstage. Was I coarse? Absolutely. Was I uneducated? Sure, in a lot of ways. But nobody ever played any more from the heart on those drums than I did. Some nights I just felt so much spirit, I was so overwhelmed by the audience, that I would literally wreck my drums, smashing my cymbals and throwing the drums over.

Gene and Paul would recoil at some of the things that Ace and I did because they had lived sheltered lives and they had never encountered street kids like us. But wasn’t rock ’n’ roll all about being a rebel and breaking all the rules? Didn’t rock stars wreck hotels and smash up cars and generally act belligerent?

Ace was as passionate about the music as I was. If his fingers weren’t bleeding, if he wasn’t playing at top volume, he wasn’t playing. We were a completely different species from Gene and Paul. But Sean loved us to death, and so did Bill. They knew that we in the toilets of Santa Monica everybu might be sitting in our hotel room drinking and we might look around and say, “Fuck it,” and then the TV was going out the window. We thought that was hilarious. We didn’t even consider that we might kill someone walking outside the hotel.

But there was an arrogance about Ace that I didn’t like. He’d yell at waiters and call them idiots. When we built up a fan base, he didn’t really like to stop and interact with our fans in the lobby. He was also a pig. When I started rooming with him, he’d drive me crazy. We wouldn’t be in the room for five minutes and there’d be wires, guitars, books, filthy underwear, and socks strewn all around the room.

One of the reasons Ace and I really bonded was that we had a serious fistfight one day during a show in Canada. It was in the middle of the summer, there was no air-conditioning, and we were wearing all that leather. I couldn’t get enough towels to soak up all my sweat. Gene was running around, Paul was running around: They were hardworking guys and they were sweating like pigs too. Then all of a sudden Ace decided he was too hot and he sat down on the stage while he played. I was irate.

We finished the set and went into the dressing room to wait for the encore. Ace was sitting down and I confronted him.

“You lazy son of a bitch, how dare you sit down while I’m banging my brains out there with two little fans on me? You better go out this encore and kick ass. You’ve been lazy the whole time we’ve been together. You never loaded the fucking equipment—”

All of a sudden, my speech was interrupted by a large bottle of orange juice that whizzed past my head and shattered against the wall.

“You motherfucker!” I screamed, and punched him in the face and knocked him out cold.

Now we had a problem. The fans were screaming for an encore. So we revived Ace and we went out and did the encore. After we got our makeup off, Ace came up to me.

“You want to ride with me in my car?” he said.

“Yeah, I’ll go back with you,” I said.

Of course, Ace had made sure the promoter loaded the car with champagne. He popped a cork.

“Let’s call a truce,” Ace said. “You’re a fucking hell of a man, Peter, I like that.”

“You are too, Ace,” I said. “But if you would have hit me with that bottle, you could have killed me.”

“You almost broke my jaw, but I love you, man.”

And he gave me a big hug and we started crying like chicks. We became inseparable after that.

You could imagine what a hard job it was to literally babysit these four egotistical maniacs. That’s what the job of the road manager was. He had to wake us up, make sure there was food at the gig, make sure we’d get in the car or, later, the plane. He’d be your mother, father, shrink, doctor, lover, all wrapped into one. We used to go through road managers like candy. One guy lasted just a day, I think. But Sean was our first road manager, and he was a doozy. First of all, he was as crazy as we were. He was totally hyperactive, with tons and tons of energy. He didn’t need coke: He was naturally wired. We tried to give him many nervous breakdowns, but we couldn’t succeed, so he was with us for a long time.

Sean would totally obsess over us “babies,” as he called us. I never had a woman as crazy about around the roomysaylme as Sean was. For some reason, Sean thought that if we got laid, we’d do a bad show because it would weaken our knees. Even if Lydia was on the road with me, Sean would bang on the door and yell, “Remember, nobody gets laid.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I’d yell back through the door. “Nothing is going to weaken my knees, you fucking fag.”

He was delusional if he thought that he could keep the four of us from getting laid. When we’d bring groupies into the rooms, Sean would storm in there, screaming, “These guys need their sleep,” and grab them by the hair and drag them out. We would warn the chicks and tell them that if he came in and threw them out, they should go sit in the lobby for an hour and then come back up again. Sometimes we’d try to hide the girls in the room, in the shower, under the bed, under the covers, under us, whatever, but Sean would throw the lights on and check every inch of the room. He was the pussy gestapo.

Besides a crazy road manager, we had a crew that would kill for us. Our original crew was Chris Griffin and Peter Moose, along with Sean. As we went along, we added Mick Campise, Paul Chavarria, Mike McGurl, Rick Monroe, and J.R. Smalling as the tour manager. J.R. was the man. He was a six-foot-four, two-hundred-something-pound black guy from Brooklyn who wore a motorcycle jacket, blue jeans, motorcycle boots, and a gray
bebop hat tilted to the side. You wouldn’t want to fuck with J.R., but underneath that Marlon Brando exterior was a sweet, gentle man.

When we arrived at the venue, J.R. would walk into the promoter’s office and the first words out of his mouth were, “Hey, man. How’s the drug situation? How’s the women situation?” He loved his pot. You’d go to his room and get a contact high. After a gig he’d light up a doobie and down a bottle of Nyquil and lapse into a coma. Then we could do whatever we wanted because he’d be out for twelve hours.

One time on the first tour we opened for Argent. They had a little Pakistani road manager who was a tight-ass. He wouldn’t let us sound check, and then he tried to pull the plug on our encore. J.R. just went over to this tiny guy, picked him up, locked him in an equipment case, and we finished our song. Of course, we also got booted off the Argent tour.

What was great about J.R. was that he had the same attitude as we did. We were headliners even if we were the opening act. When J.R. walked into a room, people jumped. If there was a problem, J.R. would find a solution. Every place we played, there was a local fire chief on hand because of all our pyro. And if the chief needed to get greased so we could blow our shit up, that would happen.

We had a biker gang from Detroit named the Renegades who drove our trailers. Guys like Hot Sand, Football, Muskrat, and Cheeseburger. They were hardcore bikers, guys with shotguns who did damaging things to people who crossed them. No one fucked with us when they were around. It was more like, KISS is coming to town, hide your daughters.

We never had to worry about our backs with guys like this around. But we did worry about playing. Each one of us would get nervous before a show, but we’d each let it out in different ways. Gene would yell at everybody. Paul would stretch and run around in the dressing room. Ace might have a beer and tell some jokes, but he was nervous too. I would pace the dressing room.

Putting on our makeup was a laborious task. It took a good hour to get it right. There would be days when we’d get up in a hotel, have breakfast sent up, put on the makeup, get in costume, go to a photo session or a radio that we couldd ever interview, go back to the hotel, take all that shit off, do a sound check, go back to the hotel, try to get some rest, then go back to the venue
and put the makeup and costumes back on. We would do that day after day after day.

But I loved that hour. Putting on the makeup was therapeutic. No one was allowed in the room when we applied the makeup, and the room would get quiet and we would morph into our characters.

After we had our makeup and costumes on, we might mingle with guests, but we always had a five-minute rule. Five minutes before showtime, Bill or Sean would clear out the dressing room and we’d spend the time together, just the four of us, to clear our minds. Being the oldest, sometimes I might start acting silly, making up words, acting spastic, whatever it took to diffuse the tension. Then we’d high-five each other and say, “Let’s beat the fucking shit out of them tonight,” and we’d charge out there and kick ass.

From the very first tour, the press would always go after us. I used to go back to my room after a show and think, Wait a minute, we just did a sold-out show and the people went absolutely wild for us. So why was I reading, “KISS just might be the worst band on the planet. The only good thing you can say about them is they are loud. I would never buy one of their records”? Where’s the mention that the audience didn’t sit down once, they stood up from beginning to the wild, orgasmic end of the show?

We’d moan and bitch about the press and Bill would try to mollify us. “Any write-up is good,” he’d tell us. “Who cares what the critic says? Your name is in the paper.” We also had to contend with not getting any radio airplay. So that meant just hitting the road and building up a fan base.

Most of the time we would blow away the headliners, and sometimes the reaction was so great that we’d get booted from the tour. Aerosmith booted us after two dates. Argent got rid of us. We opened for Foghat, ZZ Top, and REO Speedwagon, and they were all threatened by the reception we got from the crowd. It helped that the four of us had that swagger. When you believe that much in yourselves, you can’t lose.

It also helped that we had a great front man, a guy spitting fire and drooling blood, a guitar player shooting off rockets, a drummer who levitated, and tons and tons of flash pots. Try to top that.

On June 14, 1974, we played with the New York Dolls, and it was a watershed show for me. Gene told me that we were going to open for them.

“We’re going to blow them off the fucking stage, I don’t give a fuck whether it’s your friend or not,” he warned.

I agreed. And we were even more motivated when the Dolls treated us like shit and made us change in the toilet. We came on like a bat out of hell and the crowd went crazy.

I made plans to hang with Jerry later that night. I hadn’t seen him for a long time because we were both working round the clock to be famous. We got together in a room in the hotel and I had a gram of coke I figured we could share.

“Uh, coke’s not my cup of tea anymore,” Jerry said. “How about I take it and trade it for a little heroin for us?”