No Regrets

by Ostrosky, John, Frehley, Ace, Layden, Joe

  Peter and I both had lots of friends. Paul and Gene were different. Especially Gene. It was the weirdest thing. When I first got into KISS, and I found out that Gene didn’t have any friends, I didn’t know what to think of the guy. Should I feel sorry for him? Should I keep him at arm’s length? Can he be trusted? I’d never met anyone like that. Gene was only a couple of years older than me, but he seemed… I don’t know. I guess I could be diplomatic and say he was wise beyond his years, or some bullshit like that, but mainly I just felt like he had a stick up his ass. He was like a fifty-year-old accountant in the body of a twenty-three-year-old kid. One of my best friends was our sound engineer; another of my buddies was a KISS roadie. My friends used to come to our shows regularly. Peter’s wife and friends showed up all the time, and Paul’s friends showed up occasionally. But Gene? He was such a loner. His entire focus was on the business end of KISS, creating something big and successful, whatever that might mean. And God bless him, he did that. He made it happen (although not by himself, which I think Gene sometimes tends to forget; we were all riding the same rocket, after all). But there were times when I wanted to say, and did say, “Gene… come on, man, lighten the fuck up. Have a few beers.”

  He never did. Not once. To my knowledge the guy has never gotten loose in his life. I’m probably the last person on earth who should be advocating alcohol use—it nearly killed me—but Gene is one of those guys who might have benefited from having a drink once in a while. Just maybe?

  To his credit, though, Gene was the most responsible member of the band and was always thinking ahead and brainstorming. I don’t recall anyone getting all that upset about the Popcorn debacle. For one thing, it was easy to rationalize the minuscule turnout. We’d been in existence only a few weeks and had advertised the show simply by passing out leaflets on street corners in New York. Not exactly sophisticated marketing. I don’t think anyone knew that a band called KISS was going to be playing at a club called Popcorn that night. And if they did, well, good luck finding us. By the time we arrived Popcorn had been shuttered and sold, and reopened with a new name: Coventry. So you had an unknown band, still in its infancy, playing a brand-new club.

  No wonder the place was empty.

  It stayed that way for three nights and three shows. We approached it with the professionalism of a dress rehearsal, which is really what it was. A dry run, so to speak, in terms of both musicianship and theatricality. Each of us had a specific character in mind by this time, but we hadn’t figured out how to bring the characters to life.

  Gene was leaning toward horror because that was his shtick. He was obsessed with comic books and horror movies. I was leaning toward the spaceman because I was fascinated with space travel and science fiction and technology in general. Paul? I don’t know. He basically just became Paul—a glamorous singer with sex appeal. And Peter, well, he had a thing for cats. What can I tell you? It seemed to work for him. Funny thing is, he was probably the guy in the band whose makeup was the least consistent with his actual personality. I’d be sitting next to Peter in the dressing room sometimes, watching him put on that little button nose, and the cute whiskers and studded collar, and I’d think, Man, you look so tame. If people only knew.

  I’ll admit it—I really was something of a space cadet. But Peter? He’d grown up in the streets (like me), and that fact, combined with his drug use, could occasionally make him a tough guy to get along with.

  Simply put, he wasn’t always a pussycat! But neither was I, for that matter.

  Peter became my best friend in the band and is a really sweet and sensitive guy and I miss hanging out with him.

  We all did the best we could to become the characters we had chosen, but resources were limited. For the most part (Gene being a notable exception, as he had the most consistent and well-paying day job), we were all broke. We couldn’t afford stylists or costume designers, so we assumed those roles ourselves. If you look at photos of KISS from the early days (I’m talking about the first few months), you’ll notice that I’m wearing satin pants and a black shirt with wings across the chest. Gene is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with skull and crossbones. My mother and I worked on those together. I designed the wings and the skull and crossbones, even cut out the fabric. Then Mom, who was a talented seamstress, sewed everything together. I can remember asking my mother for help. She didn’t offer an opinion of any kind, just nodded and said, “Whatever you need, Paul.” Mom wasn’t easily shocked, especially by this point. I’d been a thorn in her side for a number of years by this time. She’d already endured the school expulsions, the arrests, the drinking, the music… too many annoyances and inconveniences to catalog, really. I was a weird kid, and had been since my early teens, when I started creating elaborate psychedelic paintings, illuminating them with a black light hung from my bedroom ceiling. Mom had seen it all. By the time I was in my twenties, my behavior didn’t faze her in the least. She loved me, obviously—I see that now more than ever. But I also think she’d given up any hope of changing me; so, better to just climb on board and hope the ride wouldn’t end tragically.

  The facial makeup we wore in those early shows was sloppy and imprecise. Gene looked a bit like an angry mime, with whiteface and bat wings; Paul dabbed a little blush on his cheeks; I smeared silver paint all over my face. If anyone had seen us at Popcorn/Coventry, with our high heels and makeup, they’d have assumed we were trying to mimic the New York Dolls… on acid! By this time, though, the Dolls’ feminine look had fallen out of favor. We were after something else. Something more original and shocking.

  More than a month would pass before we’d get another opportunity to play a live gig. Our manager (although I don’t believe he ever officially held that title) was a man named Lew Linet, who had worked with Paul and Gene when they were playing with Wicked Lester. For whatever reason, Lew didn’t have a lot of faith in what we were doing. He thought the music was too loud and too heavy, the characters offensive and stupid. I’m not sure what he wanted us to be—something a little more in the Top 40 tradition, probably. You can’t blame the guy. To any objective set of eyes, we must have seemed like we were out of our minds. Nevertheless, Lew was handling our career, so it was his responsibility to find us some work, which he did, at a club called the Daisy on Long Island.

  In Amityville, to be precise, in early March. This was a few years before The Amityville Horror was released, but our weekend in town was about as strange as anything I’d ever experienced. I remember doing our makeup before the show, and getting the idea for the first time that maybe I’d look better with stars around my eyes. You have to imagine the scene: four guys sitting around together in a makeshift dressing room, using handheld mirrors, applying makeup and primping our hair. Then we hit the stage and were transformed. It was like our first show at Coventry/Popcorn, only wilder. The place was owned by a man named Sid Benjamin, and it was obvious that Sid had no idea what kind of act he had booked into his club. There were maybe fifty to seventy-five people in the place, and when KISS began playing, the response wasn’t exactly what we hoped for. We hit them with everything we had, playing as loudly as possible, even running into the audience and trying to get people to clap their hands and get up and dance.

  At one point late in the show, after sweating right through my costume and downing a few beers, I looked over at Peter, who had a mirrored drum kit, and I could see my face reflected in the Mylar, all distorted and elongated, as if in a fun-house mirror. I started cracking up, even as I kept playing, and Gene kept singing, and the audience responded with awestruck silence. Peter started laughing, too. The crowd must have thought we were insane.

  So did the club’s owner. Poor Sid wasn’t even sure he wanted us back the next night, but we returned, and the audience swelled to twice what it had been the previous show. Obviously word had gotten out. This time there were fewer people sitting on their hands, a lot more people drinking and getting into the show. In many ways I’d say that was the night KISS became KISS.r />
  And you know why? Because we had conviction. We looked utterly ridiculous, and yet we wanted to be taken seriously. Here we were, in makeup, costumes, and platform heels, but we weren’t acting like clowns. Whether there were two people in the audience or two hundred, we didn’t take the performance lightly. From the very beginning there was intensity and seriousness about making something of ourselves, about being fully committed to KISS, whatever that might mean. Much more than any group I’d been with in the past, KISS carried itself with an air of confidence and professionalism. Failure wasn’t an option, and I think that came through to the audience. We weren’t just getting up there and going through the motions like some shitty Top 40 cover band. We might have looked like rejects from a science-fiction or horror movie, but we were deadly serious about what we were doing.

  The songs themselves were simple and straightforward rock ’n’ roll. Songs about girls and parties and cars and music—universal themes—delivered at breakneck pace and eardrum-shattering volume. An exception was a song called “Life in the Woods,” which was written by Paul in what must have been a contemplative, softhearted phase. It’s a song about love and nature, almost sappy in its sincerity. It didn’t fit neatly into the hard-edged image we were cultivating, and that our fans came to love, so the song never made it onto a KISS album, for obvious reasons, but I have to say, just for the record, that I really liked that song and enjoyed playing it in concert. It was a nice departure.

  Nothing ever seems to happen quickly enough when you’re starving for success. But the truth is, KISS was on the fast track almost from the day the band was formed. When I look back on it now I can hardly believe the way things evolved, how we went from playing dive clubs in front of almost no one to headlining major venues in less than a year; how we released our first three albums in a span of thirteen months! That would be absolutely unimaginable today. Hell, it was unimaginable even then. But we did it, and it all began with a demo produced over the course of a few short days in the spring of 1973.

  As with so many things that happened in the early days of KISS, the demo appeared to be mainly the result of luck and timing. But that wasn’t exactly the case. The truth is, very little about KISS was left to chance. We rehearsed constantly. Hours were devoted to grassroots marketing and public relations. Again, I’ll give credit where credit is due in this case. Paul and Gene were totally obsessed with creating a KISS brand and finding creative ways to attract attention to the band—no small task considering we were completely unknown. Whenever we had a gig coming up, Gene would utilize the resources and supplies available at his magazine job to create flyers and mailing lists, and to spread the word about our performance.

  We were not a big-time band, but we acted like we were. It’s humbling to pack your own equipment and drive from one little club to another in a rented panel truck, not knowing whether anyone will show up to see you play. But we plowed ahead, confident that eventually people would figure out that we were doing something unique and interesting. Some of my fondest memories of my time in KISS are from those earliest shows, when it was just the four of us, along with maybe Eddie Solan and a friend or two acting as roadies. We’d unpack our own equipment, drag it into the club, set it up, go through a quick sound check, and then retreat to whatever space was available to put on our makeup and transform ourselves into KISS. Afterward we’d tear everything down and go home.

  In the name of accuracy, I should acknowledge that while I carried my share of the load before concerts, I rarely carried equipment afterward. I liked to drink while I was playing, and after eight to ten beers I was in no shape to haul speakers or amps. I dropped a few things in the beginning, and then everyone agreed that it was best if I just fell asleep in the back of the truck. But it wasn’t a problem then; I didn’t let it affect the show. Not until much later did the drinking escalate to the point where my judgment was compromised and I got into all sorts of trouble. You can get away with a lot when you’re twenty-three years old; I actually believed then that a handful of beers during a show accentuated my ability on the guitar.

  And maybe it did. It felt like it, anyway, which was all that really mattered.

  When I found out that we were going to be putting together a demo, I tried not to get too worked up. I’d been down the recording road once before, with Molimo, and that hadn’t turned out so well. But then I found out where we were going to be recording, and who would be at the controls, and suddenly I couldn’t help but get excited.

  Paul and Gene, it turned out, had done some studio work in the past for which they’d apparently not been appropriately compensated. They also had a relationship with a producer named Ron Johnsen, dating back to their Wicked Lester days. Ron was affiliated with the famed Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, and as a way of evening the studio’s debt with Paul and Gene, he offered KISS a small block of recording time. They could have fought for the cash they were owed instead, but they wisely opted to take the deal. When I found out, I was thrilled. Electric Lady had been around only a few years but had already earned status as a legendary studio. The place was originally built by Jimi Hendrix and had quickly attracted the attention of many of the top recording artists of the early seventies, including the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Bad Company. The production genius behind albums recorded by those artists at Electric Lady was Eddie Kramer. He was a giant in the business, and I saw no reason to believe he’d want to work with an unproven band, especially one as unusual as KISS.

  Apparently, though, I was wrong.

  Eddie had been dragged to one of our shows by Ron Johnsen and had been impressed with our energy and ambition; he even kind of liked the makeup and costumes. So when we went into Electric Lady to work on our demo, Eddie Kramer was there, standing right beside Johnsen. The two of them worked together, with Eddie eventually taking over. For a kid like me, who had grown up idolizing Hendrix, this was a surreal moment. To be in that studio, in the same spot where Hendrix had stood, with Eddie Kramer turning the knobs… well, how could this be happening?

  But it was happening. We laid down the instrumental tracks on the first day, the vocals on the second, and mixed everything on the third. Within three days we had a five-song demo: “Deuce,” “Strutter,” “Watchin’ You,” “Black Diamond,” and “Cold Gin.”

  The last of these, “Cold Gin,” represented my first writing contribution to the band. It was a song about loneliness and poverty—hard times in general—and the comfort that can be found in a bottle, a concept I’d come to know well in the future, but that I understood only in the abstract at the time:

  It’s time to leave and get another quart

  Around the corner at the liquor store

  The cheapest stuff is all I need

  To get me back on my feet again

  “Cold Gin” is a good song. It became a KISS concert staple and it holds up well today; it’s withstood the test of time. But I have to admit—I’m not even sure what I was trying to say, or why I wrote a song about gin (let alone cold gin). I didn’t drink gin; didn’t drink liquor of any kind very often. I was a beer man then, and not even a connoisseur. Gimme a can of whatever you had in the fridge, and I was happy. I wanted to write a drinking song, and “Cold Gin” sounded like a great title. So I went with it.

  Working with Eddie Kramer was a trip, in the best sense of the word. Right from the start (and we would go on to work together on several projects), Eddie and I got along great. We had a terrific working relationship and, later, a friendship as well. Eddie wasn’t just a brilliant producer and engineer; he was gifted when it came to managing talent. Not in a business sense, but in the sense that he understood how to get the best out of a musician in the studio. He tolerated, maybe even appreciated, quirks and eccentricities, and I had a shitload of both. What I liked about Eddie was that he seemed to respect my ability as a guitar player. I wasn’t the most secure guy. I needed a pat on the back once in a while. Eddie used to offer praise and criticism in roughl
y equal amounts. At least where I was concerned, he was a generous guy. When I was around him, I wanted to play well, and I wanted to give my best effort. I needed the encouragement, and I got it from Eddie.

  In fairness, we all did, and it was Eddie’s encouragement and skill that helped make that demo one of the best recordings KISS ever did. I think everyone in the band would agree that even though it was only five songs, the demo is a stronger record than the first “official” KISS record. It was cleaner, harder, better. It came straight from the heart… from the gut. We were all proud of it and felt like it would be the perfect calling card when it came time to land a deal with a major label. And that’s exactly what it was.

  As much as we all wanted to succeed, we couldn’t make it on our own. There was no way for KISS to become the juggernaut it did without some serious muscle behind it. After we finished recording the demo, nothing really changed. Not right away, anyway. We just kept rehearsing and working odd jobs to help pay the bills. A series of shows in New York attracted some people within the industry—both artists and management types—which made it fairly clear that word of KISS was getting around. In July we rented out a ballroom at a sleazy little place called the Hotel Diplomat, and more than five hundred people showed up to watch us play. Our makeup had become more refined by this time, and our special effects had finally begun to creep beyond goofy stunts that were better known as staples of the Harlem Globetrotters (you know, tossing buckets of confetti into the crowd). Mainly, though, the music was good. The music was always good, and we delivered it with our usual intensity and volume.

  On August 10 we played the Diplomat once again, on a bill that included the bands Street Punk and Luger. But it was totally our show. We paid for the hall, and we did our own advertising and promotion. As usual, we put on a dynamite show, totally overwhelming the audience. One of the things we had going for us was our physical presence. With the help of gigantic platform shoes, we were all approaching seven feet tall. Add the costumes and makeup, and put us all in a small, sweaty club, and you have a seriously intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. I honestly think some of the people who showed up for those early shows were literally scared of us.