To make that happen we worked quickly and efficiently. I think we did the entire album in about three weeks—laying down basic tracks first, and then adding vocals and solos afterward. I was simply the lead guitar player at the time, not doing a lot of vocals or even background singing. I remember stressing out a little about the solos; I was less relaxed than I had been when we went into the studio to record our demo. There was a lot more at stake this time, and I felt the pressure.
There’s a big difference between session guys and performers. I was always a performer, thriving on the audience response and never quite repeating any solo in exactly the same way. Session guys pride themselves on precision and repetition. They are very different skill sets. It’s one thing when you’re playing live and you have an idea of what the guitar solo is, and you can just sort of freelance a bit. The audience doesn’t hear the mistakes, doesn’t notice that maybe you’ve made some minor adjustments. Performing live is all about spontaneity and energy; the audience and musician feed off one another. It doesn’t really matter whether each note is perfect, or whether the song is performed exactly as written. In fact, no two renditions should sound exactly the same.
I was comfortable in that concert setting. The studio? Totally foreign to me. The demo was challenging enough, but at least that’s all it was: a demo. By definition it was imperfect and temporary. This time it was serious. I walked into Bell Sound on that first day with my heart racing. There’s something about entering the studio and realizing that when you sit down to play, every note will go down in history. It’s intimidating to the point of distraction. Or at least it was for me. Throughout the recording of KISS I was anxious. I wanted to do the best signature guitar solos I could do, and I’m not sure I succeeded. Playing live is all about… entertaining. You don’t have to be exact. You have to have the attitude and the style, and you have to be able to put it across to the audience. In the studio it’s about being precise and focused, and that was very challenging for me in the beginning (and by “beginning” I mean the entire first album). As the process went on, album after album, I realized you had to approach studio recording differently than you would a live performance, and you had to prepare differently.
Also, I was spaced out a lot of the time, either because I’d been drinking or because I was so nervous about fucking up that I couldn’t concentrate. I took my guitar work very seriously, but I often wondered whether I was good enough. It didn’t help matters that I received very little positive feedback from the other guys in the band. I always felt like they wanted me to do better, like they expected more. It wasn’t something that was verbalized; it’s just something I felt. I never got the sense that they appreciated me as much as other people did.
As for the first album, I didn’t know what to expect. I remember thinking that it seemed like we were working hard and fast, and everyone was excited about producing a good record. But you don’t really know when you’re in the moment. If you’re not sitting at the sound board, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on, or to know whether it’s good. We were all so young and inexperienced, and we were green as studio musicians, but we gave it our best effort, and I think the songs hold up really well even after all these years. Several of them—“Deuce,” “Strutter,” “Cold Gin,” and “Black Diamond”—have become KISS classics. I’d love to redo some of those songs today using state-of-the-art equipment.
In the eyes of Bill Aucoin, nothing was deemed too outrageous. I remember sitting in Bill’s office one day, talking again about what it meant to be a theatrical rock group. It was a sweepingly descriptive term, one open to all sorts of crazy interpretations. Each of us in the band had his own opinion about what it meant to be “theatrical,” so there was no line we couldn’t (or wouldn’t) cross. I remember Gene once telling me he would go out onstage dressed in a tutu if people would pay money to see it! Things would change over the next few years, especially for me, as the music began to take a backseat to the show. In the beginning, though, before we went out on tour in support of KISS, we were all equally invested in putting on the greatest rock ’n’ roll show the world had ever seen.
Bill had some interesting ideas about what that entailed, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when we showed up at rehearsal one day and found Bill waiting there with a magician.
That’s right—a magician.
“How far are you guys willing to go?” Bill asked.
And of course the answer was, “Where no man has gone before!”
The magician spent the next few hours demonstrating some tricks of the trade, including how to use flash paper and breathe fire. I can vividly recall watching as the guy took a swig of kerosene and held it in his mouth. Then he held up a small torch a short distance from his face and sprayed the kerosene at full force.
“Holy shit!” Gene shouted. “I want to do that!”
The sight of Gene Simmons, in his demon makeup, spitting blood and breathing fire, soon became signature images of KISS, and both were born that day in Bill Aucoin’s office. Usually the gimmick, like all others in a KISS live show, went off without a hitch. But there were risks and occasional mistakes. Holding a mouthful of kerosene is not a great idea; one swallow and you’re in big trouble. That’s why we made sure that a hefty dose of ipecac syrup was nearby when we performed. Ipecac is a highly effective emetic—in other words, it induces vomiting—and on more than one occasion Gene had to rush from the stage after accidentally gulping a bit of kerosene. He’d take a quick hit of ipecac, throw up, and return to the stage to finish the show.
It was, I suppose, an occupational hazard, just as it was for me with my smoking guitar, which occasionally malfunctioned and gave me burns on my thighs and hands; or Peter’s levitating drum kit, which sometimes began to sway in the breeze, leaving us all with a lump in the throat. The crazy, outlandish things we did in the name of rock ’n’ roll!
Gene became a real student of the craft, practicing with the magician for hours on end in anticipation of breathing fire for the first time in front of a live audience. The opportunity came on December 31, 1973, during a New Year’s Eve show at the Academy of Music. That show was intended to be the official unveiling of KISS in advance of our debut album. The Academy of Music was the biggest venue we’d played, with seating for more than three thousand people. Judging by advertisements for the show, KISS was an afterthought; or no thought at all. Blue Öyster Cult was the headliner, with Iggy Pop and a band called Teenage Lust on the undercard.
KISS?
Nowhere to be found.
Not that we gave a flying fuck. We took the stage and made it our own, playing a ferocious half-hour set. Near the end, during the song “Firehouse,” Gene spewed kerosene onto a handheld flame, lighting up the stage and prompting the audience to go berserk. It wasn’t a KISS crowd, obviously, because there was no such thing. Not yet. It was just a good, solid rock crowd. I’m sure some of them were baffled by what they were seeing, but I’m also sure not one of them was bored! I realized early on that people either loved us or hated us; luckily, it turned out that most people fell into the former camp.
You can practice an effect all you want in private; you can exercise immense caution and think you’ve got it down pat. But when you get onstage in front of an audience, your adrenaline is pumping and maybe you’re not being as careful as you should. Hence all hell can break loose. Accidents will happen. It’s Murphy’s law, right?
The next thing I saw was Sean Delaney, Bill’s lover and confidant, who became an important member of the KISS creative team, running out onto the stage and wrapping a towel around Gene’s head.
His hair had caught fire!
And I remember the oddest sensation as I watched them wrestling, Sean frantically whacking Gene about the head and shoulders, snuffing out the flames, and I could hear the crowd roaring.
Pretty fuckin’ cool…
Believe it or not, none of it seemed that weird to me. Things happen. Nothing was going to stop us. By
this time we were in full costume, with our makeup completely developed. We were no longer Paul, Gene, Ace, and Peter.
We were KISS.
After the show, while Teenage Lust performed, I went to the dressing room and removed my makeup. Then I went up into the balcony (no one recognized me, of course, since I was no longer in character) and watched Iggy Pop’s set. I was struck not only by how cool he seemed, but by how odd it was that we had opened for him. For the first time I had the sense that we were on our way. New Year’s Eve in New York… at the Academy of Music… with Iggy Pop and Blue Öyster Cult.
It was a big deal, and I knew it. I could feel it: This is it. This is the beginning of something special.
ON THE ROAD
We didn’t become superstars overnight. People forget that sometimes. Three albums came and went—generating only modest sales and nearly bankrupting Casablanca Records, Bill Aucoin, and Neil Bogart along the way—before KISS became the juggernaut folks recognize today. I can still remember a moment in late February 1974, not long after our first album was released, that was simultaneously one of the happiest and weirdest of my life.
The music business was different back then. For better or worse, it lacked the cohesiveness and marketing power it has today. Rather than magically appearing in stores across the country, with prepackaged publicity campaigns, records were often released slowly and cautiously. Audiences were allowed to build as an album gradually worked its way from the coasts to the heartland, from major cities to smaller markets. Singles accompanied the release of an album, and if the proper wheels were greased (payola was alive and well in those days, whether anyone wants to admit it or not) you’d get enough airplay to create some buzz. And, obviously, you went out on the road for months on end, trying to build an audience for your music, an audience that would then go out and buy your albums and generate sales of merchandise and make everyone happy and wealthy.
Too bad it didn’t often work out that way.
We were doing things differently in KISS, putting the cart in front of the horse, creating a brand, with a unique marketing concept, before we’d even developed a following. So I guess it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that the first record didn’t exactly take the world by storm. Hardly anyone knew who the hell we were, or why we were wearing this ridiculous makeup. Was the band a joke? A gimmick?
No, man. We were dead fucking serious. But it took some time to convince everyone else.
On that February day I walked into (the now-defunct) Alexander’s department store on Fordham Road in the Bronx, right across the street from Fordham University. Alexander’s stood near one of the busiest intersections in the borough. There was always a crowd hanging out nearby, and the traffic in and out of the place seemed never to slow. I’d been shopping at Alexander’s since I was a little kid—bought a big chunk of my album collection there. So you can imagine how I felt walking through the store, my heart racing as I headed to the music section. You can imagine what it must have been like for a guy who had bought his first Hendrix record—and his first Led Zeppelin record, his first Who record—in this very spot to suddenly be thumbing through the stacks of vinyl, looking for a record of his very own.
And there it was, staring out at me from a wall of new releases:
KISS.
I picked it up, held it for a moment, flipped it from back to front. I smiled and laughed a little as I looked at my silver-painted face, gazing stoically from the upper right-hand corner.
Then I walked to the cash register, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and paid for the record without saying a word.
Why, you might reasonably wonder, did I have to buy my own record? Well, because Casablanca had not yet sent me a copy. Or maybe our manager hadn’t given me a copy. I don’t even remember. I just know that when the album came out, I went to Alexander’s to see it for myself, and to buy my own copy. That’s how slowly things worked sometimes; that’s how little clout we had in those days.
I didn’t really feel offended by the oversight. Mainly I was just thrilled to be walking out of the store with my own album. I wanted to take it out of the bag and shout to everyone, “Hey, look at this: I made a record!” But I didn’t. There was some comfort in the anonymity, too. No one knew who I was, so even if I had shown them the album cover, they wouldn’t have recognized me as the person in the upper right-hand corner. That would be one of the strangest aspects of the KISS phenomenon: for a number of years when we went out in public, we were seen primarily, if not exclusively, in character.
Life as a rock star at the highest level is weird beyond words. It’s great in a lot of ways, obviously, but it’s disorienting, too. You very quickly begin to realize that you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Everything you do is designed to help keep the machine moving, the record sales flowing. This was especially true with KISS, since so much of our popularity was based not merely on music, but on image. After a while the makeup became almost like a prison. We couldn’t appear anywhere out of character. If we pulled into a town and we had a radio interview scheduled, we had to get up a couple of hours early to put on our makeup before going to the radio station. Think about that. Full costumes and makeup for a radio appearance, where no one would even see us. I wasn’t Ace Frehley when I represented KISS. I was the Spaceman. That’s just the way it worked.
Again, that’s not a complaint, just an observation. For a long time, the benefits of being in KISS far outweighed the liabilities. Weird as it was to put on makeup for every public appearance, it did have the fringe benefit of allowing each of us to maintain some semblance of a private life away from the spotlight. For a little while, anyway.
Not that I cared much about my privacy in those days. Like the rest of the guys in the band, I craved attention. You don’t join a band and put on makeup and crazy costumes if you want people to ignore you, right? So I walked out of Alexander’s and immediately began calling up my friends, and Jeanette, and telling them about the record. I played it in my bedroom at home, an experience so strange—listening to my very own record for the very first time, on the same turntable that spun Clapton and the Stones—that I can hardly put it into words. I sat on the edge of my bed, listening to KISS fill the room… listening to Gene sing the words to “Cold Gin”… listening to my guitar solos… and I started to laugh out loud.
This can’t be real.
But it was real, a fact made even clearer a few weeks later when I was driving around with the radio blasting, changing stations, absent-mindedly trying to find something I liked, when I heard “Nothin’ to Lose,” the first single off KISS, pulsating through the speakers. I was so distracted that I nearly drove my car off the road (not the first time that would happen, incidentally), but after regaining my composure I turned the volume up as far as it would go and rolled down the windows (even though it was still winter).
Those are the moments you live for, the moments you dream about when you’re a gangly teenager teaching yourself chords in your bedroom, wondering if you’ll ever be any good, or if you’re just wasting your time. I suppose I might have been a little different from most kids; like I said, I honestly believed I was going to be in a famous band someday, and from the moment I met Gene, Paul, and Peter, I thought KISS would be the vehicle to make it happen. Still, there’s nothing quite like holding your own first record album in your hands, tearing off the shrink-wrap, and getting a whiff of freshly pressed vinyl; if there’s anything better, it’s hearing one of your songs on the radio for the very first time.
It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which you’re closer to a group of people than you are when you’re out on the road, touring with a band. That’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just an observation. KISS built its reputation through live performances. In the beginning, especially, we were road warriors in the truest sense of the term, living out of suitcases in semi-shitty hotels, traveling by bus (or, if we were lucky, flying coach), sleeping a few hours a night, eating at IHOP or
Denny’s, and fucking almost anything that moved. One town blended into the next, as we crisscrossed North America, from Asbury Park to Atlanta to Anchorage… and back again. More than one hundred separate shows the first year alone. We toured constantly, and when we weren’t touring we were back in the studio working on the second album. We lived together, ate together, slept together. We were four very different and unique personalities, but somehow we made it work, because we were working toward a common goal.
You can tolerate a lot when you’re in your early twenties. Your body recovers quickly from abuse inflicted by the road life. Too much to drink the night before? No big deal. You wake up, puke, down a few cups of coffee, and get on with the day. Guys in the band getting on your nerves? Ah, fuck it! Just a phase. You’ll get over it. While the road definitely loses its appeal with age, there’s something legitimately romantic and exciting about living that nomadic life when you’re young. As we became increasingly rich and famous, the quality of the accoutrements improved: hotter chicks, more drugs, five-star hotels, and private jets. But we had no complaints about life even on the lower rung of the rock star ladder.
Groupies were there from the beginning, although it wasn’t as big a deal to me as it was to some of the other guys in the band. I never had problems attracting women. I started having girlfriends when I was twelve years old; sex was no great mystery to me by the time I went out on the road with KISS. Don’t get me wrong—I could whore with the best of them, especially when Jeanette and I were in one of our many periods of estrangement. But I didn’t chase pussy like I’d never seen it before. I’ve heard stories about these guys who become rock stars and all of a sudden they’re getting laid all the time, and they basically lose their minds. I mean, I had already been with at least fifty women by the time I put on the KISS makeup for the very first time. If you’ve been with only one or two women (and had to beg for whatever you got off them), it must be intoxicating to suddenly have groupies falling all over you. You go from getting laid once or twice a year to getting laid a hundred times by a hundred different women. It can be a little disorienting.
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