No Regrets

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

  It wasn’t all an act.

  Although not exactly “evil incarnate,” we were threatening. Our fan base was composed largely of adolescent boys and young men, and what parent wants their kids listening to hard rock by a band that looks like it just stepped off the set of a horror movie? We looked dangerous, and at times we behaved recklessly and hedonistically. We didn’t try to hide any of that. Well, most of the time, anyway.

  In August 1974 we paused in the middle of a tour and relocated to Los Angeles to work on the second KISS album, Hotter than Hell. As with the first record, it was an intense experience: three weeks of ten-hour days at Village Recorders, again with Richie Wise and Kenny Kerner producing. We were all tired and starting to feel some pressure from Casablanca, as the first record hadn’t exactly been a big hit. Yeah, it had sold around 75,000 copies, but that hadn’t even been enough to cover the band’s expenses. We hoped to do better with Hotter than Hell, but everything was happening so fast that it was becoming hard to tell whether we were even on the right track.

  Using songs leftover from the demo and material we’d written on the road, we assembled the record at breakneck speed. My contributions were much more significant than on the first record. I cowrote “Comin’ Home” with Paul, and also wrote “Parasite” and “Strange Ways,” a song that remains one of my favorites, even though KISS never performed it in concert. I wish now that I’d had the balls to sing “Strange Ways” on that record. It’s an emotionally demanding song, heavy and rhythmic, with a great guitar solo at its center. It was all mine and I should have claimed it as such for the record. But I had no confidence in my own vocal ability, especially around Paul and Gene and Peter, who thrived in the spotlight and had a way of pushing through a song—any song—regardless of any vocal limitations. Great singers are talented, sure, but they also have passion. And they’re usually arrogant as well. You can’t get up there and sing if you don’t believe in yourself.

  I knew I was a good guitar player.

  I had no idea whether I could sing at all. So for the longest time I didn’t even try.

  “Parasite” I offered to Gene, because it seemed to suit him and he liked it. Rather than give “Strange Ways” to Paul or Gene, though, I offered it to Peter. As the drummer he was the least visible member of KISS (elevating drum riser notwithstanding!), so his ego was perpetually bruised anyway. I thought having a vocal track on the record would make him feel less threatened. Besides, I liked Peter’s voice and thought it was right for the song.

  Although basically we recorded the album live, the Hotter than Hell sessions lacked the spontaneity and thrill that we experienced while making KISS. That’s not surprising. There’s nothing quite like the first record, when everything is new and exciting. Making Hotter than Hell felt more like a job… a responsibility. It didn’t help matters any that we were fish out of water: four New Yorkers in L.A., sequestered on the West Coast for the better part of a month. We’d already been on the road for months and wanted nothing more than to get back home. But Neil wanted us closer to the Casablanca offices so he could keep an eye on things.

  In my case the plan backfired. I can look back now and say that my drinking began to escalate during the making of Hotter than Hell, partly as a response to the pressure, and partly because I didn’t want to be in L.A. Those are just excuses and I offer them not because I want sympathy, but simply as point of illumination. Drinking was my crutch. It had been since I was a teen, and it remained that way through my time in KISS, only with more profound consequences.

  On the night before we were supposed to do a photo shoot for Hotter than Hell, I got into one of my first serious car accidents. Now, I have a reputation for being one of the world’s worst drivers, but that’s not entirely well deserved. I’m actually a pretty good driver; I’m just a really bad drunk driver. I’ve totaled a lot of cars over the years, but I’ve never had so much as a fender bender while sober. Trouble is, from roughly the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, whenever I got behind the wheel of a car, the odds were pretty good that I’d been drinking.

  This was one of those times.

  We were staying at the Ramada Inn on Sunset Boulevard, basically just hanging out and partying whenever we weren’t at the studio. I’ve tried over the years to remember exactly why I left the hotel that particular night and climbed into the front seat of my rented Chevy. But that’s the thing about being a forty-year drinker: it takes its toll on your memory, leaving some recollections strikingly vivid, and others filled with holes. I know I was pissed off about something (probably something stupid) because I remember feeling angry as I cruised through the Hollywood Hills, accelerating through turns like I was a Formula One driver. I found this one particular street in the hills challenging, so like an idiot I kept circling around these twists and turns over and over again, trying to navigate the course a little faster each time. Must have made it around the loop at least five or six times! The next thing I knew, my car was spinning out of control and a telephone pole was coming up fast, rising to meet the windshield. The car spun sideways at the last minute, just enough to avoid a head-on collision, but the impact was still severe enough that I was catapulted forward into the windshield.

  As the dust settled on the shoulder of the highway, I started to laugh, a natural by-product of being drunk and relieved to be alive. At first I was pretty sure I hadn’t even been seriously hurt at all—until I felt something warm trickling down my face. I put a hand to my cheek and wiped away the blood, but the flow continued. I glanced at the rearview mirror, only to discover that it had been shattered, probably after getting rammed by my head.

  The car wasn’t completely totaled, but neither was it functional. Luckily the accident had occurred not far from the Ramada, so I got out of the car and began to walk. I can only imagine what I must have looked like, lurching along the side of the road, long hair matted, and blood running down my face. I still don’t have any idea what happened to the car. I just left it there. Presumably the cops came by, traced the registration, and contacted someone in the band. I don’t remember any legal ramifications, but there was blowback for sure.

  When I arrived at the hotel I went straight to our road manager’s room. He was a big guy named Junior, adept at everything from managing schedules to fighting with shady promoters. Not much scared Junior, but when he threw open the door and saw me standing there, his eyes widened.

  “Jesus, Ace! What the fuck happened to you?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “But I think we need to go to the hospital.”

  Encrusted in blood and dirt, with a substantial gash on my forehead that was beginning to swell up, I probably looked like I was more seriously injured than I really was. I felt like shit, though. Anyway, they cleaned me up at the ER, gave me some stitches, painkillers, and antibiotics, and sent me on my way.

  With one stern order: no makeup allowed.

  “If anything gets in that cut, it’s liable to get infected,” the doc explained. “Trust me—you don’t want that.”

  No, I didn’t want that at all. As luck would have it, though, I was supposed to be wearing my makeup the next day for a photo shoot to supplement the new album. I did as instructed and showed up with makeup on only one side of my face, which is why all the photos from that session only show my profile!

  As we were shooting, the other guys in the band alternately expressed their concern for my health and shook their heads in disbelief, as if to say, “Fuckin’ Ace, man. What’s next?”

  ALIVE!

  One of my biggest mistakes with KISS was a failure to pay attention to details. That was my nature back then (still is, to a degree). I wasn’t that interested in the business side of the business; I was into the creative and fun side, which proved to be problematic when things stopped being fun. In the early days I used to say to myself, “You have the greatest job in the world. You get to do what you love to do, and you’re getting paid to do it.”

  Then one day I woke up, looked in the mirro
r, bleary-eyed and hung over, and thought, Man, I’m not digging this at all.

  Maybe if I’d been a bit more attentive and clearheaded as we steam-rolled through those first few years, and gotten more positive feedback from everyone on my accomplishments, I’d have been in a position to offer more input and possibly help create a scenario in which I wouldn’t have felt compelled to leave. Hindsight, man. It’s a bummer. A waste of time, too.

  So much shit went down behind the scenes during the first few tours and during the recording of our first three albums. It’s almost a miracle the band survived at all. We were working our asses off, touring like crazy, refining our live show, writing material and cranking out record after record, maintaining a pace that today would be unimaginable. We weren’t just burning the candle at both ends; we were incinerating the fucking thing.

  I’m sure Gene, Peter, and Paul were somewhat aware of the challenges we were facing at that time, but I was basically clueless. When I heard that Neil Bogart wanted us to get back in the studio just a few months after we released Hotter than Hell, I was surprised. I knew enough about the record industry to know that it made little sense for us to make a third record so quickly. Unless, of course, things were going very well… or very badly.

  Even weirder was the news that Neil planned to produce our next album himself. Hey, I liked Neil a lot. We used to hang out a bit and party and I still believe he was one of the most creative people the music industry has ever known. KISS can never repay him for what he did and for the gambles he took on our behalf. Let’s be honest, though: Neil was not a hard rock producer. He was a record company executive whose creative instincts about our music were not as reliable as his marketing savvy. My first choice for producer, as always, would have been Eddie Kramer. My second choice would have been to stick with Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise. But Casablanca was Neil’s baby; he got to call the shots. And he wanted to sit at the control board.

  I didn’t understand Neil’s motivation, and frankly I didn’t care. But I didn’t think it made any sense, and neither did anyone else. After the “Kissin’ Time” debacle we were skeptical when it came to Neil’s artistic input (Paul seemed the most bothered by the idea). What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that Neil was fighting for his career, and for KISS’s career as well. Our first couple of albums had sold reasonably well—75,000 copies for KISS and about 100,000 for Hotter than Hell. Not bad considering we weren’t getting much radio airplay and hadn’t produced anything close to a hit single. Apparently, though, we still weren’t making any money for Casablanca and, more importantly, for our distributor, Warner Bros. Our promotional and touring budget in those days was significantly higher than could be justified by our record sales. It didn’t feel to me like we were living extravagantly. Our “salary” was still less than one hundred dollars per week and we continued to book rooms at the lesser hotel chains, doubling up at every stop. Fast food and cheap beer got us through the days and nights. Sure, it was mostly fun, but believe me—it wasn’t glamorous.

  What I considered frugality, though, Warner Bros. considered wasteful. When Warner declined to give Hotter than Hell the promotional push Neil felt it deserved, he basically said to them, “Go fuck yourselves.”

  Then he told us to get back in the studio.

  As was the case with the first two albums, Dressed to Kill was assembled quickly. Even though we had to write much of the material while we were recording, and even though Neil wasn’t the ideal producer, the whole process was more enjoyable than it had been on Hotter than Hell. Knowing that we had hated our time in L.A., Neil agreed to come to New York and record the album at Electric Lady Studios. So we were home, which greatly improved our mood. One thing I didn’t understand was why, during the recording process, Neil would smoke pot almost constantly without any objections from Gene or Paul, who were so antidrug. They just looked the other way. Go figure?

  There was other crap going on, too. Neil had begun dating Joyce Biawitz, which obviously left Joyce looking like she had a conflict of interest. She and Bill Aucoin were our comanagers, and while managers and record company executives often enjoy cordial relationships, they’re not supposed to be having sex with each other. They do, of course. Happens all the time. But it looks very bad and makes everyone uncomfortable. Bill and Joyce were supposed to be looking out for the best interests of their clients, the biggest of which was KISS. And sometimes what KISS wanted was not exactly what Casablanca wanted. That’s just the way it works. Talent managers and record company executives are supposed to spar once in a while. And they make strange bedfellows, to say the least. Joyce is a terrific gal and a good manager, but when she started dating Neil, it put everyone in a difficult position. Ultimately, Neil and Joyce married, and Bill became sole manager of KISS, which was the only practical solution. I missed her for some time after that, since she always had a kind word to interject just at the right time and always encouraged me to do my best.

  Hanging over all of this was the nagging sense that maybe Casablanca wasn’t the right place for us. Primarily out of loyalty to Neil, we’d turned down offers from other labels that wanted to buy out our contract. But the stakes were getting high. We all needed a breakthrough.

  Dressed to Kill wasn’t it.

  It’s a good album, I think, though not nearly as strong as either of the first two records. Having Neil in the studio with us was kind of a trip—like having your boss looking over your shoulder while you work—but it became obvious fairly early in the process that while Neil had a lot of opinions about how the band should sound, and what types of songs we should record, he lacked the expertise to bring those ideas to life. Paul and Neil butted heads most of all. As a result, many of the technical and creative decisions on Dressed to Kill were made by the band members (along with Dave Wittman, the engineer) and we were listed as coproducers with Neil.

  Two things really distinguished Dressed to Kill. The first was the clever album cover, which featured the four us standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, wearing suits and ties… and full makeup. We’d done something similar for a CREEM photo shoot and liked the concept so much that we went with it for the album. Here we are, world: just regular guys going to work!

  The second was a song called “Rock and Roll All Nite,” written by Gene and Paul with the specific intention of creating a KISS anthem—something fans would wait all night to hear when they went to a live show, and then stand and scream their lungs out to when it was finally played. An anthem is a signature song, the ultimate sing-along. Neil felt like KISS needed something like that and basically instructed Gene and Paul to come up with one. It’s an ass-backwards approach to the craft of songwriting, of course. Songs become popular for all kinds of reasons, but the most obvious one is because they’re good. You try to write well and perform with honesty, and then you hope your fans respond. There’s something very cynical about the idea of creating something designed specifically to provoke a certain reaction.

  But that was the way Neil worked, and in this case he was absolutely right. The first time we rehearsed “Rock and Roll All Nite” in the studio I knew it was a good song. When we actually laid down the track, I had a feeling it would be something special. To simulate the effect of thousands of concertgoers chanting along with the chorus, we invited our friends into the studio. It was wild—Neil and Joyce were there, leaning into a microphone. Bill Aucoin, Peter’s wife, Lydia, and other people on our team all shouting along with the guys in the band:

  “I WANNA ROCK AND ROLL ALL NIGHT! AND PARTY EVERY DAY!”

  I think we all knew we had something unique with that song, and in fact it did do fairly well as a single. But it wasn’t until we started playing “Rock and Roll All Nite” live (with a blistering guitar solo thrown in for good measure) that it really became the anthem we had hoped for. Fans loved it, and it quickly became one of our signature songs and a reliable showstopping encore for live performances.

  Unfortunately, we of
ten weren’t given an opportunity to do an encore. As our popularity increased and word of our live shows spread, an interesting thing began to happen. You see, we were still almost exclusively an opening act through our first two tours, but as time went on we began to notice that a growing percentage of the crowd represented KISS fans. It’s a tricky thing when you go out on the road as a supporting act. You want to put on a great show; you also want to get the audience all pumped up for the headliner. Those two goals aren’t necessarily complementary. If you suck, the crowd will get pissed and boo you off the stage. If you’re too good, though, the headliner will get pissed and fire you from the tour, or at least refuse to hire you again. In the beginning a lot of people simply didn’t know what to make of KISS, and we won them over anyway. As time went on we found that even though we were the opening act, the audience would sing along to our songs and sometimes get so worked up that they’d want an encore. We always delivered—unless the headliner forbade it, which happened on more than one occasion. It’s understandable, really. I mean, KISS was a tough act to follow.

  Dressed to Kill was released on March 19, 1975; by the time it hit stores KISS had become a live phenomenon. We weren’t just a fringe band or a gimmick anymore. We were a band everyone wanted to see, a traveling circus that earned new fans with every stop along the way. Two days after the record was released we played the Beacon Theatre in New York. This was among the highlights of my time in KISS. More so than the other guys, I’d grown up in the New York club scene. The Beacon was a New York landmark, a former movie theater that had recently been converted into a concert hall; in the coming years it would be one of the most popular live music venues in the city. And KISS was at the forefront.

  The very first time we played there, we also were the headlining act. What a trip, man! Just a few weeks earlier we’d been in California, opening up for a band called Jo Jo Gunne. By the time we got to New York, the roles had been reversed, and Jo Jo Gunne was opening for KISS. We sold out the Beacon; in fact, we sold out so quickly that a second show was added. More than six thousand tickets were sold, an incredible number for a band that still had not yet had a hit single or album.