In Cadillac, Michigan, the entire town celebrated its love affair with the band, hosting what amounted to a weeklong KISS festival. Bill Au-coin thought it would be great publicity to play along with the town, so we flew into Cadillac on October 9, 1975, and took part in the Cadillac High School homecoming parade; we even played a live show (a tamer, more family-friendly version of our usual performance). We turned it into a big media event. I had a lot of fun doing that because it was kind of tongue-in-cheek and irreverent. We put makeup on the mayor and some of the other local officials. Everyone got into the spirit of things. I thought it was a terrific event, because it represented thinking outside the box; it deviated from the norm, which I always enjoyed. I like the unexpected. I don’t like to know what I’m going to be doing a year from now, or five years from now. I like spontaneity; that’s what keeps my creative juices flowing. That said, I can’t stress strongly enough how little involvement I had in the promotion, marketing, and merchandising of the KISS brand. I just went along for the ride.
A lot of the time it was fun, of course. It’s fun until… well, until it’s not fun anymore. I felt invincible for the longest time—
I think we all did. There was a rhythm to each show, and it began in the dressing room, while we were putting on our makeup. Like four chicks in a beauty parlor we’d sit in front of the mirrors and dab at our faces and gossip, never really looking at each other but carrying on an endless four-way discussion. The dressing room was completely off-limits to anyone but our innermost circle. Not even wives or girlfriends were permitted in the dressing room. Just band members, our road manager, and the wardrobe girls who helped us with our costumes. Later on we hired a hairdresser to apply wigs to those band members who needed a little help. We’d sit in our chairs, in full costumes, being transformed into our various characters, and we’d chat about what had happened during the day (or the previous night) or whatever little changes we had planned for the show. If someone had screwed up the previous night, or in sound check, this was the place where we’d talk about it. Sometimes the conversation could be blunt:
“Watch the tempo!” “Don’t fuck up again!” “Ace, don’t forget the fuckin’ solo!”
More often, though, the mood was light. Gene often showed us Polaroid snapshots of the girls he’d been with the night before, and that brought out mixed reactions from all of us. Sometimes to the point of hysterical laughter. We’d pump ourselves up, talk about putting on a great show, and joke about how much fun we were going to have afterward. Even then, for me, the party had already begun. I started drinking before the show and kept at it while we played. Afterward we’d usually jump in a limo and head back to the hotel, where we’d shower and change and become acquainted with the more attractive members of the burgeoning KISS Army. If we needed to be somewhere right after the show, we’d use the shower facilities at the arena. Usually, anyway. Once in a while there would be a party at the venue, which allowed us to fulfill the wishes of fans who were more interested in having sex with the characters in KISS than in having sex with the men behind the makeup.
“Pleeeeeeease, I want to fuck the Spaceman!”
I sometimes accommodated. Different strokes, right?
More often, though, we retreated to the hotel and the privacy of a hospitality suite, where an assortment of beautiful gals would be waiting. We used to call it the “Chicken Coop,” for obvious reasons.
To any normal person living a regular life, this probably sounds completely bizarre. But it was normal for us. The hedonistic, aberrant behavior becomes a way of life when you’re at the top of the rock ’n’ roll ladder. If you want to have sex five times a day, with five different women? All you have to do is open the door. That wasn’t normally my cup of tea, but Gene loved every minute. It becomes a game, a way to pass the time (or, in Gene’s case, maybe an addiction?). You take advantage of it for any number of reasons, the most obvious being boredom and availability. Same thing with drugs. I have an addictive personality. I’m an alcoholic. I don’t want to minimize the damage that drinking can do, but for the longest time that’s all I was: a drinker.
When the money began pouring in, that all changed.
There was a time when cocaine absolutely scared the shit out of me. Not in the way that it scares me now, which is basically the way any drug, including alcohol, scares me—a good, healthy “if I start using again I will die” kind of fear. I’m talking about a gut-level fear. The kind you have when you’re a little kid; a fear of the unknown. Even though I started drinking at a young age and experimented with sniffing glue and became a casual user of marijuana, all by the time I got into high school, there was something about cocaine or any hard drug that scared me. As a kid I considered cocaine and heroin to be on the same level, and to be capable of approximately the same degree of devastation. I didn’t want to touch hard drugs, and in those days cocaine fell into that category. It wasn’t a chic drug; it wasn’t cool or hip. In my eyes, it was no different than heroin, which was the dangerous drug… the loser’s drug.
I never did get into heroin. In fact, aside from the one or two times when I suspect someone laced my coke with it, I never even tried heroin. But cocaine?
Oh yeah. Big-time.
Our next album, Destroyer, represented a departure for KISS, and not merely because of the cocaine and Courvoisier on the mixing console. The producer on Destroyer was Bob Ezrin, a studio wizard best known for his work with Alice Cooper, and a guy so widely acknowledged as being a production genius that everyone was basically willing to look the other way when it became apparent that he had a few vices of his own.
That was one of the things that bothered me most about Paul and Gene—they were very selective in their moral indignation. Bob was a brilliant producer, so they gave him a free pass, much the same way they did with Neil Bogart during the production of Dressed to Kill. I think the word hypocritical might be apropos at this point.
I remember the very first time I tried coke. It was during the recording of the Destroyer album, in December 1975. Watching Bob and others partake of the glittery crystalline powder during the recording and mixing process intrigued me and brought out my curiosity. I figured that if a genius like Bob did it, and he was very successful at what he did, then maybe it was the missing link I had been looking for in my life. I asked Peter if he could hook me up with some since I knew he had a connection. He scored some coke for me and it changed my life from that day forward.
The first time I ripped a few lines of blow I felt like I’d discovered something almost as good as sex. My whole body came to life. It was a terrific buzz on its own, and in the beginning it gave me focus and clarity, but you know what I liked the most about coke?
It made me a better drinker.
I was already damned prodigious, but cocaine put me in a different league. It allowed me to drink longer and harder without passing out. I could party way into the wee hours, into the next morning and afternoon, maybe right on into the next night if I felt like it. If I had my blow I could keep on going—like the Energizer Bunny. Hour after depraved hour. What I discovered—what any connoisseur of cocaine discovers—is the remarkable ability of the human body to withstand abuse. Cocaine is a stimulant, alcohol a depressant. Used smartly (notice I didn’t say “intelligently”), the two chemicals balance each other out. It’s almost like a speedball, the alcohol (or, in the case of a speedball, the heroin) depressing the central nervous system and the cocaine jolting it back to life. Of course, I’d never done a speedball, never would have considered it. Mix heroin and cocaine? No fuckin’ way. Too dangerous. People I knew had died from that concoction. You’d have to be out of your mind. But cocaine and alcohol? Oh yeah. All night long, baby.
Once I started doing cocaine, there was no stopping me. It really was that clear a line of demarcation, and it began with Destroyer. For a while it didn’t even have an adverse impact on my playing. Cocaine can actually make you sharper. For me, in smaller doses, it was like guzzling coffee. I h
ad tried speed a few times and didn’t like it—made me too jumpy. But coke worked beautifully, especially in combination with alcohol. I’d get comfortably numb, as they say.
Coke went hand in hand with sex, too, which was another terrific selling point. You could have more sex on cocaine. You could have better sex on cocaine. In the beginning, at least, I thought it was a wonder drug, the perfect enhancement for the rock star life.
As with every drug, though, you can build up a tolerance to cocaine, and after a while it doesn’t work quite as well. You have to do more blow to get the desired effect. You’re always chasing the memory of that first buzz from the first line, but you never seem to get it again. Then you need more alcohol to come down. Pretty soon the highs aren’t as high and the lows are crushingly painful. There’s a cycle to it. You end up taking tranquilizers or sleeping pills to fall asleep. I always called it a triad. If you’re going to do alcohol and coke in large quantities, you have to have downers at your disposal, because the alcohol ain’t enough. If you’re going to stay up for two or three days doing coke (which I did on several occasions), you need tranquilizers or sleeping pills. Then, after a while, you start taking pain pills to manage the crushing morning-after pain—hangovers like nothing you can imagine. It’s crazy stuff. My hangovers were terrible, like the worst migraine in the world. I’d wake up and vomit so hard I’d see stars. I was doing champagne for a while, and those were terrible hangovers. A champagne-cocaine hangover is unbelievable. Any drug-alcohol hangover is worse than an alcohol hangover by itself. Your whole body aches, because the cocaine intensifies the headache and makes you feel more edgy once it wears off. Your nerves are frazzled.
So what do you do? Quit drinking? Lay off the blow?
Course not. You start taking painkillers and tranquilizers. Every morning begins with Percocet and every night ends with Valium. Then night blurs into day, and pretty soon you’re taking both of them by the fistful, and slowly you begin to lose your edge, as well as your mind. One day you wake up and realize you’ve crossed a line, and you say to yourself, “Man I am strung out. And not only am I strung out, I don’t even know me anymore.”
That’s pretty scary.
It happens more quickly for some people than for others. The disease progresses differently in each person. For some people it takes only a year or two to become a fullblown addict. For others it takes much longer. I was leading a life totally detached from reality. I went from having little money or worldly possessions to having staggering wealth and fame. And I hadn’t the vaguest fucking clue as to how to handle any of it.
Like I said, I’d had a couple of bad experiences with drugs in high school, so for the longest time I was content to stick with what worked for me, which was mainly booze. Cocaine was extremely expensive in 1975. We’re not talking about cheap cocaine; we’re not talking about crack. You didn’t get into cocaine unless you had the resources to do it right.
After Alive! I had the resources, and pretty soon I had the contacts, which led me down the rabbit hole in fairly short order. For example, one of my coke dealers was this guy named Geoff who supposedly had been a mercenary in South America. I don’t know whether that was in fact true, but the guy certainly had an intense and dangerous vibe about him. He also had some of the best blow in the city. I’d gotten to know Geoff through Peter, and before long he became my primary source of cocaine. Whatever else the guy might have been, he was no slouch in the drug trade. His shit was uniquely pure and powerful. Not cheap, either. As a result, Geoff had a very elite clientele, with lots of celebrities, as well as the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers, and Wall Street types. I remember stopping by his place on Eighth Street one day and passing one of the Stones on the way out. Not that it was a big deal that they used blow. In the late seventies, it was hard to find anyone with money or fame who didn’t do coke. People did blow the way people today drink beer. It seemed almost normal.
I used to hear stories about Geoff and how his clientele was expanding beyond the point where he could safely or reasonably accommodate everyone. He was selling shit uncut, the story went, and to get uncut blow from South America was considered a real score. Word got out and the traffic in and out of Geoff’s apartment building became uncomfortably busy. It was the weirdest thing. He was clearly running a business, but he didn’t treat it that way, probably because he was too busy getting fucked up himself. Sometimes he’d deliver, and other times I had to call him up, set up an appointment, and go down to his place in the East Village. Most of the time I’d exchange cash for blow, and instead of just running out of there, I’d hang out and do a few lines with Geoff and whoever else was hanging around. He wasn’t exactly a friend of mine. Like a lot of people I got to know in those days, he was just a guy I did drugs with.
One day I missed an appointment to cop some blow. I forget why or what happened. It really doesn’t matter. The point of the story is that on the day I was supposed to meet Geoff, he and his girlfriend were killed. Shot in the head—execution-style, the cops said—right in their own apartment. I remember seeing the story on the news and feeling a mixture of sadness and relief. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Geoff was killed. If his background story was accurate, it’s easy to envision a scenario in which he had managed to offend his distributors in South America, or had maybe edged into territory previously controlled by the mob in New York. He was playing with fire. And as one of his best clients, and one of his party partners, so was I. If something hadn’t come up, I could have been there the day Geoff was killed.
I guess a guardian angel was looking over my shoulder on that day. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.
When we set out to make Destroyer, Bob Ezrin had been brought in specifically because he understood the challenges associated with taking a big, live theatrical act and translating its sound to the studio. So far, KISS hadn’t done that. We were a popular live band that reached a tipping point on the strength of a live album. The next logical step was to capitalize on that newfound popularity by recording a terrific studio album, which meant making some changes in the way things had been done.
Around the time we hooked up with Bob, he was among the hottest producers in the business, having worked with Dr. John, Alice Cooper, and Lou Reed. Going strictly by his reputation and résumé, I was looking forward to working with Bob, and while I think Destroyer is an interesting and even innovative KISS record, the recording process isn’t something I recall with great affection. Part of that is due to the fact that sometimes I was intimidated by Bob, especially when I couldn’t come up with a guitar-solo idea fast enough to suit his needs.
You have to understand where Bob was coming from. I had heard that when he worked with Alice Cooper’s band he had brought in a session guitar player to do a lot of the solos, and I got the feeling that there was a chance he was going to follow the same plan with KISS if I didn’t produce quickly enough. The pressure was on—and with a hangover as a frequent distraction, I hit a brick wall occasionally.
But part of it was also due to the fact that Bob wasn’t very patient with me; I got the feeling that Paul and Gene might have told Bob about my drinking problem, and he may have put me in the same category as the guys in Alice’s band. The difference is that I had the chops; those just needed to be finessed.
Bob was an interesting guy with a great mind for music and production, but at times he had the demanding, volatile demeanor of a football coach or drill instructor. I guess you’d say he was a high-strung artistic type, which didn’t always mesh well with my laid-back personality.
Bob used to bring a whistle to the studio, and while cutting basic tracks he really intimidated Peter by putting a small box over a microphone and hitting it with a drumstick, as if Peter couldn’t keep proper time! I really felt for Peter during those sessions. It was at times a very demoralizing experience for all of us, and no matter what any of us said, Bob’s word was the law.
Early on, in preproduction, we’d s
it in a little room, almost like a classroom, and Bob would stand in front of us at a blackboard, lecturing about the recording process. It was like he was conducting a class—he was the teacher and we were his students. The funny thing is, Bob wasn’t a whole lot older than any of us. He was only in his late twenties when we recorded Destroyer, so it wasn’t like he was the grown-up and we were the children. But it sort of felt that way. Bob carried himself with an air of maturity and importance. He believed in himself, which is probably half the battle if you want to be a record producer. And we wanted to believe in him.
But there’s something I learned later on in my career about the duties of a good producer. His job is not only to help a band make a great record, but also to bring out the best in his musicians by creating an encouraging, comfortable atmosphere in the studio, so that everyone feels good about themselves. That was a quality Bob sadly lacked.
Remember, we struggled with the fact that people were still calling us a carnival act. I struggled with it, anyway, and I’m sure the other guys did, too, even if they don’t want to admit it. It bothered me to read reviews in which more attention was paid to the special effects than the music we played. Obviously I have no right to complain about any of that. We set out to create the greatest theatrical band in the history of rock, and that’s what we did. I invented a character. I wore makeup. I figured out how to shoot rockets out of my guitar and have smoke billow out of the pickups. I bought into the whole thing and reaped the benefits. But there was always a bit of dissonance, a nagging sense that I had sold out to a degree I never quite envisioned. And that really gnawed at me. I wanted to be respected by my peers, and I wanted to be taken more seriously as a musician.
No Regrets Page 15