No Regrets

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

  We’re falling again now, faster than ever, careening through turns, seemingly out of control, no brakes, no hope of stopping, and moving at a speed far exceeding the safety limits of the ride. Seemingly in some sort of crazy death spiral. Some riders on the coaster are screaming their fuckin’ brains out, while others are completely silent, with a blank look of fear mixed with panic and confusion. We’re all wondering whether we’re going to jump the track and end up mangled somewhere far below.

  Soon, though, by the grace of God, we’re approaching the final turn again, just before the track straightens out and funnels into the exit station. The brakes aren’t squeaking anymore—they’ve probably been literally sheared off by the friction produced by the runaway ride. The attendants are standing there together, five or six of them, arguing about what to do. I twist in my seat and try to get their attention.

  “Shut it down!”

  “What?!”

  “Turn off the fucking motor, you idiots!!”

  Again we start ascending to the top of the giant tower to an almost certain horrific ending. Suddenly everything stops. No more clanking sound from the chain drive. No more screams from the riders. A weird calm overtakes everyone. Apparently the operators have finally done what they should have done in the first place: cut the power to the giant motor running the chain drive. The coaster stops dead in its tracks. We’re stuck—on the first giant hill. A little scary, but preferable to the alternative. The horror show is over! After a while security guards ascend the catwalk, accompanied by sighs of relief and cheers of happiness from all concerned.

  Slowly and carefully, one at a time, the guards escort us down the narrow catwalk to safety. Don is holding his daughter, who is visibly shaken. She’s not the only one. I’ve never been on a runaway roller coaster before, and it occurs to me for a moment that it’s the perfect metaphor for the way I feel in general right now: like my life is completely out of control. As if being in KISS is a lot like riding a roller coaster that just won’t stop. And there is nothing I can do about it.

  Is this a lesson from someone trying to reach me and make me realize my predicament? A messenger in the form of a giant machine? Maybe so, but I won’t realize it or act upon it until much later.

  The pace never slowed. We released two more studio albums in a span of seven months: Rock and Roll Over in November 1976, and Love Gun in June 1977. In less than three and a half years KISS had funneled an incredible amount of music into the marketplace: six studio albums and one double live record. We never stopped touring, either. Sometimes the road was a blast, sometimes it was a drag. And once in a while it was nearly fatal.

  Just a few weeks after the release of Rock and Roll Over (on December 12, 1976, to be precise), at the start of a show at the Lakeland (Florida) Civic Center, I was electrocuted and nearly killed. Here’s how it happened:

  We were supposed to enter the stage by walking down a set of stairs. Every entrance involving stairs was a challenge for us, given the platform shoes we wore. Usually we’d hold tightly to a railing to make sure we didn’t slip or fall. Well, on this particular night my guitar wasn’t appropriately grounded, so when I touched the metal railing on the staircase I got hit with a big dose of electricity. I didn’t even get to the stage before it happened. I was just about to start going down and I touched the railing at the top of the staircase and got thrown backward onto the platform above the amps. I don’t think the other guys in the band even realized what had happened—maybe they just thought I’d slipped or something. They continued to march toward the stage and began playing. Meanwhile, I was flat on my back, stunned nearly to the point of unconsciousness.

  Some guys from our road crew quickly picked me up and carried me down the back staircase, while the band kept playing. I was out of it for a while. I had burns on my fingertips—that’s how much voltage there was. Eventually the guys realized I wasn’t coming out, and they stopped the show and came back behind the amps to check on me. I hadn’t even gone back to the dressing room yet—I was just sitting there, disoriented, trying to get my bearings. As my head cleared I could hear the audience chanting:

  “We want Ace! We want Ace!”

  That got my adrenaline going, and after about five more minutes or so I went back out and played the entire concert. I had a nasty headache and my fingers were a little numb, but what the hell? The show must go on, right? We all performed at less than peak physical condition at one time or another. There were a few occasions when I could hardly walk because of knee pain and one of the docs would come backstage and shoot me up with needles and I’d go out and play. Paul was sick plenty of times and they’d shoot him up with something to get him through the show. When you’ve got twenty thousand seats sold, you do whatever you can to get out on the stage. That’s just the way it works.

  If there was one good thing to come out of that night, it was the fact that it provided the impetus for one of my favorite KISS songs, and the first on which I had the balls to sing lead. The guys had urged me to write about my near-death experience, and while electricity runs through the song and did indeed provide the initial spark of inspiration, the end result is a tune that’s less about getting fried onstage than it is about getting laid afterward.

  A good KISS song, in other words.

  Shock me, make me feel better, oh yeah

  Come on and shock me, put on your black leather

  Baby, I’m down to the bare wire

  Shock me, we can come together

  Thanks to the return of Eddie Kramer, my favorite producer and engineer, Rock and Roll Over was a more enjoyable experience than Destroyer had been. It’s a good record, more true to the original KISS mission than Destroyer had been, and helped placate some of the fans who were angered by the studio gimmicks of Bob Ezrin on Destroyer. Rock and Roll Over was an unqualified success, shipping platinum and producing another hit single sung by Peter, “Hard Luck Woman,” as well as “Calling Dr. Love,” which would become something of a KISS classic.

  Eddie wanted a return to the rawer sound of earlier KISS albums, so we recorded the album live at the old Nanuet Star Theatre in Rockland County, about twenty miles north of New York City, and then mixed it at the Record Plant. The acoustics at the Star were incredible, and Eddie had us use every inch of the place, setting up instruments in different places to get different types of sounds. At one point he even had Peter playing drums in the bathroom! There was also another really nice feature about recording in Nanuet. I had recently married Jeanette and we’d settled in Tarrytown, New York, which was just across the Hudson River. All I had to do was roll out of bed and shoot west across the Tappan Zee Bridge and I was there in ten minutes.

  I think my guitar playing on Rock and Roll Over is solid, and I know that I felt more connected to the album while we were recording. That’s probably due to Eddie as much as anything else. But the truth is that while I like the record a lot, it was the first KISS album on which I did not contribute a single composition. I didn’t feel good about that. I thought of myself as a writer as well as a guitar player, and I had no one but myself to blame. Yeah, it’s true that in any band with four strong personalities and big egos, there’s a certain amount of time spent marking your territory. Everybody wants to write and sing; everyone wants the spotlight. I was no different. But if you’re not bringing material to the table, you can’t really complain, can you?

  So I sat down and wrote “Shock Me.” Everyone loved it and agreed that it belonged on the next album, Love Gun. My initial thought, as usual, was to turn it over to Gene or Paul and let them handle the vocals. To my surprise, they resisted.

  “You should sing this one yourself,” Paul said. “It’s way overdue.” And that’s how I wound up flat on my back on the floor of a studio at the Record Plant, trying to relax, with the lights turned down low and Eddie Kramer at the board, encouraging me to sing from the gut.

  Which is exactly what I did.

  I like Love Gun a lot; I’m proud of the whole album.
There are a few things on it, though, that really make me smile. Like some of my leads… and the vocal on “Shock Me.” It never actually occurred to me until that album that I was a viable singer. What I learned is that you don’t have to be a trained vocalist to be a rock singer, any more than you have to be a classically trained musician to play guitar. Just believe in what you’re doing and the audience will go along for the ride.

  Looking back on it now, there a lot of things about the KISS marketing machine that make me laugh, and a few that make me cringe. Every time I thought we’d reached a new high (or low), the bar was moved ever so slightly. The cardboard “love gun” that was included in every copy of Love Gun, for example. To the relief of parents of teenagers all over the world, this gimmick was merely a toy gun, and not the giant dildo some may have expected. We also included a page of KISS tattoos that were actual duplicates of tattoos we had on our arms. That was a good one. Cheap and effective.

  More expensive, and more ambitious by miles, was the first KISS comic book, produced by Marvel Comics in 1977. We got to meet the great Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. I thought Stan was cool, but Gene was the real fanboy, trailing Stan around and asking him questions about everything he’d written over the last thirty years. Gene was and is a comic book fanatic. He told me once that when he first arrived in the United States from Israel, the first thing he learned to read was a comic book. I guess he never stopped, which at least partially explains how he came up with his character for KISS. I was a little bit of a fan, but I could take them or leave them. I was intrigued by the superhero aspect of comic books, but it was the artwork that really grabbed my attention.

  Predictably, the KISS comic book wasn’t allowed to simply sneak into the marketplace. Like everything else we did, its birth was accompanied by a wild publicity stunt. We all gathered at the printing plant in Buffalo, New York, where the comic would be produced, and together we each donated a vial of blood, which we then poured into a vat of red ink, which was mixed in with the actual ink that would be used to print the comic books. I’m not sure exactly what this was supposed to signify, but as a marketing stunt it worked beautifully. Fans thought it was awesome, critics thought it was ridiculous, and conservative and religious groups were repulsed, claiming that the stunt provided further evidence that KISS was doing the devil’s work, and that possibly we were vampires!

  To which we could only reply… “Ahhhh, bullshit.”

  The marketing silliness reached a peak of sorts with KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, a 1978 made-for-television movie with a plot so ridiculous that I start laughing just thinking about it. We played superhero versions of ourselves, locked in a battle with a demented scientist bent on taking over a popular amusement park by creating four androids that looked just like us.

  How could anyone make this shit up?

  It wasn’t the greatest movie, but that never bothered me because I wasn’t under the impression that anyone expected it to be anything other than a ridiculous farce—including the people who wrote, directed, and produced it. If you look at it now, the movie seems kind of campy and cool. The problem is, it wasn’t meant to be that way. I watch it now and get a kick out of it, but I know Gene is embarrassed about it. Then again, Gene takes everything so fucking seriously, which is ironic since he was the one who always claimed to be happy that KISS was selling out arenas and moving millions of records, without regard for artistic integrity. How the hell do you make a movie called KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park and expect people not to laugh? I also heard that when he saw This Is Spinal Tap he didn’t think it was very funny. To each his own. I personally thought it was hysterical.

  There were a lot of bad ideas surrounding that TV movie project, the main one being: who in their right mind thought the four guys in KISS could act? I suppose you could argue that all rock stars are actors, and obviously more than a few of them have made successful transitions to the big screen. In KISS we were already wearing makeup and portraying characters whenever we went onstage, so maybe it seemed like we’d have an easier time than most. When I first heard about the project, I thought it sounded like it might be kind of fun. But I didn’t take it seriously at all, and in very short order I discovered that acting was a lot less interesting and enjoyable than I’d suspected.

  I should have had some idea what to expect when I got the original script and discovered that I didn’t have a single line of dialogue. Not one! Every time my character was supposed to speak, the only thing that would come out of his mouth was the sound of a parrot: “Awk!”

  That’s exactly what was written on the page. Three capital letters: A-W-K.

  “Awk!”

  I guess the writers had picked up on a quirk of my personality, although I’m not sure where they got the information. Sometimes when I’d get loaded and didn’t want to engage in conversation, I’d mimic the squawk of a parrot until the other person gave up and went away. Pretty silly, I admit. And that was the Ace Frehley persona the screenwriters wanted to present. Or maybe they just thought I was too stoned or drunk to remember any of my lines, so they tried to keep it as simple as possible. When I first saw the script, I didn’t know what to think. Was it a joke? If so, I didn’t find it particularly amusing.

  “What the fuck is this?” I asked Bill. “I’ve got no lines in this stupid fuckin’ movie? Why am I wasting my time?”

  He laughed. “What do you want me to do, Ace?”

  “Tell them to rewrite it.”

  They did, and almost magically I had the ability to talk! I even had amazing superpowers that allowed me to transport the whole band at will to another location. So I took a deep breath and decided to give the project my best shot.

  A lot of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park was filmed on location at Magic Mountain, where we actually performed a somewhat staged KISS concert, although most of the interior scenes were done at Culver City Studios. Regardless of where we were filming, I had to be on set at eight o’clock in the morning, which was a complete drag for me in those days. The band was staying at a posh hotel in Beverly Hills, a good forty-five minutes away by car. And it wasn’t like I was getting eight hours of beauty sleep each night. I was busy being Ace—hitting the clubs, sometimes partying until the wee hours. Who the hell wants to get up at 7 A.M. with a hangover? Not me, that’s for sure. Especially when I never knew exactly how much of my time would be required.

  It didn’t take long to figure out that most of the moviemaking process was about hanging out in your trailer all day, waiting for someone to tell you that you were needed on the set. A couple of times during the movie I arrived bright and early, threw on my makeup and costume, and got all ready to go… and then sat in my trailer. After an hour or two one of the assistant directors would stop by and say, “You know what, Ace? We’re doing some close-ups on Gene this morning, so I don’t think we’re going to need you until after lunch. Why don’t you relax for a while?”

  That really made me crazy. Here I was, one of the “stars” of the film, and you’d think maybe they could have been a little more considerate? Maybe let me know the night before? Don’t these fuckin’ people plan? Truth is, I was doing a lot of coke at the time and my nerves were becoming frayed, to say the least. I was getting an ounce of blow delivered to my trailer about once a week! The delivery boy was actually one of the actors on the set (he had a minor role in the film). It was really nuts. We each had our own trailer to hang in. I filled my fridge with cold beer and champagne, and since there was a lot of downtime I indulged in the white powder frequently and followed up with whatever was handy. (You’d be surprised what was handy on a movie set in Los Angeles in the seventies.) The actor supplying me used to put the coke in his character’s hat and act like we were buddies just having a cold one together in my trailer. He actually went on to become a pretty well-known character actor down the road, with roles in several big Hollywood hits.

  For the most part, I was clueless. I didn’t realize that this
was the way movies worked, that downtime was a big part of an actor’s day—maybe the biggest part. And so the third or fourth time that it happened, I snapped. Totally went off on the producer. When confronted, he really didn’t have much to say in his defense in regard to how the shooting schedule was being handled, which didn’t make me feel any better.

  Fuck this! I said to myself. Then I shouted, “I’m outta here!” (Which, as I realize now, was extremely unprofessional behavior.)

  I went back into my trailer, quickly washed off my makeup and changed into my regular clothes, snorted a couple of lines and washed it down with a cold one, and then jumped into my Mercedes. I drove quietly off the lot, trying not to attract too much attention, but in the rearview mirror I could see my bodyguard and road manager in hot pursuit. Well, not so hot, actually. I let them follow me for a while as I bided my time until we got into a more familiar area. The traffic was becoming dense, and I began making lefts and rights, slowly and methodically trying to lose them, until finally I just hit the gas and pulled away, leaving them stuck behind a truck at a red light. The next thing I knew, I was on my own, somewhere in the suburbs of Los Angeles, hanging out at a bar, washing down some tranquilizers with a beer. I calmed down after a while and soon began feeling very guilty about sounding off to the producer. Hell, he’d only been doing his job, and I was making it harder for him. Maybe the script and schedule changes had occurred that morning and there was nothing he could do about it. And I was acting like a spoiled brat! I realize now that all the cocaine and alcohol was really starting to affect my judgment and how I perceived life in general—not just within the band.

  But now I faced a dilemma: do I run back with my tail between legs, or skip a day of shooting and hope it all blows over? I had similar experiences at times with KISS. Something would piss me off and I’d lose my temper and disappear for a while. I didn’t really like confrontation, so I’d just go off on my own and medicate myself until I felt better. It was typical behavior for an addict. I see that so clearly now; unfortunately, I was oblivious to my actions at the time.