Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  Eddie Kramer was a legendary audio engineer and producer who had worked with the Kinks, the Small Faces, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. We’d seen him at the studio, and he was a striking character. He sometimes walked around Electric Lady in a cape, carrying a cane. He elicited both fear and awe.

  Ron set it up. Well, sort of. Eddie oversaw the sessions, but his assistant Dave Wittman did the actual recording. We cut demos of “Black Diamond,” “Strutter,” “Deuce,” and “Watchin’ You.” The other track we cut, “Cold Gin,” was a song Ace brought to the table and Gene and I tweaked.

  Gene and I knew we would be depended on to bring in the songs for KISS because Peter and Ace never showed much ambition in that department. I didn’t begrudge them their limitations, but when Ace showed up with the framework of a song, I was thrilled. After all, we wanted to be like the Beatles—four identifiable characters. People liked the Beatles, but they also had their favorite Beatle. George Harrison had a song or two on Beatles albums, and even Ringo got to sing a novelty song now and then. It made the band—any band—more interesting. Toward that end we had Peter sing my song “Black Diamond.” We wanted Ace to sing “Cold Gin,” too. But he refused.

  We figured the more fully realized the individual members of the band were, the stronger the group would be—adding more ingredients would only make the soup better. I wanted KISS to be a club where every member was represented. I wanted it to be multidimensional, with four formidable personalities. The fact that one of the other guys in our band actually contributed to that illusion—by bringing in a song idea—was a bonus.

  Now, with a demo in hand, we knew we couldn’t be stopped. If you stood in front of us, we were going to crush you.

  17.

  I think in some ways all bands are dysfunctional. Often, part of the reason people get involved in rock and roll in the first place is because they themselves are dysfunctional. If you get lucky, you find camaraderie and some sort of chemistry—the fact that you each feel different brings you together. And certainly it’s nice to be part of a club of misfits. Life is easier with a support system.

  From the very beginning, I felt part of something with KISS. We were all oddballs—quirky, idiosyncratic, neurotic—but we had each other now. I can’t speak for anybody else, because I don’t know what made them tick or what the appeal was for them at the onset, but for me, KISS gave me a feeling of finally belonging—an us-against-the-world kind of mentality, and I was part of that sense of “us.” It was empowering.

  In KISS, I had a gang. I wasn’t as lonely as I’d always been.

  But despite our shared sense of purpose, I think the four of us all saw the others as odd. We were all odd. And not necessarily in a way that made us gel. In KISS, we had a collective reason for being, but outside of that, we didn’t have a lot in common. So we didn’t socialize together outside of the band. Ace and Peter had a lot of friends, and Peter was already married. Gene had a girlfriend. I was still pretty isolated outside of the band.

  Even within the band, I never let my guard down. I remained remote around my bandmates. I maintained a wall that made it difficult to get to know me at all and impossible to get to know me well. When the other guys joked around with each other, I chimed in. When they made fun of me, however, I didn’t take it well. I never betrayed why I was sensitive. I sure as hell wasn’t going to expose myself to potential ridicule by telling them about how shattering my experiences as a child had been as a result of my ear and deafness. I wasn’t going to bring up painful things with people who might use those things against me.

  “You can dish it out but you can’t take it,” the guys would say. And it was true. It was an instinctive reaction on my part. They didn’t understand how I had spent my childhood being scrutinized and ridiculed. How could they? I didn’t tell them.

  Still, it took a lot of effort to cover something like that all the time, and it certainly affected my behavior. But I wasn’t comfortable enough with myself to handle it any other way.

  Peter, it quickly became apparent, was also a very troubled person. He seemed to get off on causing problems within the band. One night after rehearsal, we all went down to the Chinese restaurant where Gene and I used to eat back when Wicked Lester practiced in Chinatown. Peter started making fun of the waiter—in a really derogatory way. We found his behavior embarrassing, and told him that if he didn’t stop, we would leave the restaurant. Peter said, “If you leave the restaurant, I’m quitting the band.” He kept it up. We got up and left. And sure enough, he quit the band for a few days. This type of needless drama became part of the way he operated.

  Ace didn’t do things to sabotage the band at that point. Though lazy, he was smart and funny. He constantly told jokes. He liked to drink, but it didn’t affect our work—at least in the beginning. Only later would he start to forget the punch lines to his own jokes and have to ask us how they ended. In the early days, when we practiced or played live, he stayed focused and bore down.

  Once Peter was back in the fold, we booked two more gigs at the Daisy in April. Quite a few more people showed up than the month before.

  I was still learning to control an audience. I felt like a lion tamer. The only way to avoid being destroyed was to put yourself in charge. “It’s really great to be back,” I said, pretending we’d been out on the road. “We haven’t been here because we’ve been so busy playing.”

  Yeah, in our egg-carton-lined rehearsal space.

  We continued to set up onstage the same way we had from the very start at Coventry and even in our rehearsal space: two vocal microphones, with one on either side of the drum kit. I may have seen myself as the frontman, but my mic was never center stage. We were a combination of elements, and so, like the Beatles, we never wanted anyone in the middle. Either person could be the singer, depending on the song. The odd thing was that because I stood “stage left” (which is the right side from the audience’s perspective), my deaf side faced the rest of the band. But it never occurred to me to set up on the other side.

  Before and after the shows, Ace continued to say, “I don’t want to carry shit.” That took colossal balls. But I realized that was who he was, and that together we had something special. I had to weigh things in terms of what was important; I had to prioritize. Was it more important to get some guy off his ass to carry amplifiers— “carry shit or leave” —than to keep moving forward with the band? No. When I carried the gear, I wasn’t doing it to be kind or to help him out. I was doing the right thing for me. I wasn’t being charitable to his lazy ass. I knew in the end it would benefit me. It reminded me of my initial reaction to Gene. I put up with crap from him because I stood to gain more by accepting some of his behavior than I would lose by telling him to take a hike.

  In May we played our first show in New York City proper, on the eighth floor of a factory building on Bleecker Street. The loft served as the rehearsal space for a new band called the Brats, whose founder, Rick Rivets, had originally been in the New York Dolls. We had seen their debut show a few months before, when they opened for the Dolls.

  We agreed to play at their loft for free and provide our PA to the other bands—the Brats and Wayne County, a transvestite and eventually transsexual who fronted a band called Queen Elizabeth. When we loaded our gear in that afternoon, the members of the Brats were not too friendly. They wanted to look like the Yardbirds and pulled it off pretty well. They all wore shag haircuts and the best rock and roll clothing—tailored velvet jackets, satin bell-bottom pants, platform boots—all the latest things from England that I recognized from the windows of Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Granny Takes a Trip. And they had rock star names: in addition to Rick Rivets there was Keith Ambrose, Sparky Donovan, and David Leeds.

  We plugged in to do a sound check and ran through “Deuce.” The atmosphere changed. The Brats suddenly became our buddies. Once again, we had found that our music broke down indifference, and even hostility.

  We opened the show that night and then stuck a
round to hear Wayne County, dressed in drag, looking like a spoof of Phyllis Diller, and backed by twin brothers no bigger than Oompa-Loompas. Wayne’s anthem was “It Takes a Man Like Me to Be a Woman Like Me,” and the high point of the show came when he/she ate dog food out of a toilet. Not the prettiest sight.

  All the cool people came to that party, though I don’t think they could make heads or tails of us. I talked to Sylvain Sylvain of the Dolls there. They had just signed a two-record deal with Mercury and were in the process of recording. “Hey,” I cajoled him, “why don’t we do a show together?”

  “You guys would kill us,” he said.

  By the time we went to pack up after the Brats’ set, my guitar—the walnut-colored one that Charlie LeBeau had made for me—had been stolen. I had to start using a black Les Paul reissue while LeBeau made me a new guitar: an asymmetrical Flying V, based on one Albert King used to play. I came to be closely associated with that Flying V until, many years down the road, I began to design my own line of signature guitars.

  We played the same Bleecker Street loft a month later, followed by another batch of shows at the Daisy. By that point people literally broke the windows trying to get into the Daisy—it was total bedlam. But we began to encounter a Catch-22 when we tried to capitalize on what to us seemed like increasing buzz. Every time we called a booking agent to help get us more gigs, we got the same response: we couldn’t get a booking agent unless we had a record label. But whenever we sent demos to labels to try to get a label deal, they wanted to know who our booking agent was.

  So we figured we’d just have to continue booking our own shows and hope for the best. But outside of the Daisy, we seemed to run up against a wall on that front, too. “Who’s your manager?” club owners asked when we rang them.

  “We don’t have a manager.”

  “Well, we need to talk to a manager.”

  “Unless we play at your club, we can’t get a manager.”

  “Sorry.”

  Something had to give. Then we had an idea. What about the Hotel Diplomat, where the Dolls had played? It wasn’t a club, so we wouldn’t need to persuade a booker or manager to hire us. We just needed to rent the place out. It could be our way to bypass the roadblocks we kept running up against. Everything would be in our own hands.

  I went to the hotel to inquire about renting the ballroom. It was five hundred bucks. That was a lot of money, but we decided to bite the bullet. We knew we couldn’t fill the place on our own, so we asked the Brats to headline the show. We agreed to pay them a few hundred bucks. We even wrote out a contract, like concert promoters. We were up to our necks now.

  In order to draw a crowd and have any chance of recouping our outlay, we realized we had to advertise. We needed handbills we could post around town, and we needed to take out an ad in some of the local papers, like the Village Voice. This would all take money, too, but Gene and I were still working, and I had gotten Ace a job driving for the same taxi company I drove for.

  We also wanted a band logo to make the ads and posters look good. Ace had jotted down a logo for the flyer for our Bleecker Street loft shows. He was a pretty decent artist. I took his sketch and used it as the basis for a series of KISS logos I designed, ultimately arriving at the one that has adorned all things KISS for the past forty years. I vividly remember sitting on my parents’ sofa while they were out of town and drawing up the final version on thick white stock using a straightedge and a drafting pen. The SS in the logo actually consists of one S that is thicker than the other, with different proportions, and they aren’t exactly parallel—because I just eyeballed it. Ace’s concept was closer to the Nazi SS. I certainly suspected that was his inspiration, and the fact that a few years later he bought Nazi memorabilia on our first European tour confirmed this in my mind. As a Jew, I was sensitive about the SS, and Gene’s family had survived the Holocaust. My father never liked our logo because he thought my version was still too close to the Nazi lightning bolts, but for me, it didn’t hit home until years later, when I learned our logo was banned in Germany because Nazi imagery was illegal there. When I drafted the logo, I certainly never intended to court controversy at the expense of victims of history. I didn’t want that on my conscience.

  Once we’d taken care of the ads, we put posters up all over the city. We did it ourselves, at night. We’d take two posters, wrap them around something—like a signpost—and staple both sides together.

  I also made logo T-shirts, cutting stencils of the logo from cardboard, laying them on black T-shirts, and then painting rubber cement on the fabric and pouring glitter onto it. Take off the stencil, and there was a sparkling metallic KISS logo on black. Peter’s sister made some, too, and we passed them out to friends of the band for the show.

  We also made up rough-and-ready media kits and sent them out to people whose names we found in magazines and the credits of record sleeves—managers and producers and booking agents. You could find all sorts of information if you scoured publications like Billboard. Each kit had a folder with a bio featuring the logo, an eight-by-ten photo, and complementary passes to the Diplomat. Nobody was hustling like that back then. The show passes listed the set time for our show, not the Brats’ show, even though they were more the draw. We hoped that the industry types would show up, see a packed ballroom, and assume we had brought the crowd.

  We had some additional ideas about our stage show, too. In June I saw Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies tour and the theatricality made a huge impression on me. He really opened my eyes to the possibilities of a rock and roll show. Although it was more staged than anything I wanted to do—it seemed quite choreographed, and the whole thing had a scripted feel to it—I liked the atmosphere and environment he created. I wanted KISS to do things as visually arresting as that, but I wanted the band to be the show, by itself, as opposed to something that was providing a soundtrack for a separate drama. I wanted KISS to command the same kind of attention without the use of dancers or giant toothbrushes. The question was, how?

  It would be a while before we fleshed out anything along those lines, but one thing we did immediately was buy a truckload of empty speaker cabinets. They cost next to nothing and looked like Marshall amps. We figured we could stack the empty speaker cabinets onstage to give our set-up the right image. We just had to warn the spotlight operator not to hit them with the light, because then people would be able to see that they were empty.

  Early on the day of the show, July 13, 1973, I rented a van and we loaded in and inconspicuously set up all our gear before anyone else arrived. This was a ruse to make people think we had a road crew. When people eventually showed up, we wanted them to see everything ready for us to walk on to the stage, as if somebody had taken care of it all before we even arrived at the venue. Nobody would realize we had humped it all ourselves. In actuality, we had just one guy, a friend of Ace’s named Eddie Solon, who handled the sound on our PA.

  After we had set everything up at the hotel, we went back to our loft on 23rd Street and got ready for the show, doing our makeup and putting on our outfits. Peter was up to his usual shenanigans, threatening to quit the band just as we thought we were on the verge of taking a step forward. In order to make him feel better, Gene and I arranged a special treat. When we all went downstairs to go to the hotel, a limo was waiting at the curb. It made all of us, not just Peter, feel special to show up in that car. I can’t imagine a limo had ever pulled up in front of that place.

  The ballroom was nearly full. We realized immediately that we must have covered our expenses—there were probably four hundred people there, and at three bucks a ticket we would be in the black. We stomped through the audience in full regalia and took the stage.

  At least one A&R exec showed up for the show, as we had hoped. His name was Rich Totoian, and he worked for Windfall Records, which was the home of the band Mountain—who’d had a massive hit with “Mississippi Queen” a few years before. “Listen,” he said. “You guys are great. But hones
tly, I don’t know what to do with you.”

  It didn’t seem like a big mystery to me. If you thought we were good live, just put out a record. I didn’t think people needed to think about packaging us or marketing us. Just put it out. Of course, it wasn’t the last time somebody was taken aback by our makeup. But by this time, we had confidence—conviction, even—in what we were doing. And since we hadn’t lost money on the show, we also knew we could do this again and get more people to check us out. Maybe somebody would figure us out.

  “This is who we are,” we told the guy. “We are KISS.”

  18.

  We decided to stage another rock and roll ball at the Hotel Diplomat on Friday, August 10, 1973. This time we took a leap of faith and headlined it ourselves. We felt we’d done our apprenticeship and were ready to make a bombastic entrance onto the next level.

  Yet, in many ways, KISS was still an unknown commodity. One day I ran into a girl I’d known at school and showed her the poster for our upcoming Diplomat show. “We’ll have three or four hundred people there,” I told her.

  “What? No way.” She wasn’t joking. She really didn’t believe me.

  In the grand scheme of things, KISS still didn’t really exist. We knew we had a small following, but filling the Daisy or even the Diplomat—what did it mean? Then again, did the Dolls have a much bigger following? They had a record deal, but they were still basically a local act. Did anyone know the Dolls in Portland, Oregon? No. And for that matter, did the people I grew up with in Queens know the Dolls? Doubtful.

  Just to be safe, we still pulled in a couple of the “cool” bands to open—Street Punk and Luger, who, like the Brats, had shared bills with the Dolls. Again we took out ads in the paper, put up posters all over town, and sent out media kits to anyone in the industry we could identify and track down.

  And again, mercifully, the same result: a full house.