Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  Another guy there had been a real Adonis in high school—handsome, with long curly hair, and a great voice. He could howl like Robert Plant and carried himself that way. Now he was pasty and bald as a billiard ball. The best-looking guy in school didn’t necessarily remain the best looking, and me, the guy nobody thought would ever win a race, turned out to be a marathoner.

  The whole thing was uncomfortable and disappointing. I left quickly and picked up my waiting girlfriend and went out for a nice dinner.

  I had found no joy in rubbing my success in people’s faces. And I never wanted to go to another reunion.

  44.

  Asylum sold nearly as well as Animalize, but the band started to peter out again after the album was released, and by early 1986 we were off the road again for about a year.

  Howard Marks, our business manager, called me one afternoon and said he’d gotten a call from Tom Zutaut, an A&R man famous for signing Mötley Crüe. “Tom just signed this band,” Howard said, “and wanted to know if you want to go check them out. They’re looking for a producer.”

  Well, Gene was off making another movie. We weren’t going to work on the next record until the following year. Why not?

  Howard came with me to meet the band—a bunch of young guys called Guns N’ Roses. We had arranged to meet them at an apartment their manager had rented for them near the corner of La Cienega and Fountain. I introduced bald, pot-bellied Howard as my bodyguard, as a joke; but after looking around for a few minutes, I could see why they didn’t get it.

  Izzy was unconscious, with drool coming out of the side of his mouth. It wasn’t clear whether he was sleeping or dead—that’s how rough he looked. Duff and Steven were very nice, and Steven was just glowing about what a big KISS fan he was. I didn’t realize that the half-comatose, curly-headed lead guitar player who called himself Slash was what had become of the sweet kid I’d spoken to during the interviews before the recording of Creatures a few years earlier. Then Axl chatted with me and played a few songs on a crappy cassette player they had lying around.

  When he played “Nightrain” I thought it was really good, but I told him that maybe the chorus could be used as a pre-chorus instead, and there could be another chorus added afterwards. That was the last time he ever spoke to me. Ever.

  Slash roused himself, and he and I started talking about the Stones. I showed him Keith’s five-string open-G tuning, which was the set-up Keith used to write all his stuff. I took a string off and retuned a guitar, and he thought it was very cool. I also offered to help Slash get in touch with people who could hook him up with some free guitars—we were sponsored by all sorts of instrument companies, and I figured a young guy like him could use some help getting equipment to record with.

  That night, I went to see their gig at Raji’s, a little dive in Hollywood. I thought the songs they had played for me were good, but they didn’t prepare me for seeing the band live. Guns N’ Roses were stupendous. I was shocked, given the collection of wastoids I’d seen earlier that afternoon, and I immediately realized I was witnessing true greatness.

  I went to see them perform again at another club, called Gazzarri’s—it later became the Key Club. They weren’t happy with the guy mixing their sound, and Slash asked me out of the blue to help out. Decades later, Slash’s recollections of the night would be faulty at best. He liked to pretend I had dared to meddle with their sound. God forbid this guy from KISS would have anything to do with Guns—I mean, what could be worse than a guy from KISS, of all things? He also recalled that I had a blond trophy wife with me. But I wasn’t married and was in fact there with a short brunette named Holly Knight, who was a songwriter famous for “Love Is a Battlefield,” among other hits. There is obviously a reason why defense attorneys never want to put alcoholics or drug addicts on the witness stand.

  That was years later, of course. Immediately after my interactions with the band, I started to hear lots of stories Slash was saying behind my back—he called me gay, made fun of my clothes, all sorts of things designed to give himself some sort of rock credibility at my expense. This was years before his top hat, sunglasses, and dangling cigarette became a cartoon costume that he would continue to milk with the best of us for decades.

  I didn’t wind up being involved with G’n’R’s album. No surprise there. The surprise came a few months later when Slash called me and wanted to follow up on my offer to help him get some free guitars.

  “You want me to help you get guitars after you went around saying all that shit about me behind my back?”

  Slash got real quiet.

  “You know, one thing you’re going to have to learn is not to air your dirty laundry in public. Nice knowing you. Go fuck yourself.”

  45.

  Five-string open-G tuning wasn’t the only thing I learned from Keith Richards. When I ran into him in person, he told me he’d been offered the chance to buy anything he wanted from our storage space in New York—part of a warehouse where we kept old stage sets and equipment, all the makeup-era outfits, lots of instruments, all sorts of things.

  “Yeah, mate,” he laughed. “Could’ve bought the lot of it.”

  At first, I simply didn’t understand. Was this the legendary English sense of humor? Was it some misremembered anecdote he’d somehow mangled? But the more I thought about it, the more worried I got. Now that he mentioned it, I had noticed things disappearing. Several times I’d gone to the warehouse to grab guitars I wanted to use, only to come up empty. Once, it was a guitar that I had stashed there only a week before. I knew it had to be there.

  The solution to the mystery was depressing: Bill Aucoin, who somehow still had keys to the warehouse, was secretly selling our stuff out the back door. By then, he had spiraled so far down that he was couch surfing from one friend’s place to another. His last client, Billy Idol, had left him. When Billy Idol abandoned you for your drug use in the 1980s, let’s just say it must have been bad. So we relocated. We had a few things torched or cut down for scrap—like the stage set from the Animalize tour—but we moved most of it first to New Jersey and later to L.A.

  Bill’s activities soon turned out to be the least of our worries, however. I still lived in a one-bedroom apartment and had only one car, but Howard Marks started saying I needed to tighten my belt. He told me I had to cut back on the money I was giving my parents. That raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  It wasn’t that I expected tour money when we weren’t on tour. But what about all the money that had been invested on our behalf? Where was that?

  I’m not living ostentatiously. I’m not living some ridiculous lifestyle.

  Something tells me HE’s making too much money.

  Eventually, I said it straight out: “If anybody’s going to get less money, it should be you.” That didn’t go over so well.

  The music industry has never been kind to artists. In the case of our business managers, I didn’t want to believe they had acted in bad faith. But certainly, some decisions had been made that smelled pretty bad once I started sniffing around.

  The big wakeup call came from an odd source: my therapist, Dr. Jesse Hilsen. I started talking about my misgivings and all the things being said about my finances, and he started asking questions—about my earnings, about retirement accounts—none of which, embarrassingly, I could answer. I wasn’t supposed to show our financial statements to anyone—which, again, should have been a red flag—but Dr. Hilsen agreed to have a look at some of them.

  And what he asked after examining some statements was a shock: “Do you know that you owe the IRS millions of dollars?”

  “What!?”

  “Yeah, and it’s overdue and they’ve given notice that they’re going to come after you.”

  “How is this possible?”

  Howard had been like a family member. I had always trusted him. Our long relationship represented an increasingly rare instance of stability with the band. Now I had uncovered many examples of highly questionable judgment. I
didn’t want to nitpick over legality—the point was that a lot of decisions had been made that clearly weren’t in my or the band’s best interests—decisions that wouldn’t have been made the same way if our business managers had been making them about their own money. There were investments with people who just happened to be associated with them and our attorneys. There were tax shelters that had gone awry and never been addressed. There were reckless decisions. A lot of it smacked of the same sort of cronyism I’d seen elsewhere inside the music business, and I had always thought we were immune to it because of Howard. Now I wanted to spit at him. It was a huge betrayal.

  I called Gene. “Listen,” I said, “we’re in financial trouble.”

  “Nonsense,” said Gene.

  “Things are not as they appear, I’m telling you.”

  I met up with him and tried to explain. He scoffed and acted dismissive and irritated. So I had him meet Dr. Hilsen, who showed Gene what was what in the statements. Gene was very defensive, even antagonistic. But the problems were all there in black and white.

  Within a day or so, I told Gene that I was leaving Howard. He wanted to stay. “You can stay if you want,” I said, “but I’m out of here. You do whatever you want.”

  He was stunned that I was jumping ship with or without him. It wasn’t going to matter. As it sunk in that I was dead serious, he began to waver. Eventually he said “I’ll go with you.”

  I wouldn’t take Howard’s calls and never spoke to him again.

  It was not a happy day parting company like that with yet another member of the team who had let us down. Howard was the last vestige of the original team to fall by the wayside, but there was no way to explain all that was there in black and white, filling countless files and documents. We got outside legal advisors and started trying to untangle the mess, which they agreed wasn’t as it should be.

  From that day forward, we never let anyone else sign a single check in our names. I’ve used a lot of ink signing my own name since then, whether it’s for my monthly phone bill or the construction of a massive stage set. No matter how small or large, Gene and I kept everything close to the vest from then on.

  Maybe we had finally learned our lesson—by taking our lumps.

  But it certainly wasn’t a case of being brilliant. It was a case of being resilient and seizing an opportunity to rectify the situation once we recognized something was wrong. Interestingly, even though it was me who got us out of a situation that was a ticking time bomb and would have decimated us, Gene continued to be lauded as a savvy businessman. I guess people just look for simplistic distinctions—as in, “Gene’s the business guy and Paul’s the creative guy.” But it wasn’t Gene who realized the ship was sinking, and it wasn’t Gene who changed course.

  As far as I was concerned, Gene’s most successful venture in business was promoting the perception that he was a savvy businessman. That has been an undeniable success.

  But then again, given that he seemed to spend 24/7 promoting that perception, perhaps it was no surprise. I didn’t fault him—that was something he saw as a life accomplishment. For me to compete in that arena would have taken away from other pursuits and challenges in my life. Gene was about nonstop self-promotion; I was about ongoing self-discovery. I wanted to figure out how to be happy, and that was far more important to me than building a myth that wouldn’t change the reality of who I really was.

  After all, just because you can get other people to believe something doesn’t mean that you believe it. Didn’t I know it.

  Transitory external factors seemed to make Gene happy, and he wasn’t interested in looking inside. That may even be soft-peddling it—Gene resolutely resisted looking inside. For him, perception was reality. The surface was the all. That distinction summed up the stark difference between us.

  And maybe that is also why any sense of unity created by our decision to break away from Howard was short-lived. That episode brought us together to fight what we both perceived as injustice, but as soon as we started to work on our next album, Crazy Nights, I found myself right back at square one.

  Gene would stagger into the studio after not sleeping all night—he was too busy once again making movies or working with other bands, including one called Black ’N Blue who had opened for us on the last tour. Gene ended up writing some songs with the band’s guitar player, Tommy Thayer. Or he spent the whole time on the phone, working this or that angle.

  The few songs Gene brought in seemed to have been written by other people, with Gene pasting his name on after the fact. Needless to say, once again the songs were not impressive.

  His lack of involvement had become a running joke in the studio, but it wasn’t funny anymore. If anything, the confrontation with Howard only increased the sense I had that Gene was screwing me. In his own way, he had betrayed me as much as Ace and Peter had. At this point he was riding my coattails. If Gene wanted an equal share, he should have to do some of the work of keeping the band going.

  I was seriously pissed off.

  I can’t live like this anymore.

  Outside the studio one afternoon, I asked Gene to get in my car. I took a deep breath. Whatever the consequences of what I was about to say, I knew it had to be done. I couldn’t go on like this, feeling like I was in a pressure cooker, dealing with everything to do with KISS on my own and still obligated to treat someone who was AWOL as an equal partner.

  “This isn’t okay anymore,” I told him.

  It wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d expected. In part because it felt good to finally let off the steam. “I’m done with this. You can’t expect to be my partner if you’re not going to hold up your end.”

  That was the beginning of a heart-to-heart conversation that began there in the car and then continued over the phone for several more days. As I vented, I never raised my voice. I’ve always believed that the person who yells loses.

  Quitting the band was never an option for me. I also did not relish the idea of taking over the band on my own. But if Gene’s reduced involvement was going to continue, I wanted to be paid and recognized for my ever-increasing responsibilities. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but apparently the talk resonated with Gene, because a few days later he approached me and handed me a Jaguar brochure. He said he wanted me to pick one out for myself. He wanted to buy me a Jag to show his appreciation for all I’d done to keep the band going.

  It was a nice move on his part. But I had my eye on a Porsche.

  When we shot the video for the second single from Crazy Nights, “Reason to Live,” the storyline involved a beautiful woman blowing up a car. It was a black Porsche 928.

  And I drove it home from the video shoot, compliments of Gene.

  46.

  The song “Crazy Crazy Nights” became a hit in Britain, and we played a European tour in the fall of 1988. At the end of the tour I stayed behind in London to hang out with the English singer and pinup girl Samantha Fox, whom I had started to see.

  She and I went to the box office smash musical Phantom of the Opera that I’d heard so much about. I loved the big-production shows I’d seen in the States earlier in the decade, and Phantom promised more of the same. As I watched it, though, I could feel it affecting me in a way nothing else ever had.

  In one climactic scene, Christine, the beautiful singer at the opera house, was alone with the Phantom, a dashing but mysterious musical genius who wore a tuxedo and a white mask over his face. It was a dramatic scene—and when she suddenly ripped off his mask and revealed his hideously disfigured face, I gasped. The drama touched a psychological nerve. The parallels to my own life should have been obvious—the tormented guy who covered himself in a cool disguise but was a shell underneath. But I didn’t connect the dots in the moment. A thought did occur to me, however, that showed I understood the parallels at least at a subliminal level: I know I could play that role.

  Me, Mike Tyson, Samantha Fox, and rocker Billy Squire in 1988. Mike’s arm on my shoulder made it impossible
for me to move.

  Nothing in my background suggested I could do musical theater. But I knew it somehow. And I never forgot it.

  I could play that role.

  After the show, Samantha and I went back to my hotel. We hadn’t slept together yet, but that night she said, “Would you like to take a bubble bath with me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  Back in the States, all was not well inside KISS. Eric had stopped talking to me during the Crazy Nights tour. He sometimes got into ruts and shut down. He seemed mad at me about something, so finally, after months—months!—I had to sit him down and read him the riot act. “You just can’t pull this kind of shit for this amount of time.”

  It might have sounded dictatorial, but the fact was he was there to play drums and be a member of the team. The silence and tension had become unbearable. “This noncommunicative bullshit stops today,” I told him.

  And it did. It seemed he needed help to force his way out of a self-imposed prison.

  Things with Eric were definitely getting increasingly weird. But they had always tended to be odd. Whenever we were both in L.A., I would invite him to come over and hang out with me. “Is anyone else there?” he would ask.

  If I had people over, I told him, “Eric, they’re nice people, we’re hanging out. Come on over, it’ll be fun.” But if anyone else was there, he refused to come.

  On the Crazy Nights tour he had started to obsess over not being the original drummer again. The whole thing was so irrational. What could I say? It was true, he still wasn’t the original drummer. He would never be the original drummer.