By the middle of January 1974, we were ready to begin work, but then we were sidetracked when Warner invited us to its convention in Acapulco. This was a major event within Warner culture. The company would fly in its entire promotional and sales staff from around the country and present them with all kinds of awards, but the event’s primary function was to bolster morale. Dinners were massive events, and the convention hotel, the Acapulco Princess, was the height of tropical opulence.
The convention was my indoctrination into Warner Brothers, and it was there that I first met many of the staff members who would play a large role in our day-to-day operations. I was particularly impressed with Warner’s cochairman, Joe Smith, a gregarious and likable man who had a remarkable ability to remember the names of everyone he had met in the industry, and even the names of those he hadn’t met. In the conference’s initial reception line, through which everyone was funneled into the room, Joe greeted his guests, and although I was not with Neil or anyone else from Casablanca, he knew my name. Joe was the kind of person who immediately put you at ease, and since he, and not Warner’s president, Mo Ostin, was actually responsible for us being there, I felt a certain warmth toward him.
Three key members of the Warner staff were Ron Saul, the promotions director; Bob Regehr, who ran marketing, publicity, and artist relations; and Eddie Rosenblatt, who was the head of sales. We immediately developed a good rapport with Regehr, but our relations were considerably cooler with Saul and Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt, who later left to become president of Geffen Records, thought that we weren’t good enough for Warner. But Saul was far worse, and he seemed to be doing everything he could to ensure that his promotion staff gave us as little help as possible, a tactic that would later backfire on him. Saul was replaced shortly thereafter by Gary Davis, though our relationship with Davis wasn’t much better.
Fortunately, Bob Regehr and his staff were very nice, and usually helpful. While they didn’t seem to understand why Warner had made this deal with us, they were willing to give us a shot. It was important to have them in our corner, as they had a separate budget that we could tap into and a great deal of clout with concert promoters throughout the country, all of which would prove highly valuable to us when it came to booking KISS. Regehr and his right-hand man, Carl Scott, knew the concert business. Regehr’s department was also responsible for publicity, and we had a nice relationship with them until our need for publicity outpaced their ability or desire to provide it. I always got along well with Carl Scott; he was accessible and fair, and I did believe he was honest with me in terms of what he could and would do. I also had dealings with another member of the artist relations group, a very small and dynamic young lady named Paulette Rapp, who was Regehr’s lieutenant.
The Warner sales department was made up of some fine industry veterans, and we worked well with all of the field people. Our problem, which did not become apparent until months later, was the head of the department, Eddie Rosenblatt. If it were not for the efforts of Russ Thyret, Rosenblatt’s second in command, we would have been at loggerheads immediately. Russ, who would later become company chairman, was in charge of single sales, and he was a particularly skilled politician, always attempting to smooth over disagreements we were having with Eddie, which usually involved how many records to ship and what sales promotions we should use. Russ had our interests in mind, and he was one of the very few inside Warner who recognized that we were not being treated fairly. Then again, given the politicking that goes on in the industry, Eddie and Russ may simply have been running a good cop/bad cop routine.
KISS’s debut album was finally ready. Our labor pains began as we prepared to deliver it. There was no shortage of enthusiasm for the album on the part of Neil and me and the rest of the Casablanca staff. It had all the energy we’d hoped for. It was filled with the songs that would be the cornerstones of the band’s sound and stage show for decades: “Deuce,” “Strutter, ”Cold Gin,” “Firehouse,” all crashing to a thunderous conflagration at the album’s end in “Black Diamond.” The finished product made Neil feel vindicated for stonewalling Warner’s attempts to dilute these garish misfits and make them more palatable. To celebrate the record’s release on February 8, 1974, Warner decided to throw a party welcoming us to the label. This would give us the opportunity to showcase KISS live for the Warner staff, West Coast radio, television, retail clients, and critics. The event grew in size and scope until it became the most expensive music industry party in history to that point. Factoring for inflation, it may still hold that distinction.
The party, held on February 18 in the Los Angeles Room of the Century Plaza Hotel, was simply amazing. The caterers had turned the ballroom into the Casablanca set. There were palm trees, camels (both live and stuffed), rattan furniture, and actors dressed in period costume playing the parts of Rick, Ilsa, and other characters. Warner had even gone so far as to dig up original set decorations and props from the movie. In attendance were rock stars like Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop, and famous television personalities, including David Janssen, and Ted Knight from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Casablanca added to the guest list, flying in numerous radio friends and retail contacts from around the country. I particularly remember Mark Parenteau (from WABX in Detroit) at the event—he’d go anywhere for a free party.
• February 2, 1974: Barbra Streisand scores her first No. 1 single with “The Way We Were.”
• February 4, 1974: The Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps millionaire heiress Patty Hearst.
• April 4, 1974: Van Halen performs its first gig at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.
At the evening’s midpoint, KISS took the stage. The retail people, who tended to skew older, walked out en masse and congregated in the lobby, taking cover from the painfully loud performance in the ballroom. The younger attendees remained, but the room’s poor acoustics and the band’s sheer volume gave some of the Warner staff more reason not to like KISS or Casablanca, and they weren’t lacking for reasons to begin with. Nonetheless, the extravagantly staged party marked our coming out: Casablanca was open for business.
Neil was an eternal opportunist, and since KISS was already out on the West Coast for the Casablanca launch party, he arranged for them to perform on ABC Television’s In Concert three days later. They also did a great deal of publicity with West Coast publications and radio. This initial glut of exposure was crucial in establishing KISS as outrageous. The party was equally crucial in that regard, as the members of its captive audience were the exact movers and shakers we needed to leak word of KISS’s overpowering and explosive flamboyance. The music trade papers and many of the big-city media outlets ran stories about the band, and people called us for weeks after to rave about what a great time they’d had at the event. Many who called were genuinely happy for us, but a number of the West Coast elite clearly wanted to see us fail; we were the brash New Yorkers who had come to show the laid-back West Coast country clubbers how it was done.
To no one’s surprise, our first release, the Bill Amesbury record, went nowhere (it peaked at a mild No. 86 on the Billboard Top 100), and this meant that I had to do the KISS album promotion and marketing almost all by myself. The Warner Brothers field staff were no help at all, providing little more than delivery service, except for a select few of their regional guys, like George Gerrity out of Boston. They did not push anyone to play the record, which wasn’t atypical: Warner had a no-pressure reputation to uphold. However, due to the AOR airplay we were beginning to receive, the group was becoming hard to ignore. By early March, we’d made “most added” in Record World and had succeeded in getting KISS added at WRKR-FM (Kalamazoo), WMMR-FM (Philly), WPLR-FM (Connecticut), WVVS-FM (Valdosta, Georgia), and KSHE-FM (St. Louis). Others—like KMET (LA), WOUR (Utica, New York), WCMF (Rochester, New York), and WNEW-FM, WPLJ, and WLIR (all in New York City)—quickly followed suit. Buck was working possible singles, but even with all our efforts, Top 40 radio was not yet buying the fact that this was a viable
group.
Although I finally convinced KMET to play the KISS album, I still had to figure a way to get KLOS, the big ABC-owned station, to jump on the record. I normally worked with just one progressive station per market, except in New York City. I always believed that if a station worked with me, then I should work with it in an informally exclusive agreement, which meant that I would be working against the competing stations in the format. I would often set up promotions that had nothing to do with my product, just to help a station. I’d also help a station out by asking the promoters I knew to work with it before another. This had worked very well for me at Buddah, back in New York. Now that I was with Casablanca and based in LA, I had to get KLOS on board.
I went to visit the station for the first time right after the KISS album came out. I walked into the programming office to see the station’s program director, Tom Yates, but in order to meet with him I first had to go through the attractive young woman who served as music director. As soon as she and I made eye contact, it was all over—we fell passionately for one another. We went out to have a picnic in a park, and then we went back to my house. She stayed for hours. In the coming weeks, she would come over to my house often, and it would just be sex, sex, sex. No drugs, just sex. She was stunning, and I’d fallen so hard for her that I even called my friend Norm Winer, the program director at WBCN-FM in Boston, to tell him I was in love. She was about five foot four and beautiful, with the cutest face, a remarkably hard body, great legs, and a very sexy, husky voice. Problem was that she had a live-in boyfriend, so it didn’t become a long-term relationship. No matter, I got KISS added to KLOS, and I got laid many times in the process. What great leverage. I’m sure Neil was very proud.
Despite our best efforts, we were not able to sell KISS singles. KISS turned out to be very unusual in that regard; many of their most popular songs were not hit singles by any stretch of the imagination, although we did everything we could think of to make people believe they were. Our failure to sell singles on KISS was something completely different for Neil. Prior to this, he’d been renowned for his ability to sell and promote singles. The fact that we couldn’t move them for KISS was a source of surprise and consternation for us, until we realized that the landscape of the industry was changing. It was a new world, and album sales were king.
It took no experience or industry acumen whatsoever to see that the key to KISS was their live performance. Even at this neonatal phase in their development, their concerts were a cauterizing experience for the uninitiated. Their look and vibe today is pure comic book—wry and admittedly (even gloriously) over the top. But in 1974, nothing like KISS had ever been seen. The field was then populated by the likes of John Denver, the Grateful Dead, and Elton John, so the KISS guys felt dangerous. Their costumes were more developed than they’d been at the Manhattan dance studio performance nine months earlier. There were no more T-shirts or velvet or red pants. They all wore leather, and everything except Paul Stanley’s lips—clothes, platform boots, backline speaker cabinets, drums—was black, white, or chrome. Their shows would start off with one of the crew, usually their tour manager, barking out a P.T. Barnum greatest-show-on-Earth introduction: “Put your two lips together and welcome KISS!” It was a call to worship, which was immediately followed by a few crashing guitar chords. Then the stage seemed to vaporize in a fusillade of smoke and deafening explosions. The three guitarists—front man Paul Stanley, lead Ace Frehley, and bassist Gene Simmons—would run around the stage with an energy and abandon matched only by The Who, windmilling power chords and galloping through dry-ice fog banks with an electric fury. But at those early shows, the stunt that drew the most gasps through its sheer originality and shock value was Gene Simmons vomiting blood. Most audiences had seen bass solos (many of them interminable, thanks to the burgeoning art-rock scene, with its unchecked musical interludes), but to see Simmons writhe as he played made no sense to them. What is he doing? His lips would then begin to spasm away from his teeth into an altogether malevolent grin. Then the first trickle of blood would appear—a thin, crimson thread from the corner of his mouth. When I watched the audiences at these shows, I saw the wheels spinning in their heads. This isn’t right. Something’s wrong with him! And then Simmons would convulse in a violent seizure and blood would spew in all directions.
The stunt was deeply unsettling to those first crowds who saw it. Other bands had explosions (though not quite so many), other bands had smoke, or lights and lasers, but the blood spitting hit people in their blind spot. They never saw it coming. I distinctly remember seeing their genuine looks of concern turn to horror, disgust, and fascination. One poor girl at an early show seemed convinced that Gene’s intestines were spilling out onto the stage.
And this wasn’t even the show’s climax. “Black Diamond,” the most epic-sounding of the band’s tracks, usually capped the evening. During the song, Peter Criss’s drum riser would be elevated ten or more feet and another blast of smoke and concussion bombs would provide an added flourish.
KISS’s show was truly jaw dropping, and what the band needed was a really good booking agent. Enter Jeff Franklin, again—the same man who had helped Neil set up distribution through Warner. Though he was the top man at ATI, the industry’s leading concert-booking agency, Jeff tended to stay out of daily operations, preferring to focus on brokering bigger deals. His two direct reports, Ira Blacker and Wally Meyrowitz, were outstanding at their jobs and kept the day-to-day bookings off Jeff’s desk.
We quickly came to realize that KISS was going to represent a huge challenge to ATI. The problem was, in brief, KISS was too good. No one wanted to follow the band, and fewer and fewer acts were willing to share the bill with them. Those who did would often sandbag KISS by limiting the band’s use of the PA system or refusing to allow their pyrotechnical displays because they were afraid of being upstaged. Audiences expected headliners to be as entertaining as KISS, and they never were.
We had to work KISS differently. The standard method for booking new acts was to put them on a bill with big-name headliners in order to expose them to as many people as possible. We couldn’t do this with KISS. As nice as it was to have such an obvious skyrocket on our hands, KISS’s potential was so volatile that it scared off would-be promoters. This put us in the disadvantageous position of having to treat KISS, a new and mostly unknown act, as a headliner, and that meant committing to spending amounts of money commensurate with headliner status. We would have welcomed better-known bands taking KISS on as an opening or middle act, but with the show they had and all the equipment it required, it was very difficult to find bands willing to go on after them. This led to canceled bookings with some pretty big bands—among them, Genesis, Queen, and Aerosmith.
I decided to take a different approach. I went to various cities and arranged for KISS to perform for free for the AOR stations in the market, a tactic I had used to great success with Genesis a few years earlier at Buddah. As long as we were paying for them to headline and losing money on every show, why not get the most out of the band’s performances?
KSHE-FM in St. Louis was (and still is) the oldest rock station in America, having been the first in the country to switch to an all-rock format, back in 1967. It was run by Shelly Grafman, a really nice guy from the old school of radio. If you showed Shelly how playing a band would put money into his station’s coffers, he would cooperate. I’d had a good relationship with him when I was at Buddah, and when I took on the job of getting KISS airtime, he was one of my first calls.
Casablanca bought time on the station and booked KISS for what was termed a “live performance promotion,” which turned out to be a headlining spot at KSHE’s Kite-Fly on March 31.The kite fest, the station’s big annual outdoor event, was held in Forest Park, St. Louis’s version of Central Park. To help promote it, we scheduled an on-air appearance at KSHE a week or so before the concert. The day of the band’s radio appearance, one of the worst storms in decades hit St. Louis. When the band and I show
ed up at KSHE, it was closed. No one was there. The station, the size of a shoebox, was located about ten feet away from a drive-in theater on old Route 66 in Crestwood, a St. Louis suburb. Both the theater’s enormous screen and the station had been damaged by the storm. So, there we were, the band members (sporting their costumes) and I, standing on top of a hill at the side of Route 66, the wind blasting us with dust and debris, wondering what the hell we were going to do. Afterwards, Shelly felt so sorry for us and was so impressed that we’d even shown up in that weather that he began to play KISS like they were the biggest thing ever to hit the city. It paid off: the kite fest drew over forty thousand people, and KISS was a smashing success. Given that KISS was still almost completely unknown and had released their first album just a few weeks prior, getting to play in front forty thousand people was an astounding opportunity. St. Louis and KSHE would become strongholds for KISS. Shelly, his wife, Emily, and I remained good friends for years.
With the KSHE success in mind, I tried to set up as many radio-oriented concerts for KISS as I possibly could. Booking them proved to be a difficult task for ATI, as the timing of the radio gigs did not always make geographic sense. ATI might normally book Chicago one night and Indianapolis the next, but my reliance on radio-sponsored gigs could have KISS going from Memphis to Chicago and back south to Charlotte all within a few days. I’m sure KISS’s road crew adored us for this, and I did have one major argument with Wally Meyrowitz and Jeff Franklin during which I insisted that they couldn’t book KISS in several cities because I needed the band hundreds of miles away at some Midwest station to do a radio-sponsored gig. I empathized with ATI’s plight; I knew the schedule made absolutely no sense in terms of normal tour routing, but I was not trying to make sense. We were desperate to break out the band, and if a powerful radio station was willing to help us out, then we would take advantage of it. Touring at this point had to be focused on cities or stations where we could maximize radio exposure. If a market didn’t have a radio station that would back us up and play the band, then we would have to ignore that market until we could find a foothold in it.
And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records Page 7