Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  “Hello, this is Gene Simmons, and I read your ad and I’d like to ask you a few questions,” this guy said. He had a deep voice and enunciated each word like he was a teacher talking to a student.

  “Uh, sure, shoot,” I said. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from this call. I had gotten a few responses to the ad and gone on a few auditions in the Village and one in Yonkers, but they were all really bad bands.

  “How tall are you?” Gene asked.

  “I’m five foot ten.”

  “Are you fat?”

  “No, I’m nice and skinny.” I was a fucking toothpick. I was a starving musician.

  “Do you have long hair?”

  “Yeah, it’s down to my tits,” I said.

  “Would you consider yourself handsome, good-looking, or cute?”

  Now it was a multiple-choice test? This was getting ridiculous. So I turned to my friends in the apartment, who had been listening to my answers.

  “Am I good-looking?” I asked them.

  “Fucking A!” they shouted.

  “I’m fucking gorgeous,” I said.

  I had to give it to this guy. He was meticulous in his line of questioning, and he seemed to know exactly what he wanted from our conversation.

  “Would you be willing to dress in drag?”

  “Would I be willing to dress in drag?” I repeated the question for my audience.

  “Absolutely. I have no problem with that. As a matter of fact, I’ll play naked. I have a nine-inch dick.”

  Everyone in the room cracked up. There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Uh, okay,” Gene finally said. He told me that he liked that I would be willing to do anything to make it, because he felt the same way. We talked for a long time and during the course of the conversation, he told me that he had a band with his friend Paul named Wicked Lester. They’d just done some recording and had a deal for the album, but it didn’t come out, they didn’t like the guys in the band, and they were looking to regroup. Somehow he made all this sound very positive. When he told me that his producer was Ron Johnson, I got intrigued. Ron Johnson was the engineer on my Chelsea album. And when he asked if I could come meet him and Paul at Electric Lady Studios in the Village, where they had recorded, I was floored. That was the studio Hendrix had owned. Now I really wanted to meet this guy who had been asking me all these ridiculous questions on the phone.

  A few days later I put on my black-and-gold velvet jacket, along with gold satin pants, an emerald-green ruffled shirt, and green-and-burgundy suede shoes I had picked up in Spain. My hair was teased up in an Afro. I was the shit. I took the train to the Village with my brother, Joey, who came along for moral support. We got to Eighth Street a little early, so we stopped in to Shakespeare’s for a few beers. Then I left Joey at the bar and walked over to Electric Lady. As I was about to go in, I looked over my shoulder and saw two guys leaning on a car. They were really nondescript—both of them had long hair and were wearing flowered hippie paisley shirts and jeans. They were staring at me as I rang the bell and went down the stairs to the studio.

  I went up to the receptionist. “Is there a Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley here?”

  “Yeah, they’re waiting right outside,” she said.

  I went back outside, and sure enough, they were the two guys leaning against the car. Immediately I thought, “This fucking guy put me through the ringer about looking cool? These guys look like two fucking hippie panhandlers.”

  When they saw me approach them, they lit up. They told me later that they thought I was someone famous going in to record. As far as Paul was concerned, I was hired on the spot. He didn’t have to hear me play, he was so impressed by the way I looked.

  We made our introductions and went back in to hear their music. I couldn’t brother, my uncle George, would ever believe I was in Hendrix’s studio! It still had the curved walls, that alien-spaceship feel to it. We went into one of the rooms and there was Ron Johnson, my old engineer from my Chelsea days.

  “Wow, Peter, what are you doing here?” he said.

  We gave each other a hug and I told him I was being considered for Wicked Lester.

  “You don’t even have to audition him,” Ron told Gene and Paul. “This is your guy. He’s the shit.” They seemed to like the sound of that. Ron put on their tape. Almost anything sounds good on studio monitors, but this really was good. It wasn’t the type of music that I loved or played. It was a little too heavy for my taste. They obviously were into Zeppelin. But I knew I could cut it, and I thought that I could change the songs around in a way that they’d go for. I heard potential, something in this music I could sink my teeth into.

  I suggested that Gene and Paul come see me play that weekend at the King’s Lounge. With their long hair and their jeans they stood out like sore thumbs in that joint. Everybody had their five-hundred-dollar suits on with their short hair and diamond pinkie rings. I was the only guy with long hair except for these two Jewish guys who were trying to look inconspicuous.

  Before I went on, the owner, Vinnie, came over to me.

  “Who are those two fucking fruits in the flowered shirts sitting in the back? You know them?”

  “Yeah, they came down to audition me,” I said.

  “Audition what? You should be auditioning them. You want us to take them in the back and slap them around a little? Tell them you got the job?”

  “No! Don’t do that. I want this job,” I said.

  “Okay, okay. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. We love you in this place, Peter. You bring these fruits down, we don’t know . . .”

  It was time to go on. I got on the stage and then Joey and the other guys came on. Three 250-pound half-bald guys just standing there like lummoxes, and I was in the back, dressed like a star, thrashing and smashing the shit out of my drums. The whole place was watching me steal the show.

  When we launched into Wilson Pickett’s “Knock on Wood,” I opened my mouth and began to sing and Paul later told me he leaned over to Gene and said, “That’s it, that’s our drummer.”

  Gene liked the savage way I’d beat those drums. He loved the aggressive vibe I gave off. They wanted a real animal on the drums, and I was their boy. But first we had to play together. We set up a date to play and I went over to this loft they had on Twenty-third Street. I had to play on their other drummer’s set and I felt like I couldn’t kick ass—they weren’t my skins. At that point I had this childish notion that I could only play on my own drum set. We broke into a song that was a bitch to follow, really hard technically, and I just couldn’t get it together. I could see on their faces that they were as let down as I was.

  “I don’t think we should let this go,” I said. “Let me come back and bring my own drums and I know that’ll make a world of difference.”

  The next time we got together, it was magic. I asked them to play something more rock ’n’ rollish, like Chuck Berry, and we broke into “Strutter” and everything fell into place. We all looked at each other and smiled and we just knew we brother, my uncle George, would ever were dynamite together. And they said, “You’re hired.”

  We started practicing like fiends. We’d get together every night from Monday to Friday for as many hours as we could and practice—their songs. I was a little frustrated, since I had original songs that I had written with Chelsea and later with Stan. I was in the same place as a songwriter as they were, but I thought I’d just zip it for a while and do their tunes.

  I could see that they wanted things their way. Already I could feel a control issue with them. But I thought, “Okay, Peter, maybe you should back off a little. It’s their record.” I figured I’d get in that drummer’s seat and then I could be a little more forceful. So for maybe the first time in my life, I thought about things rather than just opening my big mouth and losing my temper. This was an opportunity, and I didn’t want to blow it.

  It wasn’t as if they were telling me how to drum. If they had done that, I would have
walked immediately. They were happy with the way I changed the songs with my own unique style.

  At first I gravitated to Paul. He had gone to art school and he had a real artistic sensibility. With Gene everything was so methodical, so cut and dried. We had to do A, B, C, D, E. Gene was a thinker. He’d plot everything out. Sometimes in our business, you didn’t have time to think: You just have to jump in. Rock ’n’ roll is an attitude, not a science.

  I could understand why Gene was like that. He had come to this country at an early age from Israel. His mother was a concentration-camp survivor whose husband had left her for another woman. Gene hated his father for that and never spoke to him. He was a big, gawky, shy kid who had been picked on a lot when he was growing up in Brooklyn. I could see why—after all his mother had gone through, and then having his father leave, and then coming to a strange alien culture—money and power might be attractive to him.

  I had more in common with Paul, even if he was six years younger. He had grown up in Manhattan. He had an older sister, so he wasn’t an only child like Gene. His father was a hardworking guy who sold furniture. But then he shared a disturbing detail with me. When his family moved to Queens, he told me that even though he was a fat kid, he used to have fantasies that all the other kids would call him King Paul. Bingo. Looks like we had two Machiavellis in training in the band.

  I liked Gene and Paul at first. There were much more professional than any of the other musicians I had worked with. For one, they weren’t drug addicts. Most musicians I knew smoked pot or did a little blow now and then, but these guys were as clean as angels. They were crystal clear about where they were going and how they were going to get there. I felt that I had finally met my soul mates who would travel with me down the road to fame and stardom.

  It was freezing in that loft in the winter—there was no heat—so I would buy a bottle of cheap Gallo sherry and Paul and I would share it. We played so loud that the neighbors were always complaining. The antiques dealer downstairs even claimed we were damaging his delicate pieces with the vibrations. So we went out and got a thousand egg crates and glued them to the walls to soundproof the loft. The problem was there was still egg residue in the crates, so we started attracting huge prehistoric cockroaches. Gene brought up a mattress because sometimes he would crash there, and then he began bringing up women and fucking them on this filthy mattress in this filthy freezing loft with monster cockroaches crawling all over.

  I guess that was his prerogative. He was also working full-time in an office as a secretary, so he was paying the rent. Working in an office came in handy because Gene could make copies of the bios and press releases that we were starting to send out. The Wicked Lester record deal had gone south, and they didn’t have a manager who they really liked.

  I thought we were going to be the next great power trio. The only problem was we were playing for ourselves in our little loft. We had been practicing and rehearsing for six months, and I was getting itchy. I was older than they were, I had paid a lot more dues, and my musical biological clock was ticking a lot faster. I’d moan and complain that we weren’t out playing, we’d fight, and then I’d say, “Fuck this group. I’m out of here tomorrow.” Then the sun would come up and I’d get dressed and go back to rehearsing at the loft. That’s how I was quitting. Did I really mean it? No, never.

  We finally played a showcase for Don Ellis, the head of Epic Records, in November of 1972. We set up a few chairs in the loft, and Don came down with some associates. We didn’t really have our look together yet. We wore whiteface and lipstick, and Gene was wearing some sort of sailor suit. But we cranked that volume up and Don’s hair looked like it was waving in the breeze from the sheer magnitude of our sound, like that TV ad for Maxell cassettes. It was so loud you couldn’t even make out any chord changes.

  Ellis couldn’t wait to get out the door. The only problem was that my brother had just come home on leave in the real navy and was in his real navy uniform, standing by the door in the back of the room, drunk as a skunk. As Ellis beat a hasty retreat, my brother proceeded to projectile vomit all over the music mogul’s shoes.

  That was an eye-opener for us all. We realized that to get a record deal or even some good gigs, we needed a great lead guitar player. So we put an ad in the Voice and went through at least thirty guys. One day, a guy came in straight off the boat from Italy. He couldn’t even talk to us: He was using this woman, who was his wife or maybe his mother, as an interpreter. He didn’t even tune his guitar, he just took it out of the case and started playing. We were sitting there watching this fiasco when the next guy came in to audition. The first thing I saw about this new guy was that he was wearing two different-colored sneakers, one red, one orange. He had skintight pants, tight shirt, long hair, a polka-dot scarf, and he looked Mongolian to me, with real heavy-lidded eyes like John Wayne. A real character.

  This guy proceeded to take his guitar out of his case and slide over to the amp. We were thinking, What the fuck is this guy going to do? We hadn’t talked to him yet, we didn’t even know his name, and the other guy was in the middle of his audition. But this new guy just plugged in to the amp and wham! He started playing over the other guy! We were all stunned. He just cut the other guy to pieces, he was so good. The first guy packed up his gear and left in tears, so we started to jam with the interloper. He was fantastic.

  After a while, we stopped and talked. He told us his name was Ace and he was from the Bronx but he really was an alien from a planet named Jandel. I was loving this guy. I’d never talked to anyone like him. He had the balls to literally move a competitor out of the fucking way to play because he knew that guy was a piece of shit and he wasn’t. That, to me, was a winning fucking attitude.

  After he left, the three of us talked. Their main concern was that we couldn’t have a Chinese guy in the band. Because brother, my uncle George, would ever we were creating a certain look with our makeup, we felt that all the band members had to be white. Earlier we had auditioned a great guitar player but he was black, so he didn’t get hired. But I maintained that Ace wasn’t Chinese, he was Mongolian.

  “This is the guy,” I said. “He’s from another fucking planet, he even says he is.”

  But they were still hesitant.

  “I know we’re looking for Jimmy Page, but we ain’t finding him. This guy’s got it,” I urged.

  We talked about Ace for days, and then we finally called him back in. We started jamming, and the sound that was happening was like nothing I’d ever heard in my life. We all knew Ace was the guy.

  With Ace in the band, we were a lot more balanced. It turned out that he wasn’t even Asian: He was of German descent. He was the black sheep of his family, running with a gang in the Bronx called the Ducky Boys. Being from Brooklyn, I didn’t know how badass a gang that specialized in using slingshots could be. But at least he had a semblance of being a street kid, and I found that we had a lot in common. He was fun to be with, he had a great sense of humor, and he loved to party. I never met a guy who loved beer as much as Ace did, and he could drink a ton of it. He just loved to get a buzz on and tell jokes in his weird high-pitched voice.

  Maybe all that booze contributed to Ace’s offbeat beliefs. He was convinced that extraterrestrials had colonized this planet and he was one of them. In fact, he was working on a radio to communicate with his home planet—as least that’s what he told us. He believed in ghosts, karma, and lucky numbers that totaled twenty-seven.

  He also had a gigantic ego. Perhaps his belief that he was an alien gift to this planet made him think that he was above doing manual labor, but I just think he was fucking lazy. When we started playing around town, he would come up with any kind of excuse to get around loading out the equipment. He’d move his amp a few feet and then say, “Curly, I can’t work, I sprained my arm.” Or, “Curly, I have a problem breathing. I feel dizzy.” Everyone was Curly to Ace. Most guitar players are prima donnas: They just want to walk up, plug in, and play. But Ace took it
to new levels.

  He wasn’t lazy, however, when it came to beating his meat. Every chance he got, he’d jerk off. We would be loading out and Ace would be standing in the corner because it was too cold and he didn’t want to hurt his hands. So he kept them warm by pulling out his huge dick and whacking off.

  One time we were driving away from a gig in our converted milk truck. Paul would stand up behind the wheel and drive. Gene would sit shotgun, and Ace and I would be in the back with all equipment. We were all shivering in our coats and all of a sudden, we heard the familiar sound of slapping. We looked back and Ace was sitting on one of the amps, jerking off.

  The only time Ace had a legitimate reason not to load the equipment was when we were storing our gear in Gene’s mother’s basement in Queens. For a time, we kept our equipment there, but Gene’s mother wouldn’t let Ace and me into the house because we were gentiles. Maybe it was because we were not only gentiles, but part German too. She wouldn’t even let Paul into the house because he was German Jewish. Rain, snow, sleet, storm, it didn’t matter, we couldn’t enter those portals. We had to stand in the cold or the rain and hand the equipment to Gene, who then had to schlep it all downstairs. Ace would always give?” she asked” ayl Gene shit about it, too.

  Now that we had our full lineup, we had two more things to do: come up with a name and start playing gigs. One night Paul and Gene and I were driving to the loft and trying to come up with a name for the group. We wanted it to be sexual and hard yet also convey the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. “Let’s call the band Fuck,” I said as a joke. Okay, that was the bottom line. But how do you get to that point? I mentioned that I had been in a band called Lips.

  Suddenly Paul said, “Kiss.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I fumed. “That’s a terrible pansy name.”

  I looked at Gene, and the wheels seemed to be turning in his head. He knew me like a book.

  “Well, Peter, there is the kiss of death.”