Ace and I were simpatico musically, too. I was a street kid from Brooklyn and I took those streets with me onstage. Was I coarse? Absolutely. Was I uneducated? Sure, in a lot of ways. But nobody ever played any more from the heart on those drums than I did. Some nights I just felt so much spirit, I was so overwhelmed by the audience, that I would literally wreck my drums, smashing my cymbals and throwing the drums over.
Gene and Paul would recoil at some of the things that Ace and I did because they had lived sheltered lives and they had never encountered street kids like us. But wasn’t rock ’n’ roll all about being a rebel and breaking all the rules? Didn’t rock stars wreck hotels and smash up cars and generally act belligerent?
Ace was as passionate about the music as I was. If his fingers weren’t bleeding, if he wasn’t playing at top volume, he wasn’t playing. We were a completely different species from Gene and Paul. But Sean loved us to death, and so did Bill. They knew that we in the toilets of Santa Monica everybu might be sitting in our hotel room drinking and we might look around and say, “Fuck it,” and then the TV was going out the window. We thought that was hilarious. We didn’t even consider that we might kill someone walking outside the hotel.
But there was an arrogance about Ace that I didn’t like. He’d yell at waiters and call them idiots. When we built up a fan base, he didn’t really like to stop and interact with our fans in the lobby. He was also a pig. When I started rooming with him, he’d drive me crazy. We wouldn’t be in the room for five minutes and there’d be wires, guitars, books, filthy underwear, and socks strewn all around the room.
One of the reasons Ace and I really bonded was that we had a serious fistfight one day during a show in Canada. It was in the middle of the summer, there was no air-conditioning, and we were wearing all that leather. I couldn’t get enough towels to soak up all my sweat. Gene was running around, Paul was running around: They were hardworking guys and they were sweating like pigs too. Then all of a sudden Ace decided he was too hot and he sat down on the stage while he played. I was irate.
We finished the set and went into the dressing room to wait for the encore. Ace was sitting down and I confronted him.
“You lazy son of a bitch, how dare you sit down while I’m banging my brains out there with two little fans on me? You better go out this encore and kick ass. You’ve been lazy the whole time we’ve been together. You never loaded the fucking equipment—”
All of a sudden, my speech was interrupted by a large bottle of orange juice that whizzed past my head and shattered against the wall.
“You motherfucker!” I screamed, and punched him in the face and knocked him out cold.
Now we had a problem. The fans were screaming for an encore. So we revived Ace and we went out and did the encore. After we got our makeup off, Ace came up to me.
“You want to ride with me in my car?” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll go back with you,” I said.
Of course, Ace had made sure the promoter loaded the car with champagne. He popped a cork.
“Let’s call a truce,” Ace said. “You’re a fucking hell of a man, Peter, I like that.”
“You are too, Ace,” I said. “But if you would have hit me with that bottle, you could have killed me.”
“You almost broke my jaw, but I love you, man.”
And he gave me a big hug and we started crying like chicks. We became inseparable after that.
You could imagine what a hard job it was to literally babysit these four egotistical maniacs. That’s what the job of the road manager was. He had to wake us up, make sure there was food at the gig, make sure we’d get in the car or, later, the plane. He’d be your mother, father, shrink, doctor, lover, all wrapped into one. We used to go through road managers like candy. One guy lasted just a day, I think. But Sean was our first road manager, and he was a doozy. First of all, he was as crazy as we were. He was totally hyperactive, with tons and tons of energy. He didn’t need coke: He was naturally wired. We tried to give him many nervous breakdowns, but we couldn’t succeed, so he was with us for a long time.
Sean would totally obsess over us “babies,” as he called us. I never had a woman as crazy about around the roomysaylme as Sean was. For some reason, Sean thought that if we got laid, we’d do a bad show because it would weaken our knees. Even if Lydia was on the road with me, Sean would bang on the door and yell, “Remember, nobody gets laid.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” I’d yell back through the door. “Nothing is going to weaken my knees, you fucking fag.”
He was delusional if he thought that he could keep the four of us from getting laid. When we’d bring groupies into the rooms, Sean would storm in there, screaming, “These guys need their sleep,” and grab them by the hair and drag them out. We would warn the chicks and tell them that if he came in and threw them out, they should go sit in the lobby for an hour and then come back up again. Sometimes we’d try to hide the girls in the room, in the shower, under the bed, under the covers, under us, whatever, but Sean would throw the lights on and check every inch of the room. He was the pussy gestapo.
Besides a crazy road manager, we had a crew that would kill for us. Our original crew was Chris Griffin and Peter Moose, along with Sean. As we went along, we added Mick Campise, Paul Chavarria, Mike McGurl, Rick Monroe, and J.R. Smalling as the tour manager. J.R. was the man. He was a six-foot-four, two-hundred-something-pound black guy from Brooklyn who wore a motorcycle jacket, blue jeans, motorcycle boots, and a gray bebop hat tilted to the side. You wouldn’t want to fuck with J.R., but underneath that Marlon Brando exterior was a sweet, gentle man.
When we arrived at the venue, J.R. would walk into the promoter’s office and the first words out of his mouth were, “Hey, man. How’s the drug situation? How’s the women situation?” He loved his pot. You’d go to his room and get a contact high. After a gig he’d light up a doobie and down a bottle of Nyquil and lapse into a coma. Then we could do whatever we wanted because he’d be out for twelve hours.
One time on the first tour we opened for Argent. They had a little Pakistani road manager who was a tight-ass. He wouldn’t let us sound check, and then he tried to pull the plug on our encore. J.R. just went over to this tiny guy, picked him up, locked him in an equipment case, and we finished our song. Of course, we also got booted off the Argent tour.
What was great about J.R. was that he had the same attitude as we did. We were headliners even if we were the opening act. When J.R. walked into a room, people jumped. If there was a problem, J.R. would find a solution. Every place we played, there was a local fire chief on hand because of all our pyro. And if the chief needed to get greased so we could blow our shit up, that would happen.
We had a biker gang from Detroit named the Renegades who drove our trailers. Guys like Hot Sand, Football, Muskrat, and Cheeseburger. They were hardcore bikers, guys with shotguns who did damaging things to people who crossed them. No one fucked with us when they were around. It was more like, KISS is coming to town, hide your daughters.
We never had to worry about our backs with guys like this around. But we did worry about playing. Each one of us would get nervous before a show, but we’d each let it out in different ways. Gene would yell at everybody. Paul would stretch and run around in the dressing room. Ace might have a beer and tell some jokes, but he was nervous too. I would pace the dressing room.
Putting on our makeup was a laborious task. It took a good hour to get it right. There would be days when we’d get up in a hotel, have breakfast sent up, put on the makeup, get in costume, go to a photo session or a radio that we couldd ever interview, go back to the hotel, take all that shit off, do a sound check, go back to the hotel, try to get some rest, then go back to the venue and put the makeup and costumes back on. We would do that day after day after day.
But I loved that hour. Putting on the makeup was therapeutic. No one was allowed in the room when we applied the makeup, and the room would get quiet and we would morph into our ch
aracters.
After we had our makeup and costumes on, we might mingle with guests, but we always had a five-minute rule. Five minutes before showtime, Bill or Sean would clear out the dressing room and we’d spend the time together, just the four of us, to clear our minds. Being the oldest, sometimes I might start acting silly, making up words, acting spastic, whatever it took to diffuse the tension. Then we’d high-five each other and say, “Let’s beat the fucking shit out of them tonight,” and we’d charge out there and kick ass.
From the very first tour, the press would always go after us. I used to go back to my room after a show and think, Wait a minute, we just did a sold-out show and the people went absolutely wild for us. So why was I reading, “KISS just might be the worst band on the planet. The only good thing you can say about them is they are loud. I would never buy one of their records”? Where’s the mention that the audience didn’t sit down once, they stood up from beginning to the wild, orgasmic end of the show?
We’d moan and bitch about the press and Bill would try to mollify us. “Any write-up is good,” he’d tell us. “Who cares what the critic says? Your name is in the paper.” We also had to contend with not getting any radio airplay. So that meant just hitting the road and building up a fan base.
Most of the time we would blow away the headliners, and sometimes the reaction was so great that we’d get booted from the tour. Aerosmith booted us after two dates. Argent got rid of us. We opened for Foghat, ZZ Top, and REO Speedwagon, and they were all threatened by the reception we got from the crowd. It helped that the four of us had that swagger. When you believe that much in yourselves, you can’t lose.
It also helped that we had a great front man, a guy spitting fire and drooling blood, a guitar player shooting off rockets, a drummer who levitated, and tons and tons of flash pots. Try to top that.
On June 14, 1974, we played with the New York Dolls, and it was a watershed show for me. Gene told me that we were going to open for them.
“We’re going to blow them off the fucking stage, I don’t give a fuck whether it’s your friend or not,” he warned.
I agreed. And we were even more motivated when the Dolls treated us like shit and made us change in the toilet. We came on like a bat out of hell and the crowd went crazy.
I made plans to hang with Jerry later that night. I hadn’t seen him for a long time because we were both working round the clock to be famous. We got together in a room in the hotel and I had a gram of coke I figured we could share.
“Uh, coke’s not my cup of tea anymore,” Jerry said. “How about I take it and trade it for a little heroin for us?”
I didn’t like that idea. I had done heroin, but it seemed a little too down and dirty for that time in my life. Still, I didn’t want to ruin our reunion.
“All right, if it’ll make you happy, I’ll do a few lines with you.” in the toilets of Santa Monica everybu
Jerry went out to score, and I waited and waited and he never came back. The next day I saw him on the plane.
“What happened, man?”
“Ah, I met somebody and . . .” he trailed off.
I felt like I was back on the streets of Brooklyn hearing those junkie lies again.
I wanted to call him out on it, but I was too hurt. The guy sitting next to me was not the Jerry Nolan I grew up with and loved. He had totally changed, thanks to junk. I just sat there waiting to get off that plane. We finally landed and said our good-byes and I never talked to Jerry again. Eighteen years later, I got word that Jerry caught meningitis from shooting up and died. I didn’t go to his funeral. It would have killed me, but to this day, he’s still in my prayers.
The shows were great, but we just couldn’t get any radio airplay, so we had no choice but to keep scheduling dates and playing live. The road was grueling, especially with the show we were doing. It was scary being away from home in Brooklyn, so every night I would write postcards to Lydia, my mother, and my uncle George. Things like “Hey Ma, I’m in Duluth, Minnesota. Holy mackerel! There’s some strange people here, but I’m having a great time,” or “Unc, played last night and I did a drum solo and everybody went crazy. We’re still kind of struggling, and we’ll be in another Holiday Inn tomorrow. Love you.” My family kept those postcards in a special box all through the years.
We were opening for Rory Gallagher in the Midwest, and Casablanca sent a few execs out to check out our show. They were in the audience with Neil and Joyce, and after we left the stage the crowd was going wild, screaming for an encore. But we didn’t come out. Neil sent Joyce back to see what was going on and she got backstage and saw that the back doors of the venue were open and I was on the ground, with J.R. standing over me, trying to revive me. There was a low ceiling in the club, and when they levitated me during “Black Diamond,” I started breathing in all the smoke from the flash pots that had risen to the ceiling and I passed out and fell backward ten feet. Lucky for me, J.R. was there to catch me.
On June 22, we were playing the final night of a four-night stand at a club in Atlanta when Paul collapsed and we had to rush him out of the venue and end the show. Well, that’s what it looked like to the audience. The truth was that we were on our third encore and had run out of songs to perform. We were in the dressing room, racking our brains to come up with another song, but we couldn’t.
“I got it—I’ll faint,” Paul suggested.
We looked at him like he was crazy.
“You can pull that off ?” I said.
“No problem,” Paul said.
We didn’t even tell our roadies because as great as they were, they all had big mouths and would have told the whole place, “Paulie’s going to faint.” So we kept it quiet.
We went out for another encore and I sat behind the drums. We went into “Deuce” for the second time, and I was just waiting for Paul to faint. Sure enough, he swooned and fell to the stage. Within seconds, J.R. was knocking people out of the way, rushing to the stage.
Meanwhile Paul was lying there, clutching his head in an Oscar-worthy performance. J.R. and Mick Campise carried Paul off to the dressing room, and the show was over. We laughed for hours after, but then ” ayl that one.
Touring nonstop was dangerous for me because the Catman lived a very wild life. He did a lot of drugs, drank a lot of booze, got a lot of pussy. I actually wanted to get rid of him now and then and just be Peter Criscuola again. The Catman was killing me.
But Gene and Paul loved the road. They would be happy tohat audience c
CHAPTER TEN
I knew that things were changing when I set eyes on our new set after we returned from Europe in June of 1976. The money was flowing in, and Bill was funneling some of it right back into the show. I have to admit that I loved the two huge emerald-eyed cats that sat on either side of my drums. But the rest of the staging was a mess. They built a gothic castle for Gene to be a monster in. The Spaceman got his own lunar landscape. There was a modified Tesla coil that was supposed to shoot out electricity during “God of Thunder,” but it seldom worked. Neither did the tentacle tree that was supposed to undulate its branches.
“This fucking set looks like a fruit salad,” Ace said. I in the back of the headanNe, thought it was more like Disneyland. We wound up getting rid of half of it.
Just as the set had changed, so did the people who were responsible for the show itself. The changes started at the top. Bill was seldom out on the road with us. When he did come out, he’d take us all to dinner and then stand on the side of the stage and gloat over us. We felt like kids showing off for their dad. But those visits were so far and few between that we began calling him Good Gig Gui (Gui was his nickname) because he had a tendency to only show up to the larger, most prestigious gigs.
Bill decided that we needed our own business managers. He reached out to Howard Marks and Carl Glickman. Marks had worked with Bill for years and had an active hand in mediating the royalty disputes with Neil Bogart. Glickman was a real estate mogul from Cleveland who
had experience in turning around companies on the verge of bankruptcy. He also seemed to have friends who were “connected”: One of those guys was rumored to have acquired a small percentage of ownership in KISS, since he had provided Bill with a bridge loan to keep him afloat before all the royalties from the Alive album kicked in.
Then Marks and Glickman began flexing their own muscle. Most of our original crew got eighty-sixed. J.R., Moosey, Munroe, all gone, all replaced by Marks and Glickman’s people. Overnight, we weren’t a rock ’n’ roll band anymore. We had become a big business. All the heart and soul and spontaneity had gone out the door when Marks and Glickman took over.
I loved Bill to death and I never want to badmouth him in any way, but I think a lot of the problems we were facing were due to the coke clouding his judgment. Bill had been the hands-on arbiter of any disputes in the band in the early days.
“At the end of every week, I want all four of you to sit in one room and hash out whatever is bothering you,” Bill would tell us. And we did that for quite a while. Each guy would bring up what was bugging him about the others and we’d discuss it and say we’d change and then we’d all shake on it.
But we got away from that. Now there were all these new people around us, and they weren’t loyal people who had been through wars with us. Howard Marks didn’t know a fucking thing about running a band. All these guys were businessmen. Bill knew us backward and forward, but the coke was making him paranoid.
The only upside to the personnel changes was that we hired the greatest road manager we would ever have. Frankie Scinlaro was an incredibly endearing Italian, a roly-poly guy around five foot six inches with a beard and a razor cut haircut. He was a veteran of the road, having taken Alice Cooper out for years.
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