Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  Frankie was tougher than any one of us, for sure. He had a way with words that was unrivaled, so it was never a good idea to try to outjab him. He was the “why” man. He’d preface all his comments with Why? If Paul had been giving him a hard time, he’d zero in. “Why, you don’t wish you could grow a pussy overnight, next to your cock? Why, we don’t make little titties when we go in the shower?”

  “Fuck you, fat Frankie,” Paul would counter.

  “I may be fat, but I please all the girls. My dick’s not big, but I can make it spin. Can you?”

  Frankie gave all of us nicknames. He thought Paul’s nickname, He/She, was perfect, so he didn’t change that. Ace was High Octane because he was bombed most of the time. Or Scraps, because he ate. Later she would tell mes” whatever was left over on everybody’s plates. He called me either Peter Loooong, because I would complain all the time, or the Ayatollah Criscuola because of my imperious attitude. Gene was Gene the Nazarene because he thought he was God’s gift to the world.

  Frankie’s greatest salvos were always aimed at Gene. Gene actually had the balls to ask all of us to refer to him as God. He was dead serious. If I said something as mundane as “Gee, it’s a beautiful day today,” Gene would say, “Yes, I think I’ll leave it that way.”

  So Frankie would go up to Gene and say, “I’m going to sit next to God. Is it okay for me to be near your presence, Sir Gene?”

  Gene would say yes.

  “Oh, thank you so much for talking to me,” Frankie would say, actually bowing and scraping. “I feel so honored, I can’t wait to be like you when I grow up.” How could you not love a guy like that who has the balls to put you in your rightful place? He made a jerk out of me many, many times, but I loved him. We all loved him. He would always say, “Why? Who’s better than us?”

  Frankie would always scam the promoters. Every place we played, he would tell them that it was one of our birthdays that night.

  “Hey, it’s Peter’s birthday tonight. Can you make something happen? You know, some women, some champagne?” Sure enough, after the show I’d walk into the dressing room and all these people would be singing “Happy Birthday” and I’d look all surprised.

  Frankie worked the hotel managers as well. One time Ace and I tore a hotel-room door off its hinges. When the angry manager came up to complain, Frankie got irate, blamed it on crazy fans who found out our room numbers, and castigated the hotel security. One time Ace destroyed his room and the cops were on their way over, so Frankie had Ace lie under the covers and told the cops that Ace had passed out and that it angered the people he was partying with so much that they threw all his furniture out the window.

  I think Bill got a little jealous of Frankie. By then we had started chartering our own little private planes. One day Gene told me that Frankie was getting fired for taking kickbacks on the plane fees. I didn’t buy that at all. I think he was set up and they got rid of him because he got too close to the band. I got together with Frankie quite a few times after he got canned. We’d go for drinks and he’d say, “Peter, I never stole any of your money. I loved you guys. I gave you everything I had. Those guys were full of shit.” I believed him. Frankie died years after that. I cried in my room when I heard the news.

  We hit the road with our new show on July 3 in Norfolk, Virginia. It didn’t take two dates before we had our first crisis. On July 8 in Richmond, a fan threw a live M-80 firecracker that landed on my drum riser and exploded with such force that it literally blew me off my drums. My drum tech had to cushion my fall and we both went down. Then I couldn’t hear a thing. They stopped the show and threw me into an ambulance and checked me out. We came right back to the venue, but I was reluctant to finish the show.

  Sean would have none of that.

  “You fucking go out there and you tell them, ‘Fuck this, the Cat has nine motherfucking lives,’ and then go right into a drum solo.”

  I did just what Sean said, and the crowd went crazy. The noise was so deafening it felt like the walls of the coliseum would come tumbling down. The guys joined me hours a dayd ever at the end of the solo, and it was such a rush.

  Two days later, we were back in the metropolitan area. We were playing Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. It was a real shithole. But we did have a great after-show party, and Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame showed up. Of course everyone wanted a blowjob from her, but it never happened.

  This was the show where we met our new business manager’s tour liaison, Chris Lendt. Chris was a recent business-school graduate, a real clean-cut straight guy. It didn’t take us long to corrupt him. Chris and I got along real well. One of the first things I had him do was go with me to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. That’s where my grandmother Clara was resting. Clara had been my second mother. I had undying love for her. She worked her ass off at three jobs to help support my family, all the time keeping the house where she and I lived clean and hospitable. She was my hero. One Sunday night when I came home from a date, she was watching Lawrence Welk as usual, but she was having a little scotch. She never drank scotch before—she was a beer drinker—but her doctor told her that she should switch to scotch now and then since she was a diabetic and there was no sugar in scotch. Now you know why I hated doctors then.

  I went to my room that night and lay in the bed, and then I heard a thumping noise. I went into the living room and she was on the floor, unable to get up. I thought she had died and I ran to my mom’s house and she came back and we called an ambulance. Clara had taken a diabetic stroke. She couldn’t talk after that, she couldn’t walk. So my parents took her in and they had to feed her and wash her and give her her insulin injections.

  It killed me to see her like that. She was such a strong woman. She was indestructible in my eyes. This was the woman who raised me, put the coats on my back, and helped me through school. But seeing her like that was too much and I just ran, right into Lydia’s arms and into our marriage. When my grandmother died, they put her to rest in the Bronx, where her parents and her twin sister, who had died at birth, were already interred. But there was no headstone for her. There was no indication that Clara was there with them. My parents didn’t have the money to get her a proper headstone.

  But now I did. Chris and I went out and bought a marble headstone for my grandmother’s grave site. I think that little trip made a big impression on him. All the other guys were buying expensive clothes and fancy cars with their newfound wealth, and I was buying a gravestone.

  After a few weeks with us, Chris Lendt was amazed by our appeal. It was like we had hypnotized the audience, he’d say. “You can go out there and say, ‘We’re going to lift the whole building up,’ and these fans would go and do it.” It’s true, we did have an unreal amount of control over the fans. It bordered on mania. After a concert in the Midwest, we discovered that someone had broken into our dressing room and stolen my entire outfit. My boots, my costume, my gloves, all gone. The cops thought they might have a lead, so they tracked this guy to his home. Outside his door, the cops heard “Black Diamond” blasting from his stereo. He didn’t answer their knocks, so they busted the door down and there he was, sitting in a big chair, dressed in my costume and makeup, downing a beer and watching KISS videos on his TV.

  Around the same time, people started coming backstage with their sick kids in wheelchairs. These kids would be dying of cancer or other diseases and their parents somehow thought that we were superheroes and we could cure. Later she would tell mes” them by laying hands on them. So we’d hug them and sign autographs and pose for pictures. The next time we hit town they’d show up again, but one or two of them would be missing—they didn’t make it. It would break my heart. I would go into the bathroom and cry my fucking eyes out. Eventually I told Bill, “You’ve got to stop this. I’m not God. It’s much too draining for me to do this.”

  Just being on the road constantly took its toll. I couldn’t handle the constant moving around and the loneliness. So one way to combat that was to des
troy shit. It’s a rock ’n’ roll cliché, but it’s true. We started out doing simple stuff, like attaching hundreds of feet of cable to our room TVs and throwing them off the roof of the Continental Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip in L.A.

  Our techs had a lot of tools with them on the road and we put them to good use. One time Ace and I were next door to each other and we wanted to be able to go back and forth between rooms, so we took a sledgehammer and broke through the wall and created our own connecting door.

  At one point I got so crazy on the road that I thought I was a Green Beret and that people were out to get me, so I started wearing camouflage outfits and carrying a cool sawed-off BB shotgun. We were at the Peach Tree hotel in Atlanta with those huge curved glass windows. I was shooting all kinds of stuff around the room with my BBs, but then I shot at the window and the whole thing exploded. It was like a bomb had gone off in the room. They actually had to close the floor down.

  To top me, I guess, Ace brought a crossbow on tour. Around that time I began to make a game out of stealing huge paintings from the hotel lobby. I’d wait for the manager or the desk clerks to walk away and then one of the crew guys and I would heist the painting, rush it out of the lobby, and throw it into one of our trucks. Ace didn’t even bother stealing the artwork. He’d walk through the lobby, pull out an arrow, and shoot it right through the paintings on the wall. He got so out of control with that crossbow, eventually we had to take it away from him.

  It was always fun to bust Chris Lendt’s balls. One time we were staying in a hotel with a beautiful golf course behind it. Ace and I got drunk with Eddie Balandas, one of our bodyguards, and we decided to fuck with Chris. So we broke into his rental car, released the brake, and rolled it down the hill onto the golf course. That sucker destroyed greens, knocked down trees, did every kind of damage that could be done to a golf course. That night we stayed in the room and laughed all night long. When the sun came out, the cops found the car, saw that it had been rented to a Chris Lendt, and we had to pay the damages.

  Eventually we got such a bad rep that Chris was forced to put down a $10,000 deposit against any damages that we might incur. A lot of that was because of the shit that Ace and I and Eddie would pull. We had heard legendary stories of Keith Moon’s pranks and we were striving to top him. We began by simply flooding the toilets and sinks so that the water would cascade down to the lower floors. Then we graduated to cherry bombs and M-80s. Eddie somehow figured out how to hook them up so that you could light the fuse and throw them down the toilet. He’d rig up three cherry bombs with extra long fuses, and by the time we got to our car, they had exploded, destroyed the pipes, and flooded the hotel.

  Our all-time greatest prank was pulled on Gene. I came up with the idea and enlisted the whole band, even Bill. The idea was to have Fritz—who was then serving as my drum tech and whom Gene always tormented—get dressed up in one of Gene’s old co hours a dayd ever stumes and makeup. Near the end of our last number, I was going to switch places with Fritz and I’d wait backstage as Fritz took up the drumming. It could work because Fritz was a good drummer and he knew all our songs. Plus Fritz would be sixty feet in the air, and through all the fireworks, Gene would never realize that it was Fritz in his costume.

  So near the end of “Black Diamond,” we made the switch. Fritz threw in an extra beat and Gene looked up at the drums and just stared at Fritz with his mouth open. It was like he saw his doppelgänger. I was backstage, pissing my pants. Gene then looked away and shook his head as if to say, “Did I just see that?” Then he looked over to Paul and Ace, and they both looked noncommittal. When Gene looked back up at Fritz, I told Fritz to start giving him the tongue move. Now Gene was flipping out. Meanwhile, Ace and Paul were playing like there was nothing wrong. We ended the song and Gene looked up at Fritz one last time, dropped his bass, and almost fell off the stage. They had to catch him. Then I rushed up and put my arm around him.

  “Great fucking show, man,” I smiled.

  We took our bows and Gene was still in total shock.

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” he said. “I saw myself on the drums.”

  “How can that be?” I said innocently. “I was up there.”

  “I have to talk to Gui about this,” he said, and got into the limo with Bill.

  We were playing in Providence, so they had a long ride back to the city. About halfway home, Gene was so freaked out that Bill had to spill the beans and tell Gene about the prank. I don’t think Gene spoke to anybody for a week.

  On September 25 we began recording Rock and Roll Over, our follow-up to Destroyer, at the Nanuet Star Theater in Rockland County, an old theater that had been shuttered. I had gone on an all-night coke binge the night before so for the first time in my career I missed a session, which didn’t go down well with everyone else.

  Eddie Kramer was back producing, and I told him that we should record my drums in the upstairs bathroom to get a better sound. We could put a video feed up there so I could communicate with the control room. Of course, having a camera up there was going to interfere with me doing lines, so whenever I wanted to do a bump, I moved the camera away and pretended we were having technical difficulties. Then I’d shake it, and miraculously it would work again.

  I sang two songs on the album. One night, Paul played “Hard Luck Woman” for me when we were standing around the pool table on a break.

  “I love that fucking song,” I said. “I’d do anything to sing that.”

  “Well, I was thinking of Rod Stewart,” Paul said.

  “Fuck Rod,” I fumed. “Don’t I have a raspy voice? Come on.”

  Paul gave me the song, but while I was recording it he stood in the studio next to Kramer from the beginning to the end, constantly talking to me over the intercom. “No, more raspy.” “Speed it up there.” I wanted to stab him in the forehead with a knife. Toward the end of the song, I broke away from Paul’s direction and did some free-flowing soul stuff, and I think that’s the best part of the song.

  I must have done something right. The song was released as our into the” ayl first single off that album, and it went to number fifteen. Years later, Garth Brooks covered it.

  Gene and Paul let me contribute one song to the album. But even then, they fucked around with it. My original version of “Baby Driver,” a song I had written with Stan Penridge, was very cool. But these pricks had to go in and change it around. I never fucked with their original songs. They were like two gestapo agents, always exerting their will. Later they even had the balls to say that they rearranged the song but didn’t take credit for it so that the fans would think that everybody in the band was as creative as everybody else.

  With the album completed, we got ready to go back out on the road, naturally. But first we flew out to L.A. to tape Paul Lynde’s Halloween TV special. My mother was thrilled. Paul Lynde was her favorite comedian. My mother loved gay people, and she thought he was the funniest. We were a little out of place on the show, with guests like Margaret Hamilton, Tim Conway, Florence Henderson, Betty White, and Donny and Marie Osmond, but it should have been a wake-up call. We were rapidly leaving the rock ’n’ roll rebel label behind us and winding up as Hollywood pablum.

  We were back on the road by the end of November, a tour that would last until April of 1977. There’s just no way to overstate what a bizarre circus a KISS tour was. We were staying at a fancy hotel in Ontario once when Billy Miller, one of our road managers, got a dispatch on his walkie-talkie from Big John, one of our security guys.

  “Ace is small,” Big John said.

  That was the road crew’s code for Ace is drunk. It seemed that Ace got smashed and was convinced that tiny green men had entered his brain and made him small.

  They put Ace to bed, but a few minutes later they heard a German shepherd barking its head off. Then there was the sound of glass breaking. By then everyone on the floor had woken up. Suddenly, Ace’s door flew open and Ace ran out of his room in his underwear screaming, “He’
s getting me! He’s shooting me!” It turned out that Ace had put on a sound-effects record before he had passed out, and when the guns started firing, he thought they were real.

  Does this sound like a madhouse or what? We were all crazy in our own way, but that didn’t stop our juggernaut. From 1976 to 1978 we made more than $17 million from record sales alone, and more than $7 million from touring, not counting merchandise.

  Suddenly we were getting awards, too. In 1976 and 1977 I won the Circus magazine Drummer of the Year award. The first year I gave my award to Lydia. The next year Belushi got it. But the award that was dearest to my heart was the People’s Choice Award for “Beth.” Of course, we were touring at the time, but the guys let Lydia fly out to L.A. and accept it for us on the telecast. They had hooked up a satellite link to where we were, and even though we knew we had won, Bill told us to act surprised. After we waved at the camera, Lydia was brought onstage in L.A. and she picked up the actual hardware.

  Halfway into the tour we finally realized our long-sought-after dream. On February 17, 1977, we played the mecca of our dreams, Madison Square Garden. As soon as I got the tour schedule, I called my mother to tell her that we were going to be at MSG. The day of the show, all four of us were scared shitless. It hit us when we walked backstage and saw all those photos of Sinatra and Ali. This was the world’s greatest arena. I think I threw up twice before the show. Paul was climbing the walls. You could cut the energy with a knife. Bill was try into the” ayling to keep people away from our dressing rooms. He was a nervous wreck, too.

  Part of the reason we were nervous was that the sound sucked at the Garden. We were disappointed at sound check because the room was so dead. It wasn’t made for concerts—you either get nothing back, or the sound bounced off that back wall and came right back at you. And the Teamsters were a nightmare. My crew hated them. You couldn’t even take a pen up on that stage, they had to carry it up for you. My drum tech told me that it was taking them hours to set up because they’d carry one cymbal at a time. Who’s going to tell the Teamsters what the fuck to do, though?