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Makeup to Breakup

Page 23

by Sloman, Larry


  One night we were playing someplace in Quebec, and when we started into “Beth” there was a wave of energy from the crowd that almost knocked us on our asses. We finished late that night, there was a blizzard, and we had a ten-hour drive back to New Jersey, so we walked right off the stage and onto the bus. It was like, “Let’s get out of here, no autographs.” But that crowd came out of the club, surrounded the bus, and started rocking it back and forth. “You think you’re leaving? You’re not going anywhere,” they seemed to be saying, so we stayed for a while and signed all their stuff.

  We played some great places too. In New York, we did a show at the Limelight, which was an old converted church. We to_b” ayisre the roof down and got great write-ups in the newspapers. But then there were places like the Sandbox. We were wondering about that name when we pulled into Wheeling, West Virginia. I was dropped off at the hotel and slept and ate my meal. Now it was time for Tall Man to report.

  “How’s the place?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you or you won’t go. You’ll get right back on the bus and drive to the next gig.”

  I was still wondering about the name when I entered the club through the kitchen. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The club was literally a sandbox. They had filled the entire floor with sand and they had tacky paintings of palm trees and the sun on the wall. The stage was made out of plywood and it was so wobbly that Tall Man got hit in the face by his own microphone. After the second number, everyone was up and dancing. The sand and dust was kicked up and permeated the air. I wanted to throw my sticks down and leave. Talk about being humiliated, about feeling like a piece of shit after you’d been in the one of the biggest bands in the world? Now you’re playing the Sandbox. And the next gig was at a place called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I was miserable.

  Which often times led to what we called the Greyhound Treatment. The Greyhound Treatment was usually reserved for incompetent road managers, sometimes sound guys. We’d instruct the bus driver to find the nearest Greyhound station, have the guy pack his bags, and we’d pull up, open the doors, out he’d go, the doors would close, and we’d move on.

  One guy who got Greyhounded was a tour manager with a shaved head whom we nicknamed Fester. We were staying at a hotel in the Midwest that had balconies. I was upstairs and the guys were beneath me. We had finished the gig, there was no food, and I was starved.

  “Where’s the fucking food?” I yelled down off my balcony at Fester. “Food and sleep. Food and sleep, that’s all we want.”

  It was about two in the morning and Fester went out to get some food. He came back at four and reported to Number One. He had scrounged up two microwave TV dinners.

  “You’re really going to take that upstairs, man? Are you serious?” Tall Man warned Fester.

  Fester brought it up to me, and the next thing Tall Man saw was two microwave TV dinners Frisbeed off my balcony. Fester was on the Greyhound the next morning.

  When we toured for Cat #1, our lead singer was Mike Stone. He was a great singer. He wore a cool mohawk and always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But he left for a deal that fell through and then he hooked up with Queensryche.

  We replaced Stoney with a singer-guitarist named Jason Ebbs. He got the job because we needed to go out and there was nobody else around. Jason would play and sing out of tune, but he was a good-looking guy with dreads, a real chick magnet, so we hired him. One night Jason played the entire set out of key. I kept telling him to check his tuning, but with each song it got worse and worse. When the set was over, he was standing near the stage talking to some chicks and I walked over and hit him in the back of the head.

  “You will never play out of tune onstage with me again,” I screamed. “You’re fired.”

  We got on the bus that night and there was stone silence. Everybody was tiptoeing around because I had turned into this monster. One by one, the guys came up to me and told me I was being hard on Jason,” Ace said. “igd ever . They were right. I have a big heart, so I kept him on. He never played out of tune again.

  There were always groupies around, but I let the boys have them. I really wasn’t too sexual at this point. When I was out on the road right after my split with Deb, I hated all women. I had a hard and fast rule: No women on the bus. But sometimes I’d loosen up. After every gig, the girls would line up alongside the bus. Once in a while, I’d pick out about ten of them and bring them onboard. They’d be sitting there giggling and Tall Man would break out the beers and the girls would all get fucked up.

  Then we’d say, “We’re pulling out tonight for a ten-hour drive. You could come, but I don’t know how you’ll find your way back.” And they’d say they wanted to go, thinking that they were going to have a good time with me. We’d sit there and I’d be grabbing their titties and biting them on the neck and making out with a few of them and getting them all crazy, and then I’d say, “I’m going to bed. I’ve had it.” The girls would be in shock, but then the boys would jump on them. Tall Man was tall and thin, with beautiful blue eyes and long dark hair. Angel was like Robert Plant, with big blond curls and the face of an angel. Our lead singer was always good-looking. So I’d lie back there and hear them fucking all night.

  When we were staying in hotels, it was a different story. Tall Man would grab a stack of business cards from the hotel where we were staying and he’d hand them out at the gigs to the best-looking girls. Then I’d make my appearance in my Captain’s hat and the girls would all go, “Oooh.” Then I’d play around for a while, but I’d go back to my room alone.

  We were on hiatus at the beginning of the summer of 1995 when I heard that KISS was doing a convention tour and they were going to be in L.A. For years, fans had been organizing unofficial KISS conventions where they’d meet and sell their KISS collectibles. After a while, Gene and Paul decided that they should be making all that money, so they organized a KISS Konvention tour. For a hundred-dollar admission fee, a fan would get a laminated pass and access to the booths that were selling all the KISS merch. Of course, Gene and Paul would get a cut out of anything sold there. There would also be a two-hour appearance where the band would take requests and play songs and answer questions from the fans. Right away, I realized that the band couldn’t be doing well if they had to co-opt the fans’ gatherings. Gene and Paul decided to remake all their merch and sell it again. They even had their road manager call me and ask if they could sell Peter Criss drumsticks. I wound up ordering five thousand pairs of drumsticks, and they sold like hotcakes. I was getting checks for a few thousand dollars every month from the conventions. I thought, If I’m making a few thousand on some drumsticks, what are they making?

  There was going to be a convention in L.A. on June 17, and I wanted to take Jenilee so she could get a better appreciation for what her dad had done. I asked a journalist to get me in, and he had called Gene, who promptly called me.

  “Peter, you don’t have to ask somebody else, you’re part of the band’s history. This should be your place, too. We’ll send a limo to pick you up. You’ll be treated like a king, because you are. Whatever you want is yours. Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow at the Sunset Marquis and discuss it?” Gene could really bullshit you.

  I had just come off a Criss tour and I was playing really well and my voice was great. I’d just bought a Mitsubishi 3000 and,” Ace said. “Caed him I was living in Venice with Lynn. I felt good about myself for a change. So I pulled up to the hotel and Paulie was standing there in his leather pants and tight velvet shirt, opened to the waist, and cowboy boots. I think he wanted me to see how good he looked right off the bat.

  He was kind of surprised to see me driving such a cool new car, but we exchanged pleasantries and walked into the hotel. Gene ran up to me all dramatic, as if he’d missed me all his life. He picked me up, held me in the air, and hugged me. I was thinking, Fucking bastard, I’d like to stick a knife right in the fucking side of his neck—because I still didn’t like them, and I thought they were up to something
as they always were.

  We ordered lunch and began catching up.

  “We think you should sing at the convention,” Gene said. “We’ll have a great time. And we’re actually rehearsing in an hour right around the corner. Why don’t you come over?”

  Okay, so they wanted to test me. I went along with it. We got to the hall and I said hello to Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer, the latest replacements for Ace and me. Immediately Gene told me that the whole idea of me singing was Eric’s. I didn’t say anything, but I knew it was bullshit. Eric might have come up with the idea, but knowing them they put it in his head. They’re trying to make this schlep look like a hero. Eric started sucking my ass and telling me how much he liked the way I sang, especially on “Hard Luck Woman.”

  “You want to sing it now?” Gene said.

  “No, I forgot the lyrics,” I lied.

  “We have them right here,” one of them said, and sure enough there was a music stand with the lyrics set up on it. They were going all out to see if I could still sing. I had been singing that song with Criss, so I sang the shit out of it and they were blown away.

  I drove back thinking, What the fuck was that all about? Then I called Tall Man. “Watch out, Captain, they got a trap for you,” he said. “You’re going into uncharted territory and those are fucking Vulcans, man.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Number One,” I answered.

  We went to the Hilton the day of the convention and it was mobbed because word had gotten out that I was going to be there. I knew that Jenilee didn’t understand the extent of my fame, so the minute we arrived in that limo and were met by bodyguards and screaming fans trying to get at me, she was literally in shock. We went up to our room and Paulie came up and introduced me to his then-wife Pam and their newborn baby. The baby was beautiful.

  “Wow, you got a kid. Whoever would have thought,” I said. It looked like Paul had settled down. He was a family man now, and I liked it. And Gene was now with Shannon Tweed and they had a couple of kids, so I got a good family vibe off this whole thing. Yeah, right.

  I went down and peeked out from behind the curtains and the place was packed. I heard Paul address the crowd. “Remember earlier we were saying that without the four original guys, we would never be here today? We were talking about Peter and Ace. Well, I thought it might be something special, something you really deserve. You deserve this and it’s gonna be a kick for us. We told Peter to come out and sing a couple of songs with us.” And he started a “Pe-ter!” chant. And he goes, “Peter Criss!” and the place exploded. They were crazier than my audiences on the road. I wanted to scoop them,” Ace said. “Gigied him up and take them all down to the Sandbox. They never sat down.

  When I walked up on that stage and the whole place went absolutely crazy, I felt so good. I looked at Jenilee standing off to the side and she looked so proud of me. I felt like a million bucks, and I just wanted to sing the best I ever did. Gene and Paul probably thought that I would be doing it to impress them, but I was really doing it for my kid.

  I hugged Paul and Bruce and then sat down next to Gene to share his microphone.

  “You know, originally Peter just wanted to come by and be with you and us. It was actually Eric Singer who said, ‘Why don’t we get together and play?’” Gene had to get that bullshit in. We went into “Hard Luck Woman” and the place went crazy. I couldn’t believe that my daughter was standing to the side seeing all these people screaming for me. It was a real golden moment. We finished the song and I high-fived everyone. I looked over at Gene and he was smiling from ear to ear. I could hear the cash register in his head going Ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching.

  “You wanna hear more? What do you wanna hear?” Gene said. There were a million requests, but we went into “Nothing to Lose.” We did a killer version, and then I waved good-bye to the crowd. Paul ran up and put a leather motorcycle jacket on my shoulders. They were selling it there. On the back it said KISS ARMY, and there was a logo of a hand giving the finger. Paul wrapping the jacket around me and giving me a big hug, it just felt like the whole thing was scripted. They knew exactly what they were doing. They always did.

  Backstage everyone was hugging me, and Jenilee was blown away. Later I took some questions from the audience and managed to plug my upcoming tour with Ace. Then I went back upstairs and said good-bye to everyone. It had been a special day.

  I was about to get together with Ace again. George Sewitt, our old road manager, was now managing Ace and had gotten in touch with us to persuade us to join up with Ace for a tour of Canada. He wanted to call it the Bad Boys Tour, but I wasn’t really a bad boy anymore. Still, it meant playing at bigger venues and making more money, so I agreed to do it.

  We had trouble right off the bat. Ace refused to open for us, so we went on first. But then we were supposed to come back on after three songs and do three songs together. That first night, Ace was on the sixth song and they hadn’t called us up. Tall Man went ballistic on Sewitt’s ass. He was screaming at Sewitt and I was standing behind him smiling and saying, “Look what you get, George.” From then on, we came on after Ace’s third song and did “Hard Luck Woman,” “Strange Ways,” and then ended with “Rock and Roll All Nite.” I hated that idea. Why were we doing Gene and Paul’s fucking song? We were that hard up for applause? But Sewitt was smart. Eighty percent of Ace’s set was KISS songs. That’s what the audience was really there for. We did all originals, so we didn’t get the same response.

  For the most part, we were playing much better venues. But we did one show in Oklahoma where only ten people showed up. Ace played for three hours that night, almost twenty minutes for each person in the audience.

  It was great to be back on the same stage with Ace again, after we’d been through so much together, but I got scared because he seemed to be getting worse with his antics of drinking and drugging. Ace could get away with anything because his band idolized him the way mine idolized me. The a nice chunk of change,b” ayis audience never knew it, but his roadies would fill up a six-pack of Coke cans with rum and he’d get drunk every night onstage. By the time we did our encores, he could barely see me.

  Over the years that Ace and I were touring, both apart and together, we had heard that Gene and Paul would often send spies down to our shows to report back on how we were doing. Sometimes they would actually tell us that Gene and Paul had sent them. I figured they were just interested in seeing if Ace and I were still fucked up so they could gloat. But I think they were really planning a reunion years ahead of our actual reunion.

  Why shouldn’t they? KISS wasn’t exactly on a roll after Ace and I left the group. Between 1979 and 1982, KISS record sales dropped 75 percent. When Gene started dating Hollywood stars, he began thinking he should be a movie star, too. Of course, he wasn’t a handsome man, so there was no way he was going to be a leading man. He wound up doing a couple of movies where he was cast as the heavy. You had to strap his fucking head down to contain his ego. He wasn’t the sweet Gene, and even the Monster was gone. He just became an egotistical Hollywood madman. He started managing Yvonne De Carlo and he told me that he fucked her. A sixty-three-year-old woman. Then he started a record company, and that failed. He founded a company to book bands, and that failed. Yet in his mind he was the World’s Greatest Entrepreneur.

  The years that Ace and I were out of the band were easily KISS’s leanest years. David, their hairdresser, later told me it got so bad that one night they played for five hundred people! Paul would joke, “Why don’t we order two pizzas for the audience?”

  When they took off their makeup, Gene was totally lost. They became a hair band, and one thing that hair bands had was young, good-looking guys in them. These guys weren’t young anymore. Gene just didn’t know how to behave onstage without the Demon persona. Like an old fighter, Gene never shook the habit of stalking the stage, but now when he would stick his tongue out, people would just laugh. It was sad, like watching Godzilla die. Then he started wearing loud, andr
ogynous clothes, but he looked like a football player in a tutu.

  Paul was delighted, though. He could come out with pink feathers around his neck. He’d wear skintight pants and orange wristbands and he’d have all these bangles going up his arms in every fucking color in the world. He looked like an old drag queen.

  By 1983 KISS fell millions into debt with their record company. They had to sell off land that they owned in Cincinnati. By 1988 they decided to scapegoat Howard Marks and Carl Glickman and they fired them along with Chris Lendt. Eventually they hired Dr. Jesse Hilsen, Paul’s shrink, to manage the group. He was a real doozy. Paul Marshall, our lawyer, said that Hilsen used to call up the business office and threaten to let Paul go crazy unless he got paid. Now Hilsen was in charge. He rented a penthouse suite and hired a full staff and began spending money left and right. He didn’t last long before he fled the country.

  In a way, I was glad they were going through such hard times. I wanted them to learn a life lesson—that they were not the geniuses who created this band, that the success didn’t flow only from them but also from me and Ace and Bill and Sean and Chris and all those people who were now gone or fired. If they were so smart, why had they hired a charlatan psychiatrist to run their business affairs?

  Gene and Paul invited both Ace and me to do a convention stop in New York City. Neither of us could do it, but then George Sewitt told ,” Ace said. “igd ever us that KISS was offered a chance to do MTV Unplugged, and they wanted us to do a few songs together. Ace and I immediately told George to tell them to fuck off, but George was persistent.

 

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