“I love you. I really think I’m getting this love thing,” I said. “I’m still not happy about a lot of things, though.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re unhappy about,” Gigi said. “But I’m sorry. It’s just not me. I’m not Deb.”
She was right. I had to get over the fact that every woman I got into bed with wasn’t Deb or Sweet Connie from Little Rock. It was a hard lesson to learn because I had been around crazy women my whole life.
It was nice to have a two-week break, because every place we went on the reunion tour was total pandemonium. We’d have press following us everywhere we went, motorcycle escorts to the arenas. I used to love going up to the motorcycle cops and hugging them and telling them how much I loved policemen. They got us to the venues in time.
It was the same outside the country. There was always KISSmania in Japan, so that wasn’t new. We played the Tokyo Dome and the show was a nightmare. The stadium was so big that they had ramps on either side of the stage that protruded so far sideways into the audience that if you went all the way out on them, you couldn’t even see the other guys in the band. And if that was the case, who was going to cue the end of the song? Well, Paul took one look at those things and he immediately went ramp running. He was gone—he wasn’t even in the band anymore. Gene saw this and wasn’t about to let Paul have all the fun, so he took off—and he was the cue man. So I looked out and all I saw was Ace and a gazillion people. I was playing, and I was hearing Gene and Paul’s chords, but they were sloppy because they were out touching girls and throwing kisses. So the whole show went down the shitter. Then Ace disappeared. He wasn’t going to be left out. So I was all alone on the stage with all my guys running on the ramps.
Then I got an idea. At the very end of each show, all four of us would come out to the front of the stage and count one, two, three, and we’d all bow in unison. It was bullshit that I wasn’t getting noticed like the other three, so right before we lined up for the bows, I ran out on the ramp to the very end and gave a victory salute to the fans, and they went crazy. Then I came back, running right by the guys who were waiting to do the bow, and did the same thing on the other side of the stage. When I ran back and got in line, Gene leaned over to me.
“Are you satisfied?” he said.
“Very,” I smiled.
It was a wild trip for those two years we were out on the reunion tour. I was convinced that Doc was in collusion with Gene and Paul, ripping Ace and me off on all sorts of side deals. All I knew was that when the tour was over, Gene and Paul would be building mansions and Ace and I would wind up with a fraction of,” Ace said. “Is” that kind of money. I wouldn’t put it past Doc to get involved in shady dealings. He was arrested in 1988 for helping a drug-smuggling ring—with connections to Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega—import forty-five thousand pounds of grass from Colombia to North Carolina. He pled guilty to a conspiracy charge but never served time.
Doc had hired this accountant named Paco who had toured with the Who and Led Zeppelin. Paco knew every trick in the book. One day Gigi accidentally walked into the count room, the place where the promoters settled up with the band. She saw two identical suitcases, one black and one brown, both packed to the brim with cash. They banned her from that area for the rest of the tour. When we told Ace that story, he was convinced that they were skimming off money and putting it into a Swiss bank account. Sure enough, we played Zurich and on a day off, Doc and Paco had to go attend to some business. We even told Gene and Paul about our suspicions, but they just chalked it up to Ace’s paranoid conspiracy theories. What else did I expect to hear from them?
I wanted the reunion to make up for certain things. I thought that maybe Gene and Paul had a point: Maybe they weren’t as crazy as I thought they were. Well, they were even crazier when we all got back together. I thought some of that old camaraderie would resurface, but in the end it was all about the M-O-N-E-Y. And here I was, trying to make amends for fucking up onstage in a show in 1978. So it was disheartening when I realized that they were taking so much from the party, and I was working so hard for so little. I had been a co-CEO of General Motors and now I was cleaning the latrines at a plant in Detroit.
It was so irritating to hear Gene say, “You’re working for me and you’ll do what I say or you’ll be fired just like any other employee.” I wanted to cut his throat from ear to ear. If he had said that to me back in the day, I would have taken a bottle and smashed it right across his forehead. But I had changed, even if they hadn’t. They were making more money than they’d ever make again in their lives because of Ace and me, the two fucking lunatics.ng clubs like
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I was a nervous wreck the whole day, just waiting for the armored car to arrive. Finally, the doorbell rang in my apartment in Marina del Rey. I rushed to get to the door before Gigi. A man with a gun strapped to his holster gave me a small package. I quickly signed for it, tore the package open, and removed its contents.
“Who’s that, hon?” Gigi said from the other room.
I didn’t answer. She came into the living room to investigate. And then I got down on one knee, just like I’d seen so many times in the movies.
“I know I’ve been an asshole lately, but I love you so much and I will take very good care of you and I’ll always be there for you and I’ll provide a good life for you.”
Gigi looked down on a fifty-two-year-old long-haired man with tattoos. Later she would tell me that this wasn’t quite what she had envisioned for herself. She thought that she’d be married to a dignified, straight, Waspy guy, someone like Peter Graves. Instead she was getting Peter Criss.
“Will you marry me?” I finally asked her. We had been together for a year and a half by now and I knew Gigi was the right one. She was a sober, clear thinker, a good role model for my daughter. I love being married, so this just seemed right to me.
“Yes,” she said. She put that ring on and went out onto the balcony and kept looking at her hand. We celebrated with dinner at the Magic Castle that night, and then we shot some videos of ourselves kissing and bouncing around the apartment like two little kids.
Meanwhile, Gigi was getting unsolicited advice about our marriage. One night Gigi got a call from Deb, who was obviously drunk.
“You know, Peter’s really a son of a bitch in the long run. You better be aware of what you’re getting yourself into,” she told Gigi.
Gigi got irate.
“Who are you talking to?” she said.
“Well, I’m his ex-wife,” Deb said.
“Yeah, ex,” Gigi answered. “How dare you talk about Peter like that to me?” a nice chunk of change,y when ik
They got into a huge fight and at one point, Deb actually said, “It should be me in that Learjet, not you.” When she hung up, Gigi told me that now she understood why I wanted to kill Deb.
We got married on May 3, 1998. I had a traditional big church wedding with Lydia and a posh Beverly Boulevard wedding with Deb, and I thought both of them sucked. So I suggested that we have a quiet wedding, just me and her. We’d fly out her mother. My drum tech could be the best man. Gigi liked David the hairdresser on our tours, so he could give her away. I could tell she wasn’t that thrilled about not having any of her friends there, but Gigi agreed.
I loved the Bel-Air hotel. It had a lot of great history: Marilyn stayed there, Gregory Peck stayed there, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope. It was really exclusive. We rented a big, beautiful suite.
I didn’t invite the band. I didn’t want Gene and Paul there for sure, and I certainly didn’t want Ace to be there with some crazy chick, stoned and fucked up. It was Gigi’s and my day. The guys wound up sending two big diamond watches to show respect. Gigi invited Rachel, one of Gene’s longtime girlfriends whom she had gotten close to. I thought that she was just going to spy on us for Gene, but it was Gigi’s wedding, too, so she came.
I wanted a priest to officiate but you can’t get a Catholic priest if you’re divorced, which is bu
llshit, so we found a great minister through my doctor friend Terry Hammer. Gigi looked absolutely gorgeous in a simple white dress, no big ruffles or flowers. She looked so classy she should have been on the cover of Bride magazine.
We exchanged vows and then had a sit-down dinner in a private dining room next to the hotel kitchen. They served a great dinner, soup to nuts, and some good champagne. I swore to Gigi that I wouldn’t get high, but I started knocking back that champagne and soon enough my jacket came off and my tie was loose.
That night there was a mix-up, and instead of a nice suite, they put us in a regular room. Normally I would have gone crazy over their screwup but now, all of a sudden, I just froze up, and the magnitude of what had happened just hit me. I went out and sat alone in the garden.
“Is this cool? Should you have gotten married again? You’ve been married twice already, and they were miserable failures,” I thought to myself. We had already bought a big house in Jersey and we were going to move in right after the wedding. “Now you’re married to a real straightforward woman who lives by God. No more hanky-panky and champagne parties,” I mused. It’s time to grow up and be a man.
Be a man? I had no idea what that meant. I had always lived in a child’s world: Keeping that childlike innocence was really important to me. So all these doubts were going through my head, and now I felt guilty that it was Gigi’s wedding night and we weren’t even having sex because I was so freaked out. Gigi was really understanding.
“You seem scared, Peter,” she said. “Do you regret marrying me?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Meanwhile Gigi was depressed because she felt that she was paying for all of the mistakes I had made with other women. She didn’t get a nice, elaborate wedding because I was concerned about having a woman who drains all my resources in my life. I was wrong. Later I’d feel bad that I denied Gigi the wedding she’d always envisioned.
The next day we flew home and I felt suffocated, sitting ,” Ace said. “ what ” ayisin coach between Gigi and her mother. Whoever made the arrangements had screwed up royally, because I always flew first-class, but here I was dying to have a scotch and soda, wedged between two people who were sober. “I can’t even have a fucking drink? What did I get into?” I thought. So I sat on my hands and white-knuckled it, counting the hours until we landed. Ironically, they would have been fine with me having a drink. It was my hangup.
Later that summer, KISS was set to go into the studio to record our new album. Both the fans and I were really excited; this was going to be the first time the four of us had collaborated on an album in twenty years. Ace and I were both working on songs diligently. But then, once again, our hopes were shattered. We found out that they didn’t want Ace or me to play on the album. They were offering us $850,000 each not to play! I had heard that Paul once said he wouldn’t play in a studio with us ever again. I guess now that was confirmed.
That was a lot of money for nothing, but I didn’t want to just take the money and not play. It was never just about money for me, it was always about the music. Then Doc asked us to sign a paper saying that we played on the album. I told him I couldn’t lie like that. “But the fans gotta feel you guys did the album together,” Doc protested.
I sat down with Tommy Thayer (who would eventually play guitar on all of the tracks except for two) and wrote a couple of really good songs. One, “Hope,” was a ballad that I wrote for Gigi, and, since the tour was going to be called the Psycho Circus Tour, we wrote “Psycho Circus,” a cool tune that could have been the signature song on the album. Like they would have ever let me have that. I was set to come to the studio and play the songs for Gene and Paul, but that cocksucker Thayer snuck behind my back and brought them the demos before I could play them for them. Of course I was shot down, but I complained so much that they set up a meeting for me with the producer, Bruce Fairbairn. We met for lunch at the Bel-Air Hotel. He seemed like a nice guy, another Canadian like Ezrin. And he was also wired, I realized.
Bruce put the headsets on and listened to my stuff with his eyes closed, like he was into it. He already knew they weren’t going to use any of it; they just wanted to placate me with this meeting, and that’s what he did. He listened and said, “I like what I hear, Peter, there’s a lot of emotion here, but I don’t know if it fits in the KISS genre. I’ll get back to you, I got to get back to the studio, we have a session today,” he told me.
I’m thinking, “I should be at that fucking session. This is so disrespectful.” Instead of Ace and me, they had their road manager Tommy Thayer playing guitar and a guy named Kevin Valentine playing drums. Now I was locked out of my own band’s sessions. But then I get a call that Paul wanted me to sing a ballad that he wrote with Ezrin. If I sang it, they could tell people that I appeared on the album. I listened to the song, “I Finally Found My Way,” and it was just a blatant attempt at another “Beth,” except it sucked. The lyrics were about this pitiful, pathetic loser who finally finds his way back to God or Bob Dylan or some chick, who knows?
Bruce told me that I could do the song any way I wanted, so I went in and sang it as if it was a Sam Cooke song. I gave it a bluesy feel, I sang my heart out, and Bruce loved it. Next thing I knew, Paul called me.
“We heard you were down there recording,” he said.
“Yeah, I wanted to get a feel for the song_ord ever ,” I said.
“Well, we listened to it and you sound like Jimmy Durante.”
This was Paul’s attempt at a joke.
“What do you want, Paul?”
“I’m going to the studio, and you come down and I’ll be right next to you in the room and make sure we do it the right way,” he said. There was one note on the song that I couldn’t really hit. So he wanted to come in and sing it with me so I could get it right.
“You mean your way. There’s no right or wrong way, there’s Paul Stanley’s way.”
I went back and sang the song and it was like going through a root canal. Paul stood there every fucking second: “No, Peter . . . like this.”
It was the same old shit.
Then Ace called me. He really wanted a song on the album and he was breaking balls big-time, calling Gene every hour—“I want my fucking song on the album. I’m going to quit the band if I don’t get a song.” So they finally caved. Ace had written something called “Into the Void,” which was perfect for the Spaceman, but it wasn’t really a good song. Ace insisted that I come over to his apartment and rehearse with him because he wanted me to drum on at least one song on the album. That’s what I loved about Ace. He always did seem to have my back.
So we went into the studio and Gene and Paul were standing there, like they’re the producers, and we cut the track. It was a nightmare, and it was even worse when we tried to play it live, but Ace was appeased. He got a song on the album so he stood to make some money because it was going to sell well. Nobody was going to know that we weren’t on it. But in fact, the album was subpar. There was a bad song from Ace, I sang a song at gunpoint, they got a substitute in for me so they’re not getting that flaming fiery instinctual drumming that they had years ago, and the road manager is playing Ace’s leads.
In October of 1998 we started the Psycho Circus Tour. Right off the bat, things started going wrong. The big gimmick for this tour was that we were going to have a huge 3-D monitor in the middle of the stage. During the show there would be previously recorded segments shown in 3-D, so from the audience it would look like Paul and Gene and Ace’s guitars would be right in your face and my drumsticks would seem to be inches from your nose. But all that was based on the idea that you could get thirty thousand KISS fans to wear the cardboard glasses and that the glasses would work. Neither assumption was correct. The 3-D effects never seemed to work, and nobody wanted to be hindered from seeing the big picture of what was going on onstage. It made no sense. Why show some snippets of 3-D on a screen while the actual band was playing? So people just chucked their glasses, and we took a bath on that tour because
the technology to do 3-D was super-expensive in those days. We worked hard to get it to work right to no avail.
Even though the 3-D effects hardly ever worked, I still loved being up on that screen. I began to get off on the power that huge image would have on the audience. One night I was playing and I was pointing my sticks at chicks in the audience and almost as if by magic, one by one, they lifted up their tops and flashed their boobs. So I started using it as a Harry Potter–type wand to get people to do things. Once this couple on the side of the stage were actually fucking and I pointed to them and the guy lifted his girl’s dress. He had been boning her from the rear.
The tour rolled on,” Ace said. “ what ” ayis, and we did a European leg, but when we got back to the U.S. we decided to pull the plug. Ticket sales were nowhere as good as the reunion had been. Besides, Gene and Paul were preoccupied with other things. Paul was up in Toronto playing the Phantom in a stage production of Phantom of the Opera. He was great. He should have stayed in theater. Meanwhile Gene was busy putting the finishing touches on our next film, Detroit Rock City.
His next film, to be more precise. In 1982, Tim Sullivan, a huge KISS fan, had befriended Gene when he interviewed him for Fangoria, a horror magazine. Ten years later, Tim was working with New Line, the hottest movie studio in California, so Gene pitched him a proposal for a KISS movie called The Creatures of the Night. It was the same old Phantom of the Park bullshit with talismans and superpowers. Tim and the New Line guys hated it.
At the same time, a few young filmmakers were writing a script that focused on the KISS fans, a much more creative idea. The main character was a drummer who was obsessed with me. It was like a Holy Grail story where the grail was my drumstick and the drummer had to retrieve it just like Lancelot had to find Excalibur. This script was called Detroit Rock City.
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