Then he’d put his arms behind him, turn his back to the audience, and passionately make out with himself. His hands would be in his hair; he’d be rubbing his ears. I would want to hide. Then he’d go into the Crab, as we called it. He’d take his guitar and stick it between his legs and ride it around the stage and then he’d hump himself with the guitar. Then he’d switch it around so it looked like the guitar was humping him in the ass. I wanted to shoot myself. To make things worse, he’d go crazy and run from one end of the stage to the other, slapping himself on the ass.
What the fuck does that have to do with rock ’n’ roll? Gene would look at me and shrug. He would just work his end of the stage and let Paulie go crazy. Tommy would disappear and then later tell Paul how great he was. He was Paul’s bitch. He was on twenty-four-hour call in case Paul wanted to go out and look at fabrics or blinds.
In all my years of watching performers from Jim Morrison to Mick Jagger to Steven Tyler, I’d never seen any star make out with themselves, stick a guitar up their ass, fuck the guitar, and then run around slapping their own ass. I didn’t get it. Maybe if there was a song called “Slap My Ass,” then it would make sense. Sometimes I wondered how he ever got girls. But he became a focal point for a lot of gay guys. They would congregate in a section in the front of the stage and just look up at him and drool.
That was partly because Paul used to stuff his pants. He had done it before, but on the Aerosmith tour it was chronic. I guess he wanted to have a bigger dick than Steven. One night I caught him from the corner of my eye putting something down there. All of a sudden he turally?” I
CHAPTER TWENTY
The minute I got home from the tour, I went to see my psychologist. My life was so tangled and stressed from being fucked over and lied to and deceived. I was harboring immense anger toward Gene, Paul, and Doc. I even fantasized about packing a gun and taking a plane to L.A. and shooting the three cocksuckers.
I had been seeing this guy since the end of the Psycho Circus Tour. I chose to see a psychologist instead of a psychiatrist because I didn’t want someone to prescribe me drugs that would numb my thinking and feeling. I wanted to talk to someone and work out my problems in a rational, intelligent way. So we discussed the whole history of the band and how diminished I felt coming back and working as an employee for something I had built from scratch. Over the years we talked about Gene and Paul’s,” Ace said. “ turnedall Machiavellian game playing, Ace’s betrayal, and all the other bullshit.
Ever since I had rejoined the group, I had been subject to relentless emotional battering from Gene and Paul. And on top of that, I had been battered financially. Gene once told Gigi that he was still resentful that he had to pay me a share of the group’s proceeds after I left the group. Now that I was rejoining the band from a position of weakness, they had me right where they wanted me.
Some of it was my fault. I never should have allowed Ace’s manager and lawyer to represent me. They had been Ace’s guys for years, why did I think they would work in my best interests? Ace was always about “I should get more than Peter” right from that opening negotiation in their lawyer’s office.
But I was so damaged from my divorce and my IRS troubles and my carjacking and its painful aftermath that I was just an emotional wreck and a big, fat target. I had nobody on my side, except for Gigi and God.
The terms of our contracts were always unfair. In the downtime between tours, Ace and I were getting a monthly payment that was a mere fraction of what Gene and Paul were collecting. There were all of these ancillary revenue streams coming in—video games and big commercials like the “Got Milk” campaign and a major Pepsi ad. I never got my fair share of that money that was supposed to be pooled and distributed between all of us.
And when we hired an independent auditor who claimed that KISS owed me a tremendous amount for merchandise revenue in 1999 alone, all they offered me was a puny settlement. I didn’t have the money to fight it, so I wound up taking the settlement for pennies on the dollar.
The worst blow was losing my makeup. The Catman was a character I created and I never knowingly signed over to them. I’m a musician. I want to play drums. I trusted my lawyers and my managers. And I feel that they didn’t have my back on this issue. I regret the loss of my makeup to this day. So is it any wonder that I was ready to go out to L.A. and do damage to Gene and Paul and Doc?
But my psychologist helped me build my confidence up. My anger was overwhelming and was literally making me sick. We talked and talked and he helped me come to terms with the poor decisions I had made and the people I trusted. I should have been happy. I had a nice home and money in the bank. But money doesn’t buy happiness, I don’t give a fuck who you are. When you’re taken advantage of over and over again, it damages you. And it was always over money. But money is what they’re all about. So sad.
Then it all started again. In May of 2004 KISS was going to tour again, starting first in Australia and Japan. I was still under contract to them, but I hadn’t heard from them one way or the other. Finally, the afternoon that my contract was set to expire, I got a call from Paul.
“You know your contract runs out today,” he said.
“Yeah, I did notice that,” I said.
“You didn’t seem too healthy that last tour, Peter. You were coughing a lot. The corporation thinks that it might be for your benefit that you don’t go out on the road again.”
The corporation? The guy didn’t even have the balls to take responsibility. He had to hide behind the corporation? Plus I was coughing because night after night I’d inhale all that smoke from the bombs. Yet they were so concerned that they didn’t do anything about it until Gigi complained to Aerosmith’s people, who,” Ace said. “e s” were pissed off because the smoke was affecting Steven Tyler’s throat.
“The corporation just thinks it’s better for both of us that you don’t come out,” Paul continued. “You’re not that young anymore.”
Yeah, I was young enough the last seven years when I made them very wealthy men. Paul just relished calling me directly so he could personally cut my throat and taste the blood. I was lucky not to be going on that tour. Now they could rehire Eric and have Thayer imitate Ace and pay them peanuts. Good riddance. I guess the fans had the final word. In the States, they played to half-filled houses and had to cut the tour off prematurely, they were losing so much money.
It wasn’t like I was just waiting on pins and needles for them to call me. I had begun my solo album. I had written about five songs on the Aerosmith tour and Angel, my guitarist in Criss, now living in China, started sending me new songs that needed lyrics.
I decided to do a CD of ballads and draw on my experience of the last few years. So I wrote a song about my daughter and a song about my ex. I had been in New Jersey when the world turned upside down on 9/11, and I wrote a song about that harrowing experience. The plight of those first responders to the Twin Towers hit me so hard that I volunteered and played for a concert that raised millions for the heroes of 9/11.
And then there was “Doesn’t Get Better Than This.”
“Old-time movies, up till three / Another night, just you and me / The trip was lonely but now we’re here / Let’s lock the door and disappear / It doesn’t get better than this.” It was about getting away from the bullshit and going into a different world once we closed that hotel-room door. I wrote a song called “Faces in the Crowd” about our fans, and how the spotlight should be shown out onto the audience’s faces—because they really were the stars. I wrote a number of songs about Gigi.
I even wrote a song about Ace for the album: “Space Ace.” You might think it was a tribute, but I was really writing about Ace’s betrayal of me.
Have you ever been locked in a spaceship? / And lost in your lies? / Flying high above the highways / still trapped in the skies / I know the meaning of success / oh, but you got to believe / Evil has a way of showing its face
I had put all my experiences of my last go-roun
d into these songs and I just knew the fans would love the CD for its honesty.
I called Tall Man, my old bass player, and he came and stayed in my guest room in New Jersey so we could work on laying down the tracks. But working with Tall Man again was a disaster. I had come off years of touring so I was smoking hot: My chops were like nothing he had ever seen when I was with Criss. As soon as he started playing, I saw that he was sloppy and unsure of himself. He just couldn’t jam anymore. Tall Man was one of the best bass players I had ever worked with, but now he had a kid, was raising the child as a single father, and had given up the bass. He felt uncomfortable, and I felt bad for him. I loved the guy, but it just wasn’t working, so he went home. But not before he wrote some great music for the “Space Ace” song.
Meanwhile Angel was sending me stuff from China, and one song was better than the next. I was taking the music and writing lyrics and working on arrangements. By then I had met an engineer named Tom Perkins who seemed to be very knowledgeable, so I called him and he helped me get whatever equipment I’d need to record professionally.,” Ace said. “ out aed him
When we had fifteen or so good songs, I flew Angel in from China. I had set up a small home studio so we could work there. We buckled down and worked eight hours a day. Now it was time to record, and Angel was a Pro Tools genius. He said that he could engineer the recording, but I wanted his brain on his guitar playing. We started out recording with just me and Angel, figuring that we’d add the bass later, which was a big mistake. But Angel could play enough bass to fake it. Tall Man was supposed to come back when he regained his chops, but he never did. We tried sending him the tapes so he could add his bass, but that didn’t work out either.
So I went to New York and met with Paul Shaffer. Paul was an old friend, and he listened to the tracks that I wanted him to play on and loved them. He wound up offering to play for free—that’s the kind of guy he is. But we did pay him.
Through Paul, we got the great bass player Will Lee. He didn’t play for free. He had his fee and he was going to get it no matter what the gig was. But he was a world-class musician, so we bit the bullet. We went into a studio in New York and he was there for hours, playing bass on five tracks. When it was over, he came over to me.
“You know that ‘Send in the Clowns’ cover you’re doing? I really dig it. I’ll play on that for free,” he said. So that became a special track with both Will and Paul playing on it. Paul also turned me on to Clifford Carter, who did all the string arrangements.
We went home and I recorded the vocals in my huge two-story-tall living room. The sound was brilliant. Then I decided that even though we had recorded the CD digitally, I wanted that warm analog sound. Thousands of dollars later, that was accomplished.
It was time to mix the CD. I soon realized that I didn’t know how to do a mix with all these different elements. I was in a guitar band. Give me three guitars and a set of drums, and I could produce fine. But twenty strings and cellos and French horns, I don’t know where the fuck I’m going. And Tom Perkins, the engineer, was in even further over his head. He was basically a sound engineer for dialogue. He didn’t know how to mix music. I had hired two young engineers to assist, and they told me that Tom had no idea how to work with all this new technology: He was so old school. I was turning into a gestapo officer, screaming at Tom every time he fucked up. Lucky for me, Chris Jennings stepped up and engineered the rest of the album and we had the great George Marino, from Sterling Sound, master the disc. By the time we were done, the CD cost me at least a hundred grand.
In July of 2007, One for All was finally released. It had taken me three years to make it. My lawyer cut a really good distribution deal with a company called Megaforce and they did a good job, getting me into Best Buy and other big chains. I hired Lori Lousararian, a great publicist, and we broke our asses doing radio interviews, sometimes twenty a day. We had a signing at a record store in the Village and there were hundreds of people lined up around the block. Things seemed to be looking good, thanks to Gigi.
So imagine how devastated I was when the CD failed. I really believed it would sell. I thought the fans would want to scour the lyrics to see if there was any dirt in them. After all that work, the recording, going into the city to mix it, all that money, I was crushed. I never really wanted to wear all those hats. I’d rather be a member of a team than a boss any day. But I wasn’t just one guy in a band, I was the guy, so this fail,” Ace said. “Td ever ure was all on me. I couldn’t even blame the producer! I was the producer.
I was so depressed and Gigi thought that going to Hawaii might jar me out of my funk. But it was worse there. I went to my favorite spot, a big rock that overlooked the ocean, and I took my Walkman and listened to my album over and over again. I couldn’t believe that it had tanked. There were such great songs on it, and great players. We covered my mom’s favorite song, “What a Difference a Day Makes,” with just Paul Shaffer, Will Lee, and me playing the brushes. I had cut Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” Those wonderful lyrics—“Isn’t it rich, isn’t it queer / Losing my timing this late in my career? / And where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns / Maybe next year”—were a sly reference to KISS.
I had hired the best guns in the world, and I thought that I couldn’t fail. So I sat on those rocks listening over and over again, and each song was like a knife twisting into my heart and my guts.
I went back to the hotel. Gigi was lying by the pool, and I told her that I wanted to go up and take a nap. But I didn’t. I just wanted to be alone, and as soon as I darkened the room and lay down on that bed, I cried and cried like a baby. I became the most miserable man on Kauai, the most beautiful spot on the earth.
When we got back to New Jersey, I was still almost suicidal. And, to my discredit, I started taking things out on Gigi. She had worked very hard on the CD, doing tons of footwork and arranging flights and dealing with the publicist and the distribution company. It was stressful on both of us, and when the CD went nowhere I blamed Gigi and started talking about a divorce. It’s true you always hurt the one you love. It was far from her fault. I found it very difficult to let go of my pain, even going back to my mother dying and my divorcing Deb. So all that shit came surfacing again, and it was a terribly stressful time for both of us.
But, to our credit, we went to marriage counseling and worked out our problems. Gigi was determined not to let me wallow in my misery. She pushed me to get right back in the studio and work on a rock CD. She had been getting tons of e-mails through my Web site asking for a rock album, so she had arranged for Angel to come back to New Jersey and start working again. I was still feeling the wrath of failure from the ballads CD, so I wasn’t too into getting right back to work. But she went downstairs, put a lot of my memorabilia in storage, and hired some guys to build a nice big studio. I didn’t want to record in a closet again: I wanted a room big enough for my whole drum kit.
I almost felt forced into this rock thing, but as Angel sent me song after song, it started lighting my pilot light up and the fire grew and my belly started feeling warm again. Angel and I worked on every arrangement, and the songs were shaping up great. Angel was possessed. He never stopped working. He’d spend hours in the guest house, sitting at the table, playing with his headset on, working on the material. Then he’d go, “Cat, I’m going downstairs to the studio to put down this stuff while I got it in my mind.” I’d say, “Fuck it, I’m going to watch The Simpsons,” and he’d be down there working away.
I brought in Richie Scarlett, Ace’s old guitar player, who I promised I’d use on one of my albums when we were on the Bad Boys tour. I made him play bass on some of the tracks. He had switched to bass for a while when he was playing with Leslie West, and he had become a great bassist. He was back to guitar, but I convinced him we needed a a nice chunk of change,gd ever bass player, not another guitarist.
By October of 2007 we had thirteen great tracks, and all they needed was my vocals. But then fate interven
ed. Gigi was upstairs in the bathroom, finishing up a shower. She was toweling off and looked down and saw blood all over the place. At first she thought that her period had come, but then she sat on the bed to towel off her legs and when she got up the towel was just saturated with blood.
By the time she called me up, she was sitting on the toilet.
“I think I’m having a miscarriage,” she told me. I looked at her and saw blood dripping down her legs, and when she got up, there were clumps of blood on the towel.
I flipped out. I had never seen anything like that in my life.
“We got to rush to the hospital, right now!” I screamed, and started running around the house like a chicken without a head, trying to get dressed. My whole brain just became mush.
“How about we just go to my gynecologist, who knows me, before we rush off to an emergency room, where I’ll be waiting for hours?” she suggested.
She was thinking clearly, so we drove to her gynecologist’s office. The office was in a converted house, and I was not impressed with the place when we got there. They took Gigi in right away and I was sitting out there, waiting and waiting, freaking out. The doctor finally came out and told me that they were going to do some tests on her.
A couple of days later, they called her and asked her to come into the office. When she got home, she sat me down and told me that she had cancer. It was an aggressive sarcoma that could spread rapidly through the body, but they had caught it early. Gigi seemed to be taking this okay, but I think she was just in shock. Here she was, just turning forty. You don’t expect a diagnosis like this.
At first, I was in total denial. When she said, “I have cancer,” all I could think was, Yeah, that’s what they tell you so they can make extra money. I couldn’t accept that the disease that took my mother was now attacking my wife. When the news sank in, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like my heart was going to blow up in my chest.
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