And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (19 page)

May was a tremendously hectic month for KISS—even more hectic than usual. First, they took their nonstop touring brigade to Europe for their debut performances overseas. Aucoin had attempted to book them in Europe in the fall of 1975, but he hadn’t managed to solidify an itinerary. We were eager to see it happen, as it gave us the opportunity to do copromotes with our overseas affiliates. While KISS was on the verge of becoming a superstar band in the US, European fans, especially those in the UK, looked upon them as a curiosity. Only in Sweden had a substantial fan base developed, and there would be some major stumbling blocks for us to overcome as we attempted to repeat KISS’s domestic success in the European market. West Germany, for instance, refused to let the band use their trademark logo because the double lightning bolt “S” in their name bore a striking similarity to the Nazi SS insignia. Oddly enough, this wasn’t even a German law, but rather an edict issued by the Allies at the end of World War II. We finally worked it out by changing the logo slightly. The other factor that slowed our development efforts in Europe was that the distributors and licensees with whom we had a loose association all hated one another, so there was little cooperation going on. This is another instance in which having the clout of a major label would have been beneficial.

The international music business was not something we could ever grasp. In some markets, we had great distributors who would go out of their way to make things happen; in others, it was one fiasco after another, and nothing got done. Neil never cared very much about the international market anyway. He was happy to get the cash advances, and anything else was gravy. He’d never seen much international money at Buddah—why should things be different at Casablanca? As it turned out, the worldwide success of Donna Summer, KISS, and, to a lesser degree, Parliament would change Neil’s tune and our fortunes.

Things were similarly unsettled for KISS in terms of business infrastructure. Bill Aucoin had split his management company in two, retaining Rock Steady and opening AMI (Aucoin Management Incorporated), which was headquartered in a dazzling Madison Avenue high-rise. Bill’s confidence had reached new heights with the success of KISS, and he began to look for other artists to sign. One of those he signed was a singer named Billy Squier, whose girlfriend was Maxanne Sartori, a DJ on WBCN radio in Boston. Maxanne was about the only person there who would play KISS. Because of this, I had introduced her to Bill Aucoin, and Maxanne, in turn, had introduced Aucoin to Billy Squier. The two got along very well, and it wasn’t long before Aucoin was managing Squier. Bill offered us Squier, but we thought it better not to have all of Aucoin’s eggs in our basket and also wondered what KISS would think if Casablanca had another Aucoin act. We passed on inking Squier, mostly because we were leery of getting involved with someone Aucoin was having a personal relationship with, and we were under the impression he was
with
Billy in a physical sense—Aucoin was and is openly gay. Aucoin eventually signed Squier to Capitol Records, where he had several hits.

While KISS had always been very loyal to Aucoin, they were troubled that they were selling concert tickets and albums as fast as they could be printed, but there was still no money to be had. Part of this, or most of it, could be ascribed to the fact that the money they made was funneled back into touring, which was an expensive undertaking, considering how elaborate their production demands were. Still, KISS felt that their money could be better managed. So, in May 1976, they hired Glickman/ Marks Management as their business managers. Carl Glickman was a big real estate tycoon out of Cleveland, and Howard Marks was an advertising guy in New York. Aucoin had known Marks for years, as Bill’s old company, Direction Plus, had produced commercials for Howard Marks Advertising. I found the hiring somewhat odd, as Carl and Howard were both way past understanding rock and roll: Marks was forty-seven, and Glickman was fifty.

We soon found ourselves on the receiving end of a demand for a new record contract. Keep in mind that one of Neil’s greatest fears was that we would lose a band and then see them have a hit with someone else. Neil loved music, and he loved success, but he had an obsessive, abject fear of failure. For him, the style of the music was largely irrelevant; if it was good, he liked it, no matter what the genre, and he was usually excellent at second-guessing the public. But the fear of losing out on the opportunity for a hit consumed him. It had happened with Melanie. After she left Buddah, she had a big hit with “Brand New Key,” and Neil felt that this reflected badly on him—he had worked so hard for her, and he’d committed so many resources to making her a star. Numerous people in the record biz later told me that Neil had made a Herculean effort on behalf of Melanie’s career and that for a while her name seemed to be the only thing coming out of his mouth. I thought that Neil had taken the entire thing far too personally. I subscribed to the shit-happens school of thought. My take was that Melanie had had the right song at the right time, and she’d never had another. It was no one’s fault. Neil’s fear was something I could not understand, and it would be the source of several arguments between us over the years.

KISS was big enough to be a very attractive jewel for a major record company to add to its crown, and the band could easily have left Casablanca for a more lucrative domain—Capitol, Warner, or any of the other big houses. To their credit, and to our relief, they decided to stay with us. I’d like to think it was partly out of loyalty, but an important motivation was the fact that even if they signed with another label, Casablanca would retain control of their back catalog, and that made them uncomfortable. Additionally, they still believed in Neil and his ability to market them better than anyone else. Their contracts always contained a clause citing Neil as the key man. This meant that if the company was ever bought, or if anything ever happened to Neil, they were free to do what they wanted. We were going to pay through the nose to keep them, and it would be one of the main reasons for Casablanca’s downfall.

The contract Glickman/Marks brought to us called for half a million dollars per album as an advance, and another half million for advertising. A million dollars per album! In 1976, this was a ton of money for any band, though the ratio between advance money and advertising was perfectly reasonable. The cash outlay for advertising would help us as well as them, but seeing the price tag on paper nearly made us choke. Again, if they had trusted us, we would have spent the money anyway, but they didn’t, and they had decided to take control of their own destiny. Marks’s advertising agency had almost complete discretion as to how that advertising money was spent; the only fail-safe was that we had to mutually agree to all expenditures. But, in the end, while I would argue with them about certain points, they would usually prevail because they were the so-called advertising experts. I took to reminding myself that we had other things to do, and we couldn’t concentrate all our energies on one group. I won a few battles, but as time went on, I began to pay less and less attention to the hundred-page advertising schedules they sent me. Marks’s firm was to receive the typical agency commission on advertising: 15 percent of gross. This translated into a guaranteed minimum of seventy-five thousand for Glickman/Marks’s advertising agency fee, plus their fee for acting as KISS’s business managers. Aucoin was still their manager, as well, and his fee was 25 percent, so the total of fees incurred by the band was significant.

We knew that KISS would eventually become so big that they would sell at least two to three million units each time out. Cutting a deal for one million dollars per album was therefore not out of the question. The band deserved the money, and we knew that with the strong fan base they had cultivated, they would be selling large amounts of product for years to come.

Glickman/Marks got so heavily into the band’s finances and advertising that Casablanca became almost superfluous to the operation, simply handling sales and a minor bit of promotion. We were used to being involved in planning tours and controlling the press. Now we would step back and let the new KISS organization do the work, unless they interfered with our plans, and then a fight would develop. We were on the brink of getting a KISS single on few major stations when things suddenly fell apart because the KISS promotion team had butted in and ruined everything we’d set up. The KISS promo guys—they actually worked directly for Aucoin—had offered a concert exclusive to a rival station without consulting us. Neil hit the ceiling when he found out. We were all frustrated, because we felt like we were dealing with amateurs.

But there was an upside to this situation. With the growth of the company, and with all the other major artists we were developing (like Donna Summer and Parliament), it was probably better that we had less to do for KISS. While it would have been nice to use the celebrity of the band we’d worked so hard to establish to boost other up-and-coming artists, KISS was not about to let that happen. Neil and Joyce (who very quietly married on May 28, in an extremely atypical ultra-low-profile Justice of the Peace ceremony, which none of us fellow Casablanca people attended) did maintain their strong personal relationship with Howard Marks, and he and I always got along great. So the communication between the company and group improved, and soon it was running very smoothly.

For both political and practical reasons, we began to hire Howard Marks Advertising to do campaigns for other acts. We had them place advertising for Donna Summer and Parliament product and tours; they also took on various projects that we did not feel we could develop properly without using a full-service advertising agency. In any case, keeping Howard Marks happy was a strategy that we had come up with to keep KISS grief to a minimum. If we could convince Howard that his fortunes lay with us as much as they did with KISS, then he would be more amenable to working with us as partners on equal footing. We grew closer to Howard and one of his execs, Rosanne Shelnutt, through all the contact we had with them. With these deals, I paid very close attention to the agency’s advertising buys, and I often asked that buys be changed to reflect our approach to marketing many of our artists, not just KISS.

As the dust was settling from Glickman/Marks’s arrival on the scene, KISS left for Europe. They headed to England first. Wally Meyrowitz (who was still KISS’s booking agent at ATI) and his wife, Lorie, along with me and Candy, made the trip to London. The band was scheduled to rehearse for a few days at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, just outside the city. After rehearsals concluded, the entire contingent trekked to Manchester for the first show of the tour. Following the concert, Wally, Lorie, Candy, and I headed back to London, while the rest of the group moved on to Birmingham. With no one to guide us, we quickly got lost. After wandering around for a while, we made our way to a railway station, and Wally spotted a train that we thought might be headed back to London. The train had already begun to pull out of the station, so we ran after it and leapt aboard like a group of vagabonds. We landed in what looked like a cattle car—no seats, no tickets required. We rode the train for what seemed like hours before finally arriving in London. At the time, the terror campaign of the Irish Republican Army was particularly active, and people were paranoid about suspicious-looking strangers; we got back to our hotel so late and looking so disheveled that we were subjected to a strict and very thorough search before we were allowed to enter.

The response to KISS’s European tour was hit and miss. Worse, as far as we were concerned,
Destroyer
was not maintaining the tremendous momentum established by
Alive!
Not a good sign. Neil and I knew that failing to recapture the kind of hype and sales that
Alive!
had generated could lead to the band being labeled with three words we avoided like the plague: one . . . hit... wonder.

Upon returning from Europe, the band immediately geared up for another tour of North America. They would have new costumes and a completely new stage show. Glickman/Marks was turning this into a business and had hired the Jules Fischer Organization (whose experience ran toward Broadway shows) to design and manufacture a new set and production.

Much like Casablanca, KISS seemed to be operating without a budget—their only constraint was the limits of their imagination. Taking their cue from the
Alive!
liner notes (the first purposeful attempt to highlight the band mates’ individual personas) and the
Destroyer
cover’s postapocalyptic landscape, Jules Fischer drafted a set and production that was astonishing in its excess. Flights of stairs flanked the drum riser, which was guarded by two green-eyed demonic cats and rose more than twenty feet in the air at the show’s end, unfurling an enormous cat-adorned tapestry in its wake. On stage left, another flight of stairs led up to something called the Moon Garden (in keeping with Ace Frehley’s Spaceman character). On stage right, Gene Simmons’s demon profile had its own platform, which held a structure of decaying bricks like an iconic castle from the old Hammer horror films and a towering bloody stake that rose behind the bassist during his now infamous blood-spitting routine.

The backline of speaker cabinets was decorated with pieces of a cityscape (again from the
Destroyer
cover), which fell off on cue. There was also a prop that looked like a desiccated tree, which didn’t bear a resemblance to anything the band had done. It just sat there and looked strange. Above the stage were three huge lighting rigs designed to look like red-white-and-blue lightning bolts (you couldn’t escape the bicentennial), and the main lighting rigs were constructed to look like high-tension electrical towers. Behind the drum kit was an oversized Van der Graff generator that shot out enormous arcs of electricity. In a set replete with all sorts of dangers, this forty-five-year-old prop trumped them all (it had been made for the 1931 film
Frankenstein
), and I can’t imagine that Peter Criss was fond of sitting a few feet away from a rickety movie prop that shot out that kind of amperage. Even the stage floor and the band’s front stage monitors were decorated. At one point, the idea of crashing a car onstage had been discussed. Too bad that never happened—I was looking forward to working over Ford, Chrysler, and GM for the rights to give us free cars to destroy every night.