Face the Music: A Life Exposed (12 page)

Peter instinctively played ahead. At times we had to catch up to him. In the best-case scenario, a drummer is like the back of a chair: you can lean back on it and know it’s there for you. It’s a foundation. But Peter ran alongside us, which was a different animal altogether. Even so, things just clicked. Even as a trio, we sounded very promising. So promising, in fact, that we decided to once again play for Epic Records to see whether or not they wanted to keep us under our existing contract.

By this point, Gene and I had scraped together the money to buy new gear. I’d bought two guitars: a tobacco sunburst Gibson Firebird and a guitar I had custom-made by a guy named Charlie Lebeau. I got to know Charlie when he worked at a little second-floor shop on 48th Street—it was the first shop I’d ever seen that specialized in vintage guitars. Dan Armstrong’s stocked sunburst Les Pauls from the 1950s—beautiful instruments that were always out of my reach financially. But Charlie, who specialized in repairing the instruments, had struck out on his own and started building guitars. I bought a walnut-colored double-cutaway from him. The Gibson Firebird started off as a standard. I liked it because it reminded me of one Eric Clapton had played in Cream. I sent it to work with my dad one day and asked him to have the guys at the furniture shop paint it black. It didn’t end up with the finish you might normally get on a piano or guitar, but it was black.

We had also bought a Peavey sound system, with two big speakers on telescoping stands and a mixing board with huge Frankenstein dials. We needed it for the vocals. In our rehearsal space—and any small clubs we figured we might soon play—we didn’t need to mic our guitar amps. They were loud enough on their own.

Don Ellis, who was head of Epic at the time, and some other execs came down to 10 East 23rd to see the band in late November 1972. We referred to ourselves as the new version of Wicked Lester. Of course, we knew this was a completely new entity, but we didn’t have a name yet. We played our new repertoire, which was basically the songs that made up KISS’s debut album. During “Firehouse” I took a fire bucket full of confetti and threw it over Ellis, who cringed, thinking the bucket was full of water.

In the end, Epic wanted nothing to do with the band. They passed and waived any legal obligations that still might have been lingering from the Wicked Lester contract.

I had never envisioned the band as a power-trio, anyway—I never wanted to try to sustain the band on my guitar alone. Jimi Hendrix could do it, Pete Townsend could do it, Jimmy Page could do it. I could not. And besides, I wanted to swing my arm and pose and leave the acrobatic playing to somebody else.

So it was back to the drawing board. Or rather, back to the newspaper. We really needed a lead guitar player.

GUITAR PLAYER WANTED WITH FLASH AND BALLS.

T
hat was the ad we placed in the
Village Voice
. And when we opened the door to our rehearsal space on the appointed day in December 1972, we had a lot of takers—more than thirty. But becoming a rock star meant
looking
like a rock star, so we had some specific rules: no bald heads, no beards, and no excess weight.

One guy came in a Nehru jacket and beads around his neck. He couldn’t speak a word of English. His wife accompanied him as an interpreter. “He’s from Italy,” she explained. Another guy, named Bob Kulick, was a really good player, but he didn’t fit the look we had in mind. After a long and mostly fruitless freak show, a guy walked in wearing one red sneaker and one orange sneaker. He was about my age and kind of goofy and pigeon-toed. While we were still talking to Bob, this other guy plugged in his guitar and started playing.

“Hey, man, shut up and wait your turn,” we told him.

Eventually we plugged in with him, and almost from the minute we started playing, something happened that took us to a completely different place. The combination of the four of us was so much bigger than anything we’d done with the other guitar players. We weren’t the greatest musicians, but the chemical reaction of the four of us was potent.

One minute we had been one thing, and a minute later—with this guy named Ace Frehley—we became something else, something undeniable. I was absolutely stunned.

This is it.

This is lethal
.

This is the goods
.

Ace had swagger, that’s for sure. His playing reminded me of guys I really liked—Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck. He was also a total oddball. He moved in a rubbery way and barely spoke. He shrugged his shoulders a lot.

We all knew very quickly that this was it. Around Christmas, after our second rehearsal with Ace, we called the guy who had managed Wicked Lester, Lew Linet, to gauge his interest. He was a nice guy but pretty clueless about rock and roll. He managed a band called JF Murphy & Salt that played at the Fillmore East sometimes, as well as an old folkie named Oscar Brand. Lew was more of a beatnik than a rocker, but he agreed to come to the rehearsal space to see the group we had dubbed KISS. Thankfully, all the band members had voted in agreement with the name when I had come up with it. I had been prepared to fight for it because I was so sure the next key to moving forward was coming up with a band name that was classic and timeless. I saw the name as having multiple meanings—there was the kiss of death in addition to kisses of passion. It was easily recognizable. And it was so familiar that I thought people might say, “KISS? Oh yeah, I’ve heard of them.”

When Lew showed up and we launched into our set, he immediately got upset. “If you don’t turn down the volume, I’m going to walk out of this room,” he shouted angrily.

When we told him about our desire to wear makeup, he whined in exasperation, “Why can’t you dress like the Raspberries?” The Raspberries wore matching white suits. Clearly, Lew didn’t understand our aim.

Oh well. We could book gigs ourselves. And besides, we still had plenty to work on. We wanted to be a power band with roots in British rock and roll, but we wanted to take it ten steps further. We still didn’t know just how that would manifest itself. I had sketch pads full of other ideas. I’d been trying to envision the band I would want to see, as a fan, and in addition to stacks and stacks of amps, that vision included distinct characters—like the four Beatles—and signature looks cribbed from movies like Zorro and the Lone Ranger and from superhero comic books. For now, though, we stuck with the trend of the New York Dolls and all the other local bands and looked glam and feminine, with platform boots and rouge, lipstick, and heavy eye shadow.

Once we had solidified the foursome, we rehearsed seven days a week. While other bands made names for themselves by playing the Mercer Arts Center or hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, we ensconced ourselves in our loft on 23rd Street rehearsing. All those bands were far cooler than we were as people, far more socially adept, and they looked the part more than we did, but nobody worked harder than we did. Sometimes when I was driving the taxi, I would even leave my car at the taxi stand on 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue and go up to the loft to practice.

Working with Ace came very organically. We didn’t have to coach him the way we had to coach Peter. Ace just fit. And after practicing with him for about a month, we were ready to make our live debut. We booked ourselves three consecutive nights at a place on Queens Boulevard that had just changed its name from Popcorn to Coventry. A lot of the hip New York City bands soon ended up playing out at Coventry, too, including the Dolls, the Brats, the Dictators, Television, and Sniper, which was Joey Ramone’s first band.

The first of the three gigs was on January 30, 1973. On the morning of the show, I took the subway to Long Island City, the industrial part of Queens right along the East River. There, I rented a van at Public Service Rentals—it was the cheapest place to get trucks. Then I drove into 23rd Street, where later in the day we loaded our gear from the rehearsal space.

Ace turned up late and refused to carry anything. Not one thing. When we arrived at the club and parked out back, Ace did the same thing. He sat in the back of the van and didn’t carry anything. Then, as we were unloading it, Ace pulled out his penis, totally out of the blue, and said, “This is my dick without a hard-on.”

Huh?

I didn’t know what was up with Ace and Peter and their dick-size obsessions. Though as time went on, I began to suspect that this was the way they defined themselves and what was important to them.

Fewer than ten people showed up for our first gig. The place probably held five hundred. We still tried to blow the roof off the place—we knew we’d always remember this show. And it felt great.

I’ll want to remember this
.

We played the next two nights at Coventry, and each night the crowd was sparse. After each show we drove back to 23rd Street to stow the gear. Ace sat on his ass and boozed. We were still getting used to his personality. The shows confirmed that he was everything we were looking for musically. But they also confirmed the fact that he was one of the laziest people—no,
the
laziest person—I had ever met.

These first shows made some things clear to me. I had always wanted a big sound, a two-guitar steamroller. Like Humble Pie. And we had achieved elements of that. But at the same time, we lacked a sense of heft, of magnitude. I almost felt as if the other guys had jeopardized the band—they acted small-time. Ace had babbled into the mic during one of the shows. Peter had said, “I want to thank my friends from Canarsie for coming out tonight.” That did
not
sound big league. It detracted from the image I wanted to project. Perception was reality. I realized there were three guys on that stage in Queens who were clueless about how to relate to an audience. You want to be small-time? Give a shout out to Tony and Guido. You want to be huge? Make the right impression, no matter how many people are there. Interact with the audience as if you’re all at Madison Square Garden.

From that point on I was adamant that I would be the one leading the charge onstage. I would be the spokesman. Everybody chattering away was just too chaotic.

And even though I had never done it, I knew I could. I
knew
it. I already had the blueprint. The reason I loved Humble Pie was Steve Marriott, the lead singer, who always seemed to be leading a church revival. He never spoke—when he communicated with the audience, he testified and sang, bringing everything to a fever pitch.
Say hallelujah!
That was exactly what I was going to do.
Say hallelujah, people!
I wanted KISS to be church.
That’s right!
Rock and roll church.
Can I get an amen!

Funny thought, for a Jew.

Funny thought, too, for a guy who was in many ways still painfully shy. But I was absolutely confident I could create somebody onstage who
would
be riveting and engage the audience. That’s probably why I had an odd accent early on—vaguely British, vaguely Southern preacher. It was a way to pass myself off as something a bit more exotic than a kid from Queens. The onstage character camouflaged the ill-suited kid with an ear deformity from a dysfunctional family.

I would be flamboyant and cocksure. I would project the image that I was coveted and desirable. I would be the guy everyone wanted to know. All the people I perceived as having not been nice to me, as having rejected me as a friend? They would be sorry.

But in truth, I would be the Wizard of Oz: the awkward little man behind the curtain operating this huge persona.

T
he New York Dolls were the template for most bands coming out of the city at the time. Of course I’d heard of them, but up until then I hadn’t seen them live. One night in March 1973, Gene and I went to see them at a ballroom in a sleazy midtown hotel called the Diplomat—the kind of hotel where hookers and junkies crashed.

They were the kings of the New York City rock scene and arrived fashionably late—actually intolerably late. They looked spectacular. And when they took the stage, the camaraderie and chemistry were amazing. Their playing, however, was not.

Still, they looked terrific. Their waists were as big as my wrists. Gene and I looked like linebackers by comparison. We looked at each other. We realized KISS looked more like a bunch of firemen in drag or something. This wasn’t going to work. We couldn’t beat the Dolls at their own game. Forget being a better Dolls; we had to be a better KISS. We had to win on our own terms. After that show, we decided to ditch all our colorful clothing and remake ourselves in a sinister all-black look.

I used to window-shop at a couple of boutiques where they stocked all the latest rock and roll fashions, particularly the stuff that was hot in London. One day I saw a pair of pants in Jumpin’ Jack Flash that would be perfect for our new look, but they cost thirty-five bucks. That was a lot of money. I decided I could buy fabric and make something similar myself. I had never used a sewing machine before, but I took apart my favorite pair of bell-bottom jeans and made a pattern. My mom kept saying I wouldn’t be able to put in the zipper.

I can do anything
.

It’s simply a question of working at it.

The pants, in sleek metallic black satin, came out great and cost next to nothing—and the zipper worked fine. Gene liked them so much that he asked me to make a pair for him, too. Which I did. Ace’s mom made him a shirt with an applique of an eagle on it.

Then we went to a pet store and bought dog collars for ourselves. I needed a Great Dane collar—the poodle collar didn’t fit. Eventually we worked our way to shops that sold S&M gear. I’ll never forget climbing the stairs to a place in the meatpacking district and walking in absolutely wide-eyed—I had
no idea
what I was looking at: leather hoods with zippered eyes and a tube in the mouth—what on earth did you
do
with that? We ended up finding some of our early studded cuffs and collars at another S&M place, the Eagle’s Nest, down in the West Village.

Somehow, wearing white face paint went hand-in-hand with our new outfits. Together in our loft on 23rd Street, we all sat around looking at a mirror on the back of the door. We had no idea how to apply makeup. It was as if we were possessed, just smearing makeup on, wiping it off, trying different things.