Face the Music: A Life Exposed (21 page)

One night on the road just after
Alive!
came out, a woman and I were lying under the sheets in a hotel bed. She turned to me, puzzled, and said, “My boyfriend told me you were gay.”

“Well, I guess that didn’t work,” I said. “Because it didn’t keep you away.”

A
fter the release of
Alive!,
things felt different. It was like watching water simmer before it boils. It suddenly seemed like just a matter of time before things would explode. An electricity pulsed through the audience at shows. There was a churchlike fervor that gave our shows in late 1975 a holy-roller quality.

Up to then we had made steady progress, so I never questioned that it would happen for us eventually. And despite the grave financial problems—the extent of which I probably never grasped at the time—I never worried that our modest album sales would cause the demise of the band. But on the other hand, we were running out of bigger bands to play with, pissing off headliners with our outrageous show, and our options were dwindling.

Then, when
Alive!
came out, the doors just got blown off. The game changed overnight. Suddenly we headlined venues bigger than we had played before even as openers. I was a bit nervous in the beginning because I didn’t have the experience of communicating with twenty thousand people. Once I figured it out, it was the audience whose nerves sparked, not mine. But at first I had to learn to communicate with the person in the back row. I had to send energy all the way to the back to project the atmosphere of game show/circus/religious revival we prided ourselves on creating. The bigger the crowd, the harder you have to work. Everything had to be amped twenty thousand times. And I felt anointed to do it.

Let me at them.

I want to be what they want.

I want to be the Starchild.

I want us to be KISS.

I want to show them we are exactly who they think we are.

It took me time and some trial and error, but soon enough I knew I could do it. In fact, I knew I was pretty damn good at it.

The difference between a guy who has just gotten his commercial flying license and a seasoned pilot is that the first one knows how to fly the jet while the other one knows how to deal with any and all situations. I quickly logged enough flight time that nothing fazed me.

This is your captain speaking, and you’re in good hands
.

When I got out there onstage, I really did get off on seeing everyone else getting off. Crowds at our shows were ecstatic, and we were all sharing in the jubilation. Our joy matched the joy our fans experienced. And they kept my insecurities and unhappiness at bay. All the problems in the world—theirs and ours—would still be there tomorrow, but we were going to have a great time tonight.

We also got to take a few heroes of mine out on tour with us. That fall of 1975 we had both Slade and Wizzard, the band fronted by Roy Wood of the Move, open shows for us. Roy Wood’s band created an eccentric version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. His bass player wore roller skates. They were booed offstage. Afterwards I told Roy what a huge influence he had been on me. He was still shell-shocked from getting booed, and I was disappointed not to get much of a reaction from him. After the first show we played with Slade, we all stayed in the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hilton, a hotel with vintage railcars as rooms, all lined up on tracks behind the main building. I was a huge fan of Slade, and in fact the mirrored top hat I had seen guitar-playing frontman Noddy Holder wearing in concert years before was the inspiration for my cracked-mirror guitar. I dropped in to say hello to Noddy in his train car. He was completely delirious—so intoxicated he was incoherent and unable to stand. Your idols don’t loom quite as large when they’re horizontal.

We had a couple of days off and flew to New York in the midst of things exploding. When I got home to my apartment in Queens, I found shotguns in the bedroom closet.

Whoa, what the hell are these?

My girlfriend, Amanda, had started hanging around with some unsavory types she’d befriended while I was on tour. They stashed weapons at our place.
Great
. I was just a Jewish kid from Queens—the only guns I’d ever seen were the kind you used to knock over a doll at the carnival to win a prize, the kind with a cork attached to the barrel with a string. She was descending into a completely different life.

Amanda also told me that Joe Namath had given her a lift home from a club one night while I was gone. It was only after I thought about it a little that a lightbulb went off in my head and I realized Joe Namath wouldn’t drive girls to their doors and just give them a peck on the cheek. I had never lied about my activities on the road since I had told her my mantra of “Don’t ask me what happens on the road if you don’t want to know.” Somehow it had never dawned on me that the same would obviously be true of her: Don’t ask me what happens
at home
if you don’t want to know.

I told her things were over between us, although it was clearly halfhearted on my part, because she came along just the same when I moved into Manhattan and rented a place on East 52nd Street. We never had any pretenses of being in love anyway—we were bed buddies. But it was time to change the sheets.

The apartment was in a tall luxury building on a street that dead-ended at the East River. Construction on the building had just been completed. When I went to look at it, they offered two apartments. One on the twenty-first floor went for $510 a month; another on the twenty-sixth floor, with a beautiful view, cost $560. Despite our recent upturn, fifty bucks a month was a huge difference. I took the place on the twenty-first floor.

My new apartment was tangible proof of my ascension. I went to Macy’s and bought my first real furniture—a big L-shaped green velvet couch and one of those huge ball-shaped lamps that hangs from a tall arching metal stand. I felt very cool.

Another change brought about by the immediate success of
Alive!
was an upgrade in hotels: we graduated from Holiday Inns to Sheratons. At the Sheraton, the towels had embroidered “S” logos on them. Whenever we were about to have a break and return to New York, I would stuff a set into my suitcase. Soon I had a cabinet full of monogrammed towels at my new luxury apartment.

Bill Aucoin liked to see us live an extravagant life on the road once things started to pop and he started to repay his massive personal debt. We enjoyed it, too, until we got a little wiser and saw the bills. In the dressing rooms now, people asked us what we would like to drink. It only seemed natural to ask for Champagne.
How cool—Champagne!
We ordered several bottles of bubbly, not realizing everything we ordered was charged to us. But it was fun—and, besides, who knew how long this all would last?

We certainly weren’t born businessmen. Whatever the myth, we were totally green and not savvy at all about tour expenses or bottom lines. We trusted the people around us to have our best interests at heart. It took years for us to learn the ropes and to consider trying to change the way things were done.

In the meantime, I felt newly flush, whatever the reality.

One day off in New York, I went to 48th Street to pick up some things at a music store. It was a strange situation, because we had gotten quite famous more or less overnight, and yet very few people recognized us without the makeup. I could walk the streets or get a cup of coffee. I could even go to a newsstand and buy music magazines with photos of KISS in them. Of course, it was different on 48th Street. I didn’t look like everybody else. I had the blue-black hair and the street versions of my seven-inch platforms, which I wore all the time. I guess there among all the music aficionados, people could put two and two together when they saw a six-foot-eight guy with mounds of blue-black curls walk in.
If that guy isn’t in KISS, the circus must be in town
.

When I went to check out, carrying a couple sets of strings and a few other things, the shop owner wanted to give it all to me for free. I didn’t understand. “It’s on us,” the guy insisted.

The irony was not lost on me.

“I can afford it,” I said. “I can buy it. Give it to the next guy who comes in and really needs it.”

O
n New Year’s Eve 1975, we headlined the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. Exactly two years before, we had played another New Year’s Eve show, opening for Iggy and Blue Öyster Cult at the Academy of Music. This time, Blue Öyster Cult opened for us. Things were really cooking.

Backstage at that show, we received gold albums, recognizing
Alive!
for surpassing five hundred thousand copies shipped since its release in September. Everything else we had accomplished that year had been the stuff of my fantasies—whether it was moving up to headlining status, climbing the hotel chain ladder, or getting a Manhattan apartment—but receiving a gold record fulfilled a childhood dream. Elvis had gold albums. The Beatles had gold albums. Now
I
had a gold album.

The aftermath of the show was less rewarding. We had about two weeks off before starting the next leg of the tour, and I went home to 52nd Street and Amanda. Things with her had continued to go south, and this time when I got home I saw track marks on her arm. Another couple she had befriended trafficked drugs into the country—major league stuff—and I knew that even as a relationship of convenience this wasn’t going to work anymore. I didn’t want guns to start turning up again. I didn’t want to hear phone messages about shipments arriving. And I didn’t want a junkie around. “This is over and you’ve got to leave,” I told her.

She didn’t want to.

Ultimately I moved out for the final week of our tour break and stayed at an empty place Bill Aucoin had. I wasn’t quite sure why he maintained a spare apartment, but I didn’t care. Amanda and I had been fighting for several days when I left, and as I was going out the door of the building, the doorman called to me and said, “Mr. Stanley, she says she’s going jump.”

“Tell her not to land on me,” I said, and left.

Soon we went back out on tour. I called Amanda’s mother and told her to fly to New York and get Amanda out while I was gone.

On January 31, 1976, KISS headlined Hara Arena, in Dayton, Ohio. Before the show I could hear a deep rumbling sound. The commotion of a big crowd. Excitement.

Every night I asked the tour manager, “How’re we doing tonight?” The answer had been “good” for a long run now, since
Alive!
had taken off. That night, he said, “Sold out.”

The four of us were celebrating, jubilant at the knowledge that we were taking it to that next level. We were now a credible headliner, a real headliner. KISS was becoming one of
those bands,
the type we had looked up to. We had graduated.

A curtain always shrouded the stage before we went on. It wasn’t the elaborate kabuki we have now, but there was always a curtain. In Dayton that night I opened it a little and peered out. The place was packed. The energy of the crowd was almost frightening. I felt a nervousness in the pit of my stomach—the same feeling you get as a rollercoaster makes the long, slow climb up the initial hill. That’s what Hara Arena felt like to me.

Then the next night when I asked the tour manager how we were doing, again he said, “Sold out.” And again the next night and the night after that—and all of a sudden we sold out everywhere. It was no longer an anomaly. KISS was a band selling out arenas every night. Once the floodgates opened, everything happened so fast. The pressure had been building up all this time, and then it exploded. There was no turning back.

Ads with two of my favorites—Rush and Bob Seger, 1975–1976.

And yet, I was just a kid. I was twenty-four years old and the depth of my comprehension was fairly limited. Yes, this was tremendous. Yes, it was unbelievable. Yes, this was how I had planned it and envisioned it. But as it started to happen, the success of the band was overwhelming. It was frightening.

The rollercoaster feeling I’d had at Hara Arena became a more or less constant sensation: I was being pulled up the big hill, knowing we were going to reach the top at any moment and then plunge down the other side, falling, screaming, with no control whatsoever. I could feel the momentum, the process of being pulled up the hill. I could tell we had reached a point of no return. All I could do was hold on real tight.

The problem was, What did I have to hold on to?

Nothing. I had no emotionally meaningful connections in my life.

God knew the guys in the band weren’t going to be any help. The world we operated in now was littered with casualties of fame. Drugs were offered as a sign of friendship. Every. Single. Day. People became self-destructive. People numbed themselves. People died. Because of my insecurities and self-doubt, I was scared I would fall prey to the same temptations. My sense of self-preservation kicked in.

I’m going to need something to hold on to
.

This thing was going to careen down the hill at any moment, whether I was prepared or not.