Face the Music: A Life Exposed (38 page)

The only times I’d ever played live with anyone outside of KISS was when I’d recently played in a fun little cover band for a few gigs at the China Club, a New York bar popular with musicians. The combo was put together more or less spontaneously just before the gigs we did, and there was a rotating cast of characters; the only constants were me and a bass player friend of mine named Bob Held. We basically cranked out Zeppelin and AC/DC tunes.

For my solo tour, I had no illusions of playing arenas—I just wanted a little creative space and the chance to play with different musicians. So I booked a string of club gigs and put together a band. Bob Kulick was my guitar player of choice—our studio work together over the years gave us some familiarity, and gave me full confidence that he could pull it off. Bob brought in the bass player, Dennis St. James, and I turned to a keyboard player named Gary Corbett—he sang, which was important, because I needed another voice for harmonies. As for drummers, two names came up as I searched. One was Greg Bisonette, who had played with David Lee Roth, and the other was Eric Singer. Dennis suggested Eric, and I also heard good things about him from other people. So I called him.

Eric Singer was recording in New York at the time in a band called Badlands with Jake E. Lee, who had just left Ozzy’s band. The studio they were working in was right around the corner from the office we’d set up to self-manage KISS. Eric came to the office and gave me some CDs of work he had done in Black Sabbath. He had also done all the demos for the Cult’s
Sonic Temple,
and had toured the year before with Gary Moore, the legendary Irish blues guitar player.

Eric seemed promising, so I asked him to come to a rehearsal studio and jam with the rest of the band members. It was hard for me to assess him, because with drummers it’s about more than just keeping the beat—they need to play in front of the beat, on it, or behind it in a way that’s sympathetic to everyone else’s playing, in this case mine. But even in that first session, he sounded terrific.

The band was assembled, and off we went, playing dates on both coasts.

I don’t think Gene cared about my solo tour at all. If anything, my decision to go out on my own probably made him feel better about what he was doing and not doing. Eric Carr, on the other hand, was forlorn about my doing something outside of KISS. He also seemed hurt that he couldn’t be in my solo band even after I had explained to him that the whole point, for me, was to do something different, on my own. “You’re the drummer in KISS,” I told him. “You can’t be my backup drummer.”

It was exciting—and liberating—to go onstage as myself. One night we played a very crowded gig in Brooklyn at a famous club called L’Amour, and a guy ran up onstage and tried to hug me. All of a sudden there was a huge ball of hair on the stage—the stage invader had ripped out some of my hair extensions. Everybody had hair extensions back then, and when one of mine got pulled out, it looked like a dead rat on the stage.

When the tour stopped in Manhattan for two gigs at the Ritz, Eric Carr came to one of the shows and sat in the balcony with his head resting on the railing through the entire show. Afterwards he came backstage and, out of left field, turned to Eric Singer and said, “You’re going to replace me.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“He’s going to replace me in KISS,” said Eric Carr, nodding at Eric Singer.

“Listen, Eric, you’re the drummer in KISS, and he’s the drummer in my solo band.”

Eric Carr was not a happy camper by the late eighties. He had started to drink more and may have been doing drugs as well, though I wasn’t sure. People tended to conceal drug use from me since they knew I was adamantly opposed to it. I don’t know whether Eric’s increased drinking exacerbated whatever he was going through, or whether the drinking was a result of his unhappiness. But he started to get erratic.

By the time KISS reconvened and began to tour our next album,
Hot in the Shade,
in late 1989, Eric Carr stopped talking to me entirely.

Hot in the Shade
hatched a hit single, “Forever,” that allowed us to go out on a major tour again. The video got into heavy rotation on MTV, and we put together a package tour, rotating in some young MTV-friendly bands like Faster Pussycat, Danger Danger, and Winger. One of the bands, Slaughter, had basically started as Vinnie Vincent’s backup band after we kicked him out of KISS. But they too had tired of Vinnie, left him, ditched the name Vinnie Vincent Invasion, and, lo and behold, became really successful once they were no longer with him. Their record label kept them and let Vinnie go.

Funny thing about “Forever”: because it was somewhat uncharacteristic for KISS, people pegged it as “a Michael Bolton song,” since he was co-credited as songwriter. Surely
I
couldn’t have written it. In fact, after an all too brief initial writing session at the Sunset Marquis, Michael had so little to do with it that once it became a hit he asked the KISS office to fax him over a copy of the lyrics. Only then did he start performing the song in concert—and introducing it as a song he wrote for KISS.

When our record label first heard “Forever,” it was the first time in a decade that an A&R man at our label actually weighed in with an opinion on one of our songs. He sat me down in his office and said I needed to re-edit it so it faded out on the chorus. That was song-arranging 101, and even though it could be effective in some cases, it wasn’t right for that song—the ending was one of the qualities that made “Forever” unique.

This desk expert pushed his opinion relentlessly, and with a tone that made it seem like more of a directive than a suggestion. I’d had enough. “I was doing this when you were in grade school,” I told him. “I was at this label before you were here, and I’ll be here after you’re gone. So thanks, but no thanks.”

That was the end of the meeting. “Forever” reached number eight on the Billboard singles chart, giving us our first top ten single in more than a decade. Not long after, that record company expert was replaced with the next one.

Also at the time of
Hot in the Shade,
we brought in my therapist, Dr. Jesse Hilsen, to run the KISS office and oversee the organization. I signed a formal release saying he was no longer my therapist and would not act further in that capacity. From then on, we rarely spoke about anything but business.

Outside of the band, eyebrows were raised about the wisdom and even ethics of my former psychiatrist working for me, given that earlier relationship. I understand that point of view, but when did KISS ever play by the rules? Our very success was built on ignoring the rules, writing our own rules, and sometimes throwing
those
out, too. Hilsen sought out unconventional people to align ourselves with in a business often plagued by inside deals and favors done at the artists’ expense. He brought in Bill Randolph, a Wall Street corporate attorney with no experience in entertainment law. For accounting, he again avoided the big specialized New York firms and instead found Aaron Van Duyne, a savvy certified public accountant with an office in New Jersey. Van Duyne had the knowledge and software to calculate the royalties due to songwriters and recording artists, but his lone music clients were Eddie Brigati and Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals. Both Bill and Aaron remain cornerstones of our team to this day, and their maverick approach and fierce dedication have built each of them a well-deserved broad roster of clients.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Hilsen. He left his wife and children around the time he joined the KISS office, and I began to hear talk of his avoiding settlements and child-support payments—accusations he vehemently denied to me. Eventually, the claims became more public, and a case was built against him. I watched as someone who had earlier in my life been a source of stability became increasingly secretive, evasive, and paranoid. It was hard to see this person whom I had known through so many of my personal changes vanish, first figuratively and then literally. Hilsen became a fugitive in 1994, and I never saw him again.

On July 3, 1990, we did a show in Springfield, Massachusetts, followed by a day off. Since Springfield is fairly close to New York, I decided to go home after the show and spend the off-day at my apartment. I hired a car to drive me there. On the highway, not far from New York, the driver tried to change lanes, and the limo got hit on the passenger side and went into a spin.

I wrapped my arms around the seat in front of me and pressed my head into it—we were spinning totally out of control, knocking over lampposts along the side of the road. Then the car slammed head-on into an embankment, and I flew over the front seat and under the dashboard. The car folded around me.

Somehow, the driver and I managed to wriggle out through the smashed windshield. When a state trooper arrived on the scene, he looked at the car, which was totaled, turned to me and said, “You were
in
that car?”

It was the middle of the night. I went home to bed.

The next morning I could barely move. I went to the hospital, where they x-rayed my body from head to foot. I was severely banged up, but I refused to stay there for observation and was helped home.

We had to cancel the next few shows. Yet nobody from the band called me.

When I returned to the tour, I woke up every day unable to turn my head or bend down. I still had such bad back spasms that I had to have a physical therapist loosen me up before each show. Even so, nobody from the band ever asked what had happened. Nobody ever asked how I was feeling.

Nobody ever mentioned it at all.

I was in a car crash, for god’s sake! You’re my bandmates!

I couldn’t understand it.

At the end of the tour I went straight into a studio in New York to fool around with some demos. Studios are like fortresses or casinos, with no windows and no clocks. Real life is shut out. Whatever studio I worked in always became my asylum; it kept me cloistered away from the world. One night, alone in the studio, it hit me.

It’s not that you need to be here. It’s that you have no place to go
.

I had no meaningful relationships, no real connections to the world. Not even within the band that had long served as my de facto family. I had the luxury of being able to go into a studio whenever I wanted. I also had the luxury of going into a studio as an alternative to having nothing else to do.

When I got a call about the possibility of producing a band on the West Coast, I quickly booked a flight. When I boarded the plane, I sat down, feeling fine, just like any other time I had ever flown. But all of a sudden my hands started shaking uncontrollably and my lips went numb.

I started gasping for air. I couldn’t breathe.

Am I having a heart attack?

I was terrified and had no idea what was happening to me. I jumped up, grabbed my things, and ran off the plane.

What just happened?

Once I calmed down, with the help of a Valium, I went straight to a doctor’s office. The doctor told me not to worry: it was just a panic attack.

I
always find it interesting when people watching talk shows think the guests on the show are telling the truth. They believe the host and the guest are having an actual conversation—like they would in their own home or at a coffee shop.

They’re performing!

Talk-show guests always have an agenda and know how they want to come across and what they are selling. That’s the case whenever you’re in front of the media, whether you’re faced with a camera lens or a microphone. When I was in bed with a dozen women being interviewed for the documentary
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,
it was no different.

Once KISS took off the makeup, I got to be the same guy I was onstage even without the greasepaint. I enjoyed having that line erased. And yet, even though the line had been erased, it wasn’t actually me. It may have been a little confusing—truth be told, I think some women were disappointed that I wasn’t like that guy onstage when I was behind closed doors with them. I could perform like that; I could act like that; I could be like that in bed—but it wasn’t real. Women were often thrown that they weren’t getting what they expected. In some ways, I was much more boring and uptight than they had hoped.

The scenario in
The Decline of Western Civilization
wasn’t totally unrealistic. It was having all the women there
at one time
that was unrealistic. Having that many wasn’t—it’s just they would be with me over the course of a week. But I wanted to take it to an absurd limit. I created that character, yes, but I also had a sense of humor about it.

I’m sure some people thought, “What an asshole.” But I thought it was funny. I was chuckling along with the viewers.

Look at him!

I was playing Superman. Still, as I approached my fortieth birthday, I began to think I needed to find someone, settle down, and have a family.

Playing Superman was well and good, but it seemed like my career, or how I was perceived, was a detriment to finding that person. Sometimes that led to situations where I felt I had to give a disclaimer—as if the life I lived necessitated an apology. I tried to tell some of the women I dated,
Hey, I’m not really like that
. Or,
I’m really a nice guy.
Or,
I’m really down to earth.
Those things would either prove themselves to be so, or not, but I felt the need to explain myself. That was a bad precedent for a relationship. People either got it or they didn’t.