Kiss and Make-Up (10 page)

Around that time, in the middle of 1970, I met Paul Stanley. He wasn’t Paul Stanley yet, but Stanley Eisen, and he was circulating around the New York rock scene at the same time I was, trying to make a name for himself as a guitarist and a songwriter. He had even played in a band with Stephen Coronel. We were on parallel tracks, and for a long time we operated independently of each other: I was playing in bands as a bassist. I had picked up the bass when playing for the Long Island Sounds in high school. Everyone else wanted to play guitar, so I thought it would be a good idea to play something different, set myself off from the rest. I was trying to get gigs and write songs, and he was trying to do the same. Our parallel tracks even intersected, although we didn’t learn about it until much later. For example, at one point I came down from upstate because I needed to replace a guitarist for a band I had there, and I went to see Stephen Coronel in Washington Heights. There was another guy there named Stanley Eisen, and Steve told me that the two of them were putting together a band called Uncle Joe, with two guitar players and a drummer. At another point, after Wicked Lester was up and running, I placed an ad for a guitarist to play on some demo recordings. This same guy, Stanley Eisen, who would later become Paul Stanley, was one of the guitarists who answered that ad. I didn’t make the connection, though.

Finally, the two of us met. Brooke Ostrander, Tony Zarella, Stephen Coronel, and I were starting to rehearse, and Paul walked in. Paul came from a traditional middle-class Jewish background. His family also lived in Queens, where his father worked for a furniture company. And while we obviously had quite a bit in common, there were also some key differences. Paul’s parents were very well read, liberal, and assimilated, while my mother was cautious and not as well read. In some ways, Paul’s family was more like the
families of the cousins I stayed with when I came to the United States.

I’d like to say that Paul and I hit it off instantly, that a flash of inspiration passed between us, containing the seeds of what would eventually become the KISS empire. But the truth of the matter is that when we first met in upstate New York, Paul didn’t like me at all. He thought I was abrasive. I think it had something to do with the fact that after we shook hands, I looked him straight in the face and said, “Oh, so you write songs? Let’s hear them.” I certainly made no attempt to be confrontational. But he got that impression. He got this expression on his face, like
Who does this guy think he is?

Paul and I have known each other now for thirty years. He has been the brother I never had. So it’s somewhat difficult to remember that first meeting. But I can see how my manner may have been a bit off-putting; my enthusiasm sometimes comes off as a kind of arrogance. And I can see why he might have perceived me that way: I didn’t have a father, or a father figure, or a big brother, so the only one I was ever able to turn to for inspiration was myself—or, when I wasn’t able to generate it, to Superman, or King Kong. In a lot of ways I was delusional, and still am. I am one of those few guys who can look in a mirror and believe I am better looking than I actually am. This has always been the case. As a result of this delusional self-confidence, when I got dumped by girls, it meant nothing. I would think,
She doesn’t understand
, and go on to the next girl. Being relentless has its rewards. Every time I would succeed, I would think,
See, I’m right.

What accounts for this? Perhaps it’s because I was an only child. Perhaps it’s a result of my mother always being there and always saying the things that parents are supposed to say. She had survived so much hardship in the concentration camps that when she had me, she spent every minute of her time telling me the things that children should hear.
You can be anything you want to be. You’re better than everybody else. Don’t let the people outside get to you.
When my mother would answer the phone and I was in the bathroom, it was, “The king can’t come to the phone. He’s on the throne.” I guess you could say she spoiled me. While this was great for me, it wasn’t
always great for the people who met me. They didn’t know what to take with a grain of salt and a sense of humor.

As I quickly learned after Paul joined Wicked Lester, he wasn’t so different from me. Immediately, he started hanging out with the rest of us, trying to write songs and push us up the ladder of local bands. But there was some tension in the band, particularly between Paul and Steve. They didn’t get along, and I couldn’t understand why. One day at his house Steve turned around to Paul and said, “Who the hell do you think you are? Do you think you have some kind of aura around you?” And Paul said, “Yeah. I do think that I have an aura around me.”

So call it whatever you want: ego, aura. I think you have to have a screw loose to do this—to be in the rock star business. Look at nature. Animals duck or flinch when they hear a noise. It’s instinct. But there is always one animal that holds its ground and raises itself up to its full height. You see this with little dogs that bark at larger animals. Either this dog is out of its mind or it thinks it’s a much bigger dog than it is. You think the dog is crazy, but you also admire it for being fearless. If you think about it, any normal person would be scared to death getting up onstage and being scrutinized by an audience. But that never fazed me. And Paul too was driven toward this same goal: he has always been the kind of person who, though he is very intelligent, has to feel passionately about something or he doesn’t do it at all. He went to an arts magnet high school: he had to pass tests and show high achievement to be admitted. Then at college, after just a few months, he left. It wasn’t his thing. He loved rock and roll. Either of us alone might have made it, or might have cracked under the strain of all the disappointment and rejection. The two of us together, though, were unstoppable.

None of this is to say that success was quick in coming. It wasn’t. Our early gigs were nightmares: no crowds, no money. I remember one show at the Richmond College Armory. It was a dance, but nobody came. It rained nonstop and leaked through the roof. Paul caught the crabs from a dirty mattress on the floor. Another time we played a Jewish B’nai B’rith in New Jersey. We
rented a milk truck and had to drive for hours just to be incidental music in the background while all these Jewish American princesses walked around showing off their new dresses. All I knew was that we were getting paid $150 and having a chance to pick up some of these girls during our breaks. That wasn’t a great success, although I did manage to corner one girl, who started making out with me behind the curtains. But then Mom and Dad came and she had to leave. It was only five minutes, but I got a taste of her.

The early hardship produced at least one benefit: it made us focus on our songwriting, which we knew was the only thing that would advance us as a band. Wicked Lester was, by that point, an all-original band. That wasn’t so common then; most bands were still doing R&B hits and Beatles covers, with maybe the occasional original thrown in. When we played, audiences would get into the music and then ask us what song it was. “Who did that?” they would say. When we said we did, they couldn’t believe it.

Before he died, Jimi Hendrix built a studio named Electric Lady, named for his Electric Ladyland album. It was located in downtown New York, and it was one of the most advanced studios in the world, with state-of-the-art equipment and an A-list clientele. Out in Queens somewhere, Paul had met a guy who worked in the studio. His name was Ron, and he told Paul to call him up at the studio and let him know when our band was playing. Paul did, but the guy never returned his calls. Frustrated, Paul put in a more aggressive call, told the secretary that he had been calling Ron, and that if Ron didn’t call him back, his band was going to have to dissolve, and the blood would be on Ron’s hands. As it turned out, the Ron that was getting all these messages wasn’t the Ron that Paul had met at all, but rather Ron Johnson, who ran the studio. When we got him on the phone, we figured it was an opportunity we couldn’t miss. “We have this band,” we said, “and we’re really good, and you should come down and see.” He did, and he said that we had the most potential of any band he had seen, since Three Dog Night, which was a big deal at that time. At that point I was working at the Puerto
Rican Interagency Council by day and then going to work as a checkout guy at a deli on Fifteenth around Union Square.

Ron Johnson decided that he wanted to do some demos for Wicked Lester. But he wasn’t quite ready for us. Paul and I hung out in the studio and did some session work. We sang background vocals on an album by Lynn Christopher and other people who actually were making records. We did demo work and got some real hands-on experience: we learned how to work a microphone and a multitrack recorder and so on. After a few months, Ron Johnson made good on his promise and started recording Wicked Lester with the hopes of shopping a demo to record labels. He liked our songs. He liked our look. He believed in us. Despite our brief apprenticeship, we were completely oblivious to the process of making a record. We didn’t know a thing. We spent fifteen-hour sessions at the studio with barely any sleep, and at the same time we had to keep going to work or to school. But somehow we got through it. It’s a miracle that we did, because we made every mistake you could imagine. When you’re recording a song, you punch in the vocal track only so that you can lay down the vocal track without affecting the rest of the song. The engineer who was on duty that night instead pressed a button that recorded over everything—the drums, the guitars, the bass. After we finished with the vocal, he came and told us that we had to rerecord the whole song.

It was also our introduction to the soap opera of the music world. One of the other engineers on the session was married, but he was seeing a very exciting blonde on the side. She was always in the studio. One day the wife showed up, and she and the blonde proceeded to tear each other’s hair out. The poor engineer was in the middle, being pummeled by both sides. Everything was dramatic, bigger than life. Another time we were downstairs getting ready to record, and a stunning woman walked by. I went to talk to her, because I was always the advance scout, and convinced her to come up to the studio. Once we got there, she got right down to business. Before we knew it, she was servicing the entire band at once! This is something we had never seen except on sexy videos—mistresses and wives and catfighting and groupies crowding into the studio.

Paul and I never left the Electric Lady. During recording sessions, we would try to pinch our behinds tight so we could hold off the inevitable moment when we would have to run to the bathroom; we just wanted to look over the shoulder of the engineer and digest as much of the scene as we possibly could.

We finished the record, which had songs like “Molly,” “What Happened in the Darkness,” and “When the Bell Rings.” Ron started shopping it around, and pretty soon we got an offer from Epic Records. They liked what they heard, and they asked us to play at CBS Studios. We went down there, set up the amplifiers and the drums in the studio, and played the songs for them as best we could. Afterward the record execs put their heads together. Then one guy surfaced and told us, “Well, the band’s okay, but we don’t want the lead guitar player.” That was Stephen, my childhood friend. I was given the task of telling Stephen that he couldn’t be in the band. I think we had a sense that this was going to happen with Steve, but he couldn’t believe it. He felt betrayed. He wanted to know how I could do that to him, how I could let him be treated that way. It was difficult to explain, but I managed. This was one of my early lessons in the cruel division of the personal and the professional in the music business. Stephen and I remained friends after that, but it wasn’t quite the same. He reacted well to my being friendly, and my attempts were genuine. I told him that I had every intention of recording the songs that he and I had written, and I did: “She” and “Goin’ Blind” both appeared on the second KISS record. Steve has had good royalty payments from those compositions over the years. But the truth is that there’s no healing of a wound that runs as deep as that: you’re about to get to the finish line of a race you think you’re winning, and somebody pulls the rug out from under you. The decision wasn’t malicious. It really was survival. But it was one of those life-defining moments—he could have been in KISS, but it just wasn’t meant to be. He formed a band called Lover, and as KISS was growing, I would go and see him at these little clubs. The two of us would go to dinner. Those were always interesting dinners, because I liked him very much as a friend, but the undercurrent of wistfulness was very strong.

But you get it on both ends. After Steve was let go, there was a protracted period of waiting, during which time we decided to get another guitarist, a guy named Ronnie who was a talented session player. We got Metromedia Records to come down and see us at the studio. As we were getting ready to play, we started to set up around the stage, but Ronnie was still sitting in a chair. We were flabbergasted. “Get up,” we said. He said, “I’m a musician, I’m not a performer like you guys. You guys jump up and down—that’s circus stuff. I’m a musician.” Needless to say, he didn’t last long in the band.