Kiss and Make-Up (14 page)

“We had it,” I said. “Yesterday. You were there.”

“Yeah,” he would say. “But I didn’t understand anything you were saying.”

In this respect, Bill was more like me and Paul. I didn’t realize it immediately, but Bill was gay. Paul knew it from the start. I didn’t see it. Paul asked me if I minded having a gay manager—I said, “No. Why do you ask?” I was oblivious to it. Bill’s appearance and style were clearly suited for the corporate world. He dressed in suits and ties and presented himself well. He would show up with a beautiful blonde every now and then. He was not, for lack of a better word, a queen. Over time I got the sense that something else might have been happening in his life. At any rate, it wasn’t something I minded or have ever minded. He did the work he needed to do. He focused on the band. That was all that mattered. We also met Joyce Biawitz, who would comanage us with Bill. She would later marry Neil Bogart. She was a powerhouse.

From a KISS photo shoot in the early 1970s.
(photo credit 6.1)

Once we had Bill’s attention and Sean’s help, we went from nothing—playing our Friday the Thirteenth show at the Diplomat Hotel—to a record deal in about three weeks. This is where Neil Bogart entered the picture.

Neil Bogart had been born Neil Bogatz and grew up as a poor Jewish kid in a rough section of Brooklyn. He had always wanted to be in show business, and after attending the High School of the Performing Arts—that’s the school in the movie
Fame
—he worked as a singer on a cruise ship and had some odd jobs as an actor. Eventually he came back to New York and went to work for an employment agency. Soon he was in the record business, first at MGM Records as a promo man, then at Cameo-Parkway, then at Buddah. He was still a young kid at this time, about twenty-five years old. At Buddah he started the careers of bubblegum bands like the Ohio Express, who recorded “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy.” In 1973, with the help of Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., Neil started his own label.

When Bill heard about this, he sent our demo tape over to Neil immediately. Kenny Kerner and Ritchie Wise, a popular production team who had worked on big rock and roll records—“Brother Louie” by Stories and “Imagination” by Gladys Knight and the Pips, among others—heard the tape and told him they would love to produce KISS. As a result of their enthusiasm and his own, Neil signed us without ever having seen us. Bill kept explaining to him that he had to see the band live, that the stage show was an integral part of our act, so finally Neil arranged for us to play in front of him at LaTang Studios, at Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue.

It was a small room, with about twenty people, and we came
out wearing makeup and played at maximum level. We blew out everybody’s ears. It was an absolutely ferocious performance, and at one point I jumped off the stage and ran up to Neil and forced his two hands to clap together. He must have been scared out of his mind, because with the heels on, I was close to seven feet tall, and he was about five-seven. And by the end of it he was so overwhelmed that he was exhausted. He had two concerns: first, that the makeup was going to get in the way of the band’s success. He thought the glam thing was over. More specifically, he worried that we were projecting a gay vibe, particularly Paul. We talked to him for a while and explained our vision of the band, which was to go beyond glam to something else. As far as the gay thing went, our feeling was that we dressed the way we felt inside, and the gay vibe wasn’t really part of that. In a strange way, our greatest asset was the fact that we took our look seriously. Superman wore tights and a cape, and no one ever questioned his sexuality because he didn’t see his costume as campy or funny—it was just what superheroes wore. This explanation seemed to satisfy Neil.

Afterward, we were talking to him about his new label. “It’s going to be called Emerald City,” he said. I told him I didn’t like it and that he should change it. There I was, a guy who had never recorded, telling the new label president that I didn’t like the name of his company. He was taken aback. “You don’t?”

“No,” I said. “I’m in a rock band. It sounds like
The Wizard of Oz.
”

“No,” he said, “it’s about magic.”

“But when I think of the Emerald City, I think of a girl, of Judy Garland going down the Yellow Brick Road.” He ended up changing the name to Casablanca.

Neil came from a hit singles background and, more specifically, from a show-business mentality. He wasn’t qualified to make musical decisions—for all intents and purposes, he might have been tone deaf—and he was never a pure music guy. But he was a concept guy, and his influence on our career was tremendous. Someone else would have wanted singles from every KISS album, and that would have been correct according to the prevailing business models. But
what we did (and by so doing arguably became one of the biggest bands of all time—right behind the Beatles for gold albums by a group, yet without a number-one single or album in our entire career) was to go steady. The
Billboard
chart is an indication of what a record did in only one week. A band can come in and have the number-one record, and then it’s gone the next week. Neil pushed us for product. He made us go back into the studio and record albums to keep our name in stores, of course. He pressured us for hit singles, of course. But he also let us find our own pace, and we turned out to be marathoners. The guy who runs the fastest is not the guy who wins the race. It’s the guy who keeps the steady pace.

If our career was in good hands with Neil, our act was in excellent hands with Bill Aucoin. We rehearsed downtown at a rat-infested loft that Bill provided for us. He was very forward-thinking. He had been a television director and producer, with his
Flipside
show. Now he and Sean Delaney set us up with a video camera so we could see ourselves performing. Initially we resisted. It sounded stupid—why would we want to do that? But it was eye-opening. We actually saw ourselves and thought,
Wow. We look cool.
I remember sitting there afterward in stunned silence with the rest of the guys and really feeling the effect. The other thing Bill did was to put Sean Delaney with us as a kind of coach. This happened very early on: we would do our stage act, and he would stand off to the side, stopping us at certain points. I don’t recall whether he served as a choreographer or just observed us and told us what was working. But we had open lines of communication, and when he made a suggestion, he could show us exactly what he meant on the tape. We could see our act coming together and our poise growing by leaps and bounds. We knew we were part of something special.

How did we know? From seeing other bands, and realizing how much better we could be. Paul and I went to see other bands in concert, not as casual fans but as students. If a band came out with a certain kind of lighting or built a certain kind of set, we would file that away in our minds and make a note to do better. At one point,
we went to see the Who. They were touring behind
Quadrophenia
, and we went down to Philadelphia to see the show. Lynyrd Skynyrd was opening, and throughout their set the audience was talking and milling around. Then the Who came out, and the entire crowd got to their feet and started pumping their fists in the air. Paul and I got up too, but it was mostly out of respect for what they had done. The truth was that we brazenly thought we could do better. We knew we could. The bands that struck us as having something special weren’t necessarily the most popular bands. In fact, the one we kept returning to was Slade, the British glam rockers who had hits with “Cum on Feel the Noize” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now.” We liked the way they connected with the crowd, and the way they wrote anthems. But we knew they would never make it in America, because they were just too British. In fact, the lead singer, Noddy Holder, was Welsh, and it was hard to understand anything he was saying. We wanted that same energy, that same irresistible simplicity. But we wanted it American-style.

The first KISS album was recorded in September 1973 at Bell Sound Studios, which was on Fifty-fourth and Broadway, in a not entirely reputable part of New York City. The studio was seedy and dirty, although it was easy to get to from the subway. Although Bell Sound had perfectly good equipment—it was a twenty-four-track recording studio—its feel was totally different from Electric Lady’s. That was a connoisseur’s studio, built by Jimi Hendrix and treasured by professional musicians. Bell Sound was a commercial endeavor, and many different kinds of recording were going on there all the time.

We got right to work. Paul and I were especially interested in paying attention to the process, learning how a record was created. Our producers, Ritchie Wise and Kenny Kerner, worked with us on the first two records, and they were great teachers: efficient, professional, without any illusions about what we were doing, which was trying to capture the energy of a live show on a vinyl disk. If there were any difficulties, I don’t remember them, because I was so impressed that we were actually making a record. In fact, the
strangest thing about that time was the change in my workday. I was accustomed to going to work at
Vogue
, or at the Puerto Rican Interagency Council, as a straphanger—I would wake up at six or seven and come into the city by subway. As soon as we started recording, I was able to sleep until eleven, wake up and have a leisurely lunch, and then head into the studio. Of course, I wasn’t coming back until late at night, but it felt like I was suspended in time.

The studio work went quickly. KISS worked then the way KISS has always worked: the rhythm tracks went down first, and then later on we added vocals. The songs that we brought into that session included some reworked material from the Wicked Lester period, as well as some new compositions. Over time that first album has really held up well, mainly because the songs were so strong: “Firehouse,” “Strutter,” “Deuce,” “Cold Gin,” and “Black Diamond,” amazingly, are all products of the same recording sessions.

Paul putting on his Starchild makeup.
(photo credit 6.2)