Kiss and Make-Up (17 page)

Norman Seef, who had been a brain surgeon in Africa before he became a photographer, did the cover shoot for
Hotter Than Hell.
He was entirely competent and professional, but he was a guy who
believed that when you do a photo session, you have to create a certain ambience. He probably explained this philosophy to us on the phone, but before we went down to his studio, we didn’t know quite what to expect. When we got there, it was like stepping into another world. He had a number of girls, and they were walking around half naked with silver paint all over them. There were mirrors on the ceilings and pieces of furniture suspended from wires. The whole feel was very surreal, like
The Twilight Zone.
Everyone got drunk—except for me. Paul got so drunk that at the end of the shoot we had to carry him out and lock him in the backseat of our car, so he wouldn’t wander away. The photo shoot was also interesting because a few days earlier, Ace had decided to see how well and how fast he could drive his car down a winding Beverly Hills mountain. As it turned out, he couldn’t do it very well. He smashed up the car and his face. For the photo we had to superimpose the left side of his made-up face over the scarred right side.

The album was released in late October 1974. It was the second album we had put out that year, and after its release we went right back on the road. That meant more cities, more venues—and most of all, for me, more girls. By this time I understood exactly what I wanted out of the touring experience. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t using drugs. I could stay in the hotel and watch TV, and I did plenty of that, but I had my limits. When I had had my fill, there was only one more thing to do, and that was to go out and chase skirt.

I got a reputation for being indiscriminate, and I suppose it was earned—I didn’t have very specific tastes in women. If they were female and in my presence, I was interested. During that tour, though, I surprised even myself. In a conservative town in the deep south, we had a limo driver who must have been in her sixties. She was a full-figured gal in a chauffeur’s hat and uniform. I kept calling her Grandma, and she kept calling me Sonny. I must have been twenty-five, twenty-six maybe. The next day at about eight in the morning, there was a knock on the door.

“Who is it?”

“Open up, Sonny. It’s Grandma.”

“What time is it?”

“Eight
A.M.
”

“I thought we weren’t leaving until ten.”

“You’re not. Open the door, Sonny.” So she came in, and we were all over the floor, the bed, everywhere else in the room. And so help me God, in the limo on the way to the airport, the other guys in the band were looking at me because I must have smelled like a lobster. I wasn’t saying a word. And she turned around while she was driving and said, “Here’s my nineteen-year old daughter”—or granddaughter, I don’t remember which it was. “She’s coming into town, want to hook up?” Then the guys figured out what had happened, and they looked at me like I was crazy.

Another time we were playing in Atlanta, and there was a policewoman offstage while we were running through our sound check. Afterward she motioned to me with her finger. I walked over and said, “Officer, you know you can’t make me come with just one finger.” I was being cocky.

“Very funny,” she said. Then she asked me for my autograph. “It’s for my daughter,” she said. “She’s fascinated by your tongue. I don’t understand her tastes, but what am I going to do?”

“Who are you trying to fool?” I said. “It’s not your daughter. It’s you. You want to come and get it? I’m in room 190.” Naturally I didn’t expect anything. But later that night there was a knock on the door, and the woman was standing there in her full police outfit. When she walked in, it was like a scene from a movie. She took her hat off, and her long hair fell down. Then she unbuckled her belt and took off her gun. Then the scene faded to black. The next day we both came downstairs, and she was dressed like a policewoman again. The guys all lined up against the wall: it was as if someone had yelled “spread ’em.”

When I wasn’t chasing girls, I was trying to keep Ace and Peter out of trouble. It took some doing, especially in Ace’s case. Originally Peter and Ace had roomed together, but after a while they didn’t get along. Peter asked me if I would mind if he roomed with Paul and I roomed with Ace. It didn’t bother me. We were all in the same band. One night I was going down to the hotel bar to see if there were any girls for the taking. I asked Ace if he wanted to come
along. “No,” he said. “You go ahead. I’ll be down in a little while.” I went by myself, and of course there were girls, and I started talking to them. After a while, though, I started to wonder where Ace was. I called up to the room, and no one answered. Then I got a little worried. I got one of the hotel managers, and we went to the room and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Finally we smashed open the door. Ace was in the bathtub, passed out and slumped down, with the water rising. His mouth was just above the water. He would’ve died in a minute. He smelled like a pickled herring. We pulled him out of the water naked and put him to bed. I stayed up all night to make sure he didn’t roll over and fall to the ground, which he did anyway, or throw up and choke on his own vomit. By the next morning I was exhausted. Ace wasn’t—he bounded out of bed, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Hey,” he said, “I stayed in last night and went to bed early. What did you do?” He didn’t remember a single minute of the ordeal.

Despite our best efforts—and we were still growing as a touring band, both in confidence and in ability—
Hotter Than Hell
wasn’t a commercial success. The album barely made it into the top 100, and soon Neil Bogart was calling for yet another album. This time we came back to New York to record it. It was called
Dressed to Kill
, and Neil had decided that he would produce it with us, back in New York, at Electric Lady studios.

In the chair at the Georgette Klinger salon, getting ready for a
People
magazine spread in 1975.
(photo credit 7.3)

The objective for the third album was to push KISS to a higher level. For previous albums, Neil had boosted sales with novelty singles or television appearances. This time he wanted an anthem. He told us he wanted a song like Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher,” something that would get the whole audience involved, screaming, pumping their fists. Paul had an unfinished song he had been working on for months, and I had a piece of a song that I hadn’t finished either. We put the two together, and before we knew it, we had this new song, which eventually became “Rock and Roll All Nite.” The song was simple, which was very appealing, and it had a chorus vocal that was sung by a large group of people in the studio—not just the four band members but engineers, families of people from the record label, about twenty people in all. We felt the energy of it immediately—it was like those old Slade songs that we had liked when we were just starting out, but with this very accessible, middle-America feel. We had a feeling it was going to be big.

For the cover of
Dressed to Kill
, we used a photographer named Bob Gruen, who had earned some fame for taking pictures of John Lennon and had worked with dozens of other rock stars. The original idea was to have us in full makeup on the streets of New York, but Bob thought that it might be more interesting to put us in makeup and normal business clothes. We liked the idea, but there was only one problem—none of us had normal business clothes. So we borrowed suits from people, and they weren’t exactly perfect fits. If you look at the cover photo closely, you can see that my pant legs and jacket are a little too short and a little too tight.

Dressed to Kill
was released in March 1975, and the single of “Rock and Roll All Nite” went to radio a week later. It wasn’t the success we had hoped for. It didn’t do terribly—I think it peaked at number sixty-eight—but we had really thought that it might break us into a different level of radio play, and it didn’t. At the same time,
we were laying the groundwork for our next album. About a week after
Dressed to Kill
was released, we made plans to record some live shows. There was already talk of possibly putting out a live KISS album, because we still felt that we were a much more powerful band onstage than in the studio. We loved being on tour, and it showed.

I remember two sisters who showed up at my hotel room door in Indianapolis in early 1975, both of whom wanted to spend the night with me. The better-looking of the two was noticeably pregnant. Despite that, we all stripped naked, got into the shower, and became fast friends.

In another city after another show, I opened another hotel room door to find another lovely young lady. My guess was that she was eighteen. I always made it a point to ask the girls how old they were. It may not have been the most gentlemanly thing to ask, but my intentions were certainly honorable. She came in and quickly had her way with me, and I with her. Then there was another knock at the door, and I yelled for whoever it was to leave. My young lady friend said that I could answer the door, it was okay with her. When I opened the door, a woman was standing there, attractive and in her early forties, who identified herself as the mother of my companion. I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost, but the mother said there was no problem and asked me if it was okay for her to come in and join the fun. I looked over at my young lady friend, and she just giggled and nodded her head yes. Life was good.

In a midwestern city—I can’t say which, but it’s on a lake—a prominent radio promotion man invited KISS to be his guests at his home for dinner. We were told to go, because we needed radio support to sell records. The dinner was uneventful and quite boring—until the promo guy got up and started making a long speech. Sitting across from me was his beautiful wife. When she brushed her high heels against me under the table, initially I thought it was accidental and moved my leg away. I had already arranged for a guest to meet me at my hotel after dinner and had no intention of coming on to this man’s wife. She brushed up against me a second time and smiled suggestively. Then the promo guy took some of our guys on
a tour of his home, and his wife quickly took me by the hand and led me to the far end of the house into a bathroom. There she dropped to her knees without a word and showed me how fond she was of me.

Some of the memories are bittersweet. When KISS played Las Vegas for the first time, we had finished the concert and quickly made our way back to the Stardust Hotel. Standing in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, Peter nudged me and whispered, “Wow—look at that girl over there.” She was stunning: long blond hair, short tight miniskirt, and high heels. She smiled. I immediately reached out, grabbed her hand, and pulled her into the elevator with us. She came willingly. Neither of us said a word while the elevator went up to my floor. When we got inside my room, words didn’t seem necessary. We devoured each other.

Dressed to Kill
cover shoot, with Neil Bogart, at Electric Ladyland Studios in 1975.
(photo credit 7.4)