Kiss and Make-Up (29 page)

Everywhere we went with Eric, he was just like that. He was
never malicious. He worked hard. He showed up on time. He was a complete professional. But there was constant comedy, because he was so inexperienced and trusting. At one of the airports in Europe, he showed up in a camouflage outfit with an ammunition belt around him. All the bullets were hollow, but it wasn’t immediately apparent, and at any rate it wasn’t the kind of thing you brought to an airport. So of course some of the machine-gun-toting security guards at the airport took him off to the side. That’s how much they didn’t trust him. They thought he was wearing a wig because his hair was so big. “What’s under there?” they asked. I mean they really went from top to bottom. He even had an anal inspection. He was protesting all the way: “What are you talking about? I’m from White Plains.” While Peter had complained constantly, Eric was more than fun to have around. He was terrific.

After Europe we went to Australia. At that point we were the biggest thing the Australians had ever seen. One in every fourteen people in that country had bought a KISS record. We played multiple dates in soccer stadiums when nobody else had ever played stadiums there. The first band to ever play stadiums anywhere in the world was the Beatles, at Shea Stadium. People don’t realize that before then bands just didn’t get to be that big. But when we played Down Under, we were on the cover of every newspaper. On one cover the headline even said,
KISS BOOTS.
This was the most trivial story imaginable: we had sent out our platform heels to get fixed at a boot store. Well, somehow the proprietor wound up being on the cover of the newspaper. There were terrorist attacks and wars were being fought, but on the cover there was nothing but the band:
KISS ARMY INVADES AUSTRALIA.
We couldn’t go anywhere. We were trapped on the top floor of our hotel. Helicopters with zoom lenses were trying to get photos of us without makeup, because there was a price on our heads. America had gone nuts for KISS in 1974. Japan had taken it to the next level in 1977. But Australia in 1981 was like nothing we had ever seen. Anything we wanted was ours.

The effect of all this hysteria was that we couldn’t go anywhere. This might have been torture, but the Australian promoter,
bless him, rented out entire clubs and filled them with girls. They were the top-notch models in the country, and they kept us busy.

At these parties Ace would get blitzed. An Aussie press man became one of Ace’s drinking buddies, and at one of the parties, while everyone was sitting around talking, Ace and the gentleman started making out. I don’t really believe that Ace pitched for the other team, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. It was clear, however, after he got enough alcohol into his system, all bets were off. He would lose his inhibitions and think nothing of kissing and making out with men. Ace and Peter would think nothing of kissing each other. I think this was an infatuation, on both their parts, with the
Godfather
culture that had become very popular with them, a sort of “we know the right people” attitude, proof that they shared a bond, with Peter being Italian and Ace always threatening to call the right people to do his dirty work if he wasn’t treated well.

During one of those lavish private parties on the Australian tour, Eric became fascinated by one girl in the club. He was wearing a camouflage outfit again, and everyone else was dressed for nightlife—the guys in leather jackets and frilly shirts, and the girls in very little—except for this one girl, who looked like a female version of Eric in a women’s camouflage outfit. She was very beautiful, and very shapely, but Eric didn’t want to go over, so I arranged for the girl to come over and talk to him, and the two of them really hit it off. He was in the process of convincing her to come back to the hotel, and she kind of laughed and said, “Look, I can’t go back with you. I’m married.” Eric backed off immediately. I was amazed. “What’s the problem?” I said. “If you want her to come, just invite her, and then it’s up to her. Whether she’s married or not, it’s her choice.” So he told her where we were going to be next: Melbourne, I think. And wouldn’t you know it—she decided to come to see him. She got on a plane and flew to meet us.

Most guys would have been thrilled, but Eric was so nervous that by the end of the day he had horrible gas pains. He had to go to the bathroom every five minutes. And it wasn’t the kind of gas you could get rid of silently. They were all of the
1812 Overture
variety. Needless to say, the girl didn’t hang out for long. It was always like
that with Eric. Something would always happen to him. On another tour a few years later, when we were on the road in America touring for
Creatures of the Night
, Eric wrote a long letter in response to a girl who had written him. Eric was always very emotional, and it wasn’t unusual for him to reply to a fan letter with a five-or-ten-page handwritten answer. After he replied to one letter, he ended up having something of a friendship with this girl from Phoenix.

When we got to Phoenix on the tour, Eric told me me about the girl. He couldn’t wait to see her. After our sound check Eric left, and I noticed a stunning girl in a red dress standing at the back of the empty hall. She had on makeup, perfume, the whole thing. As was my custom, I brought her into my office, which was the backstage bathroom, and threw her on the floor. We had an exchange, shall we say. We became very close friends in a number of positions, and there was a photo session afterward. There always was. Then she happily left.

Later that evening, as we were putting on our makeup, I told Eric about my liaison. He wasn’t really listening; he was still preoccupied with his Phoenix girl. So we started talking about that, and I happened to ask him how he would know her, since they had never met. “Well,” he said, “she told me she’d be wearing a red dress.” As he was telling me what she looked like, the horror of it dawned on me. I showed him the photos from that afternoon’s meet-and-greet and asked, “Is this her?” Well, he was devastated. I apologized. I told him I didn’t know. And that wasn’t even the end of it. That night back at the hotel the two of them met, and he was very upset with her. They fought, and he threw her out, and she came down the hall for a second visit with me.

I’m sure when Ace woke up the next day he didn’t remember any of this.

I didn’t want Eric to be upset with me—not over this or over anything else. I tried to give him the lay of the land and told him that he couldn’t take any of this seriously. For me, it was about fun and games: if you go to a beauty pageant and there are four girls there, do you really care who you wind up with? But since it was all so new to him it really affected him.

The Unmasked tour had been a turbulent one for the band. Diana had decided to fly over so we could spend some time together during the first part of the tour, when we were in London. It became very difficult even to go to a restaurant. There were paparazzi constantly prowling around, trying to get photos of us together and me without my makeup. To make matters worse, the band and Bill Aucoin had a meeting and decided to confront me about “going Hollywood.” They said, and rightfully so, that because my relationship with Diana and, before that, with Cher were so public, it changed the fans’ perspective of KISS. We had always been outsiders who never fraternized with other celebrities, and now there I was actually having relationships with these women. It just wasn’t rock and roll, I was told.

Bill Aucoin with Elton John.

All this inner turmoil in the band wasn’t helping Ace’s mental well-being. Aucoin no longer seemed to have the spark of leadership. Eric was simply happy to be there and hardly ever voiced an opinion. I was not the favorite guy in the band at that time. After the tour, we retreated to our separate homes and spent time away from each other. I came back to New York to a new dynamic that would unfold before my eyes.

Diana and I were not together most of the time. And one day Cher called and told me she had been offered an acting part in a Broadway play called
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
, to be directed by Robert Altman, and could she stay at my place. I said yes without hesitation. If we were no longer lovers, we were certainly still friends.

In hindsight, this was probably unfair to Diana. Although we each had condos on Fifth Avenue only five blocks from each other, I’d be with Diana in the daytime and sometimes keep Cher company at night. She was venturing into a new area in her life as an actress and felt unsure of herself. She needed me and I was happy to be there for her. Though Diana and Cher had been friends before, it was clear that their friendship could no longer continue.

But this too would pass, and Diana and I grew closer. She was recording new material for what would become her first non-Motown record, and KISS was about to enter the studio to record a kind of record we had never done before: a concept album called
The Elder.

While Eric was such a positive force Ace was going deeper and deeper into seclusion. Although he liked Eric very much, he
couldn’t really hang out with him because Eric wouldn’t get high. So more and more Ace went off to Las Vegas with his friends and gambled and drank and drove his fast cars too fast.

We decided we needed Bob Ezrin back in our lives, because he was the guy who had delivered
Destroyer
, probably our best studio album. We contacted him, and he decided he wanted to work on a new record with us. Bob decided that we should move up to Toronto and cut the record there. We started rehearsing in Ace’s home studio in Connecticut, but almost immediately there were problems, the first being that Ace had no intention of leaving Connecticut for Toronto. Also, Ezrin made it clear to Ace that his material was not going to wind up on the album, or at least not very much of it, because it wasn’t impressing him. And Bob himself was having some substance problems. It was a very unhealthy situation for all of us, and it was unfortunate, because this was the first record that Eric Carr was going to play on.

Initially at least, the material for this new album, which ended up being called
The Elder
, was promising. Eric showed us that he was leagues beyond Peter by teaching himself how to play guitar and cowriting a song I helped him with called “Under the Rose.” He became a real contributing member of the band, even to the point of dealing with the facts of KISS life. For example, I had written a song called “I”—one of whose lines was “I don’t need to get wasted; it only holds me down / ’Cause I got a will of my own and the guts to stand alone.” The chorus went, “Because I believe in me.” That had always been my philosophy, so I decided to write a song about it. I was excited about recording “I,” but Ezrin didn’t feel that Eric’s drumming was cutting it on that song, and he brought in a session player. With Peter, that would have resulted in major drama. Eric, though he wasn’t happy about it, dealt with it.