Kiss and Make-Up (30 page)

The Elder
came at a strange time in the band’s history. For starters, we were no longer with Casablanca Records. Neil Bogart had been bought out by Polygram, and we went from recording for a label where we had a personal relationship with the president to recording
for a large entity called Polygram with an enormous staff. We felt lost.

Also I was starting to knock on Hollywood’s doors whenever I was in California. I had some ideas for movies and television shows. One was about a black cowboy called Gabriel who lived just before the Civil War. I came up with the idea that he was the bastard son of a plantation owner who had been forced to join the Union Army as a buffalo soldier. In the end he has to go down to the South and confront his plantation master, who was his father but also the man who raped his mother. I thought this might make a good movie, so I took it to Paramount Pictures.

When I say I took it to Paramount, I mean that I went to see Sherry Lansing, the head of the studio. I was never the kind of person to wait for managers and agents to arrange a meeting. I told Sherry the Gabriel story, and she said she would think about it. We became friendly. We found out that we’d both taught sixth grade and that we had similar ideas about things. I was attracted to her from the start, but although we went out from time to time, I never did anything about it.

From those initial meetings in Hollywood, I came up with the idea for
The Elder.
I wasn’t sure whether it would be a record or a movie. All I knew, at first, was a line that stuck in my mind: “When the earth was young they were already old.” I conceived of a race of immortal beings, energy-based beings, a take-off of Marvel’s Watcher. These beings were more observers than participants. They didn’t interfere with human choice, and as a result people were ultimately responsible for their own deeds, good and bad. The more I worked on it, the more I thought this would be a strong movie pitch.

When Bob Ezrin read my short story, he said, “Well, this is great. We should do a concept record about your short story.” Ezrin made this announcement to the band and said we were going to try to make all of our songs fit around this one central idea. We put all the songs in the pot and got busy rewriting some lyrics, and soon enough we had a rough story line. The work went quickly because we knew what we wanted: our own
Tommy.
This was the first KISS
project where someone—in this case, Bob Ezrin—talked the band members into the notion that credibility and respect from critics are as important as the love of the fans. As a result, it was a very serious record for us.

It was a bit surprising for Eric, I’m sure. When he first joined, the band was expecting to do a straight rock and roll record, so he was a little caught off-guard. He was not necessarily a big fan of the idea. Also, as much as Paul and I trusted Bob’s instincts and supported his idea, Ace opposed it. He was completely against it, to the point that he refused to show up yet again. He wouldn’t go up to Toronto and said he would phone in his solo. As it turned out, whenever Ace appears on that record, it’s as a result of that process. Copies of the twenty-four-track masters were flown to his home studio in Connecticut from Toronto. At home he put down a number of different solos, and then it was up to Bob, when it was flown back to Toronto, to figure out which solos to use—or whether, as happened in some cases, another guitar player should be brought in. A number of other guitar players played because Ace just didn’t show up.

Unfortunately all the work that went into
The Elder
seemed to be for nothing. We had a record that, for the first time, bombed so badly it didn’t even go gold. We truly were at a crossroads. We had cut our hair, though we still wore makeup. We had a new member in the band, Eric. And we were trying to figure out what to do in the wake of
The Elder
’s disappointing performance.

We weren’t going to tour with a record that didn’t sell, so we turned our attention to television and videos. We shot “A World Without Heroes,” which was cowritten by myself, Lou Reed, Paul, and Bob Ezrin and would later be covered on one of Cher’s records. We also shot a video of “I,” which would have the dubious distinction of charting in the top ten only in Italy. We did a whirlwind promo tour of Europe and made television appearances. We then went to Mexico City, where KISS was huge. On the way into the city, the limo was playing one of four different radio stations that had KISS radio programs, programs that did nothing but play KISS songs and interviews for four hours.

At the Mexico City hotel, we were feted by the Mexican record
company. We were given gold record awards and hosted the press in full KISS makeup. Ace took the opportunity to piss into a large bottle and put it next to other bottles of champagne. But, though it was a funny moment, it signaled what was about to happen.

When we returned to America, Ace wouldn’t return phone calls. We had arranged to be on the Eurovision television show shown throughout Europe to millions of people. Here was an opportunity to reach a lot of people and perhaps resurrect a dying record. We scheduled a live broadcast feed of us lip-synching to “I” from the stage of Studio 54 in New York. When the clock hit ten, we would be on. Live.

Ace never showed up. We sent limos and George Sewitt, our security guard, to Ace’s home. But on returning, he said Ace was close to comatose. The show had to go on. We performed without Ace and, for the first and last time, as a trio.

Polygram decided to release a greatest hits record in Europe only that was to be called
Killers.
We needed four new songs for it. So we got together with a producer named Michael Jackson whom Paul and I liked very much. He came from a different musical background but had some good ideas. He had produced Jesse Colin Young from the Youngbloods, one of my favorite bands. On meeting him, I strongly urged him to do something about his name. I mean, two Michael Jacksons just wouldn’t fly—I suggested Michael James Jackson, and he did change it to that.

The writing process started. It was clear things would be different. Ace was nowhere to be found. We would deal with that issue when and if we had to, but for now we had work to do.

KISS moved to Los Angeles, where Jackson was based. Paul and Eric rented places and I moved into Diana’s Beverly Hills home. I was completely distracted by Hollywood and movies, and my songwriting, as a consequence, suffered greatly. The four new songs were all written by Paul and cowriters. One of Paul’s songs needed a bridge, so I suggested a melody line he didn’t care for. I saved the melody and would later reuse it as the centerpiece of a song called “I Love It Loud.”

By 1981, I was spending more and more time in Hollywood. I
was approached by Marcy Carsey, a producer of shows like
The Cosby Show
and
Roseanne
, to try out for a show to be called
Grotus.
I would be the star. I shot a short pilot and everyone seemed to like it enough to get me in front of the ABC staff. There were ten people around a table and we chatted for five minutes. Then they offered me my own TV series. I was stunned.

I went outside with my business guy, who explained the deal to me. I would get $60,000 an episode. He told me if I left KISS, where I was making substantially more, I would in essence be paying for the privilege of being on television.

Aucoin and the band were not happy with me being on TV. This confirmed for them what they told me earlier—that I had gone Hollywood, the worst thing you could do back then. The band was in turmoil: Ace was miserable, Aucoin was slacking, Eric was disillusioned, and Paul felt betrayed by my interest in television. And my fans weren’t happy either. The press was having a field day talking about the Beast from KISS who was dating the Motown diva. The fans turned on me because of it. I had wanted to live my own life, and if this was the price I had to pay, so be it. But in the end I didn’t do the TV show; I stayed with the band.

Ace looking at the papers on tour.

Killers
went out in Europe, and the record company was happy that we were going to make some money for them. At the same time that
Killers
was being done, we started writing seriously for a new album that we imagined as a heavy record, a big guitar record, to get back to who we were. We knew that Eric was talented enough to be a kind of John Bonham figure and that in addition he could actually sing. As this heavy record got off the ground—we titled it
Creatures of the Night
—Michael James Jackson called in a guy from Canada who had had a disco hit. It was Bryan Adams and his partner Jim Vallence, and the three of us wrote “War Machine” and then “Rock and Roll Hell.” The material was strong. We were excited, the three of us. I say “the three of us” because Ace, once again, was nowhere to be found. He refused to come out to California. He never showed up, never played a single note on the record. When we spoke to him, he told us that he was working on his solo material. This was a clear signal that he wanted to leave the band; still, for some crazy reason, we worked hard to keep him within the band. At one point Paul drove up to Ace’s house to find out what was wrong. Ace launched into a long speech about how he needed a solo career. Paul, very reasonably, told him he could have both. Ace rejected the idea out of hand, and it became patently obvious that he was going to leave KISS.

In the face of his inevitable departure, we tried to move things along as smoothly as possible. We put his face on the cover and pretended that he played on the album, although he never appeared once. We were concerned that our fans wouldn’t be able to deal with the departures of two members in two records. It would be devastating to them and to their idea of us.

The search for a new guitarist started almost immediately. We used five or six different guitar players on
Creatures of the Night
, everybody from Rick Derringer to Vinnie Cusano, who would later become Vinnie Vincent and have a temporary place in the band. His performance should have been a shot across the bow for us—it was torture working with him. He didn’t like to be told what or how to
play. And from the outset, he did things like inviting us out to dinner and then, when the check came, announcing that he had forgotten his wallet. I didn’t mind paying, but why would you go and invite me to dinner and then make believe you don’t have your wallet? We thought he was wrong for the band. I kept telling him, “Look, you can’t be the guitar player. You’re too thin, you’re too small, and you just don’t look like you’re part of the band.” And he kept saying saying, “No, no, I belong, I belong.”

By 1982 things weren’t going well between the band and Bill Aucoin either. At the end of the day, the numbers we expected weren’t there. Bill, as it turned out, was a terrific idea guy, but he didn’t seem to know how to make the best use of the money. When you plan a tour, maybe you don’t need four security guards for the band. Maybe you just need two. And if every security guy is getting $1,500 a week, then if you cut out two guys, you’re saving $3,000 a week for, say, twenty weeks. Every dollar saved could be a dollar in our pockets. But these kinds of cost-cutting measures were not really his strong suit.

We weren’t the only unhappy band on earth. During that time Eddie Van Halen came down to the studio and played the beginnings of what would become “Jump” for us. I took him to lunch, and he told me how unhappy he was in Van Halen, how David Lee Roth was driving him nuts. He wanted to know whether I would consider taking him into KISS because he had heard we were looking for a lead guitarist. I didn’t think he was serious. We had lunch across from the Record Plant recording studios and I listened to him tell me his troubles. Vinnie Vincent was with us—Vinnie, at this point, was a contributing songwriter and lead guitarist on the
Creatures
record only.

We thought KISS with Eddie Van Halen on lead guitar was certainly an exciting idea, but if it came to pass, what would his makeup character be? We thought it better for KISS to find an unknown and for Eddie to go back to Van Halen. I tried to assure him it would work out. It did, for a time.