Makeup to Breakup (10 page)

This guy proceeded to take his guitar out of his case and slide over to the amp. We were thinking, What the fuck is this guy going to do? We hadn’t talked to him yet, we didn’t even know his name, and the other guy was in the middle of his audition. But this new guy just plugged in to the amp and wham! He started playing over the other guy! We were all stunned. He just cut the other guy to pieces, he was so good. The first guy packed up his gear and left in tears, so we started to jam with the interloper. He was fantastic.

After a while, we stopped and talked. He told us his name was Ace and he was from the Bronx but he really was an alien from a planet named Jandel. I was loving this guy. I’d never talked to anyone like him. He had the balls to literally move a competitor out of the fucking way to play because he knew that guy was a piece of shit and he wasn’t. That, to me, was a winning fucking attitude.

After he left, the three of us talked. Their main concern was that we couldn’t have a Chinese guy in the band. Because brother, my uncle George, would ever we were creating a certain
look with our makeup, we felt that all the band members had to be white. Earlier we had auditioned a great guitar player but he was black, so he didn’t get hired. But I maintained that Ace wasn’t Chinese, he was Mongolian.

“This is the guy,” I said. “He’s from another fucking planet, he even says he is.”

But they were still hesitant.

“I know we’re looking for Jimmy Page, but we ain’t finding him. This guy’s got it,” I urged.

We talked about Ace for days, and then we finally called him back in. We started jamming, and the sound that was happening was like nothing I’d ever heard in my life. We all knew Ace was the guy.

With Ace in the band, we were a lot more balanced. It turned out that he wasn’t even Asian: He was of German descent. He was the black sheep of his family, running with a gang in the Bronx called the Ducky Boys. Being from Brooklyn, I didn’t know how badass a gang that specialized in using slingshots could be. But at least he had a semblance of being a street kid, and I found that we had a lot in common. He was fun to be with, he had a great sense of humor, and he loved to party. I never met a guy who loved beer as much as Ace did, and he could drink a ton of it. He just loved to get a buzz on and tell jokes in his weird high-pitched voice.

Maybe all that booze contributed to Ace’s offbeat beliefs. He was convinced that extraterrestrials had colonized this planet and he was one of them. In fact, he was working on a radio to communicate with his home planet—as least that’s what he told us. He believed in ghosts, karma, and lucky numbers that totaled twenty-seven.

He also had a gigantic ego. Perhaps his belief that he was an alien gift to this planet made him think that he was above doing manual labor, but I just think he was fucking lazy. When we started playing around town, he would come up with any kind of excuse to get around loading out the equipment. He’d move his amp a few feet and then say, “Curly, I can’t work, I sprained my arm.” Or, “Curly, I have a problem breathing. I feel dizzy.” Everyone was Curly to Ace. Most guitar players are prima donnas: They just want to walk up, plug in, and play. But Ace took it to new levels.

He wasn’t lazy, however, when it came to beating his meat. Every
chance he got, he’d jerk off. We would be loading out and Ace would be standing in the corner because it was too cold and he didn’t want to hurt his hands. So he kept them warm by pulling out his huge dick and whacking off.

One time we were driving away from a gig in our converted milk truck. Paul would stand up behind the wheel and drive. Gene would sit shotgun, and Ace and I would be in the back with all equipment. We were all shivering in our coats and all of a sudden, we heard the familiar sound of slapping. We looked back and Ace was sitting on one of the amps, jerking off.

The only time Ace had a legitimate reason not to load the equipment was when we were storing our gear in Gene’s mother’s basement in Queens. For a time, we kept our equipment there, but Gene’s mother wouldn’t let Ace and me into the house because we were gentiles. Maybe it was because we were not only gentiles, but part German too. She wouldn’t even let Paul into the house because he was German Jewish. Rain, snow, sleet, storm, it didn’t matter, we couldn’t enter those portals. We had to stand in the cold or the rain and hand the equipment to Gene, who then had to schlep it all downstairs. Ace would always give?” she asked” ayl Gene shit about it, too.

Now that we had our full lineup, we had two more things to do: come up with a name and start playing gigs. One night Paul and Gene and I were driving to the loft and trying to come up with a name for the group. We wanted it to be sexual and hard yet also convey the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. “Let’s call the band Fuck,” I said as a joke. Okay, that was the bottom line. But how do you get to that point? I mentioned that I had been in a band called Lips.

Suddenly Paul said, “Kiss.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I fumed. “That’s a terrible pansy name.”

I looked at Gene, and the wheels seemed to be turning in his head. He knew me like a book.

“Well, Peter, there
is
the kiss of death.”

Hmm. He had me there with the whole Mafia thing. How could a street guy not like the Kiss of Death?

So we started breaking it down. Before you get in her pants, you gotta
kiss her. Warm her up to get to second base. Good kissing makes for good laying. It’s sexual, it’s cool, let’s go with it, we thought.

When Ace came in a week later with his sketch for a KISS logo, the name was confirmed in heaven. Ace is a great artist, and his KISS rendition, with the last two letters as lightning bolts, was totally bitching. And contrary to some people’s opinions (and later the opinion of the government of Germany), the S’s didn’t symbolize the Nazi SS. Despite the fact that Ace would get drunk and run around in a full SS uniform, complete with a monocle, and scream, “You vill die! Give me your papers! I vill kill your family,” those were lightning bolts from space. Then Paul refined the logo, made the K a little straighter, and we had a name and a logo.

Now it was time to play. At the end of January 1973, we booked ourselves in a little rock club in Queens called Popcorn (the name was later changed to Coventry). Of course we had no following then, so the audience, all four of them, was Lydia, Gene’s girlfriend Jan, her friend, and a friend of Ace’s. But we played our asses off. We played like the place was packed, and afterward I realized that this band was
the
band. I was so proud of the guys. We were all drenched in sweat, and we had given the performance of our lives for four people.

Over the next few months we played a lot at a little club in Amityville on Long Island called the Daisy. We had gotten a few write-ups, and they were uniformly negative, but we didn’t give a shit. I actually liked the fact that we were so obnoxious and crazy that people hated us, although it did bug me a little because I thought we were absolutely dynamite.

When we first started at the Daisy, we drew a sparse crowd. But for some reason Sid, the owner, kept bringing us back, and by the fourth time we were pulling up to the club in our milk van and there were a few people waiting outside to get in, and inside the place was crowded. We knew we were on the right track. The club itself was a dump, and we changed into our costumes in the owner’s office, which was barely bigger than a closet. We hadn’t formulated our characters by then: We were just experimenting with different makeup and costumes. I wore a long-sleeved spidery black shirt with studs going down the chest, black studded cutoffs that my mom had sewn, and a scarf. I bought a couple of pairs of light-green Hush Puppies and brought them home and my mother soaked them in glue and
poured silver sparkle over them and they were as far as I was concerned.at when my stage shoes. The other guys improvised as well, trying to keep to our silver-and-black motif.

One night we were about to go on, but before we left the office, I said, “Let’s go out and make believe it’s Madison Square Garden and we’re going to rock the house, because we’re the greatest!” I said that because I knew deep in my bones that one day we would play the Garden. And that became our mantra. No matter what toilet we were playing, we’d say, “Let’s go out like it’s Madison Square Garden.” And there was no stopping four guys who had that incredibly positive energy.

Gene would jump into the audience and grab people at random and make them clap their hands to the music. That took some major balls. He’d go up to huge, scary-looking guys and force them to clap. I was convinced he was going to get floored one night because what he did was so humiliating. But it never happened. And after every show, I was ecstatic.

At the time, we were managing ourselves. When we had a gig coming up, Gene would print up some pamphlets at work and then we would divide up the city and put them up wherever people could see them. We were a band of brothers, all thinking the same way, all pulling in the same direction. What was great about us then was that we were so open-minded. You want to wear nylons? Sure, no problem. You want to put on greasepaint? Fine. You’re going to wear a dress? Great. Anything we had to do to make it, we all were willing to do.

Now we had to work on our images. Androgyny was really big then, with guys like Bowie and even my friend Jerry’s band, the New York Dolls. So at first we just dressed in drag and wore women’s makeup. That was a disaster. Gene looked like an old drag queen in a blond wig and lipstick. Ace looked just like Shirley MacLaine. Paul was a little chunky then, so he looked like some hooker working the corner of Bowery and Delancey. I was a skinny little bastard, so I could get away with dressing in women’s clothes, but in the end we weren’t as cute as the Dolls. In fact, we all looked like bad transvestites. That’s when we realized that we had to come up with something no one else had.

The KISS epiphany happened the night we went to Madison Square Garden to see Alice Cooper play. Alice and his band came on, and Ace and Paul ran all the way to the front of the stage like groupies. Gene and
I sat in our chairs in the back, but we were all equally impressed by Alice. It was amazing theater. Alice was in full makeup, and the kids in the audience were freaking out over this guy who came out with a huge snake and got hung onstage. The four of us got together after the concert, and it all started coming to us. We wanted the Beatles’ wit, the same type of fun paired with a high level of creativity, too. But we wanted to be tougher than the Beatles—more like the Stones, but not quite the Stones. We had been battling to be more gangish in a way, a tougher, almost biker don’t-fuck-with-us attitude. After that concert, I forgot who said it, but someone said, “What if we have four Alice Coopers?” Alice was the star attraction and the only one in makeup in his band. But what if the whole band wore makeup, and each guy’s makeup expressed some aspect of his persona?

So Alice inspired us to go from the garish drag makeup the Dolls used to more theatrical Kabuki-type makeup. Little by little, we’d start bringing shoe polish, whiteface, and other makeup elements to the rehearsals. Now we were using the makeup to each develop a unique character. Gene loved horror films, so he became the Demon, evil incarnate. Paulie was always a star, so he had to be the Starchild. Ace was definitely a space cadet, hence the Spaceman.);
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My Catman character came to me one night. I was designing one of my stage costumes at home. I was sketching it out and smoking a joint and then I just kind of zoned out and started staring at my wife’s black cat, who was named Mateus. I realized that we both shared a lot of personality traits. We were both wild, independent, aggressive, powerful—yet also soft, gentle, warm, and comforting at the same time. I loved cats. I found them to be the most mystical, mysterious animals on the planet. They either loved you or scratched your eyes out. And like me, they had nine lives. So becoming a cat was a no-brainer for me. I brought the idea back to the guys, and they loved it.

By March of 1973 it was time to do a demo tape. Through Gene and Paul’s connections we were going to record at Electric Lady, which was really exciting for me, but better still, Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s old producer, was going to be behind the board. That was really heavy for me. He was known for the great sound he got from drums and guitars on
his records. I couldn’t sleep the night before the sessions, I was so excited to get to work. We recorded three songs in one day: “Strutter,” “Deuce,” and a song called “Black Diamond.” By the time we were ready to tackle “Black Diamond,” Eddie had already heard me singing harmonies on the other tracks and I think he dug my raspy voice.

“Black Diamond” was a song Paul wrote, and he sang the first take. Eddie was behind the board listening to the playback and I said, “Man, I could sing the shit out of that song.”

“Really?” he said in his thick British accent. “Well, go ahead, mate, go give it a crack.”

I went into the studio and belted it out. “Out on the street for a living . . .” I killed it. Eddie loved it.

“Why don’t we have Peter sing this? This song was made for him,” he said.

“That sounded pretty good,” Paul admitted.

I put everything I ever had into that song because I had waited so long for that magical moment at Electric Lady. So I finally had a lead vocal all to myself.

When I got home that night, I played the demo tape twenty-four hours a day for weeks, I was so proud of it. I brought it to my mom, who was always my most trusted critic with my music.

“Baby, this is it. This is your break,” she said. “This band has it.”

Everything seemed to be falling into place. We had a hot demo; we were gigging in the region. But we needed management to help get us a record deal. By the summer of 1973, I was getting antsy again. I was still playing on the weekends with Infiniti, doing covers, and they were getting more gigs than KISS was. So I started complaining again. I’d been up and down the New York City music roads, and except for Ace, who had once played the Purple Onion, the other guys didn’t have any of that experience.