Makeup to Breakup (11 page)

We finally lined up a gig for August 10 in the ballroom of the Diplomat hotel in Manhattan, which, despite being a sleazy shithole, was a very cool place to play. So I was a little placated. The night of the show, Paul and Gene did something really nice for me. They rented a brown stretch Mercedes limo to take us to the show so I would feel like a star making
his entrance. They hoped that would change my mood. Well, it worked for a couple of minutes. But then everybody started loading into the limo. Instead of it just being the four of us, Lydia was in there, and the sound guy was in there, some friends pi);
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src: url(kindle:embed:000d ever led in, and then the roadies put some of our equipment in the trunk and squeezed in. Suddenly the limo had become a cab. I got furious.

“We’re going to pull up in front of the place and all these people are going to come out of the limo like it’s a circus car? That’s not cool.”

But when we got to the hotel entrance, the sidewalk was deserted! There was nobody there to make an entrance for.

Gene was promoting this show and had made the wise decision of putting us on in the middle slot, even though the bands that opened and closed were much more popular than we were at the time. A lot of people would leave before the last band went on to go someplace else, so it was a shrewd move. We were getting ready to go on, and I saw an older guy standing next to my sisters up front near the stage. He was getting ready to leave before we played, but he was intrigued that the girls next to him were wearing homemade KISS T-shirts, so he struck up a conversation with them—and my sister Donna Donna told this guy that we were the most incredible band in the world. So he decided to stay.

That gentleman was Bill Aucoin, and he went on to manage us into worldwide superstardom. Of course, we didn’t know that Bill was in the audience that night. Gene was relentless in sending out invitations to hundreds of people who were somehow connected to the music industry on the odd chance that one of them might come see us and decide to manage us.

That night Bill did come, and after the show he arranged to meet with Gene and Paul later that week. That day, I got a call from Gene while they were in Aucoin’s office.

“This guy is great, he should manage us,” Gene said. “He could get us a record deal.”

“He’s probably just another asshole who’s promising to make us rich and famous,” I said.

“No, no, he’s not what you think,” Gene said. He told me that Aucoin had a music show on TV called
Flipside.
I remembered seeing John Lennon
on that show once, so I thought that maybe this guy just might be legit.

“In fact, he says that if he can’t get us a record deal in six months, he’s out of here,” Gene said. He urged me to go meet Bill.

I drove my Vega into the city a few days later and met Bill at his office. I was in my wise-guy stance, not showing any emotion, but I was really impressed. Bill was incredibly nice, soft-spoken, meticulous, and very, very smart. I left that office knowing that this was it. I didn’t let on to the guys, I actually kind of gave them a hard time about it, but I was excited.

The following weeks only confirmed what a great decision we had made. Bill was a wonderful person. Unlike most of the people in the music industry, he was sensitive and sentimental. In fact, I had signed our contract with a pen that I had found in the gutter on the way over to his office, and he kept that pen and framed it! As we got to know Bill, we saw that he had an artistic sensibility. He was classy. He dressed immaculately. He really seemed like he was the guy who had the knowledge and the wherewithal to make us famous.

Bill’s first advice to us was that we should honor our previously made bookings at Coventry in Queens. Then we were instructed not to play anywhere else. He also told us that we were going to play a showcase at the end of the summer for a major player in music who was starting his own record label.

That man was Neil Bogatz, otherwise known as Neil Bogart. Neil was a Jewish kid from Brohe Barracudas” ayloklyn who was born to be in show business. He started out as an actor under the name Wayne Roberts, then had a hit record called “Bobby” as Neil Scott. When his career didn’t take off, he became a music executive and became known as the Bubblegum King when he was running Buddah Records. Bill had known him for a while and had inside information that Neil was leaving Buddah to start his own label, Casablanca, which would be distributed by Warner Bros.

So just weeks after signing with Bill, we were going to audition for Neil at a small dance studio in midtown. Bill had a partner named Joyce Biawitz, a very cute girl who was constantly bugging Neil to come see us. For days before the date, Bill and Joyce were hyping the audition, telling us how important it would be to our careers. We got all dressed up as if we
were going to play a club and set up our equipment in that little rehears my last name

W
e were in the middle of playing when Paul started scratching his
head. That was all Sean Delaney needed to see. He blew his whistle and stopped the rehearsal.

“You can’t look like a rock star and scratch your head,” Sean barked.

“But my head itches from the dye you used,” Paul pouted. “What am I supposed to do?”

Sean walked up to Paul.

“Make it brother, my uncle George,ouayt was into a move,” he said. And he took Paul’s guitar and put the strap over his shoulder.

“Throw the guitar behind you,” he demonstrated dramatically. “Then take both of your hands and just rip into your scalp like it was on fire. Then throw your hands up in the air and walk forward like some kind of beauty model.” Sean demonstrated, very accurately, a model walking the runway. And Paul’s first signature stage move was born.

Sean Delaney was, in my estimation, the fifth member of KISS. He was a tremendously talented creative force. He wrote great songs. He had a voice you could die for. He had flair and style. He was a great dancer. He knew theater. He had worked with Tennessee Williams. In his spare time, he was a transvestite. And he was our manager Bill Aucoin’s live-in lover.

We didn’t know that Bill was gay when we first met him. In those days, especially if you were on the business side of music, you had to stay in
the closet. But as soon as Bill became our manager, he brought Sean in to refine and expand upon our act. That’s putting it mildly.

Bill had met Sean at a bar in the East Village when Sean was putting together a gay band called Manhole. For some reason that project fell through, and all Sean was left with was the earrings in his nipples. The music world’s loss was our gain. He was perfect for us, a multitalented musician who knew how to create an image and put it across. He was way, way ahead of us at that point.

The first thing Sean did was convince us to dye our hair blue-black.

“You’re a band. All of you should have the same color hair. And blue-black will really pop against the white makeup,” Sean said.

He took all of us down to the apartment of one of his gay friends in the Village. One by one, he dyed our hair in the bathtub. When we were finished, the apartment was in shambles, but we felt great. We hit Eighth Street, and everybody was looking at us. Who had ever seen a band where all four guys’ hair color was exactly the same?

Sean wanted to dress us in gold and black, but gold changes color under lights, so we changed it to silver and black. And the black, of course, would be leather. We used to wear studded dog collars that we’d get from pet shops, but Sean marched us to the Pleasure Chest, an S&M clothing store in the Village that had a large gay clientele. That’s where we got heavy studded leather dog collars and bracelets and leather vests, studded leather cock pouches and chains.

Paul was chubby at that time, and Sean knew you couldn’t have a fat rock star, so he had the owner of the Pleasure Chest design a custom lace-up corset to squeeze Paul’s love handles in. Paul would put this leather contraption on and we would go behind it and pull the laces tight.

Then Sean began to work on our stage moves. He brought us to a loft in Chinatown where his old band used to practice. Paul put up the most resistance. The two of them fought for hours.

“I can’t move like that—I don’t look good,” Paul would say.

“Sure you do,” Sean would respond. “Pucker up your lips a little more. It’ll drive the girls wild.”

We had to block out elaborate choreography because Sean had made our platform shoes taller. They were now more than half a foot high and
the guys kept falling, so he taught them how to do parachute-landing falls—and when that didn’t work, he taught them how to make the falls look like part of the show and black-and-gold velvet jacket would ever how to surreptitiously pick each other up. At first we wanted Sean to bring in a professional choreographer, so he found a famous gay guy who worked on Broadway. The guy knew nothing, so Sean intervened. His moves blew the guy away.

We had come up with some great moves on our own, but the guys didn’t even realize they were doing them. Ace would be sideways with his legs spread apart, then Gene would come over and put his leg between Ace’s legs, and then Paul put himself at the back and they all gyrated together. Sean immediately saw that it was a dynamite move and he even named it, I think, calling it the KISS Swerve. Sean said it was a physical representation of a musically charged orgasm.

These moves weren’t just for aesthetics. Sometimes Ace would get so drunk, he’d pass out while he was doing a solo. Gene and Paul would see it happening and quickly jump over him and do a little move and, by the end, lift him up. It was hard for me to play and keep a straight face: I couldn’t believe what they were getting away with, making Ace’s passing out part of the act.

The sexual element of the stage show wasn’t lost on a writer from
Mandate
magazine, a gay magazine that gave us one of our first positive reviews. The guy said that Paul “bi-modulates bi-sexually” across the stage, and Paul was upset. But what did he expect? He used to do a move where he’d wear a red garter belt like a stripper and come up to the lip of the stage and stick his leg out. Everyone in the audience, both male and female, would grab at it. He loved it—he couldn’t wait for that moment.

Paul’s sexuality became a topic of speculation even for us guys in the band. Paul always loved to doodle. And he drew the best cocks in the universe: He could have gotten a job working at a gay porno magazine. He had the veins down, he had the balls just perfect. Ace would say, “You gotta suck a dick to draw a dick that good.” Gene would just sit there and not say anything but smile as if to say, “You think?”

Of course, one of the reasons that Paul drew such perfect penises was that he was surrounded by some great models to work from. We were
young crazy guys then, and Ace and I became famous for taking our dicks out at the drop of a hat. Then we’d grab each other’s dicks. It wasn’t sexual, just stupid adolescent tomfoolery.

Sometimes we did it to provoke Gene. We’d be putting our makeup on, I’d get a huge boner, and I’d pull my pants down and go over to Gene as he was applying his makeup and lay my boner on his shoulder. Then Ace would do the same thing on his other shoulder. Gene would scream and flip out and yell, “Get the fuck away from me!” But he dug the joke.

“Go over to Paul,” he’d say.

When we’d do that to Paul, he’d cringe.

Gene and Paul never whipped their dicks out. In fact, Gene had a thing about never getting naked in front of us. He’d never shower with us after a show. Paul didn’t care, but he wasn’t as exhibitionistic as Ace and I were. Maybe that’s because Paul and Gene came in a distant third and fourth place to Ace and me when we had a contest to see who had the biggest dick. Mine was the longest, Ace’s was the fattest, and then Paul and Gene were lagging far behind. They actually named my dick. They called it the Spoiler, presumably because once a woman had me, she’d be spoiled forever. Writing about this now as a sixty-six-year-old man, it all seems so stupid. What the fuck was I thinking? But we were young and it was fun and everybody enjoyed it at the time. as far as I was concerned., ed him

Ace and I were smart enough not to take our dicks out in front of Bill or Sean. Maybe because they might have videotaped them. One of Bill and Sean’s great innovations when we were practicing in that loft was to video our performances and play them back to us and critique us as if they were football coaches breaking down plays. Bill had done some television directing, and he was really into the visual aspects of the show. So Sean would set up two cameras on either side of us, we’d get onstage in full costume and makeup and rehearse for hours, and he’d video it. When we were finished, we’d watch the whole tape back and Sean would lecture us.

“Paul, you see when you do that? That’s fucked up. Don’t do that again. Don’t open your mouth there.” Or: “Peter, do you see when you do that with the sticks? I like that. Keep that in there.”

We’d eliminate anything that wasn’t cool and keep whatever was great.
It may have looked spontaneous, but every little move was planned in our band.

Sean understood and loved theatricality. We had just developed our stage characters with our makeup, but Sean made sure that we stayed in character throughout the whole show. Sean really worked with Gene to develop his whole demon persona. One time Gene stuck out his prodigious tongue at Sean to be obnoxious, and Sean claimed he had an epiphany right then and there. Gene should be a monster the whole show. So they worked on walking like a monster and not deviating from that character. Whenever Gene would break character, Sean would pull out his whistle, blow it, and stop the rehearsal. I didn’t get away with anything either. The same went for Paul and Ace. Sean didn’t need to do much to make sure that Ace consistently acted like a space cadet, though.

What’s scary is that the more we got into our roles and the makeup, the more we actually became our alter egos. Once we ditched the female eye shadow and eyeliner and lipstick and actually created these four characters with full-on theatrical makeup, we transformed into different entities. Gene morphed right into a demon. That little Hasidic boy was nowhere to be found when the Demon took over Gene’s brain. He would spit right into our roadies’ faces. Just plodding around on those platform shoes, which added to his natural height, he exuded menace. People would literally cringe in fear when he came near. Especially when he whipped out that tongue. His tongue was so long, there were rumors that he had had it cosmetically enhanced. With his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, he looked like some demonic lizard. Gene once told me that if he could leave his makeup on all the time and never leave that persona, he would do it.