Makeup to Breakup (16 page)

Around the same time, people started coming backstage with their sick kids in wheelchairs. These kids would be dying of cancer or other diseases and their parents somehow thought that we were superheroes and we could cure. Later she would tell mes” them by laying hands on them. So we’d hug them and sign autographs and pose for pictures. The next time we hit town they’d show up again, but one or two of them would be missing—they didn’t make it. It would break my heart. I would go into the bathroom and cry my fucking eyes out. Eventually I told Bill, “You’ve got to stop this. I’m not God. It’s much too draining for me to do this.”

Just being on the road constantly took its toll. I couldn’t handle the constant moving around and the loneliness. So one way to combat that was to destroy shit. It’s a rock ’n’ roll cliché, but it’s true. We started out doing simple stuff, like attaching hundreds of feet of cable to our room TVs and throwing them off the roof of the Continental Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip in L.A.

Our techs had a lot of tools with them on the road and we put them to good use. One time Ace and I were next door to each other and we wanted to be able to go back and forth between rooms, so we took a sledgehammer and broke through the wall and created our own connecting door.

At one point I got so crazy on the road that I thought I was a Green Beret and that people were out to get me, so I started wearing camouflage outfits and carrying a cool sawed-off BB shotgun. We were at the Peach Tree hotel in Atlanta with those huge curved glass windows. I was shooting all kinds of stuff around the room with my BBs, but then I shot at the window and the whole thing exploded. It was like a bomb had gone off in the room. They actually had to close the floor down.

To top me, I guess, Ace brought a crossbow on tour. Around that time I began to make a game out of stealing huge paintings from the hotel
lobby. I’d wait for the manager or the desk clerks to walk away and then one of the crew guys and I would heist the painting, rush it out of the lobby, and throw it into one of our trucks. Ace didn’t even bother stealing the artwork. He’d walk through the lobby, pull out an arrow, and shoot it right through the paintings on the wall. He got so out of control with that crossbow, eventually we had to take it away from him.

It was always fun to bust Chris Lendt’s balls. One time we were staying in a hotel with a beautiful golf course behind it. Ace and I got drunk with Eddie Balandas, one of our bodyguards, and we decided to fuck with Chris. So we broke into his rental car, released the brake, and rolled it down the hill onto the golf course. That sucker destroyed greens, knocked down trees, did every kind of damage that could be done to a golf course. That night we stayed in the room and laughed all night long. When the sun came out, the cops found the car, saw that it had been rented to a Chris Lendt, and we had to pay the damages.

Eventually we got such a bad rep that Chris was forced to put down a $10,000 deposit against any damages that we might incur. A lot of that was because of the shit that Ace and I and Eddie would pull. We had heard legendary stories of Keith Moon’s pranks and we were striving to top him. We began by simply flooding the toilets and sinks so that the water would cascade down to the lower floors. Then we graduated to cherry bombs and M-80s. Eddie somehow figured out how to hook them up so that you could light the fuse and throw them down the toilet. He’d rig up three cherry bombs with extra long fuses, and by the time we got to our car, they had exploded, destroyed the pipes, and flooded the hotel.

Our all-time greatest prank was pulled on Gene. I came up with the idea and enlisted the whole band, even Bill. The idea was to have Fritz—who was then serving as my drum tech and whom Gene always tormented—get dressed up in one of Gene’s old co hours a dayd ever stumes and makeup. Near the end of our last number, I was going to switch places with Fritz and I’d wait backstage as Fritz took up the drumming. It could work because Fritz was a good drummer and he knew all our songs. Plus Fritz would be sixty feet in the air, and through all the fireworks, Gene would never realize that it was Fritz in his costume.

So near the end of “Black Diamond,” we made the switch. Fritz threw
in an extra beat and Gene looked up at the drums and just stared at Fritz with his mouth open. It was like he saw his doppelgänger. I was backstage, pissing my pants. Gene then looked away and shook his head as if to say, “Did I just see that?” Then he looked over to Paul and Ace, and they both looked noncommittal. When Gene looked back up at Fritz, I told Fritz to start giving him the tongue move. Now Gene was flipping out. Meanwhile, Ace and Paul were playing like there was nothing wrong. We ended the song and Gene looked up at Fritz one last time, dropped his bass, and almost fell off the stage. They had to catch him. Then I rushed up and put my arm around him.

“Great fucking show, man,” I smiled.

We took our bows and Gene was still in total shock.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” he said. “I saw myself on the drums.”

“How can that be?” I said innocently. “I was up there.”

“I have to talk to Gui about this,” he said, and got into the limo with Bill.

We were playing in Providence, so they had a long ride back to the city. About halfway home, Gene was so freaked out that Bill had to spill the beans and tell Gene about the prank. I don’t think Gene spoke to anybody for a week.

On September 25 we began recording
Rock and Roll Over,
our follow-up to
Destroyer,
at the Nanuet Star Theater in Rockland County, an old theater that had been shuttered. I had gone on an all-night coke binge the night before so for the first time in my career I missed a session, which didn’t go down well with everyone else.

Eddie Kramer was back producing, and I told him that we should record my drums in the upstairs bathroom to get a better sound. We could put a video feed up there so I could communicate with the control room. Of course, having a camera up there was going to interfere with me doing lines, so whenever I wanted to do a bump, I moved the camera away and pretended we were having technical difficulties. Then I’d shake it, and miraculously it would work again.

I sang two songs on the album. One night, Paul played “Hard Luck Woman” for me when we were standing around the pool table on a break.

“I love that fucking song,” I said. “I’d do anything to sing that.”

“Well, I was thinking of Rod Stewart,” Paul said.

“Fuck Rod,” I fumed. “Don’t I have a raspy voice? Come on.”

Paul gave me the song, but while I was recording it he stood in the studio next to Kramer from the beginning to the end, constantly talking to me over the intercom. “No, more raspy.” “Speed it up there.” I wanted to stab him in the forehead with a knife. Toward the end of the song, I broke away from Paul’s direction and did some free-flowing soul stuff, and I think that’s the best part of the song.

I must have done something right. The song was released as our into the” ayl first single off that album, and it went to number fifteen. Years later, Garth Brooks covered it.

Gene and Paul let me contribute one song to the album. But even then, they fucked around with it. My original version of “Baby Driver,” a song I had written with Stan Penridge, was very cool. But these pricks had to go in and change it around. I never fucked with their original songs. They were like two gestapo agents, always exerting their will. Later they even had the balls to say that they rearranged the song but didn’t take credit for it so that the fans would think that everybody in the band was as creative as everybody else.

With the album completed, we got ready to go back out on the road, naturally. But first we flew out to L.A. to tape Paul Lynde’s Halloween TV special. My mother was thrilled. Paul Lynde was her favorite comedian. My mother loved gay people, and she thought he was the funniest. We were a little out of place on the show, with guests like Margaret Hamilton, Tim Conway, Florence Henderson, Betty White, and Donny and Marie Osmond, but it should have been a wake-up call. We were rapidly leaving the rock ’n’ roll rebel label behind us and winding up as Hollywood pablum.

We were back on the road by the end of November, a tour that would last until April of 1977. There’s just no way to overstate what a bizarre circus a KISS tour was. We were staying at a fancy hotel in Ontario once when Billy Miller, one of our road managers, got a dispatch on his walkie-talkie from Big John, one of our security guys.

“Ace is small,” Big John said.

That was the road crew’s code for Ace is drunk. It seemed that Ace got
smashed and was convinced that tiny green men had entered his brain and made him small.

They put Ace to bed, but a few minutes later they heard a German shepherd barking its head off. Then there was the sound of glass breaking. By then everyone on the floor had woken up. Suddenly, Ace’s door flew open and Ace ran out of his room in his underwear screaming, “He’s getting me! He’s shooting me!” It turned out that Ace had put on a sound-effects record before he had passed out, and when the guns started firing, he thought they were real.

Does this sound like a madhouse or what? We were all crazy in our own way, but that didn’t stop our juggernaut. From 1976 to 1978 we made more than $17 million from record sales alone, and more than $7 million from touring, not counting merchandise.

Suddenly we were getting awards, too. In 1976 and 1977 I won the
Circus
magazine Drummer of the Year award. The first year I gave my award to Lydia. The next year Belushi got it. But the award that was dearest to my heart was the People’s Choice Award for “Beth.” Of course, we were touring at the time, but the guys let Lydia fly out to L.A. and accept it for us on the telecast. They had hooked up a satellite link to where we were, and even though we knew we had won, Bill told us to act surprised. After we waved at the camera, Lydia was brought onstage in L.A. and she picked up the actual hardware.

Halfway into the tour we finally realized our long-sought-after dream. On February 17, 1977, we played the mecca of our dreams, Madison Square Garden. As soon as I got the tour schedule, I called my mother to tell her that we were going to be at MSG. The day of the show, all four of us were scared shitless. It hit us when we walked backstage and saw all those photos of Sinatra and Ali. This was the world’s greatest arena. I think I threw up twice before the show. Paul was climbing the walls. You could cut the energy with a knife. Bill was try into the” ayling to keep people away from our dressing rooms. He was a nervous wreck, too.

Part of the reason we were nervous was that the sound sucked at the Garden. We were disappointed at sound check because the room was so dead. It wasn’t made for concerts—you either get nothing back, or the sound bounced off that back wall and came right back at you. And the
Teamsters were a nightmare. My crew hated them. You couldn’t even take a pen up on that stage, they had to carry it up for you. My drum tech told me that it was taking them hours to set up because they’d carry one cymbal at a time. Who’s going to tell the Teamsters what the fuck to do, though?

Before the show, I put one single red rose in each of the other guys’ rooms, from me to them. The note said, LET’S HAVE A GREAT SHOW. I LOVE YOU, PETER. Right before we put on our makeup, I went to see Gene.

“We’re going out to play the Garden,” I said.

“Son of a bitch, man, you said it so many times,” he chuckled.

When I got up behind the drums, I scanned the audience and I found my folks. We started to play and tears were streaming down my mom’s face. Even my dad was all teared up. This was the one thing that I wanted more than anything else in the world—to be on that stage and see my mom and dad watch me play. I started bawling and my makeup started to run down the sides of my face.

It’s funny: No matter what age you reach, you’re always still trying to please your parents. We never had money, but they let me pursue my dream. This was something I could give back to them, to make them feel that all that sacrifice was worth it. My mother was always so proud of me. She would actually go up to Gene after a show and say, “You know if my son leaves the band, there will be no band. He makes the band great. Without a great drummer, there’s no great band.”

Gene would say, “I guess you’re right, Mrs. Criscuola,” but he’d look like he wanted to choke her. But Bill would always take it up for her.

“You are absolutely right, Mrs. Criscuola,” he’d tell her. “Your son is the heartbeat of the band.” Then he’d give her a hug.

Three days after the Garden show, we came back down to reality. We were finishing our show at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island when it was time for me to levitate. By then we were using a scissors lift to get me up. Those things were not balanced, so sure enough the platform tilted to the left and half of my drums were hanging off it.

“We just played the Garden, and now we look like idiots,” I fumed afterward. I was pissed. That night I went to Ashley’s to chill and I hung out with Boz Scaggs until closing time. I got home at daybreak, drunk and
wired, and I wanted to have sex with Lydia but she refused. So I grabbed the keys and stormed out of the house and went to the garage down the street where I kept my Camaro. The attendant brought me my car and then turned around to take care of other business. I was so fucked up that I got into the car and accidentally floored it and smashed into the wall of the garage. Then I put it into reverse and floored it again and hit the rear wall. I kept repeating this until the car caught on fire. Lucky for me, one of my neighbors was getting his car and he pulled me out. By then the attendant had called the cops. I was sitting on a bench with my nose broken, bleeding profusely, and I hadn’t even left the garage yet. Somehow I was conscious enough to tell the attendant to call Bill and have him to rush over to the garage. Bill Starkey and Jay Evans, would ever

The cop arrived just before Bill.

“Peter Criss from KISS!” the cop said. “What the hell did you do?”

He looked into the car with his flashlight and hhat Ace picked