Makeup to Breakup (30 page)

We ordered lunch and began catching up.

“We think you should sing at the convention,” Gene said. “We’ll have a great time. And we’re actually rehearsing in an hour right around the corner. Why don’t you come over?”

Okay, so they wanted to test me. I went along with it. We got to the hall and I said hello to Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer, the latest replacements for Ace and me. Immediately Gene told me that the whole idea of me singing was Eric’s. I didn’t say anything, but I knew it was bullshit. Eric might have come up with the idea, but knowing them they put it in his head. They’re trying to make this schlep look like a hero. Eric started sucking my ass and telling me how much he liked the way I sang, especially on “Hard Luck Woman.”

“You want to sing it now?” Gene said.

“No, I forgot the lyrics,” I lied.

“We have them right here,” one of them said, and sure enough there was a music stand with the lyrics set up on it. They were going all out to see if I could still sing. I had been singing that song with Criss, so I sang the shit out of it and they were blown away.

I drove back thinking, What the fuck was that all about? Then I called Tall Man. “Watch out, Captain, they got a trap for you,” he said. “You’re going into uncharted territory and those are fucking Vulcans, man.”

“I’m well aware of that, Number One,” I answered.

We went to the Hilton the day of the convention and it was mobbed because word had gotten out that I was going to be there. I knew that Jenilee didn’t understand the extent of my fame, so the minute we arrived in that limo and were met by bodyguards and screaming fans trying to get at me, she was literally in shock. We went up to our room and Paulie came up and introduced me to his then-wife Pam and their newborn baby. The baby was beautiful.

“Wow, you got a kid. Whoever would have thought,” I said. It looked like Paul had settled down. He was a family man now, and I liked it. And Gene was now with Shannon Tweed and they had a couple of kids, so I got a good family vibe off this whole thing. Yeah, right.

I went down and peeked out from behind the curtains and the place was packed. I heard Paul address the crowd. “Remember earlier we were saying that without the four original guys, we would never be here today? We were talking about Peter and Ace. Well, I thought it might be something special, something you really deserve. You deserve this and it’s gonna be a kick for us. We told Peter to come out and sing a couple of songs with us.” And he started a “Pe-ter!” chant. And he goes, “Peter Criss!” and the place exploded. They were crazier than my audiences on the road. I wanted to scoop them,” Ace said. “Gigied him up and take them all down to the Sandbox. They never sat down.

When I walked up on that stage and the whole place went absolutely crazy, I felt so good. I looked at Jenilee standing off to the side and she looked so proud of me. I felt like a million bucks, and I just wanted to sing the best I ever did. Gene and Paul probably thought that I would be doing it to impress them, but I was really doing it for my kid.

I hugged Paul and Bruce and then sat down next to Gene to share his microphone.

“You know, originally Peter just wanted to come by and be with you and us. It was actually Eric Singer who said, ‘Why don’t we get together and play?’” Gene had to get that bullshit in. We went into “Hard Luck Woman” and the place went crazy. I couldn’t believe that my daughter was standing to the side seeing all these people screaming for me. It was a real golden moment. We finished the song and I high-fived everyone. I looked over at Gene and he was smiling from ear to ear. I could hear the cash register in his head going
Ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching.

“You wanna hear more? What do you wanna hear?” Gene said. There were a million requests, but we went into “Nothing to Lose.” We did a killer version, and then I waved good-bye to the crowd. Paul ran up and put a leather motorcycle jacket on my shoulders. They were selling it there. On the back it said
KISS ARMY
, and there was a logo of a hand giving the finger. Paul wrapping the jacket around me and giving me a big hug, it just felt like the whole thing was scripted. They knew exactly what they were doing. They always did.

Backstage everyone was hugging me, and Jenilee was blown away. Later I took some questions from the audience and managed to plug my
upcoming tour with Ace. Then I went back upstairs and said good-bye to everyone. It had been a special day.

I was about to get together with Ace again. George Sewitt, our old road manager, was now managing Ace and had gotten in touch with us to persuade us to join up with Ace for a tour of Canada. He wanted to call it the Bad Boys Tour, but I wasn’t really a bad boy anymore. Still, it meant playing at bigger venues and making more money, so I agreed to do it.

We had trouble right off the bat. Ace refused to open for us, so we went on first. But then we were supposed to come back on after three songs and do three songs together. That first night, Ace was on the sixth song and they hadn’t called us up. Tall Man went ballistic on Sewitt’s ass. He was screaming at Sewitt and I was standing behind him smiling and saying, “Look what you get, George.” From then on, we came on after Ace’s third song and did “Hard Luck Woman,” “Strange Ways,” and then ended with “Rock and Roll All Nite.” I hated that idea. Why were we doing Gene and Paul’s fucking song? We were that hard up for applause? But Sewitt was smart. Eighty percent of Ace’s set was KISS songs. That’s what the audience was really there for. We did all originals, so we didn’t get the same response.

For the most part, we were playing much better venues. But we did one show in Oklahoma where only ten people showed up. Ace played for three hours that night, almost twenty minutes for each person in the audience.

It was great to be back on the same stage with Ace again, after we’d been through so much together, but I got scared because he seemed to be getting worse with his antics of drinking and drugging. Ace could get away with anything because his band idolized him the way mine idolized me. The a nice chunk of change,b” ayis audience never knew it, but his roadies would fill up a six-pack of Coke cans with rum and he’d get drunk every night onstage. By the time we did our encores, he could barely see me.

Over the years that Ace and I were touring, both apart and together, we had heard that Gene and Paul would often send spies down to our shows to report back on how we were doing. Sometimes they would actually tell us that Gene and Paul had sent them. I figured they were just interested in seeing if Ace and I were still fucked up so they could gloat. But I think they were really planning a reunion years ahead of our actual reunion.

Why shouldn’t they? KISS wasn’t exactly on a roll after Ace and I left the group. Between 1979 and 1982, KISS record sales dropped 75 percent. When Gene started dating Hollywood stars, he began thinking he should be a movie star, too. Of course, he wasn’t a handsome man, so there was no way he was going to be a leading man. He wound up doing a couple of movies where he was cast as the heavy. You had to strap his fucking head down to contain his ego. He wasn’t the sweet Gene, and even the Monster was gone. He just became an egotistical Hollywood madman. He started managing Yvonne De Carlo and he told me that he fucked her. A sixty-three-year-old woman. Then he started a record company, and that failed. He founded a company to book bands, and that failed. Yet in his mind he was the World’s Greatest Entrepreneur.

The years that Ace and I were out of the band were easily KISS’s leanest years. David, their hairdresser, later told me it got so bad that one night they played for five hundred people! Paul would joke, “Why don’t we order two pizzas for the audience?”

When they took off their makeup, Gene was totally lost. They became a hair band, and one thing that hair bands had was young, good-looking guys in them. These guys weren’t young anymore. Gene just didn’t know how to behave onstage without the Demon persona. Like an old fighter, Gene never shook the habit of stalking the stage, but now when he would stick his tongue out, people would just laugh. It was sad, like watching Godzilla die. Then he started wearing loud, androgynous clothes, but he looked like a football player in a tutu.

Paul was delighted, though. He could come out with pink feathers around his neck. He’d wear skintight pants and orange wristbands and he’d have all these bangles going up his arms in every fucking color in the world. He looked like an old drag queen.

By 1983 KISS fell millions into debt with their record company. They had to sell off land that they owned in Cincinnati. By 1988 they decided to scapegoat Howard Marks and Carl Glickman and they fired them along with Chris Lendt. Eventually they hired Dr. Jesse Hilsen, Paul’s shrink, to manage the group. He was a real doozy. Paul Marshall, our lawyer, said that Hilsen used to call up the business office and threaten to let Paul go crazy unless he got paid. Now Hilsen was in charge. He rented a penthouse
suite and hired a full staff and began spending money left and right. He didn’t last long before he fled the country.

In a way, I was glad they were going through such hard times. I wanted them to learn a life lesson—that they were not the geniuses who created this band, that the success didn’t flow only from them but also from me and Ace and Bill and Sean and Chris and all those people who were now gone or fired. If they were so smart, why had they hired a charlatan psychiatrist to run their business affairs?

Gene and Paul invited both Ace and me to do a convention stop in New York City. Neither of us could do it, but then George Sewitt told ,” Ace said. “igd ever us that KISS was offered a chance to do
MTV Unplugged,
and they wanted us to do a few songs together. Ace and I immediately told George to tell them to fuck off, but George was persistent.

“This is fucking huge. I don’t know if you two guys understand,” he told us. “You guys haven’t been together in seventeen years. You’ve got to do this, it’s going to help the tour, it’s going to help record sales.”

Lynn and I flew first-class to New York. I went to rehearsal the next day to make sure my DW drums were set up properly, and the first thing I saw were cameras everywhere. They were documenting everything on video without Ace’s and my permission. I walked in and Gene went, “Hey, Peter Criscuola likes Coca-Cola. How you doing?” Then Paul and Eric came over and everyone was hugging and kissing and everything was love and peace and all that bullshit. Of course, Ace came in an hour late. “Aceleh, Aceleh, Aceleh!” they said, and now Ace was getting the love treatment. The whole thing was weird. It just seemed like something underhanded was going on.

Each day the rehearsals got harder, especially for Ace. It took Kulick hours to teach him how to play “Beth” on an acoustic. But we got through them. Come the day of the show we all got nervous, especially Ace. But he wasn’t drinking because he didn’t want to fuck this up and have to deal with Gene and Paul’s wrath. When we got to the studio, there were hundreds of kids lined up around the block.

They did the bulk of the show with their current members. Then Kulick and Singer left the stage.

“We’re going to do something special. We got some members of the family here tonight, and we’re not talking about Mom and Dad. We’re
talking about Peter Criss and Ace Frehley,” Paul announced. We walked on to a tumultuous ovation. I swear it was like walking onto the Garden stage again, it was like that old feeling never went away. The energy in the room was just insane. And it was historic, too. This was the first time the original band played together without makeup.

“I don’t think anybody expected this, did they?” Ace said.

“Oh, it was a secret,” Paul said. “Let’s see, what could we play?”

“How about something from a couple of old friends of mine, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards?” Ace suggested, and we launched into “2,000 Man.” The audience went wild. Then they set up a chair for me up front and I came off the drums and sat between Gene and Paul. Gene started tweaking my ear playfully.

“This is the sensitive stuff,” Paul said, and we did “Beth.” Ace had mastered the song on acoustic and we sounded dynamite. I looked over at Gene and he had that
ca-ching
gleam in his eyes again. He could just smell that money.

Then Paul said, “We’re bringing everybody out,” and when Bruce and Eric came back on, a large portion of the audience started booing them.

“C’mon,” Ace admonished the crowd. “They’re part of the family too.”

Frankly, I was astonished. Those guys had been in the band longer than me and Ace, and they’re booing them? But the people had spoken. They didn’t want them to come back because it was the original band again. We all did “Nothing to Lose” and then finished with “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

Years later, Gene wro,” Ace said. “Caed himte about that night in his own book. “Bruce and Eric were kind throughout. In fact, they were so accommodating that they planted the seeds for what would become their worst nightmare. Their kindness enabled Ace and Peter to step in and unfortunately push them out of a job.”

What total bullshit! Yeah, the control freak was going to let an emotionally shaky guy—which is how he characterized me—and a drunk push two great musicians out of the way? All of a sudden, it was out of his control? Who does he think he’s fooling? As soon as the KISS Army booed Eric and Bruce, Gene realound us a funk

O
nce I got the whiteface on, it was smooth sailing. Then I did the
outlining and the powdering, a little more coloring, and one eye was done. Next I worked on the nose. It was getting weirder and weirder. I got the black down and added the metallic silver and finally got to the whiskers. Then I finished with the ruby-red lipstick, added some green over my eyes, and sat back and looked into the mirror.

“Holy shit, I haven’t seen you in seventeen years, man,” I said. Then I put on the boots, stood up, and I was almost seven feet tall! I put my bandoliers on and my belt with the bullets and my leather gloves, and I looked into the mirror again. My face looked like porcelain: There wasn’t a line on it. It was like I had gone through a time warp and I was twenty-six years old again. A,” Ace said. “We when ikn unbelievable feeling of power surged over me and I knew, deep down, that everything was going to be all right, I wasn’t going to die an old, broke, forgotten man with nothing to show for all my work.