And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (13 page)

When it came time to record KISS’s third album, rather than look outside our circle to replace Kerner and Wise, Neil decided that he would produce the record himself. He thought that KISS needed a fresh approach, and while a record company exec stepping in to produce an album could be seen as a meddlesome and ego-driven move, Neil had more than enough recording studio experience to pull it off. Recording for the album, titled
Dressed to Kill,
began at the end of January in Los Angeles, though most of the work was done in February at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan. I attended some of the sessions, but I don’t remember much more than the constant haze of pot smoke that drifted around the control room. The weed smoking was primarily Neil’s doing, as Paul and Gene were notorious teetotalers when it came to drugs, and Ace and Peter tended to drink or take drugs only when they weren’t with their bandmates. The album was finished in a blur, both literally and figuratively. It was released on March 19, 1975 with the words “KISS uses Gibson Guitars because they want the best” printed on its jacket.

Two nights later, KISS was scheduled to appear at the Beacon Theatre in New York, a gig I’d booked myself. Ron Delsener, a big New York promoter, didn’t want to book KISS in the city at all. I told him that if he put them in the Beacon—which had only about three thousand seats—we’d repay him any money he lost. We had worked with Ron a lot at Buddah, and our relationship was solid. He agreed to the deal, and he put the first show on sale, despite the fact that everyone, himself included, thought I was crazy. The only local airplay we were getting was on WNEW, plus a smattering on WLIR in Long Island and on shows such as John Zacherle’s and Alex Bennett’s on WPLJ. But, guess what? The show sold out in a day.

Ron called me in LA to share the good news, and I told him, “OK, put on a second show.” Neil, who had just walked into my office, said, “What the fuck are you doing?” After I got off the phone with Delsener, I told him, “Neil, relax. The second show will sell just as well.” He didn’t say another word, he just let it go. Neil was brilliant about letting you do what you did best, gambling that you’d do the right thing. The second show sold out nearly as fast as the first.

These were KISS’s first gigs in Manhattan as headliners, and we made huge, nightlong soirees of them. Along with the usual suspects from the local industry and media, Neil’s parents, my parents, and lots of our friends attended a big after party at a restaurant near the gig. The show, of course, had been great, but you couldn’t tell that to my dad, a staunch Sinatra and big-band guy. He couldn’t stand the music or the volume and had spent most of the show in the lobby. I was especially looking forward to this night not because of the show or the party. A girl I knew had told me that she and another girl would come up to my hotel suite and we would have a three-way, my first. For me, all else had faded to the periphery. I saw her at the party, and she could not keep her hands off me. She just kept telling me how she was looking forward to our get-together. I said my obligatory hellos to various party guests, said goodbye to my parents, and then headed off to the hotel to prepare for what I hoped would be a fantasy come alive. The girls never showed, and I spent the rest of the night alone feeling guilty for abandoning my parents at the party.

Almost two months later, on May 10, KISS did a show in DC. Afterwards, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons met up with
Rolling Stone
writer Gordon Fletcher, who insisted that they all go to a local club to check out a band called Angel. Gene was so impressed with the group that after their set he called Neil from a pay phone at the back of the club to pitch them.

Angel was the anti-KISS, but the band shared KISS’s sense of energy and showmanship. This five-piece band had a look that was as pure as the driven snow. They all had flowing, immaculately styled hair and perfect features. In a word, they were beautiful—at least compared to KISS. But, in contrast to their appearance, their music had a hard, progressive edge; it was laden with experimental synthesizer and keyboard sounds. Gregg Giuffria, the keyboardist, was completely surrounded by the damned things onstage—organ, piano, synths, Mellotron—at least half a dozen of them.

I am not sure what effect Gene’s late-night phone call had upon Neil, or if it had any effect at all. I’m not even sure that Gene actually made the call. I could easily imagine him going through the charade of calling Neil to impress Gordon Fletcher or Angel. It also seems unlikely that Gene would have been inclined to help Casablanca out at that point, considering that just weeks before he’d told me he wasn’t allowed to speak to me. Furthermore, I don’t think Neil would have considered Gene’s opinion for more than a moment; he still wasn’t anybody, yet. I think that the real impetus for our interest in Angel came from their manager, David Joseph.

David was a native Australian who also had Gary Glitter on his client list. He worked with David Bowie as well. We had met David the previous summer, when we signed the Hudson Brothers, whom he also managed. Neil and I both liked him, so we trusted his judgment on Angel; but the fact that they were close to signing with Capitol really got us off our asses. I’ve no memory of how many albums were written into the contract, though I can say with confidence that any advance that Neil would have given Angel was probably just enough to cover coffee for David and the band. That’s the catch-22 we were constantly facing. We needed money. To get money, we needed acts. To sign acts, we needed money. And so it went.

Things would have been a lot easier if we’d known that we were about to do the album that would finally give the company the perception of success it needed, both internally and externally. A hit would have magic powers in terms of inspiring confidence, not just in others but also in ourselves—it would make us feel like the promotion and marketing geniuses we always thought we were. The next album would be our first step toward securing financial freedom.

 

 

In April 1974, we had rushed KISS into Bell Sound Studios to record the single “Kissin’ Time” for our big national kissing contest promotion. It had all worked out well enough except for one thing: thirteen months later, we still hadn’t paid Bell the $1,718 we owed them. They had sent a collection agency after us, which was harassing us constantly for the money. They threatened legal action and claimed they were going to report us as delinquent debtors to the national credit agencies.

This wasn’t an unusual circumstance for Casablanca. Over the course of our first year in business, our dire financial situation had forced Neil to become a master staller. His key tactics were to bargain with our creditors for a reduction in the amount owed or to hold them off until we had the money to bring the account current. He told Bell’s collection agency—London Credit Associates—that we had credits with Bell that would reduce the bill by half (which I doubt was true, but that wasn’t the point), and if they would accept half of the amount, then the issue could be resolved immediately. Alternatively, Neil suggested, London could redo the entire ledger, figure out the appropriate amount owed (he didn’t tell them what he thought the “correct” figure was, because that would have derailed his attempt to stall), and contact him when they were ready to proceed. In this case, as in most others, his ploy worked, even though London Credit Associates saw right through his ploy. We had not yet entered the age of e-mail and FedEx, so even if a collection agency didn’t buy your line of BS, it took a week for you to exchange letters, and this bought you some time. We stalled for another couple of months and ended up settling for half.

In the weeks after Joyce quit as comanager of KISS, the turbulent relationship between Neil and the KISS camp began to stabilize. On May 1, 1975, a new recording contract was drafted. This contract voided the original (November 1, 1973) agreement between Casablanca and Rock Steady, and it was directly between the label and the four members of KISS (using their legal, not stage, names: Gene Klein, Paul Frehley, Stanley Eisen, and Peter Criscuola). KISS guaranteed that they would deliver two new studio albums to us within the next year, and there were options for two additional contract periods—the first twelve months, and the second six months.

The agreement not only helped solidify our position with the band, but it also helped to alleviate our financial crunch. There was a point in the contract that allowed us to defer our first royalty payment to the band until October 20, 1975. We were also allowed to front our biggest independent distributors, Heilicher and Handleman, more royalty-free albums and singles than our other distributors. Our standard percentage of free product was 20 percent of albums and 30 percent of singles. With both Heilicher and Handleman, we were allowed 30 percent of albums and 40 percent of singles. Because these distributors moved as much product for us as all the others combined, this significantly decreased the royalties that would be due to KISS. This, and the fact that our first KISS royalty check wasn’t due for another six months, finally gave us some breathing room.

The contract points weren’t as lopsided in our favor as they might seem. Because we had no money to help finance KISS’s touring, for the past several months Bill Aucoin had underwritten most of the band’s tour expenses with his personal credit card, and he was now deep in debt to American Express. Bill insisted that the new agreement stipulate that Casablanca would provide forty thousand dollars in promotional money for each of KISS’s tours during the term of the contract. The forty grand might seem like a large payout for Casablanca due to our cash shortage, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the royalties we owed, and it at least gave the appearance that we were contributing something to the equation. Fronting KISS tour money (which we’d done before, anyway) in exchange for deferring royalty payments was a quid pro quo arrangement, and it seemed to satisfy everyone. At least for the moment.

While Neil held our growing list of creditors at bay, Cecil, Buck, and I persisted in our increasingly desperate drive to bring Casablanca some money. KISS-related projects still dominated my days, though I’d begun to shift my attention to different promotional possibilities. Thus far, I’d sold heavily to my network of radio contacts. It was what I knew, and I’d used the strategy successfully for several of our artists at Buddah, but with KISS, it hadn’t really worked. While they were becoming very well accepted as a concert act, they hadn’t sniffed the Top 40 with their singles. Their albums were doing somewhat better, but sales were spotty—the LPs sold in some markets, while in others the results were dismal. We needed a way to bypass the traditional route of driving an album with a Top 40 hit single. We needed a drastic halftime adjustment to our game plan. With the radio approach stalling, I decided to give print media a try.

I began with the teen magazines
Creem
and
Circus.
They were appealing targets: we could work them as often as we wanted and did not need to have a new single to get exposure.
Creem
was owned by Barry and Connie Kramer, who were running their fun and very influential magazine out of a small suite of offices in Southfield, Michigan, a short drive from Detroit. Barry and Connie, who were both about my age, made no effort to be hip and trendy, despite helming one of the hippest music publications out there. They were casual and naturally cool.

The
Creem
offices, which had a separate photography studio, were a disaster. The rooms were filled with desks; paper, mimeographs, photos, and thousands of back issues littered every square inch of floor and desk space. But this is exactly what most magazine offices looked like, and Barry and Connie ran a pretty tight ship—professional but loose, and free of drugs and sex, at least during my many visits. Today, a magazine of such influence would be far more corporate and impressive looking. In the mid-1970s, it was a mom-and-pop operation, quite literally, and I think that’s the way Barry, Connie, and their staff liked it.

The editor of the magazine was Ben Edmonds, and the main writer was the legendary Lester Bangs, an opinionated, talented, brusque gorilla, so well portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cameron Crowe’s brilliant 2000 film
Almost Famous.
Bangs was a towering presence in the music world, but at the office he was treated like any other member of the staff. I was introduced to all these key people by Mark Parenteau, who was still the driving force behind the city’s big rock station, WABX. I hung out at the
Creem
offices whenever I went to Detroit, and we all partied together with the WABX people.

Working in Lester’s shadow was a young writer named Jaan Uhelszki, the real life and energy of the magazine. Jaan was adorable. She was about five foot seven, with dark hair and an effervescent smile. She had a great natural enthusiasm for music and immediately ingratiated herself to Gene Simmons. Since she was close friends with the magazine’s photo editor, Charlie Auringer, she was able to influence the selection of pictures to be published in the magazine, and she did so to our advantage.

Jaan was so infatuated with KISS and Gene that she would frequently call me with ideas for stories. The most intriguing one (and I could easily see Gene behind this) was for her to be a KISS-ette for a day. She would dress up as a female member of the band and perform with them. She asked if I would help coordinate the event and pay for her travel expenses. I loved the idea and told her to run with it, although in the article she eventually wrote, titled “I Was Onstage with KISS in My Maidenform Bra,” she claimed that I had been nervous about it. She must have misread my reaction, because nothing could have been further from the truth. If the Beatles could have a fifth member (Murray the K), why couldn’t KISS? Besides, Jaan was much better looking than Murray. I agreed to cover her expenses to go to a show and write about being a KISS-ette. She flew to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 17, where she briefly joined the band onstage near the end of their set. The result was a major story in
Creem
’s August 1975 issue.

In the meantime, I had come to an agreement with Barry Kramer that if he helped us break KISS, then I would buy a lot of advertising from him and also supply him with thousands of free albums to give away with new
Creem
subscriptions. This was the only way we could advertise in
Creem,
since we still couldn’t afford to buy ads in the traditional way. Our actual outlay would simply be the cost of the albums, and since they would be royalty-free, we could manage it. We’d also frequently offer concert tickets and periodically stage a contest where the winners would be sent to a KISS concert.

We struck a similar agreement with Gerald Rothberg, the publisher of
Circus
: he would give KISS extra print coverage in exchange for advertising and free albums as well as various contests and promotions. With
Circus,
I borrowed a trick that WMMS in Cleveland had pulled off using a
Rolling
Stone magazine readers’ poll. WMMS had purchased hundreds of copies of the issue that included the poll. The station then had its employees fill in WMMS as their favorite radio station and sent the questionnaires to
Rolling Stone.
The stunt worked: WMMS was voted best rock radio station in America for many years in a row. This raised many eyebrows in the industry, as Cleveland was not the largest market in the country, and WMMS, although very popular, didn’t have the most listeners.

We could have attempted something with
Rolling Stone,
too, but our relationship with the magazine was odd. I had almost no experience with them, because during the Buddah days, the press department had handled such relationships. Any overtures I made would have had to go through Neil, whose dealings with
Rolling Stone
ran hot and cold. His relationship with Jann Wenner, the magazine’s owner and publisher, was icy. However, Neil was fast friends with
Rolling Stone
writer Lisa Robinson, whose husband, Richard, had worked under Neil at Buddah. Neil still had a lot of pull with Lisa, and she and Richard were always invited to our soirees. Why Neil had not yet exploited that friendship, I cannot say.

In any case,
Circus
also conducted a readers’ poll. We bought up hundreds of issues and sat around the Sherbourne offices filling in the poll cards, voting for Ace as best guitarist, Peter as best drummer, and KISS as best group (we thought that voting for Gene or Paul as best vocalist would be stretching it a bit). We were exploiting the age-old perception-is-reality concept. To change Neil’s mantra just slightly, we were “grease-painting the building.”

Almost without exception, the critical reception of KISS’s music and concerts had been awful. The negative reviews bothered us a little at first, but we quickly got used to them, and Neil was always reminding us (and himself) that any publicity was good publicity. And the fact that the music press so reviled KISS seemed to galvanize KISS’s audience. To many, this just made KISS
the
antiestablishment band. Using print media to build up, if not outright fabricate, KISS’s stature felt a bit cathartic and ironic to us.

After a while, kids began to believe that Peter was as good a drummer as any and Ace was the world’s greatest guitar player—although this wasn’t even close to the truth. Based on the perception created by the annual
Circus
poll, they started to buy up KISS albums. I also believe, although it went unsaid, that Gerald Rothberg was helping us behind the scenes. He thought that this whole KISS phenomenon could be beneficial to his magazine and actually helped us sell more copies. Even though the band wasn’t yet a national success, having their picture on a magazine’s cover increased circulation.

In conjunction with these efforts, I was soliciting independent photographers like Barry Levine in an effort to place photos of KISS in as many publications as possible. A handful of professional photographers had close ties with the rock magazines, and, given the right circumstances, they would use their pull to get coverage for the bands whose pictures they had taken. This was all done according to some loose-knit, wink-wink exclusivity agreement. We would periodically send some of these photographers on all-expense-paid trips to shows or events involving KISS or some of our other artists. We did not pay them; they would be paid by the magazines on a per-picture-published basis. So the photographers, in effect, worked as lobbyists for the band.

It was important for Casablanca’s cash flow to have a new KISS album to promote every six months or so. This also helped the band keep their image alive and fresh in the press, and it fed the audience’s growing demand for more KISS, although the band members were not happy that their tour schedule was frequently interrupted so they could record. Casablanca’s near-constant need for new KISS material placed a creative strain on the band; we never gave them enough time to write and record new songs.
Dressed to Kill
was so rushed (recording had started only three months after the release of their previous album,
Hotter Than Hell
) that the band had been forced to dredge up songs for it that they’d written before KISS even existed, and even so, the final product was less than thirty minutes long. And here we were, barely two months after
Dressed to Kill’
s release, with Neil looking for yet another album.