No Regrets (11 page)

I don’t want to overstate matters. I felt like I nailed the audition and I felt like these guys had potential, but I didn’t have expectations for changing the world or anything. It wasn’t that dramatic. It would be one thing if I walked in and they had makeup on and a record deal in hand. But it was just three guys sitting in a loft with egg cartons on the walls. It was very businesslike and low-key.

Nevertheless, I wanted in.

For the next few days I floated along, indulging in the
occasional daydream about joining the new band and maybe hitting the
big time. I’d left the audition feeling confident that I would get the gig; they were still going to listen to a few more people (close to thirty guitar players ultimately tried out for the job), but I had the sense that things would work out in my favor. And I was excited about it. The songs we played were catchy, and Paul, Gene, and Peter were all solid musicians. Granted, I’d barely gotten to know these guys, but I could tell they were serious. In all the years I’d been playing music, I’d never been in a band where everyone seemed not only committed to the cause, but equipped with the necessary chops.

Also, they’d made it clear up front that they were willing to do anything necessary in order to fulfill their dreams. So was I. They wanted to be a theatrical rock group, and I was totally on board with that. Gene used to say, “KISS not only gives you something for your ears, but something for your eyes as well.” I believed in that. I’d been heavily influenced by Hendrix setting his guitar on fire… by Pete Townshend smashing his guitar. I liked smoke bombs and fireworks and special effects.

I liked the
show
. And I understood how visual effects could supplement the music and make the concert experience more memorable. As different as we were personally, as divergent as our backgrounds might have been, we shared a collective vision and ambition. We just had different ways of dealing with things. You have to understand, I was a happy-go-lucky guy, and I was just going with the flow; I thought maybe it would work out… maybe not.

As the days went by, “maybe not” seemed the more likely scenario. Then the guys showed up to watch me play in a club. And finally, in mid-January, about two weeks after my initial audition, I received a phone call from Paul. He wanted to know if I could come down to the loft and hang out with the guys again. I said, “Sure, why not?” When I arrived, Peter’s wife, Lydia, was there, as was Gene’s girlfriend. I suppose they wanted another set of eyes—female eyes—to determine whether the new guy looked like a good fit. We talked for a little while, jammed a bit, and then they offered me the job. By this time I’d learned that the
band actually had no recording contract, which probably should have made me skeptical. But it really didn’t. Bands and musicians inflated their résumés all the time; I knew from personal experience that record deals were every bit as fragile as the records themselves.

The important thing was that I liked the material and I had a good feeling about it. I liked the attitude of everyone in the band. Whether I would get along with them personally was hard to say, and didn’t really factor into the equation. All I cared about was that they were ambitious. They wanted to make it professionally. I’d been playing with other people, been in other bands, and it always seemed like everyone had too much noise in their lives. They held day jobs and did gigs on the weekends. They had wives and kids. They had car payments and rent. Some even had mortgages. Not me. I had my guitar and nothing else. Music was my life, and it was nice to get together with three other guys who seemed just as single-minded.

We started rehearsing almost immediately at the Twenty-Third Street loft—kind of a pain in the ass for me, since I still didn’t have a car or enough money for daily cab fare. Obviously I wasn’t going to ask my mother to drive me to rehearsal every day, so I had to find alternative means of transportation. Sometimes I took the subway to Manhattan; more often, though, I turned to friends for help, most notably a cat named Eddie Solan. Eddie would drive to the Bronx from his house in Yonkers, and then we’d go downtown together in his Volkswagen Bug. Eddie wasn’t a musician but he deserves a lot of credit for what KISS accomplished in the early days. Not only was he a loyal friend and good sound mixer, he was also a master carpenter and electronics wizard who built the PA system for our first shows. By day Eddie worked at an electronics supply store; by night he was an unofficial member of KISS—the band’s very first roadie (and so much more). Eddie was really into mixing and sound, and I don’t think his efforts and contributions during the early days of the band have ever been sufficiently acknowledged.

We rehearsed four, five, six days a week—probably overkill, considering we had less than a dozen songs. We’d play them repeatedly, for
hours on end, beating the dead horse until there was no flesh left on its bones. This wasn’t easy for me. While I loved playing guitar, my approach to the craft was less workmanlike than some of the other guys in the band. I took the artist’s approach:
When inspiration strikes, I’ll be ready
. Peter was kind of the same way. Paul and Gene? Uh-uh. They were workaholics, committed to practicing until their fingers bled, and then turning their attention straight to the business end of things. Admirable, I admit, but it wasn’t the way I lived my life, and in the beginning I found it curious.

Not to mention exhausting.

But I got used to it pretty quickly. We spent a lot of time in close quarters in those first few months, rehearsing, planning our shows, talking about image and the direction we wanted the band to take. Considering all the problems and personality conflicts we’d have down the road, it’s worth noting how well we all got along in the beginning. I wouldn’t say we were best friends, because that just wouldn’t be true. We were very different people. As a result, our relationships were at first (and then much later) more businesslike than anything else. Everything was very diplomatic, with each band member putting in his two cents’ worth on all subjects, regardless of how important or trivial. Paul and Gene did most of the songwriting in the beginning, but once I got the hang of it, I started writing as well. And so did Peter, although to a lesser extent.

We all became friends, but once we started working together on the road, Paul and Gene quickly became aware of the fact that Peter and I were a little different from them. We liked to party. Hard. Everybody “partied,” but in different ways, and to varying degrees. Gene, for example, doesn’t drink (and Paul hardly drinks at all). But Gene, especially, was a total whore. Peter and I were the more traditional (and hard-core) partyers in the group, favoring alcohol and drugs, with women merely part of the mix. Like me, Peter had been a member of a gang when he was younger, and his personality had been partially shaped by that experience. We gravitated toward each other as the band went forward.

But I don’t want to imply that the four of us didn’t get along. We
did, especially in the formative months and years. You can’t spend that much time together, working toward a common goal, without fashioning some type of bond. Just as you can’t help but get on each other’s nerves after a while. By any reasonable standard, we were destitute. A few of us had part-time jobs—Paul and I drove cabs, Gene worked at a magazine—but there was never much money. It didn’t seem to matter. We all believed that soon enough we’d be supporting ourselves solely as musicians. We had good songs, solid musicianship, and confidence that there was a market for theatrical rock. We wanted to take it further than any of the acts that inspired and influenced us, like the Who, Hendrix, the Move, Alice Cooper, and the New York Dolls.

The Dolls were a gender-bending, pre-punk group fronted by David Johansen and Johnny Thunders. They wore high heels and makeup and generally favored androgynous clothing. They influenced a lot of other musicians on the New York scene, and they had an effect on KISS, both musically and stylistically.

So did Alice, probably even to a greater degree, because Alice’s sound was more polished and commercial, and his show revolved around theatrics. Alice Cooper in the 1970s brought blood and guts to the stage, combining rock and performance art in a way that had never been attempted. He wasn’t just a singer; he was a character in his own band, and that character did crazy, repulsive things in the name of art. Alice, like the Dolls, wore androgynous fashion, only with a sadomasochistic flavor. He utilized guillotines and snakes and buckets of blood in his shows. And people loved it.

Well, not all of the people, obviously. Conservative groups (and more than a few parents) thought Alice was doing the devil’s work, corrupting kids and peddling sex and violence. They hated him, a response that predictably helped fuel sales of record albums and concert tickets.

Alice knew exactly what he was doing. He made melodic but hard commercial rock, and he sold it with a grisly flourish (as well as a wink and a nod, I might add, though not everyone noticed), promising to make every night Halloween. It was nothing short of brilliant.
He’s now one of the most recognizable icons in rock ’n’ roll. (Little did I know Alice and I would become good friends later on down the road.)

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to follow his lead. We wanted to wear makeup and have outlandish costumes, and play hard rock. Beyond that, we weren’t so sure. We also weren’t sure about what we wanted to call ourselves. Choosing the right name was important—it had to be a good fit, convey the right image and attitude. And we all had to be comfortable with it. Looking back now I realize that one of the things that made KISS unique was the fact that we were such a democratic organization. That may seem hard to believe now, with only Gene and Paul left from the original lineup, and Gene having so carefully cultivated an image of calm control. But we were four equal partners almost from the moment the lineup was complete.

Names were tossed around for several weeks, with most being discarded in a matter of minutes. At one point, probably out of exasperation, someone suggested that we call the band, simply and graphically, FUCK! That one, too, suffered a quick demise. We wanted to be radical; we wanted to really push the envelope in a way no other band had done. FUCK! would have done the trick. It also would have made it impossible to get a record deal, or radio airplay, or any of the other things we wanted to achieve. So that wasn’t going to work. FUCK! was a dead end, in the same way that Muff Divers would have been a dead end. You want to be taken seriously as a band? Well, then, your name can’t be a punch line. And it can’t be so profane that no one will want to say it out loud (unless they’re really pissed off).

Eventually we began talking about other bands we had been in, mainly as a source of inspiration. One name can cause a spark, and suddenly you’re tossing out ideas, until finally you settle on something that just feels right. I’d been through the process multiple times with other bands. It was simple brainstorming, and it usually worked. Peter had once been in a band called Lips, and at some point the conversation
went in that general direction, until finally Paul suggested “KISS.” The collective response was, “You know, that’s not bad.”

It was that simple, that organic.

It was the same way with the now famous (or infamous) KISS logo. As soon as we settled on the name, I went home and started messing around with various stylistic renderings of the band name. While it’s true that I wasn’t much of a student when it came to traditional courses, I did have artistic ability. In fact, I used to double up in art at DeWitt Clinton. I got really close to the head of the art department, Doc Goldberg. He encouraged my interest in sketching and design; he’d even write passes for me when I came in late. Doc was used to dealing with students who had trouble fitting in. Most of the kids in his department were uncomfortable in a public school setting, but that didn’t mean they lacked talent. They were just… different. I was one of the best artists at DeWitt Clinton. I even designed a very cool psychedelic cover for the biannual school magazine, the
Magpie
. My idea was to sketch the words “Youth Revolts” on the cover, but the faculty advisor on the project felt that was too inflammatory.

“How about ‘Youth Dissents’?” she suggested. “That might be better.”

I’m not sure I even understood the meaning of the word
dissent,
but I did as I was told and the cover still looked very cool.

After moving on to Roosevelt High, I was prompted by my art teacher to enter one of my paintings in an art competition involving all the high school students in the five boroughs of New York City. That’s more than one hundred thousand kids! I was good enough to have won an Art Achievement Award naming me one of the top one hundred high school artists in the city and my painting was displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Not bad for a street punk from the Bronx.

Like Paul, I probably should have gone to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. I definitely would have had a better academic career, that’s for sure. But I didn’t want it bad enough. I loved art, but I loved music even more, and constantly dreamt about where it could take me. Like I said, I lacked focus and discipline.

Being excited about my new band, I roughed out a sketch of the original KISS logo in no time at all. It wasn’t a whole lot different than the logo as it appears today. My original concept featured the twin
S
’s in jagged detail, like lightning bolts, and a small dot in the shape of a diamond over the letter
I
. I then transferred the logo to a button using a felt-tip pen and presented it to the group. I later dropped the diamond over the
I
and that was that. Designing one of the most recognizable rock logos in history wasn’t really that difficult. Everyone loved it. Paul was a trained artist, so when things got really serious he polished my design, making everything nice and neat. (Thanks, Paul!)

And that’s how “Kiss” became “KISS.”

Incidentally, there was never any secret meaning to the logo or the name. I’ve been accused of trying to mimic the
SS
of the Nazi storm troopers. Fucking ludicrous. I wasn’t that subversive or nihilistic. I thought lightning bolts would look cool, and I had already decided that my character in the band would be called the Spaceman, and that my costume would be adorned with lightning bolts. So it all went together.