No Regrets (12 page)

As for the notion that KISS was some sort of satanic metal band, with the name an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service? Complete and utter bullshit. All that satanic crap came out of left field; more precisely, it came out of the southern Bible Belt, where so many of our fans were reared. I remember on some of our early tours, there were religious fanatics outside the shows burning our records, saying we were devil worshippers. Give me a fuckin’ break! I was brought up a Lutheran, Peter was a Catholic, and Gene and Paul were Jews. None of us had ever been involved in any sort of satanic activity.

Period.

The truth is, not only were we not a satanic metal band, but we weren’t really a metal band at all. We were just a melodic hard rock band. Some of our songs were pop, some were heavy rock, bordering on metal, but I never thought of us as a metal band per se. As for the protesters, well, I didn’t pay that much attention to them, but I kind of believed in the old adage “Any publicity is good publicity.”

Really, though, if KISS stood for anything, it was a far more common acronym: Keep It Simple, Stupid. (That saying would end up having a much more profound meaning to me later on in my life.)

Just play the music, play it well, play it loud.

And look good doing it.

January 30, 1973

By the time we hit the stage for our first
performance, at a Queens nightclub called Popcorn, interest in KISS hadn’t exactly built to a thundering crescendo. There might have been more people in the band and crew than in the audience. You try to put experiences like that out of your mind, but it isn’t always easy. My memory suffers sometimes, thanks to all the drinking and drugging, but the brain has a funny way of cataloging events as it damn well pleases. You forget some of the good stuff, and you remember some of the pain. A lot of it, actually.

Of course, even the stuff that hurts can be kind of funny. And to me, in those days, just about everything had its humorous side. So I could stand up there alongside Paul and Gene, the three of us jockeying for space on the stage, unsure how to move or where to position ourselves, and thus sometimes crashing into one another or wrapping our legs around each other until we looked like some multiheaded, hard rock serpent. And I could laugh at the absurdity of it all, even as I looked out
over the “crowd” and spotted not a single unfamiliar face. A few of our family members and girlfriends, and that’s about it. A lesser band might have been humiliated to the point of quitting, but we weren’t deterred in the slightest.

We had less than two weeks to prepare for that gig, and I suppose if anyone had captured it on video, and I saw it today, I’d be less than thrilled with our performance. I’m not even sure how we managed to put together a full set in such a short amount of time, but I know that we did. KISS played nothing but original songs that night—a dozen or more tunes that Paul and Gene had already written, and that I’d tried to absorb as quickly as possible. I faked a lot of it, using my natural musicianship to cover gaps, hoping no one would notice. Then again, since the place was practically empty, it wasn’t like there was a lot to lose.

For all my disagreements with Gene over the years, I have to give him credit for being a tireless worker and self-promoter. I never had all that much interest in the financial side of the business; Gene was obsessed with it. From the first time I met him, he seemed like a guy who put as much value on the marketing and promotional end of KISS as he did on the music we produced. Don’t get me wrong. Gene was a decent songwriter and bass player, and I respected him on that level. But it was clear to me that he considered the music to be only one piece of the puzzle. I was like that, too, but to a much lesser degree. I saw Alice Cooper wrap himself in boa constrictors and fake executions onstage, and I thought,
Wow… cool
.

Gene saw the same thing and thought,
How can we expand on that, and how do we put together a business model to ensure its success?

I always had a lot of friends when I was growing up. For better or worse (and my parents would probably say worse), I spent a lot of time away from the house, hanging out with my buddies. I liked being one of the guys. I still do, in fact, although I’m much more careful about the people I let into my life these days. Even when KISS blew up, I tried to keep it real, mainly by hanging out with my old friends, doing the things I always enjoyed doing: fishing, shooting pool, drinking beer… and of course getting into a little trouble.

“Guys, don’t call me Ace,” I’d say. “Call me Paul, okay? Ace is the guy in KISS.”

That was the absolute truth. While some of my friends had called me Ace, the nickname remained just that: a nickname, to be used in certain situations and by a select group of people. I was always “Paul” to my family, and to most of my friends. When I joined KISS we decided that two Pauls was one too many.

“No problem,” I said. “Just call me Ace.”

So, to the guys in the band, I was never Paul Frehley. I was Ace. When I went home, though, I became Paul again. It was a reality check. The people who knew me only after I became famous used to put me on a pedestal, and let me tell you, that kind of treatment can really mess with your head. It made me very uncomfortable.

Peter and I both had lots of friends. Paul and Gene were different. Especially Gene. It was the weirdest thing. When I first got into KISS, and I found out that Gene didn’t have any friends, I didn’t know what to think of the guy. Should I feel sorry for him? Should I keep him at arm’s length? Can he be trusted? I’d never met anyone like that. Gene was only a couple of years older than me, but he seemed… I don’t know. I guess I could be diplomatic and say he was wise beyond his years, or some bullshit like that, but mainly I just felt like he had a stick up his ass. He was like a fifty-year-old accountant in the body of a twenty-three-year-old kid. One of my best friends was our sound engineer; another of my buddies was a KISS roadie. My friends used to come to our shows regularly. Peter’s wife and friends showed up all the time, and Paul’s friends showed up occasionally. But Gene? He was such a loner. His entire focus was on the business end of KISS, creating something big and successful, whatever that might mean. And God bless him, he did that. He made it happen (although not by himself, which I think Gene sometimes tends to forget; we were all riding the same rocket, after all). But there were times when I wanted to say, and did say, “Gene… come on, man, lighten the fuck up. Have a few beers.”

He never did. Not once. To my knowledge the guy has never gotten loose in his life. I’m probably the last person on earth who should be
advocating alcohol use—it nearly killed me—but Gene is one of those guys who might have benefited from having a drink once in a while. Just maybe?

To his credit, though, Gene was the most responsible member of the band and was always thinking ahead and brainstorming. I don’t recall anyone getting all that upset about the Popcorn debacle. For one thing, it was easy to rationalize the minuscule turnout. We’d been in existence only a few weeks and had advertised the show simply by passing out leaflets on street corners in New York. Not exactly sophisticated marketing. I don’t think anyone knew that a band called KISS was going to be playing at a club called Popcorn that night. And if they did, well, good luck finding us. By the time we arrived Popcorn had been shuttered and sold, and reopened with a new name: Coventry. So you had an unknown band, still in its infancy, playing a brand-new club.

No wonder the place was empty.

It stayed that way for three nights and three shows. We approached it with the professionalism of a dress rehearsal, which is really what it was. A dry run, so to speak, in terms of both musicianship and theatricality. Each of us had a specific character in mind by this time, but we hadn’t figured out how to bring the characters to life.

Gene was leaning toward horror because that was his shtick. He was obsessed with comic books and horror movies. I was leaning toward the spaceman because I was fascinated with space travel and science fiction and technology in general. Paul? I don’t know. He basically just became Paul—a glamorous singer with sex appeal. And Peter, well, he had a thing for cats. What can I tell you? It seemed to work for him. Funny thing is, he was probably the guy in the band whose makeup was the least consistent with his actual personality. I’d be sitting next to Peter in the dressing room sometimes, watching him put on that little button nose, and the cute whiskers and studded collar, and I’d think,
Man, you look so tame. If people only knew
.

I’ll admit it—I really was something of a space cadet. But Peter?
He’d grown up in the streets (like me), and that fact, combined with his drug use, could occasionally make him a tough guy to get along with.

Simply put, he wasn’t always a pussycat! But neither was I, for that matter.

Peter became my best friend in the band and is a really sweet and sensitive guy and I miss hanging out with him.

We all did the best we could to become the characters we had chosen, but resources were limited. For the most part (Gene being a notable exception, as he had the most consistent and well-paying day job), we were all broke. We couldn’t afford stylists or costume designers, so we assumed those roles ourselves. If you look at photos of KISS from the early days (I’m talking about the first few months), you’ll notice that I’m wearing satin pants and a black shirt with wings across the chest. Gene is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with skull and crossbones. My mother and I worked on those together. I designed the wings and the skull and crossbones, even cut out the fabric. Then Mom, who was a talented seamstress, sewed everything together. I can remember asking my mother for help. She didn’t offer an opinion of any kind, just nodded and said, “Whatever you need, Paul.” Mom wasn’t easily shocked, especially by this point. I’d been a thorn in her side for a number of years by this time. She’d already endured the school expulsions, the arrests, the drinking, the music… too many annoyances and inconveniences to catalog, really. I was a weird kid, and had been since my early teens, when I started creating elaborate psychedelic paintings, illuminating them with a black light hung from my bedroom ceiling. Mom had seen it all. By the time I was in my twenties, my behavior didn’t faze her in the least. She loved me, obviously—I see that now more than ever. But I also think she’d given up any hope of changing me; so, better to just climb on board and hope the ride wouldn’t end tragically.

The facial makeup we wore in those early shows was sloppy and imprecise. Gene looked a bit like an angry mime, with whiteface and bat wings; Paul dabbed a little blush on his cheeks; I smeared silver paint all over my face. If anyone had seen us at Popcorn/Coventry, with our high
heels and makeup, they’d have assumed we were trying to mimic the New York Dolls… on acid! By this time, though, the Dolls’ feminine look had fallen out of favor. We were after something else. Something more original and shocking.

More than a month would pass before we’d get
another opportunity to play a live gig. Our manager (although I don’t believe he ever officially held that title) was a man named Lew Linet, who had worked with Paul and Gene when they were playing with Wicked Lester. For whatever reason, Lew didn’t have a lot of faith in what we were doing. He thought the music was too loud and too heavy, the characters offensive and stupid. I’m not sure what he wanted us to be—something a little more in the Top 40 tradition, probably. You can’t blame the guy. To any objective set of eyes, we must have seemed like we were out of our minds. Nevertheless, Lew was handling our career, so it was his responsibility to find us some work, which he did, at a club called the Daisy on Long Island.

In Amityville, to be precise, in early March. This was a few years before
The Amityville Horror
was released, but our weekend in town was about as strange as anything I’d ever experienced. I remember doing our makeup before the show, and getting the idea for the first time that maybe I’d look better with stars around my eyes. You have to imagine the scene: four guys sitting around together in a makeshift dressing room, using handheld mirrors, applying makeup and primping our hair. Then we hit the stage and were transformed. It was like our first show at Coventry/Popcorn, only wilder. The place was owned by a man named Sid Benjamin, and it was obvious that Sid had no idea what kind of act he had booked into his club. There were maybe fifty to seventy-five people in the place, and when KISS began playing, the response wasn’t exactly what we hoped for. We hit them with everything we had, playing as loudly as possible, even running into the audience and trying to get people to clap their hands and get up and dance.

At one point late in the show, after sweating right through my costume and downing a few beers, I looked over at Peter, who had a mirrored drum kit, and I could see my face reflected in the Mylar, all distorted and elongated, as if in a fun-house mirror. I started cracking up, even as I kept playing, and Gene kept singing, and the audience responded with awestruck silence. Peter started laughing, too. The crowd must have thought we were insane.