No Regrets (16 page)

Life as a rock star at the highest level is weird beyond words. It’s great in a lot of ways, obviously, but it’s disorienting, too. You very quickly begin to realize that you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Everything you do is designed to help keep the machine moving, the record sales flowing. This was especially true with KISS, since so much of our popularity was based not merely on music, but on image. After a while the makeup became almost like a prison. We couldn’t appear anywhere out of character. If we pulled into a town and we had a radio interview scheduled, we had to get up a couple of hours early to put on our makeup before going to the radio station. Think about that. Full costumes and makeup for a radio appearance, where no one would even see us. I wasn’t Ace Frehley when I represented KISS. I was the Spaceman. That’s just the way it worked.

Again, that’s not a complaint, just an observation. For a long time, the benefits of being in KISS far outweighed the liabilities. Weird as it was to put on makeup for every public appearance, it did have the fringe benefit of allowing each of us to maintain some semblance of a private life away from the spotlight. For a little while, anyway.

Not that I cared much about my privacy in those days. Like the rest of the guys in the band, I craved attention. You don’t join a band and put on makeup and crazy costumes if you want people to ignore you,
right? So I walked out of Alexander’s and immediately began calling up my friends, and Jeanette, and telling them about the record. I played it in my bedroom at home, an experience so strange—listening to my very own record for the very first time, on the same turntable that spun Clapton and the Stones—that I can hardly put it into words. I sat on the edge of my bed, listening to KISS fill the room… listening to Gene sing the words to “Cold Gin”… listening to my guitar solos… and I started to laugh out loud.

This can’t be real.

But it was real, a fact made even clearer a few weeks later when I was driving around with the radio blasting, changing stations, absent-mindedly trying to find something I liked, when I heard “Nothin’ to Lose,” the first single off
KISS,
pulsating through the speakers. I was so distracted that I nearly drove my car off the road (not the first time that would happen, incidentally), but after regaining my composure I turned the volume up as far as it would go and rolled down the windows (even though it was still winter).

Those are the moments you live for, the moments you dream about when you’re a gangly teenager teaching yourself chords in your bedroom, wondering if you’ll ever be any good, or if you’re just wasting your time. I suppose I might have been a little different from most kids; like I said, I honestly believed I was going to be in a famous band someday, and from the moment I met Gene, Paul, and Peter, I thought KISS would be the vehicle to make it happen. Still, there’s nothing quite like holding your own first record album in your hands, tearing off the shrink-wrap, and getting a whiff of freshly pressed vinyl; if there’s anything better, it’s hearing one of your songs on the radio for the very first time.

It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which you’re closer
to a group of people than you are when you’re out on the road, touring with a band. That’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just
an observation. KISS built its reputation through live performances. In the beginning, especially, we were road warriors in the truest sense of the term, living out of suitcases in semi-shitty hotels, traveling by bus (or, if we were lucky, flying coach), sleeping a few hours a night, eating at IHOP or Denny’s, and fucking almost anything that moved. One town blended into the next, as we crisscrossed North America, from Asbury Park to Atlanta to Anchorage… and back again. More than one hundred separate shows the first year alone. We toured constantly, and when we weren’t touring we were back in the studio working on the second album. We lived together, ate together, slept together. We were four very different and unique personalities, but somehow we made it work, because we were working toward a common goal.

You can tolerate a lot when you’re in your early twenties. Your body recovers quickly from abuse inflicted by the road life. Too much to drink the night before? No big deal. You wake up, puke, down a few cups of coffee, and get on with the day. Guys in the band getting on your nerves? Ah, fuck it! Just a phase. You’ll get over it. While the road definitely loses its appeal with age, there’s something legitimately romantic and exciting about living that nomadic life when you’re young. As we became increasingly rich and famous, the quality of the accoutrements improved: hotter chicks, more drugs, five-star hotels, and private jets. But we had no complaints about life even on the lower rung of the rock star ladder.

Groupies were there from the beginning, although it wasn’t as big a deal to me as it was to some of the other guys in the band. I never had problems attracting women. I started having girlfriends when I was twelve years old; sex was no great mystery to me by the time I went out on the road with KISS. Don’t get me wrong—I could whore with the best of them, especially when Jeanette and I were in one of our many periods of estrangement. But I didn’t chase pussy like I’d never seen it before. I’ve heard stories about these guys who become rock stars and all of a sudden they’re getting laid all the time, and they basically lose their minds. I mean, I had already been with at least fifty women by the
time I put on the KISS makeup for the very first time. If you’ve been with only one or two women (and had to beg for whatever you got off them), it must be intoxicating to suddenly have groupies falling all over you. You go from getting laid once or twice a year to getting laid a hundred times by a hundred different women. It can be a little disorienting.

I sort of got the feeling that Gene fell into this category. I can’t say for sure because I don’t know a lot about his sexual history prior to KISS, but I do know that once we got out on the road, Gene reacted like a starving man at a smorgasbord. I believe Gene is a sex addict, in much the same way that I’m an alcoholic. We all have our issues and vices, and I saw Gene’s behavior affect him and the band sometimes in a negative way. Maybe not to the extent that my drinking impacted the band, but certainly there were consequences.

Gene has had a lot of unkind things to say about me over the years. Some of the criticism is legitimate. In sobriety you embrace accountability, and I can’t deny that my drinking and drug use eventually became highly disruptive and problematic. But some of the personal jabs have been harder to take, partly because we were all friends at one time, and we did do something remarkable, but also because Gene wasn’t exactly the easiest guy to get along with, either. Fastidious, if not downright anal in his professional life, Gene was an utter mess in his personal life. I guess having a love for money doesn’t have anything to do with cleanliness. I should know—for the first several tours Gene and I were roommates. Strange, considering we had so little in common. A more logical pairing would have been Paul and Gene in one room, me and Peter in the other. At first I thought it had something to do with the fact that Peter and I were the guys who liked to party, and by splitting us up the risk of catastrophic behavior was minimized. But that wasn’t the case at all. Paul knew Gene well enough by this point to understand that he was a lousy roommate. As I quickly discovered, Gene was an epic slob. I remember the first time we were sitting in our hotel room after a show, and I looked over at Gene, and saw him spitting on the floor, over and over.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?”

Gene cleared his throat, dragged up a thick wad of phlegm, and spat it onto the carpet.

“Throat’s killing me,” he said in a raspy voice.

On one hand I felt bad for him. Gene had a problem. Whenever he did the fire breathing, which was just about every night, for hours afterward he’d be spitting and coughing up shit. The kerosene really agitated his system, which was understandable. What wasn’t understandable was his insistence on spitting all over the floor. I was afraid to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night for fear of stepping in a pile of mucus.

“Jesus, Gene, can’t you at least use a garbage can or something?”

“Hwwwwwwwwwk.”

Another gob of phlegm, another puddle on the floor. It was disgusting, although not as unnerving as the crabs.

See, Gene in those days seemed to live in a state of perpetual infestation. He would fuck almost anything (and I think he’s admitted as much). Short, tall; plump, svelte; attractive… merely tolerable. We all opened our beds to companionship on a regular basis, but somehow Gene was the one who would end up with bugs in his bush. I got creeped out just thinking about it; when you’re rooming with a guy, and you know he has pubic lice… well, it’s a little disturbing. Every time I scratched my balls I’d wonder whether the little bloodsuckers had crept into my bed as well, leaving me infected simply because of proximity.

Sometimes it turned out that I had been. It wasn’t just the fact that I shared a room with Gene that left me vulnerable. In those days we did everything on the fly. Stages were set up and torn down in record time. We packed lightly and traveled fast. As a consequence, our costumes were often thrown together in a single pile and packed into one suitcase, sometimes without even being washed. You can imagine how that worked out—the suitcase filled with hot, sweaty leather, crabs jumping gleefully from the Demon to the Starchild to the Cat and the Spaceman. Must have been like a giant petri dish. And sure enough,
within a few days we’d all be walking around, tugging at our crotches, scratching incessantly.

Gene would just laugh.

“Occupational hazard, boys. You’ll be fine.”

So you see, even when we weren’t sharing women (which we did from time to time), we were still sharing the experience and the aftereffects. The thing is, when you’re young and crazy, it isn’t that big a deal. You go to the drugstore, apply some ointment or medicated shampoo, and you move on. Almost nothing bothered us back then. Compared to the modern-day consequences of unprotected, anonymous sex, pubic lice was a relatively minor inconvenience. You didn’t have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases—well, not anything that could kill you, anyway. I remember when AIDS hit the scene in the 1980s; it was scary. Prior to that you worried about crabs, or maybe syphilis or gonorrhea if you were really unlucky. Those things were easily dealt with. Every month or two you’d go see the doc and get a shot of penicillin. Not necessarily because you’d contracted anything, but just as a precautionary measure. Given my behavior over the years I was incredibly lucky. Never had anything more debilitating than a urinary tract infection. It could have been so much worse.

The funny thing is, Gene was actually somewhat bashful when it came to his sexual escapades. He was, by nature, a private man. Peter and I occasionally shared women. Paul and I, too! Sometimes the three of us would share women. Later on, when there were more women than we could handle, we’d pass the chicks on to our bodyguards and the road crew. There was a pecking order (or fucking order), mind you. Bodyguards and roadies got leftovers or extras; it was never the other way around. Gene rarely joined the festivities. No orgies for Gene. Shit, he wouldn’t even shower with any of the other guys in the band. The three of us, we’d take off our makeup in the dressing room, jump in the shower room together, then get dressed in front of each other and go back to the hotel. It was like being on a baseball team or something, and this was our locker room. Not to Gene, though. He’d go off by himself,
or wait until we were done. Maybe he never played team sports when he was younger?

What can I tell you? Gene is eccentric. Always has been. He had a lot of idiosyncrasies. That’s okay. To each his own. I just thought it was a little strange.

Our first tour began in Canada, in the dead of winter,
and the main thing I recall is being unbelievably cold the entire time. I didn’t mind, though. Here I was, almost twenty-three years old, and I’d never even been on an airplane before, so the whole experience was new and exciting. Our first show was in Edmonton, Alberta; there was about two feet of snow on the ground, and yet still people came out to see us. I’m not even sure how they had any idea who we were. Maybe they were confused. Sure seemed that way sometimes. We’d hit the stage at 100 miles an hour, blowing the roof off the place, and people would just stand there for the first twenty minutes, their mouths hanging open in stunned disbelief. I couldn’t even tell if they liked the music or hated it, or if they’d come just because they’d heard about this strange new band that wore makeup and costumes, and they just wanted to see what it was all about.

The special effects on those first few tours were naturally limited by technology and resources, but we did the best we could with what we had. On one of our first trips through Canada I decided to go out and get some smoke bombs and fireworks and try to incorporate them into the show. The physics of a Les Paul (my Gibson guitar of choice at the time—and I’m still a Gibson guy after all these years) presented some obstacles to what I wanted to accomplish. It had a back plate that was virtually airtight, meaning everything went to the channel where the wires met the pickups. I wanted smoke to come out of my guitar—real smoke, not dry-ice smoke—but I realized that if I put a smoke bomb in that back chamber and lit a fuse, all the smoke would have to come out of the pickups, because that was the only canal through which it could
travel. So in the middle of a show, right before one of my solos, I picked up a cigarette lighter and lit the fuse. It looked all right and the crowd seemed to get into it, but I wanted more smoke. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that while the smoke didn’t necessarily affect my playing, it did affect the equipment, screwing up tone and volume controls. So that whole concept went out the window for a while, until I could get together with an engineer and come up with a more practical design.

The most important thing was that we played with conviction, regardless of whether we were headlining or opening for another act, and we came across as being a serious band—a powerful, exciting visual band. People got caught up in that. Usually by the end of the show, or even halfway through, as the special effects (the flash pots, the fog and the fire, and the smoke bombs) kicked in, people would get completely wrapped up in the show and we’d win the audience over. Even the folks who started off being skeptical would invariably be applauding and calling for encores, asking for more. They might not have known what they’d just seen, but they sure as hell wanted to see more of it.