No Regrets (21 page)

Coke went hand in hand with sex, too, which was another terrific selling point. You could have more sex on cocaine. You could have better
sex on cocaine. In the beginning, at least, I thought it was a wonder drug, the perfect enhancement for the rock star life.

As with every drug, though, you can build up a tolerance to cocaine, and after a while it doesn’t work quite as well. You have to do more blow to get the desired effect. You’re always chasing the memory of that first buzz from the first line, but you never seem to get it again. Then you need more alcohol to come down. Pretty soon the highs aren’t as high and the lows are crushingly painful. There’s a cycle to it. You end up taking tranquilizers or sleeping pills to fall asleep. I always called it a triad. If you’re going to do alcohol and coke in large quantities, you have to have downers at your disposal, because the alcohol ain’t enough. If you’re going to stay up for two or three days doing coke (which I did on several occasions), you need tranquilizers or sleeping pills. Then, after a while, you start taking pain pills to manage the crushing morning-after pain—hangovers like nothing you can imagine. It’s crazy stuff. My hangovers were terrible, like the worst migraine in the world. I’d wake up and vomit so hard I’d see stars. I was doing champagne for a while, and those were terrible hangovers. A champagne-cocaine hangover is unbelievable. Any drug-alcohol hangover is worse than an alcohol hangover by itself. Your whole body aches, because the cocaine intensifies the headache and makes you feel more edgy once it wears off. Your nerves are frazzled.

So what do you do? Quit drinking? Lay off the blow?

Course not. You start taking painkillers and tranquilizers. Every morning begins with Percocet and every night ends with Valium. Then night blurs into day, and pretty soon you’re taking both of them by the fistful, and slowly you begin to lose your edge, as well as your mind. One day you wake up and realize you’ve crossed a line, and you say to yourself, “Man I am strung out. And not only am I strung out, I don’t even know me anymore.”

That’s pretty scary.

It happens more quickly for some people than for others. The disease progresses differently in each person. For some people it takes only
a year or two to become a fullblown addict. For others it takes much longer. I was leading a life totally detached from reality. I went from having little money or worldly possessions to having staggering wealth and fame. And I hadn’t the vaguest fucking clue as to how to handle any of it.

Like I said, I’d had a couple of bad experiences with drugs in high school, so for the longest time I was content to stick with what worked for me, which was mainly booze. Cocaine was extremely expensive in 1975. We’re not talking about cheap cocaine; we’re not talking about crack. You didn’t get into cocaine unless you had the resources to do it right.

After
Alive!
I had the resources, and pretty soon I had the contacts, which led me down the rabbit hole in fairly short order. For example, one of my coke dealers was this guy named Geoff who supposedly had been a mercenary in South America. I don’t know whether that was in fact true, but the guy certainly had an intense and dangerous vibe about him. He also had some of the best blow in the city. I’d gotten to know Geoff through Peter, and before long he became my primary source of cocaine. Whatever else the guy might have been, he was no slouch in the drug trade. His shit was uniquely pure and powerful. Not cheap, either. As a result, Geoff had a very elite clientele, with lots of celebrities, as well as the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers, and Wall Street types. I remember stopping by his place on Eighth Street one day and passing one of the Stones on the way out. Not that it was a big deal that they used blow. In the late seventies, it was hard to find anyone with money or fame who
didn’t
do coke. People did blow the way people today drink beer. It seemed almost normal.

I used to hear stories about Geoff and how his clientele was expanding beyond the point where he could safely or reasonably accommodate everyone. He was selling shit uncut, the story went, and to get uncut blow from South America was considered a real score. Word got out and the traffic in and out of Geoff’s apartment building became uncomfortably busy. It was the weirdest thing. He was clearly running a business,
but he didn’t treat it that way, probably because he was too busy getting fucked up himself. Sometimes he’d deliver, and other times I had to call him up, set up an appointment, and go down to his place in the East Village. Most of the time I’d exchange cash for blow, and instead of just running out of there, I’d hang out and do a few lines with Geoff and whoever else was hanging around. He wasn’t exactly a friend of mine. Like a lot of people I got to know in those days, he was just a guy I did drugs with.

One day I missed an appointment to cop some blow. I forget why or what happened. It really doesn’t matter. The point of the story is that on the day I was supposed to meet Geoff, he and his girlfriend were killed. Shot in the head—execution-style, the cops said—right in their own apartment. I remember seeing the story on the news and feeling a mixture of sadness and relief. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Geoff was killed. If his background story was accurate, it’s easy to envision a scenario in which he had managed to offend his distributors in South America, or had maybe edged into territory previously controlled by the mob in New York. He was playing with fire. And as one of his best clients, and one of his party partners, so was I. If something hadn’t come up, I could have been there the day Geoff was killed.

I guess a guardian angel was looking over my shoulder on that day. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.

When we set out to make
Destroyer
, Bob Ezrin had
been brought in specifically because he understood the challenges associated with taking a big, live theatrical act and translating its sound to the studio. So far, KISS hadn’t done that. We were a popular live band that reached a tipping point on the strength of a live album. The next logical step was to capitalize on that newfound popularity by recording a terrific studio album, which meant making some changes in the way things had been done.

Around the time we hooked up with Bob, he was among the hottest
producers in the business, having worked with Dr. John, Alice Cooper, and Lou Reed. Going strictly by his reputation and résumé, I was looking forward to working with Bob, and while I think
Destroyer
is an interesting and even innovative KISS record, the recording process isn’t something I recall with great affection. Part of that is due to the fact that sometimes I was intimidated by Bob, especially when I couldn’t come up with a guitar-solo idea fast enough to suit his needs.

You have to understand where Bob was coming from. I had heard that when he worked with Alice Cooper’s band he had brought in a session guitar player to do a lot of the solos, and I got the feeling that there was a chance he was going to follow the same plan with KISS if I didn’t produce quickly enough. The pressure was on—and with a hangover as a frequent distraction, I hit a brick wall occasionally.

But part of it was also due to the fact that Bob wasn’t very patient with me; I got the feeling that Paul and Gene might have told Bob about my drinking problem, and he may have put me in the same category as the guys in Alice’s band. The difference is that I had the chops; those just needed to be finessed.

Bob was an interesting guy with a great mind for music and production, but at times he had the demanding, volatile demeanor of a football coach or drill instructor. I guess you’d say he was a high-strung artistic type, which didn’t always mesh well with my laid-back personality.

Bob used to bring a whistle to the studio, and while cutting basic tracks he really intimidated Peter by putting a small box over a microphone and hitting it with a drumstick, as if Peter couldn’t keep proper time! I really felt for Peter during those sessions. It was at times a very demoralizing experience for all of us, and no matter what any of us said, Bob’s word was the law.

Early on, in preproduction, we’d sit in a little room, almost like a classroom, and Bob would stand in front of us at a blackboard, lecturing about the recording process. It was like he was conducting a class—he was the teacher and we were his students. The funny thing is, Bob wasn’t a whole lot older than any of us. He was only in his late twenties
when we recorded
Destroyer
, so it wasn’t like he was the grown-up and we were the children. But it sort of felt that way. Bob carried himself with an air of maturity and importance. He believed in himself, which is probably half the battle if you want to be a record producer. And we wanted to believe in him.

But there’s something I learned later on in my career about the duties of a good producer. His job is not only to help a band make a great record, but also to bring out the best in his musicians by creating an encouraging, comfortable atmosphere in the studio, so that everyone feels good about themselves. That was a quality Bob sadly lacked.

Remember, we struggled with the fact that people were still calling us a carnival act. I struggled with it, anyway, and I’m sure the other guys did, too, even if they don’t want to admit it. It bothered me to read reviews in which more attention was paid to the special effects than the music we played. Obviously I have no right to complain about any of that. We set out to create the greatest theatrical band in the history of rock, and that’s what we did. I invented a character. I wore makeup. I figured out how to shoot rockets out of my guitar and have smoke billow out of the pickups. I bought into the whole thing and reaped the benefits. But there was always a bit of dissonance, a nagging sense that I had sold out to a degree I never quite envisioned. And that really gnawed at me. I wanted to be respected by my peers, and I wanted to be taken more seriously as a musician.

A step in that process was to make a studio album that even our harshest critics could not dismiss.
Destroyer
was supposed to be that album, and it damn near succeeded. For me, though, I knew I hadn’t come close to doing my best work. I had a wealth of musical ideas yet to be discovered, and with the right producer, maybe they’d be brought out.

Bob Ezrin was brilliant, no question about it, but his style did not suit my personality. I’ve never been great at creating under pressure, so when Bob would tell me to do something in a particular way, and give me a small window of time in which to do it, I didn’t always deliver.
You have to realize—I always strive for spontaneity. To this day, my best solos are not planned. I hit the record button and I just wail. If I’m in a good frame of mind, and there are good vibes in the room, I can do some amazing guitar work. On the other side of the coin, if there’s tension, or I’m not coming up with stuff as quickly as people would like me to, I shut down. That happened to me on a couple of songs during the recording of
Destroyer,
which is one of the reasons I wasn’t present for some of the sessions. I got the feeling I wasn’t contributing enough, and Bob was always threatening to bring in a studio guy. Sometimes I have it, sometimes I don’t. And when I was hungover or stressed, I didn’t have it.

It’s long been a suggested that studio guitar players were brought in to help out on
Destroyer
, filing in for me on the days when I simply wasn’t there. Well, the truth is that it happened a few times. I can’t deny it. Most of the guitar work on
Destroyer
is mine, but not all of it. I was hitting the clubs a lot at night in those days, living the life of a rock star. Sometimes that lifestyle wasn’t particularly conducive to making a record. I was starting to get out of control, but I probably would have been a lot more cognizant, and I would have showed up more and been on time, if I had gotten more encouragement from Gene, Paul, and Bob. But it wasn’t my record. In fact, of all the KISS records to that point,
Destroyer
felt the least like my record. It belonged more to Paul and Gene, and to Bob.

Interesting, really, since
Destroyer’s
signature song
belonged to Peter Criss.

“Beth” was such an odd song for KISS at the time, and the circumstances behind its writing and recording, and subsequent ascent up the singles charts, only add to its legend. All were completely improbable. Like me, Peter was always a bit hesitant about presenting material to the band, primarily because he figured he’d be shot down anyway. In the case of “Beth” his reluctance was understandable. First of all, it was
a ballad, and KISS did not do ballads. Second, it was a bittersweet love song, filled with tenderness and regret. KISS didn’t do tenderness, either. KISS did sex. KISS did volume. On the surface, at least, everything about the song seemed… wrong.

But Peter had guts. He’d originally coauthored the tune with another bandmate a few years earlier, prior to KISS. The song had originally been titled “Beck,” which was short for Rebecca (the wife of a different bandmate). The first time Peter played the song for the guys in KISS, the reaction was mixed. Paul didn’t like it. I was ambivalent, but Peter and I were such close friends that I usually felt compelled to support his suggestions. Gene actually thought it was interesting—enough of a departure that it might help serve
Destroyer
’s mission, which was to move the band in a slightly different direction. Bob Ezrin agreed, but only if he could put his stamp on the song (just as he would put his mark on the whole album). Bob was not the kind of producer who believed in letting musicians sit around the studio and
create.
He was an active participant in all phases of production. In the case of Peter’s ballad, that meant rewriting and reworking.

Whatever you might think of Bob, he deserves significant credit for “Beth.” It was his idea to change the title (to something that sounded less androgynous); it was his idea to sweeten the sound of the song with orchestration—strings and piano. Bob was a classically trained musician, and he was blessed with a unique ear. Both of these things impressed the hell out of everyone in the band, since we didn’t even know how to read music; we were all self-taught and therefore in the same wobbly boat. To a degree, Bob intimidated all of us in the studio; we felt inferior to him. When you’re around a guy like that, especially if he has a bit of a swagger, you tend to think he knows his shit. And while we would have second thoughts down the road, it’s hard to criticize much of what Bob did on
Destroyer.
“Beth” was a good song that he transformed into something extraordinary.