Despite our best efforts, we were not able to sell KISS singles. KISS turned out to be very unusual in that regard; many of their most popular songs were not hit singles by any stretch of the imagination, although we did everything we could think of to make people believe they were. Our failure to sell singles on KISS was something completely different for Neil. Prior to this, he’d been renowned for his ability to sell and promote singles. The fact that we couldn’t move them for KISS was a source of surprise and consternation for us, until we realized that the landscape of the industry was changing. It was a new world, and album sales were king.
It took no experience or industry acumen whatsoever to see that the key to KISS was their live performance. Even at this neonatal phase in their development, their concerts were a cauterizing experience for the uninitiated. Their look and vibe today is pure comic book—wry and admittedly (even gloriously) over the top. But in 1974, nothing like KISS had ever been seen. The field was then populated by the likes of John Denver, the Grateful Dead, and Elton John, so the KISS guys felt dangerous. Their costumes were more developed than they’d been at the Manhattan dance studio performance nine months earlier. There were no more T-shirts or velvet or red pants. They all wore leather, and everything except Paul Stanley’s lips—clothes, platform boots, backline speaker cabinets, drums—was black, white, or chrome. Their shows would start off with one of the crew, usually their tour manager, barking out a P.T. Barnum greatest-show-on-Earth introduction: “Put your two lips together and welcome KISS!” It was a call to worship, which was immediately followed by a few crashing guitar chords. Then the stage seemed to vaporize in a fusillade of smoke and deafening explosions. The three guitarists—front man Paul Stanley, lead Ace Frehley, and bassist Gene Simmons—would run around the stage with an energy and abandon matched only by The Who, windmilling power chords and galloping through dry-ice fog banks with an electric fury. But at those early shows, the stunt that drew the most gasps through its sheer originality and shock value was Gene Simmons vomiting blood. Most audiences had seen bass solos (many of them interminable, thanks to the burgeoning art-rock scene, with its unchecked musical interludes), but to see Simmons writhe as he played made no sense to them.
What is he doing
? His lips would then begin to spasm away from his teeth into an altogether malevolent grin. Then the first trickle of blood would appear—a thin, crimson thread from the corner of his mouth. When I watched the audiences at these shows, I saw the wheels spinning in their heads.
This isn’t right. Something’s wrong with him!
And then Simmons would convulse in a violent seizure and blood would spew in all directions.
The stunt was deeply unsettling to those first crowds who saw it. Other bands had explosions (though not quite so many), other bands had smoke, or lights and lasers, but the blood spitting hit people in their blind spot. They never saw it coming. I distinctly remember seeing their genuine looks of concern turn to horror, disgust, and fascination. One poor girl at an early show seemed convinced that Gene’s intestines were spilling out onto the stage.
And this wasn’t even the show’s climax. “Black Diamond,” the most epic-sounding of the band’s tracks, usually capped the evening. During the song, Peter Criss’s drum riser would be elevated ten or more feet and another blast of smoke and concussion bombs would provide an added flourish.
KISS’s show was truly jaw dropping, and what the band needed was a really good booking agent. Enter Jeff Franklin, again—the same man who had helped Neil set up distribution through Warner. Though he was the top man at ATI, the industry’s leading concert-booking agency, Jeff tended to stay out of daily operations, preferring to focus on brokering bigger deals. His two direct reports, Ira Blacker and Wally Meyrowitz, were outstanding at their jobs and kept the day-to-day bookings off Jeff’s desk.
We quickly came to realize that KISS was going to represent a huge challenge to ATI. The problem was, in brief, KISS was too good. No one wanted to follow the band, and fewer and fewer acts were willing to share the bill with them. Those who did would often sandbag KISS by limiting the band’s use of the PA system or refusing to allow their pyrotechnical displays because they were afraid of being upstaged. Audiences expected headliners to be as entertaining as KISS, and they never were.
We had to work KISS differently. The standard method for booking new acts was to put them on a bill with big-name headliners in order to expose them to as many people as possible. We couldn’t do this with KISS. As nice as it was to have such an obvious skyrocket on our hands, KISS’s potential was so volatile that it scared off would-be promoters. This put us in the disadvantageous position of having to treat KISS, a new and mostly unknown act, as a headliner, and that meant committing to spending amounts of money commensurate with headliner status. We would have welcomed better-known bands taking KISS on as an opening or middle act, but with the show they had and all the equipment it required, it was very difficult to find bands willing to go on after them. This led to canceled bookings with some pretty big bands—among them, Genesis, Queen, and Aerosmith.
I decided to take a different approach. I went to various cities and arranged for KISS to perform for free for the AOR stations in the market, a tactic I had used to great success with Genesis a few years earlier at Buddah. As long as we were paying for them to headline and losing money on every show, why not get the most out of the band’s performances?
KSHE-FM in St. Louis was (and still is) the oldest rock station in America, having been the first in the country to switch to an all-rock format, back in 1967. It was run by Shelly Grafman, a really nice guy from the old school of radio. If you showed Shelly how playing a band would put money into his station’s coffers, he would cooperate. I’d had a good relationship with him when I was at Buddah, and when I took on the job of getting KISS airtime, he was one of my first calls.
Casablanca bought time on the station and booked KISS for what was termed a “live performance promotion,” which turned out to be a headlining spot at KSHE’s Kite-Fly on March 31.The kite fest, the station’s big annual outdoor event, was held in Forest Park, St. Louis’s version of Central Park. To help promote it, we scheduled an on-air appearance at KSHE a week or so before the concert. The day of the band’s radio appearance, one of the worst storms in decades hit St. Louis. When the band and I showed up at KSHE, it was closed. No one was there. The station, the size of a shoebox, was located about ten feet away from a drive-in theater on old Route 66 in Crestwood, a St. Louis suburb. Both the theater’s enormous screen and the station had been damaged by the storm. So, there we were, the band members (sporting their costumes) and I, standing on top of a hill at the side of Route 66, the wind blasting us with dust and debris, wondering what the hell we were going to do. Afterwards, Shelly felt so sorry for us and was so impressed that we’d even shown up in that weather that he began to play KISS like they were the biggest thing ever to hit the city. It paid off: the kite fest drew over forty thousand people, and KISS was a smashing success. Given that KISS was still almost completely unknown and had released their first album just a few weeks prior, getting to play in front forty thousand people was an astounding opportunity. St. Louis and KSHE would become strongholds for KISS. Shelly, his wife, Emily, and I remained good friends for years.
With the KSHE success in mind, I tried to set up as many radio-oriented concerts for KISS as I possibly could. Booking them proved to be a difficult task for ATI, as the timing of the radio gigs did not always make geographic sense. ATI might normally book Chicago one night and Indianapolis the next, but my reliance on radio-sponsored gigs could have KISS going from Memphis to Chicago and back south to Charlotte all within a few days. I’m sure KISS’s road crew adored us for this, and I did have one major argument with Wally Meyrowitz and Jeff Franklin during which I insisted that they couldn’t book KISS in several cities because I needed the band hundreds of miles away at some Midwest station to do a radio-sponsored gig. I empathized with ATI’s plight; I knew the schedule made absolutely no sense in terms of normal tour routing, but I was not trying to make sense. We were desperate to break out the band, and if a powerful radio station was willing to help us out, then we would take advantage of it. Touring at this point had to be focused on cities or stations where we could maximize radio exposure. If a market didn’t have a radio station that would back us up and play the band, then we would have to ignore that market until we could find a foothold in it.
Cleveland was an ideal target. The market was dominated by two radio stations: WIXY-AM, the powerful Top 40 station; and WMMS-FM, which had a progressive rock format. WIXY was directly handled by our independent representative in the Midwest, Bruce Bird, who was one of the first independent record promoters, and a very good one, at that. Bruce had some pull with the program director (PD), Marge Bush, and he helped us to get almost all our product on the station.
WMMS was more difficult. Their PD, John Gorman, had little to do with the music—he left that up to his star DJ, Kid Leo. Leo was not thrilled about KISS. His main love was David Bowie, so we knew we would have to bring the band into the market and show WMMS how a live KISS show worked.
In terms of concert promotion, the market was repped by Mike Belkin of Belkin Productions, and he was not warm to the idea of booking KISS. To reduce his risk, we booked the band as an opening act for Rory Gallagher at the Agora Ballroom, a small, old-fashioned, low-ceilinged venue that was furnished with tables and chairs. It was far from the best place to showcase the band, but we had no other choice. The night of the show, April 1, I had Bruce and his younger brother, Gary (who eventually took over Bruce’s business and grew it into one of the most powerful independent promotion firms in the country), arrange for Kid Leo to join us at the venue. As soon as Leo showed up, I handcuffed him to a chair so he couldn’t leave.
The show was going great until Peter Criss’s drum riser began to go up. The ceiling was too low to accommodate this, and before anyone realized it, Peter had crashed into the ceiling and fallen off his drum riser. I rushed over to him and saw that he was unconscious. With the help of road manager J.R. Smalling, I managed to revive him. Meanwhile, the rest of the band, used as they were to mishaps—Gene had set his hair on fire and Ace was constantly falling down because he couldn’t walk in his space boots—didn’t miss a beat. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Leo was impressed enough to begin playing the band, and Cleveland would eventually become one of their strongest markets.
KISS’s April 7 gig was another example of how this marketing angle worked. Mark Parenteau was at WABX, the local rock station in Detroit. He was not initially impressed by KISS; he preferred another new act, Aerosmith. Mark was openly gay—why he was married, I never understood—and he had a crush on Steven Tyler, probably because Tyler reminded him so much of Mick Jagger. I arranged a special trip to Detroit to present KISS’s album to WABX. When I arrived at the station, Mark was on the air, so as we talked we were frequently interrupted; we also took breaks to toke a bit of weed or snort a line or two of blow off the KISS album jacket. At first, Mark was totally against playing KISS; the makeup really put him off, though he was a big fan of Alice Cooper (the same contradictory reaction I’d seen among some Warner staffers earlier that year). I eventually cut a deal with Mark whereby Casablanca would pay all the production costs for a KISS concert in Detroit. He could arrange to have any other bands he wanted on the bill, but if KISS blew away the audience within the first five minutes of taking the stage, then he would have to play them like it was the Second Coming. He agreed, and the show was on. The only problem was that Aerosmith insisted on closing the show to make the audience believe they were the bigger act. But, knowing what KISS was capable of, I was fine with this. Besides, the deal stipulated that on-air mentions would be the same for both bands.
WABX hired a local man named Steve Glantz to promote the show. Glantz was an entrepreneur in his early twenties whose father was bankrolling his promotion company. He had little experience beyond promoting several area college events, though he grew to be a very important contact for KISS. The station arranged for the show to be held at the Michigan Palace, an old five-thousand-seat theater in downtown Detroit. It sold out immediately—I think the ticket price was only ninety-seven cents, since ninety-seven was WABX’s frequency on the radio dial—and the WABX staff showed up in force: David Perry, Dave Dixon, Dan Carlisle, general manager John Detz, and Ken Calvert. Mark and I walked through the audience as KISS began to play. The minute Gene Simmons spit fire, everyone froze. You could hear the proverbial pin drop for about two seconds. Then there was a deafening roar. Mark yelled in my ear, “You win!”
The gig was plagued with production problems, likely stemming from Glantz’s inexperience with larger gigs. The amount of time between acts (Bob Seger and Ted Nugent were also on the bill) was an issue. At multi-act shows, the first bands on the bill do not typically use their full production, which helps shorten the gaps between acts, but I was paying for the gig, and the last thing I was going to do was let KISS take the stage with anything less than their full production. Following KISS’s set, the venue’s representatives threatened to close the building at midnight in compliance with their contracts with the stagehand and security unions. By the time I resolved the matter, it was approaching 2:00 a.m. To compound the problem, the audience was leaving the hall, exhausted after rocking through six hours of music. Steven Tyler threw a screaming hissy fit. Mike Klenfner was there representing Aerosmith’s label, Columbia Records, and he wound up on the receiving end of Tyler’s rant. The image of Tyler, about five foot two and about one hundred pounds wringing wet, yelling up at Klenfner, at least six foot four and three hundred and fifty pounds with hands the size of catcher’s mitts, was by turns hilarious and surreal. I was expecting Klenfner to lift Tyler off the ground and throw him from one end of the backstage area to the other, but he kept his cool, and Tyler lived to sing another day.