Kiss and Make-Up (12 page)

Around this time Paul and I recognized that if we were going to change the band—hire new players, write new music—we should probably have a new name. One day Paul and Peter and I were driving
around, brainstorming for new names. I had thought of a few, like Albatross, but I wasn’t happy with any of them. At one point—we were stopped at a red light—Paul said, “How about KISS?” Peter and I nodded, and that was it. It made sense. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and since then people have talked about all the benefits of the name: how it seemed to sum up certain things about glam rock at the time; how it was perfect for international marketing because it was a simple word that people understood all over the world. But we just liked the name, and that was that.

I had been equally matter-of-fact about changing my own name. In those early days when I was rehearsing, working, and traveling back and forth from Queens to Manhattan, I had plenty of time to ponder all sorts of things, like what the name of the band should be, what we should look like, and how the hell we could pull off the stunt of becoming the biggest band in the world. Most important, did the name Gene Klein have that certain ring to it?

I decided it did not. On one of those subway trips I dismissed the name Sidcup Kent for the new group and took on the name Gene Simmons for myself. It was as simple as that. Complete commitment. One day I was Gene Klein. The next day I was Gene Simmons. I would never be Gene Klein again.

We weren’t finished hiring the band yet, though. We still needed a lead guitar player, and so we put an ad in
The Village Voice.
While Peter had fallen right into place as the drummer, the search for our guitarist was significantly more problematic. We went through audition after audition. One guy came in with a Spanish
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
cloth over him. His wife was with him, and before he played, she explained that he was a highly trained musician who had spent time with the masters. When he sat down and started playing, it was flamenco. We couldn’t believe it, and we told him to stop. “Oh,” he said. He was faintly offended. “This is in the grand tradition of the masters.”

“In the grand tradition,” I said, “good-bye.”

Everything was like that. One after the other, loser after loser. Even the winners were losers. One guy, a guitar player from another group, came in and really floored us. He was a fantastic player and a
great guy. The only problem was that he was black, which wasn’t a problem for us personally but was a huge problem for us as a band. He finished his audition, which was just phenomenal, then went downstairs, and we had an impromptu band meeting in which we decided that no matter how good he was, he just didn’t fit our image. He was black, we were white, and we wanted to put together something that looked like the Beatles on steroids.

I volunteered to go down there and tell him the truth, and I didn’t mince words. I told him I liked him. I told him that we should hang out. And then I told him he couldn’t be in the band because he was black. I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. To his credit, he understood. In fact, he fired it right back at me. If the Temptations uncovered a great white singer, he said, they wouldn’t make him an offer, no matter how good he was.

Meanwhile we still didn’t have a guitarist. One guy named Bob Kulick had played around town, and we really liked him. He was close to making it, and we were giving him the golden rules. Number one: you practice all the time. Number two: no phone calls. While we were talking to Bob, in walks this strange-looking guy with two different-colored sneakers. One was orange and one was red. We had chairs in the back lined up so you could come in and sit and wait your turn. Completely oblivious to the fact that we were still talking to Bob, this new guy plugged into the Marshall amplifier and started playing. “Hey,” I said, “are you out of your mind? Sit down and wait a second, will you?” It was like he didn’t even hear me. He just kept playing. We excused Bob Kulick and told him that we would call him later. We sat this new guy down. “You’d better be good,” I said, “because two notes into it, if you suck, you’re out on your ass.” He just stared straight at me, without any defiance or remorse. We played “Deuce” for him twice, and the third time he got ready to play his solo. And it just fit. Here was this troublemaker who couldn’t match his sneakers and didn’t have the good manners to wait his turn, and he just fit.

“What’s your name?” I said. He said it was Paul Frehley. “Well,” I said, “we can’t have two Pauls in the band.”

Then he actually turned around and said, “Call me Ace.”

I said, “Call me King.” I wasn’t joking. Neither was he.

That was the foursome. That was the Beatles on steroids that Paul and I had envisioned. From the start, it was a tricky mix. People say that certain couples are like oil and water—well, we were like oil and oil and water and water, the four of us. Between Ace and Peter, with their various insecurities, it was a nightmare from the very first day the band ever got together. It was all about getting up and doing what needed to be done. It never was about friends. It never was about hanging out. It never was, and to this day it still isn’t.

Early on it was very clear that Ace would enter the band warts and all: he had some very bad self-esteem problems and was a drinker. But in those early days Peter was actually the most volatile. Mostly it was a cultural divide, one that I couldn’t imagine crossing. When we first met Peter, we knew it was going to be a different world because Peter walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Peter Criscuola, and I’ve got a nine-inch dick.” Paul and I looked at each other quizzically. We were amused, but we didn’t know what to make of it. Obviously guys say stuff with bravado to each other all the time, but half the time it’s to get a rise out of you or a joke. But the way he spoke, his tone, his attitude—they were all bizarre. The same kind of thing happened with Ace. We were at one of our first shows, and the truck was loaded up, and we were ready to leave. Ace wasn’t doing anything. He always had guys who lifted things for him. And he was peeing. We’re waiting for him, and the truck’s lights are on him. He walks over and says, “This is what my dick looks like when it’s soft.” He wanted to show us that he had the inches.

Pretty early on Paul and I were aware that we had just met two types of people that we had never been around before. They drank and were attracted to violence. There is a romantic figure in Italian neighborhoods, and that’s the unlawful guy, whether it’s the local bully or the Mafia guy. That’s the hero, the icon of all icons, not Michelangelo, not Da Vinci. Peter was from that culture. Both Peter and I spent part of our lives in Williamsburg. I was shielded from the neighborhood by the yeshiva, but Peter would run through the streets and go up to kids and demand their pocket change. Peter loved that because of his self-admitted Italian posing. The idea of a
Jewish kid running up to you and demanding your pocket change is laughable. It’s just not what you learn when you grow up. I remembered that as a ten-year-old every once in a while I would have to run down the street to get away from the gangs and get safely inside the yeshiva. Peter liked to joke that he could have been one of the guys chasing the Jews. There’s another way to describe the difference between the two cultures, and it’s an old joke. What’s the difference between a Jewish mother and an Italian mother? The Italian mother tells her kids, “If you don’t do what I tell you to do, I’m going to kill yuz.” The Jewish mother says, “If you don’t do what I tell you to do, I’m going to kill myself.”

After one of our shows, Paul and I went to return the milk truck to the rental place. Peter had driven home. Ace was nowhere to be seen because he never helped us load or unload the trucks. After Paul and I finished the work, we had arranged to meet at two or three in the morning in Chinatown, where Peter was having a birthday party. His wife, Lydia, was there, his friends were there, and he was sitting at the head table, presiding over the crowd. When Paul and I walked in, we looked like freaks. We still had makeup spread on our faces. At that point we didn’t have makeup remover. We just tried to wash it off with soap. So we came in late and tired. We just wanted some fried rice and stuff. Peter called for the waiter, who came out of the kitchen and asked us what we wanted to eat. At that point Peter started making fun of the waiter to his face with this mock Chinese speech. “What kind of fucking way is that to talk?” he said. It was very embarrassing to Paul and me. “Please don’t do that,” we said. “He’s just trying to take the order.”

Peter blew up. “Fuck you,” he said. “If you don’t like the way I talk, why don’t you get the fuck out of here!” He must have had something to drink, or at least I’d like to think so.

Paul and I said, “Okay, if that’s the way you feel, we’ll leave.”

“Hey,” Peter said. “If you walk out that door now, I’m leaving the band.”

We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and walked out the door. Peter was yelling all the way out. It was Lydia who talked sense into him, and he came back after two weeks. He was all about false bravado. The smallest dogs bark the loudest.

We came to understand that Peter just wanted to be part of the excitement, and that he took every setback very personally and very hard. His best friend was Jerry Nolan, who ended up drumming for the New York Dolls. The old Dolls drummer had died from a heroin overdose, and when they went out to hire a new one, Peter hoped that he would get the gig. He didn’t, and he didn’t take the disappointment well. As we were getting ready to go play the Diplomat Hotel, which was our first major coming-out concert to the industry, Peter was depressed and threatening to leave the band again.

Paul and I had a war council, and we decided that we should do everything in our power to keep the band together, at least until we got a record deal. Then if things still weren’t working out, we could always let Peter go and hire another drummer. It was all about pragmatism. We racked our brains trying to think of a way to improve Peter’s mood, and I finally came up with an idea. Just before the show, we were all outside, in full makeup, and Peter was bellyaching again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t feel like playing. I’m not sure what I want to be doing with my life.”

Just then a Mercedes-Benz stretch limousine turned the corner and headed down the street. It stopped in front of us, and Paul and I turned to Peter and said, “This is for you.” Knowing that he was depressed, we had rented it for him.

It worked like a charm. His face lit up. “Now I feel like a star,” he said. “Let’s go kick some ass.”

We piled everything into the limo, the guitars and the girls and the four of us. It was like one of those old college stunts where everyone crams into a phone booth. We were barely able to breathe. But we went in style. That’s how it went all the time: the ship would start sinking, and Paul and I would plug the leak and keep paddling.

We wanted the entire band to sing, and we wanted everybody to write. We wanted everyone to be a star. We wanted to do it like the Beatles, but with a twist, because we were taller and didn’t have those little-boy looks. An early photo from around that time shows us in semidrag, with heavy makeup. But as time went on and glam
became a bit more familiar, we started to rethink our dedication to dressing in drag and wearing makeup.

The first thing we did was go to all-black costumes. I had never seen a band all in black. When we started to design the mature version of KISS, we were doing things that no one had ever done in rock and roll. For example, the idea of having a big sign with the band’s name on the stage, which later became a cliché with almost all heavy-metal bands, started with KISS. You didn’t have bands getting up there with big flashing signs telling you who they were. That was Las Vegas stuff. And that was precisely what we were doing. Other bands would come out, and the audience wouldn’t know who they were. There were no signs. Sometimes they’d put their name on the drum set, but even that was fairly low key. From the beginning, we envisioned everything bigger, grander, more over the top.

We also started to put more thought into the makeup and specifically into the idea of creating a character for each band member. Later on in our career, when we went to Japan, the reporters there wondered if our makeup was indebted to the Japanese kabuki style. Actually mine was taken from the Bat Wings of Black Bolt, a character in the Marvel comic
The Inhumans.
The boots were vaguely Japanese, though—taken from
Gorgo
or
Godzilla
—and the rest of the getup was borrowed from
Batman
and
Phantom of the Opera
, from all the comic books and science fiction and fantasy that I had read and loved since I was a child. As KISS became more comfortable in this second skin, we started to see how powerful our new look really was, and how it moved far beyond glam rock, which was already feeling as though it was running its course.