Kiss and Make-Up (13 page)

The first official KISS gig I ever got for us wasn’t as KISS but as Wicked Lester. In the early days, I used to go to ridiculous lengths to get us booked into shows. Sometimes I would literally go door to door, knocking and waiting until the manager came out, then trying to convince him to hire us. There was a nightclub called Coventry (originally Popcorn) in Astoria, Queens, and I managed to get Wicked Lester a spot there. It wasn’t the weekend slot, though. It was the middle-of-the-week slot, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which was pretty much a dead zone. We gave our picture to the
club, and by this time we had decided to be reborn as KISS, thanks in part to Epic’s decision to drop Wicked Lester. I remember very clearly when our picture went up on the outside of this club, Ace took a marker and wrote our new name right on the picture. The way he drew it was pretty crude, but it resembled our logo, with the two
S
’s like lightning bolts at the end of the word. It didn’t make much difference for the show, which had a crowd of maybe three people: Peter’s wife, Lydia, a girl named Jan who I was seeing, and Jan’s friend. But it was a booking, and soon there were other bookings, including a club called the Daisy in Amityville. Those shows were packed, but mostly because it was a drinking club, with cheap beer and a biker crowd. It was the kind of place where you might see a pregnant woman with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It didn’t matter to us what the places were like or how big the crowds were. We were on cloud nine.

I had all sorts of odd jobs while the band was crystallizing. While I was in high school, I had learned to type, and in college I even started a little business, typing term papers for fifty cents a page. So when I came back to the city from college and was trying to get the band started, I took a job with Kelly Girls, later the Kelly Agency, which supplied temporary secretaries and typists to businesses all around the city. It was decent work, and also a great way to meet girls, since there were very few guys there. Through Kelly, I ended up getting a job at
Glamour
magazine, and within a few weeks I became indispensable, not only because I could type ninety words a minute but because I knew how to fix the hectograph and mimeograph machines. Pretty soon I got moved from
Glamour
to
Vogue
, where I worked as the assistant to the editor, Kate Lloyd. That lasted about six months, although at the same time I was working as a cashier at a deli. With all this work, I couldn’t get to the practice space until nine or ten at night, but I made it, and we would rehearse until two in the morning. I never had a moment’s rest. It got so busy that I moved my bed and my television set into the loft, so I could wake up and go to work without traveling for an hour by subway.
I always worked, so I often had to pay the rent or lend the band money for food or the subway.

In fact, my social life started to center on the loft, because I would arrange for the girls to meet me after rehearsal and spend the night. Not every girl dared venture into 10 East Twenty-third Street; those who did were the few and the brave, because this place was a hole. It didn’t have any windows. We had put up floor-to-ceiling egg crates to dampen the sound. Some of these egg crates had broken eggs in them, so it was a field day for cockroaches. And you could hear them, the pitter-patter of little feet. One night after I turned off the lights I had a girl on top of me on the bed, naked. All of a sudden she let out a bloodcurdling scream. Well, something must have crawled over her, because she jumped up, ran into a wall, and fell down in the pitch-black room. When I turned on the light, she was trying frantically to jump up on the bed; she wasn’t willing to let her feet touch the floor. “Get my clothes,” she said. “Get my clothes. I felt something on my back.” That was the last I ever saw of her.

As soon as I graduated college and got my B.A., I taught sixth grade for six months in Spanish Harlem. It was a fine experience in some ways, and less satisfactory in others, but it didn’t last long. Then I started working for the Puerto Rican Interagency Council as the assistant to the director of a government research and demonstration project called Improved Services to Puerto Ricans in Northeastern U.S.A. and Puerto Rico. The project was a way to track government funds and how they actually went down through government and local authorities and to determine whether they did actually get to the Puerto Rican population. Because of a government rule, I was the non-Puerto Rican working in there. But as it happened, the director liked me enough, because I could do anything. As I said, I could work the mimeograph and the hectograph machines. I also used the offices after they were closed and on weekends to send out our mailers. I used the typewriter and the layout and the stencils, and Peter knew a printer downtown. Ace did nothing. So we were able to put together a very professional-looking promotional package with a photograph, a one-page bio sheet, and everything else. I got the year-end issues of
Billboard,
Record World
, and
Cash Box
, which were music-industry trade magazines, and copied out a huge list of record company executives, managers, music reporters, and so on. Then I sent out our mailer. I must have sent out a thousand of these mailers to everybody and their cousin, and people responded. Because in those days you didn’t get professional-looking packages coming in off the street. Now every band does it. But in those days it was unheard of.

I took something from every job I had. When I was a teacher, I learned how people took in new information, and what kinds of information excited them. When I worked for the Interagency Council, I learned the importance of making a professional package. Just before the band took off, I worked for the Direct Mail Agency, a company that invites people to send them complaints about wanting to be taken off mailing lists for junk mail. The DMA then puts together a list of these people and sells it to the junk mail companies, so that they can save money by not bothering to send their junk mail to the people who have already identified themselves as unreceptive customers. They’re making the junk mail people more market-savvy.

We were primed to break—all we needed was one final stroke of luck. Paul and I took the step of planning a Friday the Thirteenth show at the Diplomat Hotel, which was on West Forty-third Street, a block from the Forty-second Street subway. It was a run-down hotel, but it had a grand ballroom. We had no stature on the local scene—while other bands were making the rounds, playing these clubs, we were in our loft practicing. So we needed this show to be a big deal. Paul and I arranged to get the Brats, a big local band that could pull three hundred people wherever they played. They looked like larger Italian versions of the Faces, a cross between the mods and the mob. We met with them, and I told them that they had to go on at eleven
P.M.
,
no sooner. We paid them $350, which was a lot of money. There was another local band, Luger, that had a small following, and we made them go on at eight
P.M.
and paid them $150. Then we took out newspaper ads and made fliers; our total cost was about $1,000. We were counting on a crowd of 750 or maybe 1,000,
each paying about four dollars a ticket. Since we had done most of the organizing ourselves, we stood to make a decent amount of money from the show. But it wasn’t about the money.

I had read that Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had actually banned Elvis’s hips from television. It wasn’t the network that did that—it was Parker. Because he wanted people to make a to-do about it, he manipulated the media and the audience. We were trying something similar. On our own, KISS couldn’t pull any tickets. But with these other bands, we could. I wasn’t a lawyer and we couldn’t afford one, but I composed and typed up contracts that restricted the movements of these other bands, contracts that required them to appear onstage at a certain time and not before or after; the whole place would be ours for a key window. When the invitations went out, they read, “Heavy Metal Masters: KISS,” and we sent along complimentary tickets, backstage passes, and so on. According to the invitations, we would appear onstage at nine-thirty. We figured that the record executives wouldn’t be able to separate the crowd; even though everybody was coming to see the Brats and Luger, we could pretend they were there for us.

Then we went into phase two of our plan. We packed the front row with sisters and girlfriends wearing KISS T-shirts, which we made at home. Paul and Peter stayed up one night and poured glue and glitter through a KISS stencil, which was good for only two or three wears. Ace did nothing. So the entire front row was filled with girls wearing these black T-shirts with “KISS” on them.

The place filled up with record company executives and producers, just everybody, including Bill Aucoin, the producer of
Flipside
and
Supermarket Sweep
, a game show. Before MTV, before anything else,
Flipside
was a groundbreaking show for televising popular music. When he arrived at the Diplomat, he saw a rabid crowd of a thousand people, including the girls in the front, and the band hitting the stage at nine-thirty sharp in full makeup sticking out their tongues. You can imagine the effect.

By that time, we had already done some recording on our own. Ron Johnson at Electric Lady owed us some money for the sessions we had worked on, and he’d asked if we wanted to take the money
or use it to do a demo tape of our new band. Paul and I jumped at the offer to do a demo—on the condition, we said, that we got to work with Eddie Kramer. Eddie had engineered Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Humble Pie, and lots of other big-name rock bands. He was already a legitimate guy. So he engineered our tape of five songs. We now had a professional-sounding tape plus an event. So if Bill Aucoin and some of the other people came and saw us and said, “We’re interested, can we hear a tape?” we could put a tape on the table that would blow them away. It sounded like a record, and we had it in hand when we went to do the Diplomat show.

When Bill Aucoin came over to talk to me after the show, I still had my makeup on, and one of the girls I had been seeing was sitting on my knee. She thought I was just flirting with her, but I was completely aware that I had to have the garnish around the food—otherwise it wouldn’t look as good. So while he was talking to me, I was in full makeup, with a girl wearing a KISS T-shirt sitting on my lap and cooing in my ear. Bill Aucoin didn’t know that I already had a relationship with her. He didn’t need to know.

Aucoin asked us if we had a management contract. I said no. We were naïve, as it turned out, because the contract we had signed with Ron Johnson was also a comprehensive management contract. But we were also lucky, because that contract was up. We were free to sign with Aucoin, and we did. When we joined up with Bill, we also joined up with another guy who would be influential in the early development of the band, a guy named Sean Delaney. Sean was a fairly young guy who had tried to have his own career in rock and roll. He had a band called the Scat Brothers. The Scat Brothers never made it, and he became part of Bill Aucoin’s management company, which was called Rock Steady. Paul and I thought that we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with KISS. But we didn’t know the first thing about turning our vision into a career. That’s where Bill and Sean came in. Without them, we were a high-spirited young band with enough enthusiasm to carry us along for a while. With them, we were poised to become superstars.

The band was
designed as a democracy. That was the blueprint—it was the Beatles model. But like the Beatles, it was clear that Paul and I were in the front seat, because we were writers, and Ace and Peter were in the backseat.

Paul and I didn’t think of ourselves as leaders, necessarily. When we met Bill Aucoin, he recommended a four-way split. In order to keep things smooth, he said, we should divide the money equally. Better to do that, he said, than to quibble over shares and half-shares. Plus, if everything went according to plan, there was going to be plenty of money for everyone. We took Bill’s advice. Whenever there were decisions, we made them democratically, which didn’t always make sense. If Paul and I wanted to do something and Ace and Peter didn’t, we were in a stalemate. To get our way, we had to emotionally batter them, and often they felt as though Paul and I were ganging up on them. That may have been the perception at times. The truth was that Ace and Peter simply were not qualified to make decisions about band matters that depended upon organization and structure. They were not willing to put in the time to think things through. We would have a meeting about a tour or a photo shoot, and then the very next day Peter would come up to me and say, “Gene, when are we going to have a meeting about the tour?”