Kiss and Make-Up (19 page)

Much of the success of
Destroyer
had to do with Bob’s bravery, particularly his interest in introducing new elements into our music. Bob’s children would come in—he was going through a divorce at the time—and they actually wound up as the little voices in “God of Thunder.” He was doing all kinds of things, like having symphony orchestras and choirs. What George Martin was to the Beatles, Bob Ezrin was to us. He had something that we had never seen before in a producer: a vision. He knew where he was going within the confines of what KISS was. And most important, he knew how to get there. While Paul and I had perspective and vision, we didn’t quite
know how to get there, because we were limited as musicians. There was one thing we did know, though—we wanted to create an experience that went beyond the experiences that other rock bands were creating.

Bob really listened to our songs and recognized that we were less about storytelling than about singing about our own feelings and perceptions: “I’m the king of the nighttime world.” “I want to rock and roll all night.” That was a quantum difference. “I am the God of Thunder.” These were the kinds of statements we specialized in, and they differentiated us from other bands. When we spoke to Bob about this, he realized that the simplicity and self-absorption in the lyrics was purposeful, that we were a band with a distinct point of view rather than just a set of guys who didn’t have a clue. We wanted to write anthems, songs that felt like the theme songs for a generation, songs that had a “you and me against the world” perspective.

As much as Paul and I loved working with Bob, Ace and Peter hated it. For the first time, they couldn’t take the easy way out. Ace was not about discipline—he wouldn’t even show up on time. And nobody had ever sat Peter down and said, “Here is a two and a four.” He has never been able to articulate his own playing: “Give me a one and a three on a kick, and a two and a four on the snare.” He wouldn’t have a clue what that meant, and to this day he doesn’t know what a two or a four is. Peter has always played by feel and couldn’t play the same thing twice.

As a result, Bob Ezrin’s time with the band was very tough for Ace and Peter, or at least that’s how they saw it. Peter in particular was devastated by it. He had never had any discipline; he was a street kid. Paul and I had always been critical of Ace and Peter because they didn’t get the big picture. But here was this guy from the outside doing the same thing, only ten times more intensely.

Paul and I used to talk about who was taking the experience harder. In retrospect, I think both of them were feeling quite defeated, although their feelings manifested in different ways. Peter would come out furious that somebody was telling him what to play
or how to sing. And that that’s not rock and roll. It was the same personality that made him threaten to leave the band if we didn’t include his “Strange Ways” solo, back in 1974.

Ace would simply leave. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up at recording sessions. On one occasion he wanted to leave early because he had a card game at seven that evening. At some point Bob didn’t worry about Ace or his excuses—he simply got another guitar player to come in to play Ace’s parts. Mainly, it was a guy called Dick Wagner, who played with the Lou Reed Band. He was not credited, and to this day people think it’s Ace on the album. Ace felt as if Paul and I especially were traitors, and that we told Bob Ezrin to get another guitar player because we never wanted him in the band anyway. Yet we were the ones who brought him into the band, pushed him to write his own songs, and asked him to be more than a guitar player and sing his own songs. He was oblivious to that, and continues to be.

During the recording of
Destroyer
in 1975, I had another drug experience. Not an experience in which I took a drug, but the first time I ever saw cocaine cut up and ready to be snorted. A mirror was built into the control console at the recording studio, and I was clueless about its purpose. I kept on saying, “Look how stupid this is, you have to bend down to see your face. The least they could do is hang it up on the wall.” And everybody would laugh. But nobody ever told me what it was for. At the time I was using Sweet ’N Low in my coffee, because I have always loved desserts but wanted to lose weight. One day I walked in, and there was powder on the mirror, and I was so oblivious to everything about drugs that I assumed it was Sweet ’N Low. I made myself some coffee and I brushed some of the stuff on the console into my cup. Then I thought twice about it and said to myself,
That’s probably got dirt and stuff.
One of the engineers explained it to me: “No, that’s cocaine. You cut it up, you snort it with a straw.”

“That’s stupid!” I said. It seemed so stupid to me, in fact, that I actually took Sweet ’N Low and spread it on the control console. I
don’t know if anybody took it or not. But I thought that was a funny thing at the time.

While we were recording
Destroyer
, we spent a lot of time in the studio, more than we ever had. During the course of those sessions, I’d be plugging one of the girls who worked there. I would say, “Excuse me, guys, I got to go pee,” and slip away to fuck her pants off. On one occasion, I snuck her into a vocal booth and laid her down. I ravenously went at her and she at me until she stopped, patted me on the back, and pointed to the window portal: Ezrin and the band had seen the whole thing. Paul then got the message and started doing her. We were on swing shift.

After KISS played a concert in Flint, Michigan, in 1975, Peter and I were in a limousine together, and he was trying to sing something he called “Beck,” about a girl named Becky. I suggested that he change the name to Beth, both because it was a little easier to sing and because it would eliminate any misunderstanding that it was about Jeff Beck. Peter brought this nice little melody into the studio and sang it for Bob. Immediately Bob sat down and fleshed it out. He had a much wider musical library than any of us. He listened to jazz, to classical, to country. He stuck in a middle eight from a Mozart piano concerto, rewrote the lyric, and suddenly we had a song.

But we didn’t really know what to do with it. Rock bands didn’t do ballads, least of all in the midst of a concerted push for rock and roll credibility. The only way we validated the idea that there were strings on it was because of “Yesterday” by the Beatles. If it was cool for the Beatles, then we could do it. The first few singles from
Destroyer
hadn’t done quite as well as we wanted. “Shout It Out Loud” was the first single, and it got into the Top 40. Then the label released “Flaming Youth,” with a special picture disk, but that only got to number 74. The third single was “Detroit Rock City,” with “Beth,” this strange unclassifiable ballad, on the B-side. We had high hopes for “Detroit Rock City,” but it didn’t even chart, and the album—which had reached as high as number 11 and sold about 850,000—was beginning to taper off. That’s when something
strange started to happen. Radio stations turned over the record and started playing “Beth” instead of “Detroit Rock City,” and it quickly became a huge hit.

“Beth” was a breakthrough single, establishing the record. Now, rather than having a hit with a live record and then sinking back down, we were riding the crest of two massive hit records. In pop music this has been the way to create superstars from stars, and sure enough, we were superstars. Soon after
Destroyer
came out, we played our first stadium, Anaheim Stadium in California, which held 55,000 fans. If it hadn’t happened to us, we wouldn’t have believed it: this was early 1976, only two years after we released our first record, and there we were playing stadiums before anyone other than the Beatles had. Bands that had been around for almost a decade, including Ted Nugent and Bob Seger, were opening for us. We knew something was going on. It was clear.

This is me, without the makeup, and an editor of
Superteen
magazine, who interviewed me for an article in 1976.

The first burst of fame coincided with the first wave of KISS merchandise. I had always seen the band as a means to an end—in my mind, making music was only part of the plan. The master plan was to create a cultural institution that was as iconic as Disney. From the very beginning, we were at the forefront of rock and roll merchandising: we had the usual products, like T-shirts and posters, but we also had an interest in expanding into other markets. We grew to the point that Bill Aucoin actually bought a share in a company called Boutwell, and we wound up in manufacturing. Warehouses in the southern California valley were manufacturing our own T-shirts, belt buckles, and stuff. Mail-order forms were enclosed inside the records. We did things other bands wouldn’t have had the balls to do, the same things you see when you buy
Time
magazine—there’s an order form inside. From the start, we didn’t care that it invalidated what we did. We were not concerned with credibility. It just looked like a lot of fun.

As time went on, some bands took a stand against this kind of thing. Primarily they came from the big art rock movement in New York. We always thought they were geeks. It was as if all of a sudden the guys who never got laid in school put guitars around their necks. They didn’t count for us. They didn’t look like stars, they looked like students. And they always talked about stuff we couldn’t care less about. Burning buildings? What are you talking about?

All of a sudden we were one of the biggest bands in the world. In the mid-1970s a lot of the bands we grew up with were not exactly at their peak. The Stones were not. The Who were not. And we were outselling them more than two to one. Bands like Queen were huge worldwide, but in America they didn’t tour much. We didn’t have many peers.

At that time misinformation about the band began to spread in the southern Bible Belt states, including a rumor that the name
KISS
stood for Knights In Satan’s Service, and that the four of us were devil worshipers. Ironically, this rumor started as a result of an interview I gave in
Circus
magazine after our first album; in response to a question, I said that I sometimes wondered what human flesh tastes like. I never wanted to really find out, but I was curious intellectually. Later on, this comment seemed to ignite the whole idea that in some way KISS was aligned with devil worship. When I was asked whether I worshiped the devil, I simply refused to answer for a number of reasons: the first reason, of course, was that it was good press. Let people wonder. The other reason was my complete disregard for the people who were asking. The religious fanatics who were asking these questions didn’t deserve the time of day. The uneducated always point to religious principles. Through the years, whenever religious fanatics accosted me, especially in the southern states, and quoted the Old Testament at me, I would quote them back chapter and verse. They didn’t know that I had been a theology major in school. An idiot is an idiot … whether he quotes the Bible or not.