Kiss and Make-Up (37 page)

Tommy didn’t even blink. He just rolled up his sleeves and said, “Okay, what do you want to do?” Without any experience, Tommy and I started to research the possibility of hosting these conventions.

The first thing that struck me was the problem of our liability. If we hosted a KISS convention, and we had parking, and a guy cracked up his car, he might sue us. If we served food, and somebody got food poisoning, she might sue us. If we rented a concert hall, and it caught on fire or there was an accident, more lawsuits. So we needed a place where we could put on a suit-proof convention, a place where I didn’t have to staff up and hire personnel to take care of parking, catering, and so forth. The answer seemed to be hotel ballrooms. I made an initial phone call or two just to see how it would work. It turned out that it was pretty reasonable to rent out a ballroom for twelve hours or so, assuming we let the hotel keep all the parking fees, the money from the food, and any receipts if the conventioneers decided to spend the night. I sent Tommy Thayer on a trip across the country, lining up the cities. At the same time I personally sent out mailings to fans, especially those within small communities so they could be part of the conventions.

When the conventions started, the crew was pretty small: me and Paul, Tommy Thayer, Eric Singer, and Bruce Kulick. Tommy arranged with some other guys locally to put together a lot of the memorabilia that I had saved, plus the KISS outfits, and to display it all in a kind of KISS Hall of Fame, with seven-foot-high Plexiglas enclosures.

At the conventions we had show-and-tell. We played an
acoustic set. We answered questions from fans, and we answered them truthfully, which means that the answers weren’t always happy ones. If a fan asked, “Is it true that Ace drinks?” my answer would be “Yes.” If a fan asked, “Did Ace play on ‘Flaming Youth’?” my answer would be “No.” This was long before that
Storytellers
series on VH1, but that was the sense of it, if you add in an extensive autograph session afterward. It was twelve hours solid with the fans.

We did twenty-three cities total, and the very first one was in Los Angeles at a Hilton hotel. By this point Peter Criss’s daughter was in her teens. She had never seen KISS in makeup and had only heard about it from her father. She wanted to go to the L.A. convention. So Peter called a journalist and wanted to know if the journalist could arrange for him and his daughter to go to the convention. The journalist called me immediately, and I called Peter. “Peter,” I said, “you don’t have to ask somebody else. You are a part of the band’s history. This should be your place too. We’ll send a limo to pick you up. You’ll be treated like a king, because you are. Whatever you want is yours.” For a few years I hadn’t seen much of either Ace or Peter. Through the mid-1990s I had worked on a number of side projects, producing acts like Black ’N Blue (Tommy Thayer’s band), Wendy O. Williams (of the Plasmatics), Keel, and EZO, and sometimes I invited Peter and Ace on these projects. But I didn’t have any real thoughts about bringing them back into KISS. Ace and Peter had become so crippled by their emotional problems and by various substances—they had become so diminished as human beings and as musicians—that they would have been an embarrassment. It’s one thing to get together again in a room and trade old stories, but when you put the makeup back on and step up on that stage, how are you going to be convincing? Still, I thought Peter deserved his spot onstage at these conventions.

There’s a funny side note to this story. About six months earlier Tom and Roseanne Arnold—they were together at that point—had called me to find out if I wanted to contribute to or somehow get involved in the Peter Criss Fund. They had read that Peter was down on his luck, that he was homeless and living under a bridge. I told
them, “Don’t pay attention to those stories, they’re not true. It may be true that Peter is broke, but I don’t think he’s living under a bridge.” They insisted that they had read this piece and heard the same news from others. Two or three months after that I was watching Phil Donahue’s show, and the guest was none other than Peter Criss, talking about a guy who was living under a bridge and who bore a rough resemblance to Peter. One of the tabloids had either paid this guy or swallowed his story, and this trumped-up tale about Peter living under a bridge began to make the rounds. So that was how Peter reappeared on my radar. By this time both Ace and Peter were relegated to playing clubs, and at one point they decided to tour together as the Bad Boys of Rock. They were playing KISS songs, but they couldn’t use the KISS logos or makeup. Peter would later tell me that being on tour with Ace was not easy, because Ace would continually be drunk or high, and because there was always a big discussion about who was going to headline. This was during their 1994 tour.

I invited Peter to come down to the convention. And Eric Singer, God bless him, said, “You know what? You should ask him if he wants to come up when we do our acoustic set. Maybe he’ll want to sing a song or two. I’m sure the fans would love it.” When Eric said that, we all looked at each other and said, “Sure, why not?”

Before the convention we got together and rehearsed with Peter. He tried playing drums, but it was substandard. So Eric Singer decided to play the drums behind Peter, while Peter just got up on a stool and sang. As it turned out, it was a heartwarming appearance. I looked across the stage and thought that it was a real shame that Peter’s other problems had prevented him from doing his best for the band, and for himself. Because the fans loved it. They were having so much fun. And so was I, to be honest. I wish we could have isolated the moment in time when we sang those two songs together. It was magic.

It wasn’t just seeing Peter that made those KISS conventions magic, as we learned from the other ones. The experience of doing them really opened up our eyes to the living, breathing thing that we had created above and beyond the records and songs. There it
was: the KISS Army, the KISS nation, alive and well. Clearly, what was running through their veins was belief in this bizarre thing that we had created. Children were named after our songs. We would meet them. “Hi, I’m Christine. I can’t wait to turn sixteen so I can become Christine Sixteen.” And they’d giggle. “Meet my daughter Beth.” On and on and on. “What’s your name?” “I’m Doctor Love.” “Oh really! And what’s your name?” “I’m Mister Speed.” Sometimes there would even be weddings at the conventions, and the bride and groom would wear full KISS makeup.

One of the most gratifying parts of the shows was the fan testimonials. People would tell us that they had been outcasts, nobodies, until they heard KISS, and from then on they had a refuge. It almost sounded religious. Girls wanted to come up and kiss us, and that was funny, and everybody got a kick out of it. But sometimes we would all—Paul, me, Eric, and Bruce—get lumps in our throats. At one of the conventions, an attractive young woman got up and told us about her boyfriend. They had met, fallen in love, and gotten engaged. Then out of the blue, he had gotten cancer, and when it became clear he was going to die, he called off the wedding, because he didn’t want to affect her life in this way, even though she was still willing to go through with it. Before he died, he asked her one thing: “Would you please bury my KISS records with me?” She explained to the rest of the people at the convention that the idea that someone could love a band so much had seemed strange to her. “Now I understand,” she said. Then she collapsed, just burst into tears, and the whole place went silent out of respect and admiration for this woman. So often we’d get off that stage exhausted, not just because we were there for hours but because it was emotionally draining. The conventions reminded us how much the fans loved us and how much we loved the fans.

When Peter left the convention in Los Angeles, he went home and picked up the phone and called Ace and told him what a rush it was and how great it felt. Ace expressed an interest in participating too.

As we went along on the convention trail, people started to
talk about them. The word of mouth was tremendous. At some point MTV sent crews out, and one of the people to take notice was a guy named Alex Coletti, the producer of MTV’s
Unplugged
series. We had been filming every one of these conventions, because we wanted to put out a long-form video about them. Coletti saw the tape of fans getting up onstage and jamming with us, and people crying. “Why doesn’t KISS bring its convention to the MTV studios and do an episode of
Unplugged
?” he said. Paul and I talked about it and decided to invite Peter and Ace to join us, not for the New York KISS convention, but for the
Unplugged
taping. We would have the entire KISS lineup: Eric, Bruce, Ace, Peter, Gene, and Paul. And when Ace and Peter went on, Eric and Bruce would be offstage, out of respect for them, so they could sing their songs. Then we’d all get together and do one or two together as a band.

When I called Peter to tell him about it, he jumped at the opportunity right away. When I called Ace, he said, “That sounds great. Thanks so much for calling me. My manager is George Sewitt.”

George Sewitt was initially our security guy. He was very adept in martial arts. Then somehow he had expanded into management and started representing Ace and Vinnie Vincent. When Vinnie Vincent left, Sewitt took on another client: Peter Criss. As a result of Ace using Sewitt as a go-between, the negotiations for this one-off KISS reunion on
Unplugged
became all-consuming for me. I had daily discussions with Sewitt about the fact that there wouldn’t be any pay, that we were just doing this for MTV, that we would play just two songs with the band, that we would retain the rights to release the performance as a long-form video, and so forth. Part of what took so long was my own meticulousness; I’m all about making a list and checking it twice. Other people let lawyers take over. I don’t.

But another reason the negotiations became so protracted was Ace himself. Initially Ace said, “Sure, I’ll show up with my guitar, and we’ll do a couple of songs together. That’s great, I look forward to it. Thanks so much.” But then came a series of conversations where Ace wanted a suite, and then a pair of roadies, and then five
thousand dollars for guitar strings and popcorn and peanuts. Then he wanted another suite for his daughter. At one point George Sewitt was calling MTV directly. I immediately cut him off at the pass. “You’re not to call MTV,” I said. “You don’t represent KISS, and this is a KISS show. We will let you know where to go and what time to show up. You may be Ace’s manager, but please don’t get confused about what that means.”

I had to be stern, because MTV would listen to anybody who represented themselves as being part of KISS. The left hand was the same as the right hand, in their estimation. Even though Paul and I were trying to keep on the best friendly face, dealing with Ace and George Sewitt was torture. The deal kept changing every single day. And with Peter it was always walking on thin ice because he was shaky emotionally. He was alone at that point, between marriages. His daughter was on the West Coast with his former wife, who didn’t have the kindest things to say about Peter.

We had no problems with the rest of the guys. Through the entire reunion process, Bruce and Eric were terrific. They were the sweetest, most professional guys. They never said anything bad about anybody. They always did their job, always showed up on time. They were real gentlemen who put their egos aside for the good of the fans. In fact, they were so accommodating that they planted the seeds for what would become their worst nightmare. Their kindness enabled Ace and Peter to step in and, unfortunately, push them out of a job.

We rehearsed at Sir Studios in New York. Peter walked in with his head down, and we immediately hugged him and told him to have a good time. Then Ace walked in and we started working.

It became very clear immediately that Ace’s guitar playing had sunk to a club level, and we made sure that Eric Singer played drums along with Peter just to keep him in time. But no matter what the problems were, whenever it was time for them to come on, Ace stepped up, and that magic thing happened. Despite all the problems, despite all the torture, when we played together it felt like 1974 again. We weren’t as good as we were with Eric or Bruce, not as proficient or as tuneful. But we had a kind of a swagger, a loose rock and roll thing that perhaps the Stones have always been more about than the Beatles. The fans loved it. It looked great.