Kiss and Make-Up (7 page)

I didn’t know what he was talking about. Cockroaches? Bugs? Was this one of those novelty acts that sometimes came on the show, like a flea circus? Then they came onstage, and the entire Beatles phenomenon just hit me like a ton of bricks, all at once, as hard as anything had ever hit me. They had these haircuts that at the time I thought were silly.
Oh my God
, I thought.
They’re dressed like girls.
That was my first thought. My second thought was that they looked like monkeys. (That was, apparently, a popular notion, because I think it’s where the Monkees got their name.) Through two thoughts, I wasn’t sold on the Beatles. But then my mother walked into the room, and she remarked on how ridiculous their appearance was, and at that point I did an abrupt about-face. I said, “No, Mom, I think they look cool.” I liked the idea that I thought they were cool and my mother didn’t. I liked the difference. I wanted there to be a difference. It was a form of rebellion. And at that moment, all the things I had wondered about for months started to make sense: these guys in these silly girl haircuts and the girls screaming for them at the top of their lungs. My first thoughts about pop music were born on that night, and they were simple thoughts:
If I go and start a band, maybe the girls will scream for me.
Don’t let anyone tell you any different—that same impulse launched a thousand bands.

In fact, the first record I remember owning came very early, before the Beatles, before
Ed Sullivan
and everything else. On WOR-TV in New York, the twist was in full swing, and Chubby Checker had an afternoon TV show, sort of an instructional spot to teach kids how to do the dance. I remember being so fascinated by the whole phenomenon that I actually went out and bought a teen magazine that had capsule biographies of the big stars of the day. I found out that Chubby Checker’s real name was Ernest Evans, that he was a chicken plucker, and that Dick Clark’s wife had named him Chubby Checker after Fats Domino. I had never heard of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, who originally did the song. I didn’t know anything, really. But I started to twist and to participate in these twist contests.

Wednesday afternoons after school we all stayed for dance contests. I’d go up and dance with the black girls, because they knew how to shimmy and shake. The white girls talked too much and dressed too dowdy. The rest of the guys stayed off on one side. The white girls thought that was dangerous at first, but soon they too would come up and start dancing. I won the twist contest, and my prize was a Nat King Cole forty-five with “All Over the World” on
one side and “Rambling Rose” on the other side. Initially, I wasn’t that crazy about it. But eventually, I came to see the point, since music—not just the twist, not just Nat King Cole, but all music—was my entrée to the soft, milky thighs of girls. I would soon realize that music was the key that made girls welcome me with open arms and eventually open legs. This is the big secret of being in a rock and roll band. There are no messages, there’s no inner being striving to express itself through music. We all picked up guitars because we all wanted to get laid. Plain and simple.

At first my dreams weren’t grand. I didn’t think about conquering the world of girls—I thought about improving my standing with the girls down the block. How do you get noticed by the girls down the block? Simple. You play in a band that plays the school dance. So I put together a band with two friends from school, Danny Haber and Seth Dogramajian, both of whom have unfortunately passed on. We went to school together at Joseph Pulitzer Middle School in Queens, New York, and we were all close friends, because we were all obsessed with comic books. Seth and I used to publish amateur fanzines about comic books and science fiction. We would write articles, review movies, and talk about characters from television shows. His fanzine was called
Exile;
mine was called
Cosmos.
But after the Beatles, it became clear to us that, as much as we loved science fiction, it wasn’t going to get us where we wanted to go with the girls. So we formed a band called the Lynx. I didn’t even think about how to spell it, but I had the animal in mind. At school, when we performed at a talent show, we were introduced as the Missing Links, which of course changed the spelling. The first two songs we did were “There’s a Place” by the Beatles and “Cathy’s Clown” by the Everly Brothers. We picked them for their three-part harmonies, because all of us wanted to sing. Danny and Seth played guitar, and I just stood there singing. I hadn’t picked up the bass yet. I’d like to say I was the front man, but the truth was that it was a three-man band.

Somehow the Missing Links won the talent show. We loved being onstage and having everyone watch us. When it came to being the center of attention, we were naturals. After that talent show, a
couple of things happened. First of all, I started to have friends, many of them people whose names I didn’t even know. Guys would walk up to me in the hall or on the street and say, “How you doing, Gene? What’s up?” Also, all of a sudden I started getting into trouble in class. Up until then I was a pretty good student, pretty well behaved. Even though I was always the tallest guy in class, I was never in any fights, never got sent down to detention. After the Missing Links won the talent show, though, I started to get the evil eye from teachers, because girls were turning around during class and asking me questions. There was one girl named Stella, and she was in Mrs. Cassola’s class with me. During class one day she turned around and said, “Hey, Gene, will you show us that weird thing you do with your tongue?” I didn’t know what she meant at first. It must have been something she saw me do at recess. But gradually I got the idea that she wanted me to stick out my tongue and wiggle it around. The second I did that, they started giggling, and the teacher came right over. “Gene Klein,” she said, “did you stick out your tongue?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but the girls asked me to do it.”

“Go to the principal’s office,” she said. As far as I was concerned, I was being railroaded. Stella had asked me to stick my tongue out, so I stuck it out. But I realized that the teacher thought it was something sexual, because her face turned red.

When you have a band and then you get in a little trouble, your reputation soars. Even the tough kids in school started giving me respect, although it was an odd sort of respect. This one guy named Danny was a weightlifter. He was huge and looked sort of like Harvey Keitel; he must have been older than the rest of us. He always had his troops around him, and he would walk down the hall pushing everyone else out of the way. For some reason he never picked on me, and I’m certain the reason was the Missing Links and this small but persistent bit of local fame I had stumbled into. The closest he ever got to beating me up was to call me Doof. That was okay with me, since I didn’t even know what the word meant. But he never laid a hand on me, and he even offered to protect me—“If anyone else ever lays a hand on you, you let me know, all right?”
You’d think I would have used the opportunity to start hanging out with the guys, get a little gang of my own. But I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to get back to my beloved television.

After school everybody else would hang out in the schoolyard and smoke cigarettes and get into trouble. I’d run home, turn on the television set, and do my homework, and I was set. I was back doing what I loved. In fact, not only did I not hang out after school, but I hardly ever had visitors come over to my house, because when they did come over, I’d ignore them and just watch TV. My house was not a fun place to go to; all I had were comic books and science fiction and fantasy magazines. The other guys were interested in bikes and baseball bats and going outside and doing sporty things. They were chewing gum and spitting, and they’d start talking in hushed tones about Mickey Mantle, and I tried, maybe for a little while, but I found that I just couldn’t care at all. Mickey Mantle next to Superman? Hands down, Superman. Are you kidding? Mickey Mantle couldn’t fly.

Tuesdays and Thursdays were the most exciting days of the week, because that’s when the new comic books came into the candy store, and I’d be there as soon as I could. The store owner knew me by name, and he would tell me what was coming up and ask if he should save me a copy:
Fantastic Four, Thor
, and all of those movie magazines, like
Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Soon I had a stack of comics and magazines higher than me. In fact, my comics collection became the basis for my next business. My mother had gotten me a mimeograph machine, which I used to publish these science fiction and fantasy fanzines, and soon it occurred to me that I could use the same machine to make some money. I started printing up fliers that said “Willing to Buy Comic Books” with my phone number on them. I had a set price: a dollar a pound, and that meant that I would get between fifty and a hundred comic books for a dollar. The people who were selling to me didn’t have the expertise or the energy to go through the collections themselves, so I would look through thousands of issues, and usually I would find one or two books that were genuine collectibles. One collector’s comic book could fetch me a hundred bucks.

Even at a young age, I had entrepreneurial tendencies. I was able to make a lot of money buying other people’s comic books and finding ones I could resell.

Despite the fact that I spent my afternoons and evenings in front of the television and with my nose buried in comic books, my music career started to take on a life of its own. Seth and I eventually brought in another guy, whose name was Stephen Coronel. I had known Steve for years, and he ended up being in a number of bands with me, including Wicked Lester, which was a precursor to KISS. This was around 1965, and the four of us, along with a drummer named Stan Singer, began to play more than just the school dances. Even though we existed largely because of the Beatles and in the wake of the Beatles, we didn’t play a single Beatles song. They were much too complex. Instead, we tried our hand at some soul standards, like “In the Midnight Hour” and “La Bamba” and anything else that was easy to play. The lesson I had learned with the Missing Links, I learned again and again. It’s great to be a guy in a band.