We have a choice in life. We can choose whether to spend life saying “Why?” or to spend it saying “Why not?”
I’ve gotten the most out of life when I’ve said “Why not?”
Honestly, we can’t know what’s behind a door if we don’t open it. Unless there are insurmountable, irreparable consequences, we have far more to gain than we have to lose by taking a crack at something.
Unlike some people, I’d rather fuck up than not try.
Thinking there are finite goals in life narrows our potential to take the ultimate journey, to take the ultimate trip. It limits us in what we’re looking for or looking at. We don’t get to absorb what’s going on around us, which may affect where we ultimately want to go. The work we do to get where we think we want to go should get us where we actually go. Because life is fluid, and the goal we’re pursuing shouldn’t be finite. In the process, we may decide that where we’ve gone isn’t where we want to be, so we decide to go elsewhere. We can’t be too fixed in what we see as necessary accomplishments, because along our way we may find something more important, and if we have tunnel vision, it may blind us to our potential. Something that may appear to be a diversion could actually be the more rewarding path.
It’s a problem when we set goals for ourselves that constrict us from changing course. The goal of KISS in 1973 was: find a manager. But if we had stuck to the well-trodden path, we’d never have found Bill Aucoin. And without Bill, who knows how things would have gone? Maybe a different manager would have tried to push us toward conventional decisions, and we never would have become the KISS that is recognized and loved forty-five years later.
When it came to realizing our dream as KISS, we broke every rule in the book. Most of what we’ve done is contrary to what would seem logical. When people say, “Why did you choose Peter or Ace?” or “Why did you choose to work with Gene?” the answer is surprisingly simple: because it felt right.
Honestly, nothing about the four of us would’ve necessarily put us all in the same band. If we had tried to put together a band of like-minded people, we would’ve ended up with different people in the band. There’s no way we would’ve come together.
Once we joined forces and started to write songs and play out, it didn’t seem strange to us to go with Bill Aucoin—who had no experience in management—as our manager. It was no more strange than wearing white makeup and making our own T-shirts. We knew exactly what we were doing. Going with the status quo or listening to people say “Be like us” is something I’ve never had any interest in—whether it was putting on the makeup, taking off the makeup, having a manager who had never managed, signing with a record company that had no real experience with a rock band—the list goes on. Just doing things the way that felt right, as opposed to the way that everybody else did them, seemed totally natural.
I’m glad that following the rules works for some people. But it doesn’t work for me. Never has. And that’s one of the keys to my success.
Why not?
Even though our manager had never managed anybody, he clearly understood the band. We were a band with white makeup and eight-inch heels. We weren’t what was currently popular at that time—we weren’t John Denver. There had never been a band like ours, so why shouldn’t we try a manager who wasn’t like existing managers? The normal way of doing things can give normal results. Extraordinary ways of doing things can give extraordinary results.
Of course, when you operate that way, you’ll also make mistakes and face setbacks. But learning from mistakes fuels success. If you don’t give up, a mistake is just another step toward success. If something doesn’t work out—whether it’s in the kitchen, in our professional lives, or in a relationship—it doesn’t mean failure. It’s just more fuel for success. After all, we can either repeat our mistakes or use them to plot a change in course.
I don’t regret any of the departures KISS made as a band. They were essential. They had consequences, but it was never going to be the end of the story. I needed to do those things, and to deny them ultimately would have denied the band and myself. I needed to write “I Was Made for Loving You,” for instance. I needed to.
The premise of KISS, when we got together, was “no rules and no boundaries.” And that’s what people embraced about us. So it would be contrary to suddenly say, “I’m going to live within another set of boundaries that the fans set.” At the dawn of the 1980s, we started to experiment musically. I was willing to accept the consequences of what I did, but I also felt the fans had to understand that our premise of no rules and no boundaries was part of what they had accepted in the first place. As fans, they championed us because we did things our way. Thankfully, most of the time it also has been something they love. But I need the freedom not to feel handcuffed by their expectations.
Don’t get me wrong. There were certainly troubles during the Dynasty era. Ace’s alcoholism and drug use were out of control, so he was no longer reliable. Peter’s drumming was substandard enough that the producer he had worked with on his solo album, whom we hired for Dynasty, didn’t let Peter play on the album. Gene’s focus was clearly on pursuing a career in Hollywood and left little room for making KISS his priority. I was more focused on serial dating and a never-ending shopping spree rather than writing the kinds of songs that celebrated a life I now saw only in the rearview mirror of my newly purchased Mercedes. The band was so splintered and dysfunctional that Dynasty was the result of all those components, good and bad.
But I wasn’t manipulated, coerced, or strong-armed during the making of Dynasty, Unmasked, or The Elder. I made decisions based on my life at that point. I don’t think they were the wrong decisions. They were necessary at that time. I needed to do “Shandi.” We needed to make The Elder. After all, these decisions got me to where I am now.
Even so, in anything we do—me or anyone else—we have to be able to take a breath, step back, and ask, “Is this good?” Which is not the same as asking, “Does someone else think this is good?” I’m talking about a gut check, an honest assessment.
We lose the plot when we try to please other people instead of making it the priority to please ourselves.
And in the case of The Elder, it was a desperate attempt to seek validation from people who would never give KISS that validation. So at some point after that album, I felt almost like when I’m in a car and mindlessly driving, only to find myself wondering, “Where the fuck am I? When did I take the wrong turn? How did I get here?”
Perhaps The Elder proves that the most effective motivation has to come from within. When we do things to placate others, or for someone else’s agenda, it’s pretty hollow. If I’m going to fall on my ass, I’d rather do it while doing something I feel compelled to do rather than while doing something someone else wants to do.
KISS was lost, and we had forgotten who we were and why we were. As we had with Destroyer, we looked to the producer Bob Ezrin to guide us, in part because he’d done a brilliant job on Destroyer. If he didn’t exactly abandon ship during the making of The Elder, he certainly took a lot of shore leave—meaning we were without a captain a lot of the time. Much like with Destroyer, we were in uncharted waters during The Elder, but this time we had nobody to guide us.
We tried the best we could and were sincere, but we were deluded and tainted by our success. Our achievements didn’t spur us on to be better at who we were and what we were doing. Our achievements gave us license to do less. Success gives everyone the opportunity either to sit back and get fat or to grab the next rung of the ladder, and that’s where we failed.
We began to get complacent and lazy, and we lost the hunger. I’m not even sure “hunger” is a good word, because hunger implies that you need to be starving to have desire. Hunger shouldn’t just come from starving; it should come from wanting more, wanting to raise the bar as opposed to sitting back and wallowing in your achievements.
If someone becomes successful, that literal hunger is gone, but creative hunger and hunger for ideals and standards should never be gone.
We were no longer in the first blush of success, and we had become complacent with success. I was dealing with having money to buy things, with security guys—and this changed the way I saw things for a while.
People may sometimes lose sight of all the complicated elements that contribute to a situation. KISS not only had fame and a certain new desire for validation from our peers; we also had a need for validation from our little sycophantic support groups. For so many reasons we found ourselves leaving behind the music that had been made by four hungry guys who had wanted to take over the world. In a sense, we felt we had accomplished that and didn’t know what to do next.
None of us had any desire to make a hard rock album, or a heavy album. Ace might say he wanted to at that time, but that’s like me saying I wanted to fly. We can’t fly without wings. Ace was totally inebriated, so, yes, he may have wanted to make a hard rock album, but he wasn’t capable of doing it.
We shrugged our shoulders and got excited with something that, in some ways, was easier for us to do: use a very familiar outline, used a hundred times before, and go in a different direction with it, because we didn’t have the chops or the teeth to do what we needed to do. But, hey, even passive decisions are decisions. If you do nothing, you’ve still made a decision. Nobody should ever kid themselves. We took the path of least resistance, which is not that different from surrendering. It would have been more of a challenge to make a hard rock album. That would have taken a lot of effort.
At the end of the day, we were half-assing the work. I’m all for exploring different avenues, but it’s important to do it from a position of strength and excitement, as opposed to being dazed. That’s just wandering onto a path. It’s just as easy to wander off a cliff.
That being said, everybody’s vision was clouded, and what we did was misguided and of our own doing. For me to sing some pseudo-opera tune like “Odyssey” with a bogus Broadway voice reminds me of Alfalfa singing “I’m in the Mood for Love” in The Little Rascals. But anyway, it started from the wrong place. It started with the wrong reasons. There was no righting the ship.
Our choices flow from always having a reason why we do things. We question ourselves, question our foundations. Why are we doing this? Is this the right thing to do?
I guess one thing I can say in defense of The Elder is that we were not content merely to keep doing what we had already done. Nobody can re-create the past. The past is spontaneous and honest, whereas in any creative outlet, to try to re-create spontaneity is forced. It’s the antithesis of where we came from, which was a place of innocence, and oftentimes creating by what we didn’t know. Trying to fake that would have been impossible.
All the things that turned out to be problematic or distractions were the things that went along with success: enablers, people to open the doors. We wanted bigger, broader success, though in the end, we found out that all those things were detrimental to the success of KISS. But we had to attain the success to realize that. We had to do it all. We were compelled to do it. We needed to.
Besides, I couldn’t have written “100,000 Years” at that point. I was still searching.
Fortunately, as my mom always used to say, “Nothing bad ever happens.”
After all, Creatures of the Night couldn’t have happened if it weren’t for our no rules and no boundaries manifesto and an attempt to reclaim our identity—if not re-create who we had been, at least reconnect with the reasons we had been. Creatures was the pendulum swinging all the way in the other direction. That was change for all the right reasons. It was an amped-up, supercharged version of what KISS had done before.
It took those missteps and that state of complacency and creative gout leading to The Elder to get us back on the right road. I don’t think I have ever wanted success and an outlet for my musical creativity any more desperately than when I saw it slipping away, when I saw complacency and the poisons of success breaking my connection with what had made me want to be successful in the first place. The past thirty-five years of KISS wouldn’t have happened had we not teetered so close to the edge.
I have no regrets with KISS, none at all, because here I am, nearly fifty years later.
A lot of people say they have no regrets as a way of being bullheaded. When I hear people say it, I get the impression that what they’re really saying is “I don’t make mistakes,” whereas I’m saying, “I make mistakes, but the mistakes are still valuable.”
Mistakes got me here.
What’s the saying?—“Communism is the longest and most painful route from capitalism to capitalism.” In the same way, that malaise we felt—or whatever was going on—was necessary to get KISS from where we were to here. It was a long route back to home, but we had to experience it.
Why not?