When I was younger, I had a lot of dos and don’ts, rules about what I required of myself and others. During my teens and early twenties, what I regarded as acceptable behavior from people around me was so strict, so stringent. But I found that these parameters weren’t based on life experience. My standards were based on some crazy notions that, as a kid, I had set up in my mind, all rooted in my limited experience of the world beyond my home. The rules had all been established kind of arbitrarily.
Turns out we can’t just conjure up those sorts of rules or parameters. We set ourselves up for misery or failure by expecting things of ourselves that aren’t realistic or that are based on fantasy. We have to experience life before we know what is and isn’t applicable and positive for us.
I made my life difficult and made having friends and socializing difficult by holding everybody to a standard—an inflexible, almost mechanical perfection—that no one could reach. Any mistake somebody made or anything that somebody did that annoyed me was reason for expulsion from my circle.
A girlfriend once said to me, “You’re never going to be happy because you’re too judgmental and expect too much from everybody.” She was right. I wasn’t happy. It’s a bad idea to set up—even unknowingly—a situation where we’re bound to fail. There’s a difference between setting a high bar and setting an impossible goal. That goes for everyone.
One of the things I find interesting at this point in my life is to look back at times when I said things to friends and lovers and behaved in ways that, in hindsight, were appalling—but were very much in keeping with how my parents acted and spoke. It made it very difficult for some people to be around me, and it certainly affected some relationships.
My mom sometimes said to me or my dad or other people, “Who the hell do you think you are?” It’s a horrible thing to say, but when I was young, I thought nothing of saying that too. If I was angry or somebody said something I didn’t like or behaved in a way I didn’t like . . . “Who the hell do you think you are?” It can be intimidating to hear something like that, and to make it worse, I said it like I was mad at the person.
I knew that saying this was demeaning and dismissive. But I said it anyway.
Another thing I remember saying in the course of arguments or conversation was “This discussion is over.” And it worked sometimes. Though just as often the person would look at me and reply, “What are you, crazy? This discussion is not over.”
I should’ve looked at myself in the mirror and asked, “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Part of the way I tried to establish a sense of security or safety was to hold people to my set standard, which was too rigid to be realistic. At the time, I felt there was safety in being able to decide boundaries, to decide how people could behave and what was acceptable and what wasn’t. It gave me a sense of control over situations—though of course it was a false sense.
One of the earliest times I can remember being forced to examine my own behavior—my own shortcomings, really—was on a tour in 1979. A woman who was working backstage at the food service, where we could grab dinner, gave me an unexpected life lesson. I was with the band and some crew members, and we were teasing and making fun of some people as we ate. As this was going on, the woman became visibly upset. It was a strong emotional reaction: I would say she was truly aghast.
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “They don’t mind. They like it.”
I guess I was trying to dismiss the cruelty as part of the usual backstage antics.
“That’s not what matters,” she said. “You don’t treat people the way they allow themselves to be treated. You treat people the way they deserve to be treated. You treat people with the respect you would expect.”
Her words were like a sledgehammer to my head, and to this day I’ve never forgotten them. The way she put it was so articulate and concise that I immediately got it. Not that I had ever seen myself as cruel, but I immediately realized that this behavior I had deemed acceptable was in fact totally unacceptable. And it took somebody pointing that out to me, pointing out my behavior, to give me an aha moment. The sentiment was, of course, something I certainly knew was right, but I’d never given it sufficient thought in the context of my own behavior. Me, the kid who’d been bullied in the schoolyard, making fun of someone? What the fuck was I doing? I wouldn’t want someone to do that to me, so why was I doing it to someone else? Once the woman voiced it in those words, I realized I had been wrong. It was valuable, constructive criticism.
In a similar vein, it’s interesting to be able to look back and see that I wasn’t so innocent in dealing with girlfriends, wives, bandmates—whoever it may have been.
On the 2017 KISS Kruise, I spent a little time with Peter Criss’s ex-wife Lydia. We had a Q&A panel with Lydia; Michael James Jackson, who produced Creatures of the Night and Lick It Up and helped us get back on track in the 1980s; and our first security guy, Big John Harte. It was terrific, and people asked great questions. I hadn’t seen Lydia in a long, long time. When she was married to Peter, we had a contentious or uncomfortable relationship at times, though certainly in hindsight it wasn’t one-sided. On the Kruise, it would’ve been easy to avoid contact with her because of experiences decades ago. But it also would’ve been a missed opportunity. I had, after all, played a part in those strained relationships.
I hoped that she wasn’t the same person she was back then, and I know I’m not, so the idea of seeing somebody in a new light was intriguing. In the end, I wanted to see her—and it was indeed great to see her. It was rewarding and opened up far more avenues than living in the past would have. It’s always great to have a chance to celebrate with somebody where we are today, rather than steep ourselves in the discord of where we once were. There’s a coming together and a celebration of where the road has taken us.
I almost wonder what I had been fighting about with people like Lydia. Sometimes we tend to get into the rhythm of doing something a certain way. To see her again and instead give her a hug and introduce her to my family was awesome—and I think we both felt that way.
That was also very much what I hoped for when the KISS reunion happened with the founding band members in 1996. The idea, at least for me, was to take advantage of how we had grown individually so we could correct some of the mistakes and go forward. That hope turned out to be very short-lived. But I see a great potential for reward in revisiting old situations and old friends or people from our past after we have a new perspective. It can put to rest any doubts we have and allow us to reflect on what caused the problems in the first place. With closure, it’s possible to remedy, rectify, and move on; it allows us to move on without the what-ifs—and I don’t want what-ifs in my life.
How I had seen Peter and Ace when they left the band was based not only on my perspective back then but also on how I had affected them with my own behavior. So I thought it was worth taking a shot at healing. Not to take advantage of that possibility—if only to resolve a lot of questions—would have been a shame. Though some people didn’t see the opportunity the same way. At the beginning of the tour, it felt like a new beginning, but that feeling didn’t stick around.
Of course, in the case of a band, any reunion is complicated by musical factors too. When Peter came back into KISS, he was born again: he was a born-again KISS-tian. He was joyous in knowing that he was back, and he seemed cognizant of the mistakes he had made. At the onset, he said that he would never make the same mistakes again. So his musical shortcomings wouldn’t have been insurmountable if he had continued to be willing to work on his playing—which he was when he first came back. He was very open to adjustments. I don’t want to say “criticisms,” but let’s call them “helpful directions.” This was something he’d never been able to handle in the past.
Unfortunately, things with Peter changed dramatically almost overnight.
Back in the 1970s, Bob Ezrin, who produced Destroyer, had gotten Peter to play things that should’ve been impossible for him. But Peter pulled them off. It goes back to the fact that we know how much something is worth to us by how hard we’re willing to work for it—and once the reunion got under way, Peter wasn’t willing to work to improve his playing. It descended into a destructive situation. I remember thinking, If you’re John Bonham and you’re a prick, that’s one thing. . . . If, on the other hand, you can barely play and you’re a jerk, then what’s the point?
Of course, at the end of the day, the only person I can change is me.
In a band, for it to work, everybody has to do their job and contribute what’s necessary to make it work. When someone doesn’t do that, I can’t do it for them. I can’t do it for them any more than I can make up for what the other person in any kind of failed relationship isn’t doing.
With Peter, ultimately it wasn’t about his not being able to play; it was about why he wasn’t able to play. It was about him as a person—his failure to commit to being the best he could be, his lack of wanting to do the work. That is much more the point.
And to some extent, the same was true of Ace. Again, the same resentments that plagued the early days of the band resurfaced, and those resentments came from internal factors. I just became the target, the personification of whatever those guys were dealing with on a personal level.
Throughout the reunion, Peter felt that the room service people treated him disrespectfully. He went right back to finger pointing and blaming everyone else. You’d think most hotels hired their staff based on their ability to be disrespectful to Peter Criss, because he found such people in every hotel in the world. What could we do about that? I believe that if we all had been committed to bettering ourselves as musicians and working as a team—if we all had understood our place on the team and worked individually to be better at what we did—maybe we could’ve continued.
When Ace and Peter were out of the band, the remaining members had taken the band down to the dirt and built it back up. So there was no way Ace and Peter were going to return and have everything as it once was. Plus, during those years—the non-makeup years—I had learned a lot of aspects of the business and touring that I hadn’t known before. So for Ace and Peter to come back and be considered equals was ridiculous. It was so unfortunate when they became more concerned with how much money I made versus how much they made. A whole lot of people in the world are richer than I am, but it doesn’t eat at me at all.
It was sad. But I don’t cry about it.
Still, it was terrific to get back together, because it put to bed any doubts or thoughts I’d had about possibilities. Without the reunion I would’ve had to live with those thoughts. But I’ve been sleeping real soundly since then, I can assure you.
I’ll drag something as far as I can, but at some point I know there’s no point in dragging it any farther. When is it enough? When it’s enough. It’s just that simple.
I got to a point where I was confident that the band wasn’t failing because of me. I’d pushed it in a different direction, and since it was still failing despite my efforts to be different, then it wasn’t due to me. I was certainly cognizant of what the band had dealt with before—my shortcomings and inflexibility, my insecurities and defenses—but by 1996, fifteen to twenty years later, I was a different person.
From the beginning, the original thinking behind KISS was that the four of us didn’t have to do an equal amount of the work; we each just had to give 100 percent of what we were capable of. That might not be the same thing within any given song. And certainly not within the band as a whole. We weren’t all the same when it came to how much we each contributed creatively to the music or to the overall image or staging. But for us to share equally, we had to contribute as much as each of us was capable of contributing.
And once again, those guys were not doing that.
But, again, does anything bad ever happen?
I don’t think so.
We dealt with crisis management as time went on. I’m sure that Ace and Peter at this point are either baffled by or dismissive of how we have evolved and what Gene and I have reached in our lives, but the irony is that without the two of them there would be no today. Even so, they had to realize that what’s true today isn’t necessarily true tomorrow—being in a band isn’t a birthright.
When KISS started out, we believed it was all for one and one for all, and that was the way it would remain until the end. Well, that’s fine until you don’t believe it anymore. Then what do you do? Do you take your ball and glove and go home? That’s for each person to decide. I was in a band with three other guys who shared a sense of camaraderie and commitment to this force called KISS. Like a lot of things in life, I assumed that was forever. Marriage is often the same way.
What happens when forever comes to an end?
I refuse to let anyone else decide my fate. I refuse to let anyone else decide my life experience, because we get only one shot at this. I refuse to let a bad bandmate shut down a good band. I refuse to let a bad marriage negate the potential for a good one. I refuse to let a bad marriage make me cynical about the ideals of a great marriage.
Each person has to make their own rules to live by and, as I’ve said, seek to revise and improve those rules on the basis of their experience.
If someone doesn’t want to play within the rules, then find someone else to play with. I was stunned when a therapist said to me once, “If you’re working really hard in a relationship, you’re in the wrong relationship.”
I was like, “What? It’s that simple?”
Yep.
And I don’t think family gets a free pass. The fact that you share common blood with somebody shouldn’t allow that person to taint, compromise, or detract from your life. This is the only life I will have, as far as I know, so I don’t care whether it’s a sibling, a mother, a father, or another relative—bringing something in that pollutes or dilutes my experience or the experience of people I care about is unacceptable.
If you have to work at a relationship too much, you’re in the wrong relationship—no matter what. We all make things much more complex than they need to be sometimes. As opposed to the complicated and unrealistic rules I tried to impose when I was younger, this is something incredibly simple and totally based in common sense and reality.