We can argue about whether beggars can be choosers, but when Bill told us Neil Bogart wanted to sign KISS to a record deal, I thought it was our shot. Neil had turned Buddha Records into the number one singles label in the country by cranking out what some in the rock community might have regarded as prefab crap. He basically invented bubblegum music, with acts like the Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, and the Lemon Pipers. Yummy, yummy, yummy, chewy, chewy, chewy.
Neil had recently left Buddha to start his own venture, which was originally going to be called Emerald City Records but eventually became known as Casablanca. He agreed to sign us after he heard our demo and a couple of producers he knew told him how good they thought the demos were, too. Neil told Bill, “I’m leaving Buddha and want your guys to be my first act.”
But Neil had never seen us live at that point. When he finally saw the makeup, he asked us to take it off. That was a deal breaker. Soon, though, Neil realized it was our calling card—the visual embodiment of our mentality. He acquiesced and made us the very first act on his new label.
Neil and Bill set up a private concert for the press in early September 1973, and, for dramatic effect, we signed the contract in makeup at that event. Now at first blush, I would certainly rather have signed to a label like Atlantic. Neil had made his career flogging singles, and though he said he wanted to launch Casablanca with a credible rock band—which almost by definition meant marketing albums, not singles—I had my doubts. After all, singles sold by getting airplay on Top 40 radio on the AM dial; rock was played on progressive FM radio stations. But nothing in KISS world ever went according to plan. In retrospect, that’s part of the beauty of it. Throughout the band’s career we’ve ignored the rules, either deliberately or by circumstance. In this case we didn’t seem to have any choice. It wasn’t as if other labels were beating down our door.
Once fully on board, Neil got excited. He began to chip in with ideas on how to make our show even bigger. It was Neil who suggested the elevating drum riser. His original concept was basically a forklift—two prongs beneath the drum riser to lift it. Neil, it was clear, got it.
Bill, however, proved the critical visionary able to take what was still a rough diamond and polish it. Once we had secured our deal with Casablanca, Bill quickly unveiled some of his ideas for the band. The first thing he did was introduce us to his boyfriend, Sean Delaney, who unified our look by dying all of our hair blue-black. We all had dark hair already, but he wanted us to match. We went to an apartment on 11th Street and Sixth Avenue and dunked our heads in a bathtub to give us what Sean wanted to be the jet-black hair of Elvis or Roy Orbison.
Bill also rented a new rehearsal space for us—a cramped, rat-infested basement in the Village. And in there he set up a video camera. Again, this was something that never would have occurred to me. We could see ourselves. Great idea. Even bands like KISS, that prided themselves on being visually arresting, rarely had a chance to see what they really looked like. Together with Sean, who was himself a performer, singer, and songwriter, Bill wanted to analyze the way we moved. This was the TV guy thinking, obviously.
When I performed, I thought of myself as moving all around, swinging my arms, and embodying the rock and roll guitar hero thing. But when we went to the videotape, I could see how small everything was. You could barely make out my gestures. I had to modify my moves if I really wanted to grab the audience. Sean served as coach and cheerleader, helping me develop dynamic, effective moves.
Like everyone else in our haphazardly assembled team, Sean became devoted to fleshing out the KISS concept and helping us be as good as we could possibly be. Once during rehearsal he noticed us kind of swaying in unison for a second. He found the spot on tape and played it back for us. “See this moment when you move together?” he said. “That should be part of the show. That should be something you do—a signature move.”
I think initially we all thought it was kind of corny. We were going to be choreographed? But we decided to give Sean’s idea a go, and the three of us—Gene, Ace, and me—stood close together at the front of the stage moving our guitars and swaying. Looking at the videos, we realized that it worked. Sean was right. And sure enough, when we first did it in front of an audience, people went crazy. Sean’s move killed. We didn’t know we needed a Sean until we had Sean. He really upped the theatricality of our act—and later he co-wrote songs with almost all of us.
Another day Bill had us into his office. He introduced us to a guy named the Amazing Amazo or something corny like that. A magician, he said. The guy breathed a ball of fire and scorched the ceiling of Bill’s office. “Okay,” said Bill. “Who wants to do this onstage?”
Not me!
Gene agreed to give it a try, and the rest is history.
All of this reinforced my initial thoughts about Bill: his ideas were miles away from those of other people, including the members of the band—or any other band, for that matter. Bill understood as much as we did that we didn’t have to play by anyone else’s rules. He approached things without preconceptions. And he was energetically delivering on everything he had said at our first meeting.
Near the end of September, almost nine months to the day since our first-ever gig together at Coventry, and only a few weeks beyond Bill’s self-imposed two-week deadline, we went into Bell Sound to record our debut album. Our debut album!
We requested Eddie Kramer as the producer, since we were pretty pleased with the demo he had supervised. But Neil had something against him—Eddie had worked on an album, by the band Stories, for Buddha Records that hadn’t spawned any hits and might also have cost more than Neil expected. So Neil paired us with Richie Wise and Kenny Kerner—who had actually gone into the studio with Stories after Eddie and cut their big hit, “Brother Louie.”
Opening that door on 54th Street, walking up the stairs, and entering Bell Sound the first day was terrific and terrifying. We set up all our gear, and the technicians placed all the microphones. I was afraid that if anything moved, the results would be cataclysmic. I ran around telling the guys, “Don’t touch anything! It’s exactly where it needs to be!”
We were totally green. But this could not have been more different from Wicked Lester going into the studio on spec time. This time, we had producers who led us and told us what to do. We recorded quickly, all in the same room, with virtually no overdubs. We had the songs down, and they changed very little from the demos we had cut back in March. We didn’t understand anything. We just waited to be told what was next.
At first, I was self-conscious in the studio. I knew the songs so well, but when the tape was rolling, I started watching my fingers on the guitar and fouled up. Something that came so naturally became stilted. I saw the microphone as an intimidating obstacle in front of my face instead of seeing it as an ear—just a way to speak to the public, like onstage. I had to stop thinking about the surroundings. I had to recognize that all the studio gadgetry was a vehicle to get to the public, not an obstacle.
Recording the first KISS album in 1973 at Bell Sound Studios on 54th Street.
It took some time, but I settled down.
I still had a lot to learn—how to sing into the mic, when to sing away from it. But part of what makes a first album so vibrant and alive is the fact that the musicians are typically just pups. That was certainly true for us. I was only twenty-one years old.
When it came to listening back to our music on studio equipment, the fact that I was deaf on one side had no effect—it was the way I had always heard music, and my inability to hear stereo had no bearing on what I did or thought because it was the way I had always heard things. The one thing I noticed was that when we listened to the mixes, I found myself sitting a few feet to the right of center. I just scooted over to compensate, without even thinking about it. That didn’t mean I was hearing stereo, but it created a balance. Whenever I was between two speakers, I would move to where the sound was optimal for me; if I looked up, I was always toward the right side.
At lunchtime, sandwiches magically appeared. It was incredible. All this and free food, too? We had no idea at the time that all those sorts of perks were tacked on to the recording bill, which went onto the tab we owed the record company. All I could think was, We’re in a studio, recording songs we wrote, living the dream, and being fed—how much better can it get?
We talked Peter through the songs as we recorded them. I had a microphone into which I had to say things like, “Okay, here comes the dat-dat-dat” or “now the rat-a-tat-tat.” It was the only thing that worked.
I didn’t think the drums had the same power I heard on records by a lot of British bands I listened to at the time. But that was mostly because of the way our album was engineered. Old-school engineers didn’t believe in pushing the meters into the red. They thought it was wrong—you didn’t want distortion, you didn’t want to overdrive things. Kenny and Richie’s engineer definitely fell into that school, and it affected the recordings. I wished we had somebody who was aware of what was being done in the contemporary world of the genre we worked in. But we didn’t, so our record came out a bit flat. The guitars sounded plinky and piano-like instead of big; Gene’s bass runs—he wasn’t a bass player who stuck to peddling on the root note—got lost; the vocals had more of an ambient quality; the overall sound lacked breadth. Pushing the limits on the recording console gave a lot of our contemporaries a pulsating urgency that our record lacked.
It was another case of things not going to plan. Sure, it was a bit rinky-dink sounding, but based on the way the album has since been received, I suppose it might have been a blessing in disguise that the recordings didn’t sound as bombastic as I thought we sounded live. And anyway, just making a record far outweighed any critiques I might have had about the sonic qualities of the recordings.
Each night we left the studio with a great sense of accomplishment. We said goodnight, see you tomorrow, and then we each went to our parents’ places—except Peter, who was married and living with his wife. Before long we had finished all nine songs. We had our debut album in the can.
The art department at Casablanca asked whether they should redraft the logo for the album cover to make each S the same width and ensure they were perfectly parallel. “It got us this far,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”
Next we needed a band photo for the album cover. In those days people still misunderstood us—even people hired to work with us. The photographer who shot our first album cover, Joel Brodsky, had done the Strange Days cover for the Doors. When we showed up at his studio, he was very friendly and seemed genuinely excited. “Look what I’ve got for you!” he said.
He brought out a carton filled with all sorts of straw hats and red rubber noses.
What the hell?
“You know, for your pictures,” Joel said.
“No, I don’t think you understand,” we told him. “We’re serious. We’re not clowns. This is what we do.”
He was stunned. “You mean, you guys aren’t meant to be funny?”
“No, this is us.” He could keep the straw hats and red noses.
A lot of people didn’t understand that this wasn’t fun and games to us. It wasn’t frivolous. It was a religion. It was a crusade.
Joel told us there was a makeup person on hand for the shoot. We all did our own makeup anyway. Except Peter. He had the makeup person do it, who decided to make his face look like some sort of tribal lion mask. We had never seen that makeup before, and we were glad not to see it again.
So maybe our record cover didn’t look the way I had expected. And maybe the record didn’t sound the way I had expected. But by God we had an album. That trumped everything else. I was so excited. For all the minuses I may have felt—about the sound or the cover—we now had a finished album, which was the prerequisite for all the other things we wanted to do. We were in the game now.
With everything done, Bill told us we were going to go out and start playing. I had no concept of the country we lived in, let alone the world. The idea that we were going to travel to other cities . . . I didn’t have the slightest idea what these places were like. I just assumed every new city would be like New York.
We had our revamped show nearly ready to go. The forklift contraption would lift Peter’s drum kit up about seven feet. We had Gene fire breathing and the three of us swaying in unison. Just one last piece of the puzzle remained as far as our show was concerned: pyro.
Pyro had not yet become a science. We just “auditioned” a few maniacs who liked to blow shit up. We needed somebody who could make big booms. Bill eventually found our guy. God knows where. I don’t really know if there were any credentials at all for early pyrotechnicians. All they needed was a fascination with fire and explosives.
We probably saved lives and property by hiring these guys and keeping some arsonists and pyromaniacs off the streets.