KISS had slowly climbed the touring ladder, and for some of the shows toward the end of 1974, we started to be “special guests,” the second band on a bill, rather than the anonymous third. You know, “Tonight in Cedar Rapids: REO Speedwagon and special guest KISS plus surprise third act!”
Part of becoming successful was getting your own hotel room. Part of becoming successful was traveling by plane instead of by station wagon or rental car. Sometimes when I was home for an off-day, still crashing at my parents’ place, a limo picked me up to take me to the airport. We had switched to flying commercial flights from gig to gig, getting picked up and driven to and from hotels, while the gear caught up with us by truck and met us at the venue. We had also moved up to Holiday Inns instead of roadside motor lodges. It was easy to think we’d won the lottery as I put another quarter in the vibrating bed each night.
At some point, in addition to having our own rooms, we even began to rent a spare room, dubbed the “Chicken Coop,” where we could party and girls could wait their turn instead of loitering in the lobby. After a show, we would retire to our individual hotel rooms to freshen up, and then the phone would ring. “The Chicken Coop is room 917,” the tour manager would tell us. We’d go down to a room full of girls, all of whom wanted to go back to our rooms. Some of them came from the concert audience, others were connected to a local radio station or knew somebody who knew somebody on the crew or at our label or whatever.
We had also managed to get additional clothes. We hired a guy named Larry Legaspi, who made clothes for the band Labelle, who had a huge hit at the time with “Lady Marmalade” and had a kind of disco-in-outer-space look. We also gave sketches of the new boots we wanted to the uptown New York bootmaker Frank Anania. An old-world craftsman, he couldn’t make heads or tails of the designs, but he made us boots that, unlike the street versions we had used up to then, were both more stable and more sturdy—all the better for all the jumping and running around we did onstage.
I met my first girlfriend in Atlanta in September when we returned to the Electric Ballroom. Or rather, she became my girlfriend at the end of that run in Atlanta. Amanda was a tall curvy blonde from Michigan who was traveling with one of our technicians. She flirted with everybody, and finally one night when the technician wasn’t feeling well, she slipped him a couple of Valiums and took off with me.
I took her back to New York since we had a few days off. I was still living with my parents. She and I slept on the fold-out sofa in the living room, which was where I slept when I was home. I didn’t have a room anymore because the one I had shared with my sister now was my niece Ericka’s room. The sofa-bed sat against the wall to my parents’ bedroom. One morning when Amanda and I were staying there, my mom came out and, just making small talk, I asked her, “How’d you sleep last night?”
“Not well,” she said. “The sofa kept banging against the wall.”
I knew it was time to get a place of my own. To be honest, I had known that for a while, but I hadn’t been totally comfortable with the idea of living on my own. Now, conveniently, I had found somebody to move in with.
We grabbed a copy of the Long Island Press and paged through the listings for apartment rentals. We found a furnished apartment on Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens, near the Long Island Expressway, that was cheap and available immediately. We took it. It wasn’t the Waldorf-Astoria, but it still made my finances very tight.
Our first day there, we sat around listening to AWB, the new album by the Average White Band. Then I was off on tour again, gone for weeks at a time. I was always above board when I left and told her not to ask me what happened on tour unless she wanted to hear the truth. She knew that world. But she didn’t care. She had worked her way up from a lighting technician to a band member.
Touring came with a certain amount of isolation. We had no contact with other bands at our level. With the exception of Rush, we didn’t socialize much with other bands. Even if we wanted to, we had two hours of makeup and wardrobe to deal with before each show. Since we traveled constantly, the only interactions we had with the few musicians we did know were secondhand—news we gleaned from groupies who had seen them when they passed through town the week before. “Oh, Queen’s coming through next week?” I remember saying to a female guest in Kentucky. “And you’ll be with Roger? Say hi for me.”
The demands on the road crew and tour managers were so extreme that they often couldn’t hack it for long—road managers in particular we shuffled through constantly. We hung out with those guys, but it was such a revolving door that few became real friends. Wives and girlfriends quickly became abstract realities because there were no cell phones, and hotel phones were expensive—nobody even had answering machines or call-waiting, so the chances of catching somebody were slim. We lived in a bubble.
Still, being back out on the road also meant less conflict within the band. For one thing, we were forced to function as a unit on the road. For another thing, despite whatever issues each of us was dealing with, the availability of women tended to replace the intraband friction with a much more pleasurable type of friction when we were on tour. And anyway, being onstage playing rock and roll was my dream. Sure, we were making only sixty dollars a week—that’s what Bill salaried us—but I was getting paid to rock. This was my job. Every week on the road was another week I wasn’t driving a taxi or working for the phone company.
Despite all the apparent progress of our career, sales of Hotter Than Hell leveled off quickly, selling only a little better than the first album. The situation was more dire than we realized.
One afternoon, back in New York for a day or two off, I went into Manhattan to see Bill at his office. I had decided to ask him for a raise. I thought we should get ten bucks more per week than the sixty dollars we had been earning for about a year now. I walked in and sat down facing Bill, who was sitting with his feet up on his desk. There was a hole in the bottom of his shoe and duct tape stuffed into the hole to keep it somewhat closed. He had a hole in his sweater, too.
On second thought, never mind.
Little did I know, Bill was a quarter million dollars in debt on his credit card from financing our tours, and Casablanca was on the verge of collapse. “What’s on your mind, Paul?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing. Just came by to chat,” I lied. When I saw Bill, it was obvious we were all in the same boat. He was making sacrifices for something he believed in, too. I stuck with my sixty dollars a week.
Fortunately, as the band began to climb the ladder, Gibson started giving me free guitars. All I had to do was call the company and ask. Then, whenever I was in New York, I would unpack them from their shipping boxes and get on the subway to 48th Street. I took the brand-new Marauders they sent me and unloaded them at music stores to put a little extra money in my pocket or to pay the rent.
When KISS played at the Santa Monica Civic Center as Jo Jo Gunne’s special guest on February 1, 1975, Neil Bogart, who had relocated Casablanca to L.A., came to see us. He came backstage and told us, “Your album stopped selling. Hotter Than Hell is dead. You have to end the tour and go back to New York to do another album.”
We had one song finished that I knew was special. Weeks earlier Neil had said something with a sense of perception that was much clearer than ours. “You need a song that your fans can rally behind—that states your cause. Something like Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Dance to the Music.’ You want to get people pumping their fists and joining in.”
I had taken a guitar back to the Continental Hyatt House that night and went straight to work. Pretty quickly I came up with the chords and a few lines for a chorus: “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day.”
I knew this was the perfect battle cry.
I went down the hall and knocked on Gene’s door. “What do you think of this?” I asked, playing what I had.
“I have a song called ‘Drive Me Wild,’ but I only have the verses and no chorus,” he said. It went, “You show us everything you got, you drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy.” We coupled his verse to my battle cry.
As we got to work and finished the song, I could picture people pumping their fists and singing along.
This could be the rock and roll national anthem.