After the release of Alive!, things felt different. It was like watching water simmer before it boils. It suddenly seemed like just a matter of time before things would explode. An electricity pulsed through the audience at shows. There was a churchlike fervor that gave our shows in late 1975 a holy-roller quality.
Up to then we had made steady progress, so I never questioned that it would happen for us eventually. And despite the grave financial problems—the extent of which I probably never grasped at the time—I never worried that our modest album sales would cause the demise of the band. But on the other hand, we were running out of bigger bands to play with, pissing off headliners with our outrageous show, and our options were dwindling.
Then, when Alive! came out, the doors just got blown off. The game changed overnight. Suddenly we headlined venues bigger than we had played before even as openers. I was a bit nervous in the beginning because I didn’t have the experience of communicating with twenty thousand people. Once I figured it out, it was the audience whose nerves sparked, not mine. But at first I had to learn to communicate with the person in the back row. I had to send energy all the way to the back to project the atmosphere of game show/circus/religious revival we prided ourselves on creating. The bigger the crowd, the harder you have to work. Everything had to be amped twenty thousand times. And I felt anointed to do it.
Let me at them.
I want to be what they want.
I want to be the Starchild.
I want us to be KISS.
I want to show them we are exactly who they think we are.
It took me time and some trial and error, but soon enough I knew I could do it. In fact, I knew I was pretty damn good at it.
The difference between a guy who has just gotten his commercial flying license and a seasoned pilot is that the first one knows how to fly the jet while the other one knows how to deal with any and all situations. I quickly logged enough flight time that nothing fazed me.
This is your captain speaking, and you’re in good hands.
When I got out there onstage, I really did get off on seeing everyone else getting off. Crowds at our shows were ecstatic, and we were all sharing in the jubilation. Our joy matched the joy our fans experienced. And they kept my insecurities and unhappiness at bay. All the problems in the world—theirs and ours—would still be there tomorrow, but we were going to have a great time tonight.
We also got to take a few heroes of mine out on tour with us. That fall of 1975 we had both Slade and Wizzard, the band fronted by Roy Wood of the Move, open shows for us. Roy Wood’s band created an eccentric version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. His bass player wore roller skates. They were booed offstage. Afterwards I told Roy what a huge influence he had been on me. He was still shell-shocked from getting booed, and I was disappointed not to get much of a reaction from him. After the first show we played with Slade, we all stayed in the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hilton, a hotel with vintage railcars as rooms, all lined up on tracks behind the main building. I was a huge fan of Slade, and in fact the mirrored top hat I had seen guitar-playing frontman Noddy Holder wearing in concert years before was the inspiration for my cracked-mirror guitar. I dropped in to say hello to Noddy in his train car. He was completely delirious—so intoxicated he was incoherent and unable to stand. Your idols don’t loom quite as large when they’re horizontal.
We had a couple of days off and flew to New York in the midst of things exploding. When I got home to my apartment in Queens, I found shotguns in the bedroom closet.
Whoa, what the hell are these?
My girlfriend, Amanda, had started hanging around with some unsavory types she’d befriended while I was on tour. They stashed weapons at our place. Great. I was just a Jewish kid from Queens—the only guns I’d ever seen were the kind you used to knock over a doll at the carnival to win a prize, the kind with a cork attached to the barrel with a string. She was descending into a completely different life.
Amanda also told me that Joe Namath had given her a lift home from a club one night while I was gone. It was only after I thought about it a little that a lightbulb went off in my head and I realized Joe Namath wouldn’t drive girls to their doors and just give them a peck on the cheek. I had never lied about my activities on the road since I had told her my mantra of “Don’t ask me what happens on the road if you don’t want to know.” Somehow it had never dawned on me that the same would obviously be true of her: Don’t ask me what happens at home if you don’t want to know.
I told her things were over between us, although it was clearly halfhearted on my part, because she came along just the same when I moved into Manhattan and rented a place on East 52nd Street. We never had any pretenses of being in love anyway—we were bed buddies. But it was time to change the sheets.
The apartment was in a tall luxury building on a street that dead-ended at the East River. Construction on the building had just been completed. When I went to look at it, they offered two apartments. One on the twenty-first floor went for $510 a month; another on the twenty-sixth floor, with a beautiful view, cost $560. Despite our recent upturn, fifty bucks a month was a huge difference. I took the place on the twenty-first floor.
My new apartment was tangible proof of my ascension. I went to Macy’s and bought my first real furniture—a big L-shaped green velvet couch and one of those huge ball-shaped lamps that hangs from a tall arching metal stand. I felt very cool.
Another change brought about by the immediate success of Alive! was an upgrade in hotels: we graduated from Holiday Inns to Sheratons. At the Sheraton, the towels had embroidered “S” logos on them. Whenever we were about to have a break and return to New York, I would stuff a set into my suitcase. Soon I had a cabinet full of monogrammed towels at my new luxury apartment.
Bill Aucoin liked to see us live an extravagant life on the road once things started to pop and he started to repay his massive personal debt. We enjoyed it, too, until we got a little wiser and saw the bills. In the dressing rooms now, people asked us what we would like to drink. It only seemed natural to ask for Champagne. How cool—Champagne! We ordered several bottles of bubbly, not realizing everything we ordered was charged to us. But it was fun—and, besides, who knew how long this all would last?
We certainly weren’t born businessmen. Whatever the myth, we were totally green and not savvy at all about tour expenses or bottom lines. We trusted the people around us to have our best interests at heart. It took years for us to learn the ropes and to consider trying to change the way things were done.
In the meantime, I felt newly flush, whatever the reality.
One day off in New York, I went to 48th Street to pick up some things at a music store. It was a strange situation, because we had gotten quite famous more or less overnight, and yet very few people recognized us without the makeup. I could walk the streets or get a cup of coffee. I could even go to a newsstand and buy music magazines with photos of KISS in them. Of course, it was different on 48th Street. I didn’t look like everybody else. I had the blue-black hair and the street versions of my seven-inch platforms, which I wore all the time. I guess there among all the music aficionados, people could put two and two together when they saw a six-foot-eight guy with mounds of blue-black curls walk in. If that guy isn’t in KISS, the circus must be in town.
When I went to check out, carrying a couple sets of strings and a few other things, the shop owner wanted to give it all to me for free. I didn’t understand. “It’s on us,” the guy insisted.
The irony was not lost on me.
“I can afford it,” I said. “I can buy it. Give it to the next guy who comes in and really needs it.”