By the time Destroyer was certified gold in April 1976, we were solidly in the black, after digging ourselves—and especially Bill—out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt incurred during the first two years of touring. But we still weren’t making much money ourselves. Touring, even now that we sold out arenas, didn’t fill the coffers of the band members. A manager took 20 percent of the gross from a show right off the top, and salaries and production expenses easily ate up another 50 percent, leaving the rest to be split among the four of us. That reality was still lost on us. Standard business practices meant we did the work while others took most of the money. I still lived in a rented apartment and didn’t even own a car.
One night a reporter asked me, “What does it feel like to be rich and famous?”
“Well,” I said, “I can tell you what it’s like to be famous . . .”
That was all about to change.
Bill Aucoin always saw the bigger picture. He could tell that we connected with our fans in a way that far exceeded the norm. He grasped the extent to which people would respond to us beyond the music: he understood the potential of merchandising.
When I first saw the tour program Bill created for the later stages of the Alive! tour, I had never seen anything like it. He never told us he was going to do it. He just showed up one day and said, “Here’s the tour program.” After paging through its twenty-four pages, I thought it was terrific. Bill also thought—and was quickly proved correct—that our fans would want T-shirts and belt buckles. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. He founded an in-house merchandising company together with a guy named Ron Boutwell. Initially, the company fulfilled orders from our fan club. Bill just announced it to us, very matter-of-factly: “We’re going to start marketing merchandise.”
It could not have happened without Bill.
There’s a myth out there that we took part in a grand plan right from the beginning. That is not the truth. We were clueless about merchandising. Nobody in the band was ever involved with the merchandising plan. Eventually, we started to have a hand in it, but that came over time. All we provided at first was the template—the music was ours, the makeup was ours, but so much of the rest was Bill’s. Obviously, we were the nucleus of everything that happened, but in terms of the reach of the KISS image through merchandising, we had no more to do with that than we’d had with the fire breathing or the levitating drum set. I’m a big believer in promoting the team because you’re only as good as the team. It’s the team that wins the game. We weren’t brilliant businessmen and there wasn’t a brilliant Madison Avenue company behind us. There was just Bill, who, like us, wasn’t held back by perceived limitations. He just pushed forward with an innate sense of what he could accomplish.
Bill wanted to maximize our potential on all fronts. We certainly weren’t going to be marketed like Led Zeppelin. And we had more to offer than just music—we were naturals for merchandising, even if we didn’t realize it ourselves at first. Back then, the breadth of KISS merchandise was often scoffed at. But I looked to the Beatles. You could get Beatles dolls and shirts after they made it big, so what was wrong with it? Obviously, nobody wanted Deep Purple dolls, but why would they? Without disrespecting their music, a lot of the bands of the day had a fairly nondescript, forgettable look. But KISS had visual appeal. That was the nature of KISS. The beauty of KISS. So I understood the desire to market us that way. And I never thought it detracted from the band.
I just wanted to be sure there was substance. In this respect, Gene and I had some differences. If someone came to us and said, “Let’s make a KISS cake,” Gene would say, “Let’s make it ten feet high with lights all over it.” I would say, “That’s great but what will the cake be like? How will it taste? That other stuff is cool, but we need to have a great cake underneath. Without that we have nothing.” Sizzle was great, but you needed the steak. That remained my concern as the merchandising took off. Sometimes I wondered how far would be too far—were there things we shouldn’t do? But at that point the answer was no. It all seemed good. Phenomenal, even: KISS radios, KISS motorcycles, KISS lunchboxes.
As the money started to flow from Bill’s merchandising concept—as well as continued sales of Alive!—I have to say I was impressed. It was exhilarating to hear about money going into our personal accounts. We still drew a fairly modest weekly salary and didn’t take physical possession of the rest of the money, but we were told about it. Again, we didn’t know much about what was going on. We didn’t understand the various revenue streams, where they came from, or where they went. None of it.
In the midst of this maelstrom, Howard Marks, who was Bill’s boss, approached us with an offer to manage our money. Howard had an advertising agency that had created the album cover for Alive! and then put together the brilliant covers of our next three albums. Howard said to us, “There are a lot of sharks in the business, and you’re going to need somebody to look after your finances.”
It happened that Howard had a best friend who was a wealthy businessman in Cleveland named Carl Glickman. Howard volunteered to form a company with his friend to take care of our finances. His concern for our welfare made him feel all the more like family to us.
How great is this? How lucky are we?
The new financial company, Glickman-Marks, held regular meetings to update us on money matters and soon started sending someone on the road with us to serve as an accountant along the way. It never occurred to us that the road rep’s taste for fine wine, expensive food, and paid companionship might be compromising nightly box office settlements. What we did notice was that the company built personal financial portfolios for us. I mean, hey, we owned an industrial park in Cincinnati at one point.
At the financial meetings we asked things like, “How much did we make?” rather than, “How much came in?” And because the figures we heard as answer to the first question sounded very impressive to kids like us, who had no experience of making real money, we never asked the second one, or its logical follow-up: “How much are you making?” Bill soon moved his office to an entire floor of a building at 645 Madison Avenue and ultimately rented another floor in the same building.
Bill’s marketing of the band’s imagery expanded our appeal beyond a rock audience. One afternoon back in New York, I went into a jeans shop on 59th Street. The register sat atop a glass display case, and on the case was a sticker Bill had distributed to promote Destroyer that featured the fantastical graphic novel–style album cover image of the four of us, painted by Ken Kelly. As I was poking around the shop, a mom and her little boy walked up to the counter. The boy—who couldn’t have been older than four—pointed to the image. “KISS,” he said.
A wonderful piece of history; the beginnings of the KISS Army, and Bill Starkey started it all.
Cool. We’re more than a band.
A band makes music, a phenomenon impacts society. And if a kid who had no idea about music recognized KISS . . . weren’t we a phenomenon?
Not long after that, in May 1976, we jetted off to England for a two-month European tour. To me, England represented the musical holy land. Everything I loved came from there. We even had two nights booked at the Hammersmith Odeon, in London, where so many of my favorite bands had played legendary gigs.
But nearly as soon as we landed, I hated it. We had become a big band in the United States. In England and the rest of Europe, we had to prove ourselves all over again. We were back at square one—nobodies. Thank God for the fans. As we had seen back home when we started out, the fans in England were also rabid in their dedication to us. On the other hand, the food was horrible and the transportation archaic. The people who ran things were very stodgy. Merchants took perverse pride in the fact that you couldn’t get dry cleaning back for a week. There was no air conditioning, and, if you pleaded, they might begrudgingly put one lone ice cube in a drink for you. These things were badges of honor to the older guard of the British Empire.
But the hotel policies represented the biggest sore spot. They made it virtually impossible to take female guests to your room. You had to sign them in, and they had to leave by 10 P.M. And the staff enforced the rules.
Trouble taking girls to our rooms was a much bigger problem than the food. I could go without food, but I couldn’t go without a steady diet of wild and willing women. That was absolutely essential.
Ace bought knives all along the European tour, and on the way home he taped a bunch of them to the inside of his Marshall cabinets to sneak them into the country. It pissed me off—if they were found, all our gear would be impounded. But it was par for the course for Ace. Once, on a domestic flight, our tour manager’s bags had been searched, and a stolen hotel phone was found. The tour manager hadn’t put it in there. Ace also stashed drugs in the bags or pockets of crew members—without their knowledge—so he wasn’t on the hook if they were found. Ace was all about Ace, regardless of the cost to anyone else.
Arriving in the middle of the night back at my apartment on 52nd Street after a month in Europe, the doorman stopped me as I walked in with my suitcase. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Yeah, very funny, I live here,” I said. I kept walking toward the elevator.
“Sir, if you don’t stop I’m going to call the police.”
I was gone a lot.
And I was soon gone again. As the tour continued back in States, the strain of dealing with the splintering personalities in the band meant we shuffled through more and more tour managers—all told, during the first five years of the band we probably went through twenty tour managers. Among the most colorful was “Fat” Frankie Scinlaro, an old-school manager who had worked with Joey Dee and the Starliters. His upbeat nature was contagious. He had a lot of nicknames for us—he called Peter the “Ayatollah Criscuola,” Gene was “Gene the Nazarene,” and I was the “He-She,” because of my preening and dancing onstage. We’d begun to call Ace “Baby Elvis” because he was developing such a paunch. He ate a lot of potato salad, and in general he ate with his mouth open—he said it “aerated” the food. It was like watching a cement mixer. Fat Frankie would do anything to get us laughing, and when he did, tensions within the band faded. He could be really self-deprecating, too: he liked to say “I may have a little dick, but I can make it spin.”
Some of the tour managers were fired because Bill didn’t think they were doing a good job; most were ousted because of jealousies within the band—each member wanted the undivided attention of the road manager, or at least a sense of favoritism. When one of us didn’t get that, that person not coincidentally began to think the road manager was no good. A lot of them quit, too. Even people who had worked with other bands couldn’t deal with the growing friction in ours. It was just too trying to have four hyperactive, dysfunctional people demanding all your attention and, if they didn’t get it, sabotaging you so you fell on your ass.
Through all the changes in road managers and crew, the only constant was Bill. He had a way of defusing tension and making each member of the band think he was his favorite. But Bill, too, was increasingly stretched thin. He had started trying to expand his management business and seemed to spend a lot of time now on acts like Piper, Starz, and Toby Beau. We felt somewhat spited—we made all the money, and now he spent most of his time dealing with these baby acts who never went far. Sean Delaney’s attention was also diverted by these other acts. And I was annoyed by the way Bill now seemed to believe that the formula for success was simple: give a band a look and a logo and they would become as big as KISS. That was insulting—Bill and Sean’s ideas had definitely helped us immeasurably, but our success wasn’t so simple. There was more to us than a logo, platform boots, and makeup.
Ever since I’d haunted 48th Street as a kid, I had admired the vintage guitars that cost a fortune. Now, however, I was ready to start collecting them. I put the word out on that leg of the tour that I wanted to buy guitars. The first exotic instrument I bought was a Gibson SG double-neck, like the one Jimmy Page played. I bought it in Indiana from a guy who collected them and had a room full of double-necks. Most of them were cherry, but this one was sunburst. From then on, the promoters knew I was in the market, and often, a line of people with guitar cases would be standing at the truck entrance to the concert venues when we pulled in. It was terrific—you never knew what might turn up.
I bought my next one in Arizona from a guy who owned a store called Bob’s Bizarre Guitars. That was a sunburst Les Paul—exactly what I’d always wanted—and I paid $2,200 for it. I couldn’t believe I finally had one of those guitars! It had what are called white or cream humbuckers—the bobbins where the copper wire is wound were white. You don’t usually see the color of the bobbin because they are encased in a chrome or nickel case on the old guitars. But if you looked under the casing, the bobbins could be black, white, or what was called zebra, meaning it had one white and one black. Most of the guitars had all black bobbins, which was considered the least desirable set-up; the most coveted ones had two white bobbins.
I was over the moon.