The atmosphere in the band was much better without Peter’s constant negativity to contend with. It was eye-opening what a difference it made—we had alleviated such a huge problem and so much uncertainty, strife, and hostility. It was as if the sun had suddenly come out—and that was only Peter. Ace was still in a downward spiral, but at least now we had half as much turmoil.
Ace had lost an ally, but he hadn’t lost a buddy. Whatever relationship he’d had with Peter was strictly mercenary. Ace was smart, and he manipulated Peter to help him vote for things he wanted. If he missed Peter at all, it was on that level, not as a friend. Now it was me and Gene and this other guy who didn’t have the same seniority or power as a full member. Ace was the odd man out as far as the decision-making process. I knew it bothered him, but it wasn’t an immediate issue while we were on tour.
When we arrived in Australia for the first time, in November 1980, it quickly became clear that things were going to be crazy. We’d been told KISS was massive there, but you never know what to expect. You can only comprehend things you’ve already experienced; Australia was like nothing we’d ever experienced. Huge here meant not being able to leave the hotel. It meant taking a helicopter from the hotel to the stadium we were playing.
Melbourne, Australia, in 1980, with 50,000 of my closest friends.
The phenomenon we witnessed became known there as “KISSTERIA.”
We had an entire floor of the hotel, with one suite devoted to our own Australian public relations staff. And no wonder, since we were on the front page of the newspapers every day accompanied by headlines like, “KISS in Midnight Cruise on Sydney Harbor.” We had to keep the curtains drawn in our rooms. The place was crawling with bodyguards, and there was a constant drone of screaming outside. “You’re not going anywhere,” we were told.
Thankfully, Australia had its own Penthouse magazine, and a number of Penthouse Pets came over to the hotel to keep us company. Paparazzi camped in front of the hotel, and whenever we went anywhere, we had to hide on the floors of vans. Every single night, the promoters threw parties, which were packed with models and actresses. Some parties were women-only. We would show up at a club or ballroom that had been taken over, and the place would be filled with beautiful women. Australia was one giant Chicken Coop.
Eric, however, would often leave the parties and go out and befriend some waif he met on the street. He identified with the fans. Maybe he felt more like them than like one of us at that point. He sometimes brought girls to his room who had been camping outside trying to catch a glimpse of the band. For his comfort, he chose women like that over models and Penthouse Pets. Issues shape personalities.
The first hints of Eric’s troubles started to come out, too. One day he rented a car and driver to spend a day in the countryside with a girl he’d met. He was so nervous, he told us, that he got awful gas and had to stop the car every ten minutes to go to the bathroom. He was depressed afterwards about what an idiot he felt like. He also went on about how he was losing his hair. His hair was so big that when he moved forward, it moved backwards—it was always moving in the opposite direction from the rest of him. And yet he constantly wanted me to look at his head. “Look, is it thinning here?” And strangest of all, Eric struggled with the idea that he wasn’t the original drummer of the band. I didn’t understand it. I mean, of course he wasn’t the original drummer. He was the second drummer. So what? There was no talking him out of his funk when he started obsessing over the fact that he would never be the first drummer.
Me, Bill Aucoin, and Elton John, out to dinner in Australia, 1980.
In Australia I began to seriously question Bill Aucoin. His cocaine use had become more extreme, and since splitting up with Sean Delaney, his general behavior had become reckless, too. One morning I went to his room and found a boy in his early teens eating a bowl of cereal in Bill’s bed. Another morning I found a different boy there.
Bill was out of control.
When we got back to the States, a boy who had won a contest had been flown in to meet us, along with a photographer from the magazine that had sponsored the contest. Bill was clearly hitting on the kid. The next day I said, “Bill, tell me you didn’t.”
“Yes I did. And the photographer.”
Bill had crossed a line into an area I saw as criminal and immoral. I was no longer laughing.
Back home, the band had more time off. Even though we hadn’t toured in the States for a full year, we figured we’d make another record first. We decided to work with Bob Ezrin again, the producer who had served as our captain and Svengali for Destroyer.
That was it! We would make another Destroyer.
The problem was that the stuff we were writing was no better than the songs on Unmasked. In fact, it was probably worse. We’d lost the plot. My songs were nothing to write home about; Gene’s were no better. But then Bob entered the picture, and he floated the idea of a concept album—which really came out of left field. Gene quickly bought into it and came up with a generic, vague, typical concept: it was about a kid who was the chosen one. Bill got behind the idea, too. It would be our attempt to woo the critics.
“Let’s put out an album that makes a statement,” he told us. “One that shows everybody how talented you are.” Trying to show people how talented and bright you are is the best way to make an idiot of yourself, and we ended up doing that with flying colors.
Looking back, we wanted peer acceptance and critical approval and lost sight of the fact that none of that had mattered to us in the beginning. The people who so vehemently disliked us were more tied up in their own issues than in what kind of music we were making. The fact that the dislike and distaste was so pronounced, almost obsessive, throughout our career should have been a clue that it had little to do with us. If people wanted to waste their time wringing their hands over how much they hated my band, that was pathetic; what may have been more pathetic was that we tried to overcome it by pandering to those people. But we were clueless and decided to try to elevate ourselves, to separate ourselves from where we had started. We assured ourselves that we would impress a lot of people. Finally, we would make an album that garnered critical acclaim—our masterpiece.
Gene, Eric, and I moved to Toronto in March 1981 to work on the album—Bob wanted to do it on his home turf. We didn’t know at first, but his drug habit was now dictating his choice of location.
Ace didn’t even travel to Toronto. It’s all well and good for him to say in retrospect that he didn’t like the musical direction the band was taking, but the fact is that even if we had been doing exactly what he wanted to do musically, he was too wasted to play. He didn’t need an excuse to drink; he was a drunk. He was bombed all the time.
KISSTERIA in full swing, on a private yacht with the Penthouse Pet of the Year. Australia, 1980.
As work trudged on, Bob’s substance problems became so acute he didn’t show up, either. I had always been aware that Bob had a drug problem, but he had managed it in the past. Now his 24/7 cocaine use had taken on epic proportions. The captain abandoned ship. He was supposed to serve as the visionary behind the concept, and all we were getting were notes sent to the studio by messenger after Bob listened to cassettes we sent to his home.
Eventually we got so far behind in the production that Gene and I started working simultaneously in two separate studios, both of us sending tapes to Bob and getting back notes, doing the whole thing piecemeal. We had virtually no idea what the other guy was doing, and we couldn’t reach Bob on the phone. His wife relayed messages because Bob was too fucked up to get to the phone.
Poor Eric—this wonderful guy who thought he had joined a hard rock band—was suddenly playing gibberish with a fox costume in his closet. He was completely thrown by this band that had lost its way and was stumbling along a ridiculous path. He wasn’t comfortable making explicit objections at that point, but he did express bewilderment and discomfort. “You know, this isn’t what I was expecting,” he said. But he was never in a position to draw a line in the sand. He must have had serious doubts, though. He kept playing us a new band called Metallica—he was into stuff like speed metal and thrash way before we were.
The songs we recorded had no teeth. We were gumming the music at that point. We had forsaken everything we loved and embraced. We were intoxicated with fame and success. We were no longer the band everyone loved—and clearly we didn’t love that band anymore either. How else to explain the way we veered away from what we did? For a band like ours to be doing something like Music from “The Elder” truly reeked of the little Stonehenge coming down on the stage during This Is Spinal Tap. If only we had realized.
For the cover, we intended to use my hand instead of a model’s hand. But the day before the photo shoot, I slammed my finger in a window and had a purple nail that had to be retouched. This should have been an omen.
When we were finally finished in September, we went back to New York. If I played the tape for anyone at my apartment, I insisted on silence—as if I was exposing them to brilliance—and they had to sit through the entire thing straight through. We also had a listening party for the record company, with the same insistence that they listen to it in a manner befitting its artistic merit. The reaction at the end of the listening session was like the audience when they heard “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers. Mouths wide open. I already knew somehow that it wasn’t because the sheer greatness of the album had taken their breath away.
The record label hated the album. It was originally sequenced in a way that vaguely told a story. But that meant you didn’t get to anything that resembled a rock song for quite a while. So they made us change the order. As if it wasn’t already bad enough, they basically did the equivalent of tearing all the pages out of a book, throwing them up in the air, and then binding them together again.
In preparation for the launch, we also changed our image to accommodate how we now chose to look offstage. We didn’t want to have long hair anymore. I had razor-cut hair, a bandana around my head—I still needed to hide my ear—and a necklace that looked like I got it from Chiquita Banana. Gene had a little braided ponytail hanging over his shoulder. Ace was still in the photos even though he had in essence left the band. We were delusional. We had drunk the poisoned Kool-Aid, so to speak.
I went into a record store down on 8th Street in the Village the day the album came out in November 1981 and saw a poster for it. I had a panic attack. I looked at the poster and it hit me like a sledgehammer.
What the hell have we done?