Detroit rock city—back where it all began. Tiger Stadium, sold out, June 28, 1996. Gene, Ace, Peter, and me, together again. Magic. Electricity.
Here we are.
We had arrived ten days earlier—once again leaving nothing to chance—and had done seven rehearsals, including one full dress rehearsal. Ace was late for all of them.
At this point in my life, there were certain perks and prerequisites I felt I had earned and were necessary to make the coming tour manageable. We booked the best hotels; I wasn’t going to be staying in hotels with a paper ring around the toilet seat saying SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. Ace and Peter hadn’t stayed in the upper echelon hotels in the sixteen years since they’d last toured with KISS. Peter in particular seemed completely lacking in world experience. I took him to Starbucks one day, and he was blown away by how good a biscotti was. Quite quickly both Peter and Ace came to resent the fact that they weren’t as worldly or savvy when it came to maneuvering in nice surroundings. Peter constantly felt disrespected by hotel staff, for instance, which was simply the result of his feeling intimidated by them—and almost anyone else for that matter.
On the afternoon of the show, we did a sound check. As I stood on the stage, it was still hard to grasp that this baseball stadium would be jammed to capacity in a few hours. We took pictures, enjoying the moment. Peter, who had recently broken up with a girlfriend and was there on his own, seemed uncharacteristically open and grateful. His tendency was always to become dependent on someone and cut himself off from everybody else by using his girlfriend as a buffer—either a good buffer or a bad buffer, depending on the woman’s personality. Now, single, Peter let himself bask in the moment.
That night, on our way to the stage, golf carts drove us through the mazelike bowels of the stadium. Suddenly we emerged from one of the access ramps to the area behind the stage, and the air was electric. You could hear the excitement, the anticipation. It was overwhelming. I realized I was suddenly exponentially more important than I had been just a few months before—because I was again a member not just of KISS, but of this version of KISS. I could hear the pent-up feelings of the people waiting for the show. People had made the journey from around the world to witness this night. It was deafening.
When the lights went down, it was pandemonium. It seemed like forty thousand flashbulbs went off as people waited for us to emerge.
I knew this show was pivotal. This show would reintroduce the band and the imagery and everything that went with it. This show could allow us to move forward. To continue. It felt like we were in the eye of a hurricane, everything swirling around us as we calmly watched from the quiet of backstage.
As we took the stage—still behind the curtain—I felt an incredible wave of pressure. The sound of the crowd had a tangible force to it. And even as the place went quiet, the noise of forty thousand people breathing created a deafening kind of hush. I had never felt like this before.
Alright, Detroit! You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest band in the world . . . KISS!
The curtain dropped, and the force of the crowd reaction nearly lifted me off my feet.
I had to fight to be in control of the situation, of myself, of my persona, of the band. I was worried about staying connected to Peter—there was going to be a lot of foot-tapping and hand signals, I knew, in order to keep him with us. Fortunately, he was happy to have the guidance. It wasn’t like him, to be honest, to be open to that sort of thing, but for the time being Peter was terrific—working hard, being cheerful and appreciative.
The joy for me was being able to revisit something I’d experienced as a much younger person in a different frame of mind. When I was in the midst of it the first time around, I had the sense it would never end. No matter how thankful I was, I had still suspected it would be endless. Then it had died down. But there on that stage, with KISS reunited, facing that kind of energy again, I felt thankful in an entirely different way. It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about fame. I had those things already. This was the chance to read a book that I’d read as a kid, to see a movie that I’d seen when I was younger, to get something out of the experience that I hadn’t had the capacity to get or appreciate before.
I was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude.
As the tour continued, everyone seemed to share that feeling. At least initially. Peter swore up and down that he wouldn’t repeat the mistakes he had made the first time around. And for the first few months of the reunion tour, we voted Peter the MVP. He often joined us for dinner. He was upbeat and pleasant to be around. His attitude seemed to mirror mine—we were incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity.
One of the things we had worried about on the reunion was Peter’s drum solo. He had wanted to play one from the get-go. In a perfect world, a solo was part of what we did—we had always had a drum solo during the Alive! years. Looking back, it wasn’t clear why we felt we needed to, but it had become a tradition. In the meantime, Peter’s abilities had greatly deteriorated. But since he wanted to do it, and it was part of the tradition, Gene agreed to help him put one together.
Fortunately, by the nineties, you could hit a Coke bottle with a stick and make it sound explosive and powerful if you put enough effects on it. And that’s exactly what we did. We put triggers on each individual drum so that when Peter hit one, it activated a prerecorded drum sound. Although Peter had played with fire in the seventies, he was a shadow of himself now. On the reunion tour he hit the drums like he was worried his arms would snap if he did anything more than barely tap them. His arms hurt, he said. How hard you hit the drums determined the activation of the triggers, but fortunately they could be set to any level of sensitivity. We used to say we had the triggers set so Peter could play a solo by sneezing. I’d hear these huge drum sounds and turn around to look at Peter and see that he was barely moving his sticks.
But we wanted to succeed. And succeed we did.
For a time.
Then came Gigi. She was a born-again Christian who by all accounts had been a dancer before—and I don’t mean she was in Swan Lake. When Peter got together with her, things started to change quickly. Peter reminded me of a small animal—when it’s afraid, it’s timid, but when it feels protected, it shows its teeth. Peter latched onto her and started to distance himself from everyone else.
I was amazed that while he and Gigi professed a deep love of God and religion, they inflicted nothing but pain and suffering on all those around them. Suddenly, when I called his room to talk, she would answer and say, “What do you want?”
“Is Peter there?”
“What do you need him for?”
Just get him to the damn phone. You’re a guest.
She became a gatekeeper.
The tour might as well have been printing money by this time. Everything was selling out, and we kept adding shows. We were living an amazing life, flying around in a large private jet with a flight attendant, staying at beautiful hotels—we were on top of the world. Peter and Ace made millions of dollars—and they hadn’t made squat in the nearly two decades they’d been out of the band. They had nothing before the reunion. And yet, as soon as their bank accounts began to fill up again, they changed.
Peter’s hotel requests necessitated Doc printing a multipage handbook that was distributed to hotel staff wherever we went. It contained a set of complicated rules: if Peter put a sign on his door with one symbol, the staff could go in and vacuum, but they couldn’t touch the windows; another sign meant they could air the room out, but not touch the towels; he needed to be a certain distance from the elevators; he couldn’t be too high up; he made them cover certain windows with tinfoil.
Are you kidding me? This time last year you’d never been to a Starbucks!
One afternoon I heard screams and crashing sounds coming from the hall. I opened my hotel room door and saw Doc running past toward Peter and Gigi’s room. Dishes were flying out of the room and smashing against the opposite wall in the hallway. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Doc shouted.
“They didn’t clean my room!” screamed Peter.
“But Peter, you put your sign on the door that means they can’t come in!”
The cracks in the band were beginning to show—already.
Some nights Ace nodded out while putting his makeup on—just slumped into his chair with a paintbrush practically stuck in his eye. His use of a variety of illegal drugs was again out of control. He would go through all kinds of contortions—he even managed to get a superficial gun wound in Dallas—and then demand prescriptions for more drugs. Doc would have to blow the whistle and tell doctors not to give him painkillers. As Doc used to say, “Ace has the willpower of a grubworm.”
It was sad. And frustrating. This should have been four guys celebrating something miraculous. Instead, it became hard work just to make sure it came off every day—that Peter and Ace got out of their rooms, that we made it to the venue, that we got through a show.
While I traveled with one rolling suitcase, Ace was now traveling with seventeen bags, including one that weighed more than a hundred pounds. In it was a projector and cables so he could run an image of his face and Elvis’s face morphing into each other on a loop in his hotel room.
Ace brought along some interesting girlfriends, too. One liked to wander out into the audience with a clipboard and take notes—apparently, she was checking to make sure Ace was mixed loudly enough. Another one must have shot up on the plane, because she left blood all over her seat. She was in such bad shape, we sent a doctor into Ace’s dressing room to have a look at her. “If I were you,” the doctor told us, “I wouldn’t have her traveling with you, because she’s going to die.” Doc handled that situation, and she was never seen on the tour again.
Needless to say, Doc was increasingly pissed off at Peter and Ace.
“You’re going to be changed out,” he told them. “This is a business. I’m not an archaeologist, I’m not here to preserve the past. I’m here to make this thing move forward and grow. If you’re a hindrance, you’re going to go. It would be a shame for you to miss this opportunity. You have a second lease on life—why can’t you just ride the pony?”
They hated Doc for saying that, but he was sick of having to drag them through everything and motivate them to do the basic things they needed to do for us to function as a band.
As things went south, though, a lot of the fallout actually landed on Tommy Thayer, who had to take over as tour manager of the operation about six months into the first year of the reunion tour. Tommy spent 90 percent of his time and energy dealing with things a person shouldn’t have to deal with—making new arrangements when Peter or Ace missed a flight or didn’t show up for a car pickup, making sure the hotel staff didn’t take the tinfoil off Peter’s windows, whatever it was. Ace was chronically late getting out of his hotel room when we needed to get to a venue or to our jet. For a while, Tommy just lied to him about departure times—pushing them an hour forward so there was a chance of Ace’s making the actual time. But when Ace realized that, he got bent out of shape.
At some stage Tommy came to me with the realization I had been waiting for. He admitted that the perception he’d had—of me and Gene as the tight-asses, the business guys, and Ace and Peter as the rock and roll guys—couldn’t have been more wrong. Being inept, unreliable, and marginally capable didn’t make you rock and roll. It made you inept, unreliable, and marginally capable. Ace was now, in Tommy’s words, “a fucking loser.”
In early 1997, we flew to Japan, where we were received like heroes once again, huge crowds awaiting us everywhere we appeared. We traveled between shows by bullet train. One afternoon, we went to board a train and an enormous crowd greeted us once again—kids gathered at the station to see us. We walked through the station surrounded by security people, and when we arrived on the platform, it too was mobbed with fans.
It was incredible—again, I felt blown away.
We should wake up every day and thank whatever God we believe in for what we are experiencing.
And at that moment, Peter turned to me and said, “I’m sick and tired of this Hard Day’s Night shit.”
I was speechless.