Peter posted a sign every day counting down the number of days left on the Farewell Tour. He started painting a teardrop below his eye. I thought it made him look like Emmett Kelly’s famous Weary Willie character, the tragic clown who toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. And as for the rest of his makeup, it was as if he had forgotten how to do it. He started to look like a panda bear, with big rectangles around his eyes.
The tour was horrible. Constant drudgery and misery. We spent all of our energy trying to coax Peter and Ace out of their hotel rooms. Ace sucker-punched Tommy at one of the shows. Peter had his usual handbook detailing how hotel staff had to treat him and which windows had to be covered with tinfoil and all that. There was no reasoning with either of them. We never knew if we’d make it to a show on time, and once we got onstage we never knew whether we’d get through the show. I mean, if a guy has trouble putting on his makeup, how is he going to play? Not surprisingly, the shows could be pretty awful.
I was angry at Peter and Ace for being disrespectful toward everything we had accomplished and everything the fans were giving us.
I bought into the idea that this really was it. The end of KISS. There was no place to go. It was unbearable.
We were stuck in a rut musically as well—basically playing the same seventeen songs we’d taught them for the initial reunion. This was the third tour with the same set list. Peter and Ace just couldn’t master any more. The needle was already into the red. I had to come up with nonsensical interview responses to questions about why we were playing the same songs. I couldn’t just say, “Because Peter and Ace can’t learn any others.”
One night during a show Doc McGhee tried to get my attention from the side of the stage, gesturing up at me and holding his nose.
Huh?
“You stink!” he yelled. I walked over to him during a break between songs. “What did you say?”
“You stink!” he repeated.
“Fucking Peter is playing too slow,” I told him.
Doc ran around behind the drum riser and started making the same gesture at Peter. “Peter, you’re playing too slow!”
“Well, so are they!” Peter shouted back.
“What are you talking about?” Doc screamed. “You’re the fucking drummer!”
Another night Peter had a new problem. He stopped playing in the middle of a song and just held his sticks up and looked at me like a deer in the headlights. I yelled, “Play!” and started tapping my foot so at least he would start hitting the drums again. That happened on more than one occasion.
A well-known musician—who had seen the band many times—approached me one night and said, “I can’t come to any more shows. It’s just too painful to listen to.”
The worst feeling was reading reviews trashing the shows and thinking, That’s spot on. It was such a shame because the band could have been great and wasn’t. The drama offstage and the hostility and resentment and backstabbing were taking a heavy musical toll. And then there were the drugs. When Ace had an off night and made a lot of mistakes, we would joke that his mixture was off.
It would have been great to go out in a blaze of musical glory; instead, we were dragging our asses. At one point we put aside a few days to brush up on songs and tighten things up. Ace didn’t show for one of the rehearsals. He said he wasn’t feeling well because he had Lyme disease—an illness brought on by the bite of a deer tick. Peter, brainiac that he is, said, “That’s bullshit! He was never bitten by a deer!”
Am I living in an insane asylum?
On August 11, 2000, we had a show in Irvine, California, after a week off. Ace had spent the week in New York. We had a rule that if anyone was going to fly cross-country on a commercial flight to get to a gig, he had to get there a day in advance—just to be safe, in case there was a storm or a mechanical issue or whatever. We didn’t want to have to cancel shows.
The day before the Irvine show, Tommy had arranged for a limo to pick Ace up and take him to his flight. He always had the limo show up hours early because it was the same chore to get Ace out of his house as it was to get him out of a hotel. Then all of us sat around waiting for updates on Ace’s progress. Ace’s pickup was scheduled for noon East Coast time. At 1:30 P.M. Tommy called the limo. “Mr. Frehley needs to get going.”
“Um, sir, he hasn’t come out of the house yet.”
Another half an hour passed. Tommy and Doc tried to get Ace on the phone, calling his house. No answer. After calling his house five more times, they finally got him on the line. “Ace, you have to get in the car—you’re going to miss your flight.”
“There’s a problem . . . uh . . . and I’m sick . . .”
Millions of excuses.
They kept rescheduling Ace on later and later flights. The limo went back each time. It got to be 7 and then 8 P.M. “Passenger has not left his house, sir,” reported the limo driver each time.
Tommy managed to get Ace on the phone again. “There’s one more flight out tonight, last one.”
“Okay,” said Ace. “I promise.”
But again at the appointed time, nothing happened. “Passenger still not out of his house, sir.”
Flight missed.
The next day was the show. Ace started the day on the other side of the country. By some minor miracle, however, he made it to the airport in the morning, was met by the on-site rep, and was escorted onto his plane.
Traffic from LAX airport to the venue was going to present a serious problem. So we arranged for a helicopter to sit at Terminal 4, where Ace was arriving, and shuttle him to the venue by air. That way he could probably make it in time for the concert.
Then we got a call. “Well, there’s good news and bad news.”
Okay.
“The good news is that Ace really is on the plane. The bad news is that the plane has a mechanical problem and is delayed.” At that point Doc told Tommy to drop what he was doing and get to the venue. He was going to have to play the show.
We traveled with a Spaceman outfit custom-fitted to Tommy—as an insurance policy. A brand-new outfit, boots and all, tailored to Tommy always came along in one of the wardrobe crates. We knew Tommy could do it, but he had never actually done it.
“You guys are like superheroes,” said Doc. “So Tommy Thayer is playing Batman today? It’s still Batman.”
Tommy got made up and dressed. And meanwhile we were getting updates on Ace’s location as the start time of the show approached. He’s landed . . . passenger is in helicopter . . . fifty miles away . . .
Ace walked into the dressing room about twenty minutes before the show was scheduled to start. He looked at Tommy—fully dressed and made up, with his guitar on, ready to go—and just said, “Oh, hey Tommy, how you doin’?”
We delayed the show an hour, Ace got into his makeup, and we played the concert.
The fact that we traveled with a costume for Tommy didn’t seem to faze Ace. He thought it was a ploy—something between a joke and an empty threat. But we were 100 percent ready to go on with Tommy. We didn’t have him suit up to teach Ace a lesson; we did it because we had a concert to play. The same reckless behavior that had led to a decades-long downward spiral was threatening to sink the ship. Here was a life preserver.
Still, Ace continued to think and act like he was irreplaceable. He continued to show total disregard for everyone else, continued to act as if we were blessed to have him. He congratulated himself on making it to the show.
“This will not do,” Doc said to me and Gene. “These guys are just terrible. I run a management company, not the Red Cross. They don’t send me into destroyed countries to rebuild things. I don’t save people. You have to make changes.”
But still Gene and I clung to the idea of the four of us being together.
“You’ve already given it three more years than I would have,” said Doc.
We decided to take the Farewell Tour to Asia in early 2001. Ace was on board. I personally offered Peter a million dollars to play eight shows in Japan in March 2001. He made the brilliant business decision to say no.
“Peter,” I told him, “I want you to understand: you get one million dollars or you get nothing and the train leaves without you.” Still no. Once again, what I was making was more important to him than the seven figures he would sock away. I told him I would call Eric Singer.
“The fans will never accept it,” said Gigi, who was now married to Peter. “Peter’s the most talented one in the band.”
I just said, “Okay.”
Initially, Doc’s talk about getting rid of Peter—and Ace, for that matter—had been wishful thinking. No longer. This time we’d all had it. It’s one thing to put up with somebody who’s a virtuoso and a prick. It’s quite another to put up with somebody who can barely play his instrument and is a prick.
I called Eric Singer, just as I had told Peter I would. To Peter’s shock, the tour would go on. And Eric would wear the Catman makeup. At that point it was clear that compromising the four iconic characters had been a mistake the first time around, and we wouldn’t repeat it. The Catman, the Demon, the Spaceman, and the Starchild were far more important than Peter, Gene, Ace, and Paul. Nobody in KISS is irreplaceable—and I definitely include myself in that calculation. All around the world people can identify a picture of the band KISS without necessarily knowing any of the members’ names. So be it.
Gene, Ace, and I got together with Eric to rehearse in L.A. before we left for Japan. What a breath of fresh air. The reality of playing without Peter was freeing. Peter was marginal when the reunion started, and his playing had gone downhill since. His drum solos were an embarrassment. Eric hated drum solos. That kind of tells you everything you need to know about Eric.
Without Peter, the musical standard quickly improved. Even Ace picked up his game with Eric behind him. Even so, I wasn’t sure what the reaction of the fans would be. Just as I hadn’t been sure what the reaction would be when we took off our makeup years before. But overall, fans didn’t seem to care. We didn’t use any sleight of hand about the change. We introduced Eric by name at every show, and he got the applause he deserved for his playing. Nobody put a gun to people’s heads and forced them to buy tickets, and yet the shows were just as full.
We had labored unnecessarily under a self-imposed concept. It turned out there had been no need. Few missed Peter—and Ace wasn’t one of them. “I don’t want this to get back to Peter, but I’m glad he’s not here,” Ace said one night. “He got me all worked up—I’m having a whole lot more fun now.”
With Eric back in the band, Ace actually started socializing with all of us again. He liked Eric on all levels and loved playing with him. We had band dinners again and hung out together in Japan and Australia, where we added additional concerts into April 2001. Everyone got along better than ever. And in concert, Ace played the best he had since 1996. The vibe was great—until the last show in Australia on April 13. Ace had a rough show that night, and in some ways he was never the same again.
The plan was to say farewell in Europe after that, but we had trouble pinning Ace down. He would say yes and then change his mind. Eventually, he dropped completely out of sight. Nobody could get ahold of him, not even his lawyer. Finally he showed up for a meeting to discuss another proposed European farewell, and he was shockingly thin. Over the years he’d had a tendency to blow up and then get skinny again, careening back and forth depending on what he was ingesting at the time. But now he looked like he was going to die. And it was obvious that he was out of it. “My God, Ace, how’d you get so thin?”
“Yoga,” he slurred.
The shows never got booked.