Gene Simmons

30:19And so I want my sense of the rock star thing. I didn't come from the Dylan or Springsteen or any of that school, which is, you know, you have a something inside of you. You want to impart a message or something. I just wanted to be rich and famous and get lots of chicks without any reservations, unapologetic, because what I saw when I saw the Beatles and the girls, especially, were going insane in a primal way. I said, I have to have that thing. And I firmly believe that when Lenin McCartney, especially, were strumming and coming up with those songs, so many hundreds and hundreds of songs. And only seven years, I don't know how that happened.

31:09I don't think they were thinking about what's the secret of life. Or I want to change society or it was just Moon Jun Spoon. And that kind of sounds good. I hope we can pay the rent. That's it. Yeah. It was really devotion to music. They just love this thing. They love this. And the thing was a multi -headed beast because they loved rockabilly. They loved Buck Owens, Country and Motown and Blues. And all the English bands had this kind of understanding. American music, strangely, America invented clearly from Black people. That music came blues, hip hop, the white version, rock and roll, which means having sex.

32:00People don't know that. Let me rock and roll you all night long. You know, let me have sex with you all night rolling around. And people go, oh yeah, rock means sex. And we may have invented all those musical genres, but what the British did with it. Forget about it. Yeah. And it's a very strange island. I know there are a few, there's whales and in Scotland and so on, but that's small island of people created the biggest bands on the planet up until Taylor, who's a phenomenon all by yourself. The Beatles and the Stones and it just got hundreds and hundreds of these bands. And some of them were completely different.

32:49If you listen to Yes, it has nothing to do sonically with Led Zeppelin, which has nothing to do with, I don't know, Kat Stevens. And they all coexisted at the same time. And I have to say that it was the most varied under the umbrella of rock. It was the most varied creative period I was ever aware of.

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34:54Tell me about songwriting with Paul. When did it start? When did you know it got good? Again, I've always been delusional. I am now. And I believe it's a healthy mindset. I mean, if you don't take yourself seriously, but if you're Mike Tyson and you were starting out and you're too short, not heavy enough in your you don't have long arms, how could you possibly envision yourself as the most dangerous boxer whoever stepped in the ring? And if you take a look at photos of everybody Tyson thought, it looks like a joke. They're all a foot taller and huge arms and yet. The power of belief. That's right.

35:37You're so right. There's kind of delusional notion. I don't mean that as a negative, just understood. Real sense of the stars. Because it's unrealistic, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Absolutely right. And that's why not everybody scales the heights. You have to have this before it's a reality. Hindsight's easy. Because you go, oh, that's how you do it. But before you do it, you've got to have vision and a delusional belief in yourself. When I first met Paul, I hadn't met. I'd written a few hundred songs on my own. Almost all of them terrible. A few survived. I met Paul because my sixth grade chum, Steven Carnell with whom I'd written two songs with.

36:31He came up with a riff and I melody and I did the rest myself. And both those songs we recorded as KISS and they did well. He was the original guitar player and we could bluster, but unfortunately didn't have the goods. But through him, I met Paul Stanley. And Paul Stanley, when you first met me, I didn't mean it, but didn't like me a lot. That's fair to say. Because I couldn't imagine that anyone else wrote songs. I thought again, delusional, I figured something out that regular people didn't. I mean, they were Lenin, McCartney, and Jagger, Richard, those guys. But they weren't real people. They're up there.

37:18Yes. But walking down the street, I didn't know anyone who could play guitar or come up with melodies that write your own songs. I was crazy. And Steven Carnell introduced me to this guy who was not yet Paul Stanley. And I remember saying, let me hear what you got. And he sat down and he played a song called Sunday Driver. It goes, let me be your Sunday driver. Let me be your Monday man. Take you in a way. Just as fast as I can.

38:03Doesn't matter what you want to do. It doesn't matter where you want to go. You just got a desire girl. And then you let me know. But let's get down you want to know.

38:31Like that. I'm going. Wow. Let me be your Sunday driver. Let me be your Monday man. That's really good. And I'm going, wow. And then he said, what do you got? Oh my god. Have I got this is fucking embarrassing.

39:04My uncle is a rough and he always keeps me floating. He's so good to me. It treats me tenderly. It doesn't matter who you are.

39:22My uncle is a rough. What the fuck is that? My uncle is a rough. And he was just looking at me like deadpan going, uh -huh. Because there was nobody around to say it now. Put that away. That's not a good one. Because you know, we all have to do that song. My uncle is a rough. That's where it came. That's really good. I hear it. It goes. It goes. That's what it is. It goes.

39:53To that spirit.

40:11That's where I got it from. Great work. But well respected man was a cultural kind of pop commentary on something. The fuck does my uncle is a raft and he always keeps me floating. You were kidding. Yep. And I didn't know there was nobody. There was no Rick Rubin around to say, well, maybe not that one. So then right from that meeting of Paul, did you guys start? No. Paul had joined Stephen Carnell and one other guy who was playing keyboards, Marty Cohen and a drummer who I played with. And they had, they didn't have a bass player. And Paul was a real anglophile. He had a Gibson, but they didn't have amplifiers.

40:59And when I was in college, I had a side band and I saved all my money. So I bought two Marshall stacks with 200 watt Marshall heads. Nobody had those. And then Stephen Carnell and I decided to put a band together. We didn't have a name. And we put an ad in village voice, which at that time was a free newspaper. And one of the ads was looking for a guitar player and blah, blah, blah. And we saw Paul called the phone number we had, which was in the rehearsal hall. And I remember answering the phone. And what's your name? Stanley, you know, so and so. And I didn't recognize the name. And we were talking with each other.

41:49We're looking for, you know, lead guitar player. And Paul says on the other phone, I can play okay lead, but I'm more rhythm player and I can think, I'm so sorry looking for guitar. I didn't know I was talking to Paul. So there was another miscarpetunity. And then it was Stephen Carnell, who was in this fledgling band with me, which would become wicked d 'leste. He says, why don't I call this guy Paul that I, you know, he sings great and he can play with him guitar and I'll play Lee. So we had a second chance. Like who gets a second chance? And when Paul and I got together, he, you know, slowly warmed up to the idea, because I did have other material that we started doing.

42:33And we started, you know, writing together, he would come in with a finished song like, uh, out on the streets for a live end. Pictures only be gone.

43:00Not you under there. I said, where'd you get that? The Rolling Stones under my foot. And I said, well, that's really good. And I like the chords the way they sound, but you know, it's not memorable. So the bass lines that I wound up playing because I wasn't trained bass. McCartney was a big influence. I just played what was in my mind. So I started doing.

43:37That became the, the other beginning.

43:44And so those chords, but the chords only came in during the verse. They'd began with my bass riff. During the verses.

43:56And that became a thing. We recognized all of us that what I was naturally playing.

44:11It was a bass line that I was doing for a song Paul had called Love All I Can. But then I said, why don't you guys play my bass line?

44:32So while that's gone and had drums are going on back of it, it had an interesting syncopated thing. And the chords got out of the way. So a lot of the songs, the early songs, either Paul and I would come in with their own things and the riffs.

44:58The riffs.

45:05And then A's with Paul.

45:11Against adding the harmony.

45:17And and what sounds stupid on acoustic guitar played loudly kind of like, wow, it's kind of like cream. And we had harmonies. Tell me about up until making the first album. So gigs. Did you guys do shows? We. Paul and I got a loft 10 years 23rd Street. I had worked at that time as the assistant to the director of the Puerto Rican interagency council because I could type 90 words of minute. I could fix minigraf, hexagraph, rexagraph. So I was the one man office when you had to do copies of anything. Take a note. In fact, before that, I was a dittiful typist from 8 p .m. until 8 a .m. at Williamson at Williamson, a law firm on Wall Street.

46:14So after work, I'd lock up the office. It was a government funded research and demonstration project. I take the subway to downtown 15th Street. And I was the checkout guy at a Jewish deli. So you take people's money, ring it up, but I could eat as much as I want and I can take doggy bags with me. So make extra money. I was taken care of free. I could eat whatever I wanted and boy, that I punished those cheesecake, the blueberry cheesecake. And then after my stint at the few hours, and by 9 or 9 30, I take the subway or walk to 23rd Street. And we start rehearsing at night. Would you be exhausted or no?

47:03Of course. But you're two years old. You just don't have that. You just go. Yeah. Pick up food where you could and you just go, go, go. And would you say all of the work was to get you to the rehearsal or no, everything was the same. It was all just work. Money. You're driven by money. Still have. Yeah. And even the band from the beginning was only about money. You have to add chicks. Okay. Because you didn't. I and no one else in the band and no one else I ever met or admired in other bands ever talked about the ethereal or poetic nature of, I don't know Bob Dylan, let's say, who's a higher life form.

47:54Yeah. The glitter movement was amazing. Did you ever see any of those bands? Did you ever see the dolls play live? We opened for them. We opened for them. Three shows or so. Paul and I went to see them at the hotel, Diplomat in New York before the record had already come out. They came out before us about six months. Were you already in full makeup? Yes. Right from the beginning. At the very first show. We played, we were fourth on the bill 1973 New Year's Eve. It was kiss, teenage lust, diggy pop and glues to cult. Wow. At the Academy of Music for 3000 people that became the palladium. They sound like a great show.

48:41Yes. In those days, there was no separation. I mean, I saw Albert King, the Chambas brothers and Poco on the same bill. We could see the music, music, Woody Herman Orchestra and Led Zeppelin on the same bill. Wow. How did the first New Year's Eve show there? By the third song, my hair caught fire. This was New Year's Eve. Firehouse because we got ourselves a manager, a guy who directed a late night TV show called Flipside. That was in the studio. They'd bring John Lennon or record label heads and it would be live music in a recording studio. How did you find him or how did he find you? Oh, I found everybody.

49:30The mountain in common to you, Mohammed. Okay. I have the offices at the Puerto Rican interagency council. After everybody left, I bought a voraciously red billboard, record world and cash box, every issue you did too. I did. And then they had the year -end issue. And they listed every single management company, every single and when the band was put together before anything, we rented out the diplomat hotel on 43rd Street and got bigger bands, bigger local bands than us. Street punk, local band before the punk era, they were called Street Punk. And they had a good song called Master of Flash, one good song.

50:21So locally, they met more than Kisquit. Kisquit was a new band, untried. And Luger, a small band, and I wrote up the contract. You'll be there. There will be antlethars and the sound system. All of it rented. It will sell tickets and everything. And you get a sum total of $125. I said that. And you show up at, you know, eight o 'clock. That's when you play Luger and you get 75 or 100, whatever it is. And what they didn't know, they assumed, and you know what happens when you assume, makes a nice out of you and me, is that we all understood they were the headlines. Well, Kis, this new band was going on at 930.

51:04So we invited, I put together the prescott myself up at the offices of Puerto Rican Interagency Council, bought Mandela envelopes, printed up the stuff there in the office and sent it to every person in the record industry, including, by the way, the director, producer of Flipside, because it was a music show. And we were looking for managers and everything. And a few people came down and it said, heavy metal masters before people used the term, the William Burrows heavy metal. And we put our own makeup and Paul and his friends, actually went out and bought glue and glitter. And those days you could buy multicolored glitter and Paul and his friends outlined the kiss logo on a t -shirt in glue and then dropped the glitter on there and let it dry.

52:01And then hand it out just like Frank Sinatra, the Bobby Soxers at the Paramount Theater, because we were all students of how do you create something that's not going to come to you. And Colonel Tom Parker used to pay these teenage girls to be in the front going, and we literally got everybody's girlfriends or any pretty girl that we could and here put the t -shirt on and be in the front row. And when we come on, so one of the industry people that came to see us was this producer director, they were record companies there as well. When fall records and a few others, and Paul and I had already walked out of the epic records contract with who could luster, we just didn't believe in it.

52:50And Bill McCoyne, I remember right after we came off the stage, I went, if people are still milling around because everybody, the guys are all trying to get laid and the girls are staying there and if they didn't have boyfriends, you know, it was all social. And I remember a one of the photographers, a girl, who was in the front taking photos, you know, of us while we were on stage, just like real bands. And it was a pretty good sounding hall and we came off well, we did firehouse and all those songs that would later become popular within a year. And I remember this guy coming in and I was sitting by the mixing console in makeup with homemade glittery pants made out of like what your grandmother would put on a glittery thing that she soars at home, but not well -made.

53:49Black and black leather jacket and black t -shirt and all that and puffed up hair and makeup and I'm sitting by the and this guy Bill McCoyne comes in and as soon as he's coming, I grabbed this girl Regina with a camera around her and she happened to be blessed in that special way. And so I put her on my lap and was, you know, moving my lap up and down so that you would see God's gifts bouncing. I mean Shakespeare said the world is a stage in world's as plain. They were lifted and separated as I recall and pointing in his general direction. Had money sat down, she's, you know, a guy with the makeup and the thing who on stage was sticking his tongue out and the girls were screaming the stuff.

54:40And of course Paul was the better -looking guy and this girl on stage and photos and the room is full because they they were coming to see the other bands, not us. Yeah, but we made all the money, made over $750 because I think the entrance was $50 or something like that. So you pay the other bands, he's a hundred here, 75 hotel rental and the rest of it was ours. We actually made some money and a coin's looking at this and goes, oh, there's something going on here that I haven't so he immediately called. We later found out this guy Neil Bogart, who was a record company and you know, semi -legend even the early days he had yummy yummy yummy.

55:28I got love in my tummy. The 19 -10 food gum company, but he also had the impressions per se mayfield, you know, legitimate stuff. Black music, bubble gum. It was a form of music and the lemon piper's listen while I play hey, hey, hey, my green tambourine and he told him about it and this guy Bogart was starting a new label. Castellan. That's right. But originally I have to say I'm guilty of it. He was going to call the label Emerald City. I remember by the way, once he was going to sign us, he asked me in the office, Bill Cohn's office, which was called Rock Study. He created that before the Aritha song.

56:17What do you think of Emerald City? I said, I don't like it. I was completely unqualified. And I don't know if I said it or if he said it, but what about Tassa Blanca? Oh yeah, they had a kiss. It's just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh. Yeah, that's cool. And we were the very first band signed to Castellan. I didn't know that before disco, before anything else. Of course, we think of Castellan. Mainly it's a disco label. After kiss. After kiss, I did find a group called Angel and convinced Bogart to sign them and they were impressive and good looking. They just never made it. But the real money for Bogart came from Donna Summer, which was massive.

57:09They had the parliaments, a version of it because they were on three different labels and were sued by everybody. Parliament Funkadelic was on Westwind. The parliaments I just want to testify what your love has done to me. Get up for the downstroke. Everybody get up. And parliaments, Donna Summer, the village people, I mean, they had huge, huge hits, not just for one record, lots of records, but we were the first. The only rock band, really. Yeah. That's interesting. The only rock band out of New York that made any kind of noise ever. Yeah. That could play stadiums and do that. No other New York band.

57:55Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny when you take a look at it, the Beatles didn't come from London. They came from Liverpool. Yeah. And you too didn't come from, I don't know, wherever the capital city is. All these small pockets where, I don't know if it's the underclass, Grange didn't start in a major area. Like a rainy other area. And when you think of Nashville, everybody's from Nashville. No, not really. They're up in the hill. They come there from the hills. They have the gestation period. This development thing is off somewhere else. I mean, Elvis didn't come from New York. No. The geniuses of managers, whatever would never think of a white good looking boy.

58:48So look, I'm going to give you the DNA. Here's what you got to do. Go to black churches, listen to gospel and integrate that and to do this and do that and then do the, no, it happened. The Beatles were real. All that DNA from different things. They made that mixture. And Elvis did that gospel music with white little country, little gospel. They invented themselves. And that sort makes it authentic that it wasn't some grand scheme. Now there's nothing wrong with the monkeys. I was a major. I love the monkeys. Yeah. But that was created. Yes. And it does not. The music does. The people does not do not stand the test of time because you know, they were actors.

59:30They didn't write their own things. So Mike Nezmeth did write two songs. Did you know the stone ponies, different drums? Oh, that's a great song. I'll give you Mike Nezmeth. I love that song. Mary, Mary wrote that for Paul Butterfield Blues band. Great song. Mary, Mary. Great song. You know where he made all his money. And I am just a bucket full of trivia. His mother invented white out. Pretty good. You know what white out is? Yes, I do. Kids today, no idea what that was. Yeah. You don't need it now because you can erase on the computer. So you don't need white out. You don't even need your fingers.

1:00:10You just talk to Siri.

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1:01:51I think we're going to listen to a song or two from each album from the first album until the solo albums. So, the very first album is just called Kiss. I will play a song from the first Kiss album.

1:02:24I know a thing long too about her.

1:02:32I know she'll fall in making cry.

1:02:40She'll let you walk the street beside her. From where she goes. Your hands, your palms, your palms, your palms, your palms, your palms, your palms.

1:03:03The riff.

1:03:15She wears her satsangs like a baby She gets her way just like a child You take her home and she's the man Baby, baby, she takes you down and drives you wild Everybody's the shit she's looking at, and lighten all the time No storm, stride What do you remember about that? First of all, when we recorded the first record at Bell Sound there were no 24 track machines 1970s, 16 track, 16 track, 16 tracks And just a few years... Where's Bell Sound? I don't know that place Down the same street as Studio 54 On one end of Studio 54, closer to 7th Avenue is Bell Sound, no longer there I remember at the same time upstairs the other floor, they were recording the soundtrack for Lords of Flatbush with Stallone They also have the Warriors later there They were all wearing makeup And so that song started off as one of these songs I did as a solo before I met Paul called Stanley the Parrot I know, it sounds like stupid Taken from kind of like Boris the Spider Look who's flying on my wall Boris the Spider Yeah Boris the Spider I know, almost childlike And I started with these chords Then it goes And then it went into this other section And Paul heard that song when we first got together we played a lot of tunes for each other And he says, that is a god awful song But I like these chords I do the same thing to his stuff I like the chord That's what makes a good songwriting partnership is you make each other better I say the same thing about we couldn't shine their shoes But when Len and McCartney were together Absolutely Nobody touched them Here's the thing that just pisses me off at how good Not even good Geniuses Guys come into a band and say, hey I got a new song What is it called?

1:06:52It's called yesterday How's it go? Yesterday Oh there's no introduction or nothing The title is the first word And it's the first thing you hear Without anything I got another one What is it called? Michelle Michelle Oh, I got it And then you go, what I got another one What is it called? How's it go? Bumpa to the left She loves you Yeah, I've got it Bumpa to the left How did they do that? What's the other one? Eleanor Actually, they did It was Len and who put the eye Look at all That was Len and his thing And during the making of help Because they had Hard Day's Night the song It's man of Hard Day's Night That's the name of the movie And it goes right into that Richard Luscher comes up to the band It says, look we've got a movie called Help Because we like the title We need a song called Help And I read different things This is what happened During lunch, Len and went off And he wrote Help in a half hour And when you take a look at it It was a song about a guy Who had close to manic depressive tendencies He had real personal problems Help I need somebody help Not just anybody help You know I need someone help And it's his whole life Help me if you can on feeling down But I do appreciate you being around Help me if you just Insane against this Pop melody with amazing With them answering When I was young It's just memorable He goes, honey like this It goes like this Help I need somebody help Oh my god So what I call a perfect song Hardly ever done Ironically Charlie Chaplin was a co -writer of one of the other perfect songs Doesn't depend on introductions Instrumentation, arrangement, or guitar solos Or piano solos It's just the melody and the lyric And the subject matter And the song he co -wrote was Smile Smile though your heart is aching Smot right there You kill me with those two Smile though your heart is aching Smile though your heart is aching And by the way, there's a great songs like that Begin and end with the same song When you just smile yesterday Or my throat I believe in yesterday Help, I just, you know Simple, super simple Simple, try to write one like that And that ends It's possible to do that Oh my god, and it's not even a chorus The way you think of a chorus Because yesterday, for example, It's one word Yesterday, pregnant pause, pregnant pause All my trouble And then the rest of the song begins It's genius Yeah Must have been the way Salieri in that movie Alma Dayis Eventually goes mad He was the king's musical director And wrote symphonies that are operas well respected And then he saw this little puts You know, who had write three -minute piano concertos Mozart Wrote it linear He composed linear as he was playing it It was writing it down And he did it in front of Salieri Who went insane And there's a pivotal moment in that movie That is supposedly taken from historical fact Salieri's in prison goes angry And in order for some time People saw an actor in every day He would beat his head Which was beaten to a pulp There's artwork of that Yes Curcing God Why did you give this youngling The genius of music When I've been devoted to all my life And he couldn't get over The genius of Mozart What do you remember about the cover shoot first album.

1:10:58Joel Brotsky, I remember I think was the photographer. We went to him because he did the photographer for strange days, the doors. The doors. We loved that cover and the doors were not even on the cover. It was like circus. There was a strong man. The vibe of it. I think he did a lot of stuff for Electra. Yeah. Joel Jack Holtzman and all that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a shame. The art of it is gone. There's no more art considerations and stuff. I used to buy records just because of the album cover. It was a good indication. And bands would torture themselves with artwork and everything. So we walk in, a new label, cast a black and everything.

1:11:47And he says, okay, guys, what kind of ideas do you have? Well, you know, we wear makeup and everything. Okay, go off into that room. You've got yourself over there. Let me see what you've got. And we came out and I'll never forget this. And he goes, oh, I get it. Your clowns. What do you mean? And he sent his assistant. They went downstairs to a kind of a Woolworth or something and they brought up balloons and you see his assistant blowing up balloons and everything. And we said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. No, this is serious. We're like kiss like the kiss of death. What do you mean?

1:12:27No, we just want to do the album cover like meet the Beatles looking straight ahead. And if you take a look at meet the beel, that's what it is without without musical instruments. Yeah, just the faces. Yeah, the record company was furious. Aren't you put the guitars in the kiss logo come to be. The kiss logo. First of all, I wanted to call the band. I have seriously, fuck. I wanted to be edgy. And the first record would be called it. Like it. The second would be called you. Fuck you. The third record would be called whatever it is us. And it all and it's just the on and off. Cool. Who are you going to go see it?

1:13:14We're going to go see fuck. Yeah, fuck. Yeah. Pretty punk rock. Pretty punk rock idea. I didn't know. I just sounded edgy. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. I was, no, that's the live record. Fuck. Yeah. And of course, everybody thought, no, no, you can't do that. And it was Paul Stanley who in his Mustang, he's fairly and I were in the back seat. Paul was in the front. Peter was already married. So his wife would pick him up and Paul's driving scared to death. Thought you were going to die because he was always horrible driver. And he said, I don't know why. And he can't remember where it came from. He says, Hey, how about kiss?

1:13:52Not semi believing what he was saying and all of a sudden, you're going, wow. And we started talking, you know, kiss, kiss of death, kiss of this, kiss of that. Wow, that's kind of, wow, it's kind of cool, kind of like glitter. And yeah. And then in those days, I was making the phone calls to clubs and taking care of the biz, sometimes paying whatever I had to do and whatever. But Paul would be driving the truck because I couldn't drive until I was 34. And we had this photo enlarged of us as wicked luster because it was a transition. We were wicked luster. Even as we, Paul and I got rid of the other guys in the band wicked luster and Peter and Ace joined the band, we were still wicked luster just as a kind of like the yard bird.

1:14:44Same thing happened before. Let's have the new yard birds and all that. Yeah. So there's a photo of us because I got us a gig at popcorn, which became Coventry. We were the first band to play it right in Woodside in Queens. And how many people would have been at that show? You could have fit two or three hundred. And when we played, there might have been four. Jan Walsh, who was a girl I was seeing at the time, her girlfriend, who was seeing her brother Lydia Chris, who was the Peter Chris's wife and then one or two other people. That was it. But to us, we were playing Yankee Stadium. You're playing our songs.

1:15:32We're doing it our way. It was just and on stage with lights on you. And there's a video. The system everything. The system makeup everything. Big martial amps. And we have videos of it. We have. Oh, yes. Before anybody was doing that. We wanted to see what that was. Nobody did that stuff. How many shows would you say you did in that first year before going to record? Four. Total of four. The rest of the time was just rehearsing at the loft. I got to do song. How does it go like that? And just every day playing those songs. I remember we did a version of Go Now. Yeah. That was by the Moody Blues.

1:16:12That was a cover. You should hear the original version. Anyway, we played at the Amityville where Jaws was and so on at this club called The Daisy. Couldn't have had more than 150 people or so. And there's video and music of that. I believe it will. Strangely. Yeah. And a lot of those songs wound up on the first record. And we played the Diplomat Hotel Coventry. And maybe a charity event. That's it. That's it. And then recording. Well, yeah, the deal as soon as Bill of Coin, the flipside guy saw us. He called Neil Bogart. We played half hour set at Latang's. Tat dancing studio, halfway between Bell Sound and studio 54.

1:17:07It was a very famous choreographer of 40s and 30s movies. And they were mirrors all over the place which we loved, you know, because we were putting on the makeup and doing. And Neil Bogart came to see us who was already very successful. Warner Brothers gave him his own label. And he got to give him credit. He saw something in us. We don't have any hit singles. The first single we had was a song I wrote called Nothing to Lose. And I came up with this lick.

1:17:52I thought about the back door. I didn't know it's just before I had a baby. I tried it the way. I thought about the back door. I didn't know what to say. Yeah. But once I got a baby. I tried every way. She didn't want to do it. But she did anyway. Yeah. Say baby, please don't refuse. You know you got nothing to lose. You got nothing to lose. You got nothing to lose. It got got. So that was the, it was that I had a chorus of some kind. But nobody knew that it was about that back door. And I knew. The first single. Yes. On Casablanca. The very first song. Yeah. By KISS. Yep. Nothing to lose. Amazing.

1:19:03And the ad was me spinning fire, full -page rolling stone ad and all that stuff because no other band ever was doing that. So they led with, you know, the guy who sticks his tongue out and all this kind of stuff. And they went with nothing to lose. When I first heard back door man, I didn't know what that meant. I had no idea. I thought, you know, he's going to sneak in through the back door. And no idea. It was about the gateway to hell. I didn't know. See what I did there. And that record was done in two and a half weeks in New York. And I remember being at my then girlfriend's house in New Jersey.

1:19:46She had a little basement to herself. She was living at home as well. And her parents, wonderful people. It has broken. And I would, you know, go visit her there. And she'd lock the door. You know, we were doing boyfriend, girlfriend kind of stuff there. And with music fairly loudly. So you wouldn't hear the shenanigans. And I was a slayed fan and I like, you know, just English music. And when a song came on, Allison Steele was the nightbird. W. Any W. And I heard.

1:20:36And you know, my head is broken. I'm so tired. And I thought it was slayed. I go, wait a minute. That's me singing. That's Aces Song, Cole Jim. At all of a sudden, I stopped paying attention, quotation marks attention. With my girlfriend at the time, I just stood up and I was, I don't know if there's another phrase for that sense of wonder that a ethereal thing when another dimension comes into your reality. Maybe they call it a piphany, kind of a, like dreaming come true stuff because I never imagined my voice. Well, I did. But you hear yourself singing on the radio for the first time. On my favorite thing with Allison Steele saying, okay, here they are.

1:21:28See what's going on. You know, all this stuff. And Cole Jim comes on. And I thought it was slayed. I thought it was like an English band. And she sits up, what happened? That's, that's our band. That's kiss. She goes, kiss? She barely knew about it. We barely, we were nobody. And that first record got us opening slots for Manford Man's Savoy Brown. And we kept getting kicked off tours because we would have levitating Trump sets to follow. They died. And our kiss logo, nobody had logos that were hung on stage. Our logo lit up. So it blinded you. And between the changes of the band, half hour, they didn't have enough time to bring it.

1:22:21So whoever came on Argent and on stage, the kiss logo was still on there because they didn't have enough time to take it down. Not only that, but after a song would be over by anybody, it would go to black. But imprinted in your eyes, it would say, kiss somehow on your retina. You know that thing. Because it's so bright. Yes. Even when the lights go off, it's still burned in. Yes, you couldn't create a more perfect thing. And in fact, New Year's. You're designing right from the beginning. Right from the beginning. Yeah, levitating. Trump set, which was just guys in the back. Yeah, yeah. You know, with the crank, and spinning, far throwing explosives above the heads of the crowds.

1:23:08And just anything we could, spinning blood, all that stuff. In fact, New Year's Eve, a month and a half before the first record comes out, 1973, 1974, we're fourth on the bill. And within three songs, my hair catch is fire because stupidly, I sprayed. I didn't notice that on the spray can. It says, Gene, you fucking idiot. Don't spray your hair like that because this is flammable. It said, Gene, you fucking is right there on the can. That's the only time it ever happened. Oh, no, six or seven times. No, really? Yeah, yeah, as I switched to lighter fluids, which caught like that at the last long, but we had guys with fire extinguishers and wet towels and all that.

1:23:56I would never know. Technical difficulties that happened over the years. You could think of. Yeah. People just think, okay, put something in your mouth and you spin it out. But in those days, everything was dangerous. And Fire Marshall said, no idea because they never heard of anybody doing that. And especially not bands. And so what happens is you have a flame source of sword or a torch or something. In my case, it was like a sword. And on the hilt of it, or in these wrapped material that was soaked in caracene or gasoline, or anything that was flammable, a torch. Yeah. And you would light it.

1:24:39And my mouth was filled with caracene. Nobody would see it. I'd walk out on stage with a mouthful of caracene and then spit the fire and bring the torch close to my mouth and spit it. And while I'm spitting, you have to move the torch away. And before I run out of steam, I've got to move the torch away from the line of my mouth because that fire is very quickly eating it towards your mouth. Yes. And the actual fire source fuse bigger fireballs coming at you five feet or more. I'll believe you. And so in the early days, the fire source would go as much as 10 feet away, real flammable stuff. Later on, I started to use more safe, but not as flammable stuff, odorless, lampoil because I didn't know that the fumes of caracene would actually give you cancer.

1:25:39I didn't really tell anything. Really toxic. So we were major fans of Melody Maker and the other English things. And we'd go down to eighth street right across the street from electrical lady studios to buy the first copies that would come in anywhere in North America. They would be right there on eighth street in sixth avenue. And a few days after we played the concert, and I caught fire and everything, one side was shorter than the other. There I was, my ugly face on the cover of Melody Maker. Wow. And then we somehow intrinsically knew it without being able to verbalize it. And the idea is actually, it was true then and it's true now.

1:26:30And that is the rock stars, the stage personas that we all admire actually have to impact the audio and the visual. Otherwise, it's great songs like torn between two lovers. That's a great song. Who wrote, I don't know who sang it or anything, but just a good song. So the song becomes the thing. But you can't sing satisfaction or play it without knowing it's the stone, something about the imagery or the style or something. Yeah. And we intrinsically knew that because, I mean, certainly there was Alice who was around, I don't know, two, three years before us. But we were in trying to do that. It was not referring to us in the third person.

1:27:23We are that. In fact, which had never been done before during our sense, people were so fascinated by the makeup. And initially they only knew us in the makeup on the album covers and so. And I think it was Bill McCoyn who actually said, we're going to trademark your faces.

1:27:45And we were one of the few people who were able to trademark our faces. So because they're like characters, they're cartoon characters, essentially bigger because you could be Johnny Carson or Elvis Presley or whoever. And you could make Halloween masks of those faces. You say, oh, that's Elvis Presley. He couldn't do a thing about it. But if you used our makeup on anything on Scooby Doo and everything, and we did that too, we could sue you and take your first born. So immediately it started to have an impact on fans who before we had makeup kits, because we've done everything from kiss condoms to kiss caskets.

1:28:31We'll get you coming and we'll get you going. I told you that before. Thousands and thousands before we knew that, it started to happen naturally right from the beginning. You started doing very much beginning as all different kinds. Oh, yeah. As soon as the kids, we call them the kids, but they came in all ages, which so photos like it, I'm going to go see this band. Well, they'd want to dress up like the thing and they'd make homemade t -shirts and all that because it's a chance for somebody, the rights of passage, your self -esteem isn't yet well developed enough. I could cover my face. And like Halloween, you know, you can dress up and pretend and be outrageous and get more attention.

1:29:21You could do that, but with Argent, you like the song. Hold your head up. But you know, nobody looks like. You have no idea who's in the band and didn't care. It was kiss the first band had personalized guitar picks. Yes. Because now everyone has them. Of course. But that was a kiss thing first. Yes. And we had like the Mickey Mouse Club, we had fan club. That's right. That's correct. And we had in the albums, we would have envelopes full color and everything where in those days, you put five dollar bills or checks or ten dollar bills, round numbers. And there were color, ten items on the inner flap or whatever you could check what you wanted.

1:30:11And you would send away to it before people t -shirts, hats, necklaces, everything. And we had four warehouses in the San Fernando Valley working 24 hours a day, billions of dollars. We were already playing Atlanta Stadium and you know, at Einstein Stadium, we didn't think twice about it. It was just like, oh. And by the way, at that time, we were on $85 a week salary. Yeah. I didn't have a car. I didn't care. This happens how many albums in three. The first three records didn't sell at all. But the groundswell, the cultural groundswell, circus magazine, rock scene, raves, all that stuff, we were always on the cover.

1:31:00Yeah. So and the concerts always did well. Sold out in the, yeah, multiple days anywhere because we went every, we went to Yip's Lenty, Michigan. And you ever go to Europe? Yeah. The very first European shows with the, with the Hammersmith audience, which sold out, we did a European to 1975. When we went to Japan in 1977 for the first time, we broke the Beatles record and played four or five days at the Budokan, which was and continues to be the large arena before bands played stadiums there. When we went to Australia the first time, we played two days per stadium down there. One in every 14 Australians bought tickets or albums.

1:31:53I know it was insane. We were trapped on the top floors of our, the Seabull townhouse because they tried to take photos of us without our makeup. Nobody ever done that. We were always protected our sort of carcans Superman thing. That was an idea from day one. We're going to never be seen without a makeup. It was Bill O 'Conn who said, you've never seen Marilyn Monroe in a potato sack outfit without our makeup. That's why you have such a vivid. It was never like, this is me without makeup. Nope. It ruins the thing. You didn't know that under Superman it was this kind of an ordinary carcane kind of a guy.

1:32:36I'll never forget this. The first night we're playing two days at Sydney football stadium and then two days at the Melbourne stadium, football stadium. No one did that. Not the Beatles. Not there.

1:32:55The first night we were staying there. We have jet lag and everything. The shows are coming up in a day or two and we have the curtains drawn and the sun is going down and I hear a loud motor like a plane or a helicopter coming about to crash into the top floor which we had. I parked the curtain a little bit and right outside my window is a helicopter with a TV crew trained on the windows trying to get photos of the band. Yeah. And the only way we could have some privacy is we take out these huge boats into the harbor and fill it with food and chicks and all that stuff away from it. And of course, here in the middle of the harbor and smaller boats are circling the things.

1:33:42You basically experience speedlemania. That's what it was. I couldn't imagine when the Beatles played at Chase Stadium. They were on for 20 minutes. Yeah. And the sound system couldn't hear them. All you could hear was just the screaming.

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1:35:33Let's hear a song from the second album.

1:35:39Rock and roll!

1:35:47Chuck Berry. That's it. Everybody knows your mother tells the baby.

1:36:05This is from that first show at the hotel Diplomat. Amazing.

1:36:21I never knew I needed a baby like you. I never knew I needed to let you. Yes, you're here.

1:36:34Cause baby's down for me, I'm in the high low. And I lost the sound of the bell.

1:37:03I know. Insane. Far as you I could see. Wow. Remember anything about this cover? Yes. Second album. Yes. I basically wrote, let me go rock and roll by myself, but Paul, I think through and some stuff. And we just looked back on Len and McCartney said, okay, I've said both times now. So second record, we were constantly on tour. In those years, we did two albums a year and write the songs and tour. How many shows would you do in a year, typically? From the time of it? 200 plus. 200 plus plus two albums. Travel, rehearse, do all that. Write everything. All the time. Would you be writing on the road all the time?

1:37:50All the time. Cause you're on the road with demos. We had a day off. We go in and you do a demo. There was no time. And the records were done in two weeks. But the astonishing thing is it doesn't matter how unique and how well you do stuff. We're like ants next to the Beatles. Len and McCartney, I keep going back to that. I know I can't shine their shoes. They'd write two or three songs. And they'd come in the next day and teach the guys in the studio and record all two or three songs finished, done, mixed in one day. And Led Zeppelin I was recorded in 18 hours from beginning to end. How do you do that?

1:38:33Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So a second album cover, what do you remember? The cover is Norman Seif. Norman Seif was a brain surgeon out of South Africa. And he spoke, you know, that kind of Afrikaans accent and came to LA for, you know, all the good times and the stuff. And he had a movie film studio. And he would, in the early days of videos and things, he would just take photos all the time. Very artistic. And that's totally his creation of, he was a big fan of Japanese pop art culture. And he was the one that did that. In fact, put our names in Japanese on the covers so much so that that record immediately made us a big deal in Japan and in Asia because they thought we were Japanese.

1:39:31Wow. They thought we were Japanese and we're shocked because they never saw us without makeup. And that's in modern, you know, there are different versions of English. If you say V and vowel and all that, you think, oh, that's not real. No, it was like conversational Japanese. And during the photo sessions to get the back cover, I remember Paul is not a drinker, never has been. The other two guys, not so much. Indults. And that night during the photo session, we had like satiricon, you know, Fellini, everybody in costumes, horse heads, and girls with no tops and just crazy stuff. Do you know what I mean by Fellini?

1:40:17Yes, of course. And Paul had too much to drink, so much so that he was killing over. We had to prop him up when we were taking the photos because we were trying to do that. And I remember, we didn't have limos or anything. We had a station wagon and Bill McCoy and I picked up Paul like a sack of potatoes and took him into the station wagon, put the seats down in the back and put him in the back and locked the car. So he wouldn't get in trouble. Amazing. Yeah. So by the way, Ace Freyly started to indulge in his interest in things that went up as nose and other things and this was the first time any of us had been in LA.

1:41:01So Ace met the wrong people. Somehow he was, he would attract or they would attract him. And he was, you know, a rebel in that source, whatever. There's a red light. He'd go through it full speed. It just seems to be in the DNA. And he would never, from all my time, with him, never drink socially. Just excess everything. Peter, as well, would take that certain prook activities. Had any rate, Ace, through his own stories and in one of his own books, said that he rented his first car because he never owned a car. We were on tour. We didn't know. This was like the end of 74. And you're also coming from New York and in New York, a lot of people don't own cars.

1:41:51It's not really a car. It's just a walk on the street or you hop a cab or go to subway. Exactly. And everything's half hour away. It is no traffic jams or anything. And Ace rented his first car and decided, I'm guessing, yeah, something in the system, to go up to Mulholland. And I don't know if it was Coldwater Canyon or Laurel Canyon. He decided in the middle of the night before we did the photo session tomorrow, to go down and take those two as fast as he could from his own admission. And of course, crashed into something and crashed his face, half of his face into the wheel of the car. So he was all bloodied and black and blue and everything.

1:42:39Next day, the show must go on. We have to do it. So what we did and we have photos, he put on makeup only on half of his face. And then before Photoshop, they took a photo of the left side of his face and just duplicated it on the right side. Like a mirror. Like a mirror. It still looks a little strange because everybody's face is a little bit different on one side than the other. Yeah, that was one of the things. And I remember at the end of the photo session for the back cover and front cover, must have been one in the morning. We were staying at the Ramada Inn across the street from Casablanca Records.

1:43:24And I remember coming in, there was a swimming pool and in full dragon boots and diving into the pool, it must have looked like some Ethereum monster or something because I had the bat wings and the black and all that just swimming there. And we pretty much stayed awake that night. We had a second and third floor and it was only a three floor thing. And then our girls going from one room to the other. The good times before AIDS. And when girls took birth control and had a different mindset, before feminism became a tool and I fully supported. Everybody just loved life. It was just a much happier place.

1:44:14Time. Yeah. I don't remember divisions. I mean, there was a hippie stuff in the 60s because of Vietnam War. But other than that, everybody was, how do I put it in life? Everybody was happy getting laid and not worrying about anything, just enjoying life. So the last song we listened to was... Let me go rock and roll. Let me go rock and roll from the second album which is Harri Than Hell. Both of those first two albums came out in 74. Within six months of each other. Amazing. And then next is the third album which is Dressed to Kill. Yeah. And let's hear a song from that.

1:45:07You show us everything you've got. You keep on dancing and the mood gets hot. You drive us wild. We'll drive you crazy.

1:45:21You say you want to go first and then. The party's just begun to let you in. You drive us wild. We'll drive you crazy. You keep us out. We'll drive you crazy.

1:46:05I'm party every day. You keep us saying you'll be mine for a while. You're looking fancy and I like your style. You drive us wild. We'll drive you crazy. You show us everything you've got. We've a people that's quite alive. And you drive us wild. We'll drive you crazy. You keep us shouting. You keep us shouting.

1:46:43I want a rock and roll all night. I'm party every day. I want a rock and roll all night. I'm party every day. So I had a song. Conceptually like Stephen King's Christine. Which was a song about a car. And it was called You Drive Me Wild. And I'll drive you crazy. He goes.

1:47:24You drive me wild. And I'll drive you crazy. I'll drive you crazy. I'll drive you crazy. I'll drive you crazy. You know, just straight ahead kind of. Chuck Berry -esque. And this is even predating Kiss the song. That part of it. No, that was once Kiss started. I was constantly writing. Always writing. We'd bring, yeah. And Paul Lackoy's had was always writing. And it came when you didn't think about it. It came easy. Would you have a guitar in the hotel rooms on the other time? On the bus. And you'd bring a little tape recorder. And you know, just ideas. And then Neil Bogart, the head of the label, said, I'm going to produce your third album.

1:48:21We didn't have a title. Then we did the photo session right on, I think 14th Street and 5th Avenue with Bob Groen who became a Lennon photographer and all that. And we were walking, somebody came up with the idea. Let's put on suits and ties. And be on the streets and see how people react, you know, make it kind of like strange days. Well, it's New York and they've seen it. Been there, done that. Nobody looked twice at us. They just walked right by us. Just kind of like, well, we've got to get to it. I feel like taking a ship. They're just walking right. In fact, I didn't have a suit and tie and all that.

1:49:03So I wore billiacons in those days. I was pretty thin. So I wore billiacons suit and tie, which barely fit me. I was much taller than him. And so you see the pants, the halfway up the leg. Yeah. And clogs, because I didn't have regular shoes and clogs, I think belonged to Ace Freyly. So there I am with socks, clogs, and short pants, like they shrank in water. And then when we saw the photo, somebody came up with, oh, right, the name of the record is just a kill. So Neil Bogart, who was a record man and knew a hit when he heard it, was pretty tone deaf. Didn't play an instrument, couldn't tell you what was it.

1:49:49But he was experienced enough to see that when he would go to kiss concerts, they were out of their minds. They looked like us. It was almost like an African or Indian tribal gathering, because their faces would like war paint kind of thing. And they would all be bobbing and you know, like a cult. Amazing. Mouthing all the words and moving together. When we'd move on stage that way, the whole audience would be doing that. You know, really nuts. Unlike other bands, of course. You have the swifties and the the dead audience. And a lot of bands have their own thing. But our thing was very cult -like, gathering of the tribes.

1:50:35And he said, worst in the effect of you guys may not understand it, but I've been in the audiences and they're nuts for you. And you have everything going for yourself. We don't have hit songs or anything. You need to write, I remember, like it was yesterday. You need to write an anthem. And both Paul and I looked at each other and said, like, what's an anthem? You sort of know the word. What do you mean? He goes, well, a song that says something about who and what you are, what you believe in. And when you take a look at how that applies to certain bands, especially Queen, we will rock you. We are the champions.

1:51:24Something about being aware of the fans and you, like a football thing. Yeah. Like a football thing. Yeah. That's an anthem. And we did know it. So Paul and I are trying to figure out how to do that. So I played him. You drive me wild. I'll drive you crazy kind of a thing. And I kind of like that. And then he went off and came back with...

1:51:58I have that.

1:52:05And he said, well, maybe put in a transitional thing.

1:52:15We'll figure out the words later and then lift it with... We got a big... And he came up with...

1:52:29Now, if you write songs and you're aware of bars, only musicians know about this. You go...

1:52:46So the last chord is a five bar instead of a four bar, because the words go too long. Rock and roll on, die. And party every day. I. That comes in... If you know about bars, it comes in wrong. But if you tap your foot, you're not aware of it. So it's a four bar chorus, except for the last chord, which is five. And something about that seems to make it even catcher for some reason. I don't know why... It's a little tension, I don't know why that is. But it definitely gives you the feeling of... It's more memorable. And party every day. It does that pause. And in retrospect, it was always about the fans.

1:53:34And then when you meet Mike McCready and the Metallica guys are... Lenny Kravitz, who was kicked out of school because he came in... looking like me one day, uh, Trent Resner. I mean, it just goes down like Lawrence Fishburn, all kinds of people to whom the band meant more than songs. And they're in lies the crux of a lot of the appeal. And why we were able to do thousands and thousands of licensed products with our faces, is where I'm madly in love with Aero Smith and, you know, all kinds of amazing bands. What you get is Steven and the music. What you get with us is Disneyland with a backbeat.

1:54:29I can remember listening to... I want to rock and roll all night in party every day. I can remember I was in the gymnasium of my junior high school. And I remember listening to it over and over again. I want to say trying to understand it. I don't mean understand the words. And I don't mean understand the music. But understand what was happening. Why do I want to listen to this over and over again? It's really interesting to me to keep going. Keep going. What's happening here? And I remember that experience of listening to it over and over. And it didn't relate to my life in any way. But something about the combination of the music and the sentiment of the words moved me at, I don't know, 13 or 14 years old.

1:55:20However, I was at the time. But I remember listening to it over and over and over again. And just feeling like it made me want to know more. It is a very strange thing. This music that encompasses those raw country. You know, all this stuff by people who maybe taught themselves their instruments and weren't classically trained and can't read or write music. But it really is kind of modern folk music, like reflecting the times, the culture, the feelings, and all that stuff with lyrics, lyrics, even if it's, I said, a -na -na -na -na -na -na -na. Something about a wap ba -la -lu -wa -wap bambum.

1:56:07Something about the lyrics and the sound of the words is cultural. Zappa, who I wrote a song with, may have said it best. Talking about music is like dancing to architecture. It's just a feeling. It just comes over you and it either gets you. When I hear Baby Workout by Jackie Wilson, I'm in it. I feel it. And when I hear classical music, I listen to it. When was the first live album? Kiss Alive? The New Year's Eve, 1975, 1976. Two albums a year. We were on tour. We didn't have enough time to go into studio to do another one. This is after what we just listened to was the third album. So a live came out after the third album.

1:57:00Within six months. And it was a double album. And we were at the band who only has three albums. And in those days, if you put out a live album, it's like if you played Las Vegas, your career was over. It weighed nood in people like that. Only when your career was over, the skyliners and the flamingos, you put out a live record because you didn't have new material. It was unheard of for a band starting out. To put out a live record. So we decided, again, delusionally, not having any resume or experience. We decided to put out a double album with a souvenir. Like you went to Disneyland, you got photos.

1:57:43And not a lot of words, just a lot of photos of what the live experience was like. And write personal notes to the fans from each of us. And in the records, we kept doing that, putting in like in Cracker Jack's box. You'd get the peanuts in the pump corn. And a surprise. I bought the Cracker Jack's boxes for the surprise thing, not for the peanuts in the pump corn. And wash off tattoos and love gun would be a bang, bang, you know, thing that you can go like that. It would make a bang note. And of course, a thing you filled out where do you live? What magazines do you buy? All this stuff, which sounds like marketing, of course, it is.

1:58:24But it told the fans, we got closer to the fans. Who are you? Where do you live? It's the one to know about you too. Yeah. We, you know, who are you kind of stuff? And that connected the Kiss Army and stuff. And the Kiss Army started in Teraholt, Indiana, where a guy named Sharky calls a local radio station and says WKRX might be, it might be WKRX. Could be wrong. Aren't you play Kiss? My friend and the guy goes, I don't know. We don't play, we play Carpenter's and, you know, on John Denver. We don't, what is this Kiss? Oh, you got to check him out. It's the best thing to go. He goes, no, I'm afraid we can't do that.

1:59:05So then he hangs up and the kid calls back again. Well, listen, if you don't play Kiss by 5 o 'clock today, I'm going to have the Kiss Army surround your, there was a broadcasting station, a little one shack outside of town so they could have their broadcast wires outside of town. We're going to have the Kiss Army surround you until you surrender and all that. And the disc jockey was one man operation called the newspaper and the newspaper says, yeah, whatever. Sure enough, after 5 o 'clock, he didn't play it. And God knows how many people surrounded this little shack and it was on the cover of the Teraholt newspaper.

1:59:49Kiss Army invades WKR, you know, whatever. Wow. That's where the Kiss Army, and by the way, after that, they played Kiss. Yeah, and that's where the name came from. It was not a marketing thing. It was created by the fans. If it's a Kiss Army, it's a voluntary army. And it got so crazy that we went to Flint, Michigan because we kept getting letters from the football coach. And there's going to be a movie about this. I think Dave Grohl is going to be the director so far. That's what I hear. I hope so. And it's called Cadillac High, Cadillac, Michigan, outside of Detroit. Small town where all the grown men whatever had gone to Detroit to work in the auto industry.

2:00:35So there were very few, you know, sort of grown people there. And the teenagers were aimless and stuff. And the football team in high school lost every single game they played. And this school teacher with a family English teacher comes into town looking for a job. And I'm an English teacher and you know, can I get a job kind of thing? I got to support my family. The principal says, you know, I think about football. And of course, the guy goes, yeah, yeah. I know a lot about football. He goes, okay, you want to be the coach of the football? We have an opening. That's fine. He didn't know anything about football.

2:01:15Me to job. That's just a job. And he goes out in the field meets the guys and their aimless and stuff. They start throwing the ball around and immediately they go, let's do doose. Then he hears, okay, black diamond. He goes, hey guys, what are you talking about? What is all this? Oh, no, they're plays. You know, where one guy goes to the left and I throw it to him. And we know it's like secret language. It's by our favorite group, kiss. He goes, kiss. What's that? And he started to see the photos. It's like he didn't understand what he didn't know anything about. Football didn't know about kiss.

2:01:53And he said to the guys, okay, that's what we're going to do. I'm going to put on a blast kiss and our secret code between ourselves is going to be their song titles. And there's a matter of history. And it's a real story. A real story. And ESPN did a two hour special, which you can still go. They went undefeated to the state and national championship from day one. And we started hearing about this and the state senator and the governor and the local officials. Oh, you got to come to Cadillac, Michigan, which we never heard of. And we were playing Flint, Michigan on the way to Seoul. So we had a day off.

2:02:38And then, okay, we'll put make up on. And we'll pass them. And I gotta show you two seconds. We come into town. And the whole town is in kiss makeup. Mothers, daughters, they streets were kiss boulevard. I don't know how to describe it. It was like you landed on a twilight zone episode. And it looks like earth, but not so much. In the small town of Cadillac, Michigan, population 10 ,000 Cadillac High School's Friday night homecoming in early October has long been a cherished tradition, as well as the homecoming parade hours earlier. But it's the parade for the Vikings that went through town in 1975 that has never been forgotten by anyone here.

2:03:36Because it looked like this.

2:03:48Unbelievable.

2:03:55Jim Neff is the man who brought the rock band Kiz to Cadillac some three decades ago. Back in 1974, he was an assistant coach with a problem. The Cadillac defense was finding itself back on its heels on the field because they were waiting to tight in the locker room before game. Back then it was game face on. Everybody was stern and you know, one cracked a smile. It was pretty somber and the kids were they were really down and they weren't having any fun. I said, well, let's play let's play some rock and roll the locker room. They have the perfect band because their name is Kiz and Kiz stands in football for it.

2:04:34Keep it simple, stupid. It's incredible. Incredible. Now when you open the middle of a live one, yeah, are two fans holding a Kiz homemade thing? Yeah. Famous picture, I remember it. We didn't even have a gold record yet and we met them, I don't know 10 or 15 years later and I'm proud to say one was a successful real estate agent and the other ones a doctor. Amazing. And we later found out that night after we came, they had the single largest amount of pregnancies in their history. In their history. You're spreading good will. You're somebody was spreading something but it wasn't me. And so we wrote rock and roll all night and when that hit, by the way, it was not a hit on radio, it went so and so.

2:05:29We realized that Kiz never spent enough time in the studio. The quality wasn't good. The producers weren't good. It wasn't until Bob Ezren came in later on that we started to do that. Is that a sonic destroyer? Yes. Fourth one. Where the arrangements got better. Ezren, who also secretly worked really deeply in the wall. Which he barely got credit for. So we decided to do a live album as a souvenir as close as you can get to the live event. So throughout the record, the audience was screaming at their heads off. That became Kiz alive. Kiz alive became the second within a half hour platinum record of all time.

2:06:21The very first platinum record was New Year's Eve 1976, 7576 and it was Hotel California. Owers was a half hour later, a double album, multi -million live album. It was a live record too. Now, the platinum record, historically speaking, was invented as a promotion by capital records for Grand Funk Railroad. They were outselling the stones and everybody else or at Times Square billboards. You know, for about two years, they played Shay Stady and opening was Humblepock. They were a big band for about two years and capital records. They gave away not gold records, but platinum records, which was just a promotional because records, if you sold a million dollars worth of records, a $3 .39 per record, that would be million dollars, so about 300 ,000 albums.

2:07:23But more and more records were selling 500 ,000. So gold became 500 ,000 LPs, long players. But then bands started to sell millions of records so that RIAA took on platinum records. And the first two were Hotel California single record and a live one, a double album. And that alive one, beget Rock and Roll All Night Live version, which came out and was top four, top five. So the hit version was not the studio version, but the live version? Yes. That's really interesting. The Frampton song was also one that was the live version. That's exactly right. And don't kid yourself. Kiss engineered by Eddie Kramer.

2:08:11Frampton comes alive. A live became the synonymous with this is a double album. It's not the end of our career, but new and using the alive thing. And Eddie Kramer did that record too. And sure enough, the hit songs alive record became like, and then everybody, cheap, trike, dead live records and everybody. And they didn't wait until the end of their career to do live album. And I got to tell you this because strange things happened, certainly to us and to many bands, where in the middle of recording one of the shows of the forum, and during the middle of the show, all of you see, all of a sudden you see a prosthetic leg.

2:08:50It was a full leg with a sock on it and one sneaker. And it was being held in the front of the stage above. So we stopped the show and we looked at each other like, what are we supposed to do? And somebody gave us what was then called a magic marker before sharpies. And we signed the prosthetic leg in on the pink area. And we kind of held it in the front and somebody touched it back. I guess we had somebody took it. You see hands and took it. And I'm assuming the gentleman who sent it up on stage was leaning on somebody because he didn't have the use of two legs. On another occasion, they were passing up a very young, close to being baby with headsets on like earphones.

2:09:43What are you going to do that? Sign it or barbecue it? I don't know. What? Passing a baby to the stage. Yes, we did not very fused it and just said, you know, kind of no. Yes. And but clearly, do you think they were donating the baby to you guys? I hope no, I don't think so. I think it was just please sign my baby. Yes. Yes. Amazing. Next we have the fourth album. I'll play it song first, Destroyer. I might skip the intro because it's really long. And it's not music.

2:10:37... I did not die the whole Saturday night. On to another monthly Class. I am not dumb. Get it off the roof. Cut the film. Get the water gone too. I got it. Get off the fight's gonna lose their seat. Get down here if I'm gonna leave their seat. They got to lose them on the Detroit rocks in it. Get off here if I'm gonna lose their seat. Get down here if I'm gonna leave their seat. Get down here if I'm gonna leave their seat. Get it laid. I just can't wait. Get up loud. Get the door out of here. Get the road. First I'll drink, then I'll slow. I got the car and I'm proud of it because it did not show.

2:11:38Get off here if I'm gonna lose their seat. Get down here if I'm gonna leave their seat. Get down here if I'm gonna leave their seat.

2:11:56Can you hear the car? Yeah.

2:12:18Great song. Paul wrote that one about a live experience about a fan who wants to see KISS and Detroit rock city and dies before he gets there. We'll in fast do a 9 -5. Look at that. Now, right after that section, there is a solo. Do you mind playing a solo very quickly?

2:12:46Do it fast 95. Get down here if I'm gonna lose my seat. I feel so good. I'm so alive. Here's my song.

2:13:10Now there's no band just by itself.

2:13:35I'm so happy.

2:13:42I'm so happy.

2:13:51It's 12 o 'clock. I got a rock. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. I'm so happy. Get up here if I'm gonna leave their seat. Get up here if I'm gonna leave their seat.

2:14:34Then it goes on to King of the Nighttime World and other great songs. That's solo. Bob Ezra comes in and says, okay, there's songs like that. Here's the solo. And he goes, you guys aren't gonna play. It's just gonna be that melody and drums. And then it's gonna be in harmony. Which bands didn't do that. Later on in May. And the boys are back in town. I've had a lot of fun. I had that harmony. You have to say, it's almost like classical music. Yeah, it's not blues. It's not blues. It's not blues. It's not blues.

2:15:26It's blues flat third. That's all him. Also the bass part. It's a third. Which reminded me of, I can't play that bass part. That's Freddy's dead. Bad amp amp. Bad amp amp. It sounds like the first time I've ever seen it. It also reminds me of John Antwissol. Yes. But it's in the solo of the Houson. Is it my generation? Yes. It is. In the middle he does... He has a good idea. Yeah. And that's a real producer. By the way, originally, Paul had Detroit Rock City. And I was his ideas. Bad amp amp. Doing five. I'm going to die. No time to run. But without the fifth. No, I'm going to die. Get up. And it was Ezra and he said, like, Dylan V.

2:16:34I said, a nine or five. Shut up. Shut up. It was that, you know, he gave it a room. Yeah. It became... I don't know, bigger, almost more symphonic. And then he... Bob Asrin said, the song is about a fan who dies. Well, at the end. So let's put in a car... He's starting up the car in the beginning. And at the end, it crashes. And goes right into... BAM BAM BAM. King of the Night Justice.

2:17:13The real one, two punch.

2:17:29INTRO Onegiptoff .ains that we cousins. Neel I'm the king of the lifetime world.

2:17:53What a song.

2:18:15It's your mind and I think I'm a king of it. Amazing. What a song. But all the songs had a... about the culture of the band and the fans. The first song is about a fan, unweighted Detroit to see his favorite band, his music, his favorite song, and he dies. The second one is about the feeling of it. I feel like the king, and you're my headlight queen. And then we release Detroit Rock City as the first single. In those days, there were B -sides. You'd get the single, the A -side, which you wanted ready to play, and you'd give the fans another song on the B -side. Well, the B -side was a song we never imagined anybody would care because it didn't sound like KISS.

2:19:03But it's not a wimpy ballad. Beth, I hear you calling, but I can't come home right now. Because me and the boys are playing all night. What's more important, your band? Actually, the band is more important. Yeah, just a few more members. You're just going to soak up the... And it was a very unromantic thing, which made it rock, but the sound was like a ballad. So one of the very few times didn't happen often, where radio turned the song over and started playing... And Beth became a head. Massive. It warned the people's toys awards on all this stuff. Let's hear a little bit of Beth.

2:20:12I'm the sound. Just a few more hours. And I'll be right home to you. I think I hear them calling. Oh, Beth, what can I do? Beth, what can I do? You're safe, you're so empty. That our house just ain't a home. I'm always somewhere else. And you're always there alone. Just a few more hours. And I'll be right home to you. I think I hear them calling. Oh, Beth, what can I do? Beth, what can I do?

2:21:14Ezra and I heard the song. This middle section is Mozart. It's in public domain.

2:21:24Mozart. And he integrated that in the middle. And that's an outside musician... Dick Wagner playing guitar on a few songs because Ace by that time had given in to his weaknesses and wouldn't show up in the studio. And I love Ace and I love Peter and I was just so sad that happened to them. The fans hated me for... It's like your mom telling the kids that your fathers are drunk and a loser. Kids don't want to hear that. But it's the truth. And all these decisions are just hurting himself. Nobody else. Everybody thinks you can't get along without me. Actually, spirit tires are just as good as the real tires and the car moves along just fine.

2:22:23How was the Destroyer album received? It stopped at 890 ,000 albums. And then when Beth kicked in, nothing anybody expected. It became multi -plot and sold by the millions right away. And that's the first album cover that's actually cartoon. Is that correct? Yes. I'm afraid it's my idea. I said, you know, we're not against it. I'm just saying to people who are musos, what they call it, is where the guitar and the drums are going. No, no, no, we're bigger than our instruments. We're like Marvel Superheroes. That's what it looks like. Yeah. That's what it looks like. And so all the poses are directly from Jack Kirby.

2:23:09We'll create a fantastic form. It looks like the Fantastic Four X of Justice Kiss. Yes. And the idea being is, how do you separate yourself from people that define themselves by their instruments? It bears noting that perhaps the most musical out of all the beetles were never on their covers with their instruments ever. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, there's just a suitcase and they're around it. It's because they're bigger than the instruments they play. Yeah. The next album was, if we're counting, there have been four studio albums, three studio albums. And we're up to the fifth studio.

2:24:26You can run, you can hide, but you never get away. You can lie as an op, but you know you're gonna be. Never know, never thought you could treat your right, though you know I'm old. You can fight for the night and the stars, and you can do. I want you. I want you. Very Beatles -esque harmonies. I want you. I want you. You can walk in a haze, you can drop a billion dollars. You can live in a dream, and have your heart full of basketball. Ever say that you're hipster, hate. You never say that you're the handsome face. You can fight for the night and the stars, and you can do. I want you. I want you.

2:25:18Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, over you! Baby, baby, baby, over you!

2:25:26Great song. And maybe my favorite kiss album cover. Have I become iconic? That's Paul on league guitar. Paul could also play, you know, in his range. Just want to say something that we started to discover, not just who and what we are, but what we meant to the fans. So the word, the demon, the start child, the space man, the cadmium, those were created by the fans. They started to refer to us as that. So they never had names before that. Now we were just changed sentence and Paul sangly and so on. And the fans took it. We started to have kiss comic books, Marvel comics, the biggest selling Marvel comics of all time.

2:26:09At a buck 50 instead of 25 cents. And it was my idea to make a bigger size. So they would be racked next to time magazine because the smaller comic books were in a different rack. And not everybody read comic books. At any rate, we started writing songs about ourselves. We started making fun of each other. I said, Paul, you will always write silly love girl songs like Christine 16. I made it up on the spot. He goes, oh, that's a good title. Christine 16. That's a good title. So as soon as he heard that, he was going to go and write a song. So I better go and write one. So I wrote Christine 16 fast and had the van hailing brothers come in and you know, to the demo.

2:26:56And then Paul said to me, yeah, you're ever writing a monster song. I'm the God of Thunder and all this guy. What did you say? Well, that's cool. God of thunder. I'm going to go right now, but he finished it first. Paul wrote God of Thunder, a modern day of man of steel. And I command you to kneel kind of thing. And it was Bob Ezra and I wrote it making fun of your character. Making fun. Yeah. And you Christine 16 making fun of Paul. Yeah. Amazing. And I mean, you could say this thing. You have a Lenna McCartney. Lenna was like, oh, you ever write a love song like silly and McCartney later on.

2:27:31So what's wrong with silly love songs? So when we were doing destroyer, and Ace didn't always show up unfortunately. And it was time to record God of Thunder. It was Bob Ezra and who turned to Paul said, Gene's going to sing this one, not you, because you're not the God of Thunder. Genes. Yeah. I really heard Paul, but then when we heard the track back that became a an iconic kind of a thing because it was song about the band, me. Just like the boys are back in town by thinly as these kind of like the feeling of, hey, we're back in town. We're going to raise some hell. And we are the champions.

2:28:18Feels like, hey, we're singing about like a football. It's about us. Yeah. And we will, we will rock you. It's a very anthemic. Yeah. And so I started writing more songs like that. Like they call me Dr. Love and I like that. And I remember going back to crazy world of Arthur Brown. When I first heard that song, I went, oh, wow. It starts off with, I am the God of hellfire. And I bring you the name of the song is fire. By the way, you could have had fire. Yeah. Ben Newton, really, and all that song. But he at the beginning says, I am the God of hellfire. And I bring you fire as a teenager. I went, what the hell?

2:29:00Because people didn't sing about themselves. Let's listen to Collin Dr. Love, same album. I remember writing Collin Dr. Love at the Indianapolis Holiday Inn. The middle of the night, I saw a three stooges cartoon. It was a three stooges as idiot doctors. And they're running back and forth from different rooms. And the view is down the hallway. Collin Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Collin Dr. And they're going from one room to another. And I'm going Collin Dr. Love, Collin Dr. Love. And then it just rhymed because I've got the cure you're thinking of. And the song wrote itself like that, inspired by the three stooges.

2:30:13You need my love to play the old soul bad. You're not the only one I've ever had. And if I say I want to set you free, don't you know you're being miserable free? They call me Dr. Love, Dr. Love, Dr. Love I got the cure you're thinking of.

2:30:48And even though I'm full of sin, in the air you left me in, you let me do this nothing you can't do. You need my love and don't you know it's true. So enter please, and on your knees, there are no bills there. I kind of was silly song with a pop chorus. They think it's girls and fall and I fall settled. Not sonically recorded well at all. They call it Dr. Love. Dr. Love. It's like the Supremes. And I knew one of them well. How did you meet Diana Ross? How did I meet Diana? I was, we were at a party in LA when the band decided to do four individual solo records and release all four solo records on the same day.

2:31:53Nobody had ever done before during her sins, kind of stupid, but they all turned platinum. So I had this idea of filling up the solo record. Like I remember the rock and roll circus thing, the Beatles or all you need is love. Everybody there, Chetral Tall and the Rolling Stones. And I loved that idea, that community of stuff. So I wanted to fill my solo record with all kinds of people you'd never think of. So as I would meet Helen Ready, who at the time was the face of feminism. I am woman, treat me. Every girl was like singing that song. And Janissian, who I loved like crazy. There was a song called at 17.

2:32:45A beautiful song. Huggly ducklings like me and what a song. And I remember singer when she was 14. Jamie's down, I can't get off the ground before she was sung. So I wanted her and all kinds of people showed up on that record. I reached out to Len and McCartney. They were busy. J. Lee Lewis flew in, but too late to be on the record. Crazy slick and Donna Summer and Rick Nielsen. Everybody was on it. And I went to a government dinner. This guy, Jerry Brown, was running to be the governor of California. And he was there shaking hands. He wanted to meet celebrities. And Cher was there. I had never met her.

2:33:30And was a big fan. You know, beat goes on especially. Carol Kay did that baseline. That became love book. Carol Kay sat me down. It's on YouTube. And showed me how if you got the right base part, it is the song. You know, hit the roadjack as bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. That's what you remember.

2:33:53So from her side, Chastity, her daughter at the time, said, oh my god, you're going to that party. Gene Simmons is going to be there. Cher had never heard of me. She thought it was the actress, Gene Simmons, the old actress, 1940s, I think. Yeah. And she was married to Stuart Granger from Bo Brummel, all that. And she walks up to me and she said, are you Gene Simmons? And I go, yeah. Nice to meet you and everything. And she sat down. We started talking. And she said, let me tell you a funny story. And I said, you know, I'm a really big fan. Those songs meant a lot to me. Because I got you babe is a teenage survival story.

2:34:40You know, they say we're young, but we don't know that I got you. You got me like this kind of surviving teenage love story. And I loved the lyric and the whole thing. And Sonny, as it turned out, wrote a lot of, a lot of songs with Phil Specter. And so I told her all that stuff. I knew about the ricking crew. And we talked all night. I asked her, do you want to be on my soul record? I'm doing a solo. And she said, yeah. And after the party, she asked me if I wanted to go with her. I didn't know where anything. Because my history is tainted, you know. So I hop in her limo and Marcia Strossman, who used to be on Mr.

2:35:24Carter. Or reality was she has best friend, warn share. You don't want to go with this guy. I know all about him. Despite that fact, Sharon, I went. And I remember staying up all night at Shares House. And we were just talked about you're from Israel. What the hell is that? And you don't drink or smoke or get high because she was surrounded by that culture. It's Hollywood. So we very quickly started. She was on the record. She appeared. And we started living together for a few years. And then Christmas time came up. And I told her, look, I'm going to New York. I got a recorder tour. What do I get you for Christmas?

2:36:07I don't know to get you. She said, call my best friend, Diana Rose. She'll take you shopping and whatever she buys. She'll know what I like. This is my best friend. I got to New York. I called Diana. And you know where this is going. And I'd never met her before. Of course, I was in awe. The supreme's in Diana Rose. And Motown, all that. And I went up to her place and told her about she's like, oh no, she called me. And I'm going to take you shopping. And I don't want to eat anything. I'm not so much. Food is okay. But I love cake. You're like cake. Oh, yeah, worship cake. Well, I've got some chocolate cake.

2:36:52You want some chocolate cake? I love it. She gave me a slice. And then she gave me a second slice. Literally. And then we became a thing. We lived together or kind of relationship on and off. And needless to say, share in Diana, you know, for a while, I think they were okay. Now for a while, didn't speak with each other. Tell me about the personality of share and the personality of Diana Rose. The DNA, it seems to me, is similar. Both women didn't suffer fools easily. Alpha females. A lot of women, and I've known a lot in the capital K biblical sense, use their femininity and their looks to get what they want.

2:37:55And fair enough, you use what tools you have. And both share and Diana, it seems to me, unlike almost any other females, did not define themselves by their men. Either in marriage or relationships or anything, they did what they wanted to do, which explains how they were able to climb so fast and stay for so many decades. And I don't care. You know, I will say whatever I want to say. I don't care about being canceled or who likes me or who not. I honestly cannot say a bad thing about share or Diana. They're wonderful, wonderful, exciting, mentally stimulating, and it's just great. What was the gift that you got for share?

2:38:47Not a fucking cult. I don't remember. I don't shop well. It just means nothing to me. It's not that I don't appreciate it. Every time there's a holiday or birthday or Christmas, my kids and Shannon, who I've been with for 41 years, I always beg them. Please don't buy me anything. It goes in a closet or I give it away. I'm not a thing guy. I mean, I wear some loud clothes every now and then, but I never buy them. What do you remember about the album cover? I think it was Paul that had the title Rock and Roll over because he liked the roll over kind of a thing. It was Dennis Wolick, the art director at our business manager's guy named Howard Marks office who had this idea that there's no up or down, that you could turn the record sideways or upside down, and it would also work.

2:39:49So he created that with an artist whose name I forgot, and it's become iconic beyond. I've seen many, many groups do that. It's so cool. And by the way, I'm proud to say that on the Kiss tribute album, we had everybody from Lenny Kravitz and Garth Brooks and everybody else. And I put together that record, so I'd be calling Neil Young, you know, talk to him. So, hey, I want Neil to sing a song. You want Neil to be on the Kiss tribute album. How about you'll be on a Neil tribute album? I said, okay, Neil first, and then we'll do a song for that called Madonna's Off. I wanted her to do what I was made for loving you.

2:40:30That would be so cool. Yeah. I had wine, sound bee, and just everybody you can think of. And of course, Jimmy Iveen called and said, what are you doing talking to my ex directly? They're signed, you know, to me. I'm going, hey, rappers do it, bees do it. Why can't we do it? So we were lucky to get the artist we got. And one of the tracks was Calling Doctor Love, singing lead as Maynard, you know, from Tool and Purpose Circle. And I'll get Tarz Tom Morello and there were a lot of so many cool people doing that. And it meant the world to me because they did it from the point of view of the music being a soundtrack of their lives.

2:41:12Because they grew up with it. I understand. The next album is the last album before the solo albums. And I will play you a song from that.

2:41:47I need some of you.

2:41:52Ooh, man. That's how I pick you all you forget. Here we go, let's go. Woo!

2:42:05I'm the one who's off, it's my head. I got the number, I think of the things you say. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Oh, hi. Oh, you're no. Oh, you're no. Hey, that must always be your love. Oh, you're no, you're no. You're no, you're no. You're no, you're no.

2:42:33So that's an example of a song where the riff is the hook. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And there were quite enough of those. A lot of the songs were based around the riff, either like...

2:42:57That's got a thunder. Everybody's playing that riff.

2:43:03Everybody would play the riff, whether you mask it with soap... Yeah, riffs had a lot to do with it. And, you know, unreminded, my favorite band of all times, sometimes you hear...

2:43:19That's the bass line, but played with guitar. It sounds like horn lines. And the way I played bass, I tried to follow in the way behind in the shadow and the footsteps of McCartney who played bass more in the way a string quartet works, which is that... Unlike ACDC, which is like if there is a song in A, the bass would go... Boom, boom, tap, boom, tap. You don't go.

2:43:57I'm making it up, and I'm doing it easier, but... And the bass wouldn't move, it would be the railroad track. And they were maybe the best at doing that. And with the Beatles, you remembered the bass. You know, a lot of bass lines. But yes, like a string quartet, the cello had its own melody. Even if the drums was doing a beat, and some of those McCartney, you know, Lady Meddda.

2:44:30That was the bass line.

2:44:34Whatever. You know that thing. The whole song is a riff. And by the way, it shows this.

2:44:47The bass doesn't do that though, the bass does...

2:44:56I guess that's it. It's a very strange thing. It's actually wrong. Because they wind up on the A. Worked out of A for a note. Against the G, which is a passing dissonant.

2:45:17So this is the Love Gun album. And what... How would you say the band had changed from the beginning to Love Gun? We were selling out everywhere in stadiums and arenas and stuff. We had come back from Japan and Europe. And we had yet to play South America. When we went to South America, the first time in 1980, we played Barakana, the largest stadium in the world. Anywhere from 175 to 200 ,000 people. And that was at the low point in the band. There was a local opening band, and that was it. And by that time, Ace was out of the band. We had at least 10 different lineups. Is that the first album?

2:46:06Love Gun, the first album where it's not the original members? No, the original members were hanging in there, although we were having more and more problems with Ace and Peter, demands and showing up late and not doing that. No, the band... We were riding high. The Gallup poll, which used to mean a lot, we were the number one band in the world per the Gallup poll for three years in a row. 77, 78, 79. Number two, I think, was Beatles. I mean, it was Led Zeppelin and Bee Gees and other bands. Unlike the other bands, some bands were selling more records. A few bands actually sold more tickets, but nobody touched us in licensing and merchandising.

2:46:50And we were making millions. So we went out and did another greatest hits collection called Double Platinum. When was Alive 2, though? Alive 2 was right after destroyer, rock and roll over, and love gun. Then Alive 2. Okay. Another three records, another Alive, also multi -platinum creating new... I think that was at the time my favorite of your albums was Giselape 2. There were some good songs rocking into USA, All American Man, a few others. Ace Freyly did not show up for quite a few of those songs. Also we got Bob Coulick, Rick Daringer, a few other people. And by that time, you know, cracks, not all was well in Paradise.

2:47:39And after Alive 2, we couldn't really get our act together. Peter Chris started to make problems. So in the meantime, right after that, we released Double Platinum, which was another greatest hits collection. You remember our fans kept getting younger and younger. New fans because of the toys and the games were discovering the band. So they didn't know about the... They were really wrecked. No, they just like, oh, Double Album. And it was really cool cover with silver, yes? Yeah. Like mirror life. The imprint mirror. By the way, copied from Uriah Heep, they had an album, it was called Mirror Images or something, where the faces were imprinted.

2:48:23You know, everybody gets inspired or everything. And we did a discook version of Strutters. It was Strutters 79 or something. It just same song, just... That kind of thing, which didn't work at all on the Double Platinum. So, but on Alive 2, millions flew out the door. But they was trouble in Paradise, both Ace and Peter. And during that time we did a movie that was in theaters, driving theaters. We called it in Australia. We went back outdoors, packed with cars that everywhere. We replaced Peter first, whose drumming went down. We used to call him Mr. Misery or the Ayatola Criscola. I was this original name.

2:49:17I was Jean de Nazarene. I want to grow up to be just like you. You're so important. You know, that thing. Paul was the hee -shee. He screwed on. Sometimes he's a hee -shee. There was a thing in the media that they thought Paul pitched for the other side, or was secretly a woman, you know, whatever, all that stuff, nonsense. And Ace was high octane and other such names. But clearly Ace and Peter were having problems. And I always feel the pain that fans must feel. I mean, my heart was broken when I heard Lenin going on about, you never wrote anything except like, oh my God, you were childhood friends.

2:50:06Heartbreak. When they turned on each other, you go, what? Don't mom and dad, you know what? When they turn on each other. So I'm aware of it. So we had to get rid of Peter and Eric Carr, who cleaned stoves in Westchester. It was Eric Caravello. We changed to Carr. So it didn't sound like Mr. Boucher Loup selling fruit on the street corner. Yeah, you got your fruit over here. And then Caravello said, it's just not a rock sounding name. Jews changed their name. Nobody was born Bob Dylan. On the other hand, nobody was born the edge. I think I'm going to call my baby the edge. And new members came and went.

2:50:56Eric was great. A real team player and sadly passed. You got a rare form of cancer and he passed. Quickly, very, very first. And then Ace, during the filming of the Kiss Meets the Phantom film, he wouldn't show up also Peter. He wouldn't show up on Sundays. We had to get stuntmen. There was an African American stuntman who dressed up in his thing so he could do the stunts and everything. And Ace was nowhere to be found. God knows where he went. And this film was big. And we started doing an album called Creatures of the Night. Before then, we had another greatest hits album called Killers with four new songs.

2:51:45And they all kept selling. And then we hit rock bottom with Creatures of the Night in America.

2:51:56And a co -wrote a song called War Machine. Where they knew Guy who had a hit record, but they sped up and they thought it was a girl, Brian Adams. I had the riff and he and Jim Evalence finished the song. And then I wrote, I love it loud. You know, kind of like, this is what we're about, kind of like an anthem thing. Which is still one of the songs which has been sampled by rap groups and all that. And the record came out and it was a bomb. 250 ,000 albums, something like that, where we were multiple millions. And at the same time, we went to South America and played the largest shows we'd ever played.

2:52:38If you can imagine Anaheim Stadium four times the size. And so much so that the spotlights that were out in the audience were airplane landing lights because regular spotlights didn't reach the stage. They would dissipate. And we were trapped in our hotel rooms. It was Mania and the army was our, so we went to armored personnel carriers with tank treads. And we're inside looking through people to see outside. Somebody was run over. Nobody stopped. It was insane. We played three outdoor shows. And then when we left the promoter, God bless them, absconded, took our equipment. And it took a court case, hey, South America.

2:53:32To cure equipment. Yeah, because he thought we should have paid less or we paid too much or whatever that is. But, you know, we went to court and got everything back. But it's, you know, it's the Wild West. It's South America. And again, at the same time, we came back after having played the biggest shows we'd ever played. So in certain parts of the world, and it's the same with any band that lasts long enough, it can't get on a plane without getting turbulence. Of course, you get more turbulence in the back than you do in the front. And we had new members, Mark St. John came and left and Bruce Culeck came.

2:54:16And it was Paul who came to me and said, you know, we're doing good stuff. Creatures of the night was a decent record. It had some good tunes on it. Maybe it's time to take the makeup off. Wow. Interesting. I thought I'd be lost without it because that became so ingrained. I knew who and what I was. And it's like what's Dr. Jekyll without Mr. Hyde? Yeah. It was just a doctor. Yeah. And we had a guy named Wearing Abbott, a photographer. We had a confidential photo shoot where nobody would get copies. And we stood around without our makeup. And we were writing songs pretty good with new members.

2:55:06The liquid up record came out and we hit again. We went right back up without makeup. Less is more. Was he an unmasked album? Is it called unmasked? Before unmasked came after I was made for loving you and dynasty. And Peter Chris, that was his last record. He got credit for it. He didn't play a single hit. It was made for living you to really get some. Anton Fink from the Letterman show who was in another band called Spiderman, and he was a good drummer. He played secretly. Did a coin manage you guys the whole time? Yes. And shortly after that by 83, we stopped being managed by him. And later on he got sick.

2:55:57He passed away, unfortunately, from AIDS. He just wouldn't go to the doctor. It was just awful, awful. And then our business manager took over business management. But no manager, we were managing ourselves. The period of time though with Doc McGee or no? Doc McGee is after we decided to put the makeup back on again in 94, 95, after all kinds of records sold out to us. We even played stadiums without the makeup. It was surprising. We didn't expect it. But still the kiss is like kiss without makeup with effects and pyro and stagecraft. And it worked fine. New generations hated up. It was great.

2:56:41And then we did the kiss conventions. And I hired a guy named Tommy Thayer, who was in a band called Black and Blue. They asked me to produce their last two albums, which I did. And I recognized a talented guitar player and a professional, which shows up on time to make lists, checks it twice and all that stuff. It's so important to the band. And hired him to do whatever I had to be done. So he became a road manager. We put together history books and my guesthouse sold it direct to the fans, no retail. They sent cash. We made millions. You know, all the publishers went, why didn't I came to you?

2:57:28You didn't believe in it. So we had two volume one and volume two and they were enormously successful. And then right after that we did the kiss conventions. I think it was my idea. The idea being that fans can never get close enough. And in those days, a hundred dollar ticket was crazy. So we would take over the ballrooms of hotels, which often they'd give us for free, because they wanted to traffic the food, fans staying over. And we called local kiss tribute bands who would play there. And we would take Plexiglass collectibles and just showcase it. And on stage, tell you what do you want to hear.

2:58:13Here's a song acoustically. There's no big stage show. Question and answer. Like a real fan thing. They were very successful. And can you do that all over? Not just in one place. Yeah. Interesting. And MTV got wind of it so we'd like to do one in New York and record it. And we did. That became the unplugged kiss unplug thing with Ace and Peter and Eric Singer who was in the band. And Bruce Culeck, you know, it was like six guys to original guys and that stuff. And there was very successful, big record and all that stuff. And the audience was packed with a wide zombie and anthrax guy, this guy, you know, because they grew up with the stuff.

2:59:00And Paul and I looked at each other saying, you know, Ace and Peter aren't in too bad of a shape. They look like they're clean. And so we looked at each other and said, you want to try reunion? You know, we talked to them. There was still some vestiges of demands. I want this. I want that. And they agreed to it. And at that point, I was booking some stuff. And, you know, we didn't have a manager. And we looked in the, in essence, the phone book. And interviewed a few managers, Donna's manager, this guy's manager, and Bon Jovi, and Motley Crew happened to have this guy, Doc McGee, and we took both of those bands out on their first tours.

2:59:52And we liked McGee, what he had to say. And also it was a very hard negotiation. I think I was the asshole said, you can't take from the gross. You can only take from the net after all costs. You could have some skin in the game. And he agreed and we put the thing together. And in short order, the reunion tour became the number one tour, Gallupold Stadium, the whole thing. The very first show was Tiger Stadium, which went clean in 45 minutes. And more and more, Ace and Peter start to fall back. Some people can kick the stuff, and I'm not qualified, but some people can't. Either self -esteem issues or life isn't going their way, or even if it is going their way.

3:00:45You're rich and famous, what's the problem? No, I think I've got to numb myself and become dependent. I never understood it. I don't understand the appeal. And I'm told, if you drink too much, your schmeckle won't work, and why the fuck would you want that? I think about it. You will throw up on your girlfriend's shoes, which she just bought, next morning you have a headache, and your schmeckle won't work. What is that? Tell me about the last kiss show. We kept talking about the end, because we were acutely aware, basically, Paul and I, as fans of this thing, this culture, this thing, because say what you will about classical music, I don't see a culture, a ten commandments of what it all means.

3:01:50Renaissance was a freeing of creativity, but country is a culture. It's how you dress, how you talk, what you believe in, church, your truck, your beard, all these kind of things, a hip hop for sure. So we were aware of boxers and bands staying in the ring too long, because you just can't do it 50 years, just to be clear. But you're still, look at me. I know. Come on, Ruben, I know. And the people show up. And they show up. They show up. I know I'd be popular in jail. I got it. There are a lot of people, my age. Yes. I'm 75, who would walk around with their walkers. It bears noting that Mick Jagger, I think, is a little older than Joe Biden.

3:02:45Yeah. And he's doing two hour shows running around on stage. I mean, I don't want to say that. That's a part of it is DNA, your genes. And part of it is kind of like the joy of life I've met, you know, I've met 60 -year -olds who act like they're a hundred. Yeah. It is, it mindset. When I wake up in the morning, it's just like, wow, look at this stuff. So Paul and I were talking about Peter Chris and Ace, they came back in the band. And by 2000, we did Dr. Steyman, this and that, all kinds of cool stuff. New Year's Eve, Dick Clark, all that, and sold more records. And a lot more licensing and merchandising.

3:03:32And we're talking about cartoons and movies and all that. And both Peter and Ace back in the band was just torture. Sadly, they were both in and out of the band three different times. How many times does life give you a chance to earn millions and millions and play music? And play music and have the time of your life and not worry about stuff just, you know, live the life of Riley, as they say. And we thought, you know, the very last show of that tour, we got to get rid of the guys. And we thought, New Year's Eve, let's just end it because you can't, you can drive with some flat tires, but it's not convincing.

3:04:19And, yeah, the carton, you still out there, that's great. Very few people, his age, should be on that stage. There's he. And bless, baby, King, he went out on stage, sitting down. But rock is a certain thing. You got to be on two legs. You got to do something if you're not running around at least something. So we decided, you know, go out while you're on top. Go out when the story is good. And we were going to end 2000. Once Aston Peter left for the third time. And we took some time off and everything. And then the fans kept asking, why'd you stop? Well, we, Aston Peter, no longer, while you got on without them with different members, we entered the makeup off and everything, we came to see you and you sold out everywhere.

3:05:12And your records were good. And we started to look each other like, what about that? And, you know, the fire and the belly was relit. Do we dare hope against hope that we can, I mean, how many years do you think you can last here? What new generations, hair metal bands and grunge and new romance and Adam in the ants? You know, all the new kinds of things, honking stay relevant. And maybe, or just popular. Forget about relevance. And, well, you got new guys. Tommy Ther, who was in black and blue, was also in a Kistribute band called Cole Gin. And they did so well that they actually toured Japan as a Kistribute band and get, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 ,000 bucks per night, made a good living being a Kistribute band.

3:06:08And he knew all the songs and physically looked like, have you ever seen a Kistribute band? What's that like? Bizarre. And you can also see little people Kistribute bands. There's many Kists. And oh, yeah. There's all female Kists called Priss and a few other variations. It's really quite amazing. There's Gene's Addiction, which is a Seattle band made up of Green River and some of the Seattle bands. You'd note, and all of them are just like me. And when one of them spits fire, all five guys, just like me, spits fire, at the same time, including the drummer. I'm not making it up. I wore the Gene's Addiction get it, the A &D T -shirt for the longest time.

3:07:02And then when Maynard and Morello did the track on Kiss My Us, they called it Shandy's Addiction. Shandy was a pop song Paul wrote on one of the records, which was a hit in Australia. So we took a look at this idea of we were born in New York City, 10 East 23rd Street, 10 blocks down, 10 from 33rd Street, Madison Square Garden. So we decided let's finish off Christmas or Christmas, 50 years after the birth of the band, 10 blocks down. Let's do it at New York and only do one show and film it and all that stuff and invite our friends. It'll be like a celebration. And then the film crew and everybody in McGee convinced us to do two shows.

3:08:00We could have been there for a week or 10 days. Better for the film to shoot more than one. Well also, you don't know if a microphone's not going to work, or you get a flat tie or whatever. So we did December 1, December 2 in New York. But by the way, like all things Kiss, the Empire State Building lit up with our faces on it. There were 800 New York City cabs wrapped around with Kiss imagery. If you went into the subway and you got a subway ticket, you had our faces on the subway. You went to get a pizza, the outside of the pizza boxes, we were our faces in your face. There were kiss pop -up shops.

3:08:40Basically, if you started a new religion and called it Kiss Chianity, that's what was going on. I was like a total take over. What year was this? This last December. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, we just couldn't believe it. Amazing. Anywhere we went. I mean, there were people walking around the streets of New York during the daytime because fans flew in from around the world. Japanese fans and all that stuff during the daytime and full makeup. We'd be going to the Empire State Building because we went up to the top where King Kong fell off and all that stuff. Because in 76, we were on top taking photos when there were no guard rails hanging off the sides.

3:09:27So one of those photos that became a thing. And on the way there, we were seeing Kiss people on the streets, you know, dressing early to go to the show. You're any different on stage knowing it was the last one? Very emotional. Yeah. Pride, but also a little sad because people who have been married and guessing a few times. But remember when it was real love and that magic of the thing, if it doesn't last, there's a sadness there. Sometimes it's drugs and alcohol. Sometimes they just go apart. But when it was great, it's sad because not everybody survives life. And I'm still sad about a Sampeter who even today can't enjoy the fruits of their labor.

3:10:26They were equally as important as Paul and myself in the formation of the band and those first few years. There's no question about it. It was a four -wheel drive vehicle. And then the air started coming out of two of the wheels to the point where, as a matter of fact, when it was time for Peter to go, Ace voted, no, he's got to go. He can't play the drums anymore. And then Ace, using his words, walked out of kiss. Even though he said, you can stay in kiss, have a solo career. We don't want a penny of it. Have your cake and eat it too. And he said to my face, no, I can't stay in the band. He said it in print.

3:11:08If I do another tour, I'm going to kill myself. That's verbatim. And I didn't understand what that meant. I didn't want to get into it. And then he said, you watch, I'm going to sell 10 million records.

3:11:28I can't respond to that. I don't know what that meant, especially with, you know, logically, say in the band, have your cake, eat it too. Of course. So what an amazing journey and, strangely and magically. And the both shows were terrific. And people were crying. Yeah, people were more gorgeous. We had the lumped on the throat. You'd look around and my poor mother didn't make it. She lived to be 94 years old. But every time we played in New York with her thick Hungarian accent, she'd elbow whoever was next to her. You know, that's my sonny boy. Oh my god, I just don't get me started. And she'd be doing my handsick, no, along with everybody else.

3:12:17In broken English, rock and roll, rock and roll, you know, all that stuff. And singing, I want to rock and roll, or night, you know, wow. I don't know, amazing. Mom, I had, she's with me every day. And the very end of both of those shows, we had made a deal with a company called Comp House. Who bought Abba Reitz and put on this avatar abbas show in London, which has got millions of people going. It's incredible. I've seen it. Incredible. And whatever technology you saw there is now primitive. They are investing untold amounts. I don't want to say anything more than, you know what virtual reality is when you put those glasses on.

3:13:12And you would swear your life that the ground just opened up and you have a cas - had your falling and free fall. And you have this sense that what you're seeing is real. And by the way, all around you, right? No matter where you look, up down and stuff, your sense of reality. Now imagine that without glasses. Amazing. And I've seen it. And when will that be? By 2027. It's just so much exciting stuff. So in a lot of ways, entertainment itself and life itself is changing dramatically with AI and technology and all this stuff. There will still be room for live bands playing live with the blues and all that.

3:14:01There's no substitute for that. But in other areas, the sky is the limit. No limit. Can I play you a song from your solo album? Which one? I got two of its one. Yeah. With the American symphony orchestra all wearing Jean Mas. Really?

3:14:36Yeah. Yeah.

3:14:48Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

3:14:59Yeah. Yeah.

3:15:08Yeah.

3:15:18Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

3:15:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All those stuff as dreamers western haunted houses 2018 Gages down She brings to that in his life. And see his youth, where the world's here, the power of style. Your dreams are the world's right. On a solo record, the rest of the guys were smart. Peter Notslemont, Peter was doing R &B covers, which were not convincing and stuff. But Ace especially just went to his roots and did what he knew back in the year of groove. Which was a cover. I didn't know that. The arrows, I think it was. I didn't know that. Yes. It was Eddie Kramer, who said, why don't we do that song.

3:17:11And it's still played in Yankee baseball games and everything. It was a big hit. Paul likewise did a rock record with guitars and everything. I wanted because I'd written so many songs, so many different styles. So there are ballots on there. There are symphony orchestras, there's things. And when I was 12 years old, I went to see Pinocchio. And I told you I was delusional. I didn't have brothers or sisters at a lot of time on my own. I read comic books and all about fantasy and science fiction. The 5 ,000 fingers of Dr. T. All this stuff that I just loved. And when I saw the big Disney animated movie and little Jiminy cricket steps up.

3:18:02It's another one of those perfect songs called When You Wish Upon a Star. Here's how it starts. When you wish upon it right at the top. I'm going, oh my god. At 12, I didn't know anything about anything. When Jiminy cricket, this animated little cricket steps up and looks into the camera and starts singing. Larger than life, I thought he was singing only to me like a magic friend. Your dreams come true. I went out of that movie theater like I was touched by Jesus. You know, I don't worship the guy. I think it's a good guy, but I went like, it was a religious experience. I remember that feeling of being inspired.

3:18:51That you could be anybody and your dreams can come true. That's an amazing thing because other songs didn't have that. Yeah. When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. When I finally did my solo record, I rented the Concord, Share, and the Kids in the Nannies flew with me. We recorded at Oxford Studios down the street from George Harrison and Eric Clapton. All the big bands were there and I flew over all the best musicians, you know, played. I played guitar in the record, not bass, because I wanted to. I could have whatever I wanted. All kinds of stars on the record, singing backgrounds and Donna Summer, singing with me on Burning Up with Fever, which she was going to cover.

3:19:40And George O'Marota said, no, you're not going to do a Gene Simmons song. But all kinds of crazy stuff, which goes against the quote rules, if you're in a rock band, you don't want to have hell and ready on the up. I didn't care. I always wanted to do what you wanted to do. That's what it's supposed to be about. I wanted to have Lassie Barking. I wanted to have the New York City Rockets tap dancing on Living in Sin at the Holiday Inn, which I wrote. And I was making, I was wanting to record on stage at Radio City Music Hall, Symphony Orchestra to do these big symphonic things. They also played on Mad of a Thousand Faces.

3:20:22I wrote Before Kiss as an homage to my hero, Lanshaine Senior, who invented Makeup and Hunchback of Noche and Don't Fat. And he invented and created the Flaired Nostrils Plastics, which nobody had done before. And I was so fascinated by the guy whose mother and father were deaf and dumb, they have to communicate with sign language. And that's why he was such a great actor in silent films, where you couldn't do anything except physically expressing. In fact, the image of me on stage with that thing is all Lanshaine Senior from London after midnight, photos of him, because there's not a print remaining of that original film about a vampire at night, including the Bat Wings, which is all Lanshaine Senior.

3:21:15And so I had to do, when you wish upon a star, I couldn't sing it. The guy that sang it was Ned Washington, I'm pretty sure, who may have written it, of such a heartwarming song when you hear the original song. When you listen, oh, my God, I don't have that kind of voice. And I remember being in the sound booth in England and in America, Cherokee studios, because we had to do overdubs and stuff, and I had to plug in everything, crying my heart out, because it took me back to the 12 -year -old kid watching Pinocchio on 83rd Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, going to the movie theater alone.

3:22:12I saved up, I don't remember, 59 cents, whatever cost. Nobody goes anywhere alone, but I didn't have brothers or sisters, and I was 12, I didn't have dates or anything. My mother was always working, and my father was not around. He ran out on us. And alone in that movie theater, I had... A semi -religious experience. The music and the visuals, but the message your dreams can come true. And they have. It makes no difference who you are. It says that in the lyrics. Me? Because how dare? How dare? You're nobody. You're speaking, hello, but not those, you know, you speak with an accent. You come from nowhere.

3:23:00I know that doesn't matter. Your dreams can come true is an astonishing message I had to do it.

3:23:35Athenem is a new podcast on the Tecrogramma Tin Network.

3:23:45Do you know about the connection between Charlie Manson and MK Ultra, the US government's mind control operation? What if everything you thought you knew about the Manson Mervys? Was wrong. Join Ayesha Akali for a once in a lifetime in -depth conversation with Tom O 'Neal, author of the Runaway Best Seller, Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the secret history of the 60s. In this limited deep dive series, Tom O 'Neal unpacks his 20 -year investigation into the CIA's Mind Control program, linking it to Charles Manson and the disturbing secrets buried in America's history. From missing FBI files to Hollywood cover -ups, governments surveillance, LSD, and the dark collapse of the 60s hippie dream.

3:24:36This is the story behind the story. It's not true crime. It's true chaos. Hear it on Athenem, the new podcast on the Tecrogramma Tin Podcast Network, available wherever you get your podcasts. Truth isn't just stranger than fiction. It's far more dangerous.

3:24:58Coming soon on The Athenem Podcast.