How I spent my Spring Vacation on tour with kiss in Japan

Three days in Tokyo, and so far I've seen so little of Kiss, our hosts, that I barely have all their names straight. Except for watching them clown for us during the flight over--and a solid rumor that they all ordered spaghetti from room service when they got in--the only thing I've learned about them that isn't printed every month in Hit Parader is that drummer Peter Criss is a gun fancier and has a tasty pistol collection that leans toward James Bond models. This tidbit came from a short, unplanned interview conducted with him at the huge and lavish Hotel Okura late Saturday night, lying on the floor in the hallway in front of bass player Gene Simmons' room.

Carl Arrington of the New York Post and I had been in Gene's room while he showed us, one by one, a suitcase full of Japanese Kiss memorabilia--their painted alien faces on the covers of magazines, guest appearances as comic-book characters, hand-inked portraits done by lovelorn artistic teenagers. As background through the open door, we could hear occasional manic outbursts in the hallway. For reasons of security--the hotel's--we'd been given a whole floor to ourselves. The seed of college-dorm life in the setup was blossoming time lapse into full freshman bloom.

So we're looking through this stuff, marveling in the right places, when in the hall we hear laughter, the muffled clump-clump-clump of feet running in short bursts, periodic airy pop-pop-pops, more laughter.

The BB wars have flared up again. While we of the press were stuck sitting in traffic on Saturday afternoon, on our Hato Bus tour of Dynamic Tokyo, most of the band and friends were cruising a five-story toy store here. Japanese toys are terrific because many of them, used right, are fairly dangerous. Especially nice are the futuristic Buck Rogers pistols that shoot small plastic BBs shaped like miniature champagne corks. The band bought several.

When we got back from Dynamic Tokyo in the afternoon, in moods ranging from grumpy to worse, the hallway on our floor was already reel three of Gunfight at the Hard Rock Hotel. We apparently came in just as they were getting bored with tracking and shooting each other. We were fresh game and, better yet, we were the press. So I'd earned my battle scars earlier in the day.

But just then, a phantom in white terrycloth speeds by Gene's open door and gets off two low quick ones faster than Lee Harvey Oswald. Pop-pop at our feet. He flies by again, laughing, pop, at Carl's shin.

Maybe ignoring him will work?

No. At floor level, in the doorway, a black-plastic gun barrel is slowly poking its nose around the corner.

I know this is only good-natured fooling around, but it really has been a long day and, it occurs to me, during my diving leap for the gun, that I'm really tired of our side having no firepower.

Our phantom is surprised but street wise and doesn't lose his grip on the piece as I lunge. I'm trying to wrestle it away from him when flash I get a look at his face and see that here I am on the floor, wrestling with one of our stars, trying to steal his gun.

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On Monday morning comes our first real chance to see Kiss us. the Orient, at a press conference in the Tokyo Hilton.

Kiss in Japan is news.

We had our first inkling back in the Tokyo airport four days earlier, getting off Pan Am flight #1, groggy from a flight so long some of us got drunk twice. We were greeted by a phalanx of flashing Nikons. Behind them, beyond the glass-enclosed customs area, were a thousand teenagers, most there in hopes of just a glimpse....

Kiss was ready to oblige and had spent the last hour of the flight up in the 747's first-class lounge, putting on full make-up and drag, ready to give the kids what they wanted. They had gone up regular street long-hairs from New York and come down platformed visitors from another planet, star-trekking ambassadors from the distant galaxy of Zit. But the sensible fellow in charge of customs wasn't having any. These crazy Americans could walk around dressed up like monsters if they wanted to, but, famous or not, they didn't look a hit like the people in their passport pictures and he wanted to see their real faces before letting them into the country. Triumphal entry turned anticlimax. The boys go to wash up. So eager were the teenagers by then, like wind gusting on a wheat field, the sight in customs of any Western face beneath long hair sent excited screams rippling through them. The band, their faces inspected and repainted, wisely ducked out a side door. Most of the kids never laid eyes on them. The true believers were left at last with following our bus full of press and roadies in taxis, on a long, expensive ride into the city, in hopes of trailing us to the band's lair. Every once in a while, as gray, ugly Tokyo unfolded before us, provoking shouts of "Newark!" "Detroit!" "Cleveland!" inside the bus, I'd see a taxi alongside, blossoming with young girls waving and giggling and peeing their pants. Big Al Ross, our friendly publicist, kept comparing it to the Beatles. And, like it or not, in some ways he was right.

The press conference, for example, provided a few echoes of those golden old hard day's nights, or was supposed to. Outside the Hilton as we pulled up, there were maybe 60 or 70 young girls, black hair gleaming in the sunshine, standing around in small bunches on both sides of the street, patiently waiting for that magic glimpse. We were directed to a featureless meeting room, past security right up there at Manhattan Project levels. Inside, sitting around tables were 100 or so select photographers, journalists and a few well-connected groupies. Cameras and tape recorders of every fancy description lay in black heaps on the white tablecloths, alongside trays of little bald crustless sandwiches and glasses filled with cola and Bireley's Orange.

Lead guitarist Ace Frehley's wife was turned out in a gorgeous silk kimono, bought the day before, and looked like a stand-in for Madeline Kahn in Sayonara '80. Bill Aucoin, the band's manager, trimly 30ish, in tailored beige slacks that matched his exact mustache, was, just then, taking picture after picture of her--trying out his spiffy new Nikon, a gift from Mr. Udo, the Japanese promoter, of whom more later. Aucoin is persistently rumored to be the real brains behind the entire multimillion-dollar Kiss boogie, though it is as persistently denied.

The press conference opened with dimmed lights and a short color film of the band onstage, dressed like delirium tremens, prancing and leaping and leering through four songs. The lights went up after the film and in strolled the live flesh, wearing full battle dress. They sauntered theatrically toward the long low dais in front, and the photographers went nuts. There are almost 100 rock magazines--some of them fat as phone books--published in Tokyo alone, and they must pay handsomely for close-ups of Kiss. In ten years of wasting my life this way, I'd never seen such a prolonged electric storm of flashes. It lasted nearly 15 minutes, a remarkable photo frenzy, with the photographers buzzing around the band like giant stroboscopic flies. Eventually, some were coaxed reluctantly back to their seats and the Q and A began, moderated by an attractive bilingual young woman. The tone the band seemed to be aiming for was classic charming Beatles put-on, and in spots it pulled it off.

From the Hilton, after a lavish lunch bash thrown by Victor Musical Industries, Japanese division, featuring bite-sized chunks of broiled this and that, served perched on small hot boulders suggesting lunch-sized Alps and Rockies, we were taken to the airport and put on a packed flight for Osaka, 250 miles southeast. During lunch, the distinguished-looking president of Victor stood and addressed us briefly in Japanese. Translating for him was a skinny PR man whose business card read Satoshi "Hustle" Honda. As Hustle relayed it, the president was saying that in this propitious cherry-blossom season, it was his hope that this tour would cause the sales of Kiss albums to spread across Japan like cherry blossoms blown before a spring wind.

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Half the buildings in Osaka were bombed to splinters during the war, but the city has been built back industrial-strength and draped in future-shock neon to make sure you notice. Much of it looks like the issue of a ménage à trois among downtown Chicago, Century City and Las Vegas. The view from my room at the Osaka Grandé consisted of an elevated expressway soaring above a six-lane bridge that crossed a river long since domesticated into a canal, with low geometric mountains of high-rise office buildings behind. On one hung a golden heraldic crest three stories high, emblem of the Suntory company, which produces a whiskey of the same name that's as ubiquitous in Japan as Budweiser is back home.

Guidebooks usually advise that if you find yourself stuck in Osaka, you should day-trip elsewhere. That's what most of us did. We had two days to hang out while the band rehearsed and got used to the new set. Then, after two Osaka concerts, it would be life on the road, 40 of us moving together on trains and planes and buses, a series of one and two-nighters that would go like this: from Osaka to Kyoto, then to Nagoya for two concerts, back to Osaka for one more, then one down south in Fukuoka and back to Tokyo for four concerts at the Budokan--the last of which would tie a record established by the Beatles.

I spent Tuesday temple-hopping in Kyoto with Arrington and Michael Gross, who was covering the tour for Swank. To get there, we took the famed Shinkansen--which translates as Bullet Train or Rocket Train. It can do upwards of 150 mph without swirling your sake, and the lead car is designed to (continued on page 232)My Spring Vacation(continued from page 226) resemble a silver snub-nosed bullet or a voyage to the moon circa 1952. The Shinkansens connect most cities in Japan like railroad superhighways and they are always on time. A terrific way to get around. The Osaka--Kyoto run is so short, though. about 15 minutes, that our Shinkansen never quite got cranked up and wailing--we got that the next day on the way to face our past in Hiroshima.

In Kyoto, we made our rounds of the necessary stations. Kyoto was never bombed during the war, in part because it was the ancient imperial capital. Scattered around town are nearly 1000 shrines and temples, some tucked into spots on thriving business streets, others spread thoughtfully over acres, ponds and gardens tended with Buddhist care since the 13th or 14th Century, our time.

At the Ryoanji Temple on the outskirts of the city, there's a celebrated stone garden created back then by a Zen monk with strange things on his mind. It is mainly a long rectangular expanse of white gravel raked lengthwise meticulously into many parallel rows. Cornfields under snow seen from the sky. A limestone sea in light chop. Anything you see, including nothing. This combed expanse is broken in only five places, deliberately random, by craggy small groups of black boulders. That's the garden. Rocks and gravel. I loved it. As the temple brochure explained, "We can view the garden as a group of mountainous islands in a great ocean or as mountaintops rising above a sea of clouds.... Absorbed in this scene, we, who think of ourselves as relative, are filled with serene wonder as we intuit Absolute Self, and our stained minds are purified. In Zen, everything, even a leaf of grass, expresses ultimate Reality. Thus, we can say that this simple garden of itself suggests to us absolute value."

Running the full length of the garden on one side are three rows of bleachers made from fine Japanese cedar. On them sit people in their socks, holding clear-plastic bags provided by the temple and containing their shoes, contemplating the garden in silence. The crowd at a Zen football game. I added my own invisible cheer for a while.

On the grounds of the same temple, there's a monk-made pond that's 1000 years old, which is also something to think about. Back about then, my Saxon ancestors were living without villages or roads in the forests and swamps of northern Germany-to-be, chased around like wild goats by Charlemagne; while in Japan in 900 A.D. there was a bureaucracy already so advanced that one government bureau was designated the Department of Poetry.

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The world's thinnest teenager had a jagged scarlet lightning bolt streaking diagonally across his face. The bolt was edged in silver glitter. From the ground up, he was platform shoes, silver tights, black-leather hotpants and a cling shirt. His poor mother. Three girls not to write home about stood near him, talking, black hair spilling without flaw onto the shoulders of their white coveralls, each with the Kiss logo sewn in spangles across the back. Elsewhere, also in spangles, they had duplicated exactly the signature of each band member. The autograph of Paul Stanley curved gleaming around one athletic rump. A few kids had on UCLA sweat shirts. One with a Playboy Rabbit. A T-shirt that said on the back, in graceful English script, Lonely Boy! Another in the same style that read Young Blood. Scattered here and there were the mad devout, their faces painstakingly painted in the image of their heroes.

We were all hanging out in the lobby of the concert hall, waiting for Kiss to start the first of ten in Japan. Most of the crowd was already sitting inside. The opening act, a Japanese group called Bow Wow, had just finished its set and been rewarded for its efforts with a bored pitter-pat of applause.

In a few minutes, we went in to find our seats. The usual between-acts Muzak was being piped loud and clear through the monstro amps on each side of the stage, stereo headphones of the gods.

Could it be? Yes. To warm up this audience of 2500 Japanese teeny-boppers out here in the Osaka sticks, Kiss before going on was feeding them tapes of flower-top primo Led Zeppelin--Stairway to Heaven, Black Dog, Rock & Roll. ... They did it every night of the tour. I never figured out whether it was bravado or ingenuousness--if it mattered to Kiss at all that they were, musically speaking, blowing themselves out of the water every night by playing these Zeppelin tapes.

Silvery machine-gun bursts from a bad angel, Jimmy Page's guitar was nicely carving up the place when two live roadies appeared onstage. Urged on by increasingly excited screams, they began lethargically removing the black sheets draped over the Kiss set--a new, cut-down version of the one they use in the States. The old one wouldn't fit on the lone 747 they'd chartered to carry cargo, and they wanted a new one, anyway. It cost only $150,000. Twenty-five feet high, it's wide as the stage and consists chiefly of stacked black Marshall amps. Peter Criss's considerable drum kit is inset in the center of this loud honeycomb. It's flanked on each side by a Busby Berkeley stairway to heaven, ascending steps big as dream-sequence dominoes that light up when they're stepped on. Much fancy prancing occurs here. At the top, over the Marshalls, there's a runway on each side. The drum kit itself is on a platform that moves up and down like a lube rack; during the drum sola, it's sent zipping pneumatically to stage front. And there are also the smoke bombs and flash pods and eerie dry-ice fog and confetti canisters artillery-launched over the crowd, exploding in fireworks bursts that fall like showers of spring snow....

As the lights go down, the screaming goes up. Bob Weiner, ace gossip columnist for the Soho Weekly News, has brought along a box of gum-wad earplugs and passes them out among us press. As Gene Simmons said quietly a few days earlier, "The kids like it loud." I guess. When I'd seen Kiss at the Chicago Stadium back in January, they were putting out a measured 140-plus decibels to the first 20 rows or so. It's an effect you can reproduce almost exactly by sticking your head inside a jet engine. If you're under 15, it's very stimulating. The considerably more sensible Japanese had set an upper limit of 110 or so--and were metering the concert halls every night to keep Kiss honest--but that's still high enough to leave you with a head full of ghostly telephones ringing away for hours.

Everybody is standing and screaming in the semigloom as Kiss takes its carefully choreographed battle stations. Then lights, flash bombs ... music! Simple slamming Gibson chords. Paul pouts and leaps and shouts out lead vocal. Gene is the prowling evil lizard, horny and looking for something to rape. Ace, playing lead guitar in a Flash Gordon outfit, is of the Bill Wyman school of performers. The self-proclaimed "master of space and time" seems to have left his body playing guitar while his spirit is off in another dimension, duking it out with Ming the Merciless. Somewhere behind the jungle (continued on page 254)My Spring Vacation (continued from page 232) of drums is Peter, an everyday good guy from an Italian section of New York, with his face painted to look like a cat's--though a friend of mine said she thought he liked like Minnie Mouse.

By the end of the tour, I'd seen eight concerts. Night after night, the show varied only in minor details, including Paul's intro raps. The crowds and their response were also nearly identical every night. Some more up than others, but that's all. In the midst of all this sameness, I was changing my opinions about the band more often than my underwear. Are they a threat to mankind and harbinger of apocalypse? Minstrels for the new barbarians? Carny for the Seventies? Four nice guys with a very commercial idea? Boring? Terrific? All of the above?

Some of my concert notes:

Osaka #1: Meet You in the Ladies' Room. The kids know the lyrics, singing along behind us... and, unlike concerts back home, the Japanese throw only long streams of crepe paper instead of firecrackers, rolls of toilet paper, cherry bombs or each other....

Ace's solo is, well, underwhelming ... but then his guitar does give off actual smoke, billowing out of some contraption wired inside. The rock-crit image brought vividly to life, sort of. At one point, he leaves the guitar alone onstage, spotlit in a rack, where it smokes and wails feedback on its own as well as it had under his direction.

The snow machine cranks up, Paul does the duty guitar smash and throws the pieces--gently--into the audience... the kids begin shouting in unison. "Encora, encora, encora!"

•

Osaka #2: The show's a return engagement for a number of the fans. The world's skinniest teenager is back, sans red lightning bolt, but back. Also, the girls in white coveralls. And Tough Blondie, in the front row again.

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Gene doing his troglodyte blood-spitting act, with the dry-ice smoke rolling out... drooling and snarling under exorcist-green lights.

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Kyoto #3: Saturday. Hibino Sound truck sitting outside the Kyoto hall, which is the nicest we've seen so far. A gaggle of Kissu kids, one with a crewcut 254 done up as Gene... inside, the hall is a modernist concrete horseshoe with what look like schools of cubist sea biscuits flying ten feet below the angled plane of the roof, acoustic tiles become art.

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Standing at ringside, watching Gene's antics and playing. It's kind of comic up close--and much more overtly and deliberately sexual. Wagging the silver-scaled codpiece that shines against black tights between his legs and looks like a biker's fantasy of a chrome-studded penis... licking every girl in the first five rows with his fat long serpent's tongue. And it is a great costume. Thigh-length silver-scaled boots, each scale twice the size of an Eisenhower dollar, scales evolving at the ankle into a boot that becomes a sour apelike monster face with red rhinestone eyes in front and ten-inch platform heels behind. This is all just a little too much for the plump schoolgirls in the first row, who react as most Japanese girls do when tremendously embarrassed, by putting their hands to their mouths and lowering their eyes as they giggle like mad.

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Sunday; to Nagoya by train: On the Shinkansen to Nagoya. Ridin' that train, high on Suntory.... And there's Honey, the sad-eyed not-yet-ripe groupie who's been following us everywhere. All day, on the photo shooting at temples around Kyoto, she and her friends followed us in cabs. And tonight, as we attacked the Shinkansen platform, there she was again, in her white-denim jacket with a cloth Kiss decal sewn on the back, pouting, on the platform with a bunch of her friends. (Later that night she will appear in that same outfit in the fancy rooftop restaurant of the Nagoya Grandé, weeping, wanting Michael Gross, who it appears she has fallen in love with, to tell him that she's out of money and would he, gulp, help? On arrival at the Kyoto Grandé two nights earlier, Michael had connected with her--they'd been eying each other since Osaka, which is where I first noticed her--and was on his way upstairs with her toward better things when he found out that she was only 15 and had never been kissed. She definitely did not yet know how to be nasty, and Michael wisely decided not to teach her. So he'd said a polite goodbye and grabbed his hat. Rejected, she was now deeply in love. And broke. And light-years from home.)

We have taken over one entire first-class Green Car on the Shinkansen, blitzed the bar car and come away with Suntory pints. Too bad for the few other folks sharing the car with us, at least if they were expecting a quiet ride to Nagoya. Three separate cassette players are cranked up and slugging it out for attention. But what's this? There, sitting a few seats away with an average-looking mom, are two little girls of eight or nine or so. Mom has dressed her daughters for the trip in high red-plastic go-go boots, silver tights, black-satin hotpants and red tops--with a decorative gold cocaine razor blade hanging from a gold chain around each neck. In-scrutable!

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Nagoya #4: The biggest hall yet--a sports arena. On the way to our seats, we pass stacks of Kiss albums sitting untended on tables in an aisle. At home, they would have been ripped off and resold twice by now....

And I'm actually beginning to enjoy the show--through earplugs. Kiss is all right if you think about it in the right way. Musically, I mean. It's the clockwork-orange costumes and huge halls and bombs going off and pervo Walt Disney staging that fool you. If you close your eyes and get past all that, you can hear the secret of Kiss--that it's a bar band. It's a par digm of the form. That's one reason it's so adored. Its fans sense, know, that they could be up there prancing around instead, that what Kiss does musically is Jacksonian democracy, proof that you can still make it in America with energy, that genius isn't required. If Kiss were in jeans and I had a flat draft beer in front of me, I'd swear I was back in college at Al & Larry's Upstairs, happily listening to Tony & the Bandits do cheery off-key versions of current Stones and Beatles hits .... And that is, after all, where all four members of Kiss come from--the bar-band circuit in Queens and Brooklyn and Jersey. It fits with who they are offstage, as well. All through the tour, we so-called rock press have been marveling to one an-other about how normal they are, human and likable, and quite unlike some of the ego monsters created by rock-'n'-roll stardom that we've all encountered. Four or five years ago, they were still buying tickets and standing in line with every-one else at the Garden to see the Stones or The Who. Now the Garden fills for them, and they have more money than they can còunt, but those days of scuffling around New York broke and anonymous aren't so far behind and they are remembered. And they probably understand better than any of us how thin the (continued on page 262)My Spring Vacation(continued from page 254) line separating those times from now really is--thin as a layer of make-up.

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Osaka #5: Back at the Osaka Grandé, after two nights in boring Nagoya. Our camp-following groupies become more and more familiar. Sad-eyed Honey is still with us, as are the two whose talents Simmons appears to have sampled during our stay in Nagoya. He's nicknamed diem Nabisco and Bosco.

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On this return engagement at the Osaka Grandé, we find that we aren't the only group in the hotel. We are sharing it with another musical entourage--the Moscow Opera. There's a blackboard hanging in the lobby, a schedule and timetable scribbled in Russian characters. Dour Russians stand around the lobby smoking, while we wander through, and a scattering of teeny-bop groupies in various scandalous outfits hang out waiting to be noticed. One Moscow Opera member, especially, is doing a great imitation of Peter Bull playing the Russian ambassador in Dr. Strangelove. In the elevator, I find myself with several people dominated by a fellow a head taller than all, with a chest like a bull fiddle. Stan Meises of N.E.A., another of us on the Kiss ride, smiles and sings deeply, "Bass...." The big Russian laughs and booms out a couple of low notes in reply.

In the lobby, as I went up to my room just before the concert, the wives and wimmenfolk of our entourage were sitting on couches facing the bank of elevators, bored, gossiping fitfully. hanging out waiting for the gig to start. Later, when I came clown, the elevator doors parted at the lobby and I was facing, sitting on those same couches, the wives of the other group. Solid Russian women in their 50s, bored, gossiping fitfully, hanging out while their husbands in the Moscow Opera got ready for their gig....

The next morning, both groups were leaving and mingled in the coffee shop and lobby. Like Kiss, the Moscow Opera had brought along enamel buttons to give away as presents to the gift-crazy Japanese. Through mutual broken German or French, or simply through sign language, we all traded buttons back and forth--our smackeroo red Kiss lips for frowning Lenin buttons.

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Fukuoka #7: Wednesday, after the concert, we're all invited to a party at the Honey Pot #2--a private club across the street from the Fukuoka Grandé. The owner is one Gan, a short, shoulder-heavy wedge of muscle who taught four of our black-belt Japanese security guards everything they know. Gan is some sort of martial-arts master and owns a few cabarets around Japan on the side: He is also something of a groupie and has invited the whole Kiss entourage to Honey Pot #2 for an after-hours party.

But Stanley is in a mood to talk: and so are Arrington, Meises, Frances Schoenberger (of the German magazine Bravo) and I. So we're in his hotel room, tapes rolling, while Stanley sits in a towel taking off the last of his make-up and telling us stories about his days as a New York City cabdriver. There's still an afterimage of his famous star over his right eye as he tells us these tales in New York accents. We're collectively working on a fifth of Japanese green-tea liqueur.

The talk turns eventually to sex, as it will. One of us asks Stanley about the rumor that's spreading among the Japanese groupies to the effect that he's gay--because he hasn't been sampling their riches the way the others have. He says he's just been down.

"It's funny," he told us, "I was talking to Gene before, because everybody is getting this picture of me. Gene noticed that on this tour, I'm very quiet. It's really not like me."

Why is it happening on this trip?

"Strange country, these guards around me all the time, driving me crazy--I mean, much as I may like them, I'm not into that kind of stuff. It brings me down a little having people stifle me."

"If you wanted to bring in a six-pack of groupies tonight, could you get them past the guards?" I ask, because certain of our more active press have been hassled repeatedly about bringing strange talent onto our hotel floor.

"I could get Osaka in my room if I wanted to," he responds. "It's all a matter of choice. I screw like a demon, but I screw who I want to screw. I'm not chopped liver, you know."

Did you go through a period when it was like being a kid in a candy store?

"Sure, absolutely. When you're growing up, you're always looking for girls and coming on to girls, and they're always telling you to get lost. And then, all of a sudden, you become a star, and I mean, everybody is coming on to you and wants to come back to your room and this and that. And, for a while, you're like a rabbit in heat. I'm still like that to an extent. But these days, as far as pulling people into my room, they've got to be hot stuff."

What's hot stuff these days?

"A woman that's as much in touch with herself as she is with everything around her. Blondes turn me on, brunettes turn me on, dark skin turns me on, light skin turns me on, big tits, little tits, big asses, little asses, it doesn't matter. I think a lot of beauty and sexiness comes from a certain amount of knowledge, the way you carry yourself. And I think it's really sexy when you meet someone who really is in touch with herself."

That sounds suspiciously romantic.

"Oh, I'm a romantic. God. I'm left over from a couple of hundred years ago. I would rather be a Sir Lancelot than an Elvis Presley."

It's going on this way when Weiner appears, to report that the party across the street's a dud. "Gentlemen, I advise you not to go. It is an empty dub filled with Michael Gross, Al Ross and Bob Gruen and that's all. And a few Japanese and a loud Fifties-style rock band and some cold chicken and, you know, no Japanese, no nobody. No nothing, no chickie-poos, nothing."

We believe Weiner's unsolicited testimonial, but after talking through another side of tape, we decide to go check it out anyway.

The black wet street shines in a cold mist of rain as we cross toward what proves to be the bolted steel security door of Honey Pot #2. Much banging and shouting. The door is mounted garage style. Unlocked, it's shoved upward but sticks halfway and looks like a cartoon guillotine poised for a man-sized mouse. One by one, we bend and scurry inside.

The club holds maybe 100, in two low tiers of tables and booths facing a stage and dance floor in one corner. The stage is full of rock-'n'-roll weaponry--drum kit, amps, mikes, a fat conga drum, etc. But nobody's using any of it. We've missed the show--an oldies band fronted by a Japanese imitator, speak of the Devil, of Elvis, authentic right down to the sahd-berns and hillbilly sneer.

Weiner has barely understated the crowd, which is bored and going terminal when we come in. But Paul, leader of our pack, is up and energized by the gang-bang interview, and ready to rock 'n' roll all night.

Gan, accommodating, star-struck, sends someone to fetch the Fifties band. Not to play another set--to borrow their instruments. Paul is in a mood to jam--and very quickly, so is everyone else. Hope yet for something to do in bleak, rainy Fukuoka; it's hardly after midnight and everywhere else is long closed. We don't seem to be in tune with local rhythms.

Mr. Udo, impeccable in an expensive suit, stands near the back and smiles as the instruments arrive and are claimed. Since Ace and Peter aren't here, we are treated to a jump-shift in the pecking order right before our eyes. Paul straightaway claims lead-guitar slot, moving up from rhythm, and is already plugged in, playing bits of this and that, while a roadie tinkers with Gene's amp. Gene has moved up from bass to rhythm guitar. A roadie named Barry has jumped right on the bass, and another roadie who first claimed the drums is replaced amid cheers by one B. Posthlewhaite, function unknown.

Mr. Udo smiles and smiles.

Paul tries to kick this jury-rigged group into Honky Tonk Woman and runs nicely through the lead part like a bat out of Keith Richard, not bad at all... but confusion reigns around him and it collapses with a thud. Back to basics. They start up again with a slow, greasy Wild Thing. Dual vocals are provided by Hollywood Richard, the costume caretaker, clearly a star in his own shower, and the Japanese Elvis, who's back, wearing a striped sports coat and white slacks. They try to fight it, but Wild Thing slides inevitably downhill, like mud, into Louie, Louie, anthem of every bar band that ever dodged a bottle.

On Louie, Louie, they begin to cook.

Mr. Udo smiles and smiles, even as an associate leans toward his ear and tells him something in urgent tones. I drift their way to find out what's up--and overhear Gan telling Mr. Udo that the police, thoughtfully, have called to say that they will be raiding the joint shortly.

Mr. Udo smiles and smiles while thinking about this.

The jam is actually on the verge of cranking up and we crazy Americans are beginning to smell in the air a party till dawn, with the highest-paid bar band in the world supplying the music.

But Gan has a license to lose and is not so cool as Mr. Udo. After a few more loud minutes, when decency and subtle suggestion fail utterly, Gan commandeers the mike and announces a little frantically that we will all for sure spend the night in jail if the music doesn't stop immediately; but we don't have to go home, because he has a demonstration for us.

It's another of those very Japanese moves. Like the story in a newspaper a couple of days earlier. Two of the southern islands had voted, as an ecological move, to ban the use of chemical detergents. Wonderful. But how would they bring this about? "The Kamajima Fishery Association has passed a resolution to 'seize every detergent found on the island from April.' They will confiscate any chemical detergents found at homes and give out natural soap in exchange." Yes, detergent goons will burst uninvited into your home and tear things apart snooping for contraband--but if they find any, instead of fining you or carting you off to jail, they will give you the right thing and put you on the proper path.

Gan and the police tonight are seizing our loud jam and giving us, in exchange, a demonstration of classic samurai moves.

Bare to the waist, Gan kneels on the dance floor, gripping a samurai sword with both hands. Also bare to the waist, assisting him in this solemn ritual, is the Japanese Elvis, who is, truth be told, a little too drunk to pull this off; but he will try mightily. Symmetrical roses are tattooed on his pecs. He kneels a few feet away from Gan and begins the demonstration.

It is a fierce chop-and-kick ritual, or is supposed to be, punctuated by warrior shouts of "Uuous!" that sound to my Ohio ear like what you might get by sneaking up and kicking an unsuspecting cow in the stomach. The Japanese Elvis is drunk but gaining concentration. He flashes through a series of steel-trap moves, shouting "Uuous!" with each change. It's beautiful, in its way, but it isn't Louie, Louie and is mainly hilarious to this drunk and stoned company.

Mr. Udo is not smiling until we ugly Americans manage to stop hooting and cracking up.

Then Gan goes into his ritual butcher act with the samurai sword, another brave repertoire of moves, executed above and around the head of the Japanese Elvis, who is reeling a bit by now and bellowing "Uuous!" whenever it feels right.

For several minutes, Gan carves metaphysical air with his ancestral sword, sweating, veins in his forehead ready to pop, slashing away his fizzled party and the cops and the bombed Japanese Elvis and whatever else is on his mind.

•

It is a brilliant sunshiny morning in Tokyo, first Saturday in April, and everywhere the cherry blossoms achieve their brief perfection. Down the hill outside the Hotel Okura, a bird-watcher division of groupies is spending this terrific day standing on a side-street corner, staring and staring up at the windows of our floor, the fourth, looking for signs, ready to wait all day.

Behind the drawn curtains at which they stare, a considerably more fortunate member of their ranks is lying naked beneath the sheets in the bedroom of Simmons' suite. As I go into the living room for a final interview with Gene, she smiles at me through the open door between rooms, tugging the covers an inch higher on her bare chest.

Gene is sitting in a bathrobe in the living room, having breakfast and talking to me about his jewelry, which ranges from strange to macabre and features human skulls and spiders as prevailing leitmotivs. I admire a sterling-silver bracelet shaped like a jungle-sized spider, with legs that curve grasping around the wrist. Gene then shows me a silver-studded belt inspired by Doberman collars, with an actual fat, hairy spider encased in plastic as the buckle. Next is a heart-shaped pendant made of valentinered acrylic with a real tarantula inside.

What's a nice kid from New York and former teacher of sixth grade doing with this stuff?

"I've never been able to figure out why this stuff appeals to me. It's something that's completely alien. Anything we don't understand we're fascinated by. The thing about spiders with me is they don't look like me at all. If there was any indication of what alien life forms were like, they'd probably be like bugs, spiders, because they're as completely different from human beings as the word different can mean. They don't have a real bone structure, from what I understand. Not inside--it's all outside."

From my clays as Boy Entomologist, I respond, "Yeah, there's an exoskeleton."

"Which is an amazing concept, because if you fall, you're not as susceptible to breaking bones and becoming immobile. I mean, I remember stepping on those huge superbugs in New York when I worked at the downtown law office----

"Giant cockroaches?"

"They don't go ouch or anything, they just crawl off. They are superbeings, if there ever...." His sentence trails off.

"I've read that the things most resistant to atomic attack are----"

He finishes for me. "Are bugs. Cockroaches. Not only that. Cockroaches are the life form that's existed longest on the face of this planet."

Our lofty scientific discussion drifts nowhere wonderful until Gene's attention lands on his new hot-shot Canon Super-8, with everything but a Strato-Freeze air conditioner on it. He holds it up. "I got this as a present from Bill Aucoin, our manager. We're constantly giving each other presents and things. I've also got a Polaroid SX 70 in there," indicating the bedroom, where Tutu patiently waits for round 23 or so.

What are you using them for? I wonder, innocently.

Gene goes into the bedroom and comes back with a fistful of Polaroids, which he hands me. Instant replay. They are shots of the very Tutu in the next room, frolicking nude and lewd and giving every appearance of enjoying it quite a bit. My favorite features Tutu lying buck-naked on the floor, legs bowed and spread, performing mock fellatio on the Canon Super-8. It seems to contain a hidden meaning.

"When I got the camera," Gene explains, "I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I am not a great fan of buildings and cars and stuff like that. And I figure when I'm fifty or sixty years old, I'll be able to...."

Are you making a movie?

"Yes. The movie is going to be your basic kind of porno thing. Just as a kind of record of who I've been with. Not very complete. I'm going to open up with a Warner Bros. cartoon clip"--as Bugs Bunny, he trills through the Looney Tunes theme--"with a very short subtitle and here's some flesh, barn, right into it. It'll have cartoon sound effects and everything. You know, the serious porno stuff just bores the shit out of me."

What are some of the better scenes so far?

"Some of the better scenes involve nose picking."

That's pornographic?

"I think it's perverse, because perversion has to do with displacement of things. Like, sitting on the pot is not in itself a perversion, but it's how you treat it as a social thing. For instance, if somebody was filming you taking a shit, it's perverted. Or if you were--and I love to do this--if a willing young thing was riding on top of you while you were sitting on the toilet, and as you're about to come, you flush... and you get this cool breeze beneath your...."

Why are you keeping the Polaroids and film, toward what end?

"I don't think I'll be putting on limited Kiss shows when I'm fifty years old--and in the insane asylum, the way everybody keeps telling me. I can just imagine myself balding, fifty-five, you know, in an insane asylum. I can still breathe fire. Watch, I used to be in Kiss."

"And there are also the smoke bombs and flash pods and confetti exploding in fireworks bursts."

"What Kiss does musically is Jacksonian democracy, proof that you can still make it with energy."

"'I'm left over from a couple of hundred years ago. I'd rather be Sir Lancelot than Elvis Presley.'"