Kiss and Makeup

Someday soon, just after the final chords of Rock and Roll All Nite ring out on the Shea Stadium stage, I will pick up my bass and exit stage right. After I experienced 29 glorious and tumultuous years filled with the highest highs and the lowest lows, America will have seen the last of Kiss onstage. America was our home. Americans were our people. And playing the final show will be bittersweet, to say the least.

Thirty years ago, there was no Kiss. There was only Gene Simmons, an aspiring rock musician in New York City. Ten years before that, there was no Gene Simmons--only Gene Klein, a Jewish kid who lived in Queens with his single mother. And 10 years before that, there wasn't even a Gene Klein--only Chaim Witz, a poor boy growing up in Haifa, Israel. All those people, of course, were me, and I was all those people. I was born in Israel, saw the world change around me when I came to America with my mother and then began to change myself--first my name, then my face. When I picked up a bass, it was a kind of transformation. When I put on face paint, it was a kind of transformation.

And when I took the stage, it was the most profound transformation of them all. In the process, I had managed to help steer Kiss to the pinnacle of rock and roll: We would eventually stand right behind the Beatles in the number of gold-record awards by any group in history.

The Early Days A band is like a puzzle. Some of the pieces get filled in right away, and some take a little longer. At first, Paul Stanley and I had a vague idea of what we wanted our band to be like, but as time went on, we began to hone in on what we were trying to achieve. We saw plenty of bands doing things we didn't like, and every time we saw them, we were able to refine our vision. Paul and I were primarily songwriters and singers. We could play instruments, but at demo level. We needed the rest of a band to fully realize our vision. First on the list was a drummer. One afternoon I ran across an ad in Rolling Stone that read, "Drummer available--will do anything." I called the guy, and even though he was in the middle of a party, he took my call. I introduced myself and said we were starting a band and looking for a drummer, and was he willing to do anything to make it? He said he was, right away.

He answered almost too quickly. So I slowed him down.

"Look," I said, "this is a specific kind of band. We have very particular ideas about how we're going to make it. What happens if I ask you to wear a dress while you play?" He covered up the phone and repeated the question to a guy in the background, who laughed. I went on: "What happens if I ask you to wear red lipstick or other makeup?" By now, the people in the background were beside themselves. But the drummer answered my question. No problem, he said. "Are you fat?" I asked. "Do you have facial hair?" Because if he did, I explained, he would have to shave it. We didn't want to be like a San Francisco hippie band. We wanted to be big stars, not medium stars who looked like hippies or truck drivers. We were going to put together a band the world had never seen. We were going to grab the world by the scruff of its neck and....

I guess I went on too long, because at some point the drummer stopped me. "Why don't you just come and see me?" he said. "I'm playing at a club in Brooklyn on Saturday."

Saturday came, and Paul and I took the subway all the way down to the end of Brooklyn, to this small Italian club, whose clientele could easily have been actors on The Sopranos. There were maybe 20 people there, all of them milling around, drinking beer and watching this trio onstage. The bass player and guitar player looked like soldiers for the Genovese family. The drummer was something else entirely. He had a shag haircut that looked like Rod Stewart's on a good day, and he wore a big gray scarf. He outdressed everybody in that club, and he looked like a star.

They were playing mostly soul covers, and when they did In the Midnight Hour, the drummer started to sing, and this Wilson Pickett-style voice came out of him. Paul and I said, "That's it, that's our drummer." His name was Peter Crisscoula. We shortened it to Peter Criss. We brought Peter into our loft on 23rd Street and began to play as a trio. It was 1972 and things were moving more quickly now: We had songs we were happy with, and our look was starting to crystallize--we were even starting to wear makeup, although it was far cruder than it eventually became.

This new version of the band needed to go before Epic to see if they were interested. The record label sent down the vice president of A&R. He came to the loft, where we had set up a little theater--10 rows of four seats--to simulate the feeling of playing in front of a live audience. He sat down, and we played the three songs that we were most confident with: Deuce, written by me, Strutter, written by Paul and me, and Firehouse, written by Paul. The set went well, although we weren't sure the A&R guy exactly understood what we were about. I was wearing a sailor's uniform, and I had my hair puffed out and painted silver. At the end of Firehouse, there was a stage move we had worked out where Paul grabbed a pail filled with confetti and tossed the contents over the audience. He went for the pail, and as he flung it toward the seats, I saw a look of terror on the A&R guy's face. Clearly he thought the pail was filled with water. He leaped to his feet and headed for the door.

Around this time Paul and I recognized that if we were going to change the band--hire new players, write new music--we should probably have a new name. One day Paul, Peter and I were driving around, and we started brain-storming for names. I had thought of a few, like Albatross, but I wasn't happy with any of them. At one point Paul said, "How about Kiss?" Peter and I nodded, and that was it. It made sense. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and since then people have talked about all the benefits of the name: how it seemed to sum up certain things about glam rock at the time, and how it was perfect for international marketing because it was a simple word that people all over the world understood.

We weren't finished hiring the band, though. We still needed a lead guitar player, so we put an ad in The Village Voice. While Peter had fallen right into place as the drummer, the search for our guitarist was significantly more problematic. We went through audition after audition. One after the other, loser after loser.

One guy, Bob Kulick, had played around town, and we really liked him. While we were talking to Bob, in walked this strange-looking guy in two different-colored sneakers. One was orange and one was red. We had chairs in the back lined up so you could come in and sit and wait for your turn. Completely oblivious to the fact that we were still talking to Bob, this new guy plugged into the Marshall amplifier and started playing. "Hey," I said, "are you out of your mind? Sit down and wait a second, will you?" It was like he didn't even hear me. He just kept playing. We excused Bob and told him we would call him later. We sat this new guy down. "You'd better be good," I said, "because two notes into it, if you suck, you're out on your ass." We played him Deuce twice, and the third time he got ready to play his solo. And it just fit. Here was this troublemaker who couldn't match his sneakers and didn't have the good manners to wait his turn, and he just fit.

"What's your name?" I asked. He said it was Paul Frehley. "Well," I said, "we can't have two Pauls in the band."

At that point, he turned around and said, "Call me Ace."

I said, "Call me King." I wasn't joking. Neither was he.

Life with Cher

I met Cher in 1978 at a party Neil Bogart was throwing for Casablanca Records. I didn't really know any of the other people there--I knew some by face and by reputation but not personally. At some point in the evening I found myself talking to Cher. I introduced myself, and she didn't believe I was who I said I was. It turned out that her daughter, Chastity, was a Kiss fan and had encouraged her mother to go to the party because she knew Gene Simmons would be there. But Cher apparently had it in her mind that she would be meeting Jean Simmons, the actress. She didn't make the connection.

At that time, I was starting to think of ideas for my solo album. I thought it would be great if I could get Cher to sing on it.

At the end of the night, I went over to her place. Normally, this would have meant one thing and one thing only, but in this case it meant something else entirely. We were back at her house, and before I knew it we were talking about our lives, where we had come from, what we were like as children. I started to feel the presence of another person in the conversation. This was a strange feeling for me. She was smart, interesting and funny. At that moment I set aside any thoughts of it turning into something sexual.

The night went on, we kept talking about things--her life, my life, my record. I remember the hot chocolate because she put marshmallows in it, which I had never seen before. She seemed interested in the fact that even though I was a rock-and-roller, I could put a sentence together, and also by the fact that I was straight and had never been drunk. Cher had just come out of a relationship with Gregg Allman, who reportedly had a serious substance abuse problem. Cher was always antidrug.

Early the next morning--five or six o'clock--she drove me back to L'Ermitage Hotel, where I was staying. We parted and agreed we should talk more about my solo record. I felt there was something brewing, and I wanted to see if she was interested in going out that evening. She said she was going to see the Tubes. "Great," I said. "What time do you want me to pick you up?"

She explained she had already invited her friend Kate Jackson, who at the time was on Charlie's Angels. I didn't know Kate, but it was fine with me. Usually at a concert, I would arrive with the audience and leave with the audience. But this was different. When we went backstage, it was awkward. Some of the Tubes were taken with Cher, so I sat in the corner and talked with Kate. Finally, the backstage party was over, and we got in the car to go home. On the way back you could have heard a pin drop. Back at the house, when Cher finally spoke, she exploded. She told me she didn't take very kindly to being ignored, especially when I was coming on to her girlfriend Kate. I was speechless. When I tried to talk to her about it, she told me she never wanted to see me again.

In retrospect, I realize I should have been more aware. But I was oblivious to that kind of thing, because I hadn't had any real relationships, and because the whole jealousy thing was foreign to me. I wasn't accustomed to having conversations about how somebody else felt. I'm an only child. My mother came from incredible hardship: She was in the concentration camps. I grew up poor. I was happy if I had something to eat. For me, that was the beginning and the end of everything. If I wanted companionship, I'd get companionship. If I was tired, I went to sleep. Life was good, simple and straightforward. But at first with Cher it was neither simple nor straightforward. I called her from the hotel and said I was going to New York to work on a record, and that I would call her when I got there. "Fine," she said. "I can't talk to you now."

On my way to New York, and after I arrived, I was still thinking about her. Cher was on my mind a tremendous amount. During the day I kept calling her, under the pretense that I wanted her to sing on my record. We would speak for hours on end and I found her fascinating. Our conversations usually got personal pretty fast. Early in our relationship she had me talking about the situation with Kate, and how she was angry that I had given attention to another woman. This seemed fair to me. It made sense.

One night while I was in the company of a beautiful young woman, the phone rang. It was Cher. She wanted to know when I was coming back to California. She wanted to know when we could sit down and talk about the record. So then we started talking about us again--about Cher's feelings, about what she wanted from me. It was a strange situation made stranger by the fact that there was this beautiful girl in the other room waiting for me. I (continued on page 180) Kiss (continued from page 126) liked this girl. But there was something about the woman on the phone, a woman I hadn't been sexual with yet, that I couldn't ignore.

Cher met me at the Los Angeles airport in jeans and a T-shirt. At the time, that was one of the major differences between the coasts. California had already gone casual--it was all about dressing natural and looking natural. In New York, if you had money, you showed it on your back: silk shirts, leather pants, all those kinds of things. No one wore jeans and T-shirts except for bums. New York was the Dolls. Los Angeles was the Doobie Brothers. Before I knew it, I moved right in.

Still, when I first arrived in California, I was walking around on shaky legs. With groupies, I didn't have to explain who and what I was. Suddenly, I'm going around with Cher and being a father figure to her children, going on walks, having conversations. I remember once Cher woke me up early in the morning. We had moved to her Malibu home. I said, "What, what?" It must have been six in the morning.

"Let's go running," she said. I said, "Where to?" I put on my leather pants and silk shirt and snakeskin boots. "You can't dress like that," she said.

"Why not?" I said.

"You've got to put on sneakers and shorts, because we're going to run on the beach."

"Why?" I said. I was dumbfounded. I mean, you didn't do that in New York. Not in 1978. Jog was not even a word I knew. In New York it was always too cold to run, and where were you going to run, anyway? It was something you did when somebody was chasing you.

So we went. There I was, running alongside Cher in my snakeskin boots, and I could barely stand up because my boots were sinking into the sand. And out on the beach I saw Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand. It was like I was on another planet.

I was being related to in a different way, for the first time in my life. Cher had her opinions about the women I had been with. I wouldn't say she was jealous, not exactly. I was a rock star and had been a rock star for quite some time, with a reputation for chasing skirts. It was the only thing I could do on the road, since I didn't drink or take drugs. What threw Cher was the photography. Since 1976 or so, I had been taking pictures of the girls I had been with, sometimes film footage. I didn't do it without their knowledge or compliance. In fact, most of the girls were thrilled about it. It was a hobby of mine, partly to keep things exciting and partly as a kind of documentary. There were so many girls--by the time I met Cher, at least a few thousand. At one point I told Cher about the photographs. It wasn't to confess, because I didn't feel guilty. I just wanted to share everything with her. She was shocked. She didn't understand why I would want to do that.

Introducing new Drummer Eric Carr

After Unmasked came out in 1980, we started to look for a new drummer. Auditions were held again in New York. Hundreds of people showed up, including this guy who was a stove cleaner in White Plains--Paul Caravello.

The moment he left the audition, we decided he should be in the band. We called him and offered him the job, and he couldn't believe it. We changed his name from Paul Caravello to Eric Carr, and we even went out and bought him a Porsche so he wouldn't feel substandard. We wanted him to know he was in the fold. He was one of us.

Bringing Eric into the band the way we did--just before a tour, with little preparation and tons of enthusiasm--was like living the beginning of our careers all over again.

Everything was brand-new for Eric. He was wide-eyed as we started our European tour and not used to the kind of fame we were experiencing. One night we were in a hotel in England, and he was downstairs in the bar. There were girls there, as always. One of them introduced herself as a photographer for Melody Maker, the British music paper. Eric talked to her for a while and gave her the complete new-rock-star rap. At one point he asked her if she wanted to come up and take nude pictures of him. She said, "Sure." So they went up, and apparently he had told her, "Look, these pictures are just for you." She said she understood completely. Eric got into a bathtub nude, holding a champagne glass with shades on and this big moptop head of hair. Apparently, they didn't spend the night together--after she took the pictures, she took off. The next day Eric related the story to us. We doubled over laughing. It was like Trust on the Road 101. "Are you out of your mind?" we said. "This girl is going to print those photos." Eric protested for a second, but then the truth dawned on him. "Oh my God!" he said. "You think she will?" Of course, she did.

Groupies

One in every 14 people in Australia had bought a Kiss record. We played multiple dates in soccer stadiums when nobody else had ever played stadiums there.

The effect of this hysteria was that we couldn't go anywhere. This might have been torture, but the Australian promoter, bless him, rented entire clubs and filled them with girls.

During one of those lavish private parties on the Australian tour, Eric became fascinated by one girl in a club. He was still wearing a camouflage outfit, and everyone else was dressed for nightlife--the guys in leather jackets and frilly shirts, and the girls in very little--except for this one girl, who looked like a female version of Eric, in a woman's camouflage outfit. She was beautiful and very shapely but Eric didn't want to go over, so I arranged for the girl to come talk to him, and the two of them hit it off. He was in the process of persuading her to go back to the hotel, and she kind of laughed and said, "Look, I can't go back with you. I'm married." Eric backed off immediately. I was amazed. "What's the problem?" I said. "If you want her to go, just invite her, and then it's up to her. Whether she's married or not, it's her choice." So he told her where we were going to be next: Melbourne, I think. And wouldn't you know it--she decided to come to see him. She got on a plane and flew to meet us.

Most guys would have been thrilled, but Eric was so nervous that by the end of the day he had horrible gas pains. He had to go to the bathroom every five minutes. Needless to say, the girl didn't hang out for long. It was like that with Eric. Something always happened to him. On another tour a few years later, when we were on the road in America touring for Creatures of the Night, Eric wrote a long letter in response to a girl who had written him. Eric was always very emotional, and it wasn't unusual for him to reply to a fan letter with a five-or 10-page handwritten answer. After he replied to one letter, he ended up having something of a friendship with this girl from Phoenix.

When we got to Phoenix on the tour, Eric told me about the girl. He couldn't wait to see her. After our sound check, Eric left, and I noticed a beautiful girl in a red dress standing at the back of the empty hall. She had on makeup, perfume, the whole thing. As was my custom, I took her into my office, which was the backstage bathroom, and threw her on the floor. We had an exchange, shall we say. We became very close friends in a number of positions, and there was a photo session afterward. There always was. Then she happily left.

Later that evening, as we were putting on our makeup, I told Eric about my liaison. He wasn't really listening; he was still preoccupied with his Phoenix girl. So we started talking about that, and I happened to ask him how he would know her, since they had never met. "Well," he said, "she told me she'd be wearing a red dress." As he was telling me what she looked like, the horror of it dawned on me. I showed him the photos from that afternoon's meet-and-greet and asked, "Is this her?" Well, he was devastated. I apologized. I told him I didn't know. And that wasn't even the end of it. That night back at the hotel the two of them met, and he was very upset with her. They fought, and he threw her out, and she came down the hall for a second visit with me.

I didn't want Eric to be upset with me--not over this or anything else. I tried to give him the lay of the land and told him he couldn't take any of this seriously. For me, it was about fun and games: If you go to a beauty pageant and there are four girls there, do you really care who you wind up with? But since it was new to him it really affected him.

Hef's Mansion Parties and Shannon Tweed

In 1984, during the making of Runaway, I would have enough time off during weekends that I could fly into Los Angeles and run around to parties. The best parties were at the Playboy Mansion, especially the Midsummer Night's Dream parties, which were big summer bashes with hundreds of girls in corsets and underwear and a select group of eligible bachelors. Guys were not allowed in unless they dressed in pajamas, and girls had to wear as little as possible. The ratio was something like 4:1. That's how Hugh Hefner liked his parties.

At one party I spent some time--and made some time--with a few gorgeous women, and then I ran into Richard Perry, a record producer I knew who had produced everybody from Rod Stewart to the Pointer Sisters. Perry introduced me to a girl named Shannon Tweed and her sister, Tracy. Both of them wore stiletto heels and corsets, and both were formidable--well over six feet tall. You can imagine the effect. I was devastated by Shannon in particular and did everything to try to woo her. We talked for a while. At first she wasn't interested, but after a while she came back around to talk with me. Then she took me to the library, where a secret door behind a bookcase opened into a passage that led to a wine cellar below. She sat down on a table in there, and I remembered thinking this was clearly an invitation.

But five minutes went by without any sex, and then 10 minutes. I remember just being lost in conversation with her. She came from Newfoundland and I came from Israel, and we started talking about the strangeness of America and how we both felt like fish out of water. After that we went upstairs, not having consummated our first meeting. On the way out she gave me her number and said, "Call me."

After meeting Shannon, I lost interest in the other new friends I had made that night, including Miss February.

I went back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and all that night and the next morning I tried calling her. She'd given me a wrong number. A guy answered. He had never heard of Shannon Tweed. I couldn't figure it out. Eventually, I figured I had been taken for a ride. Then, as I was watching television in my single room at the hotel, I saw a photo being pushed under my door. I got up and looked at the photo. It was a black-and-white headshot of Shannon. Then I looked on the back, and there was a handwritten note; "I've never been so insulted," it said. "If you took my number, why didn't you call me? Next time be a man and don't start anything you're not going to finish." It was that kind of letter. On the bottom it said, "If you still have the guts, here's the phone number." The number was different from the number she had given me the day before--only one digit different, but that's enough. I called her up immediately and said, "I say what I mean and mean what I say, and you gave me the wrong number."

"The wrong number?" Shannon said. "Don't you think I know my own phone number?"

"I'm just saying that the last number is different," I said. She was angry at first, but eventually she relented. I went over to see her and was overtaken with passion and lust.

This new level of intimacy made me want to share everything with Shannon. I started talking about everything, about how I was straight, had never been drunk, but that I had chased a skirt or two in my day. I even told her about the photographs. I had always felt, if I had been the girl, that I would want a picture of the experience. I'd had a few thousand liaisons and had taken photos of almost all the ladies. I told her everything that she needed to know about me. No secrets. I remember putting all the pictures on the table and letting her go through them. She couldn't believe it. She didn't understand it. But she wasn't judgmental. She has always been like that. I didn't know much about Shannon's life until we started living together. I didn't read Playboy, although I had obviously seen the magazine at friends' homes. I wasn't aware, until she showed me, how many times she had been on the cover and inside. Perhaps some men would have a problem with millions of others looking at nude photographs of the woman they were with, but I was actually proud of the fact. Nudity to me isn't an issue. Violence and drugs are. As far as I am concerned, if everyone had more sex there would be less violence.

Shannon was the girl of my dreams. She kept getting more beautiful. She never asked where I was going. She never asked when I was coming back.

One Last Kiss

We wanted to go where no band had gone before. We wanted our fans to be proud of us. We wanted to make a spectacle of ourselves. And we did. So Kiss will continue. Maybe not in the way everyone expects it to, but it will live on. There will be a Kiss cartoon and a theme park. There are already Kiss caskets. They say you can't take it with you, but I say you can.

Pucker up with Playboy's Girls of Kiss pictorial at cyber.playboy.com.