Free Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal by Jon Wiederhorn

out of here.” We told him we were going to play “Deuce” and that when we reached the solo part he should let fly. We weren’t expecting much. But we started playing and hit the solo part, and Ace blew us away. We could not believe it. We knew that was the sound of KISS.
PAUL STANLEY: We looked like rock stars, we acted like rock stars, but if you had seen our practice space at the loft at 10 East Twenty-third Street in New York, you would have laughed.
GENE SIMMONS: There was wall-to-wall humanity sleeping in the hallways of our loft, and you’d step over whatever needed a good night’s sleep to get to your practice space. We were paying $200 a month rent. The place was rat and roach infested. We covered the walls with egg cartons to muffle the sound so we could really play loud, but some of the broken eggs and the shells stuck to the cartons, and the roaches loved it. It was like an “à la carton” feast for them. After we hired Peter and Ace, we’d rehearse until one or two in the morning almost every day. When the lights went out you’d hear the roaches running all over the place. It sounded like a very bad drum solo. Once I had a girl in bed with me and when she woke up there was a dead roach under her. She didn’t appreciate that much.
PAUL STANLEY: I was driving a cab, and I got Ace [a job] doing that too for a while. We’d drive around, show up for practice, and afterwards I’d get back in my cab and make some money. We wrote “Strutter,” “Black Diamond,” and “Deuce” in that place.
    Inspired by makeup-wearing artists like the New York Dolls and David Bowie, KISS started painting their faces in early 1973, but realized almost immediately that the androgynous glam look wasn’t for them. So they went the opposite way, creating black-and-white kabuki-style designs that masked each member as a separate character. Simmons was the fire-breathing, blood-drinking demon; Stanley was the starchild; Frehley a spaceman; and Criss a cat.
GENE SIMMONS: We knew we had to move away from the New York Dolls thing. So we bought some black T-shirts and some glittery pants that circus performers wore. Then we went down to the West Village—the gay section of the city—and bought leather items at a hardcore sex shop. I don’t know why we did it—as far as I knew, none of us had ever tried the S&M or gay thing. But there was something about the studs and the leather that seemed right to us.
PAUL STANLEY: There were no I-wanna-be-a-rock-star-stores [like Hot Topic] back then. So we had no choice but to go down to the forbidden area of the city and buy our stage clothes. It wasn’t easy shopping in these stores, but we knew it would pay off.
GENE SIMMONS: We loaded in for our gigs in the afternoon because we wanted everybody to think we had a road crew. They would show up and, lo and behold, there was our equipment, which consisted of speaker cabinets with no speakers in them, just to make it look like we had a Roland amp, and we would tell the guy not to put a spotlight on them, because if they did, you’d see right through them.
PAUL STANLEY: We never wanted to play the same area too often because we wanted people to believe that we were busy. While the other trendy bands were hanging out at Max’s Kansas City doing a fashion show for each other, we were practicing.
GENE SIMMONS: Today, everybody thinks there was this great rush forward and everyone was really believing in what we were doing. The truth is very different. One time, Paul left my bass under the bed before we left for the gig. Well, you know the old adage, “Is there a doctor in the house?” We went onstage and made an announcement, “Does anybody have a bass?” This kid in the audience says he’s got one, so he goes home and gets a hack-strung bass guitar no better than the box that you have at home with the rubber bands attached to it—the worst piece of shit you ever heard in your life. Somehow we got through the show.
    Once they had