Free Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons Page A

the dog is crazy, but you also admire it for being fearless. If you think about it, any normal person would be scared to death getting up onstage and being scrutinized by an audience. But that never fazed me. And Paul too was driven toward this same goal: he has always been the kind of person who, though he is very intelligent, has to feel passionately about something or he doesn’t do it at all. He went to an arts magnet high school: he had to pass tests and show high achievement to be admitted. Then at college, after just a few months, he left. It wasn’t his thing. He loved rock and roll. Either of us alone might have made it, or might have cracked under the strain of all the disappointment and rejection. The two of us together, though, were unstoppable.
    None of this is to say that success was quick in coming. It wasn’t. Our early gigs were nightmares: no crowds, no money. I remember one show at the Richmond College Armory. It was a dance, but nobody came. It rained nonstop and leaked through the roof. Paul caught the crabs from a dirty mattress on the floor. Another time we played a Jewish B’nai B’rith in New Jersey. Werented a milk truck and had to drive for hours just to be incidental music in the background while all these Jewish American princesses walked around showing off their new dresses. All I knew was that we were getting paid $150 and having a chance to pick up some of these girls during our breaks. That wasn’t a great success, although I did manage to corner one girl, who started making out with me behind the curtains. But then Mom and Dad came and she had to leave. It was only five minutes, but I got a taste of her.
    The early hardship produced at least one benefit: it made us focus on our songwriting, which we knew was the only thing that would advance us as a band. Wicked Lester was, by that point, an all-original band. That wasn’t so common then; most bands were still doing R&B hits and Beatles covers, with maybe the occasional original thrown in. When we played, audiences would get into the music and then ask us what song it was. “Who did that?” they would say. When we said we did, they couldn’t believe it.

     
    Before he died, Jimi Hendrix built a studio named Electric Lady, named for his Electric Ladyland album. It was located in downtown New York, and it was one of the most advanced studios in the world, with state-of-the-art equipment and an A-list clientele. Out in Queens somewhere, Paul had met a guy who worked in the studio. His name was Ron, and he told Paul to call him up at the studio and let him know when our band was playing. Paul did, but the guy never returned his calls. Frustrated, Paul put in a more aggressive call, told the secretary that he had been calling Ron, and that if Ron didn’t call him back, his band was going to have to dissolve, and the blood would be on Ron’s hands. As it turned out, the Ron that was getting all these messages wasn’t the Ron that Paul had met at all, but rather Ron Johnson, who ran the studio. When we got him on the phone, we figured it was an opportunity we couldn’t miss. “We have this band,” we said, “and we’re really good, and you should come down and see.” He did, and he said that we had the most potential of any band he had seen, since Three Dog Night, which was a big deal at that time. At that point I was working at the PuertoRican Interagency Council by day and then going to work as a checkout guy at a deli on Fifteenth around Union Square.
    Ron Johnson decided that he wanted to do some demos for Wicked Lester. But he wasn’t quite ready for us. Paul and I hung out in the studio and did some session work. We sang background vocals on an album by Lynn Christopher and other people who actually were making records. We did demo work and got some real hands-on experience: we learned how to work a microphone and a multitrack recorder and so on. After a few months, Ron Johnson made good on his promise and started recording