Free Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons Page B

Wicked Lester with the hopes of shopping a demo to record labels. He liked our songs. He liked our look. He believed in us. Despite our brief apprenticeship, we were completely oblivious to the process of making a record. We didn’t know a thing. We spent fifteen-hour sessions at the studio with barely any sleep, and at the same time we had to keep going to work or to school. But somehow we got through it. It’s a miracle that we did, because we made every mistake you could imagine. When you’re recording a song, you punch in the vocal track only so that you can lay down the vocal track without affecting the rest of the song. The engineer who was on duty that night instead pressed a button that recorded over everything—the drums, the guitars, the bass. After we finished with the vocal, he came and told us that we had to rerecord the whole song.
    It was also our introduction to the soap opera of the music world. One of the other engineers on the session was married, but he was seeing a very exciting blonde on the side. She was always in the studio. One day the wife showed up, and she and the blonde proceeded to tear each other’s hair out. The poor engineer was in the middle, being pummeled by both sides. Everything was dramatic, bigger than life. Another time we were downstairs getting ready to record, and a stunning woman walked by. I went to talk to her, because I was always the advance scout, and convinced her to come up to the studio. Once we got there, she got right down to business. Before we knew it, she was servicing the entire band at once! This is something we had never seen except on sexy videos—mistresses and wives and catfighting and groupies crowding into the studio.
    Paul and I never left the Electric Lady. During recording sessions, we would try to pinch our behinds tight so we could hold off the inevitable moment when we would have to run to the bathroom; we just wanted to look over the shoulder of the engineer and digest as much of the scene as we possibly could.
    We finished the record, which had songs like “Molly,” “What Happened in the Darkness,” and “When the Bell Rings.” Ron started shopping it around, and pretty soon we got an offer from Epic Records. They liked what they heard, and they asked us to play at CBS Studios. We went down there, set up the amplifiers and the drums in the studio, and played the songs for them as best we could. Afterward the record execs put their heads together. Then one guy surfaced and told us, “Well, the band’s okay, but we don’t want the lead guitar player.” That was Stephen, my childhood friend. I was given the task of telling Stephen that he couldn’t be in the band. I think we had a sense that this was going to happen with Steve, but he couldn’t believe it. He felt betrayed. He wanted to know how I could do that to him, how I could let him be treated that way. It was difficult to explain, but I managed. This was one of my early lessons in the cruel division of the personal and the professional in the music business. Stephen and I remained friends after that, but it wasn’t quite the same. He reacted well to my being friendly, and my attempts were genuine. I told him that I had every intention of recording the songs that he and I had written, and I did: “She” and “Goin’ Blind” both appeared on the second KISS record. Steve has had good royalty payments from those compositions over the years. But the truth is that there’s no healing of a wound that runs as deep as that: you’re about to get to the finish line of a race you think you’re winning, and somebody pulls the rug out from under you. The decision wasn’t malicious. It really was survival. But it was one of those life-defining moments—he could have been in KISS, but it just wasn’t meant to be. He formed a band called Lover, and as KISS was growing, I would go and see him at these little clubs. The two of us would go to dinner. Those were always interesting dinners,