Makeup to breakup

They were offering us $850,000 each not to play! I had heard that Paul once said he wouldn’t play in a studio with us ever again. I guess now that was confirmed.

That was a lot of money for nothing, but I didn’t want to just take the money and not play. It was never just about money for me, it was always about the music. Then Doc asked us to sign a paper saying that we played on the album. I told him I couldn’t lie like that. “But the fans gotta feel you guys did the album together,” Doc protested.

I sat down with Tommy Thayer (who would eventually play guitar on all of the tracks except for two) and wrote a couple of really good songs. One, “Hope,” was a ballad that I wrote for Gigi, and, since the tour was going to be called the Psycho Circus Tour, we wrote “Psycho Circus,” a cool tune that could have been the signature song on the album. Like they would have ever let me have that. I was set to come to the studio and play the songs for Gene and Paul, but that cocksucker Thayer snuck behind my back and brought them the demos before I could play them for them. Of course I was shot down, but I complained so much that they set up a meeting for me with the producer, Bruce Fairbairn. We met for lunch at the Bel-Air Hotel. He seemed like a nice guy, another Canadian like Ezrin. And he was also wired, I realized.

Bruce put the headsets on and listened to my stuff with his eyes closed, like he was into it. He already knew they weren’t going to use any of it; they just wanted to placate me with this meeting, and that’s what he did. He listened and said, “I like what I hear, Peter, there’s a lot of emotion here, but I don’t know if it fits in the KISS genre. I’ll get back to you, I got to get back to the studio, we have a session today,” he told me.

I’m thinking, “I should be at that fucking session. This is so disrespectful.” Instead of Ace and me, they had their road manager Tommy Thayer playing guitar and a guy named Kevin Valentine playing drums. Now I was locked out of my own band’s sessions. But then I get a call that Paul wanted me to sing a ballad that he wrote with Ezrin. If I sang it, they could tell people that I appeared on the album. I listened to the song, “I Finally Found My Way,” and it was just a blatant attempt at another “Beth,” except it sucked. The lyrics were about this pitiful, pathetic loser who finally finds his way back to God or Bob Dylan or some chick, who knows?

Bruce told me that I could do the song any way I wanted, so I went in and sang it as if it was a Sam Cooke song. I gave it a bluesy feel, I sang my heart out, and Bruce loved it. Next thing I knew, Paul called me.

“We heard you were down there recording,” he said.

“Yeah, I wanted to get a feel for the song,” I said.

“Well, we listened to it and you sound like Jimmy Durante.”

This was Paul’s attempt at a joke.

“What do you want, Paul?”

“I’m going to the studio, and you come down and I’ll be right next to you in the room and make sure we do it the right way,” he said. There was one note on the song that I couldn’t really hit. So he wanted to come in and sing it with me so I could get it right.

“You mean your way. There’s no right or wrong way, there’s Paul Stanley’s way.”

I went back and sang the song and it was like going through a root canal. Paul stood there every fucking second: “No, Peter…like this.”