Surfing the Waves of British Heavy Metal

The below is not a comprehensive history of heavy metal, British or otherwise. Those of you who would like to read such a thing, though, can do no better than Ian Christe's Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, from which all quoted sections below are taken unless otherwise noted. This is an overview only of how I've come to organize the information based on my own interactions with it over the years.

I've previously raved about Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a memoir of "growing up metal" in North Dakota, but I'd also like to recommend Seb Hunter's lesser-known Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict, which is a little like the British version of Fargo Rock City, making it perhaps more appropriate for this particular blog.

As I'll be using the term repeatedly, a good place to start would be to ask the obvious question: Qu'est-ce que c'est le "heavy metal?" 

William S. Burroughs named a character in his 1964 novel Nova Express 'Uranium Willy, the heavy metal kid.' The critic Lester Bangs later applied the term to music. Before them, heavy metal was a nineteenth-century term used in warfare to describe firepower and in chemistry to designate elements of high molecular density. When 'Born to Be Wild songwriter John Kay howled about 'heavy metal thunder' in 1968, he was describing only the blare of motorcycles.

My own first association with the term came via Saxon, whose song "Heavy Metal Thunder" is still what erupts across my mental HQ whenever I read or hear the term. But we'll be spending plenty of time with Saxon towards the end of this blog, so we'll put the lads from Sheffield aside for now.

The term acquired its current meaning with the arrival of Black Sabbath, universally recognized as the godfather of the genre.

Still an amazingly creepy and atmospheric cover.

Without Sabbath, the phrase was an accident of poetry, the empty prophecy of a thousand monkeys hammering on typewriters in search of a Bible. (...) Emerging like the monolith in Kubrick's 2001, Sabbath was as irreducible as the bottomless sea, the everlasting sky, and the mortal soul. There was no precedent - and no literal explanation of their power was needed. Their gloomy tones were a captivating siren call to a deep unsatisfied void within modern consciousness. The rumbling sludge of heavy metal was inevitable, lying in long wait to be introduced by Black Sabbath in 1970 and adored by the massive human sprawl. (They) remain the bedrock, the heavy stone slab from which all heavy metal rises.

That description is pretty metal itself! I would place Sabbath at the forefront of what I'll call the FIRST WAVE of British Heavy Metal, alongside such luminaries as Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, UFO, and of course Led Zeppelin. (Zeppelin more or less comprises a category-of-one.) The British rock scene of the late 60s and early 70s incubated a variety of genres that all had their roots in "rock and roll," essentially, and by the end of the 70s, you had a variety of divergent directions from that common starting point. But as far as what we mean when we say "metal," Sabbath is a good catch-all answer. And still is. As Bill Ward told Guitar magazine around the time of the Reunion tour: "Today it seems like heavy metal replaced what the blues was (when we were starting.) Everybody gets up and does "Paranoid" instead of the old blues stuff."

And "Smoke on the Water," of course, which as we all know is the first riff everyone learns on an electric guitar. Ritchie Blackmore, by the way, left metal behind in later years to become a Celtic troubadour, allegedly because he grew tired of the charge that all metal was based on "stealing the blues" and wanted to showcase British music's much older roots.

While their music isn't my cup of tea, the set-up is very metal.

Back to Sabbath: I'm baffled by the variety of answers given out there in internet-land on what Sabbath's best album is. The answer is obvious; it is Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath (1973.)

There should be no confusion on this topic, yet disagreement abounds.

With uncredited keyboards by Rick Wakeman - prog rock and heavy metal would diverge many times after 1973, but it was all of a piece at one point in time.

Ozzy stole the spotlight at the 2002 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C. - taking tremendous applause from the political elite as President George W. Bush sang the praises of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," oblivious to the fact that Ozzy was once arrested for urinating on the Alamo.

Of the other bands I mentioned, UFO might be the second most influential. Outside of a couple of tunes, I'm unfamiliar with the bulk of their work, but their twin-leads sound is an oft-mentioned influence for bands who came in their wake. (Indeed, Maiden - who expanded the twin leads concept to three leads starting with Brave New World, as covered elsewhere, covers UFO's "Doctor, Doctor." Blaze sings on that, not Bruce.) You could just as easily say Thin Lizzy for the twin-leads sound, but UFO probably gets mentioned more.

Another First Wave band that casts a longer shadow than its popular success might indicate is Budgie.

Cover by Roger Dean. Another Yes connection! 

They definitely had an interesting approach to album cover design.

I knew "Breadfan" and "Crash Course in Brain Surgery" from Metallica's versions of those songs, but I'd never listened to the source material until just last week. I dig it. It's easy to hear their influence on later bands (from Van Halen to Alice In Chains and Soundgarden.)

Although I've never seen them referred to as such, I'd say the MID-WAVE of British Heavy metal is best exemplified by three acts, two of them ongoing, one deceased: Ronnie James Dio, Motörhead, and Judas Priest.

On first glance, Dio might seem out of place on that list. For one thing, he's not British. Fair enough, but he came to prominence as the lead singer of Rainbow, once Blackmore split from Deep Purple, and eventually replaced Ozzy in Black Sabbath itself. By the time he started a solo career in the 80s, he was already metal royalty, pretty much. Dio, whom a friend once referred to, respectfully, as "the Neil Diamond of heavy metal," passed away in 2010.

His legacy lives on in Bulgaria.

I had the chance to see Dio when his band toured with Maiden in 2003. Great show. The opener was Motörhead.

We arrived to the concert hall just as the show was starting, and as we were waiting in line, we heard the show start. My friend said "Oh great, we're missing 'Ace of Spades.'" Turned out, tho, we didn't; it's just that, like the Ramones, the opening strands of a great deal of Motörhead's catalog can be mistaken for "Ace of Spades." (My other anecdote from that show: the guy two rows behind me kept screaming - loud enough to be heard over the sonic assault from the stage - "MAKE MY EARS FUCKING BLEED! MAKE 'EM BLEED!" He was carried out by paramedics before Motörhead even finished their set. Metal.)

Motörhead has released a ridiculous amount of albums over the years and is still kicking, though for how much longer is anyone's guess. Like Keith Richards, Lemmy's continued survival remains a source of much speculation and bemusement. He had to cancel last year's European tour on account of illness, but he appears to be on the mend. 

(EDIT 12/30/2015: Lemmy passed away on Dec. 28. RIP loudly!)

Two tidbits from those articles: 1) Lemmy mentions "my friend Slash." Slash is friends with everybody, seriously. (Well, except Axl.) Whatever six-degrees-of game all these metal guys belong to, Slash is the Kevin Bacon of the bunch. And 2) (from the second) "Lemmy says he worries about the future of his beloved rock and roll as his generation eases past middle age into retirement or worse. He sees few younger artists committed enough to the tradition to carry it into the future. "'There's nobody now,' he says. 'There is going to be a huge hole, and nobody to step into it." You can see the concern on his face. 'I think it's important music. It's the constant music of this generation and the last one and the last one.'"

In non-metal circles, Judas Priest is probably best known for the movie Rock Star, based on the real-life story of Ripper Owens, or for being gay. Or for "You've Got Another Thing Coming," which has been used in commercials, movies, tv, video-games, etc. All of these things are noteworthy, of course, but this only scratches the surface of their legacy. I'm not even going to attempt to do so here, but take my word for it, when it comes to metal legends, Priest is on anyone's short list.

At one point, they were my favorite band, hands-down.

I remember being asked at the bus stop in 7th or 8th grade what my favorite song was, and I answered "Turbo Lover."

The confused looks I received in response confirmed what I already suspected: the music scene in my new home of North Smithfield, Rhode Island, was a whole lot different than it had been back in Sprendlingen and Weiderstadt in Hesse, Germany.

They got a lot of flak for "selling out" with Turbo (MTV videos, keyboards, etc.) and seemed to get self-conscious about it, as all subsequent releases got heavier and faster and, to my ears, less tuneful. I lost interest somewhere around Painkiller, although I remain tickled pink that they released an album named Jugulator - that title is too damn funny. From their back catalog, Defenders of the Faith is arguably their high point, but British Steel is a start-to-finish metal classic. Totally underrated.

Priest headlined the last day of the 1983 U.S. Festival and played to over 600,000 people. That is a staggering amount of concertgoers, especially for a concert on U.S. soil. Normally, numbers like that (though hardly ever over half-a-million; that is singular) are reserved for South American tours.

Such was the loyalty inspired by Judas Priest that impressionable new bands from abroad chose their names from every song but one on the masterful 1979 live album Unleashed in the East - Excited, Running Wild, Sinner, Ripper, Green Manalishi, Victim of Changes, Genocide and Tyrant. Only "Diamonds and Rust," a Joan Baez cover, did not inspire a namesake.

I can't recall the first time I read or heard the expression NEW WAVE of British Heavy Metal (or as it is commonly abbreviated NWOBHM) but of the three waves discussed, here, it is the only "official" one. It was created to distinguish the bands that began appearing in the wake of punk around the United Kingdom. Its two most famous alumni are Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. (Their sound became about as un-metal as you could get as the 80s wore on, but you can definitely hear the NWOBHM influence on their first album and even more on their demo EP, particularly "Getcha Rocks Off." It's still there on High and Dry and Pyromania, but that's pretty much where Def Leppard got off the NWOBHM train for good.)

I liked Maiden and Leppard pretty much from the go. At the time, I remember a few friends trying to get me into Venom.

In a scene as diverse as the NWOBHM, there had to be a place where all the despised grit and filth collected. That was unlikely Kerrang! * darling Venom, who catered to more aggressive appetites with militant Satanism and a "They want bad? We'll give them bad!" philosophy. Indebted to Kiss for inspiration and to deviant Roman emperor Caligula for execution, Venom played fast, distorted muck for the sake of speed, then sprinkled on occult imagery to scare off critics. 

* Kerrang! is the Cahiers du Cinéma / Sight and Sound of the metal world.

Venom peaked in 1984 with At War with Satan, an album featuring a 17-minute track by the same name. Indulging every excess of its considerably crazy career, Venom raunched through the complete saga of Hell's minions assaulting Heaven. In the irony-laden storyline, demons invade Heaven and toss out the angels, who then regroup in Hell and return tainted with wrath to disrupt and destroy the demonic victory party.

"Taking up an entire album side with this deranged concept was commercial blasphemy from a band with little hope of radio play."

Though it was inconceivable at the time, Venom would become of the NWOBHM's most influential bands. Their comically evil act was routinely discounted by writers and fellow musicians, but they fascinated fans. Venom could not keep a consistent tempo, their mixes were drenched in reverb and distortion to hide the ineptitude, and songs like "Poison" and "Live Like an Angel, Die Like a Devil" dissolved into howling noise by the finish.

Sounds a little like punk in that description, but no one would confuse their sound with anything but the blackest, doomsiest metal. I'd say Venom more than any other band save perhaps Witchfinder General -

Not to be confused with Witchfynde, mind you!

is the obvious prototype for the "doom metal" movement that lives on today in Norwegian death metal and the thousand-and-one subdivisions to which various bands lay claim. Venom, it should be noted, had their tongues firmly in cheek; that aspect of it seems to be missing from later doom-metal incarnations.

The ultimate platitude was reached earlier than all of these, actually, with the band Satan. I mean, that's pretty much the last stop on that train, right? You can't out-Satan Satan.

Call black metal's dress code and arcane semantics an addictive power fantasy for rejects, but it required a special rarefied sensibility for fans to don shirts depicting giant blazing pentagrams and memorize long lyrical lines of barely audible blasphemy. Constant shout-outs to Satan were distracting and distressing to the unassimilated ear, but like most youth ideologies, mock devil worship merely expressed the desire to smash societal restraints and carve a special place for unfettered fun. Or, in the words of Possessed's Larry Lalone: If you believe in all of this Satan stuff, you have to be stupid.

Then there was Grim Reaper. "Wasted Love" and "Night of the Vampire" are probably their best known tracks, but when I need an instant shot of metal hilarity, I personally go for:

I'd like to say "not at their expense, of course," but... maybe a little bit. This stuff is so powerfully ridiculous that it's hard to figure out if it wasn't parody of some kind. If you're the sort to get a kick out of such things, it doesn't get much better than "Rock You To Hell." The first candidate to make this his or her campaign song gets my vote for all eternity. Bombast metal at its silly best. 

Before moving on, I sometimes wonder if the complete lack of humor in so much of the black metal to come is in response to stuff like this. I mean, Satan comes across as kind of a goofy dude in these things. The legacy of "Rock You To Hell" lives on better, perhaps in something like Little Nicky.

"The Prince of Darkness should have a sort of distinguished look to him, and let's face facts, I'm no George Clooney..." I know a lot of people hate this movie, but practically every joke in it lands with me. And I blame bands like Venom and Grim Reaper for that.

The nearest miss of the NWOBHM era was Diamond Head. Its landmark Lightning to the Nations was recorded in 1980 and released in a plain white sleeve decorated only with the four members' autographs. The songs were also clean and modern, jammed with a fast, antiseptic heaviness that fled the dark alleys of Iron Maiden for the gleaming skyscrapers and groceries of the unborn New Britain. Though they helped define the NWOBHM with their power chords and optimism, they became disembodied observers of their own doomed career. Diamond Head was like an ethereal ghost, damned by Led Zeppelin comparisons and incapable of discovering salvation.

I'm not too familiar with Diamond Head, outside of "Am I Evil," which, of course, every Metallica fan knows start-to-finish. Ditto for Mercyfyul Fate, although of course I am passing familiar with King Diamond. No self-respecting metal fan couldn't be.

If thrash metal someday engendered a Las Vegas casino show, King Diamond would be the fake-blood-drinking emcee - wearing his black top hat and waving his trademark bone cross mic stand like a showman's cane.

Before we get to my other favorite of the NWOBHM era, a few words on Tygers of Pan Tang, who like Budgie, I'd often heard of but never listened to until only a week or so until very recently.

Good stuff. If you like Maiden, you'll enjoy Tygers of Pan Tang. The band's most famous alum is probably John Sykes, the guitarist eventually for Whitesnake, seen by a hundred million young Americans later in the 80s.

Demon was a band that never seemed to live up to the wonderfully spooky way they opened their albums, but "One Helluva Night" is a top 5 NWOBHM tune.

My brother had a Halloween party one year (I want to say 1983 or 1984) and I was told to stay upstairs and out of everyone's way. Which I did, but I came downstairs at one point to go to the kitchen/ peek in. Everyone was gone (I think out in the backyard for something or other) and this song was cranking on the stereo. I remember standing there in the doorway with this cranked, completely by myself in the house, with the chorus blaring over and over again.

Although little-known, for me it's a classic as evocative of its era as "Come On Eileen," "You Shook Me All Night Long" or many others.

Finally, Saxon. My childhood and early adolescence was absolutely saturated with these guys. It's tough to pick just one song from their catalog. That's the weird part about these guys; for a band as relatively off-the-radar as can be, on U.S. shores at least, they have 20 or 25 songs that you hear and instantly recognize as a classic, even if you've never heard it before. They just have "that sound."

True, their album covers tend towards the unremarkable:

Oh dear.

  
but Saxon remains the proverbial book never to judge by its cover(s.) Absolutely essential. Whether it's straight-up metal madness (Motorcycle Man, Warrior, Battle Cry, Power and the Glory) rock anthems (Denim and Leather, This Town Rocks,) historical storytelling (And the Band Played On, Sailing to America) swagger-riff classics (Strong Arm of the Law,) what my buddy Derek used to call "metal for sensitive hockey players" (Northern Lady, Suzy Hold On, Waiting for the Night) or my sometimes-favorite of all their tunes (Nightmare) always delivers. One of these days I will listen to the dozen albums they've released since the last new one I bought (Solid Ball of Rock.)

From 2012

Before we part, a few words on Metallica. I tried to avoid all American bands in this blog, but Metallica deserves a mention for two reasons. One, alone among any metal band in the 80s, they dramatically expanded their audience in the 90s while (practically) everyone else's shrank, making any conversation about metal that doesn't include them irrelevant. And two, it was Metallica's endless championing of obscure NWOBHM bands that led to those bands who never quite made the big time (Budgie, Killing Joke, Diamond Head, et al) receiving some recognition (not to mention royalties) for their pioneering efforts.

Whatever one may think of their later work or their battles with Napster, Metallica exemplified the NWOBHM spirit and forced the music industry to deal with them on their own terms. "Eclipsing the popularity of the entire grunge and lite punk genres, Metallica sold more than 22 million CDs in America just between 1995 and 2000, while touring and remaining internationally popular. Metallica's total career headline gross for North American shows during this period was $218 million."

Remarkable stuff for a band that grew from a couple of guys who got together just to listen to Lars Ulrich's NWOBHM tapes. Their influence even extends to Psy-Ops, and I close this trip down Headbangers' Lane with one final excerpt from Sounds of the Beast:

Unbelievably - as if it agreed that American culture was painful - U.S. Army Psychological Operations announced it was subjecting captured enemy combatants to repeated plays of "Enter Sandman" during interrogation. James Hetfield called this news "absurd and sad." (Lars Ulrich quipped "I feel horrible about this... how about firing up some Venom?") Just a few miles away, Kid Rock was using "Enter Sandman" as backing music on his USO tour to boost the morale of American troops. 

Not for the first time, the irony was totally lost on the Army. As Army Sgt. Mark Hadsell told Newsweek: "Trust me, it works. They can't take it."

No Regrets by Ace Frehley

"This is remarkable. I've never met anyone with your resistance to tranquilizers."

"Well, Doc, being a rock star is a very stressful occupation."

The cover design is mostly fine, but the "A Rock N Roll Memoir" bit is a little silly, isn't it? I'd have put "The Spaceman Speaks!" on there somewhere. And maybe a fake-blurb from Toucan Sam: "Awk!"

As Ace himself readily admits, "let's face it, my memory isn't what it used to be." So even though we get the usual cross-section of early childhood details, rock star excess stories, drunken or drugged-up escapades, and the (more or less) happy ending common to most rock star memoirs, how much of it is as-told-to-the-author and how much of it is personal recollection is never quite certain.

On one hand, this means little, so long as the end product is entertaining. And although more than one reviewer thought this book should have been titled No Details, I can safely say that it is definitely entertaining. As Eric Singer notes, even the dullest Ace stories are crazier than anyone else's:

You'll never meet another person like him. Ace Frehley stories are the absolute best. Anyone who has ever worked with Ace will verify it. One night before a Kiss show, he actually took Viagra because he wanted his dick to be hard during the concert. When I asked him why, he said, "So people can see me get hard in the costume." He even tried snorting it once (...) He thought it would get into his system faster. So Ace snorted the Viagra... but his nose swelled up instead. True story! When I tell this stuff to people, they think I'm lying or embellishing. But it's all absolutely true. 

That story is not retold in No Regrets, but rest assured the stories we do get are all equally crazy. What I like about this one is Ace's motivation for snorting the Viagra. i.e. it's a great story that Ace snorted Viagra, but it's even better when you learn he was doing it "for the fans." I love that he (and Peter. And Paul and Gene, too, let's be honest) are so convinced seeing these guys get aroused in their costumes is part of what the fans want.

Hell, maybe it is. As for what this fan wants, erections, in-costume or otherwise, ain't it. But the general zaniness of Ace's approach to things definitely is. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line (as evidenced in the tell-all books published by former assistants and girlfriends) Ace's general zaniness was overcome by general addiction, and you can feel him straining, somewhat, to relay the stories without a whiff of regret. (Despite the title.) 

Put another way, while Ace may have learned "to live without regrets," he seems somewhat reluctant to embrace his own antics as wholeheartedly as he did, say, on the Tom Synder show.

That's probably a good thing, all around. But it lends a certain sadness to things. When you read about Ace's antics in Peter's and even Gene's books, there's a certain "Oh that rapscallion - what a loon" quality to the escapades. Not as much - though not absent altogether - in No Regrets. 

Would I have been more interested, say, in a mock-memoir of an alien from the Planet Jendell sharing his account of fifty-plus years of exile on Planet Earth? Sure. Might have been a harder sell for the public, though I suspect a younger Ace would have really gone for the idea, but it points to a different problem with the idea of a Space Ace memoir: the myth of the Spaceman overshadows even the real-life-craziness of Ace Frehley.

Space Tuba

Reconciling the two is no easy task, and in the final analysis, Ace wasn't quite up to it. We get instead this relatively breezy but not exceptionally insightful collection of anecdotes and musings. 

And info on the Frehley's Comet years (and Kiss reunion tour) is similarly thin.

The most discoverable moments come when he talks about his early days, running around the Bronx with the Duckies (a street gang immortalized - or as immortalized as something can be in a nearly-forgotten film - in The Wanderers) or sneaking backstage to hang out with John Kay and Jerry Garcia and others ("For awhile there I was the Leonard Zelig of the American rock scene, popping up randomly alongside the biggest stars in the business.") or seeing Cream and The Who at the RKO Theater. It's easy to see the formation of his personality and  outlook during these passages. 

Long hair was a political statement and threatened people in authority. To be perfectly candid, I was blissfully unaware of issues of any greater significance than how to get chicks out of their clothes. I was hardly a political dissident. Any hippie tendencies I might have exhibited were strictly a matter of convenience and lifestyle. I wanted to get laid, get drunk, get high, and play in a band. I wanted a certain look onstage, and by achieving that look, I found myself getting bundled in with war protesters and demonstrators.

Despite this disclaimer, Ace's "hippieness" comes through loud and clear in other passages, particularly anything involving guardian angels or the number 27. (Gene wrote a bit about Ace's obsession with the number 27. From Gene's perspective, it wasn't so lucky, and he recommended Ace get a different one.)

Passages like these: 

You never know what life might bring… or when it might come to a screeching halt.

And it’s best to act accordingly.

Life as a rock star at the highest level is weird beyond words. It’s great in a lot of ways, obviously, but it’s disorienting, too. You very quickly begin to realize that you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Everything you do is designed to help the machine keep moving. (…) After awhile, the make-up became almost like a prison.

comprise an awful lot of the reading. On one hand, it's relevant insight. On the other, it's the sort of insight you can come up with on your own without having lived Ace Frehley's life.

But since it is Ace's life we're talking about...

INTO THE VOID

Ace was well on his way to being an alcoholic before he joined Kiss.

Alcohol, mainly beer, made me a different person, and I kind of liked that person. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Not only that, but he was smooth as silk when it came to dealing with girls. It all goes hand in hand. Women like guys who are confident, funny, cocky. A little bit dangerous. I was all of those things in a single package. I’d found girls and alcohol to be a great combination. The rock and roll would soon follow.

It wasn't until Kiss hit the big time (around the time of Destroyer) where he was introduced to cocaine, and he discovered this put him "in a whole different league as a drinker." Cocaine enabled him to stay up drinking for days at a time. He discovered this led to nuclear-war-sized hangovers, so he started gobbling tranquilizers and painkillers to mitigate them. As he points out, this wasn't quite that out of place in the anything-goes atmosphere of late-70s New York. Finding doctors to prescribe weapons-grade pharmaceuticals (and accept uncut cocaine in lieu of payment) was relatively easy.

These years are dealt with (for the most part) honestly. (I say "for the most part" because he's somewhat cagey - and it's understandable - about the amount of time he spent pretending to be sober or "working on it," when he was still quietly feeding his demons. Again, in spite of the title, you get the sense he'd rather his life story was defined a bit more by his successes than his decades of addiction.) The reader gets a contact high as Ace pals around with Belushi or heads to Studio 54 with models on his arm, snorting lines with Mick and Bianca and whomever else in the office, and the contact-jitters as he realizes he's incapable of stopping the neverending party on his own.

Being addicted to Betty * occupies a lot of your time. I’d get a large prescription of antibiotics from my doctor and make sure they came in a capsule form. Then I’d empty out a dozen capsules and very carefully refill them with cocaine. After the capsules were reassembled, I’d mark them with a tiny dot so I could tell them apart from the rest. If anyone tested the capsules for illegal drugs, the chances were better than 6 to 1 in a prescription of 90 pills that the coke wouldn’t be discovered. This type of insane planning surely sounds obsessive to a normal person, but if you’re strung out, this amount of meticulous preparation for a trip is almost commonplace.

* "Betty White" was Ace's sobriquet for cocaine.

OZONE (I'm the kind of guy...)

I have a reputation for being one of the world’s worst drivers, but that’s not entirely well deserved. I’m actually a pretty good driver; I’m just a really bad drunk driver. Trouble is, from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, whenever I got behind the wheel of a car, the odds were pretty good that I’d been drinking.

Ace's vehicular misadventures are somewhat legendary. I'll only focus on three here.

The first: After a multi-day bender, he was attempting to leave a bar in the city and head back to Connecticut when a cop spotted him love-tapping the parked car behind him as he pulled out into traffic. What followed was, as Ace recounts it, "a real life game of Grand Theft Auto where I led the police on a chase through Westchester County." Pushing his DeLorean to the limit, he managed to lose the cops - multiple times - but was busted when he pulled into a diner to use the pay phone to report the car stolen. (The car was billowing smoke, and he was battered and bloodied from the chase. But he didn't think anyone would notice, nor did he himself notice the phalanx of squad cars that surrounded the diner as he made call after call, trying to sort it out.) Needless to say, this did not end well for the Spaceman, and he spent the next day and night suffering through an agonizing withdrawal and hangover (not to mention a dawning awareness of the mess he was now in.) Cell #27, ironically enough.

Also ironic: This was how he met his AA sponsor, who was one of the cops chasing him. "If you ever want to stop living like this," he said, giving Ace his card, "call me." Eventually, Ace did, and the two have been friends ever since.

In a way I was fortunate. Had this been 25 years later, the fallout would have been much worse: mug shot on TMZ.com, video clips of my courtroom appearance on CNN, and cellphone footage of the car chase on YouTube.

The second: He and Anton Fig (drummer for many an Ace project, as well as Kiss's Dynasty and Unmasked albums) went out fishing and got wrecked, and he totaled the car on the way back. They walked away from this one (first fishing out the coolerful of trout from the trunk) and only discovered the extent of their injuries hours later at home. Reluctantly agreeing to go to the hospital, his mood brightened when the doctors sent he and Anton home with two huge bottles of Percocet.

"Jackpot!"

The third is another escaping from the cops story, this one ending with his making it home to his mansion in Wilton, CT and calling his lawyer to (somehow) get the cops who started surrounding the place to "back off." What this entailed he doesn't describe, but once he discovered that they had left, the party continued. He got out his .357 Magnum and walked out into the driveway amidst other houseguests.

I was interested in figuring out how many times a .357 Magnum bullet would ricochet off concrete walls before coming to a halt. I felt I was being scientific, figuring out the trajectory of the bullet, where it would strike, and the geometry of the angles its paths would follow. 

Although nothing bad happened as a result of these scientific inquiries - besides scaring his guests back into the house - a similar incident involving an uzi that blew up in his hand led him back to the hospital. (Apparently, the right combination of firearms, pills, coke and booze brought out his inner Sid the Science Kid.) The doctors discovered pieces of bullet shrapnel had embedded themselves in his chest.

The other: with the docs and the bullets in his chest after the uzi jams. “At one point, the surgeon asked a nurse for a magnetic probe to help locate the fragments. “I don’t think that’ll work,” I slurred. “Excuse me?” the doctor said. “Bullets are made of lead, right? How you gonna’ find ‘em with a fucking magnetic probe? Lead isn’t magnetic."

It's got to be something to be medically corrected by Ace Frehley.

SAVE YOUR LOVE

Perhaps tellingly, you end up learning more about his buddies and their antics than you do about any of the ladies involved in the Ace Frehley story. Outside of a few obviously heartfelt passages involving his daughter Monique,

Despite almost killing her as an infant when he crashed his truck through the wall of her nursery, stopping inches away from her crib. She wasn't in it at the time, but still.

not much is revealed about his personal relationships, whether with his wife Jeanette 

or with his other daughter Lindsay (fathered while he was still married to Jeanette.) We learn a bit about Jeanette's family (all Teamsters, whose extracurricular methods of persuasion he'd offer up to Kiss management when they ran into trouble) and that their first maid Ellie once vacuumed up "Mr. F's happy powder" while cleaning. That's about it. Virtually nothing is said of his time with Wendy Moore, who penned the tell-all Into the Void.

Given that book's contents, perhaps this last omission is understandable.

He has more to say about his relationships with other Kiss members, though.

Gene was a 50 year old accountant in a 23 year old body… (He) was incapable of loosening up to join the fun, even in a setting that clearly called for some spontaneity and horsing around. How seriously can you take yourself when you’re sitting there in a superhero costume and full face makeup? I love the guy, but he never, ever got it.

Gene is a sex addict in much the same way that I’m an alcoholic. He’s had a lot of unkind things to say about me over the years. Some of the criticism is legitimate. In sobriety you embrace accountability, and I can’t deny that my drinking and drug use eventually became highly disruptive and problematic. But some of the personal jabs have been harder to take, partly because we were all friends at one time, and we did do something remarkable, but also because Gene wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with. (…) He lived in a state of perpetual infestation. (…) What can I say? Gene is eccentric. Always has been.

That "we did something remarkable" bit makes me a little sad. Because it's true. It'd be nice if these guys could have just worked it out, if only on the strength of that. I mean, wouldn't it? Isn't that what any fan of any band wants, their heroes kicking back and happy about what they accomplished and the tunes they brought to your life?

But that's a rarity in the rock band world, not the routine. He trashes Gene in a few places, but (even now) he's a lot nicer about the guy than Gene ever is about him. Equally understandable, perhaps, but it's too bad. 

He sums up Gene's solo album rather amusingly: "Fucking Helen Reddy, Gene? Really?"

"Paul? I don't know. Paul basically just became Paul - a glamorous singer with sex appeal."

In other interviews, Ace has expressed some confusion about Paul's more recent assertions that the two of them were never really friends. 

"Peter, well, he had a thing for cats. What can I tell you? He became my best friend in the band and is a really sweet and sensitive guy and I miss hanging out with him."

His thoughts on Kiss are pretty much what you'd expect them to be. The long and short of it:

I can sum up the Kiss situation in five words: What goes around comes around. No matter what happens, I’ll be fine. 

That being said, in reality, I think they’re just a bunch of dirty rotten whores. Awk!

SHOT FULL OF ROCK

As aforementioned, those looking for some insight into how all those great Ace tunes came to be will get very little. There's an extended sequence on the writing of "Rocket Ride" with Sean Delaney (SPOILER ALERT: lots of coke was involved,) as well as a lot of (fun) technical details on the making of the 1978 solo album. 

He does mention how miserable a time he had during the making of Destroyer on account of Bob Ezrin, who by all accounts was a drill sergeant in the studio. Whereas Paul and Gene accepted Bob's aggressiveness as necessary to take Kiss to the next level - and perhaps it was - his attitude had the opposite effect on Ace. I can relate to this one. 

Whenever I read about a Bob Ezrin type and hear how "effective" his methods are, all I see is a bullying asshole who'd be even more effective with a shovel to the face. (Same goes for Bill Parcells.)

Bob's drug use never seemed to bother Paul and Gene funnily enough. “This was one of the things that bothered me most about Paul and Gene – they were very selective in their moral indignation.” This still appears to be the case. Despite his miserable time making the record, "if I take a step back and try to judge it objectively, I’d say it’s one of Kiss’s best studio efforts." I disagree, but what do I know? I think "Torpedo Girl" is the best song Kiss ever recorded. 

Ace adds little to the public record about Attack of the Phantoms (“I thought it was a natural step in the devolution of Kiss. We got exactly what we deserved.”) But he does write about how they had the entire amusement park to themselves and how he'd ride around at night on his motorcycle, all by himself, not a soul around, just him and the statues and the rides and the shuddered stands.

Unsurprisingly, he crashed it.

After Peter was fired, Ace found himself outvoted on everything and retreated even further into isolated drinking and drugging. The final straw was Music from... The Elder.

I knew it was a collosal mistake in judgment. Paul, Gene, and Bob didn’t get it. They went forward with the whole ridiculous concept. As anyone who knows rock and roll can tell you, concept records can be career killers for the most talented bands. The problem is instead of ending up with a masterpiece like Tommy, you could end up with Saucy Jack, Spinal Tap’s unproduced rock opera about Jack the Ripper. (…) Didn’t matter, though, I was outvoted. 

Ezrin has willingly taken considerable heat for that album over the years and admitted he was doing a lot of drugs at the time, which clouded his judgment. Dammit! I was doing a lot of drugs, too, but I could still see the project was going to be a flop. At one meeting after another, I went on record against it, but the other guys insisted on moving forward.

Ace walked away from the $15 million dollar deal Kiss's management had arranged with Polygram just to get away from having to deal with Gene and Paul. It's difficult to tell how much he made from the reunion tours, but it's probably somewhere around there. So, I guess he got it back in the end. 

I Live Five Days To Your ONE...

While No Regrets was not my favorite expose on rock star living nor a particularly revealing look at one of my all-time favorite guitarists or Kiss as a band, it's definitely fun reading. And his friendships with the other members aside, it all ends happily enough. Ace is by all accounts clean and sober these days, engaged, touring, giving interviews, and recording. I sometimes worry all of these reports are bullshit, as so many of them have turned out to be over the years. (The 20 year gap between Trouble Walkin' and Anomaly featured semiannual assurances that Ace was clean and that the new album was coming out "next spring.")

Regardless, Ace's place in the rock and roll history books is well-earned and will always be attended to with great affection by yours truly.

AWK!

Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons

In my life story I am the main character. My story is about power and the pursuit of it. Ultimately, all conflict seems to center on it: who has it, and who wants it.

If I had to choose a single passage to best summarize Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons, that might be the one. It provides the best lens through which to view the events relayed  and even the ones completely omitted from the narrative but alluded to in other Kiss books. Another one might be:

In a lot of ways, I was delusional and still am. I am one of those few guys who can look in a mirror and believe I am better looking than I actually am. This has always been the case.

It's especially for this reason that I think Gene Simmons Family Jewels was a good move for the Demon. He's difficult to humanize - especially when he's trying to do the job himself - but the affection his family obviously has for him and he for them softens his oft-times insufferable public persona.

The fabricated reality of Reality TV is pretty much a perfect fit for Gene. And at no time - at least in the episodes I've seen - do Gene and the gang come across like the Kardashians or any of the Real Housewives or whomever.

It's fairly easy to dump on Gene. He's such a goof in a lot of ways, and he says such crazy things about people and things. And not in an "I'm a crazy rock star saying crazy things" sort of way but in a double standards and I'm-going-to-bang-your-girlfriend sort of way. Not to mention he's deliberately misleading. He constantly represents both himself and the band as the biggest musical success story after the Beatles, for example. This is a dubious claim to make any way you crunch the numbers, but it's one he never tires of making.

I guess from his point of view he's just being a good businessman and up-selling his product, but such things are certainly at odds with his assertion in the preface to Kiss and Make-Up that "everything you're about to read is the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

Then again, caveat emptor.

THE EARLY YEARS 

Gene was born Chaim Witz in Israel and moved to the United States with his mother (a concentration camp survivor) when he was 8 years old. He patterned his speech after what he heard on TV, particularly Walter Cronkite. He certainly did a good job of it; listening to him, one would never know English wasn't his first language. I've never been a particular fan of Gene's vocals (or when he goes into that game-show voice in concert or interviews) but it's certainly an impressive feat to achieve stardom singing in one's third language.

It's kind of funny, too, to consider that native-born Peter was the one whose lines had to be overdubbed in Attack of the Phantoms on account of his Brooklyn accent being too thick.

Upon arrival in the States, "one of the first things I remember seeing was a Christmas billboard for Kent cigarettes, with a picture of Santa Claus smoking. He had this big cherubic face, and in the background the reindeer were up in the sky, waiting for Santa to join them. Since I had never really heard of Christ or Christmas or Santa Claus, I immediately thought, Oh, that's a rabbi smoking a cigarette. I figured that he must have been a Russian rabbi."

As a teenager, he discovered rock and roll but only as a means to end. His philosophy - which would be articulated many times in the years to come - began to take shape.

This is the big secret of being in a rock and roll band. There are no messages, there's no inner being striving to express itself through music. We all picked up guitars because we all wanted to get laid. Plain and simple. (...) Having a band was simply a tool for getting access to other things. (...) It was never about friends. It was never about hanging out. It never was, and to this day it still isn't. (...) The master plan was to create a cultural institution that was as iconic as Disney. (...) Disney is not just the theme park or the cartoons - it is anything you can imagine, from pillows to pajamas to videos. Mickey Mouse started out as a cartoon, then became part of America. Whether Mickey Mouse is respected or not is such a small issue. When you're too big to argue with, you make your own rules.

Is Elvis credible or not? Who cares? The question is moot. You may think Santa Claus doesn't have any credibility. But at a certain time of year, he rules. That's what I wanted for Kiss: to make such a big impact that authenticity or credibility would be beside the point.

Gene was (and remains) the driving force behind Kiss's merchandising. Few topics are more nebulous or lines more fine than the whole concept of "selling out." Gene's approach at least has the virtue of being unambiguous:

We have no illusions about our corporate identity - we're like any other corporation. Some rock bands are delusional. They say they're a people's band, but even they don't perform for free. Whether you have long hair or razor blades in your eyeballs, you're a corporation. (...) Americans by and large feel a little awkward talking about money or showing it off when they have it. That's why the richest men in the country walk around in jeans. When a band that has sold millions of records walks onstage in jeans, it's every bit as much of a costume as Kiss's costumes. 

At the same time, maybe not everyone gives a crap about such things? I'd say this is where Gene gets himself into trouble. He makes absolutist statements that no one could ever really back up. In this, he's no different than most people in the media, but that's hardly a standard of comparison of which to be proud. So many people disagree with him or embody a counter-ethos that you'd figure he'd at least acknowledge he doesn't speak for everyone, yet he consistently implies (if not outright insists) that anyone who does is just being dishonest.

Regardless, he at least approaches a live and let live attitude about it all, even if he does so somewhat dismissively.

Let other people go into trances and think about spirituality or Werner Erhardt. I'd rather concentrate on having something to eat. The here and now. Be glad you can get a good night's sleep and eat a good meal and, if you're lucky enough, have somebody attractive sharing your bed with you. That's about all there is to life.

He devotes a good amount of space to the early years of the band, how they came together in the local New York scene of the time, his bonding with Paul and forging the connections in the industry that would lead them to recording the first album. When it came time to choose an image for himself - the band having decided upon the course of theatricality that would define their stage presence - he mined his own preoccupations to create The Demon. One part Universal Horror movie and one part comic books

Specifically, Jack Kirby's design for Black Bolt.

And one part a codpiece that would make A Clockwork Orange's Alex blush. But that was always (part of) the point: to be over the top, to obliterate artistic pretensions with a very sincere sensationalism.

The main point (to Gene) was always to score chicks, of course:

The lifestyle really appealed to me, spending the night with a girl who wanted me just because I was in a band, whose name I barely remembered. I wanted to do (it) all the time. I understood exactly what I wanted out of the touring experience. I wasn't drinking. I wasn't using drugs. (...) There was only one more thing to do, and that was to go out and chase skirt. I got a reputation for being indiscriminate, and I suppose it was earned - I didn't have very specific tastes in women. If they were female and in my presence, I was interested.

Which brings us to...

GENE'S BINDER FULL OF WOMEN

Gene liked to take photographs of his many liaisons with the ladies of the road. Those who have seen this legendary tome have all attested to its tastelessness. He got permission from each of the girls and hasn't published it on the internet or anything like that, so I don't quite see the big deal. It isn't a crime to be tasteless. (Surely, the world proves that on an hourly basis.) But Gene's attitude about it - and his bewilderment at his subsequent girlfriends (and eventual wife's) reactions to it - is worth noting:

As far as I was concerned, it wasn't any stranger than any other road behaviors - drinking, drugs, and that kind of thing. In fact, it was quite a bit less strange, and it didn't hurt anyone.

Gene is an unabashed chauvinist and will argue - as he did with Terry Gross during his notorious Fresh Air interview - that this is just the male condition. As with his unabashed capitalism, sometimes his candor on this topic is somewhat refreshing. But it, too, gets caught up in his curious web of double standards. (Then again, as he states in the forward: every personality has contradictions, and a large personality has large contradictions.)

The AV Club takes him to task on this in their review of the book:

In Gene Simmons’ myopic mind, where his own needs and urges take precedence over everything else, collecting an extensive collection of photographic evidence of your sexual conquests (...) then sharing news of that collection with your girlfriend is a far healthier, more normal, and understandable quirk (...) than drinking some Riesling after a show or smoking a bowl before bed. After all, he isn’t a degenerate like those animals Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, merely a reasonable chap who likes to pass around a massive photo album of strangers from various towns and countries whose orifices he has penetrated. 

"Women exist to be fucked. Men exist to give him money. It’s as simple as that to him, and he seems genuinely bewildered that others think there’s more to life than that."

And speaking of Ace and Peter (from the same review:)

Simmons pats himself on the back for having the courage to deliver the unvarnished truth about Kiss in spite of what fans might think, but that mostly means he’s comfortable repeatedly trashing Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. To critics who ask how he could have treated core members of his group so coldly, he responds, “Would you want to be in a group with Criss and Frehley?” Simmons portrays himself here as a man who patiently endured Criss and Frehley’s drugged-up craziness until he was forced to replace his band’s problem children with company men eager to go along with their bosses’ wishes.

This is the revisionist version of the band's history that he's engaged in over the years. Gene never seems to recognize that a musician like Ace is never going to take someone like Gene - whom Ace nonetheless acknowledges as a decent songwriter and showman - seriously. Gene almost takes pride in the fact that he couldn't care less about jamming with other musicians and can't distinguish between different models of guitars. (This strikes me as completely at odds with his "the fans are our bosses" attitude; aren't you telling the fans you don't give a shit about your craft, just their money? If a pilot got into a cockpit and said I don't bother with all the controls and the console or the safety of the passengers; I just like the stewardesses, what would people say?)

Gene brags about his prolific songwriting, but the difference between quality and quantity seems entirely lost on him. Don't get me wrong. Gene's not a bad songwriter. But simplistic? Absolutely. I don't know if he's qualified to tell Ace what is or isn't a great Kiss tune. (Apparently, "Great Expectations," "Charisma" and "Sweet Pain" and so many others are "Kiss-level" but any of the tracks on Ace's '78 solo album aren't? Please.) I'll even go so far as to say this: of the original line-up, Gene would have been the easiest to replace. Picture the scene in The Prestige where they find the drunk actor to impersonate "the great Danton" in the magic show. With the exception of his tongue - which I don't think would have been a great loss, despite Gene's assertions that it was / is the singlemost important visual element of the band - you can't tell me they couldn't have found dozens of musicians in New York alone that could have done the job equal to or better than Gene.

So, to answer his question, "Would you want to be in a group with Criss and Frehley?" Perhaps not. But perhaps the alternative - having someone with questionable qualifications to evaluate musicianship and an equally delusional relationship with reality micromanage, manipulate and criticize everything you do under guise of being "the reasonable one" - is just as intolerable and ridiculous.

The band was designed as a democracy. This was the blueprint - it was the Beatles model. But like the Beatles, it was clear that Paul and I were in the front seat, because we were writers, and Ace and Peter were in the backseat. (...) Whenever there were decisions, we made them democratically, which didn't always make sense. If Paul and I wanted to do something and Peter and Ace didn't, we were in a stalemate. To get our way, we had to emotionally batter them, and often they felt like we were ganging up on them.

It's passages like this that best corroborate Ace's and Peter's version of events. Gene basically admits here that he and Paul actively exploited Ace's and Peter's insecurities, vulnerabilities, and fears in order to achieve their own desires. Perhaps Gene's ideas of his own power and the pursuit of it shouldn't come at his allegedly democratic bandmates' expense. He bitches about "band members who didn't see us as a unit, who sought to undo everything we accomplished," yet is this not exactly what he reveals about his own behavior in this passage?

That said, I certainly walked away from Kiss and Make-Up with sympathy for Gene's position. Drunks and druggies - particularly at the level of Ace and Peter - aren't easy to put up with for very long. And Paul and Gene had to put up with them in close quarters for agonizing lengths of time. And were forced into enabling it all, in many ways. Given the financial hits the Kiss organization withstood as a result of their antics (particularly the situation Gene and Paul found themselves in with Ace's departure, as recounted in Kiss and Sell) it's completely reasonable for Gene to have, as the kids say, simply run out of fucks to give.

LADIES IN WAITING

In between assuring the reader of his many road conquests and STD adventures, he spends a good amount of time describing his relationships with Cher, Diana Ross, and the woman who would eventually become his wife, Shannon Tweed.

It comes as something of a surprise to discover how into Gene these women actually were. (Are, I guess, in Shannon's case.) I don't think any of them would be on anyone's short list of "Most Reasonable Women of Hollywood," but each had dated rock or Hollywood royalty (or Hugh Hefner, making Ace the only member of the original line-up not to marry one of Hef's exes) and you'd just figure they'd have no time for someone as nakedly gutter-chasing as Gene.  This was a guy whose criteria for spending time with him was simple proximity.

But who can fathom such things? Gene was rich, reasonably good-looking, and led an adventurous life. He remains friends with Diana and Cher to this day, so obviously, in private, Gene must be something more than the sleazy and proudly unimaginative pig he excels at being in the public eye.

This section of the book is fun for some of his fish-out-of-water revelations:

It took me awhile to get accustomed to Los Angeles. (...) It seemed absurd in every way. I had never watched soap operas, partly because I never understood what everyone was so miserable about. In those shows everybody was good-looking. Everybody was rich. Everybody was healthy and young. And everybody was miserable. The promiscuous characters were berated and tortured for not curtailing their natural lusts. The others were talking about their innermost emotions and needs and priorities. And eventually, everyone became promiscuous. 

Once, I remember, I was in a room with a bunch of other people, friends of Cher's, and we were watching television commercials with footage of poor African children. People got sadder and sadder, and finally someone said, That's it, I'm adopting an African child. Then another one chimed in. Yeah, me too. It was almost like the Home Shopping Network of kids. I didn't know what to make of it. (...) There were lots of things like that in California.

Or celebrity interactions: 

I met Jane Fonda through Cher. Our interaction was brief. (...) She asked my opinion about a movie she had been working on and what I thought about the title The China Syndrome. She told me what it was about. I told her I didn't think much of the title. I said I preferred something like What If... The three dots following the If... would light up one at a time and start to cycle faster with a beep being heard for each visual flash. The movie came out. It was called The China Syndrome. 

Gene doesn't mention it in Kiss and Make-Up, but Lendt recounts in his book how Gene introduced one of the stagehands, a white guy whose girlfriend was black, to Diana Ross by telling her This is so-and-so and he also dates black girls. He seemed genuinely befuddled at Diana's (and the stagehand's) embarrassment.

One assumes the binder - which more than likely does not contain any pictures of Cher or Ms. Ross - is collecting dust in the closet these days. Or at least let's hope so.

The book came out before Gene and Shannon tied the knot and contains plenty of Gene's anti-marital philosophy. Which is kind of funny to read considering how it all turned out. Guess she wasn't as firmly committed to "unmarried bliss" as he makes her out to be in the book.

One final revealing passage from the "Hollywood Gene" days (on the set of Runaway:)

Kirstie Alley played my girlfriend. I got to stick a knife through her neck in the movie. That made me a really likeable fellow. I tried coming onto the actress Cynthia Rhodes. That didn't work out, so I tried her sister. That didn't work out either, so I went for one of the extras on set, a real knockout of a Canadian girl. That worked. If at first you don't succeed...

THE DEMON AND THE STARCHILD

(Neil Bogart) worried that we were projecting a gay vibe, particularly Paul. We talked to him for awhile and explained our vision of the band, which was to go beyond glam to something else. As far as the gay thing went, our feeling was that we dressed the way we felt inside, and the gay vibe really wasn't part of that.

 

Paul's sense of things is what you'd more traditionally think of as the female perspective. Call me simplistic, but I think women are less interested in the endgame, in winding up in bed with somebody, than in just being recognized for being attractive. Paul is more like that. Paul is less interested in whether the girl winds up in bed with him than in whether she finds him good-looking. I'm not interested in whether she finds me attractive; I'm only interested in whether she winds up in bed with me. 

JOURNEY OF 1000 YEARS

There's a bit in Ace's book where he describes Gene calling him up to ask if he'd take part in his roast. That Ace would consider doing it at all is remarkable considering the things Gene's said about him over the years, but that's the way Ace is. He decided not to, though, once he realized that Gene didn't really have anyone to call. He'd focused so intensely on his position in Kiss and in scoring with the groupies that he didn't leave much room for developing or maintaining friendships. When the time came to be roasted, he had to basically hire people to come in and "good-naturedly" rib him. 

In a way, that's kind of sad. But in context of everything in this book, it makes sense. Gene's world was first he and his mother and no one else, (so much so that he forbade her - in so many words - to have a boyfriend or relationship of any kind until he moved out of the house) then just Gene (this includes all his years in Kiss,) and then just Shannon, and eventually Nick and Sophie. So, really, it's not only a natural outgrowth of his entire life and perspective, it's also a story with a plausibly happy ending for him.

And the fact that he has to manufacture the appearance of friends to make fun of him is soooo Kiss that I don't think anyone could have scripted it that way and maintained plausibility. As Stephen King (someone Gene actually contacted to write the Kiss biography; King was unavailable, though) has often said, reality is the fakest thing going.