Then the deputy turned to me and said, “What’d ya shoot him with, son?” So I showed him. He handed me back the gun and said, “That’s a fine gun. If I couldn’t kill a snake with that, I’d just drop it and back away slowly and wish that snake good day.”
He had no comment at all about why a guy like me might have a big revolver in a gold briefcase. We all had guns. That was Florida in 1979. And with that, the deputy left.
I decamped for the Hilton, where I had no further reptile problems. But first I insisted on a credit for the room charge, as the place had clearly been unsatisfactory. The firm and positive manner in which I had dealt with the poisonous snake convinced the manager of the reasonableness of my argument.
The incident with the snake had been a welcome distraction, but I was still plenty worried about how my equipment would do at its first show. Tex and I set up both the guitars, and we checked and rechecked until it was time to go on. I went outside and walked in circles around the building until the show started, because I couldn’t sit still. The crowd was getting bigger and by my third orbit there must have been ten thousand people in the parking lot.
I walked toward the main entrance, where fifty or more outlaw bikers had set up camp while they waited for the gates to open. I walked over to check out the bikes. One of the bikers saw my backstage pass, and he trotted over.
“Hey, man, can you get me and my buddies inside? We have some acid and other shit, too.”
I was afraid to say I never touched acid. Two more bikers joined the first one. One had a heavy chain around his neck. They were considerably dirtier and smellier than I had ever been. They appeared to cultivate filth.
“You wanna beer?”
The police were eyeing them already, wondering if they should try to arrest them for having open bottles in public. The bikers were eyeing the law, wondering if they had the balls to try to arrest them for having open bottles in public. So far, it was a standoff.
A biker with no front teeth ambled over. He grinned. I was now surrounded.
“How many of us can you get in?”
“We got some great shit.”
“You wanna bitch? We’ve got plenty if you want one. Ellie there is hot.” She didn’t have any front teeth, either.
I was reluctant to decline the female bikers, because the males looked dangerous. But I wasn’t interested in a toothless, smelly, possibly diseased female. Unsure how to frame a polite response, I stood still for a few seconds. That gave them the wrong idea.
“You queer?”
“Okay, guys, I’ll see what I can do,” I said. I pulled out my pass and went to the front door and banged hard. When the security guy opened it, I waved my pass in his face, said, “Thanks,” and headed back inside, out of sight, as quick as I could. I didn’t go out front again. I was learning about mingling with the crowds.
Backstage, I couldn’t stand still. The waiting was killing me. I kept talking to myself: Is my stuff going to work? How many minutes till the show starts? I walked to the back door, hoping the air would be fresher. It wasn’t. There weren’t any bikers out back, though, so I stepped out.
Now there was a crowd gathered by the back entrance to see the band drive in. I tucked my pass out of sight. There were people dressed up as KISS look-alikes, ten-year-old girls with their mothers, even a guy dressed like a medieval magician. As the parking lot filled, I found myself driven to the edge of the grass.
I walked back around to the front, keeping an eye out for reptiles, went back in, and made my way to the front of the stage. There was an aisle there, with a six-foot-high crowd barrier and security guys patrolling back and forth like guard dogs in a prison. We nodded to each other as we passed. Some of them had sticks, and I had a gun. We were ready. I watched the audience pour into the hall. Would my stuff work?
Finally, it was showtime. The band opened with “King of the Night Time World,” and moved into “Radioactive.” I was so wound up, I didn’t even hear them Then it was time. Ace picked up the smoking guitar and began to play his solo. I didn’t even breathe as I watched for his fingers to turn the knob that fired the bombs. When he cranked it, I heard the snap through the speakers, and the light glared from the front of the guitar while smoke poured out.
Still he kept playing, and the smoke kept getting thicker. Now the audience was on its feet. They were applauding! For my guitar! I was thrilled. I was so relieved, I almost collapsed as Ace’s solo wound down and the song came to an end. The lights dimmed and he handed my guitar off for another one for the next song. But there was still one guitar to go…
A few songs later, Ace picked it up and stood facing away from the audience as he turned it on. The whole stage was dark. Everyone could see something flashing behind him, but no one knew what it was. He lit into the opening chords of “New York Groove,” then turned around and the audience roared. I couldn’t believe it. It was probably the proudest moment of my life, seeing the audience respond to my guitar like that. It was the hit of the show, and it was on the TV news that night. I was ecstatic. For once, everyone loved me.
Backstage after the show, Ace was all over me with questions about the guitars. “Ampie, can you make one that shoots rockets? Can you make one shoot nine-millimeter pistol ammunition? Can you make a laser guitar? Can we make the smoking guitar fly? Can we blow it up at the end of the song?”
“Sure, we can do all that.” I sounded confident, even though my head was spinning. But I knew I could do it. And I was sure Jim and Little Bear would help. Ace had five brand-new Les Paul guitars for spares. I took one out and retreated into my corner to consider the next move.
When I got up the next day, I felt like a new person. My stuff had worked! I had proven myself. I had been so afraid it would all be a failure, and that I would head home in disgrace. All of a sudden, I was on top of the world. The tour was starting, and I had stuff to build. I realized I had not come to Florida with any fresh underwear or socks. I had one pair of pants, and two T-shirts. I needed clean clothes.
Two hours and five hundred dollars later, I was transformed. Gone was the old Ampie in ripped blue jeans and an outlaw biker shirt. Now I had a supply of respectable shorts and shirts with alligators and horses on them. If Orlando had only had a yacht club, I could have hung out and not been evicted. Still, I was on tour, and I’d be visiting other cities where children and salesclerks would no longer edge away slowly at my approach.
I considered getting a haircut but settled for a shower. Then it was time for lunch. The waitress smiled at me.
“I’ll have two hamburgers, a bowl of the chowder, and four glasses of iced tea. And a brownie sundae in a few minutes.” Silence. “Thanks.” I was trying to remember to be polite, and still order efficiently. I wanted my food.
The Lincoln was starting to stink from the dirty clothes in the backseat. I packed them into a box and sent it home, using the band’s FedEx account. (By the time I got back home, a few months later, the smell had dissipated. I washed them anyway, of course.) Then I went back to the civic center and talked with Ace about the guitars to come. Now I had a mission. I returned to the hotel and started making diagrams and plans.
I had figured to hand over that gallon of gin after the second show, but it didn’t work out that way. While I was putting my gear away, I was startled by a commotion at the doors. It was the DEA. They came in and headed straight backstage. I shrank behind the equipment cases to render myself less visible and waited. They came out from backstage a moment later with two of our carpenters in handcuffs, and a sack full of something. Tex said, “They’ve got a pound of coke in the bag.” They wouldn’t need my gallon of gin where they were headed. I carried that gin around for a month before I found someone else to give it to.
I remained with the tour from Lakeland on. It was a hard life, but it was exciting, and I felt good seeing how people reacted to my creations. It was a wild life, too, something I had never experienced and didn’t really know how to engage in. We played shows in sou
th Florida where coke dealers came backstage with free samples.
“Here Ampie, take some.” They had party trays with lines of coke, and punch bowls of the stuff on tables. Big bowls, like you mix cookies in at home. They also had pills. Anything you wanted, we had it.
And that wasn’t all. We had madams come backstage with free samples, too. People would ask me, “Do you get lots of girls out there on tour?” People seemed to assume girls would throw themselves at me, and that I’d take them up on their offers. But it didn’t happen that way. I was still shy about meeting people, so I never initiated conversations with girls, and I never really considered spending the night with someone I was going to have to say good-bye to the following day. The whole thing just seemed creepy to me.
And, of course, I had a girlfriend. “Who cares?” The guys would make fun of me. “When I leave home, it’s open season on every girl I can catch!” they boasted. Somehow, I just couldn’t embrace that concept. The idea of having to meet and befriend one person after another was just too scary to me.
Did any of the girls try to pick me up? I’ll never know. My sensitivity to other people’s actions was limited enough that any attempt to pick me up went unnoticed. I often felt lonely when I saw couples together, but I could not see any way I could change my own situation, so I just plodded along.
When people were drinking and doing coke around me, I often felt confused. I didn’t like feeling out of control, and I had seen people do outrageous things while they were drunk and have no memory of it the next day. The mere thought that I might do things like that was enough to make me cringe. So I didn’t know what to do.
“Relax, Ampie! Here, have a line! Here, have a drink!” An observer would have said temptation was all around me, but to me it wasn’t tempting at all. I did a few lines and I drank a few drinks—just enough to feel like I was being polite. I never felt the desire to pack in all the beer I could drink or all the coke I could snort. I just did not like how it made me feel.
The few times I was drunk or on drugs, I would close my eyes and the world would spin, and I would say to myself, When is this shit going to end? Why did I do this? It didn’t take me very long to outgrow it, if outgrow is the right word. I stopped doing drugs and liquor, and I didn’t resume.
One of the high points of any tour is being the headline act at Madison Square Garden. We were scheduled to play several shows there midway through the tour. When the road crew was setting up Ace’s guitars, a rocket went off, sending Tex to the emergency room with burned fingers. We had no spare for that guitar and I had to race to fix it. Showtime was coming, and people were starting to crowd around me in hopes I’d go faster.
“If you screw up and make us late, we’re getting fined ten thousand bucks a minute. Get that stuff up there!” Fritz, our road manager, stood over me, urging speed.
I had not screwed up. I was saving his sorry ass. I was going as fast as I could.
“Go, go, go. Fines, Ampie, fines. Don’t make us late!”
We carried it up there and started on time, and it all worked.
By 1980, my special-effects guitars were a regular part of the show. Each of the guys had a gimmick. Gene flew through the air and spat fire and blood. He also played a bass that was shaped like a bloody battle-ax. Paul had the eye, and a mirrored Ibanez guitar that reflected the spotlights. And Ace had my customized Les Paul guitars. Every show, he would start into Mick Jagger’s “2000 Man” playing a stock black Les Paul guitar. Halfway through he would step to the edge of the stage and swap guitars for the black smoker. He’d begin playing his solo, and in the middle of it he’d twist the knob that set off the smoke bomb and the lights. Ace’s projector lamp threw a square of light all the way to the back of the hall, and smoke poured from the hole. The guitar really looked like it had caught fire.
You could tell when Ace lit the smoking guitar just by listening to the audience. They loved it. We knew many KISS fans came for the spectacle, and I did my best not to disappoint them. Our pyrotechnics wizard said, “Ampie, we set off more fireworks every show than most towns shoot on the Fourth of July.” I was inclined to believe him.
After a few shows, we improved the smoking guitar still more. A second twist of the knob would fire a second, larger, smoke bomb. Ace would almost vanish in the cloud, and the smoke would spread across the stage while the heat burned the strings right off the guitar as he continued to play. As each string burned through with a ping, the audience would roar.
At that point, we would drop an invisible cable down from the ceiling. We had rigged a track up there that allowed the cable to drop down, pick something up, then lift it and swing it around—all by remote control. The cable was rigged with a coupler and a powerful electromagnet, and one of us would be at the controls to run it. The guitar had a steel hook to grab the cable. Ace would begin to swing the guitar at the end of his solo, looking like he was chopping the air with his guitar. When he felt the cable grab the hook, he’d throw the guitar out toward the audience and it would start swinging around on the cable. One of the crew would be reeling the cable in slowly, so the guitar was swinging and rising into the air. Meanwhile, I’d be standing to the side with a radio-control rig that I’d scavenged from a model airplane. I’d start flashing the lights in the guitar off and on. It would look like a lighthouse beacon, swinging and flashing, as it rose fifty feet above the stage.
From that height, the flashes would shine all the way to the back of the hall, no matter how big a place we played. And some of those places were big. It seemed like a quarter mile from the stage to the last row of seats in huge arenas like Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome. While everyone watched the guitar, Ace was stepping over and grabbing the rocket guitar to play the next part.
The rocket guitar was another Les Paul, identical in appearance to the last two. It had a three-tube rocket launcher at the end of the neck. He’d start playing his solo again, and then he’d step to the front of the stage, stamp his foot, swing the guitar to the left, and fire the first rocket. The audience could hear a bang, and they saw the flash from the end of the guitar neck. We had hung a bag of flash powder and confetti from the roof above the audience—about a hundred feet back—and we’d blow it up when he fired. The audience would think we were shooting airburst shells over their heads. It was a great effect. The crowd loved it.
Then he’d swing to the right and fire again, and we’d blow another bag of flash powder. The flash powder bombs were filled with confetti that would rain down on the crowd for ten seconds or so. As the confetti from the first two bombs was falling, he’d point his guitar up and fire the finale—straight up at the burning smoker. We’d blow up the biggest charge of all, and I’d use the radio control to shut the smoker off. When everything went dark, the crowd assumed he’d blown it up.
It worked really well, too, until we played Olympic Stadium in Munich. At that show, the charge from the rocket guitar actually hit the smoker, and it fell seventy feet and shattered in the crowd barrier in front of the stage. There was a riot as mobs swarmed over the barrier to grab chunks of guitar. There was nothing left of it.
I jetted home so we could make a new smoker, and then I flew it back to Germany. I got two first-class tickets—one for the guitar, and one for me.
18
A Real Job
By the end of the 1970s, despite my success with KISS, I was barely making a living. I was working for the big bands as much as I could, but they only needed me to get ready for a tour. Then I went home, the money ran out, and I was flat broke.
In Texas, on tour, I dined at the Mansion on Turtle Creek and charged it to the band. I ate exquisite gourmet meals served by perfectly dressed waiters on fine china. In Atlanta, I dined at Trotters, beneath oil paintings of racehorses and jockeys. Limousines and private planes ferried me from place to place.
Back in Amherst, I had a Cadillac Eldorado convertible, but I couldn’t afford the gas to drive it. I dined on Kraft macaroni and cheese. When I couldn’t af
ford milk to mix it up properly, I made a slurry of water and macaroni and powdered cheese and ate it like that. I foraged for leftover slices at Bruno’s Pizza and robbed the condiment bowls for dessert. Instead of the Plaza Hotel, with its beautiful wallpaper and marble bathrooms, I stayed at 288 Federal Street, with newspaper plastered on the walls and a plastic sink in a four-foot-square bathroom with a stand-up shower.
It wasn’t too hard being broke. Any apartment was better than living in a lean-to under a tree, as I had for a time when I first left home. The hard part was living the contrast between being rich and being broke. It was like being smart, and waking up one day to find yourself dumb as a rock, but able to remember your former brains. What I needed was stability. I needed two hundred dollars a week for ten weeks, not three thousand dollars one day and nothing for three months.
“Ampie, you should move to L.A.! You could work on films with me.”
“You should move to New York. You’d have more work than you could handle.”
Everyone was full of well-meaning advice about where I should go and what I should do. I was constantly reminded of the bright future I’d have if I moved to the big city. But I had grown up in the country. My favorite places were the Georgia countryside and the woods in Shutesbury. I didn’t like cities. They were full of people—people who made me feel anxious, people I didn’t know how to relate to. I understood animals, and I understood the country. I felt safe in the woods. I never felt safe in a city or a crowd.
And I had someone else to think about. Little Bear was at UMass at Amherst, and we had just moved in together. She couldn’t quit school, and I couldn’t leave her.