Chords for Paul Stanley on the downfall of KISS during the Dynasty tour
Tempo:
127.2 bpm
Chords used:
Abm
Tuning:Standard Tuning (EADGBE)Capo:+0fret
Start Jamming...
Bill A'Coin brought in Vinny, who had produced Peter's solo album, to appease Peter.
By this point we were stuck in an ongoing yo-yoing process with Ace and Peter.
Are they in or out?
Can we keep this going?
Bill and Sean Delaney's relationship was fraying at the same time.
Sean was sent off to work on a few of Bill's other bands and then he just disappeared.
We basically never saw him again once he and Bill split up.
So Bill needed Vinny to be the peacemaker.
We found out later that anyone hired to work with us at this time [Abm] got briefed by Bill about
what you could and couldn't say to each guy.
He made sure we were insulated in this artificial world where nobody ruffled our feathers.
People were told what we each liked, what offended each of us, what we each needed to hear.
People were paid to tell us what we wanted to hear and it was hard to make a distinction
between motive and heartfelt opinion.
We were in an Elvis bubble.
People literally held open doors for us.
Someone opened the door at the studio and there was always a catered meal.
Bill knew us inside and out.
He knew how to placate each one of us and keep us happy.
That is a manager's job, particularly when confronted with four people as volatile and
[N] combustible as we were at the time.
But those people were enablers too.
Nobody wanted the gravy train to stop.
To Vinny's credit though, he didn't want Peter to play on Dynasty despite their relationship.
For Peter, Vinny was a buddy.
But for Vinny, this was a job and Peter was no longer capable of playing what was asked
for and needed.
So Vinny brought in Anton Figg to play the drums.
Anton had been in a coin-managed band called Spider and had played on Ace's solo LP.
He later went on to play in David Letterman's house band.
We worked out a deal.
Anton was paid well, but we weren't paying for secrecy.
Rumors did swirl that Peter wasn't on the album, but we never felt the need to address them.
We never thought about actually kicking Peter out, at least not yet.
For now, it would remain the four of us, as always.
With Vinny at the helm, the album wasn't really a rock album.
But then again, we weren't really a rock band anymore.
We were a bunch of rich guys who lacked a primal spirit.
Of course, we also never felt we had to play by anybody else's rules.
What was musically acceptable to us broadened over time.
For some people, it was fine that we did things our way, until we didn't do things their way.
That constituted a betrayal.
When I heard I Was Made For Loving You being played back in the studio, I was blown away.
Yeah, it wasn't Detroit Rock City or Love Gun, but it was undeniable.
Another band came into the studio while it was playing and they loved it too.
It was universal, something that grabbed you the first time you heard it.
Was it calculated?
Yeah.
Was it calculated to succeed?
Yes, ultimately it was.
But was that a bad thing?
It started as a challenge to myself to see whether I could write in that style instead
of meat and potatoes rock and roll.
It was no different from the challenge I gave myself with Hard Luck Woman.
The only difference was the style.
No apologies for a hit that people worldwide still want to hear and sing along to.
The show we mounted to support the release of Dynasty was no longer a rock show.
It was more like HR puffing stuff on ice.
It was something that perhaps in some ways we consciously maneuvered toward.
Over time, the band had evolved to include a broader demographic than in the beginning,
but the change in our live presentation was just one of many missteps made at the time.
We wore ridiculous outfits for the Dynasty tour, like Vegas or Disney characters jumping
around in our colorful outfits.
I don't consider what we normally wear to be costumes, but the clothes we wore on that
tour certainly were.
I had a layered lavender top.
I guess the thought was that the black and silver look we'd always had was too hard
edged, so now we were going to add an individual color for each guy based on the halo color
on each of our solo albums.
It was horrible.
I had designed the stage hexagonal with elevators that brought us up to stage level.
We paid a fortune for a laser curtain to ring the whole stage.
This was the early days of lasers, though, so they were very dangerous and water-cooled and big.
It never worked properly.
We spent years in court trying to get our money back for that laser curtain.
We also had two complete stages built in anticipation of the need to leapfrog to alternating cities.
We could add dates in one city while another crew erected the second stage at our next
destination, allowing us to satisfy ticket demand in one place and then play the next
place without an off-date to tear down and rebuild the stage.
Without Sean around, Bill brought in a choreographer named Kenny Ortega to try to tinker with the show.
Kenny went on to work on stage shows from Michael Jackson and Cher, movies like Dirty
Dancing, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and High School Musical, and the music video that some
blamed for killing Billy Squire's career, Rock Me Tonight.
Bill also brought in a guy named Joe Gannon to work as a stage manager and direct our
show like a Broadway musical.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the tour was in trouble from the start.
It wasn't a good omen when our first show was cancelled.
We figured we would be doing multiple nights in most markets, but for the most part, that didn't happen.
We [Abm] had already had a few two and three night stands on our last tour in 1977, so what was next?
More nights, obviously.
Nope.
Fewer.
The bottom got pulled right out from under us.
It was shocking and scary to see that instead of getting bigger, we were getting smaller,
as it seemed people were having second thoughts about coming to see us.
Why aren't they coming?
We had sanitized ourselves and were well on our way to extinguishing the fire that had
propelled us so far.
We stayed at a hotel opposite the Forum in LA when we played there, and I looked out
the window and broke out in a cold sweat because I saw so many kids and families standing in
line, which at that time could only backfire on us.
The line could just as easily have been for the circus.
There was an upside, though.
I saw a lot of apparently single moms with their kids in tow.
I could tell somebody, blonde mom in row three, have her and Junior come backstage after the
show and then send Junior off for a tour of the stage.
But it was all wrong.
[N]
By this point we were stuck in an ongoing yo-yoing process with Ace and Peter.
Are they in or out?
Can we keep this going?
Bill and Sean Delaney's relationship was fraying at the same time.
Sean was sent off to work on a few of Bill's other bands and then he just disappeared.
We basically never saw him again once he and Bill split up.
So Bill needed Vinny to be the peacemaker.
We found out later that anyone hired to work with us at this time [Abm] got briefed by Bill about
what you could and couldn't say to each guy.
He made sure we were insulated in this artificial world where nobody ruffled our feathers.
People were told what we each liked, what offended each of us, what we each needed to hear.
People were paid to tell us what we wanted to hear and it was hard to make a distinction
between motive and heartfelt opinion.
We were in an Elvis bubble.
People literally held open doors for us.
Someone opened the door at the studio and there was always a catered meal.
Bill knew us inside and out.
He knew how to placate each one of us and keep us happy.
That is a manager's job, particularly when confronted with four people as volatile and
[N] combustible as we were at the time.
But those people were enablers too.
Nobody wanted the gravy train to stop.
To Vinny's credit though, he didn't want Peter to play on Dynasty despite their relationship.
For Peter, Vinny was a buddy.
But for Vinny, this was a job and Peter was no longer capable of playing what was asked
for and needed.
So Vinny brought in Anton Figg to play the drums.
Anton had been in a coin-managed band called Spider and had played on Ace's solo LP.
He later went on to play in David Letterman's house band.
We worked out a deal.
Anton was paid well, but we weren't paying for secrecy.
Rumors did swirl that Peter wasn't on the album, but we never felt the need to address them.
We never thought about actually kicking Peter out, at least not yet.
For now, it would remain the four of us, as always.
With Vinny at the helm, the album wasn't really a rock album.
But then again, we weren't really a rock band anymore.
We were a bunch of rich guys who lacked a primal spirit.
Of course, we also never felt we had to play by anybody else's rules.
What was musically acceptable to us broadened over time.
For some people, it was fine that we did things our way, until we didn't do things their way.
That constituted a betrayal.
When I heard I Was Made For Loving You being played back in the studio, I was blown away.
Yeah, it wasn't Detroit Rock City or Love Gun, but it was undeniable.
Another band came into the studio while it was playing and they loved it too.
It was universal, something that grabbed you the first time you heard it.
Was it calculated?
Yeah.
Was it calculated to succeed?
Yes, ultimately it was.
But was that a bad thing?
It started as a challenge to myself to see whether I could write in that style instead
of meat and potatoes rock and roll.
It was no different from the challenge I gave myself with Hard Luck Woman.
The only difference was the style.
No apologies for a hit that people worldwide still want to hear and sing along to.
The show we mounted to support the release of Dynasty was no longer a rock show.
It was more like HR puffing stuff on ice.
It was something that perhaps in some ways we consciously maneuvered toward.
Over time, the band had evolved to include a broader demographic than in the beginning,
but the change in our live presentation was just one of many missteps made at the time.
We wore ridiculous outfits for the Dynasty tour, like Vegas or Disney characters jumping
around in our colorful outfits.
I don't consider what we normally wear to be costumes, but the clothes we wore on that
tour certainly were.
I had a layered lavender top.
I guess the thought was that the black and silver look we'd always had was too hard
edged, so now we were going to add an individual color for each guy based on the halo color
on each of our solo albums.
It was horrible.
I had designed the stage hexagonal with elevators that brought us up to stage level.
We paid a fortune for a laser curtain to ring the whole stage.
This was the early days of lasers, though, so they were very dangerous and water-cooled and big.
It never worked properly.
We spent years in court trying to get our money back for that laser curtain.
We also had two complete stages built in anticipation of the need to leapfrog to alternating cities.
We could add dates in one city while another crew erected the second stage at our next
destination, allowing us to satisfy ticket demand in one place and then play the next
place without an off-date to tear down and rebuild the stage.
Without Sean around, Bill brought in a choreographer named Kenny Ortega to try to tinker with the show.
Kenny went on to work on stage shows from Michael Jackson and Cher, movies like Dirty
Dancing, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and High School Musical, and the music video that some
blamed for killing Billy Squire's career, Rock Me Tonight.
Bill also brought in a guy named Joe Gannon to work as a stage manager and direct our
show like a Broadway musical.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the tour was in trouble from the start.
It wasn't a good omen when our first show was cancelled.
We figured we would be doing multiple nights in most markets, but for the most part, that didn't happen.
We [Abm] had already had a few two and three night stands on our last tour in 1977, so what was next?
More nights, obviously.
Nope.
Fewer.
The bottom got pulled right out from under us.
It was shocking and scary to see that instead of getting bigger, we were getting smaller,
as it seemed people were having second thoughts about coming to see us.
Why aren't they coming?
We had sanitized ourselves and were well on our way to extinguishing the fire that had
propelled us so far.
We stayed at a hotel opposite the Forum in LA when we played there, and I looked out
the window and broke out in a cold sweat because I saw so many kids and families standing in
line, which at that time could only backfire on us.
The line could just as easily have been for the circus.
There was an upside, though.
I saw a lot of apparently single moms with their kids in tow.
I could tell somebody, blonde mom in row three, have her and Junior come backstage after the
show and then send Junior off for a tour of the stage.
But it was all wrong.
[N]
Key:
Abm
Abm
Abm
Abm
Abm
Abm
Abm
Abm
_ Bill A'Coin brought in Vinny, who had produced Peter's solo album, to appease Peter.
By this point we were stuck in an ongoing yo-yoing process with Ace and Peter.
Are they in or out?
Can we keep this going?
_ Bill and Sean Delaney's relationship was fraying at the same time.
Sean was sent off to work on a few of Bill's other bands and then he just disappeared. _
We basically never saw him again once he and Bill split up.
So Bill needed Vinny to be the peacemaker.
_ We found out later that anyone hired to work with us at this time [Abm] got briefed by Bill about
what you could and couldn't say to each guy.
He made sure we were insulated in this artificial world where nobody ruffled our feathers.
People were told what we each liked, what offended each of us, what we each needed to hear.
_ People were paid to tell us what we wanted to hear and it was hard to make a distinction
between motive and heartfelt opinion.
_ We were in an Elvis bubble.
People literally held open doors for us.
Someone opened the door at the studio and there was always a catered meal.
Bill knew us inside and out.
He knew how to placate each one of us and keep us happy.
That is a manager's job, particularly when confronted with four people as volatile and
[N] combustible as we were at the time.
But those people were enablers too.
Nobody wanted the gravy train to stop.
_ To Vinny's credit though, he didn't want Peter to play on Dynasty despite their relationship.
For Peter, Vinny was a buddy.
But for Vinny, this was a job and Peter was no longer capable of playing what was asked
for and needed.
_ So Vinny brought in Anton Figg to play the drums.
_ Anton had been in a coin-managed band called Spider and had played on Ace's solo LP.
He later went on to play in David Letterman's house band.
_ We worked out a deal.
Anton was paid well, but we weren't paying for secrecy.
_ Rumors did swirl that Peter wasn't on the album, but we never felt the need to address them.
We never thought about actually kicking Peter out, at least not yet.
For now, it would remain the four of us, as always.
_ With Vinny at the helm, the album wasn't really a rock album.
But then again, we weren't really a rock band anymore.
We were a bunch of rich guys who lacked a primal spirit.
Of course, we also never felt we had to play by anybody else's rules.
What was musically acceptable to us broadened over time.
For some people, it was fine that we did things our way, until we didn't do things their way.
That constituted a betrayal.
_ When I heard I Was Made For Loving You being played back in the studio, I was blown away.
Yeah, it wasn't Detroit Rock City or Love Gun, but it was undeniable.
Another band came into the studio while it was playing and they loved it too.
It was universal, something that grabbed you the first time you heard it.
_ Was it calculated?
Yeah.
Was it calculated to succeed?
Yes, ultimately it was.
But was that a bad thing?
It started as a challenge to myself to see whether I could write in that style instead
of meat and potatoes rock and roll.
It was no different from the challenge I gave myself with Hard Luck Woman.
_ The only difference was the style.
No apologies for a hit that people worldwide still want to hear and sing along to.
_ The show we mounted to support the release of Dynasty was no longer a rock show.
It was more like HR puffing stuff on ice.
It was something that perhaps in some ways we consciously maneuvered toward. _
Over time, the band had evolved to include a broader demographic than in the beginning,
but the change in our live presentation was just one of many missteps made at the time.
We wore ridiculous outfits for the Dynasty tour, like Vegas or Disney characters jumping
around in our colorful outfits.
I don't consider what we normally wear to be costumes, but the clothes we wore on that
tour certainly were.
I had a layered lavender top.
I guess the thought was that the black and silver look we'd always had was too hard
edged, so now we were going to add an individual color for each guy based on the halo color
on each of our solo albums.
It was horrible.
_ _ I had designed the stage hexagonal with elevators that brought us up to stage level.
We paid a fortune for a laser curtain to ring the whole stage.
This was the early days of lasers, though, so they were very dangerous and water-cooled and big.
It never worked properly.
We spent years in court trying to get our money back for that laser curtain.
We also had two complete stages built in anticipation of the need to leapfrog to alternating cities.
We could add dates in one city while another crew erected the second stage at our next
destination, allowing us to satisfy ticket demand in one place and then play the next
place without an off-date to tear down and rebuild the stage. _ _
Without Sean around, Bill brought in a choreographer named Kenny Ortega to try to tinker with the show.
Kenny went on to work on stage shows from Michael Jackson and Cher, movies like Dirty
Dancing, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and High School Musical, and the music video that some
blamed for killing Billy Squire's career, Rock Me Tonight.
Bill also brought in a guy named Joe Gannon to work as a stage manager and direct our
show like a Broadway musical. _
_ Perhaps not surprisingly, the tour was in trouble from the start.
It wasn't a good omen when our first show was cancelled.
_ We figured we would be doing multiple nights in most markets, but for the most part, that didn't happen.
We [Abm] had already had a few two and three night stands on our last tour in 1977, so what was next?
More nights, obviously.
Nope.
Fewer.
The bottom got pulled right out from under us.
It was shocking and scary to see that instead of getting bigger, we were getting smaller,
as it seemed people were having second thoughts about coming to see us.
Why aren't they coming?
_ We had sanitized ourselves and were well on our way to extinguishing the fire that had
propelled us so far.
We stayed at a hotel opposite the Forum in LA when we played there, and I looked out
the window and broke out in a cold sweat because I saw so many kids and families standing in
line, which at that time could only backfire on us.
The line could just as easily have been for the circus.
There was an upside, though.
I saw a lot of apparently single moms with their kids in tow.
I could tell somebody, blonde mom in row three, have her and Junior come backstage after the
show and then send Junior off for a tour of the stage.
But it was all wrong.
[N] _ _
By this point we were stuck in an ongoing yo-yoing process with Ace and Peter.
Are they in or out?
Can we keep this going?
_ Bill and Sean Delaney's relationship was fraying at the same time.
Sean was sent off to work on a few of Bill's other bands and then he just disappeared. _
We basically never saw him again once he and Bill split up.
So Bill needed Vinny to be the peacemaker.
_ We found out later that anyone hired to work with us at this time [Abm] got briefed by Bill about
what you could and couldn't say to each guy.
He made sure we were insulated in this artificial world where nobody ruffled our feathers.
People were told what we each liked, what offended each of us, what we each needed to hear.
_ People were paid to tell us what we wanted to hear and it was hard to make a distinction
between motive and heartfelt opinion.
_ We were in an Elvis bubble.
People literally held open doors for us.
Someone opened the door at the studio and there was always a catered meal.
Bill knew us inside and out.
He knew how to placate each one of us and keep us happy.
That is a manager's job, particularly when confronted with four people as volatile and
[N] combustible as we were at the time.
But those people were enablers too.
Nobody wanted the gravy train to stop.
_ To Vinny's credit though, he didn't want Peter to play on Dynasty despite their relationship.
For Peter, Vinny was a buddy.
But for Vinny, this was a job and Peter was no longer capable of playing what was asked
for and needed.
_ So Vinny brought in Anton Figg to play the drums.
_ Anton had been in a coin-managed band called Spider and had played on Ace's solo LP.
He later went on to play in David Letterman's house band.
_ We worked out a deal.
Anton was paid well, but we weren't paying for secrecy.
_ Rumors did swirl that Peter wasn't on the album, but we never felt the need to address them.
We never thought about actually kicking Peter out, at least not yet.
For now, it would remain the four of us, as always.
_ With Vinny at the helm, the album wasn't really a rock album.
But then again, we weren't really a rock band anymore.
We were a bunch of rich guys who lacked a primal spirit.
Of course, we also never felt we had to play by anybody else's rules.
What was musically acceptable to us broadened over time.
For some people, it was fine that we did things our way, until we didn't do things their way.
That constituted a betrayal.
_ When I heard I Was Made For Loving You being played back in the studio, I was blown away.
Yeah, it wasn't Detroit Rock City or Love Gun, but it was undeniable.
Another band came into the studio while it was playing and they loved it too.
It was universal, something that grabbed you the first time you heard it.
_ Was it calculated?
Yeah.
Was it calculated to succeed?
Yes, ultimately it was.
But was that a bad thing?
It started as a challenge to myself to see whether I could write in that style instead
of meat and potatoes rock and roll.
It was no different from the challenge I gave myself with Hard Luck Woman.
_ The only difference was the style.
No apologies for a hit that people worldwide still want to hear and sing along to.
_ The show we mounted to support the release of Dynasty was no longer a rock show.
It was more like HR puffing stuff on ice.
It was something that perhaps in some ways we consciously maneuvered toward. _
Over time, the band had evolved to include a broader demographic than in the beginning,
but the change in our live presentation was just one of many missteps made at the time.
We wore ridiculous outfits for the Dynasty tour, like Vegas or Disney characters jumping
around in our colorful outfits.
I don't consider what we normally wear to be costumes, but the clothes we wore on that
tour certainly were.
I had a layered lavender top.
I guess the thought was that the black and silver look we'd always had was too hard
edged, so now we were going to add an individual color for each guy based on the halo color
on each of our solo albums.
It was horrible.
_ _ I had designed the stage hexagonal with elevators that brought us up to stage level.
We paid a fortune for a laser curtain to ring the whole stage.
This was the early days of lasers, though, so they were very dangerous and water-cooled and big.
It never worked properly.
We spent years in court trying to get our money back for that laser curtain.
We also had two complete stages built in anticipation of the need to leapfrog to alternating cities.
We could add dates in one city while another crew erected the second stage at our next
destination, allowing us to satisfy ticket demand in one place and then play the next
place without an off-date to tear down and rebuild the stage. _ _
Without Sean around, Bill brought in a choreographer named Kenny Ortega to try to tinker with the show.
Kenny went on to work on stage shows from Michael Jackson and Cher, movies like Dirty
Dancing, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and High School Musical, and the music video that some
blamed for killing Billy Squire's career, Rock Me Tonight.
Bill also brought in a guy named Joe Gannon to work as a stage manager and direct our
show like a Broadway musical. _
_ Perhaps not surprisingly, the tour was in trouble from the start.
It wasn't a good omen when our first show was cancelled.
_ We figured we would be doing multiple nights in most markets, but for the most part, that didn't happen.
We [Abm] had already had a few two and three night stands on our last tour in 1977, so what was next?
More nights, obviously.
Nope.
Fewer.
The bottom got pulled right out from under us.
It was shocking and scary to see that instead of getting bigger, we were getting smaller,
as it seemed people were having second thoughts about coming to see us.
Why aren't they coming?
_ We had sanitized ourselves and were well on our way to extinguishing the fire that had
propelled us so far.
We stayed at a hotel opposite the Forum in LA when we played there, and I looked out
the window and broke out in a cold sweat because I saw so many kids and families standing in
line, which at that time could only backfire on us.
The line could just as easily have been for the circus.
There was an upside, though.
I saw a lot of apparently single moms with their kids in tow.
I could tell somebody, blonde mom in row three, have her and Junior come backstage after the
show and then send Junior off for a tour of the stage.
But it was all wrong.
[N] _ _