Chords for Paul Stanley on problems with Ace and Peter before the Reunion tour
Tempo:
107.25 bpm
Chords used:
F#
Tuning:Standard Tuning (EADGBE)Capo:+0fret
Start Jamming...
A reunion seems obvious.
It's the way to go."
Not surprisingly, it took a lot of wrangling with Peter and Ace's representative to get
a deal in place.
Ace insisted on getting more money than Peter because, as Ace put it, Peter wasn't worth
as much as he was.
"'Peter hasn't done anything,' Ace insisted.
"'He hasn't been playing, and I'm more famous than he is.'".' Of course, this was all behind Peter's back, for all the times Ace threw Peter under the bus, he should have had muscles [F#] like a professional bodybuilder. And yet Peter still saw Ace as his teammate and buddy, no matter how many times Ace offered Peter up as a sacrificial lamb. "'In the past, people had told me, the time to find out that you don't want to be in bed with somebody isn't when your clothes are off. So we spelled everything out in the contracts with those guys, ground rules, consequences for not following them, all the things we would and wouldn't do. And most importantly, we would rehearse and see how everyone responded to working together within carefully spelled out parameters. We left nothing to chance. Part of that included hiring personal trainers, not just for Peter and Ace, but for me and Gene too. We wanted the band to look the way people remembered us looking. The last thing I wanted was people to be disappointed when they saw a bunch of fat guys in tights. The trainers weren't bodybuilders or anything like that. It was about cardio and basic strength. Even so, the guy working with Peter was aghast, not only at how weak he was and how low his endurance was, but also at how little Peter was willing to work. The trainer said it was like working with an old man. Peter had a tendency to explode at the trainer about nonsense because Peter didn't like working out. Ace as usual was just lazy, but he put in his time. Alongside the physical training, we also started the rehearsal process, or tried to. We convened in LA in March, planning to rehearse for several months. It was imperative to look and sound great for these shows. We were competing not just with our past, but with people's recollections of our past. That was the challenge as I saw it. We had to recreate the impact our shows had on people at a time when nobody else did what we did. By the 90s, everybody had pyrotechnics, everybody had a show with Kiss DNA in it. All it took was money. We had to blow away a new standard. Then Ace asked, why do we need to rehearse? I know these songs like the back of my hand. It quickly became apparent that Ace didn't know the back of his hand very well. And Peter? Peter was another story. There was no point to rehearsing as a band. Peter and Ace didn't know the material, didn't know their parts. I called Tommy Thayer. Tommy knew our music inside out and would make a good coach. We wanted to be true to the original Kiss Alive versions of our classic songs. Listen Tommy, I told him, we need you to get together with Peter one on one in a rehearsal studio, just you and him, you on guitar, Peter on his drums. You need to go through all the songs with him and make sure he knows what he's doing. After the first day of working one on one with Peter, Tommy called me. Paul, he said, sounding very serious. I don't know exactly how to say this. Uh-oh. I want to see this happen more than anything for the sake of everyone involved, Tommy continued. But, well, I have to be honest with you. I don't know how you guys are going to be able to do this. He paused. Then I laughed. I assumed he was joking. No, I'm serious, Tommy said. Playing with Peter is like playing with someone who picked up drumsticks for the first time today. It's like he's never played before. He doesn't remember anything and he can't play. Somehow this didn't surprise me. Not only had Peter failed to grow musically or to hone his craft over the years, he had neglected it. I still hoped Tommy could bring him around. Give it a few more days, I said. You can do it. Tommy kept at it, recording their sessions on cassette and bringing them over to play for me afterwards or playing them to me over the phone. Listening to the tapes was frustrating. At times, Tommy would gently say things like, maybe that last bit wasn't quite right, and Peter would shout at him aggressively, don't you fucking tell me how to play drums. It was a thankless job having to be so diplomatic, having to take Peter's abuse, and for what? So Tommy, a guitar player, could teach Peter, supposedly a professional drummer, how to play his drums as well as a beginner again? In the end, Tommy taught Peter the parts like you would teach a dog a trick. It had nothing to do with music, but lo and behold, after a few weeks it started to click. Peter had learned his tricks. He could roll over and play strutter. We reconvened as a band. Now we realized Ace wasn't there yet either. I was shocked to see the full extent of the deterioration in these guys, the disrespect they had for their talents and gifts. I called Tommy again, same drill. Tommy and Ace sat face to face in a studio for hours a day, two chairs, two martial lamps, reviewing songs. Ace got up to speed much faster than Peter had. Again, we reconvened as a band. Now things started to sound better. We obviously weren't going to get to the level of the previous lineup, or any previous lineup, honestly, but there was now a bit of chemistry. We had a bit of that ragtag feel like we'd had in the early years. Finally, the day came when we went over to Gene's house and put on makeup and outfits together again for the first time, just to see how we looked. It was like time had stood still. We were those guys again. It was magical. I even let myself daydream about the possibility of not having just this moment, but of having a future, picking up where we had left off. When we got down to the business of planning the tour, Doc McGee said, We'll start at Tiger Stadium. Are you nuts? I said. I knew it was going to be a big tour, but I didn't see it at that scale. This was well over the number 10,000 that I had pegged when I had called Gene to try to persuade him to consider a reunion tour. Here, Doc was having us open at a venue that held four times that number of people. No testing the water on ticket sales, no warming up. It was chutzpah beyond anything I could muster. Doc clearly knew something we didn't. He was coming off mega tours with Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, and he knew that perception would become reality if people bought into it. Luckily, we deferred to him. Soon we had offers from venues we had played at the height of things in the 1970s. And this at a time when many of our contemporaries, bands of the 70s and 80s, seemed on the verge of extinction because of grunge and the sea change in the music industry. Meanwhile, we had huge offers on the table. It was unreal. It was like hitting the lottery again. When the tickets for the reunion tour went on sale, usually early in the morning East Coast time, I would get on the phone with Doc in the pre-dawn darkness of LA and monitor what was happening at Ticketmaster in real time. Tiger Stadium sold out in less than an hour. As the other shows went on sale, it was the same. Okay, New York just went on sale. Okay, sold out. Rolling into a second show. Second show sold out. The sun wasn't even up where I was, and we had sold out four shows at Madison Square Garden. Okay, we're into Boston. It was amazing. Doc had been right.
It's the way to go."
Not surprisingly, it took a lot of wrangling with Peter and Ace's representative to get
a deal in place.
Ace insisted on getting more money than Peter because, as Ace put it, Peter wasn't worth
as much as he was.
"'Peter hasn't done anything,' Ace insisted.
"'He hasn't been playing, and I'm more famous than he is.'".' Of course, this was all behind Peter's back, for all the times Ace threw Peter under the bus, he should have had muscles [F#] like a professional bodybuilder. And yet Peter still saw Ace as his teammate and buddy, no matter how many times Ace offered Peter up as a sacrificial lamb. "'In the past, people had told me, the time to find out that you don't want to be in bed with somebody isn't when your clothes are off. So we spelled everything out in the contracts with those guys, ground rules, consequences for not following them, all the things we would and wouldn't do. And most importantly, we would rehearse and see how everyone responded to working together within carefully spelled out parameters. We left nothing to chance. Part of that included hiring personal trainers, not just for Peter and Ace, but for me and Gene too. We wanted the band to look the way people remembered us looking. The last thing I wanted was people to be disappointed when they saw a bunch of fat guys in tights. The trainers weren't bodybuilders or anything like that. It was about cardio and basic strength. Even so, the guy working with Peter was aghast, not only at how weak he was and how low his endurance was, but also at how little Peter was willing to work. The trainer said it was like working with an old man. Peter had a tendency to explode at the trainer about nonsense because Peter didn't like working out. Ace as usual was just lazy, but he put in his time. Alongside the physical training, we also started the rehearsal process, or tried to. We convened in LA in March, planning to rehearse for several months. It was imperative to look and sound great for these shows. We were competing not just with our past, but with people's recollections of our past. That was the challenge as I saw it. We had to recreate the impact our shows had on people at a time when nobody else did what we did. By the 90s, everybody had pyrotechnics, everybody had a show with Kiss DNA in it. All it took was money. We had to blow away a new standard. Then Ace asked, why do we need to rehearse? I know these songs like the back of my hand. It quickly became apparent that Ace didn't know the back of his hand very well. And Peter? Peter was another story. There was no point to rehearsing as a band. Peter and Ace didn't know the material, didn't know their parts. I called Tommy Thayer. Tommy knew our music inside out and would make a good coach. We wanted to be true to the original Kiss Alive versions of our classic songs. Listen Tommy, I told him, we need you to get together with Peter one on one in a rehearsal studio, just you and him, you on guitar, Peter on his drums. You need to go through all the songs with him and make sure he knows what he's doing. After the first day of working one on one with Peter, Tommy called me. Paul, he said, sounding very serious. I don't know exactly how to say this. Uh-oh. I want to see this happen more than anything for the sake of everyone involved, Tommy continued. But, well, I have to be honest with you. I don't know how you guys are going to be able to do this. He paused. Then I laughed. I assumed he was joking. No, I'm serious, Tommy said. Playing with Peter is like playing with someone who picked up drumsticks for the first time today. It's like he's never played before. He doesn't remember anything and he can't play. Somehow this didn't surprise me. Not only had Peter failed to grow musically or to hone his craft over the years, he had neglected it. I still hoped Tommy could bring him around. Give it a few more days, I said. You can do it. Tommy kept at it, recording their sessions on cassette and bringing them over to play for me afterwards or playing them to me over the phone. Listening to the tapes was frustrating. At times, Tommy would gently say things like, maybe that last bit wasn't quite right, and Peter would shout at him aggressively, don't you fucking tell me how to play drums. It was a thankless job having to be so diplomatic, having to take Peter's abuse, and for what? So Tommy, a guitar player, could teach Peter, supposedly a professional drummer, how to play his drums as well as a beginner again? In the end, Tommy taught Peter the parts like you would teach a dog a trick. It had nothing to do with music, but lo and behold, after a few weeks it started to click. Peter had learned his tricks. He could roll over and play strutter. We reconvened as a band. Now we realized Ace wasn't there yet either. I was shocked to see the full extent of the deterioration in these guys, the disrespect they had for their talents and gifts. I called Tommy again, same drill. Tommy and Ace sat face to face in a studio for hours a day, two chairs, two martial lamps, reviewing songs. Ace got up to speed much faster than Peter had. Again, we reconvened as a band. Now things started to sound better. We obviously weren't going to get to the level of the previous lineup, or any previous lineup, honestly, but there was now a bit of chemistry. We had a bit of that ragtag feel like we'd had in the early years. Finally, the day came when we went over to Gene's house and put on makeup and outfits together again for the first time, just to see how we looked. It was like time had stood still. We were those guys again. It was magical. I even let myself daydream about the possibility of not having just this moment, but of having a future, picking up where we had left off. When we got down to the business of planning the tour, Doc McGee said, We'll start at Tiger Stadium. Are you nuts? I said. I knew it was going to be a big tour, but I didn't see it at that scale. This was well over the number 10,000 that I had pegged when I had called Gene to try to persuade him to consider a reunion tour. Here, Doc was having us open at a venue that held four times that number of people. No testing the water on ticket sales, no warming up. It was chutzpah beyond anything I could muster. Doc clearly knew something we didn't. He was coming off mega tours with Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, and he knew that perception would become reality if people bought into it. Luckily, we deferred to him. Soon we had offers from venues we had played at the height of things in the 1970s. And this at a time when many of our contemporaries, bands of the 70s and 80s, seemed on the verge of extinction because of grunge and the sea change in the music industry. Meanwhile, we had huge offers on the table. It was unreal. It was like hitting the lottery again. When the tickets for the reunion tour went on sale, usually early in the morning East Coast time, I would get on the phone with Doc in the pre-dawn darkness of LA and monitor what was happening at Ticketmaster in real time. Tiger Stadium sold out in less than an hour. As the other shows went on sale, it was the same. Okay, New York just went on sale. Okay, sold out. Rolling into a second show. Second show sold out. The sun wasn't even up where I was, and we had sold out four shows at Madison Square Garden. Okay, we're into Boston. It was amazing. Doc had been right.
Key:
F#
F#
F#
F#
F#
F#
F#
F#
A reunion seems obvious.
It's the way to go."
Not surprisingly, it took a lot of wrangling with Peter and Ace's representative to get
a deal in place.
Ace insisted on getting more money than Peter because, as Ace put it, Peter wasn't worth
as much as he was.
"'Peter hasn't done anything,' Ace insisted.
"'He hasn't been playing, and I'm more famous than he is.'".' Of course, this was all behind Peter's back, for all the times Ace threw Peter under the bus, he should have had muscles [F#] like a professional bodybuilder. And yet Peter still saw Ace as his teammate and buddy, no matter how many times Ace offered Peter up as a sacrificial lamb. _ "'In the past, people had told me, the time to find out that you don't want to be in bed with somebody isn't when your clothes are off. So we spelled everything out in the contracts with those guys, ground rules, consequences for not following them, all the things we would and wouldn't do. And most importantly, we would rehearse and see how everyone responded to working together within carefully spelled out parameters. We left nothing to chance. _ _ Part of that included hiring personal trainers, not just for Peter and Ace, but for me and Gene too. We wanted the band to look the way people remembered us looking. The last thing I wanted was people to be disappointed when they saw a bunch of fat guys in tights. The trainers weren't bodybuilders or anything like that. It was about cardio and basic strength. Even so, the guy working with Peter was aghast, not only at how weak he was and how low his endurance was, but also at how little Peter was willing to work. The trainer said it was like working with an old man. Peter had a tendency to explode at the trainer about nonsense because Peter didn't like working out. Ace as usual was just lazy, but he put in his time. _ Alongside the physical training, we also started the rehearsal process, or tried to. We convened in LA in March, planning to rehearse for several months. It was imperative to look and sound great for these shows. We were competing not just with our past, but with people's recollections of our past. That was the challenge as I saw it. We had to recreate the impact our shows had on people at a time when nobody else did what we did. By the 90s, everybody had pyrotechnics, everybody had a show with Kiss DNA in it. All it took was money. We had to blow away a new standard. _ _ Then Ace asked, why do we need to rehearse? I know these songs like the back of my hand. It quickly became apparent that Ace didn't know the back of his hand very well. And Peter? Peter was another story. There was no point to rehearsing as a band. Peter and Ace didn't know the material, didn't know their parts. I called Tommy Thayer. Tommy knew our music inside out and would make a good coach. We wanted to be true to the original Kiss Alive versions of our classic songs. Listen Tommy, I told him, we need you to get together with Peter one on one in a rehearsal studio, just you and him, you on guitar, Peter on his drums. You need to go through all the songs with him and make sure he knows what he's doing. _ After the first day of working one on one with Peter, Tommy called me. Paul, he said, sounding very serious. I don't know exactly how to say this. Uh-oh. I want to see this happen more than anything for the sake of everyone involved, Tommy continued. But, well, I have to be honest with you. I don't know how you guys are going to be able to do this. He paused. Then I laughed. I assumed he was joking. No, I'm serious, Tommy said. Playing with Peter is like playing with someone who picked up drumsticks for the first time today. It's like he's never played before. He doesn't remember anything and he can't play. _ Somehow this didn't surprise me. Not only had Peter failed to grow musically or to hone his craft over the years, he had neglected it. I still hoped Tommy could bring him around. Give it a few more days, I said. You can do it. _ Tommy kept at it, recording their sessions on cassette and bringing them over to play for me afterwards or playing them to me over the phone. Listening to the tapes was frustrating. At times, Tommy would gently say things like, maybe that last bit wasn't quite right, and Peter would shout at him aggressively, don't you fucking tell me how to play drums. It was a thankless job having to be so diplomatic, having to take Peter's abuse, and for what? So Tommy, a guitar player, could teach Peter, supposedly a professional drummer, how to play his drums as well as a beginner again? In the end, Tommy taught Peter the parts like you would teach a dog a trick. It had nothing to do with music, but lo and behold, after a few weeks it started to click. Peter had learned his tricks. He could roll over and play strutter. _ _ We reconvened as a band. Now we realized Ace wasn't there yet either. I was shocked to see the full extent of the deterioration in these guys, the disrespect they had for their talents and gifts. _ I called Tommy again, same drill. Tommy and Ace sat face to face in a studio for hours a day, two chairs, two martial lamps, reviewing songs. Ace got up to speed much faster than Peter had. _ Again, we reconvened as a band. Now things started to sound better. We obviously weren't going to get to the level of the previous lineup, or any previous lineup, honestly, but there was now a bit of chemistry. We had a bit of that ragtag feel like we'd had in the early years. _ Finally, the day came when we went over to Gene's house and put on makeup and outfits together again for the first time, just to see how we looked. It was like time had stood still. We were those guys again. It was magical. I even let myself daydream about the possibility of not having just this moment, but of having a future, picking up where we had left off. _ When we got down to the business of planning the tour, Doc McGee said, We'll start at Tiger Stadium. Are you nuts? I said. I knew it was going to be a big tour, but I didn't see it at that scale. This was well over the number 10,000 that I had pegged when I had called Gene to try to persuade him to consider a reunion tour. Here, Doc was having us open at a venue that held four times that number of people. No testing the water on ticket sales, no warming up. _ It was chutzpah beyond anything I could muster. Doc clearly knew something we didn't. He was coming off mega tours with Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, and he knew that perception would become reality if people bought into it. Luckily, we deferred to him. _ Soon we had offers from venues we had played at the height of things in the 1970s. And this at a time when many of our contemporaries, bands of the 70s and 80s, seemed on the verge of extinction because of grunge and the sea change in the music industry. Meanwhile, we had huge offers on the table. It was unreal. It was like hitting the lottery again. _ When the tickets for the reunion tour went on sale, usually early in the morning East Coast time, I would get on the phone with Doc in the pre-dawn darkness of LA and monitor what was happening at Ticketmaster in real time. Tiger Stadium sold out in less than an hour. As the other shows went on sale, it was the same. Okay, New York just went on sale. Okay, sold out. Rolling into a second show. Second show sold out. _ The sun wasn't even up where I was, and we had sold out four shows at Madison Square Garden. Okay, we're into Boston. _ It was amazing. Doc had been right. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
It's the way to go."
Not surprisingly, it took a lot of wrangling with Peter and Ace's representative to get
a deal in place.
Ace insisted on getting more money than Peter because, as Ace put it, Peter wasn't worth
as much as he was.
"'Peter hasn't done anything,' Ace insisted.
"'He hasn't been playing, and I'm more famous than he is.'".' Of course, this was all behind Peter's back, for all the times Ace threw Peter under the bus, he should have had muscles [F#] like a professional bodybuilder. And yet Peter still saw Ace as his teammate and buddy, no matter how many times Ace offered Peter up as a sacrificial lamb. _ "'In the past, people had told me, the time to find out that you don't want to be in bed with somebody isn't when your clothes are off. So we spelled everything out in the contracts with those guys, ground rules, consequences for not following them, all the things we would and wouldn't do. And most importantly, we would rehearse and see how everyone responded to working together within carefully spelled out parameters. We left nothing to chance. _ _ Part of that included hiring personal trainers, not just for Peter and Ace, but for me and Gene too. We wanted the band to look the way people remembered us looking. The last thing I wanted was people to be disappointed when they saw a bunch of fat guys in tights. The trainers weren't bodybuilders or anything like that. It was about cardio and basic strength. Even so, the guy working with Peter was aghast, not only at how weak he was and how low his endurance was, but also at how little Peter was willing to work. The trainer said it was like working with an old man. Peter had a tendency to explode at the trainer about nonsense because Peter didn't like working out. Ace as usual was just lazy, but he put in his time. _ Alongside the physical training, we also started the rehearsal process, or tried to. We convened in LA in March, planning to rehearse for several months. It was imperative to look and sound great for these shows. We were competing not just with our past, but with people's recollections of our past. That was the challenge as I saw it. We had to recreate the impact our shows had on people at a time when nobody else did what we did. By the 90s, everybody had pyrotechnics, everybody had a show with Kiss DNA in it. All it took was money. We had to blow away a new standard. _ _ Then Ace asked, why do we need to rehearse? I know these songs like the back of my hand. It quickly became apparent that Ace didn't know the back of his hand very well. And Peter? Peter was another story. There was no point to rehearsing as a band. Peter and Ace didn't know the material, didn't know their parts. I called Tommy Thayer. Tommy knew our music inside out and would make a good coach. We wanted to be true to the original Kiss Alive versions of our classic songs. Listen Tommy, I told him, we need you to get together with Peter one on one in a rehearsal studio, just you and him, you on guitar, Peter on his drums. You need to go through all the songs with him and make sure he knows what he's doing. _ After the first day of working one on one with Peter, Tommy called me. Paul, he said, sounding very serious. I don't know exactly how to say this. Uh-oh. I want to see this happen more than anything for the sake of everyone involved, Tommy continued. But, well, I have to be honest with you. I don't know how you guys are going to be able to do this. He paused. Then I laughed. I assumed he was joking. No, I'm serious, Tommy said. Playing with Peter is like playing with someone who picked up drumsticks for the first time today. It's like he's never played before. He doesn't remember anything and he can't play. _ Somehow this didn't surprise me. Not only had Peter failed to grow musically or to hone his craft over the years, he had neglected it. I still hoped Tommy could bring him around. Give it a few more days, I said. You can do it. _ Tommy kept at it, recording their sessions on cassette and bringing them over to play for me afterwards or playing them to me over the phone. Listening to the tapes was frustrating. At times, Tommy would gently say things like, maybe that last bit wasn't quite right, and Peter would shout at him aggressively, don't you fucking tell me how to play drums. It was a thankless job having to be so diplomatic, having to take Peter's abuse, and for what? So Tommy, a guitar player, could teach Peter, supposedly a professional drummer, how to play his drums as well as a beginner again? In the end, Tommy taught Peter the parts like you would teach a dog a trick. It had nothing to do with music, but lo and behold, after a few weeks it started to click. Peter had learned his tricks. He could roll over and play strutter. _ _ We reconvened as a band. Now we realized Ace wasn't there yet either. I was shocked to see the full extent of the deterioration in these guys, the disrespect they had for their talents and gifts. _ I called Tommy again, same drill. Tommy and Ace sat face to face in a studio for hours a day, two chairs, two martial lamps, reviewing songs. Ace got up to speed much faster than Peter had. _ Again, we reconvened as a band. Now things started to sound better. We obviously weren't going to get to the level of the previous lineup, or any previous lineup, honestly, but there was now a bit of chemistry. We had a bit of that ragtag feel like we'd had in the early years. _ Finally, the day came when we went over to Gene's house and put on makeup and outfits together again for the first time, just to see how we looked. It was like time had stood still. We were those guys again. It was magical. I even let myself daydream about the possibility of not having just this moment, but of having a future, picking up where we had left off. _ When we got down to the business of planning the tour, Doc McGee said, We'll start at Tiger Stadium. Are you nuts? I said. I knew it was going to be a big tour, but I didn't see it at that scale. This was well over the number 10,000 that I had pegged when I had called Gene to try to persuade him to consider a reunion tour. Here, Doc was having us open at a venue that held four times that number of people. No testing the water on ticket sales, no warming up. _ It was chutzpah beyond anything I could muster. Doc clearly knew something we didn't. He was coming off mega tours with Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, and he knew that perception would become reality if people bought into it. Luckily, we deferred to him. _ Soon we had offers from venues we had played at the height of things in the 1970s. And this at a time when many of our contemporaries, bands of the 70s and 80s, seemed on the verge of extinction because of grunge and the sea change in the music industry. Meanwhile, we had huge offers on the table. It was unreal. It was like hitting the lottery again. _ When the tickets for the reunion tour went on sale, usually early in the morning East Coast time, I would get on the phone with Doc in the pre-dawn darkness of LA and monitor what was happening at Ticketmaster in real time. Tiger Stadium sold out in less than an hour. As the other shows went on sale, it was the same. Okay, New York just went on sale. Okay, sold out. Rolling into a second show. Second show sold out. _ The sun wasn't even up where I was, and we had sold out four shows at Madison Square Garden. Okay, we're into Boston. _ It was amazing. Doc had been right. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _