Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley Page B

would be perfect as a record cover if we made an album. The image showed the earth and a flower in outer space, crying. He looked at me and said, “You get it?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Yeah, you get it.”
    “I have no idea what that is. A flower crying on the earth? Okay.”
    Because Brooke Ostrander played flute as well as keyboards, the band worked out a cover of “Locomotive Breath,” a brand-new song by Jethro Tull. But Brooke sometimes had a problem when he sang—saliva would go down the wrong pipe and he would double over coughing. He might be singing one second and then suddenly drop out. I’d turn around and see him choking.
    Lead guitarist Steve Coronel and I didn’t always get along. After one argument, he started yelling at me. “Do you think you’re special or something?” he shouted.
    “Yeah, actually I do,” I said. “I have an aura.”
    From the look on Steve’s face you would have thought I had just shot his mother. “You think you have an aura !?”
    Steve was incensed. Then Gene spoke up.
    “He’s right, Steve,” Gene said. “He does.”

12.
    W e played a gig in early 1971 billing ourselves as Rainbow. A community college in Staten Island hosted the gig—and I got crabs for the first time.
    You can get crabs from a bed. You can get them directly from a person. But I didn’t get them from a bed or a person—which might have helped make it at least a little worthwhile. Instead, I got them from a toilet seat at that community college. Soon after the gig I started itching, but it took a while before I put two and two together. I finally realized I had crabs when I found what looked like bread crumbs in my underpants. Upon closer inspection, the crumbs were crawly things. There must have been a hundred of them. It was revolting thinking they had been living on me, feeding off my body. It was the middle of the night when I figured out what they were, and I woke up my parents and told them I was going to the emergency room. I wasn’t going to wait an instant longer to get treated—and it wasn’t like there were twenty-four-hour pharmacies back then.
    My mom was horrified that I might spread them though the house. “Honestly, Stan,” she said, “what kind of dogs are you sleeping with?”
    Once I had overcome my revulsion to the critters, I found it all very funny. And the fact that my parents were disgusted and revolted by my lifestyle was a source of pleasure to me. I might never get the approval and support from them that I so desperately sought, but hey, at least I was getting a rise out of them.
    In April 1971 the band played another show up in the Catskills, about two hours north of New York City, this time with a new name: Wicked Lester. We played fewer covers and more of the songs Gene and I had written.
    Back home in Queens, one day I popped into Middle Earth to say hello. The owner pulled a piece of paper out of the register and handed it to me. “A guy from Electric Lady was here, and we got him to leave his number,” he said. “Electric Lady” meant Electric Lady Studios, the facility built by Jimi Hendrix on Eighth Street in Manhattan. To a musician it was like Israel to the Jews. It was hallowed ground.
    I examined the note, which had the name “Ron” and a phone number scrawled on it. I couldn’t believe they’d gotten this number for me.
    I dialed it and said, “Can I speak to Ron, please?”
    “Which Ron? Shimon Ron or Ron Johnsen?”
    Well, Ron Johnsen sounded more promising somehow. “Ron Johnsen.”
    “Please hold.”
    Ron Johnsen was a producer at the studio. I was connected to his secretary and left a message with her about my band, his leaving his number at Middle Earth, the whole spiel.
    I called back the next day. Same story: Ron wasn’t available. I called back over and over again, day after day, until finally I told his secretary, “You tell him that it’s because of people like him that bands like mine break up.” That got him to the phone.