Ryan Werner
We were between the ages of twenty and thirty, a time in our lives where it seemed logical to accuse other people of being falsely modest, to first resent them for thinking they could be as fucked up as we were and then for thinking we wouldn’t notice. We started a KISS tribute band at the end of one of those lost summers we always seemed to have.
At first, it didn’t necessarily seem like we had to be KISS. At practice, we played “Shout at the Devil” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” We played “Rockin’ in the Free World” with a few of the right words but mostly just endless, mid-tempo chugging on our thickest strings and the title of the song yelled out over and over. Like the process of moving through our lives, we assumed we had options, that we merely had to let those options simmer for a while, and they would turn into opportunities.
Unlike the process of moving through our lives — our gas station jobs, our drug problems, our lack of profitable skills — we started learning KISS songs and found out rather quickly that not only could we not become anything we wanted, but that, at our best, we are only a part of something bigger than ourselves.
And, also unlike the process of moving through our lives, this was something wonderful.
The city we operated out of is Dubuque, Iowa, population 58,000. It was mostly a manufacturing city until the packing plant — once the third largest beef slaughterhouse in the nation — started to do poorly and was subsequently sold around the time Lick It Up by KISS was released. Lick It Up was an empty renaissance and The Pack going under was just empty.
After that, unemployment shot up to twenty percent. People made stickers and graffiti that said Will the Last One Leaving Dubuque Please Turn Out the Light? It’s an idiom that came from the post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel, The Stand, an unofficial city-motto akin to naming the state bird after a meal from KFC.
In 1990, the city tried to increase diversity by bringing in a hundred black families from Chicago. The Ku Klux Klan quickly convinced the already-struggling, mostly white inhabitants of Dubuque that this was a problem. Between September and October of that year, five crosses were publically burned.
KISS played the Five Flags center, because location is everything.
Things eventually got better. Dubuque ended up fifteen years later having the 22nd-ranked fastest growing economy nationwide, went from less than one percent African American to four percent, and stopped burning crosses. As for KISS, they put the make-up back on and played the hits.
Luckily for us, KISS songs are easy to play, with plenty of energy left to carry both their history and ours around our necks like almost-tuned guitars.
The named we picked was Crazy Knights, a combination of the late-80’s KISS record Crazy Nights and the Knights In Satan’s Service acronym that pastors and their wives made up to insert the coolness of the devil into what would have otherwise been sloppy musical theater. We practiced in an old warehouse in an industrial district and everything was a hassle, just the noise of life. It had been a schoolhouse years before, but by the time we got to it, it was gutted and used for storage.
The owners half-assed a remodel for three-and-a-half years. Power tools and the people who ran them were always in our way. The plumbing didn’t work except an intermittently functional toilet that, in the lengthier periods of downtime, would grow a thick film atop the water that we’d encourage one another not to puncture.
It was like practicing in a thermos or the trunk of a Buick. In the summer, we had fans that did nothing except blow the hot air all over us. We’d finish looking like we left the pool. In the winter, we’d move everything out of the open area on the main level into an eight-by-twelve room and plug in several space heaters. One was a propane flame blower that almost claimed every cable and pant leg we had until it was eventually stolen by one of the construction workers.
The owner’s kids would show up and want to use the space to practice Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. The roof leaked in a different spot every month. Most of the floor tiles were loose, damaged, or missing. The front door didn’t have a handle.
That all sounds kind of terrible, but listen: I had a Peavey Butcher from the 80s, which is the kind of amp people buy when they want to be louder than the people who buy nice things, and I turned it up so goddamn loud that it wasn’t even notes that came out of the speakers.
It too was the noise of life, but the right kind.
Some of the problems we had were regular band problems: when to practice and what songs to play and endless fucking up. Some of them were a subset of that, the kind really only found in tribute bands based on a financially successful and overly-branded juggernaut. This meant discussions about whether or not to have promo pictures taken, about whether or not to do stage banter in character, about which period of costumes to emulate, and if it’s crucial to coordinate, to spare the world from having to tolerate, on the same stage, a Love Gun Peter Criss with a Hotter than Hell Gene Simmons.
We’d rectify some of these, but were still a KISS tribute band — our biggest problem, the one that couldn’t be broken down or built up by reason.
We reduced the scale of KISS and localized it, plotted out our entire career arc in a documentary that never got made. The harmless idiocies of KISS left us plenty to pull from. Ace Frehley claiming to be an inventor. Peter Criss being the overwhelming shame of Gene Krupa’s drum tutelage. Gene Simmons buying an arena football team. Paul Stanley keeping an acoustic guitar handy whenever he has guests over, just so he can randomly serenade them with the terrible ballad, “Every Time I Look at You.”
We were obsessed with KISS: with the disease Mark St. John, guitarist on Animalize, had that caused him to quit, with what kind of heart cancer Eric Carr had, with Alice Cooper’s guitarist playing all the leads on side four of Alive II. Being in a KISS tribute band wasn’t the biggest or hardest or most important thing in our lives, but it was the most of all of those at once, the rare occasion where three essential qualities were presented and we didn’t get to pick only two.
Our buddy Harpo has the world’s largest florescent light bulb collection and a goiter the size of a water balloon. He got into heavy metal in the first go-round of it back in the 60s and 70s, saw Black Sabbath play one of the local high schools. All that stuff. If anyone we knew would be an expert, would be able to share in a life with us that we’d previously thought was impossible, it’d be him. After our first show, he was pretty much the only person who said anything to us: You should’ve been an Ozzy cover band, bud.
All said, we only played three shows. Did you think it was more? Did you think that rock and roll would make itself out to be something larger than it was?
The makeup we bought never set right. Ten songs in and we’d look more like The Cure than KISS.
Our Paul Stanley was too short. Our Peter Criss was too tall. Our Gene Simmons, for the first two shows, wore denim cut-offs that he had — for some reason never fully explained — spray-painted gold.
Me as Ace Frehley left a lot to be desired, too. My first costume was cheap black spandex with strips of white, curved foam — from ice cream cone boxes at my gas station job — poorly superglued around my wrists and chest. My next costume was a silver windshield reflector that looked much better but also — in addition to reflecting the heat from the stage lights off me — retained the majority of my body heat.
My third costume was similar, but we had pretty much fallen apart by then. It was on Christmas Day — Merry KISSmas! — and I was Ice Frehley. I didn’t even bother to shave, just put makeup around my eyes and used a can of fake frost to spray my eight-month beard white.
The actual three performances themselves I don’t remember much of. I know that I couldn’t read the setlist without my glasses and nobody seemed to care about the deep cuts we were so excited to play.
But I remember the warehouse, the practices spent playing the first twenty seconds of “Twist of Cain” by Danzig and “Reign in Blood” by Slayer, before chuffing our collective way through the twin lead part in “Detroit Rock City” for just ourselves. It didn’t matter if Ace Frehley played Marshalls and I could only afford a Peavey, if our Paul Stanley didn’t know how to tune his guitar, if our Gene Simmons and I were hardly talking to each other by the end of it, if our Peter Criss wished we were playing Motley Crüe songs instead. We all loved rock and roll and our version of it, our part of a lineage of pure, earthbound joy, and when it was loud and we were alone, we made the best sound that nobody else ever needed to hear.
“Crazy Knights” originally appeared in print in the chapbook, Maybe Don’t Drown Everything You Ever Wanted in a Mop Bucket That Isn’t Yours, from Passenger Side Books. You can buy a copy here: http://passengersidebooks.blogspot.com.
RYAN WERNER has got a body built for sin and an appetite for passion.