the form of a catalogue of strong, cohesive songs.
Alongside our musical development, we molded ourselves into what we thought we should be . For the first time, I knew I was working with someone whose vision was as big as mine. I’d been around kids who could play their instruments before, but Gene seemed to understand the whole package, the fact that your music or your musical ability was just one part of making yourself an appealing musician. Like me, he saw the importance of marketing yourself—not in a Madison Avenue way, but in terms of appealing to people, being engaging, promoting yourself. Success wouldn’t happen by chance; it would happen by design.
Toward that end, we made a conscious decision to lose weight. Gene started dressing cooler. And we both changed our names. Gene had already changed his name once, from Chaim Weitz to Gene Klein, so one more change, from Klein to Simmons, was no big deal for him. I had always hated my name and even told my parents as a little kid that I was going to change it. They said I could change it when I got older. Little did they know I was going to do it almost as soon as I was legally able.
The chances of a rock star named Stanley Eisen seemed pretty slim. It just didn’t sound like Roger Daltrey or Elvis Presley. Stars were supposed to be larger than life. Why was there no Archibald Leach? Because Cary Grant sounded better. Ringo Starr sounded better than Richard Starkey. It wasn’t about hiding my ethnicity.
I would just rather have been Paul McCartney than Schlomo Ginsberg. But I also didn’t want a stupid name like Rock Fury. I wanted a name like the people I aspired to be like, something easily identifiable. The question was, what sort of a name? Ozzy Osbourne’s nickname derived from his last name. Eizzy Eisen? Nah. Then it hit me: Paul. That was a comfortable name. There was Paul McCartney, of course, and Paul Rogers of Free, another band I liked. I didn’t want to completely give up who I had been, so when I thought about last names, I was happy that my thoughts went Daltrey, Presley . . . Stanley!
Paul Stanley.
Initially I didn’t change my name legally because I figured I’d go back to my original name at some point after our career took its course. In those days, bands ran their courses pretty quickly, and nobody then had made it to ten years, though a few—like the Who and the Stones—were closing in on it.
I hoped for five years.
14.
N ow that we had the songs and the beginnings of a look and feel, we needed a band. We weren’t Simon and Garfunkel; we weren’t the Everly Brothers; we weren’t Jan and Dean. Our songs were built to rock.
We made finding a lead guitar player our initial priority. I had never aspired to play lead. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. When I listened to people sing, I knew I could do something reasonably comparable. But I rarely heard a guitar solo and thought, I can do something like that . Unless somebody was playing slowly. Once in a while I heard a solo by Paul Kossoff of Free and thought I might be able to pull it off, but I just wasn’t a fast, flashy player. My gut also told me that this was an area where work might not pay off for me—that I might get only mediocre results regardless of how much time I put into it.
Fortunately, Gene knew the perfect guy for the job. Unfortunately, the perfect guy for the job lived upstate—and Gene didn’t know exactly where. Or even exactly who he was. He had run across somebody when he lived up there, and this person—whoever it was—became our first target. So that fall of 1972 we started hitchhiking up to the Catskills in search of the mythical lead guitar player who apparently played in the bars and ballrooms of the low-rent resort circuit up there. We stood on the side of the Major Deegan Expressway with our thumbs out, me in lime-green high-heel boots and him in an antique woman’s fur coat.
Inevitably, we hit the road without a place to
Alongside our musical development, we molded ourselves into what we thought we should be . For the first time, I knew I was working with someone whose vision was as big as mine. I’d been around kids who could play their instruments before, but Gene seemed to understand the whole package, the fact that your music or your musical ability was just one part of making yourself an appealing musician. Like me, he saw the importance of marketing yourself—not in a Madison Avenue way, but in terms of appealing to people, being engaging, promoting yourself. Success wouldn’t happen by chance; it would happen by design.
Toward that end, we made a conscious decision to lose weight. Gene started dressing cooler. And we both changed our names. Gene had already changed his name once, from Chaim Weitz to Gene Klein, so one more change, from Klein to Simmons, was no big deal for him. I had always hated my name and even told my parents as a little kid that I was going to change it. They said I could change it when I got older. Little did they know I was going to do it almost as soon as I was legally able.
The chances of a rock star named Stanley Eisen seemed pretty slim. It just didn’t sound like Roger Daltrey or Elvis Presley. Stars were supposed to be larger than life. Why was there no Archibald Leach? Because Cary Grant sounded better. Ringo Starr sounded better than Richard Starkey. It wasn’t about hiding my ethnicity.
I would just rather have been Paul McCartney than Schlomo Ginsberg. But I also didn’t want a stupid name like Rock Fury. I wanted a name like the people I aspired to be like, something easily identifiable. The question was, what sort of a name? Ozzy Osbourne’s nickname derived from his last name. Eizzy Eisen? Nah. Then it hit me: Paul. That was a comfortable name. There was Paul McCartney, of course, and Paul Rogers of Free, another band I liked. I didn’t want to completely give up who I had been, so when I thought about last names, I was happy that my thoughts went Daltrey, Presley . . . Stanley!
Paul Stanley.
Initially I didn’t change my name legally because I figured I’d go back to my original name at some point after our career took its course. In those days, bands ran their courses pretty quickly, and nobody then had made it to ten years, though a few—like the Who and the Stones—were closing in on it.
I hoped for five years.
14.
N ow that we had the songs and the beginnings of a look and feel, we needed a band. We weren’t Simon and Garfunkel; we weren’t the Everly Brothers; we weren’t Jan and Dean. Our songs were built to rock.
We made finding a lead guitar player our initial priority. I had never aspired to play lead. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. When I listened to people sing, I knew I could do something reasonably comparable. But I rarely heard a guitar solo and thought, I can do something like that . Unless somebody was playing slowly. Once in a while I heard a solo by Paul Kossoff of Free and thought I might be able to pull it off, but I just wasn’t a fast, flashy player. My gut also told me that this was an area where work might not pay off for me—that I might get only mediocre results regardless of how much time I put into it.
Fortunately, Gene knew the perfect guy for the job. Unfortunately, the perfect guy for the job lived upstate—and Gene didn’t know exactly where. Or even exactly who he was. He had run across somebody when he lived up there, and this person—whoever it was—became our first target. So that fall of 1972 we started hitchhiking up to the Catskills in search of the mythical lead guitar player who apparently played in the bars and ballrooms of the low-rent resort circuit up there. We stood on the side of the Major Deegan Expressway with our thumbs out, me in lime-green high-heel boots and him in an antique woman’s fur coat.
Inevitably, we hit the road without a place to
Similar Books
