Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley Read Free Book Online

hadn’t they asked Matt, who at that point was a better guitar player than I was? Maybe because I’m in high school and Matt has another year of junior high? Is Matt going to be pissed?
    Holy shit, a real band! This is huge!
    I didn’t hesitate for another second. I said yes. Next thing I knew we were rehearsing in the same basement where Matt and I had previously practiced. We worked on an up-tempo cover of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” I also worked out a version of “Born in Chicago” by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and even sang lead vocals.

    Playing Tompkins Square Park in the East Village with “The Baby Boom.” I’m on the left, at age fifteen, Jon Rael on the right.
    Everybody else in the band was at least two years older than me, which, at that age, seemed like a lot. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that they would graduate high school at the end of that school year. But in the short term, I was all in. We had a few gigs in “our” new lineup, and then I suggested we try to get a recording contract. I said we should have some pictures taken—and I knew just who to call. That summer of 1967 I’d spent two ill-fated weeks at a summer camp near the Catskills Mountains. Or at least, it was supposed to be a summer camp. It turned out to be a scam—some guy got a bunch of parents to pay him to have their kids come up to his farm, camp out, and, it turned out, help him tear down an old barn. He called it a work camp, implying that his program represented a chance for city kids to work on the land. In the end, though, it had been kind of fun, and I had become friends with one of the counselors, who were as duped as the campers. His name was Maury Englander, and he was now working for a famous photographer in Manhattan.
    Maury had access to the photographer’s studio whenever it wasn’t being used—that was one of the perks of the job, since Maury was in the process of becoming a photographer himself and in fact would be working for magazines like Newsweek less than a year later. So I called him, and we arranged to go into the studio one weekend and have Maury take some promo shots. Maury was pretty wired-in politically as well, and we parlayed the photo session into a few gigs playing parties for various antiwar organizations in early 1968, as protests against the Vietnam War were picking up steam.
    Club gigs were tough to come by, because they still wanted Top 40 cover bands for the most part. We played a lot of our own songs, and the covers we did were not the sorts of songs at the top of the charts. I arranged an audition for us at a place called the Night Owl; I had read that the Lovin’ Spoonful had played there, and the Spoonful’s jug band roots and good-time sound weren’t so far off from what the Post War Baby Boom was trying to do. But at the audition, the guy who was making the decision walked out while we were still playing. We didn’t get that gig.
    Despite the slow-going, I wanted to succeed and worked at it ceaselessly. Eventually I managed to pass some materials to somebody with an in at CBS Records, and an exec from the label called me. “If you guys can play as good as you look, you’ll be great,” he said. He was referring to one of the studio shots Maury Englander had taken of the band.
    Before the guy ever saw us in person or heard us, he arranged for us to record a demo at CBS. I wrote a song for us to record called “Never Loving, Never Living,” but I was too shy to play it for the band until the day before we were supposed to cut it. And then our female vocalist decided to go for a swim in the fountain in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village the night before, and she caught a cold and lost her voice. When we showed up in the studio the next day, my first time ever in a real recording studio, she couldn’t sing.
    To top it all off, the CBS exec told us he wanted to rename the band the Living Abortions. The demo never got finished.
    Meanwhile, at Music &