Rock and Roll all night, baby

OK. So I had originally intended to write about a totally different subject this month. But a glance at the calendar and the death of one of my teen heroes means I am gonna write about Halloween. Kinda. Sorta.

When I was a kid, Halloween was about one thing. The candy. Minimal effort was put into costumes. Me and my siblings would throw together some ratty clothes or an old, torn sheet and call ourselves hobos or ghosts and then range far and wide over a two or three square-mile area, each carrying a pillowcase for the sugary haul.

When we got home, we would sit on the living room floor and count it all out and, of course, the obligatory trades to get rid of the icky stuff in favor of something we liked better.

The counting tradition was still going strong when my daughter was a kid. But the costume thing was very different. I know there are still a few of her elaborate costumes hanging in a closet downstairs. Linda, my wife, went through some literal hell trying to make the outfits that Erin dreamed up. The hardest one was undoubtedly when Erin announced she wanted to go as, “The Swan Queen when she gets married.” Picture a tiny wedding dress with wings. Linda killed herself on that one.

There were the expected Disney characters that a Caucasian kid probably can’t get away with anymore lest they upset the Sensitivity Police. Pocahontas, Mulan, the gypsy girl from Hunchback whose name I can’t remember. My only real contribution —as a guy who can sorta sew on a button if under duress —was figuring out how to use fishing line and weights to hold the elaborate headpiece of her Queen Amadala costume up and wire a portable speaker into the costume so it played the Star Wars theme every time she knocked on a door. Still kinda proud of that one.

These days, if we go to a Halloween-themed event, I have an orange T-shirt that says “This Is My Costume” on it. But there were a couple of times… And, yeah, this is where the whole dead hero thing comes in.

It’s really hard to oversell the impact that four guys from New York in wild face paint playing rowdy rock music had on a generation of guitar players. I was about 15½ when KISS Alive came out in September of 1975. I had been playing in garage bands already learning songs by BTO and David Bowie and I can’t even remember what else. But THIS! This was something none of us had ever seen.

As a recently-converted LDS teen, I was part of a tradition called “road show.” Hard to explain what a big deal it was back then, but individual wards (LDS-speak for a congregation) would write these little 15-minute mini musicals and then we would all travel between ward buildings in a kind of rotation and perform our bit. You kinda had to be there.

But, because of road show costumes, there was a lot of theatrical makeup in the home of Ryan McKinnon, the buddy I had pressed into service as our bass player. He and I and Glenn Potts, who was a budding drummer, had been making horrendous noise in Ryan’s garage for months and were presented with a golden opportunity —a Halloween party.

We were only a three-piece but we did our best to learn a few KISS songs. “Strutter” for sure. I seem to remember Ryan singing “Cold Gin” which made his parents very uncomfortable. “Firehouse” maybe? And, obviously, “Rock and Roll All Night.”

I do not remember how we talked them into it. You gotta remember that in the mid-1970s in LDS World, KISS was seen as some kind of demonic Pied Pipers set out to destroy the youth of the church. But somehow we got Ryan’s older sister and, I think, his mom to do our makeup.

I really don’t remember the party, but I know that by the time it was over, I knew that bands were gonna be big part of my life for a very long time.

Fast forward to the next summer. KISS was on the tour supporting Destroyer, probably their best record. There was a big festival show scheduled in August at Anaheim Stadium, where the then-hapless Angels played. By that point, I was working at a diner and Ryan had moved away and Glenn had opted to concentrate on basketball because that was a much more reliable way to get girls than being in a garage band.

But my friend Stan Woodruff had a car and a couple of my co-workers were fans so we went to the Sears in the mall. Upstairs behind the furniture department where no one ever seemed to go, there was a walk-up window for Ticketmaster. We got our tickets and waited for the day to come.

And of course, like hundreds of others, we did the whole painting up thing again. But this time there were four of us. These Anaheim Stadium shows were big, general admission festivals. That particular one was Montrose with a very young Sammy Hagar, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent and our painted heroes. So, in an attempt to get as close to the stage as we could, we trekked from the San Fernando Valley to Anaheim the night before the show, intending to get in line and sleep in the parking lot.

Our plans were foiled though. The Man had decreed that the parking lot would not open until the early morning hours of show day. So here we were, three kids from the Valley just tooling around in Stan’s car painted up as our favorite band on a Friday night in then-very-conservative Orange County. We went into a liquor store to get soda and snacks and the clerk was a little taken aback at our finery but nothing really weird happened.

We got back in the car and were just driving around when Stan noticed a police cruiser following us. And it kept following us for a solid 10 minutes or so. Finally, Stan, another LDS kid who had never even been pulled over by a cop, got nervous and announced we were gonna go to a coffee shop on the other side of the intersection we were idling at just to get the fuzz off our tails. (Yes, we talked that way in 1976.)

What we could not have known was that the cops were City of Orange and by entering that coffee shop parking lot, we had crossed over into their jurisdiction. They pulled in behind us, lights came on and two officers came out of the car, standing behind the open doors with their guns drawn telling us to get out of the car with our hands showing.

The officers had seen us, had no idea about the concert or KISS or face paint and thought we were wearing masks so we could rob a store or something. We had to fill out forms with all of our contact info just in case such a robbery occurred so they could arrest us later.

But the concert was amazing.

I took my wife to see KISS when they first reunited. I took my daughter when they were playing a residency at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas. Every time, I felt like I was explaining to them how playing guitar became such a huge part of my life. And they actually understood. I think.

Last week, Ace Frehley, the original Spaceman and lead guitarist died after he fell in his studio. Word is he fell once and would not stay in the hospital because he wanted to get back to the studio and then fell again from the same rickety stool and the second fall caused the brain bleed that killed him. He was known to be a really stubborn dude.

Last note. Falls as one gets older are no joke. I have had a couple of scary ones, once down a flight of stairs in the house and a couple of times on the wet and slippery deck at the pool. A fall is what killed my dad a little more than a year ago. Be careful out there.

But do it while rockin’. Always.