When I heard there was a new book about KISS, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and Starz, the first thing I thought was “I have to read that – it was written for ME!” The next thing I thought was “I wonder if Colin knows about this. We have to cover it on Pencil Storm!” Then, if I’m being honest, I looked at the cover of the book again and asked myself….”Um, who are Starz?” feeling like I should know. Well, I sure do now.

Doug Brod’s They Just Seem a Little Weird: How KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll is an exploratory journey into the history of these four bands, and especially the connections between them. Anyone who loves Paul Stanley’s 1978 solo album, made the connection long ago that the same guy (Jack Douglas) produced Aerosmith’s Rocks and Cheap Trick’s 1977 debut, or has the iconic logo cover (but maybe not the content) of the first Starz LP imprinted in their brain after decades of thumbing through record store bins, well – this book is for you.

It is very well written, detailed enough for the inner-music-geek to get excited about the most inane detail, but with a flow and vocabulary that is a little more rock-magazine – kind of fun, visual, and easy-going at the same time. It’s a good mix that avoids the juvenile grammatical trappings of many rock books, and the encyclopedic dryness that is occasionally the other extreme. This is likely the culmination of Doug’s previous gigs, including a stint as the Editor-In-Chief of SPIN magazine, and his self-professed decades-deep fandom of rock and roll. 

Even if these bands aren’t your bag, there’s plenty of surrounding content to keep your interest. The New York Dolls are heavily integrated into the first half of the book as their rise intertwines with both KISS and Aerosmith’s formative years. The labels, business side, recording & touring arrangements, and inner workings of ‘70s rock & roll are discussed at length, especially Casablanca Records, and the ever-present pair of Sean Delaney and Bill Aucoin who worked in tandem to construct the images of both KISS and Starz and subsequently take KISS to the top. There’s commentary from rock & roll royalty ranging from Soundgarden to Styx to Skid Row, and there are stories. Man, are there stories. If you live somewhere, it’s probably mentioned. If you love a band that was active in the ‘70s, there’s a good chance they make an appearance. If you aren’t sold yet, then maybe They Just Seem a Little Weird isn’t for you after all.

 THE PENCILSTORM INTERVIEW: DOUG BROD

Author Doug Brod graciously agreed to an interview about the book and we talked for nearly an hour about the approach, the bands, his personal connections and favorites, and our mutual love for all things Cheap Trick. Pencil Storm thanks Doug for his gracious time and encourages our readers to crank up the Spotify playlist above, read the interview, and promptly get yourself a copy of this great book! 

JP: Hi Doug – Thanks for doing this! How did your work at SPIN, Entertainment Weekly, MTV and Atlantic Records prepare, or set you up to write this book?

DB: Hey Jeremy – Thanks for having me!

Luckily throughout my career I’ve been involved in entertainment journalism and I’ve always been a huge music fan. I’ve written some rock criticism in the past. I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I wanted to write one about KISS and Cheap Trick, who are two of my favorite bands growing up, when I first started getting into music. I wanted to find a way to connect them – there were some very obvious connections between the bands. Then I just broadened it a bit to include Aerosmith and Starz, because in my research I found that there were a lot of connections between those bands as well.

I’m sure you’ve been asked a lot about Starz. It’s kinda like “one of these things is not like the other” – why include them as a focal point with three bands who were infinitely more popular and long-lasting?

You know, I found the perfect launching point for the book in the 1978 Gene Simmons solo album. His guest guitarists on that record included Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick, Joe Perry from Aerosmith, and Richie Ranno from Starz. Starz had a very deep connection with KISS – they had the same manager in Bill Aucoin, they were the second band managed under his tutelage. They had Jack Douglas producing two of their records, and he produced Cheap Trick and Aerosmith records. They toured extensively with Aerosmith in the ‘70s, so although they weren’t a big band, they had so many connections with these other bands. And talking to a lot of more contemporary musicians, like the guys who came out of the hair-metal scene, the grunge scene, a lot of them cited all four of the bands as big inspirations. So I thought that it might be a nice way to include this band that had many of the same opportunities as the other bands, but never quite made it to the next level. And I was always curious as to why – there was always that level of band back in the ‘70s like Angel, Legs Diamond, Detective, The Godz, Montrose and so many other bands that despite getting a decent push never made it to that level, and I thought Starz would be a good band to investigate and figure out why.

When it comes to Starz, a recurring theme seems to be that other musicians don’t see them as authentic. They were a group of non-rockers put together to be successful playing rock n roll. A creation. Both Paul Stanley and Billy Squier (among others) make this remark. Is there a chance the reason Starz never hit it big was fans could pick up on this as well. Were Starz posers? 

That’s a very good question! I think from the perspective of many other artists, and from their peers, that is a very widespread belief. I even have Dennis DeYoung from Styx, who played with all four of these bands, saying he felt that they were put together just to capitalize on KISS. In terms of the fans, I don’t know if they were that savvy back then. I think the problem with Starz was that they just couldn’t get a big radio hit, and back then, a big radio hit is what you needed to sell records. I mean, I grew up in New York in the ‘70s and I played rock radio all the time and Starz had a top 40 hit “Cherry Baby” and I never heard it, and I never actually even heard Starz until 2005 when Rykodisc put out their records on CD. I was always familiar with the logo and the band – I’d seen photos and album covers and magazines in the ‘70s, but I had never heard them. They were never on my radar. Then during my research, I started to realize that they’d be perfect for this book because they’re an interesting, obscure band.

You touched on that in the book – how they were “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” Richie Ranno cast blame on AOR researcher Lee Abrams, suggesting that he simply didn’t like the band and therefore shut them out from getting the radio airplay that could have broken them to a wider audience. It kind of ties back to that stuff.

I don’t know if they’re still wrestling with, you know…why, but the band members themselves have a lot of theories about why. On the one hand, Richie Ranno has said that Lee Abrams was the main reason why they never got on the radio. On the other hand, they say that Bill Aucoin, who was their manager, had an issue with them because of an assault that I detail in the book. And then Bill Aucoin claims, and they also claim, that Capitol, despite putting them on their label, never really got them and never promoted them the right way. So they have a lot of ideas as to why they never broke out, but I think there’s a lot of credence to the theory that they just couldn’t get a song on the radio and that’s what translated into record sales.

At any point did you consider including the NY Dolls instead of, or in addition to, Starz? Seems like they are at least as much a part of the story, and maybe even more in those early years, especially with KISS and Aerosmith, even more than Cheap Trick.

Yeah, I definitely tried to put all of these bands in context with The Dolls. Like you said, very early on both Aerosmith and KISS looked towards the Dolls for inspiration. In fact, Steve Leber and David Krebs, who managed Aerosmith, also managed the Dolls early on, so there were some real connections there as well. For my story, in particular, the other four bands, the ones I focus on, are the more organic ones that I really wanted to link. And the New York Dolls didn’t really have all that much in common with Starz or Cheap Trick.  

And they also fizzled out as the story really got going.

Exactly – yeah. People have suggested in the conversations that I’ve had, bands that could have been slotted in that fourth or a fifth role. Bands like Angel, or Ted Nugent. Someone said Journey, I’ve heard Rush. But one thing I really wanted to focus on were these bands that were really flamboyant or had that theatricality to their stage performance, and I don’t think that Journey was all that worried about doing a stage performance.

How did you get so much detail and insight into Sean Delaney?

He was very integral to KISS’ formative years. He was their choreographer, he was their theatrical director. He told them how to move on stage, how to play to the back of the stadium with big gestures, and he was Bill Aucoin’s lover and right-hand man, so he was very important to the early days of KISS. He also served that role in the early days of Starz. So then purely through researching him for the book I found his solo record that he did for Casablanca, and then I found his subsequent band called the Skatt Brothers, which featured Starz’ ex-bass player Pieter Sweval as well as a drummer by the name of Richie Fontana who played on Paul Stanley’s solo album, and they were also managed by Bill Aucoin on Casablanca Records. So here was yet another connection that brought two of these bands – KISS and Starz – together yet again. So it was in my research that these connections kept coming up. And I have to say that that’s one of my favorite chapters in the book where I talk about Sean Delaney and The Skatt Brothers. It was something I had never even heard of, and no one has written about.

Yeah, I’ve read most of the KISS books and they’ve never gone into that level of detail about him, so it was really interesting. Bill Aucoin’s name keeps coming up, but he didn’t really see a whole lot of success outside of KISS did he? Considering all his resources and lack of results, did he just sign the wrong bands? Was it just bad luck? Or was he just an incompetent manager? 

That’s a good question. As Paul says in the book… he felt that at a certain point Bill took his eye off of KISS and wanted to create bands in the image of KISS and he pointed to bands like Starz and Piper. Bill also had bands like New England and Spyder. None of these bands really did much, maybe one or two albums that faded. From what I understand, and I don’t get too deep in the book, Bill let success get to his head, he had problems with drugs, which led to some bad business decisions.

He did rebound though, when he had Billy Idol in his stable, after Billy Idol left Gen X. He basically shaped Billy Idol into a solo artist. That was his second biggest success after KISS, but you’re right, he couldn’t sustain. Once he lost KISS, he really had nothing until Billy Idol came along.

You seem to go a little more in-depth with the catalog of Cheap Trick and everything tends to tie back to them a bit more than the others. You almost give a track-by-track analysis when talking about a couple of their records. Would it be correct to say that Cheap Trick is your favorite of the four bands? Or did you maybe have more access to or knowledge of them and their story?

To be honest, they’re certainly my favorite of the four. I’ve seen them probably 50, 51 times.

I’m at about 37, yep.

Oh! Good for you – I like to hear that! I love writing about them, I love their records. I felt like I wanted to set the stage, for each of these bands, I think, at least for myself, as to why the music is so worthwhile. I did that for the early KISS records, but I might have put my thumb on the scale for the Cheap Trick albums because I love them so much. But yeah, my extensive writing about them in the book is a function of them being my favorite band of all time.

I love Dream Police, I think it has to be my favorite. I love that `77 record too, but I always go back to Dream Police, I don’t know why.

That was the first time I saw them – in 1980 on the Dream Police tour, at Madison Square Garden, with The Romantics, and that was right before Tom [Petersson] left. And obviously I’ve seen them many, many times since he rejoined.

And The Romantics were great back then too! Can you talk about your personal connection to each band – as a fan, someone in the biz, friends – whatever.

I wouldn’t say that I’m friendly with any of these bands. Richie Ranno from Starz was very generous with his time and telling the story. I’d like to think that they come off as this under-rated, under-heard band, but I think someone coming in might think that it sounds sad, what happened to them, and I’m hoping that’s not the case.

I’ve met the guys in Cheap Trick a number of times at their shows. They probably wouldn’t know my name if they saw me. I’ve spoken to Rick a number of times over the years, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends. And I’ve never spoken to anyone from Aerosmith and they declined to participate in the book. But I will say this – one very dear friend of mine is Ira Robbins, who I quote extensively in the book, he was one of the first American journalists to really jump on the Cheap Trick train in 1977 and he’s chronicled them throughout their career, so he’s very close to the band, and especially to Rick. So that’s probably my biggest tie to the band, through someone else.  

Are you a collector? Do you own a Rick Nielsen pick? Any Kiss memorabilia? Original Starz flyers? Piper demos?

[Laughs] I used to be. I used to collect every KISS magazine. I just don’t do it anymore. But you know, I collect posters. I have a ton of Cheap Trick posters. In fact, here in my office space I have two, looking at me, and they’re nicely framed. Occasionally I’ll buy an interesting toy. Like, I’ve got a Cheap Trick truck – it’s a toy truck with the Cheap Trick logo on it. It’s a licensed product from, I believe the early, mid-90s. But I don’t collect every piece of memorabilia, every tee shirt (though I do have a lot of tee shirts). First of all, I have no place to put it, and I guess my fandom only runs so deep.

Did you make it to Rockford for the Rick’s Picks exhibit at the Burpee Museum?

I didn’t and I regret it! I moved to Toronto a year and a half ago, and I used to see Cheap Trick in New York pretty much whenever they played. In fact, my friend Ira was very instrumental in that whole thing. I think he wrote the program and interviewed Rick for some stuff. I really regret it. Did you?

Yeah, we went one of the last weekends it was running – it was really great. There was a guy there who had extensive knowledge of everything, and he was showing a friend around – I wonder if that was Ira?

Yeah, I don’t know – it might have been! I went to Rockford to interview Bun E. and I spent an afternoon in his drum barn where he keeps all his equipment, and the night before I went to see him play with the Monday Night Band at Mary’s Place in Rockford, and there’s a photo of the show I went to in the book. I spent two days in Rockford and drove around and it was an interesting little town and I regret not getting there earlier to see the exhibit. 

I loved the stories about how Cheap Trick and Aerosmith crossed paths, and especially Joe and Rick. Wasn’t it in Gene Simmons’ house where Joe says he was doing lines on the pinball machine when Rick came in and they first met? But Rick has very different memories of their initial meetings. There was a similar story with Jack Douglas’ first time seeing Cheap Trick – very different perspectives than the band has. In those two cases you gave both sides in an almost humorous way. Were there other situations/stories you got where the chain of events from opposite sides just didn’t add up?

That’s a really good question. With all of this stuff you try to get corroboration. The whole thing about Jack Douglas discovering the band in a bowling alley in Waukesha, Wisconsin – that’s his basic, standard story that he repeats in every interview. However, both Ken Adamany, who was Cheap Trick’s manager at the time and Bun E. Carlos have told me differently. They tell me that the band actually reached out to Jack and brought him to Wisconsin to see them with the hopes that he would produce them, so it wasn’t quite as mythologically random as him just stumbling upon the band. And I wanted to be fair to Jack, of course, but he declined for whatever reason to be a part of the book. It’s difficult – you want to give both sides, and I did give both sides, I was hoping that he would speak to Bun E. and Adamany’s recollections, but I couldn’t get him to do that.

As for other places in the book – there are a few, and I think I pointed them out where people are mis-remembering things, but I had to rely on other things is some cases, particularly with Peter Criss and Ace Frehley. I had to rely on their memoirs because they also declined to participate in the book. It happened a couple times. Later on, when Peter Criss rejoined KISS in 2003 to go on tour when KISS were playing with Aerosmith, and that was the last time Peter played with KISS and it was a very kind fraught period in terms of his relationship with the band.

Pencil Storm did a fantasy draft of the songs on the KISS non-makeup albums and everyone on the staff ended up with an “album” to review. Can you share some thoughts about the non-makeup era – what you liked, what you didn’t, how it ended up a part of their legacy?

I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of KISS fans fell off the KISS train at some point. I was there from almost the beginning, from like `74 or `75, when I was very young, and around 1980 my tastes changed, and I got into punk and new wave and other kinds of music and I didn’t pay much attention to KISS pretty much after Dynasty. I kinda got back on the train back in `96 when they put the makeup back on. I was always familiar with the non-makeup KISS and I liked a lot of the singles that I heard, but I never really paid attention to the albums, which is weird because I wrote a book about them! But I actually had to dig in when doing research for the book, and there’s a lot to like on those records.

It always seemed weird to me that they took the makeup off right when MTV was starting – the makeup made them ageless – but they basically became like every other hair-metal band. Yeah, 10 years older, but the same outfits, the same production design on their videos, the same dayglo and leather clothing. It always seemed odd to me that a band that looked so cool with the makeup and the costumes – and they were the very definition of cinematic and theatrical – why would they take off the makeup right when the camera was on them and could take them to, in my estimation, even bigger heights? So I don’t know, I thought it was it was an interesting choice. I interviewed a bunch of people for the book who said they had no choice – they had to change things up. But others said they’d wished they kept the makeup and the costumes on, because they just became like everybody else.

On a slightly related note, we’re also HUGE Cheap Trick fans. I love and appreciate Bun E., there’s only one Bun E. Carlos for sure, and he was awesome, but I am a big fan of Daxx and the new life & youth he’s breathed into the band. I think he gave them a kick in the ass when they really needed it. What do you think of the Daxx-era of Cheap Trick?

I think I might have seen his first gig with the band at South by Southwest in Austin, 11, 12 years ago? I think he’s a great asset to the band, he sounds great. I have to say that Bun E. Carlos is one of the greatest drummers I’ve ever seen and one of the most under-rated rock drummers. But for whatever reason, and there are various reasons out there, that he’s not playing or touring with them, and Daxx, frankly, as far as I’m concerned is the next best thing. He knows the songs, he plays them well, and you’re right about him adding that youthfulness and giving them a kick in the butt,

It’s the same thing with current KISS, I think. I mean, Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer do an excellent job, doing what they do. They’re not Ace and they’re not Peter, but they’re doing the job and the band sounds great with them. I understand a lot of fans don’t appreciate the fact that they’ve taken the characters, that they’re pretending to be those characters, but it doesn’t bother me as a fan as long as they’re doing a good job. I cut them more slack than a lot of people do.

There were a lot of comments and thoughts from all sorts of people in the book, and you’ve talked a bit about some of the key players who declined to participate. Was there anyone you really wanted to talk to who you weren’t able to get?

I would say two people. I mean, Joe Perry for sure, because he was so connected to both Gene Simmons and Rick Nielsen. And he goes on at length in his own book Rocks about Cheap Trick. And his wife hired Cheap Trick to play his 50th birthday. They are one of his favorite bands, if not his favorite band, so I would have loved to have gotten Joe Perry.

The other person is Jack Douglas. He was involved in three of the bands and he actually had a tenuous connection to KISS as well when he was considered for producing the album after Destroyer, because the band were uncomfortable with how Destroyer came out, so Bill Aucoin approached Jack Douglas, which became somewhat of a scandal.  

Favorite debut album between the four? Based on our discussion so far it seems safe to say that Cheap Trick’s would be your favorite?

Probably. I love all four of those, wait, no, let me scratch that – I don’t love Aerosmith’s debut album. I like some songs on it, I don’t think it’s recorded very well. But from the other bands, I would say Cheap Trick, KISS, Starz, and Aerosmith, in that order.

The RRHOF nominees were just announced. Three out of four of these bands are in, deservedly so. What are your thoughts on the RRHOF?

I don’t really think about it all that often, to be honest. It seems to me that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tries to hard, too often, to be all things to all people. I mean the fact that Dionne Warwick is nominated and could get in before so many other crucial artists in the rock and roll genre… I try not to place too much attention on it. To be honest I just don’t care. I know that when you’re nominated and selected it’s a big deal. I went to the KISS induction in New York and it was an interesting show, and a fun show, but it’s just not very important in my estimation.

So you don’t get a vote?

No, I’ve never been invited to participate.

This website is based out of Columbus, Ohio but I’m near Detroit, so I always shoehorn in a Detroit question. It was great to hear how important Detroit was, especially to KISS, but Aerosmith too, and that legendary Runaways show in Royal Oak with Tom Petty and Cheap Trick supporting. Can you please touch on that briefly – the role Detroit played between the coasts on the trajectory of these bands?  

Yeah, it’s interesting because Detroit came up a lot in my interviews. I was talking to this guy Ray Tusken who was the AOR Promotions executive at Capitol Records and he was telling me that Detroit, because of the aesthetic of the city, and the people in it the city – it was so important for rock and roll bands to get a foothold there. So you had a lot of great bands coming out of Detroit, but it was important for bands like the Dolls and KISS and Aerosmith and Cheap Trick and even Starz, who recorded a song called “Detroit Girls” and that was based on them being in Detroit and rehearsing for a record at the Michigan Palace. You had the MC5 and The Stooges, and nearby you had Grand Funk from Flint – it is such an important rock and roll town that every band from that era wanted to grab a foothold there.

I’ve been to Detroit…yeah and to me it really feels like a rock and roll town.

And finally – are you happy with the book and the response? Do you have another book in you? What’s next? 

Yeah – I’m happy with the way it came out. I’m happy with the response in that the people who have read it appear to have really liked it. My whole thing with writing this book was to tell a story that had never been told before. Like you said – there’s tons of KISS books out there, there are a number of Aerosmith books, there are very few Cheap Trick books and there are no Starz books. I wanted to tell a different story and focus on the inner-connections between these bands and to put in a lot of other stuff about what the ‘70s rock experience was for these bands – touring, recording, getting played on the radio – and how they influenced generations after. So the people who get it love the book, and I love hearing that.

My next book? I have some ideas and I should know in the next few weeks which one will rise to the top, and I’ll let you know when I hear!

That will be great! We can do this again when that one comes out! Anything else you want to mention, or that I left out?

Sounds good! I don’t know – you had great questions, to be very honest with you. I just hope people learn something new and get from the book that I’m a big fan of these bands. And that’s one thing I’m getting from people who are reaching out on Facebook or Twitter – that they really feel like it’s a fan writing about these bands for other fans, and that was one of my goals, so I am happy to have met it.

Great – thanks so much for your time!

Thanks so much, Jeremy!

JP: Special thanks to Colin Gawel & John Burke for helping with some great questions!

 Jeremy Porter lives near Detroit and fronts the rock and roll band Jeremy Porter And The Tucos. Follow them on Facebook to read his road blog about their adventures on the dive-bar circuit.
www.thetucos.com
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www.rockandrollrestrooms.com

Twitter: @jeremyportermi | Instagram: @onetogive & @jeremyportermusic