See that there on the left? Them’s the makins for Russians! Black, White, it don’t matter! All that matters is Vodka and 70 proof Kaluha Especial (that’s Kaluha w/ Rum) will, as Clinton and Charlie would soon find out, take you down… and hard.
So, why provide hard booze to middle aged rock dudes who handle their liquor with the same restraint and grace as a dorm of college freshmen? It’s because we were assigned with doing a cover of Kiss’ “She” for an upcoming anthology of Kiss songs and being the Kiss scholars we are, it seemed in the spirit of things to get completely shit faced drunk in honor of The Spaceman himself, Ace Frehley. Check out Ace’s most glorious cinematic moment below!
“Leave it to me, Starchild, I’ll bend these beams with [think Ace, think!] myyyy mind.” I dunno about you but given Ace’s infamous debauchery and drunkenness, that sounds more in the spirit of the kind of drunken bet you’d make at a bar. Luckily, Gene is there to talk sense into Ace. All joking aside, we are glad to hear that Ace seems to have his booze problems in his past but we did kind of think this might be a good idea at the time. You see, beer kind of restricts your throat a bit while harder booze seems to loosen it. So we thought not only was it in keeping with Kiss’ legacy but also good for Charlie and Clinton’s vocals. That’s not quite how it ended up. That 70 proof Kaluha was gone by the end of the night and the Vodka was a mere shadow of its former self. Split between a lot of people that wouldn’t be so bad but what we didn’t realize at the time was that Clinton kept going back to the well and Charlie didn’t even to bother mixing a Russian – he just knocked back a 50/50 mix until the bottle of Kaluha was expertly depleted. The result was THIS and THIS!!!. He didn’t threaten to bend bars with his mind but man, I now know so much more about Star Trek Voyager now.
Meanwhile, Clinton (seen here before the booze got the better of him) was so bonked out that he couldn’t finish the session that night and ended up crashed on the sofa (Steve kindly set his alarm to wake him for work the next day). If he meant to channel Ace Frehley, he ended up more in Nikki Sixx territory or maybe that lead guitarist from Twisted Sister. Needless to say, diminishing returns was an understatement that night and the next morning a hungover Clinton Heider sent us this e-mail..
“I think we need to add “White Russians” to the list of beverages that are banned from band practice. Vodka is evil.”
POSTSCRIPT: Clinton safely slept it off and did return a week later to complete both his vocals and his guitar parts. They we dubbed indubitably bad-ass by all.
Not much is known about Charlie outside of the fact that he did complete his vocals that night but he doesn’t say very much about what happened after the session. All we do know is that we got a call from Bob Costas in Sochi asking us to please come pick him up the next day, something about a fight with the Olympic bear mascot in a bar, and to please, please keep him away from the Vodka.
