When Kiss drummer Peter Criss quit the band in 1980, it presented a young musician named Paul Caravello with the opportunity of a lifetime.
After taking the stage name Eric Carr, the New York-born drummer laid down the beat for the self-styled Hottest Band In The World for the next 11 years until he succumbed to heart cancer at the age of 41.
Carr passed away on 24 November 1991, the very same day that Freddie Mercury died.
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Many years later, in an interview with Outlaw magazine, Kiss frontman and founder member Paul Stanley admitted that his own reaction to this tragedy had troubled him ever since.
“In a perfect world, I would have done things differently,” Stanley said. “But, given where I was at in my life, that wasn’t possible.”
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Eric Carr joined Kiss at a strange and turbulent time in the band’s career. The pop-oriented material on the 1979 album Dynasty and 1980 album Unmasked had alienated a number of diehard fans. And in the wake of Criss’s departure, lead guitarist Ace Frehley was also becoming increasingly disconnected from Stanley and bassist Gene Simmons – a situation caused and exacerbated by Frehley’s drinking.
Where Criss’s makeup and alter-ego portrayed him as The Catman, Carr presented as The Fox.
The problems for Kiss in this period continued when the band’s first album with Carr proved a commercial disaster. Music From ‘The Elder’ was both a concept album and the soundtrack to a movie that was never made.
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Producer Bob Ezrin had worked with Kiss before on the group’s 1976 best-seller Destroyer. Ezrin had also been at the helm for Pink Floyd’s hugely successful concept album The Wall. But when The Elder bombed, Stanley and Simmons decided that the way to get Kiss back on track was with an over-the-top heavy metal album.
That album was named Creatures Of The Night, and while Ace Frehley appeared on the cover he played no part in its creation.
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Two lead guitarists who contributed to the recording without being credited were the much-travelled Robben Ford (previously employed by Joni Mitchell, George Harrison and many others) and Steve Farris (later of Mr. Mister). The guitarist who co-wrote three tracks on the album and ended up joining the band was Vinnie Vincent.
Creatures Of The Night was also Eric Carr’s crowning glory. He played with astonishing power, and with the help of producer Michael James Jackson he achieved a thunderous drum sound reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham.
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It was with the 1983 album Lick It Up, the follow-up to Creatures Of The Night, that Kiss took off the makeup – to prove, as Paul Stanley said, that the band could stand on its music alone.
Later, lead guitarists came and went – after Vinnie Vincent, the baton passed to Mark St. John and then to Bruce Kulick.
But all through the ’80s Eric Carr was reliable and rock-solid, performing on the band’s albums Animalize (1984), Asylum (1985), Crazy Nights (1987) and Hot In The Shade (1989).
It was in early 1991 that Carr was diagnosed with heart cancer. While he was recuperating from subsequent surgeries, Stanley and Simmons recruited another drummer, Eric Singer, to work on material for the Kiss album Revenge. This album also saw them reunite with Bob Ezrin.
While Carr was hospitalised, Stanley and Simmons made repeated visits to him, during which they reassured him that he could rejoin the band if and when he recovered his health.
It was not to be. In the summer of 1991 Carr was informed that he had only months to live.
Amazingly, despite his deteriorating condition, Carr travelled from New York to Los Angeles in July 1991 for the video shoot for the Kiss single God Gave Rock And Roll To You II, a cover of a song by British band Argent. Having lost his hair during chemotherapy, Carr wore a wig during the video shoot.
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His final public appearance as a member of Kiss was at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1991. Two months later he passed away.
In the interview with Outlaw magazine in 2019, Paul Stanley reflected on the death of Eric Carr and the effect this had on him.
“I would say that in my life, in the big scheme of things, I have absolutely no regrets, because everything that I did got me to where I am now,” Stanley said. “But I would have to qualify that and say that with Eric Carr’s illness, leading up to his passing, I wish I’d handled that differently.
“I didn’t know then what I know today. My life experience was more limited, and the idea that someone close to me had cancer and was going to die, I couldn’t take it in.”
He continued: “The day that Eric told me he might have cancer, I said to him, ‘Everybody goes to the worst place when they don’t feel well, but you’ll find out everything’s okay.’ But then he came back to me, after some more tests, and said, ‘I have cancer in my heart.’
“I think after that I was in shock. In some crazy way I thought that at some point Eric might get better and come back to the band. It was probably a way of dealing with my own fear. Right up until the end, it was too hard to grasp.”
Eric Carr was unable to play on the Revenge album, but in tribute to him the final track on that album was a drumming showpiece instrumental he had recorded with the band a decade earlier, which they titled titled Carr Jam 1981.
Paul Stanley was asked in Outlaw magazine if there was some degree of comfort in knowing that Carr may have had the best years of his life in Kiss.
“Yes, totally,” he said. “People who were close to Eric realised what a gentle and kind soul he was, but he was also very often an unhappy person.”
Stanley also returned to the theme of regret.
“I regret for Eric that I didn’t handle certain parts of his illness better. I might have not gone forward quite as quickly without him in the band. But at the same time I don’t fault myself because it was beyond my scope at that time. If I regret it, I regret it for him.”