[Exclusively for KISS ASYLUM & www. EricCarr.com, here is part from the Eric Carr Memorial Tribute special that appears in issue 34 of KISS Kollector magazine.]
MEMORIAL TRIBUTE - Eric 'The Fox' Carr remembered by his family and close friends
By Joop van Pelt
As you could've read in the previous issue, a festival in honor of Eric 'The Fox' Carr was being held on August 6, called the FoxxFest 2000. One of the special guests was former KISS guitarist Bruce Kulick. During the interview I recently had with Bruce when he spent some time in Holland, we also talked about Eric for a bit:
Why was there suddenly so much (well deserved) attention for Eric Carr in 1999, with the release of the Rockheads EP, the Rockology album and the homevideo Tale Of The Fox?
"There was no real masterplan. I know it came to Rockology and the EP, that was something that I had some control over because I had the masters. I obviously had all the unfinished Eric music. I was waiting for the time when A) I had the time and B) that I felt that someone made a business offer that made it happen. So, again, no real masterplan for it but at the same time of course his sister Loretta always having people present things to her that she never knew should I do it or shouldn't I do it? The video finally started to come together and it all did come out practically in one year. But it's not like 'Oh, a 10th anniversary or a 9th anniversary', this is just the way it came out. And I was happy to do a song on The Blue Room, you know, Dear Friend. And it was great to do the interviews. Yeah, it seems like a lot of attention. I'm just happy the stuff's out."
Are the 11 songs on the Rockology album really all there is?
"From during the KISS years that's all I have. I know that his sister and family have stuff pre-KISS, but they sound very different. For what Eric's fans really know him for and all, what's on Rockology is a good representation of what got left off KISS albums. But I know that if you're looking for more material, I might have like one or two like kinda loose jam type things that I couldn't really sour to say it's anything..."
Do you have an Eric anecdote you can share with the readers?
"Oh well, we're in Amsterdam so I may as well tell the Amsterdam story. Eric certainly knew how to drink, he would like to have a drink with the fans after the show sometimes. That was obviously his social kinda thing to do. But everyone knows in Amsterdam, you know, pot is legal, you can get high here. At the time the roadcrew and myself, me having a lot of experience especially from the seventies pre-KISS years about pot, there's no way that I was like a pothead during KISS, no way, and one of the forms that you can get high is like space cakes. So Eric didn't smoke and figured well I'll have one of these. He isn't feeling anything after that one, so we gave him another one. I think he probably had like two and a half, okay. And then by the time, you know, it affects everyone's metabolism different. Sometimes they say the first time getting high if you never smoked pot or had the chemical that's in pot, in your system, it doesn't know what to do... But all of a sudden his body started to feel numb and he felt like his legs couldn't move. Instead of going with it - and I certainly understood, I mean it's gotta be frightening for somebody when you don't know is this supposed to be good, and it feels like you really don't have control over your body? I mean, of course we didn't have a show that night, I think even the next day we had a day off. But it was pretty weird. He was just really upset. And the rest of us, the crew and myself, we were all sort of high and obviously that kinda like straightened everybody out, you know what I mean. He was really unhappy. He was thinking that he was gonna die or something, it was weird. So we babysat him, as we say, and made sure that he was okay."
And when I interviewed Adam Mitchell (longtime KISS songwriter and friend of the band) a while ago he had this to say about The Fox:
"Eric loved Europe. He was always very excited when they would go there. He felt the fans were great and loved the cultural aspects of seeing the different countries." "He was hysterically funny, he had absolutely the world's greatest sense of humor. Being around Eric was a lot of laughs. He was a great, great guy." For a previous Eric Carr Memorial Tribute special I interviewed Eric's sister Loretta Caravello, and the following anecdote was one of the things she mentioned:
"When Eric was around 9 years old, the minute he would come home from school the first thing he would do was run to his room... We would see this flash just zoom by... Mom would go by his room and catch him peeking through the little keyhole on his bedroom door. My mom could never understand what he was up to. So one day when he was at school, my mom decided to see what was so interesting in this keyhole. Low and behold there was a tiny little picture of a pretty blonde scrunched into the keyhole. Needless to say Eric's little heart was broken..."
With the reunion of the original KISS line up coming to an end probably early in 2001, let's see what Eric Carr's personal view on the rumours of a reunion tour (some 5 years before the reunion actually took place, so aprox 10 years ago) was at the end of his life: "All it says to me is that eventhough we're doing great and eventhough the fans love us, we're competing against something that we can never... that no mere mortals can ever really compete against. You know, there's no band - even us - that can compete with the fantasy, the sheer imagination fantasy world that KISS created before. So, unless you can really make it be special you run the risk of really watering down something that was better left in memory, because it was so great. All you have is all these great memories of what that was. And to see it happen ten years later, and say gee, well they don't look the same or it's not the same, or whatever it is, you know, then it kind of takes away from the memories people have."
For more Eric Carr related stories, please check out KISS Kollector magazine. Editorial address:
KISS Kollector Fanclub
P.O. Box 1159
1200 BD Hilversum
HOLLAND
(www.kiss.animalize.com)
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