In a recent Howard Stern interview with Paul Stanley of Kiss, he opened up about regretting the drummer felt betrayed by the band while he was dealing with health struggles that ended up costing him his life.
Stanley stated, “I’m not a big believer in mistakes, I believe that everything you do gets you to where you wind up, and without those mistakes, you wouldn’t succeed on the level you could have. But the one thing that I think personally was a mistake was when our second drummer, Eric Carr, got sick with cancer.”
Eric Car passed away in November of 1991 after his diagnosis of a rare heart cancer. Earlier in the same year, Kiss recorded the track “God Save Rock ‘n’ Roll to You II” for the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey Soundtrack, with Eric Singer taking over on drums. However, Carr did contribute backup vocals for the song and wished to appear in the video even though his health was struggling.
Stanley added, “Eric desperately wanted to work on the song, but he was still very frail, If I knew then what I know now — I never thought this might be his last chance to perform — I would have let him play, but at the time I was sure that he would beat the odds.”
Carr was furious with the band making plans to record a new album without him. Stanley said, “Once we told him we were going to record Revenge, he cut himself off from us. … Though I thought I had made the best choices at the time, I began to realize I’d been wrong, We had cut Eric off in perhaps the worst way, by denying him what mattered most to him — his place in Kiss.”
He continued by saying that, “We flew to Eric’s bedside immediately, as soon as we knew he went to the hospital, and [asked], ‘Is there anything we can do?’ All that,” With Gene Simmons adding, “And Paul’s right — you just [think], ‘Oh, he’s sick, he’s in the hospital.’ You just don’t think he’s going to pass away.”
Stanley concluded on the topic stating, “In hindsight, you go, Wait a minute. They told us he had this cancer that affects six people a year, and somehow we were just able to … we did what we thought was caring, but we didn’t take into account the depth of what was happening, So yes, I feel bad about that, and he rightfully pulled himself away from us and felt betrayed.”
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