On 22. July 1980, Eric Carr was announced as the new drummer in Kiss after Peter Criss had been “voted out” of the band a couple of months earlier.
Gene Simmons alleged that Carr wanted to use the stage name “Rusty Blade” until Simmons dissuaded him. He decided on “Eric Carr” quite carefully. He noticed that while the four members’ full stage names were each three syllables long, Criss’ name was the inverse of the other three band members’ name syllable pattern – ‘Peter Criss’ was two syllables followed by a single syllable. He decided to make his stage name sound the same rhythmically as Peter Criss’ by choosing a double syllable first name and a single syllable last name so when people said all four names together it would still fit the same to the ear. Carr was shortened from his birth name Caravello, and he chose Eric from a list of first names his girlfriend at the time had given him. Paul Caravello remained his legal name.
For his Kiss persona, Carr initially tried “The Hawk”; this concept was apparently very difficult to realize in greasepaint – a suitable make-up design was never created, and the “Hawk” costume was a “bright orange yellow!” The idea was dropped after Paul Stanley mentioned that it looked like Big Bird. With the band on deadline (only two weeks before Carr’s stage debut), Carr came up with the make-up design for the persona of “The Fox”; Simmons liked it and thus the character was born. The original design was modified within days of Carr’s initial photo sessions and debut concert as a Kiss member.
Paul Stanley:
“It took some time to figure out a character for Eric. Heaven forbid we put him in a character people already knew. That seemed too obvious to us, and maybe sacrilegious. Originally, he was going to be the Hawk. We had a costume built with a protruding chest and feathers all over it. He painted a beak on his nose, but he looked like the mascot for a high school football team. All that was missing were the big foam chicken feet. It was horrible. Fortunately, he came up with the idea of the Fox. He wore the same size boots as Peter, so we used existing boots and had the platforms built up even more. The boots ended up being like stilts, and he still looked tiny next to us.”
