TAKING THE KISS

are clearly the biggest, the best and the most successful showband in the world. That said, mainman Gene Simmons isn t exactly up-to-speed on the word showband itself, but when this peculiarly Irish phenomenon is explained, and he s asked so, it s okay if we call you guys The Kiss Showband? , he replies you can call me any fucking thing you like, man, as long as you buy a ticket!
Sadly, ticket sales for Kiss recent gig at The Point were so poor that it was cancelled. But that doesn t mean shit to Gene, the Kiss organisation in general or to their travelling roadshow. They intend to hit 23 countries on their current tour, playing to ten million people along the way, which will bring them in something in the region of $100- 200 million . It all adds up to a hell of a lot of people paying big bucks to see The Kiss Showband play in what is already the most successful tour in America this year. They re also promoting a Greatest Hits collection and an Unplugged album.
So, tapping into a seminal Kiss legend, there is obviously no point in starting an interview with Gene by asking, have you lost your marbles? He hasn t.
No, I still have them in an old Dutch Masters cigar box, he says, laughing, and letting his memory wing back to childhood when he did actually place real marbles in a cigar box to remind him of one vital lesson he learned very early in life. Namely, to punish people who mocked him.
Back then, he was a Jewish boy of nine, named Gene Fields, the son of a woman who had survived the holocaust and had moved to America to start a new life. Unfortunately, the first local kids Gene approached on a street corner basically told him where to go, mocking his accent while they did so. He retaliated by challenging them to a game of marbles. And won every single tiny multicoloured glass globe they cherished, which he then took home and placed in that cigar box. The lesson learned is central to the philosophy he later applied to Kiss. We Irish, I guess, would call it fuck the begrudgers.
I like that phrase, man, but then, hey, I like anything that includes a good fuck! he ejaculates. And punish those who mock has always been the modus operandi for me because I am a foreigner and I ve always been a stranger in a strange land. Perhaps that s something the Irish understand, particularly those who have to live in the North, right? As in that sense of being a second-class citizen. I mean, if someone calls you a potato-head or, what is it, a Mick, you can call him out on that, but there s still a snobbishness among any power elite which is well used to subjugating outsiders and getting away with it. I always knew that, as a Jew.
But, on the other hand, that is the fuel for the fire, knowing you are part of an underclass and being determined as hell to rise above all that shit. Look at the entertainment world. It s mostly inhabited by outcasts. Especially here in America, where there obviously is still racism, even though, legally, it s not allowed. But look at music and movies. Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy et cetera, the black underclass is well represented.
But then that goes way back to the slaves that inhabited this colonial empire and to even the North and South divide, where the underclass were white hillbillies. But blend them both and what have you got? The birth of rock n roll, which I still see as the voice of the underclass, no matter what kind of music you are playing. And that is exactly how I ve always seen Kiss.
Let s not get too socio-serious here, Gene. Haven t you always really seen Kiss as one big fuck?
Yes. But that, too, is part of the celebration, he responds. Rock n roll is pure sex. The term rock n roll comes from a blues number, Let Me Rock N Roll You All Night Long . I mean, we re not talking Kierkegaard or Nietzsche here! He wants to sit her down and fuck her all night long, till his back breaks. Or she and he both die with delight.
Sounds pretty existentialist to me. Surely this is also precisely what Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were secretly longing for, when they wrote about their battles with the night?
Sure. But those guys talked so much they never got down to doing it, like most philosophers! I mean, guys who write as much as they did, obviously aren t getting laid, right? But, hey, I ve been getting laid for years, thousands of times, as part of Kiss. But, as I say, that s rock n roll. So when anyone says to me, all you guys sing about are cocks and fucking I say, so? At least I m doin it, man!
I do mean it when I say I ve always seen sex as central to rock n roll. And bands who have no sexual dimension to their songs are, by definition, not rock n rollers. Euro-techno bands, by and large. That doesn t mean it s not good, but it s not rock, to me. Morrissey, whose work I think is sonically superb, lacks that sexual dimension, because I don t think he s clear on all this himself. It s all too ambiguous, too ethereal.
But surely Morrissey s fans prefer that form of sexual ambiguity, rather than, say, Gene slapping his flaming codpiece up their ass?
Fair enough, but then we re back to people who probably aren t doing it because they can t even face the subject in songs! And there s a difference between Morrissey s intention and the effect. It s like, somebody looks at a nun and gets a hard-on. Their intention may not be to get a sexual result, but they still get the hard-on and maybe the same thing happens to certain fans when they listen to Morrissey s songs. Whereas other people prefer their strippers dressed as nuns!
Eh, quite. Moving swiftly on, is it true that before he put on the make-up and the mammoth and probably deceptive codpiece that led to his life of endless rides, he regarded himself as one of the ugliest dudes on the planet? And still does, when he takes off the make up?
No, that was just a line, again, punish those who might mock me! he says, laughing. My problem is that I think I m the most beautiful guy on the planet but if I say that I m going to have many barbs to defend myself against, so it s easier to say I m the ugliest guy. And yeah, you re right, I have the smallest penis on the planet.
Really?
Hey, whether I do or not, the real point is that I still get laid more often than anyone in your entire country! And that s why I got into music. You couldn t figure out what the music was doing, when you were a kid, really. All I remember is seeing these early rockers like Jerry Lee, Elvis, but I was too young, none of it made sense until I saw The Beatles and that single-handedly changed my life. And later I realised it was more than just a song, and that a group is more than just music. The few bands that realise that go on to make history.
Let s face it, there have been great records by artists who you couldn t fucking remember if they held a gun to your head. That s the problem. You can make great, faceless music but if you also have presence, charisma, whatever, you go down in history too. You have to conceptualise a band and that s what I did, from the outset, with Kiss. If there isn t a special it to a band they are forgotten.
Plus, it was clear to me from the beginning that when people buy a concert ticket, sure, they are there to hear the music, but they also want to see something, a show. And once we came to grips with the fact that 50% is visual, we said, let s attack that very strongly, let s put the band together that we never saw on stage. And that was at the time of the Mercer Arts Centre, in New York, where you had all these other glitter bands going around being androgynous androgynous , that s another of those big words like gymnasium , right?
And they can sometimes go together, can t they?
Right. Androgynous Gymnasium, a name for a new band. Patent it right away! So they can do a double tour next year, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Androgynous Gymnasium! And Morrissey can front both bands, joined by Kiss for the final gig.
Despite his healthy sense of self-deprecation in relation to Kiss, Gene recently suggested that he gets pissed off when bands like the New York Dolls are credited as the originators of punk in the Big Apple. Why? Is it because, for instance, in the recent Dancing In The Streets history of rock, Kiss were basically written off as representing the worst form of vacuous excesses during the 1970s, and were seen as the antithesis of punk?
Well, as I suggested earlier, in terms of the basic drive behind rock n roll, be it purely sexual or something you re driven to do as part of an underclass, that, to me, is what s really important, he responds. Inner drive, urgency at that level, not just the style of the music you play or how you look on stage. And some people do realise that about Kiss, though the masses don t. They just judge the book by the cover, in the same way maybe you and I would say fuck! when a girl with very large frontal talents walks by. When these things are lifted and shaped and pointed in your general direction you respond, right? We don t know if she s nice, even good in bed, we just go wow! . So I accept that people will judge us mostly on a superficial level.
But surely Gene s endless tirades against critics who describe Kiss as the band they love to hate, suggest that at least some of this criticism gets to him? Like saying critics are failed musicians, failed human beings, completely useless lifeforms on the planet as we know it. C mon Gene, as a basic premise, ain t this a bit of a cod piece? Probably masking his jealous realisation of the fact that all rock critics basically have big pricks!
No, are big pricks, that I agree with! he responds. But my gripe with critics is not that they attack the band. We re fair game, because everybody is allowed a shot. And I m too fucking well-paid, too rich for it to really matter, If you don t think Godzilla is cool, who cares? This Godzilla is about to stomp Tokyo! And once you get this big it doesn t fucking matter. My beef with critics is that to do their job they don t need any credentials. At least, to drive a car you have to go do a driving test. What college do rock critics go to?
What college do rock stars go, that is if going to college means anything these days? Surely, to be a rock star all you need is a vast ego, a modicum of talent, financial backing, a sales pitch and a big mouth?
Maybe. But in rock most of us work our way from the bottom up, pay our dues, are part of a process. Whereas, it seems to me that in terms of rock critics you just suddenly appear and have access to this position of power. There s nothing wrong with that if, in our case, a critic says I just saw Kiss, they played New York, it was a madhouse, people seemed to have the time of their lives but I didn t like it. That s valid. But for critics to say, it s the worst piece of shit I ve ever heard says who? Who are they to completely disregard what 50,000 other people were seeing, and enjoying? It s dishonest journalism. A critic can stand up there and be the Pope, and say this sucks , but by not reporting what you saw and what was happening in general, it is unethical journalism. A critic s job is to report on the event, then, at the end, maybe say I don t like it.
Shifting focus to movie critics, Gene hauls out Independence Day to highlight what he perceives as the chasm between the critical response to a given work and the public response.
Critics hate that movie but we, the people, love it, he says, neatly paraphrasing the Constitution of the United States. And that is the great thing about post-colonial societies like the United States. We figured out early on that the first three words of the Constitution are, we, the people . It is not The King says . The King? Suck my ass, the King ! No queens, no kings in America. The people make their own fucking choices and that, at least, is one thing I love about this place. And obviously a lot of the people dig Kiss. And fuck the critics.
But then you re never going to be loved by everybody. For example, I m not a fan of Christ and a lot of people are into him. I think he was a good Jewish boy, but apart from that? No big deal. But what I think should be really uppermost in people s minds about Christ is we worship a Jew . Let s have a little honesty here. In the Church, especially. You can still believe in the Christ as the Son of God, but teach honesty, teach truth. Mary was a Jewish mother, of Christ and that s not his name. His real name is Yusseah Ben Yusuf comes from Christo which means Messiah or King . That s why people say the Christ which is right. But most don t have a fucking clue what the guy s name is. They worship him. But if I ask anyone who is Christian, Protestant or otherwise: what s his name? they go Jesus Christ . That is not his fucking name!
So, as quite a cute lead-in to Christmas, what is Gene saying here? That to deny the Christ s real name is a rejection of Jewishness?
It s rejection of history! he says. Jews have no missionaries. A Jew is not allowed to tell someone that his religion is better. In fact, everybody should worship their own God. But when we don t use the Christ s real Jewish name, it s not so much because we re rejecting Jewishness, it s because the Church, in 312, after Christ, and died, and was resurrected or not, depending on your point of view the Caesar was Constantine, it was the fall of the Roman Empire, and he converted to Christianity and in one fell swoop changed the entire Roman Empire to the Holy Roman Empire and completely bastardised everything Christ taught.
This Caesar turned all his soldiers into Christian Soldiers when Christ had specifically said, take your swords and make them into plough shares . He didn t want soldiers. He didn t want a Pope and the Papacy and human beings telling you what to do. Except him, of course. It s all lies. And that is my message to Ireland for Christmas!
But is rock n roll similarly a lie, with all this celebrate-the-black-base or, at a push, recognise-the-Native-American-spiritual-input. Donald Fagen and the Beastie Boys aside, where is Jewishness celebrated in rock?
Well, it s there in our music, energy, drive, as I said earlier. That s exactly what I meant earlier about being an outcast, a stranger in a strange land. You have to prove to everyone, especially the people who mock you, what you really are worth.
Neil Diamond has spoken of how the Jewish equivalent of what blacks see as the blue note , the oratorical tilt in his delivery, the minor mode he often uses and the cry of the heart that similarly defines some Irish music, all reflect his racial base.
True. And that note is the flat third. And we fool around with the flat third in Kiss, even though that s clearly not straight-ahead pop music. But every once in a while you go aaaeeeha when you do the flat third on the melody and though some people may see that as blues, it s not. But then even Little Richard was far enough away from the straight-out blues because it was more celebratory in tone. And that s what I heard in his music, and loved. Blues is my baby left me .
Surely blues is more than this? In terms of its gospel base, the assertion of the life force, the sense of we ll fly away ?
Yes. All of that. Initially it was the slave who was getting the torment out of his soul by singing this kind of music and that evolved into gospel and jazz and then rock n roll. And even though rock n roll owes its roots to blues and all that, clearly it is more celebratory in nature.
Is this why Gene Simmons sees the sense of celebration Kiss similarly pass on to fans as legitimate, in the purest sense?
Yes, he replies. And if people choose to have something like Kiss in this world, the best we can do is put on the greatest show on earth. If you re going to pay me a hundred million dollars on this tour, the least I can do is give you the best show there is. That means sparing no expense. We put seven million bucks of our own money into this tour before we sold a ticket. All that, to put together hydraulics, lifts, fireworks, like nobody s ever seen before. People pay hard-earned money for a ticket, my God, the least they can expect is a band that gets up there and works their asses off.
I ve seen so many bands whose records I ve loved and in concert, I get the sense, I m working for them , like they re doing me a favour even being up there. Wait a minute. Who s the boss here? The person who pays the money, as far as I m concerned. That s at the core of it. I ve always understood that basic idea, which seems to escape most rock stars, we work for you, you are the boss. We wouldn t be here without the fans. So the least we can fucking do is show up on time, be responsible and put on the best show possible. (sarcastically) Now, that s not rock n roll, I know. Rock n roll is if you re a heroin addict, or a guy like Axl Rose. I d beat the pants out of Axl Rose if he was in this band.
Does Gene really mean it when he continually declares he ll never tolerate any of this rock n roll crap?
Absolutely, and to prove it, Ace and Peter, when they were being self-destructive, were no longer in the band. Whether they were asked to leave, or left of their own volition, is all how you look at it. But Ace and Peter are fantastic now, as human beings. It s like in gridiron. Imagine, you throw the ball to one of your team-mate and he fumbles, and, because of that, the whole team fumbles.
So where did Gene get the strength to resist drugs and drink?
Why should I hurt myself in that way? There are too many people waiting to do that, so why the fuck should I help them? he asserts. And I always felt that way, never been high, never been drunk.
Is that really true?
It doesn t matter to me if people don t believe that; I practise my life as I see it. I don t gain anything by saying this. In fact I lose cool points by saying I hate drugs . But I do. And anybody who does drugs in the tour, and that includes the road crew, they are out, gone, before they can spell their last name.
So what gets Gene the most high these days? The audiences, the money, the fans, the women or the woman he s living with?
The whole thing, replies Gene, everything you list there. But I d like, for a minute, to address a British fixation. Not an Irish fixation, because you guys know what it is to work hard and earn money. Whereas the British have had money for so long that there is this self-consciousness about wealth and we get British critics saying, so you guys do this only for the money. Let s, for a second, presuppose that Kiss, or any band, is only doing it for the money. Why the fuck is that any less credible than for a plumber to do the same thing? He gets up in the morning, does his work and, of course, he wants to get paid, right? Besides, if the cool thing is not to do it for money I would please like somebody to name the band who is doing it for free. Look at U2 and Paul McGuinness. Are you going to tell me they aren t interested in making money?
I m always suspicious of rich white boys who sing, exclusively, blues. I don t think it connects to the soul, unless they are completely fucked up as individuals. So the bottom-line truth is that we get paid an awful lot of money and love getting paid that money. But that is not the sole reason we do this. I really love the energy of what happens on stage. This is clearly an electric church, a feeling you can t get anywhere. Religion doesn t have it. I don t get it from anything, anybody, anywhere else.
Not even sex? Neil Diamond did once suggest that the sense of exhilaration playing his greatest gig is better than the greatest orgasm.
My favourite evening is to do the show on stage and then do the encore back in the hotel! elucidates Gene, laughing.
So, ultimately, has he achieved all and more than he dreamed of when he originally placed those marbles in that Dutch Masters box?
Well, when it comes to women, I realised a long time ago that if women think that men are dogs, the least I can do is sit up and beg! And I ll do that, perform any tricks if it works for me. And it usually does!
As for our career, a magazine over here in America just did an article on the number of paying customers lining up to see acts like Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, etc., and guess who s number one? Kiss.
So why, then, did Kiss never really score that big in Europe?
Well, we are primarily a visual band and we never really came over there, for one thing, he suggests. Another thing is that Europe still hasn t gotten used to the idea that it is no longer the centre of world culture. American pop culture rules the world, from hamburgers, rock n roll, movies, comics, television and when I say this you gotta remember I m not an American, so I m not waving the flag. I m an Israeli. So what I m saying is that the French can go on about caviar and import it to Thailand but those guys are going to be eating hamburgers and drinking Coke and that s the fact of the matter! Same in Australia. Again, we, the people have spoken and that is their choice. And Kiss, to many people, are the essence of that kind of American madness.
But, hey, the point is that Kurt Cobain loved Kiss, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam says he played guitar because of Kiss, Soundgarden s Kim Thayil learned his music listening to Kiss and those guys sure seem to do well over there in Europe. Same with Garth Brooks, who said he based his stage act on Kiss, who he loved in high school. We also have Robin Wilson from Gin Blossoms praising Kiss, saying we were an influence. So, all of that shows me that at least a lot of great musicians look beyond all the superficial shit and see what we re made of. As for Europe, we ll see what happens when we go there next year.
Gene pauses. Let me ask you one question. Say, if I ask, what do you want more or less, you say more, right? If I say bigger or smaller , whether that relates to the size of your dick, lunchbox, wallet, the tits on your girlfriend, you say bigger . That is America. And that, my friend, is Kiss.