Like the proverbial rolling stone, Gene Simmons gathers no moss. As the fire-breathing, blood-spewing, co-founding member of KISS, Simmons (and creative partner Paul Stanley) turned their group (along with Ace Frehley and Peter Criss) into an internationally recognized brand. Now he’s leading The Gene Simmons Band and taking it to The Paramount on May 9.
KISS sold hundreds of millions of albums, packed venues around the planet — including an upcoming show at The Paramount in Huntington — and wielded enormous musical influence, all the while being marketing juggernauts when it came to all things KISS.
Detractors will say that Gene Simmons is a rapacious businessman using his band’s distinctive logo and legacy to gin up profits in any and every way. Admirers will chalk up the former sixth grade schoolteacher to being a savvy businessman giving fans what they want. In reality, the septuagenarian rocker falls somewhere in the middle. While KISS may have played its final show at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 2, 2023, the man born Chaim Witz insists that the band lives on when asked what life looks like post-KISS.
“Most people believe that KISS is over — we stopped touring,” Simmons said. “Truth is, we’ve been working for years on taking advantage of technology. A great company named Pophouse [Entertainment] bought the underlying rights — the makeup and stuff like that. Together, we’ve been working on advancing technology in ways that people could never imagine. For now, the placeholder are KISS avatars. What you’re going to be experiencing in the next two years will blow you away like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
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Now if you expected Simmons to sit on top of his considerable fortune and just watch the money roll in, then you’ve missed the point that at best, he’s unable to resist “…the pull of the stage.” What that looks like is the Gene Simmons Band, a group of musicians Simmons has been touring with for years, dating back to when he still had his day job with KISS. It’s a lean and mean operation he’s rightfully proud of.
“My side band — they’re killers by the way,” he matter-of-factly said. “They’re multi-instrumentalists and all sing lead. It’s really a terrific idea. We don’t have a manager — there are no trucks, no nothing. We just set up and play. We have the flexibility of doing requests someone may yell out. Or if we’re asked if we know ‘Tush’ by ZZ Top — we’ll look at each other, it’s the key of G, let’s go, and boom, you’re off to the races.”
He added, “We’re going to do material KISS has never done. We’re going to do some stuff that maybe has never been recorded. The other thing we can do that KISS never did, is pull fans up from the audience. Do you want to be a rock star? I may pull you up if you can play an instrument. Or if it’s a kid that looks like he can hold his own on stage, I’ll pull him up. No rules.”
All this drive can be traced back to someone who came over to the United States from Israel when he was 8 with his divorced, Holocaust survivor mom. Stoked by the hunger to succeed that only an immigrant who came from nothing and wanted nothing more than to experience the American dream (“We didn’t have radio where I came from and was born. There was barely any infrastructure”), the young Chaim Witz had his musical fuse lit by Chuck Berry, whose eulogy he gave at the latter’s funeral decades later.
“My mother and I were staying in the basement of her brother Larry Klein and his wife Magda in Flushing, Queens,” he recalled. “I’d never even seen a TV set. I turned on the radio and this music came on — it might have been ‘Roll Over Beethoven.’ I didn’t understand the words — I couldn’t speak English then. But, my body started moving and that was the profound difference. I couldn’t dance or anything. Your head just started nodding back and forth. I just remember the profound impact that music had on me. From then on, I just gorged myself on music everywhere.”
Later on, it would be The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show that further inspired Simmons to go down this musical path. Straight edge at a time in rock and roll when it wasn’t a thing, Simmons credits eschewing booze, drugs, and even cigarettes as one of the ingredients in his longevity.
“It’s difficult to run a race when you’ve got stuff going on inside of you,” Simmons explained. “Try putting sand in fuel and then pour it into a car. It’s not going to run very well — not for long. One of the books I wrote is called 27: The Legend & Mythology of the 27 Club, about the 27 club. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain. Drugs and alcohol. Self-induced. We had the upper hand because we simply did not follow that lifestyle. And then we had an [edge] because we happened to pick the right initial mixture of Ace and Peter.”
While he would never be the best bassist or songwriter, Gene Simmons’ internal drive would never find him getting outworked by anyone. Cliched as it may sound, hard work was and continues to be the key to the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s success.
“I’m an only child so I have an advantage,” Simmons pointed out. “My mother, who was and continues to be my moral compass, had a belief in me I never understood until I tried to do things and just kept succeeding. No matter what I tried to do, I succeeded beyond what I ever imagined because I wasn’t afraid of work. Most people want a job. I never thought of it that way. I just liked to work.
“The harder you work, the luckier you get. Most people want good luck. Good luck is passing. You may win the lottery once, but chances are that you’ll never win it again. But the guy who works all the time will do better than the guy who doesn’t. There’s no substitute for hard work.”
The Gene Simmons Band will be appearing on May 9 at The Paramount, 370 New York Ave., Huntington. For more information, visit theparamountny.com or call 631-673-7300.
