Gene Simmons, bassist, singer (along with Paul Stanley) and founding member of Kiss, assures that it is true, that it is definitive: on December 2 the band will offer their final concert at Madison Square Garden in New York. Before, on June 25, his last performance will take place in our country, at the Rock Imperium festival in Cartagena (Murcia). We begin the interview with reasonable doubt, as the band, which originated in the Big Apple 50 years ago, has been extending its farewell tour since 2019. Long before that, in 2000, it announced the Farewell Tour with the intention that it would be the last. Two years later, the group gave up and returned to the road with a tour called World Domination… And so until today. On the other end of the phone, the most visible face (and tongue) of one of the most marketable rock groups of all time, with 100 million records shipped, sounds surprisingly calm and thoughtful.
Are they going to burn all the fireworks they have left in Madison Square Garden? [Risas] I’m sure we’re going to use whatever we have on hand.
What do you plan to do when Kiss ends? We have other things going. There’s a movie coming out about the group, a cartoon series, and we’ll continue to keep the Kiss World complex in a Las Vegas hotel. [que incluye un museo con todo tipo de objetos relacionados con la banda, un campo de minigolf y una capilla para bodas]. the movie is a biopic that we have been preparing for a long time, the script is very good and it will be directed by a world-famous filmmaker. We are about to do the casting.
Who is the director? Hmm! He should be careful about this, but I can tell you that he directed Johnny Depp in a couple of pirate movies. [Todo apunta a que se refiere a Gore Verbinski, responsable de la trilogía original de Piratas del Caribe.]
The archetype of the American dream
Gene Simmons was born in 1949 in Haifa (Israel) under the name of Chaim Witz and his biography is one of the most accurate incarnations of the American dream. The son of a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust, he immigrated with her to New York when he was 8 years old and lived in near poverty until he discovered the Beatles and felt he could do the same. After playing in various rock & roll groups in his teens, in 1970 he met guitarist Paul Stanley and together they created the band Wicked Lester, which had almost no tour. Three years later, while groups like the New York Dolls were emerging in their city willing to shake everything up, they met guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss, and changed their name to Kiss. kiss).
Five decades later, his co-leader can boast of being one of the richest musicians in the world, with an estimated net worth of 410 million dollars (about 382 million euros). He has also had his own reality show, He has boasted of sleeping with more than 5,000 women and, this is verifiable, he was the boyfriend of Cher and Diana Ross until he met his current wife, the ex playboy girl Shannon Tweed.
They brought a completely different concept of what a rock group was, as if Kiss were fictional characters. Did they see rock as an escape route to another reality? That’s how it is. When I was a kid, I would go see the bands that I liked but I always left disappointed. They played looking at their shoes, you didn’t feel that it was important or exciting. In forming Kiss, our idea was to create a group that had never been seen on stage before. It may sound strange because, at that time, we came from nowhere, we didn’t have any experience or know anything about that world. We were just four street kids, 20 and 21 years old. Then it occurred to us to put special effects on everything on stage. We didn’t want to be just four guys playing music, so we created characters: The Demon, The Starchild, The Catman and The Spaceman. After that came our comics, toys, video games and a lot of things under our logo that we never thought we would have.
Where did all those ideas come from? Don’t know. There really wasn’t a plan, it all happened naturally. At first we didn’t know any makeup artist, we didn’t even have a manager, it was just the four of us trying to paint our faces in front of the mirror for no reason, like it was all some kind of cosmic plan. But when we looked at each other in the rehearsal room it was fascinating, because we felt different, unique.
The group that took the merchandising rock to another level
In the mid-seventies, Kiss became a money-making machine, especially after hiring Bill Aucoin as a manager, a seasoned manager who, later, would also work with Billy Idol or the equally heavily made-up Lordi (those Finns dressed as monsters who won Eurovision in 2006). His rise to fame came in 1975 with the live album Alive!, In whose mix they added more decibels coming from the public to intensify the sensation of a live experience. Musically, they are among the pioneers of heavy metal, but his achievements are greater as inventors of the concept of merchandising associated with a group in the manner of a brand, not only in rock, but even anticipating what would happen soon after in the cinema with films like Star Wars either Superman.
Were you always at peace with that association between capitalism and rock or did you ever think you were going too far? I have always felt very happy and proud. Even with the biggest bands, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, there were always limits to what they could do. With Kiss there were never any limits. Actually, all the groups do the same thing: they charge for their shirts and for their tickets, but we also decide to sell coffins, vending machines, pinball and everything that occurred to us. Capitalism? Of course it is capitalism. If you work, you want to be paid. Capitalism is good, it creates jobs for people. Communism does not create anything.
Kiss was also the first rock group to become Marvel comic characters. Is it true what was said about the ink being mixed with his own blood? It’s true. My inspirations when forming the group were comics, car movies and just everything that was dreaming, fantasy, book characters… Even The Bible is a superhero story, the idea that someone could walk on the water was anticipating the X-Men. I was a huge Marvel fan since I was a kid. At the age of 13 I wrote a postcard to Stan Lee and he wrote back telling me that I could do great things. In 1977 I came up with the idea for the Kiss comic. The whole gang in makeup caught a flight to Buffalo, New York, and we went to the Marvel press and put our blood on the red ink.
Are there many false legends in the history of Kiss? Some there are, like we were Devil worshipers [se contaba que Kiss era un acrónimo de Knights In Satan’s Service, caballeros al servicio de Satán] or that I had cut out the tongue of a cow and had operated on it to put it in my mouth. It was also rumored that we were Nazis. My mother at the age of 14 was interned in a concentration camp, so it’s pretty stupid to think that. People made up stories out of sheer imbecility.
Of all the business ideas you’ve had, which would you say has been the craziest? Selling our own meat buns.
Are there any that have been rejected? Of course. Cigarettes, sex toys and something else.
Taking into account the funeral nature of this tour, I suppose that the Kiss coffins will be the item that is selling the most, right? In fact, they have sold out. We also have ropes air guitar by Kiss. When you buy them, you get the plastic bag and there is nothing inside.
That would have delighted Marcel Duchamp. I also see similarities between his philosophy and the one he had Salvador Dali. Are you in tune with that idea of considering business as one of the Fine Arts? Business is an art form and art is business. Art is not free, you have to pay for it. People don’t like to talk about money, I don’t know why, but I love it. I carry a dollar symbol in one of my wallets and the euro symbol in another. It’s art, that’s right.
They were forerunners of the practice known as meet & greet [la posibilidad de que los seguidores paguen por conocer y saludar al grupo] and often attend Kiss fan conventions. Has that connection with the public been important to you? It is the most important thing of all, because without the fans we are nobody. They are our bosses and we work for them. The fans are the only people who tell us the truth. Sometimes someone tells us “Hey, I don’t like that song”, we ask them why and they say: “Well, I think that chorus is a bit slow, or that the melody is missing”. And we always tell them to tell us more and tell us which ones they like. We stopped to listen to their opinions. Critics, on the other hand, often don’t understand anything. Memory the first review that was written about the first Led Zeppelin album in the magazine rolling stones. The critic talked about him as if he were a dysfunctional penis. Incredible!
What are your feelings on stage these last few days? We are all proud and happy but, at the same time, the closer we get to the end we know it’s going to be sad. We are sad, happy and proud. But, just like at one point in your life you have to grow up and stop living with your parents, there is another chapter that will continue, but in different ways. The reason we don’t want to tour anymore is because, at a certain age, I think bands should stop. There are many bands that have played for too long and don’t look so good anymore, they don’t have energy or they live on their past. The perfect star was Marilyn Monroe because she died young, we never saw her grow old. I am 73 years old now, I am in good health, I keep the hair on my head and much more on my back, I stay strong… It is the best moment to stop, say thank you generously and go out with pride.
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Rock, coffins, makeup and hundreds of millions: the big business of Kiss explained by Gene Simmons