Gene Simmons

0:06Pushkin.

0:10Gene Simmons is known for his theatrics, and man, did I get a concentrated dose of that in this episode. Gene's the co-founder, bassist, and frontman of KISS, along with Paul Stanley, and built an outrageous, maybe obnoxious persona dubbed the Demon. Now 76 years old and retired from touring, he's finding new ways to keep KISS fans, known as the KISS Army, engaged. Including a three-day event this November called the KISS Cruise, landlocked in Vegas. I'd arranged for an hour interview with Gene, like I did with Paul Stanley a few months ago, to talk about the event and KISS lore. I was excited to pick his brain since he has an almost encyclopedic memory for a certain era of music.

0:49But things got off to a rough start, stayed rocky, and in the end, this may be the strangest interview I've ever done. We only talked for about 30 minutes, but it's still worth running to me because it is a pretty good insight, I think, into the man they called the demon, Gene Simmons. This is Broken Record. Real musicians, real conversations.

1:13This is an iHeart Podcast.

1:43That's your business, Supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. Every great music conversation goes beyond the surface. The influence that shaped an artist's sound. The moment that changed their creative direction. The story behind the story that fans never hear. Claude helps you discover those deeper connections. Upload interviews, liner notes, or music journalism, and Claude reveals patterns across an artist's entire journey, showing how influences become innovations.

2:24Whether you're a music journalist, passionate fan, or someone who loves understanding creative processes, Claude matches your curiosity about what really drives great artists. Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash broken record. Lexus is a company that believes in the importance of setting a standard, which I can appreciate as someone who holds themselves to lofty if not ridiculous standards, especially with the car I drive. The standard Lexus has set for themselves is to experience amazing. Lexus measures success by the feeling and emotions evoked in a driver, like exhilaration and joy. Amazing can only be achieved by knowing people on a deeper level.

3:01The standard of amazing results in a feeling in drivers that their car was built in anticipation of them. Machines that make you feel more human. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. Here's my conversation with Gene Simmons. Can you hear me? Oh, I hear you. Loud and clear. Sound great. Okay. Dulcet tones of Gene Simmons. Amazing. Wow. emanating from my oral passage. Are you in LA? Oh, I'm straight. I'm so sorry.

3:46We just met. You already want to know us. Oh, where do you live? We're off to the best start I could imagine. This is perfect. Man, great to meet you. Thank you. And thanks for dressing for the event. You look great. Thank you. Thank you. You look much better, but I would suspect you would always.

4:13You know, I saw you. By the way, speaking of potato chips, unfortunately, my apologies, we're going to have to cut it shorter than I'd like to go because I got the stink eye from one of the guys who says I've got a lawyer conference thing, so I'll shut up so you can do the talking. Okay, sounds good. You know, I saw you recently talking about Ozzy's death and being quite verklempt about it, as many people are. But I was thinking, you guys obviously must have first met on opening for Sabbath, right? Yeah, we were both trying to make our mark, you know, and we came a little bit later than Sabbath, a year or two afterwards.

5:04So they were starting to make some headway, but we were still in the 2 ,000, 3 ,000 seater level, you know, of... And, you know, a long time ago, before digital, before anything, you had amplifiers, you had a cord that connected to your guitar, and you plugged it into the amplifier. There's no ear, no autocorrect, no nothing. You're not just meeting potatoes. And since neither Sabbath nor Kiss wrote singles, you had to get in the back of the station wagon, You can go from one city to the other and take your case to the people. So in a lot of ways, it was a much more honest time. You know, the bands that became big bands became big bands because the fans liked what they heard and what they saw.

5:58When you say neither Sabbath nor Kiss wrote singles, what do you mean by that? Well, if we took a look at the lyric, Our first, quote, single was called Nothing to Lose. I happened to write it.

6:16Before I had a baby, I tried every way. She didn't want to do it, but she did anyway. I thought about the back door. It was about, you know, the sex from the backside. But radio didn't pick up on it. But that's what it was about. And, you know, Sabbath came on sort of more darker, perhaps. But even we dabbled, me as the demon and god of thunder and all that. Later on, I did some darker stuff, unholy, stuff like that. but until I was made for Loving You I mean Rock and Roll All Night was a single but not really a hit so we tended to write about chasing skirt and enjoying life we didn't write a song about how could I live without you all those songs that are directed at chicks In fact, even Beth, which was a big hit.

7:34Beth, I hear you calling, but I can't come home right now because me and the boys are playing all night. In other words, what's more important, me or the band? Actually, bitch, the band. You know, it brings up a point I was curious about, which is, you know, I feel like your songwriting is unique in the sense that you mentioned nothing to lose. But if you think about some of your later songs seem not better, but they seem almost like you knew who you were and what you wanted to say. Your writing became almost more direct and clear from my perspective. Could be wrong, and I'm happy to be wrong.

8:20Some of the mid-career Kiss songs, or even some of the songs from, say, Monster, sound like fully, like this is Gene Simmons, the demon of Kiss. And I don't know if you feel that way. I will say that all of us, going back to, I mean, the Brits really started writing their own songs, even though Sam Cooke wrote his own songs and Chuck Berry. But predominantly, you have the Brill Building filled with my people, Libra Stoller and all that, who wrote all the hit songs. You ain't nothing but a hound dog. No, these are not African Americans who wrote it. They were Jews who wrote all this. You know, on Broadway, all these sort of blues tinged.

9:06You ain't nothing but a hound dog. Libra Stoller, two New York Jews, wrote that because they loved black music. So artists of the previous time, previous generations, lined up. They came to the studio and they were given the music that somebody else wrote. They had hits written for them specifically by other writers. And The Monkees is probably the preeminent example. You show up in the studio and you have great writers, Boyce and Heart, Neil Diamond, all the best writers would write hit songs for them. But when the Beatles came along, it changed everything. These guys started writing and performing their own songs, playing all the instruments as opposed to the Temptations, who were one of my favorite bands, didn't play instruments.

9:58They just sang and did stage movements. They had full bands at back. No, no, the Beatles were fully contained. They played their own instruments, wrote their own songs, and in a lot of ways crafted and designed their own. You know, it's like a sculptor who's got a big block, a rock. He's got, you know, a hammer and a chisel and, you know, kind of bangs his way through it and finds the form that he sees in his mind. But I want to say that all of us, Hendricks, Obtiga, whoever, and of course their much higher life form, are self-taught. Nobody studied music theory. Nobody to this day who's popular can read or write music.

10:48Nobody's trained in music theory. Nothing. We're just, you know, deaf and dumb, just bumbling through a forest of musical notes and trying to find that thing that, you know, appeals to us

11:07versus real songwriters who knew exactly how to craft a hit song. Max Martin, you know, the more modern, who wrote Britney Spears, Christine Aguilera, all that stuff. He sits there, okay, what kind of craft? And they craft, you know, this kind of song. The rest of us are just bumbling our way through it. It's actually quite an interesting enigma of how we get from, I didn't know how to play a chord, teaching myself that first chord, and then I'm talking about all of us figuring out how to write songs. Because nobody sat down and said, okay, here's how you write a song. We'll be back with more from Gene Simmons after the break.

11:54In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at an Ooclas speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage. With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity, even in times of high demand.

12:32With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, Supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ukla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. The greatest music stories aren't always in the songs themselves.

13:14They're in the late night studio sessions, the chance encounters, and the cultural moments that shaped entire movements. For music lovers who find themselves going down rabbit holes about their favorite artists, Claude, an AI thinking partner, helps you explore those deeper questions. Whether you're wondering about the connections between different scenes, trying to understand what drove a particular creative period, or exploring how social movements influenced sound, Claude works through these complex cultural puzzles with you. It's built for people who know that understanding music means understanding the human stories behind it.

13:47Claude doesn't just compile facts. It helps you see patterns across decades of music history, ask the kinds of follow-up questions that reveal deeper truths, and works through the nuanced relationships between artists, movements, and moments. Whether you're a music journalist, industry professional, or someone who just lives for understanding the stories behind the sounds, Claude matches your level of curiosity about what really drives great art. Try Claude for free at Claude.ai slash brokenrecord and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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17:28There's no rhyme. The words just flowed nicely. So what, Gene? Hey, look, I come from a time when you had more serious songs. You had ballads. You had blues. You had country, rockabilly. Country artists were having hits right down the middle. and you had novelty songs. And the first rap song I ever heard was, well, even before Wild Thing, which, don't kid yourself, is spoken word. It goes like this. Wild Thing, you make my heart. There's no melody. It's just the chords and background. In a lot of ways, it's rap. But before then, we had a song by number one, Napoleon the 14th. Yeah. Yeah, it goes like this.

18:24They're coming to take me away. They're coming to take me away. To the funny farm. And the guy talks for, you know, it's about a guy who's crazy, I guess, and they're coming to take him away. That's it. Totally. And on the cover, there's a guy with a Napoleonic hat with his hand in his thing. And then there was Dickie Goodman, who would string together pieces of hit songs. This was before sampling, because it was sampling. They'd take eight miles high by the birds and, you know, wild thing. And so little snippets, and he'd craft a story. Well, there's a flying saucer landing over there. I wonder where it came from.

19:04Eight miles high. Well, it can't be, you know. My goodness, it looks like a big fish coming out of the water. In fact, one of his hits was Mr. Jaws, about a guy going fishing who catches a big thing, and they string together hits. Big hits. So what, Gene?

19:30Well, the larger point is that you have, though you did not go to school to study music, you clearly have an incredible ear for music. Incredible would have an incredible, you have a great regard. Incredible is overused. There's a wonderful movie called Amadeus about Salieri, who was the king's composer, did operas and stuff, and well-known historically as a fine melody craftsman during the Renaissance. and he was a childhood friend somewhat of Mozart who was a little bit younger and he was tortured his entire life by how Mozart would sit down and he would write full pieces, full symphonies and operas and everything like as if he's just putting it down because it had already been written.

20:32The rest of us, poor mortals, you know, you take a piece from here, I got to fix this. Then you go back and do it. It's like even da Vinci would paint something. No, I don't like that. Then he's got to go back and do that. Nope, not Mozart. He would go from right to left. And when he was done, something happened. That is a prodigy. That's the word incredible. And Beethoven was actually deaf. He wrote music in his mind. Da-da-da-da. And he wrote the entire symphonic arrangement, every single notation, the bassoons, what every instrument was doing is a counter melody and everything in his mind. He never heard any of the compositions he wrote.

21:26That's incredible. Well, I would almost argue it's miraculous more than incredible. Okay. These are semantics, but I'm not anti-semantic.

21:38I'm pleased to hear that. I mean, no, but it's your point. I mean, that's clearly a gift. There's no explanation for it. It just is. You know, it's like an idiot savant. There was a wonderful movie called Rain Man. And I was at the studio liaising with some guys and developing my own stuff as Rain Man was being developed into a movie. basically about, I don't want to use the term, but an idiot who in life didn't know where he was going, bumbling, he would cross the street and not pay attention to red light, green light stuff. But the first hint that there's something else going on happened when he was in a restaurant and he went over to reach for a toothpick and the toothpick holder fell off the table and all these toothpicks were on the floor.

22:33Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman. And when they were walking out of the restaurant, Cruise tells Hoffman's character, don't worry about it. Those toothpicks, it's fine. I'm sure you put all of them in. They said, yes, 237. And Cruise went, what? 237. Yeah, 237. I picked up when it was 236. And when I put mine in, it became 237 237 because it was 236. He said, what are you talking about? So he went back in. How many toothpicks were in there? He says, well, sir, let me count them. 237. And based on a real person, there was an idiot savant, and they asked him, could you name the day? What day was July 3rd, 1848?

23:24Friday, just without thinking about it. and people go and they check it, sure enough, it is. There's no explaining what that is. So an idiot savant is a genius in one area and helpless in others. I mean, the mystery of the brain. I don't know how we got off to this tangent, but as you can clearly see, I love the sound of my own voice. Well, you were demure. Well, in fact, you're being a bit demure, I would say. That's a big word like demasium. I haven't met another human being in real life who used that word. not the straight guys anyway well we're on zoom so not yet you have still yet to meet someone in real life to use that who uses that word to you um but what i was saying is you have an incredible recall and we could argue if it's incredible or just good i have a good i have a good recall it helps not to use drugs or alcohol or cigarettes and that way i can put my hand in front of my face and it doesn't do this i'm turning turning 76 in three weeks you look incredible i was saying that to myself i said self looking good but i mean you're talking about a song songs like you know i mean the bob lynn song that's what 65 66 so even 65 is right yeah so so even as a kid even as a kid though you're processed long before you would have even gotten into could have Well, but I had an advantage because I wasn't born in America.

24:55So everything was so vivid. You know, I came from Israel. I'm sure you can tell I wasn't born in Sweden. And so I came here with my mother when I was eight. As a matter of fact, I was eight before I was nine. See what I did there? Eight before I was. It's Rain Man with the numbers. That's really. With the numbers. And so the first music I heard was black music. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard. I was fortunate enough to know Little Richard and spend time with him and introduced my young son at that point to Richard. I said, you know, we went to see Richard play live. And I took my son because I wanted him to understand, you know, what some of this stuff was.

25:42I'm backstage, Richard. Young man, you know, I invented rock and roll, you know, all this stuff. I'm only three and a half. I don't know what's going on. It was hilarious. Strangely, life is what happens to you while you're busy making your plans. And sadly, I seem to be the only one of note on some level who did the eulogy for Chuck Berry's funeral. I was at the open casket where the whole family and friends and family were there in an auditorium. And I was in the back, and the Berry family found out I was in the back. And there were nobody, you know, McCartney, Keith Richards, they were not there.

26:25I don't know why. Because without Chuck Berry, they wouldn't be the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, you know, any of these guys. That was the backbone. And I was just there out of respect, and they came up, would you step up and say a few words about Chuck? As a matter of fact, you can Google and schmoogle it and all that button-pushing stuff that tortures me. And I became so overcome by emotion because when I first came here as an 8 1⁄2-year-old kid with my mother and hearing that music and not understanding the words, I just felt the feeling. I didn't know what the words were. and I tried to mimic, you know, I didn't know what I was saying.

27:14But the feeling of it made me move the way, quote, white music didn't, you know. Torn between two lovers. This doesn't make you want to, yeah. You know, that feeling that's in the groin, under the belt buckle, that down there, white music just didn't do that. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da. Oh, yeah, I'm feeling it. No, it doesn't. That's head stuff. Black music was all like down there kind of stuff, which is why you move your hips and your butt and do all that. That's the magic of black music. And again, nobody took music theory. It's all self-taught, and it came from the heart and from the soul, and that's why that music continues to resonate.

28:04But American music really was founded on the backs of creative former slaves who could barely play guitar. And somehow these melodies came out of it. I mean, blues, jazz, and then rock and roll and rap. All that came from black music. Yeah, most certainly. One last break and we'll be back with Gene Simmons. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at an Ooclas speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

28:58With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity, even in times of high demand. With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, Supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

29:38where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ukla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. The greatest music stories aren't always in the songs themselves. They're in the late night studio sessions, the chance encounters, and the cultural moments that shaped entire movements. For music lovers who find themselves going down rabbit holes about their favorite artists, Claude, an AI thinking partner, helps you explore those deeper questions. Whether you're wondering about the connections between different scenes, trying to understand what drove a particular creative period, or exploring how social movements influenced sound, Claude works through these complex cultural puzzles with you.