Richard Johnson | Page Six

Gene Simmons — the long-tongued KISS bassist and author of “Me, Inc.” — didn’t suffer from shyness as a kid in Forest Hills, Queens.

Alan Stuart Graf recounts in the book “I Inhaled: Rantings, Ramblings and Ravings of a Hippie Lawyer,” how he and Gene Klein, as he was known then, were in a band together called the Long Island Sounds.

“We were about 14 at the time, and this other guitar player and I were playing Ventures [surf-rock] music with a cool cat drummer named Stan,” Graf wrote.

“But we needed a bass player. So I talked Gene into getting a bass. We went down to Manny’s Music Store in downtown Manhattan and picked him out a Paul McCartney imitation white bass. He was in love with it and kept on fantasizing that he was Paul and all the girls loved him because of his fine bass.”

Graf went off to college and lost track of the band, and never realized until 1995 that his old pal was one of the hugely successful rockers behind the KISS make-up.

When KISS finally came to Portland, Ore., where Graf was practicing law, Graf went to their hotel and found Simmons in the restaurant.

“The more we talked, the more we realized that we were on completely different trips,” Graf wrote. “Gene decided to impress me and tell me about all the girls that we both knew back in grade school that he had felt up. I thought to myself, this guy is still . . . 16 years old.”