Feyyaz Ustaer | Metal Head Zone
Megadeth bassist David Ellefson spoke in an interview with Rock Sverige, and revealed the reason of why KISS bassist Gene Simmons is one of the greatest rock stars ever.
Here’s the statement:
“Gene’s one of my favorite bass players. I defend Gene to the grave. Absolutely one of the greatest rock players ever.
I missed The Beatles. I was born in ’64 the year they came out and they were broken up by ’71 and I started to listen to music about ’74, so I just missed them completely.
Gene and Paul [Stanley] very much credit The Beatles for the whole concept of KISS. KISS were my Beatles and it’s funny, as big of a KISS fan as I was and I was the biggest, as we all claim to be, funny thing is that in my bands growing up, we never played any KISS songs because they were hard to play.
Paul’s guitar, his voicing and chord choices were so avant-garde and just really out of character and that’s what made them so cool. They were riffs, but there were these chords… whereas you listen to this kind of 12-bar blues kind of stuff that was going around at that same time… the KISS stuff was very challenging and they tuned down a half step.
I remember when I bought the KISS ‘Destroyer’ [1976] piano, vocal, acoustic guitar songbook and everything was in E-flat and I knew how to read music and I went, ‘But my bass only goes to E? How do you play this?’.
I got very frustrated and I didn’t realize they tuned down and of course in a piano book, everything’s very little. You can’t drop tune a piano and drop tuning wasn’t even in vogue. Gene’s bass playing was just incredible.