Daily Archives: January 28, 2025

Rock Legend: KISS co-founder Simmons celebrates solo venture

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The Grammy Award-nominated and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted rock group KISS took the stage on Dec. 2, 2023, at Madison Square Garden for the last stop of the band’s End of the Road World Tour — marking the group’s final performance in its five-decade history.

And while the band’s legacy will continue on via digital avatars for virtual stage shows, slated to start up in 2027, the live music still lives on — particularly with founding co-member, bassist and co-lead vocalist Gene Simmons, who has been playing out with his own band since last April.

On May 3, he and his group — the Gene Simmons Band — will make its debut at the Beaver Dam Amphitheater, kicking off the venue’s 2025 First United Bank & Trust Concert Series.

It’s been just over two years since Simmons, who turned 75 in August, was in front of the 20,000-person crowd in New York City as “The Demon” alongside fellow founding member Paul Stanley, longtime drummer Eric Singer and the group’s final lead singer and guitarist Tommy Thayer — a moment Simmons described being “a combination” of “satisfaction, pride and, of course, bittersweet” feelings.

“… Imagine you’re climbing the unclimbable mountain to get to the top of Mount Olympus. When you get up there, you’re beaten up by the weather, the air is thin up there …,” Simmons said. “… Even though we won in following our own rules and so on — … not being part of important musical genres that came and went … — there’s nothing I would have changed, I have to say.

“You have to know when it’s time to say thank you,” Simmons said.

Born in Haifa, Israel, Simmons — birth name Chaim Witz — legally emigrated to the United States with his mother Flora Klein, a Holocaust survivor, in 1958 at the age of 8, settling in the borough of Queens in New York City.

Shortly after, Simmons, who did not speak “a word of English,” became exposed to what was playing on the radio and became infatuated with the sounds of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino.

“I couldn’t stop listening (to) that music,” he said. “Not so much the pop music; it was fine. I enjoyed it, but instantly forgettable like a sugar high. … It didn’t stick to your ribs.”

Simmons, who went on to speak at Berry’s funeral in April 2017, recalls being emotional that day in reminiscing about hearing Berry’s music during his youth.

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The day Gene Simmons first encountered rock ‘n’ roll: “Never seen a television set”

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As silly as it sounds, it’s genuinely hard to imagine a world without rock ‘n’ roll—a time before the term “rock star” existed, before pop music was taken seriously as an art form. A time before you could witness a man dressed like a sex dungeon Lord Zedd flying around a stadium stage, shredding on a burning bass guitar. Truly, what were we as a culture before Kiss entered the picture? Fittingly, their frontman, Gene Simmons, belongs to a generation that (vaguely) remembers that time.

Born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, he didn’t move to America until he was eight years old when his parents split, and his mother decided to emigrate to Queens, New York. When asked by Goldmine Magazine to put together a list of the ten albums that changed his life, in true Simmons fashion, the list began with a spiel explaining the exact context behind why those records changed his life.

Most of them come from the pre-to-early rock and roll period, which is the period of time that inspired Simmons the most. As he puts it, “I came to America with my mother in 1958, and I had never heard of rock and roll, and I actually had never seen a television set. We didn’t have one. We were very poor in Israel, and I never could have imagined that there was a magic box where people flew through the air and there were monsters and the Empire State Building and King Kong.”

The very idea of pop culture and youth culture was more or less new to the young Simmons. When he puts it like that, it’s easy to see where the very concept of Kiss comes from. Imagine moving to a new country and seeing all this new culture for the first time. Not only that, but you do so at an age where you’re old enough to understand it but young enough to be the target audience.

What else is Kiss but all that inspiration coming together in one place? Hearing the music of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and having it have just as much effect as reading a Fantastic Four comic or watching Godzilla fight Mothra on TV. Going to the movie theatre for the first time and watching Dr No or The Music Man, then coming home to see this bunch of Limeys on Sullivan calling themselves The Beatles.

After all, for all their fearsome image, Kiss’ music never really got past being a mix of Chuck Berry and early Beatles with a bit of glam heaviness thrown in for good measure. That is the nature of inspiration, though. We are, consciously or unconsciously, inspired by everything that surrounds us. Sure, Simmons rhapsodises about Little Richard and Ray Charles, but the music alone doesn’t bring Kiss to life.

The best part of it is that inspiration never stops. While Simmons moved to America and discovered all this for the first time, that doesn’t make his experience more or less meaningful than anyone else. It just meant he decided that all these things that were making his world a bigger, more exciting place could coexist as one entity. Really, anyone can do that, no matter where or when they’re from!

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