Gene Simmons

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Am I allowed to pick anything up? You can do anything you want. You're very free here. Did Cash ever play this? I don't know if Cash played it. Tom Petty definitely played that one. He gave me that one. Yeah, the neck is like, wow. very soon and nice to play. Good sounding instrument. Who would ever start a song like... And then you go into the song. The introduction is the bridge. And I will say...

As a matter of fact, you understand. It's the harmony to the melody. It's crazy. And that's the introduction to the song. Who does that? Somebody really who knows what they're doing. Good lord. Unbelievable. Wherever that came from, four guys really from the middle of nowhere. Nowhere. And the name of the place was Liver Pool, like Kishka Village.

When I first heard that, I was... I couldn't believe it was a place called Liverpool, the most disgusting sounding like, you know, like a vat made of innards. And there is something called a singularity because... For instance, Harrison was supposed to be the guy. whose writing wasn't on the level of Lennon McCartney.

But if you put Harrison in any other band, any other band, and so what have you written lately? Well, let me see. I got While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I wrote that by myself. I wrote something by myself. Here comes the sun. Oh, my God. Which I think is the number one Beatle stream song, shockingly. I know he would be great, but in the Beatles, he's just the third guy. Yeah, amazing. Tell me about New York.

Around the time that the band was starting, 70s New York. Band started in 73, 74. 73? 73, yeah. Tell me about 1973 in New York. What do you remember? What was going on? I was... because I didn't want to spend money and all that stuff. That's how we know he was Jewish, by the way. Lived with his mother until he was 33 years old. How old were you, though, in 17? I was 56. No. In 73, I was...

22. 22, 23. So you're a kid. Yeah. And everybody in the band's about the same age? I was the oldest. Paul was... 20, Stanley was 20 or 21, and the other two guys, Ace and Peter, were, no, actually, Peter Criss was older than I was, so he must have been 23 years old or so, 23, so he must have been. 25, 26. He had already been in another band called Chelsea.

which had a record out that didn't do well paul and i were in a previous band called wicked lester we had a record that was finished for epic and was not released we bought The record back gave Epic $44,000.

which at that time was a lot of money because in retrospect just i i don't want to be the doobie brothers or three dog night it was that kind of band nothing wrong with those bands yeah we wanted to be anglophiles you know kind of inspired by the english stuff yeah the way the instruments sounded and What they sang about was clearly not American stuff. Yes, there were pop songs and so on, and we all love those, but...

When you started in Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, kind of, who's Ruby Tuesday? The names of the bands were so ethereal. Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull and all this. I mean, it's clearly English, but it sounded like another clearly culture, but reality or something. We were mesmerized by it, starting off with the Beatles. So, well, first thing is both Paul and I, who share a common background. How do you meet Paul?

I had written songs delusionally by myself, taught myself a few chords, CFG, you know, those things, and wrote very poppy. terrible Beatles inspired melodies. My uncle is a raft and he always keeps me floating. He is so good to me. He treats me tenderly. Melodies like that with the stupidest McCartney-esque kind of lyric. and went to Eskimo Sun. Eskimo Sun, you shine at me. Mother's love, far as the eyes can see, six months' love is here. You know, these kinds of...

Beatle-esque things, and went shopping, went knocking on doors, did a demo, and thought of myself as a solo artist. Of course, in those days, I was Gene Klein. That ain't rock. You know, dress British, think Yiddish. Did he ever play shows as Gene Klein with acoustic guitar or otherwise? Yes. high school, places like that. And at the same time, I was studying to be a teacher. I did in fact teach sixth grade in Spanish Harlem for a short time.

How was that experience? Teaching? Yeah. Both my roommates in college were black. And I wanted to do that on purpose. I wanted to confront... you know it was one of those introspective times it was post hippie movement and people were thinking about within, words like that, which the generation before never thought, what do I mean, within.

I grew up Jewish in a white world and knew a little bit of anti-Semitism, but not a lot. My mother, however, was... a survivor at 14 years of age of the concentration camps of nazi germany so my best friends during uh preschool of fifth grade sixth grade and all that were black kids because I loved black music and the first Music I heard was pre-Beatles, Chuck Berry. And as I sit here saying Chuck Berry, what a strange world it is because I actually did the eulogy for Chuck's funeral.

unplanned or anything, and nobody else was there. No McCartney, no Keith Richards. I don't know why. But I happened to be in the same place and wound up just bawling like a child with his open casket. At any rate, the first music I heard was Chuck Berry, Little Richard. Fats Domino fell in love with that stuff.

Then, of course, when the Beatles came in, my mind was blown. And sure enough, as I dug into the Beatles, they were doing cover versions. Motown, Chuck Berry, and so did the Stones. They all did that. And I went, ah. That is cool and that does translate to white boys and all that. So the beginning of the 70s was a very pivotal cultural time. Right out of the 60s gave teenagers a lot of power. The vote, they had...

discretionary monies, and all of a sudden, you know, young people shouldn't be hurt. You didn't care about teenagers in the 50s. Yeah. Once the pill came in... Women of age and sometimes even underage were having sex not necessarily to get married, just they enjoyed it too. And the civil rights movement, you know. while you're busy leading your also happy life. the slave world. And my grandfather was a slave.

It's a different world, a different culture, black culture. And in the southern states, you were acutely aware. that they couldn't even go to school black folks vietnam war was winding down and there was a lot of tumult using big words like gymnasium, where there was an old generation that, you know, America'd love it or leave it and sort of... The end of the hippie movement quickly got over the Dr. Timothy drop in, drop out, all that stuff, I was thinking, okay, drop out.

But out of what? What's the alternative? I never got the answer to that. Just don't be a part of it. Just live off the land. Drop into what? How do you pay the rent? How do you do that? I rejected that whole lifestyle, although still kept my eye on British music. So what happened in New York... that never happened before, during, or since is the glitter movement.

The Brats, the Harlots of 42nd Street, clearly the New York Dolls. A lot of these bands, I've never made it. New York Dolls, unfortunately, never made it. started to dress up androgynous. You think it was inspired by David Bowie or did it come from somewhere else? Hardly, but clearly inspired by the English bands. their satanic majesty's request you know you'd see you'd see these albums in the english

Dressing up unlike the American bands, you know that we had the Grateful Dead They had the crazy world of Arthur Brown. Yeah seen were these skinny, small kids, you know, people in their early 20s, dressing up, wearing, you know, plant is wearing women's tops and not afraid to do, you know, semi. feminine kind of physicality on stage, the androgyny of it, although clearly they were heterosexual. And so all those mores...

And a lot of the New York bands, including the Dolls and others, were playing around with wearing lipstick and teasing their hair. and wearing crop tops, you know, little girls' outfits and stuff, but singing harder. kind of lyrics talking about drugs and semi-punk before punk lyrics were going out. They feel like outsiders, and that very much appealed to us. So Paul and I had formed this Wicked Lester band that was very pop.

And we didn't like it because the thing that we liked was that English music, the Kinks and the Stones. The American bands just weren't writing that kind of music. And the American bands didn't look that way. The English bands had... I mean, especially Page and Zeppelin and those bands, the guitar was... worn way down on the crotch and they'd hit a cord and for no reason whatsoever the hand would swing up in the air.

And a lot of these guys would do the Jesus Christ pose like that. American bands didn't do that. It was more theatrical. Grand. It was glamorous. Yeah. In those days, you got your sense of what was going on in magazines. So new magazines came out, circus and raves, and it was in full color. and you really got a chance to see what these bands were. Needless to say, you were attracted to the English bands.

Not the Three Dog Night. Yeah. And I knew some of the guys and stuff. One guy had like an Italian waiter's mustache and everything. They just, it was not like, yeah, let's be in a band and grow our mustaches. That's not. what you wanted to do you look at page and plant you go i want to do that and it's funny when i heard zeppelin first when i first went into college

I was convinced this was a white girl who was doing an impression of Janice Joplin. Way up there, I thought it was a girl with a kind of a raspy voice. I never imagined. And it's so funny, after all this time, I can sit here and remember that first time I heard Zeppelin, and then many years later... Jimmy Page becomes a friend. Like, how does that work? Amazing. Life's incredible. So incredible. And, I mean, your journey coming from...

Run DMC and then Beastie Boys and you. I read up on you, Ruben, insisting you put guitars in with the rap and do that and combining Run DMC with Aerosmith. I mean, great, great stuff. that, left to its own devices, would have probably gone down familiar roads. It's the pushing against the walls that makes it like, what? What is that? And Yoko still doesn't belong on any stage anywhere.

Not with Chuck Berry and John Lennon on the same stage. You saw that footage, right? I don't think so. John Lennon and Yoko were co-hosting the Mike Douglas show, an afternoon variety show. That was our first TV show as well. And it was a big deal. Yes. Amazing. Four o'clock in the afternoon, nationwide, when mom was home. Yeah.

And they had comedians and that kind of stuff. And they did rock and roll. And for one week, John Lennon and Yoko were co-hosting. And Lennon, because he was such aficionado of the founding fathers, brought Chuck Berry on. And he wanted to play with Chuck Berry. You know, like, who didn't? And they did. Not rehearsing. And Yoko is right near John. Bless her. I don't know how to describe it. You know, just oral madness.

It had nothing to do with melody, rhythm, almost like Dr. Yanov's scream therapy. You know, you put somebody in, get your anger out, and just go, like that. And you can see it on YouTube. There's a close-up of Chuck Berry's eyes just wide open like a deer in the headlights. What the hell is that? And he's looking at Lennon. Lennon's just going along with it. I don't know. Why? At any rate, it was a magical time because the pill was around. Girls were, let's say, friendlier. You could wake up.

with one or two young ladies whose names you never bothered to learn. It was pre-AIDS, pre-what does it all mean? Where is this going? Do I have my mother's hips? It was the sexual revolution. Yeah, we just thought of it like, boy, are we having a lot of fun. on a guy's point of view. Girls may have a different point of view, but I can only speak for heterosexual male point of view. So we decided to put together the band. Paul and I that we had never seen on stage.

What you imagined you'd want to see. Wanted, yeah. Because the bands we saw, we loved. Loved Townsend smashing guitars. Wasn't about love the songs, but... Smashing a guitar, what's that about? And you're seeing Keith Moon destroying his drums. The American bands simply did not do that.

And Hendrix came out of that school. Jimmy James and the Flames and all that, they couldn't make any headway. He goes to England, and all of a sudden, this guy's on the floor humping his guitar, singing it on fire. playing the guitar over his head or with his teeth. Insane. American bands, we love The Temptations, but I didn't want to be in a band like The Temptations.

to cookie cutter, although great songs. Yeah. Unequaled. Yeah. And so on a very primitive level, all these New York bands, including Paul and myself, were self-taught, learned how to... write, play, and somehow put bands together. Needless to say, none of them, including the Ramones, ever made it. Were you guys before the Ramones?

I don't know what year the Ramones started. About six months to a year. Because there are not so many bands from New York. No. It's you and the Ramones, basically. Strangely. Blue Oyster Cult. Yeah. Blue Oyster Cult have more success. than the Dolls or the Alones. They had hit songs. They had Don't Fear the Reaper. And again, not necessarily hits, but Velvet Underground were an influential band from New York. Although if you went to Nebraska, they wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Yeah. Influential, there are the critics, and then there's the real world. Yeah. Ramones have much more credibility than Chicago. But Chicago, which started off as the Chicago Transit Authority, had 22 multi-platinum albums in a row. where each one was a Roman numeral. So is it of the people, for the people, by the people? Or do a few elites who actually can read and write well for magazines?

Whose opinions counts more? And I never cared one way or the other, even though I had a degree and I started teaching sixth grade. I was the assistant to the director of the Puerto Rican Interagency Council, made a good living. I was the man Friday for Vogue magazine. I was the only guy on the floor. How'd that happen? I'm an only child to my mother, and I've always, for some reason, been fearless. I don't care about rejection. because I'm delusional about myself.

I know I'm not the best-looking guy in the world. I know I'm not the smartest-looking guy in the world. I know that logically, but not in my... Do you think it's because your mother made you believe otherwise? Like, to your mother, you were... The king. The king. Yeah, not only that, but before we had phones and bathrooms, I'd always work. By the time I was 20-something, I saved up $23,000 after tax, which in those days, you know, today would be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And when Paul and I first met, after work, I'd go back to my mother's house because I didn't want to pay rent. And if you meet a chick, you go to a Holiday Inn. It's like, what's the problem? Paul would immediately know by about 6 o'clock, I'm back at my mother's house, and the phone would ring in the kitchen. And so help me God, my hand to God.

Paul is basically asking, can I talk to Jean? And my mother, in her thick Hungarian accent, she goes, no, no, no, no. He was working. He's no, no, no, no. He goes, well, is he home? Yes. Well, can I talk to him? No. He goes, well, no. He goes, my mother would say, the king is on the throne. Literally. Yep. And she would always ask me, how is the orchestra? It's just the sweet innocence of... And my mother, bless her, never, she passed at 94, never understood.

We started making money pretty fast and quite a bit of it. Never understood what my working hours were or who was paying me and where did I work. You know, because those jobs, you make money, somebody pays you money and stuff. This vague idea that somehow the money came from people was a bizarre idea. And I, and my work ethic. And my moral compass and everything I am is my mother. I remember... Even before 76, you know we we made millions right away and

In those days, taxes were lower. And the cost of living was, so a million dollars was a lot of money. Maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 million by today's standards. I remember giving my mother in those days check. or the way you transferred lots of money before the rules about you can't carry more than ten thousand dollars it was just it's how you did it either cash or check I remember giving my mother a large check with lots of zeros on it. And she didn't understand.

what that was. It was too much money for her to conceive of. Yes. And you're still 22, 23, 24? 23. Yeah. And I basically told her, I'm going to go with you to the bank. We're going to set up accounts and everything. And you can buy. Any house you want, any price, everything else. And she just... Couldn't fathom what that was because from surviving, not living through, surviving World War II where Europe is devastated, where our family and half the world's Jewish population...

Two million Catholics, two million gay people, the Romani, the Gypsies, anybody who was unacceptable to the Nazis were incinerated in the concentration camps. And my mother... survived at 14. So from her perspective, was not the important thing. To this day, I don't, I mean, I have lots of houses all over the place. It's more about surviving. Yes. I was always afraid of being poor. Yeah. And always wanted.

Lots of money. I'm still motivated by money, success, and raw power. But in parentheses, what it's really about is... You don't want to be vulnerable to poverty and everything else. And I mean, the byproduct of being a reasonably good guy is I can support 1,400 kids in Zimbabwe, which I do. give to multiple charities, but at the core of it, that's only possible because you make a lot of money. In real terms, a poor person never gave me a job. And I still live by the principle that

You know, Jeff Bezos is a good guy. He gives away a lot of money and Buffett and everybody else. There actually are hundreds of billions of dollars, but they give away a lot of their money, including Elon. Elon gets a bad... Ravi does amazing amounts. So let's say you, Rick Rubin, are worth... a trillion dollars and let's say you're not let's say you're a complete arrogant selfish asshole who only wants to spend money on himself

So on the surface of it, we have this preconceived notion that what good are you on the planet? Actually. Even if you never gave a penny to charity, even if you never helped anybody or just were totally self-absorbed, the fact that you're building a 50,000 square foot home and have 10 houses and build yachts. actually provides people with a chance to feed their families. All those people that work for your arrogant, selfish, self-absorbed ass.

you're still making the planet a better place. Now, of course... The best part of that is to work hard, make an awful lot of money, and create jobs and give to charity and all that stuff. But even if you were arrogant, never gave. You're better for this world because without the rich, this is not an easy pill to swallow because I came from nothing. And my mother made $37.50 a week. where we would save every slice of bread, and we had four dishes.

There was no such thing as breakfast, dinner, whatever was in the fridge, that's what you ate, and you were happy to eat it. To this day, the bane of my waistline is if there's crusty old bread. I just had it this morning with a little cream cheese or peanut butter and jam. I'm thrilled. My daughter went. Sophie, who's enormously successful, by the way.

Sound Scan and all that stuff. She's got hundreds of songs for Rick Rubin, producers, writes all this stuff. She went to Cordon Bleu, the cooking school in France, and tried to tell me what she was... You know, the frog's legs and all. I'm going, what? He goes, yeah, well, there's a rabbit. You put it on the thing, you gut it open, and you cook it because Mother Nature. I go, no! No! So there is such a thing as having the right thing at the right place and the right time.

Making your own luck is an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work because if the Beatles, for example, with electric instruments existed during one of the great musical times, the Renaissance. People wouldn't understand what the electric instruments were or that kind of song structure. It was the right time and the right place. Yes, the culture has to be right behind you so that you can be slightly ahead of it. Because when I first heard the Beatles, it was a revelation.

And yet they were still dealing with those eight notes and one, four, five chords and so on. But the visual part of it, people hardly ever... Point two. But you were thinking about that from day one? Immediately. Because... I loved The Love and Spoonfall and Sly and the Family Storm. Huge fan. What is it that makes a rock star, which is the only musical form that's actually...

The genre is actually a verb, rock on. You can't soul on or folk on or country and western on. And if somebody in politics or architecture is really good, you say, that guy's a rock star. You can't say that guy's a hip-hop star. It means nothing. that hip-hop stars call themselves rock stars. Yes. Yes. And that just happens naturally in culture, black culture, white culture, any culture. And so I want my sense. of the Rockstar Thing.

I didn't come from the Dillon or Springsteen or any... of that school which is you know you have a something inside of you, you want to impart a message or something. I just wanted to be rich and famous and get lots of chicks without any reservations, unapologetic, because what I saw... When I saw the Beatles and the girls especially were going insane in a primal way, I said, I have to have that thing. And I firmly believe that.

When Lennon and McCartney especially were strumming and coming up with those songs, so many hundreds and hundreds of songs in only seven years, I don't know how that happened. I don't think they were thinking about what's the secret of life or... I want to change society. It was just moon, June, spoon. That kind of sounds good. I hope we can pay the rent. That's it.

It was really devotion to music. They just loved this thing. They loved this. And the thing was a multi-headed beast because they loved rockabilly. Yeah. They loved Buck Owens. Country. And Motown. Yep. And blues. And all the English bands had this kind of understanding. The American music. Strangely, America invented.

clearly from black people. That music came, blues, hip hop, the white version, rock and roll, which means having sex. People don't know that. Let me rock and roll you all night long. you know, let me have sex with you all, not rolling around. And people go, oh yeah, rock means sex. And we may have invented all those musical genres, but what the British did with it? forget about it yeah and it's a very strange island i know there are a few there's whales and

and Scotland and so on. But that small island of people created the biggest bands on the planet up until Taylor. was a phenomenon all by herself the beatles and the stones and it just got hundreds and hundreds of these bands And some of them were completely different. If you listen to Yes, it has nothing to do... sonically with Led Zeppelin, which has nothing to do with, I don't know, Cat Stevens. And they all coexisted at the same time. And I have to say that it was the most varied.

Under the umbrella of rock, it was the most varied, creative period I was ever aware of. LMNT. Element electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout? Or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add Element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better.

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These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra. And stay salty with Element Electrolite. LMNT. Tell me about songwriting with Paul. When did it start? When did you know it got good? Again, I've always been delusional. I am now. And I believe it's a healthy mindset.

If you're Mike Tyson and you were starting out and you're too short, not heavy enough, and you don't have long arms. How could you possibly envision yourself as the most dangerous boxer who ever stepped in the ring? And if you take a look at photos of everybody Tyson fought, it looks like a joke. They're all a foot taller and huge arms. And yet...

The power of belief. That's right. You're so right. The power of belief. This kind of delusional notion. I don't mean that as a negative, just reach for the stars. Because it's unrealistic. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Absolutely right. And that's why not everybody scales the heights. You have to have this before it's a reality. Hindsight's easy. Because you go, oh, that's how you do it. But before you do it, you've got to have...

vision, and a delusional belief in yourself. When I first met Paul, I hadn't met. I'd written a few hundred songs on my own. Almost all of them were terrible. A few survived. I met Paul because my sixth grade chum, Stephen Carnell, with whom I'd written two songs with, he came up with a riff and melody and I did the rest myself.

And both those songs were recorded as Kiss, and, you know, they did well. He was the original guitar player in Wicked Leicester, but unfortunately didn't have the goods. But through him, I met Paul Stanley. Paul Stanley, when he first met me, I didn't mean it, but didn't like me a lot. That's fair to say, because I couldn't imagine.

that anyone else wrote songs. I thought, again, delusionally, I figured something out that regular people didn't. I mean, there were Lennon McCartney and Jagger Richard, those guys, but they weren't real people. They're up there. But walking down the street, I didn't know anyone who could play guitar or come up with melodies or write your own songs. I was crazy. And Stephen Carnell introduced me to this guy who was not yet Paul Stanley.

And I remember saying, let me hear what you got. And he sat down and he played a song called Sunday Driver. It goes... Then you let me know Like that. I'm going, wow. Let me be your Sunday driver. Let me be your Monday man. That's really good. And I'm going, oh, wow. And then he said, what do you got? What have I got? This is fucking embarrassing. My uncle is a raft, and he was just looking at me like deadpan, going, uh-huh.

Because there was nobody around to say, no, put that away. That's not a good one. You know, we all have to... But the Kings could do that song. Yes. That's where it came. That's really good. I hear it. Ray Davies. That's what it is. It goes... That's where I got it from. Great. well-respected man was a cultural, you know, kind of pop. The fuck does my uncle is a raft and he always keeps me floating. You were kidding.

Yep. And I didn't know. There was no Rick Rubin around to say, well, maybe not that one. So then right from that meeting of Paul, did you guys start? No. Paul had joined. stephen carnell and one other guy who was playing keyboards marty cohen and a drummer who i played with and they had they didn't have a bass player

And Paul was a real Anglophile. He had a Gibson, but they didn't have amplifiers. And when I was in college, I had a side band, and I saved all my money, so I bought two Marshall stacks. With 200-watt Marshall heads, nobody had those. And then Stephen Carnell and I decided to put a band together. We didn't have a name. And we put an ad in Village Voice, which at that time was a free newspaper. And one of the ads was looking for a guitar player and blah, blah, blah. And we saw Paul called.

the phone number we had which was in the rehearsal hall and i remember answering the phone And what's your name? Stanley, you know, so-and-so. And I didn't recognize the name. And we were talking with each other. We're looking for, you know, a lead guitar player. Paul says on the other phone, I can play okay lead, but I'm more a rhythm player and I can think, I'm so sorry, looking for a guitar. I didn't know I was talking to Paul.

there was another missed opportunity. And then it was Stephen Carnell who was in this fledgling band with me, which would become... Wicked Lester, he says, why don't I call this guy Paul? You know, he sings great and he can play rhythm guitar and I'll play a lead. So we had a second chance. Like, who gets a second chance? And when Paul and I got together, he, you know, slowly warmed up to the idea because I did have other material that we started doing. And we started...

You know, writing together, he would come in with a finished song, like... And I said, where'd you get that? The Rolling Stones? And I said, well, that's really good. I like the chords, the way they sound, but you know it's not memorable. So the bass lines that I wound up playing, because I wasn't trained bass, McCartney was a big influence. I just played what was in my mind. So I started doing... That became the beginning. And so it was those chords.

but the chords only came in during the verse. It began with my bass riff, and during the verses, And that became a thing. We recognized, all of us, that what I was naturally playing... It was a bass line that I was doing for a song Paul had called Love Her All I Can. But then I said, why don't you guys play my bass line? So while that's gone, and drums are going in the back of it, it had an interesting syncopated thing, and the chords got out of the way. So a lot of the songs, the early songs...

Either Paul and I would come in with our own things and the riffs. The riffs. And... And what sounds stupid on acoustic guitar, played loudly, kind of goes, wow, it's kind of like cream. And we had harmonies. Tell me about up until making the first album. So gigs, did you guys do shows? We... Paul and I got a loft, 10 East 23rd Street.

I had worked at that time as the assistant to the director of the Puerto Rican Interagency Council because I could type 90 words a minute. I could fix mimeograph, hexograph, rexograph. So I was a one-man office. When you had to do copies of anything, take a note. In fact, before that, I was a dictaphone typist from 8 p.m. until 8 a.m. at Williamson & Williamson, a law firm on Wall Street.

So after work, I'd lock up the office. It was a government-funded research and demonstration project. I'd take the subway to downtown, 15th Street, and I was the checkout guy at a Jewish deli. So you take people's money, ring it up, but I could eat as much as I want and I can take doggy bags with me. So make extra money. Who was taken care of?

free so i could eat whatever i wanted and boy did i punish those cheesecakes the blueberry cheesecake And then after my stint at the, a few hours, and by 9 or 9.30, I take the subway or walk to 23rd Street. And we'd start rehearsing at night. Would you be exhausted or no? Of course. But you're two years old. You just don't have that. You just go.

pick up food where you could, and you just go, go, go. Would you say all of the work was to get you to the rehearsal, or no? Everything was the same. It was all just... Money. You were driven by money. Still am. Yeah. And even the band from the beginning was only about money. You have to add chicks. Okay. Because you didn't, I and no one else in the band and no one else I ever met. or admired in other bands ever talked about the ethereal or poetic nature of

I don't know, Bob Dylan, let's say. It was a higher life form. The glitter movement was amazing. Did you ever see any of those bands? Did you ever see the Dolls play live? We opened for them. We opened for them for three shows or so. Paul and I went to see them at the Hotel Diplomat in New York before the record had already come out. They came out before us about six months.

Were you already in full makeup? Yes, right from the beginning. At the very first show, we were fourth on the bill, 1973, New Year's Eve, it was Kiss. Teenage Lust, Iggy Pop, and Blue Oyster Cult. Wow. At the Academy of Music for 3,000 people. That became the Palladium. That sounded like a great show. Yes, in those days, there was no separation. I mean, I saw...

Albert King, the Chambers brothers, and Polko on the same bill. You could see the Woody Herman orchestra and Led Zeppelin on the same bill. Wow. How did the first... New Year's Eve show? By the third song... This was New Year's Eve. Firehouse. We got ourselves a manager, a guy who directed a late-night TV show called Flipside. That was in the studio. They'd bring John Lennon or record label heads. It would be live music in a recording studio. How did you find him, or how did he find you?

oh i found everybody the mountain ain't coming to you mohammed okay i had the offices at the puerto rican interagency council after everybody left i bought I voraciously read Billboard, Record World, and Cashbox every issue. You did, too. I did. And then they had the year-end issue. And they listed every single management company, every single... And when...

The band was put together before anything. We rented out the Diplomat Hotel on 43rd Street and got bigger bands, bigger local bands than us. street punk local band before the punk era they were called street punk And they had a good song called Master of Flash. So locally, they meant more than KISS. KISS was a new band, Untried. And Luger, a small band. And I wrote up the contract. You'll be there. There'll be amplifiers and the sound system, all of it rented.

It will sell tickets and everything, and you get a sum total of $125. I said that. And you show up at 8 o'clock, that's when you play Luger, and you get $75 or $100, whatever it is. And what they didn't know, they assumed, and you know what happens when you assume, makes an ass out of you and me, is that we all understood they were the headlines. Well, Kiss, this new band, was going on at 9.30.

So we invited, I put together the press kit myself up at the offices of Puerto Rican Interagency Council, bought Medela Envelope. printed up the stuff there in the office and sent it to every person in the record industry, including, by the way, the director-producer of Flipside, because it was a music show. And we were looking for managers and everything. And a few people came down and it said heavy metal masters before people used the term, the William Burroughs heavy metal.

And we put on our own makeup. And his friends actually went out and bought glue and glitter. In those days, you could buy multicolored glitter. And Paul and his friends outlined the Kiss logo on a T-shirt in glue and then dropped the glitter on there and let it drop. And then hand it out just like... Frank Sinatra, the Bobby Soxers at the Paramount Theater, because we were all students of how do you create something that's not going to come to you.

And Colonel Tom Parker used to pay these teenage girls to be in the front going, ah! And we literally got everybody's girlfriends or any pretty girls that we could, and here put this T-shirt on and be in the front row. And when we come on, ah! So one of the industry people that came to see us was this producer, director. There were record companies there as well.

Windfall Records and a few others. And Paul and I had already walked out of the Epic Records contract with Ucad Lester. We just didn't believe in it. and bill a coin, I remember right after we came off the stage. I went, people were still milling around because the guys were all trying to get laid and the girls were staying there if they didn't have boyfriends. You know, it was all social. And I remember...

One of the photographers, a girl, who was in the front taking photos, you know, of us while we were on stage, just like real bad. And it was a pretty good-sounding hall, and we came off well. We did Firehouse and all those. songs that would later become popular within a year. And I remember this guy coming in and I was sitting by the mixing console in makeup with Homemade. glittery pants made out of

Like what your grandmother would put on a glittery thing that she sews at home, but not well made. Yeah. black and black leather jacket and a black t-shirt and all that. And puffed up hair and makeup. And I'm sitting by the... And this guy, Bill O'Coin, comes in. And as soon as he's coming, I grabbed this girl, Regina, with a camera around her. And she happened to be...

blessed in that special way. And so I put her on my lap and was, you know, moving my lap up and down so that you would see God's gifts bouncing. And I mean... Shakespeare said the world is a stage and we're all just playing.

They were lifted and separated, as I recall, pointing in his general direction. And when he sat down... he's you know a guy with the makeup and the thing who on stage was sticking his tongue out and the girls are screaming and stuff and of course paul was the better looking guy and And this girl on stage and photos and the room is full because they were coming to see the other bands, not us.

Yeah. But we made all the money. Made over $750, because I think the entrance was $50 or something like that. So you pay the other bands, here's $100, here's $75. hotel rental and the rest of it was ours. We actually made some money. And a coin's looking at this and goes, uh-oh, there's something going on here that I haven't even... So he immediately called, we later found out, this guy Neil Bogart.

who was a record company and, you know, semi-legend. Even in the early days, he had Yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy, the 1910 Fruit Gum Company. But he also had the impressions, Percy Mayfield, you know, legitimate stuff, black music. Bubble gum, it was a form of music. And the Lemon Pipers, listen while I play my green tambourine. And he told them about it. And this guy, Bogart, was starting a new label.

Casablanca. That's right. But originally, I have to say I'm guilty of it, he was going to call the label Emerald City. I remember, by the way, once he was going to sign us, he asked me in the office, Bill Coyne's office, which was called Rock Steady, he created that, before the Aretha song. What do you think of Emerald City? I said I don't like it. I was completely unqualified.

And I don't know if I said it or if he said it, but what about Casablanca? Oh, yeah, they had that thing. A kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh. Yeah, that's cool. And we were the very first band signed to Casablanca Records. I didn't know that. Yeah, before disco, before anything else. Wow, because we think of Casablanca mainly as a disco label with the exception of Kiss. That's right. After Kiss.

I did find a group called Angel and convinced Bogart to sign them, and they were impressive and good-looking and all that. They just never made it. But the real money for Bogart came from Donna Sommer, which was massive. The parliaments, a version of it, because they were on three different labels and were sued by everybody. Parliament Funkadelic was on Westwind. The parliaments, I just want to testify what your love has done to me.

Get up for the downstroke Everybody get up And Parliament's Donna Summer, the village people, I mean, they had huge, huge hits, not just for one record, lots of records. The only rock band, really? Yeah. That's interesting. The only rock band out of New York that made any kind of noise ever that could play stadiums and do that. No other New York band.

And it's funny when you take a look at it, the Beatles didn't come from London. They came from Liverpool. And U2 didn't come from, I don't know, wherever the capital city is. All these small pockets. where, I don't know if it's the underclass, grunge didn't start in a major area. It was like in a rainy other area.

When you think of Nashville, everybody's from Nashville. No, not really. They're up in the hills. They come to Nashville. They come there from the hills. The gestation period, this development thing. is off somewhere else. I mean Elvis didn't come from New York. No. The geniuses of managers, whatever.

would never think of a white, good-looking boy. Okay, I'm going to give you the DNA. Here's what you got to do. Go to black churches, listen to gospel, and integrate that into do this and do that and then do that. No, it happened. All that DNA from different things, they made that mixture. And Elvis did that. Gospel music with white, little country, little gospel.

They invented themselves, and that's what makes it authentic that it wasn't some grand scheme. Now, there's nothing wrong with the Monkees. I was a major Monkees fan, but that was created, and it does not, the music does. The people do not stand the test of time because you know they were actors. They didn't write their own things.

did write two songs. Did you know? The Stone Ponies, Different Drums. Oh, that's a great song. Mike Nesmith. I love that song. Mary Mary wrote that for Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Great song. Mary Mary. You know where he made all his money? I am just a bucket full of trivia. His mother invented White House.

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And experience next level performance with Athletic Nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. I think we're going to listen to a song or two from each album, from the first album until the solo albums. So the very first album is just called Kiss. I will play a song from the first Kiss album.

What do you remember about that? First of all, when we recorded the first record at Bell Sound, there were no 24-track machines. Did we 16-track? 16-track. 16-track. And just a few years... Where's Bell Sounds? I don't know that place. Down the same street as Studio 54. 54th Street. On one end of Studio 54, closer to 7th Avenue. is Bell Sound no longer there. I remember at the same time, upstairs, the other floor, they were recording the soundtrack for Lords of Flatbush.

with stallone they also have the warriors Later, they're all wearing makeup. And so that song started off as one of the songs I did as a solo before I met Paul called Stanley the Parrot. I know. It sounds like stupid. Taken from kind of like Boris the Spider. Yeah. Boris the Spider. Yeah, Boris the Spider. Almost childlike. And I started with these chords. Then it goes. And then it went into this other section. And Paul...

Heard that song. When we first got together, we'd play a lot of tunes for each other. He says, that is a god-awful song. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I like these chords. I do the same thing to his stuff. I like the chords, you know, because it's... That's what makes a good songwriting partnership is you make each other better.

I say the same thing about we couldn't shine their shoes, but when Lennon and McCartney were together, nobody touched him. Here's the thing that just pisses me off at how good. Guys come into a band and say, hey, I got a new song. What is it called? It's called Yesterday. How does it go? Yesterday. There's no introduction or nothing. The title is the first word, and it's the first thing you hear without anything. I got another one. What is it called? Michelle. How does it go? Michelle.

And then you go, I got another one. What is it called? She loves you. How does it go? She loves you. How do they do that? What's the other one? Eleanor Rigby. Actually, it was Lennon who put the, I look at all. That was Lennon's thing. And during the making of HELP...

Because they had Hard Day's Night, the song. It's been a hard day's night. That's the name of the movie. And it goes right into that. Richard Lester comes up to the band and says, look, we've got a movie called Help because we like the title. We need a song called Help. And I read different things. This is what happened. During lunch, Lennon went off. And he wrote help in a half hour.

And when you take a look at it, it was a song about a guy who had close to manic depressive tendencies. He had real personal problems. Help. I need somebody. Help. Not just anybody. Help. You know, I need someone. Help. And it's his whole life. Help me if you can. I'm feeling down. But I do appreciate you being around. Help me if you... insane against this.

Pop melody was amazing with them answering, when I was young. Just memorable. He goes, honey, like this. It goes like this. Help. I need somebody. Oh, my God. So what I call a perfect song. Hardly ever done. Ironically, Charlie Chaplin was a co-writer of one of the other perfect songs. Doesn't depend on introductions, instrumentation, arrangement, or guitar solos, or piano solos. It's just the... And the subject matter and the song he co-wrote was Smile.

Smile Though Your Heart Is Aching. Right there. You're killing me with those two. Smile though your heart is aching. Smile though your heart is breaking. And by the way, there's great songs like that. Begin and end with the same thought. When you just smile. You know, yesterday, all my trouble. I believe in yesterday. Help. Simple. Super simple. Simple. Try to write one like that. and that ends impossibly oh my god and it's not even a chorus

The way you think of a chorus, because yesterday, for example, it's one word. Yesterday, pregnant pause, pregnant pause, all my trouble, and then the rest of the song begins. It's genius. Must have been the way Salieri in that movie, Amadeus, eventually goes mad. He was the king's musical director and wrote symphonies and operas, well-respected, and then he saw this little putt. who would write three-minute piano concertos, Mozart.

composed linear as he was playing it was writing it down and he did it in front of Salieri who went insane and there's a pivotal moment in that movie that is supposedly taken from historical facts. Salieri is in prison, goes angry, and every day he would beat his head, which was beaten to a pulp. There's artwork of that. Yes. cursing God, why did you give this youngling the genius of music when I've been devoted to you all my life? And he couldn't get over the genius of Mozart.

What do you remember about the cover shoot, the first album? Joel Brodsky, I remember, I think was the... We went to him because he did the photographer for Strange Days. The Doors. The Doors. We loved that cover. And the Doors were not even on the cover. It was like circus. There was a strong man. Great cover. The vibe of it. I think he did a lot of stuff for Elektra. Yeah. Joel. Jack Holtzman and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And... It's a shame the art of it is gone.

There's no more art considerations and stuff. I used to buy records just because of the album cover. It was a good indication. And bands would torture themselves with artwork. New label, Casablanca and everything. And he says, okay, guys, what kind of ideas do you have? Well, you know, we wear makeup and everything. Okay, go off into that room. You've got yourself over there. Let me see what you've got. And we came out, and I'll never forget this. And he goes, oh, I get it. You're clowns.

What do you mean? And he sent his assistant. They went downstairs to a kind of a... Woolworth or something, and they brought up balloons. And you see his assistant blowing up balloons and everything. And we said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. No, this is serious. Like Kiss, like the kiss of death. He goes, what do you mean? No, we just want to do the album cover like Meet the Beatles, looking straight ahead. And if you take a look at Meet the Beatles, that's what it is.

Without musical instruments. Yeah. Just the faces. Yeah. The record company was furious. Why don't you put the guitars on the drums? How did the KISS logo come to be? The KISS logo, first of all, I wanted to call the band Half Seriously Fuck. And the first record would be called It. like it the second would be called you fuck you the third record would be called whatever it is And it all, and it's just on and off.

Cool. Who are you going to go see? We're going to go see Fuck. Yeah. Fuck yeah. Pretty punk rock. Pretty punk rock idea. I didn't know. It just sounded edgy. Yeah. Fuck yeah. I go, no, that's the live record. Fuck yeah. And of course, everybody thought, no, no, you can't do that. And it was Paul Stanley who... In his Mustang, Ace Frehley and I were in the back seat. Paul was in the front.

peter was already married so his wife would pick him up and paul's driving scared to death thought you were going to die because he was always Horrible driver. And he said, I don't know why, and he can't remember where it came from. He says, hey, how about Kiss? Not semi-believing what he was saying. And all of a sudden, we went.

Wow. And we started talking, you know. Kiss, kiss of death, kiss of this, kiss of that. Wow, that's kind of cool. Kind of like glitter. Yeah. And then in those days, I was making the phone calls to club. and taking care of the biz, sometimes paying whatever I had to do and whatever, but Paul would be driving the truck because I couldn't drive until I was 34.

We had this photo enlarged of us as Wicked Lester because it was a transition. We were Wicked Lester even as Paul and I got rid of the other guys in the band Wicked Lester and Peter and Ace joined the band. We were still wicked luster, just as a kind of a thing. Like the Yardbirds, same thing happened before Led Zeppelin. The new Yardbirds and all that, yeah.

so there's a photo of us because i got us a gig at popcorn which became coventry we were the first band to play it right in woodside in queen How many people would have been at that show? You could have fit 200 or 300. And when we played, there might have been four. Jan Walsh, who was a girl I was seeing at the time, her. who was seeing her brother lydia chris who was the peter chris's wife and then one or two other people that was it but to us We were playing Yankee Stadium.

You're playing our songs. We're doing it our way. And on stage with lights on you. PA system, everything. PA system, makeup, everything. Big Marshall amps. And we have videos of it. Wow. Oh, yes, before anybody was doing that. We wanted to see what that was. Nobody did that stuff. How many shows would you say you did in that first year before going to record? Four. Total of four. The rest of the time was just rehearsing at the loft. I got a new song, how does it go?

like that and just every day playing those songs. I remember we did a version of Go Now. Yeah, great song. That was by the Moody Blues. That was a cover. You should hear the original version. Anyway. We played at the Amityville, where Jaws was and so on, at this club called The Daisy. couldn't have had more than 150 people or so and there's video and music of that unbelievable strangely yeah and a lot of those songs wound up on the first record and We play The Diplomat Hotel, Coventry.

and maybe a charity event that's it that's it and then recording well yeah the deal as soon as bill a coin The flipside guy saw us. He called Neil Bogart. We played a half-hour set at Le Tang's. tap dancing studio halfway between Bell Sound and Studio 54. It was a very famous choreographer of 40s and 30s movies and there were mirrors all over the place which we loved you know because we're putting on the makeup and doing and neil bogart came to see us

who was already very successful. Warner Brothers gave him his own label. And he, you got to give him credit. He saw something in us. We don't have any hit singles. The first single we had was a song I wrote called Nothing to Lose. And I came up with this lick. You got nothing to lose. So that was the, it was that I had a chorus of some kind, but nobody knew that it was about that. Backdoor. Was that the first single? Yes.

On Casablanca. The very first song, yeah. By Kiss. Yep. Nothing to lose. Amazing. And the ad was me spitting fire, full-page Rolling Stone ad and all that stuff, because no other band ever. was doing that so they led with you know the guy who sticks his tongue out and all this kind of stuff and they went with nothing to lose when i first heard backdoor man

I didn't know what that meant. I had no idea. I thought, you know, he's going to sneak in through the back door. I had no idea it was about the gateway to hell. I didn't know. See what I did there? And that record was done in two and a half weeks. I remember being at my then-girlfriend's house in New Jersey. She had a little basement to herself. She was living at home as well. And her parents, wonderful people, in Hasbrook Heights.

And I would, you know, go visit her there, and she'd lock the door, and, you know, we were doing boyfriend-girlfriend kind of stuff there, and with music fairly loudly so you wouldn't hear the shenanigans, the sound. And I was a Slade fan, and I liked, you know, just English music. And when a song came on... Allison Steele was the night bird. WNEW. And I heard... you know my heat is broken i'm so tired and i thought it was slain i go wait a minute that's me singing

That's Ace's song, Cold Gin. And all of a sudden, I stopped paying attention, quotation marks, attention. with my girlfriend at the time i just stood up and i was i don't know if there's another phrase for that sense of wonder that ethereal thing went another dimension comes into your reality, maybe they call it an epiphany, a kind of a like dreaming come true stuff because I never imagined.

My voice, well, I did, delusionally. But you hear yourself singing on the radio for the first time. On my favorite thing, with Alison Steele saying, okay, here they are, see what's going on, you know, all this stuff. And Cold Gin comes on, and I thought it was Slade. I thought it was like an English band. And she sits up and goes, what happened? That's our band. That's KISS. She goes, KISS? She barely knew about it. We were nobody.

And that first record got us opening slots for Manfred Mann's Savoy Brown. Wow. And we kept getting kicked off tour. A levitating drum set? It's hard to follow. And our KISS logo, nobody had logos that were hung on stage. Our logo lit up. So it would blind you. And between the changes of the band, half hour, they didn't have enough time to bring it. So whoever came on, Argent and on stage, the KISS logo was still on there because they didn't have enough time to take it down.

Not only that, but after a song would be over by anybody, it would go to black. But imprinted in your eyes, it would say kiss. Somehow on your retina, you know that thing. Yeah, because it's so bright. Yes. Even when the lights go off, it's still burned in. Yes, you couldn't create a more perfect thing. And in fact, New Year's Eve. You had the sign right from the beginning?

Right from the beginning. Yeah, the levitating drum set, which was just guys in the back. Yeah, yeah. You know, with the crank. spitting fire, throwing explosives above the heads of the crowds and just anything we could, spitting blood, all that stuff. In fact, New Year's Eve, a month and a half before the first record comes out 1973-74 we're fourth on the bill and within three songs my hair catches fire because stupidly i sprayed

I didn't notice that on the spray can it says, Gene, you fucking idiot, don't spray your hair like that because this is flammable. It said, Gene, you fucking, it's right there on the can. That's the only time it ever happened. Oh, no. Six or seven times. No, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As I switch.

to lighter fluid which caught like that that didn't last long but we had guys with fire extinguishers and wet towels and all that i would never know technical difficulties that happened over the years you could think of yeah People just think, okay, put something in your mouth and you spit it out. In those days, everything was dangerous, and fire marshals had no idea because they never heard of anybody doing that. and especially not bands. And so...

What happens is you have a flame source, a sword or a torch or something. In my case, it was like a sword. And on the hilt of it were these... wrapped material that was soaked in kerosene or gasoline or anything that was flammable. A torch. Yeah, and you would light it. And my mouth was filled with kerosene. Nobody would see it. I'd walk out on stage with a mouthful of kerosene and then spit the fire.

and bring the torch close to my mouth and spit it. And while I'm spitting, you have to move the torch away. And before I run out of steam, I've got to move the torch away from the line of my mouth because that fire is... very quickly eating its way. Moving towards your mouth. Yes! And the actual fire source... It's like a fuse. bigger fireballs coming at you five feet or more. Unbelievable. Yeah. And so in the early days, the fire source would go as much as 10 feet away. Real flammable stuff.

Later on, I started to use more safe, but not as flammable stuff, odorless. Lamp oil because I didn't know that the fumes of kerosene would actually give you cancer. I didn't really say anything. Really toxic. We were major fans of Melody Maker and the other English things, and we'd go down to 8th Street, right across the street from Electric Lady Studios, to buy.

The first copies that would come in anywhere in North America, they would be right there on 8th Street and 6th Avenue. And a few days after we played... The concert, and I caught fire and everything, and one side was shorter than the other. There I was, my ugly face on the cover of Melody Maker. Wow. And then we somehow intrinsically knew it. without being able to verbalize it. And the idea is actually It was true then and it's true now. And that is...

The rock stars, the stage personas, actually have to impact the audio and the visual. Otherwise, it's great songs like, Torn between two lovers. Oh, that's a great song. I don't know who sang it or anything, but it's just a good song. So the song becomes the thing. You can't sing satisfaction or play it without knowing it's the stone. Something about... the imagery or the style or something, yeah. And we intrinsically knew that because

I mean, certainly there was Alice who was around, I don't know, two, three years before us. But we weren't trying to do that. It was not referring to us in the third person. We are that. In fact... which had never been on before during or since. People were so fascinated by the makeup and initially they only knew us in the makeup on the album covers and so on.

And I think it was Bill O'Coin who actually said, we're going to trademark your faces. And we didn't know what trademark meant with the Library of Congress. And we were one of the few people. who were able to trademark our faces. Because they're like characters. They're cartoon characters, essentially. Bigger because...

You could be Johnny Carson or Elvis Presley or whoever, and you could make Halloween masks of those faces. You'd say, oh, that's Elvis Presley. He couldn't do a thing about it. But if you use... our makeup on anything, on Scooby-Doo and everything, and we did that too, we could sue you and take your firstborn.

So immediately it started to have an impact on fans who, before we had makeup kits, because we've done everything from kiss condoms to kiss caskets, we'll get you coming and we'll get you going. I told you that before. Thousands and thousands. Before we knew that, it started to happen naturally. Right from the beginning, you started doing merch. From the beginning. All different kinds. Oh, yeah. As soon as... The kids, we call them the kids, but they came in all ages.

which show photos like it, I'm going to go see this band. Well, they'd want to dress up like the thing, and they'd make homemade T-shirts and all that, because... It's a chance for somebody, the rites of passage, your self-esteem isn't yet well-developed enough. face. And like Halloween, you know, you can dress up and pretend and be outrageous and get more attention. You could do that, but with Arjun.

You like the song. Hold your head up. But you don't know what he looks like. You have no idea who's in the band and didn't care. Was Kiss the first band to have personalized guitar picks? Yes. Because now everyone has them. Of course. but that was a kiss thing first yes and we had Like the Mickey Mouse Club, we had... Fan Club. That's right. His Army. That's correct. And we had...

In the albums, we would have envelopes, full color and everything, where in those days you put $5 bills or checks or $10 bills, round numbers, and they were color. on the inner flap or whatever, you could check what you wanted. And you would send away before people. T-shirts, hats, necklaces, everything. And we had four warehouses in the San Fernando Valley working 24 hours a day. Millions of dollars.

We were already playing Atlanta Stadium and, you know, Anaheim Stadium and stuff. We didn't think twice about it. It was just like, oh. And by the way, at that time, we were on $85 a week salary. Yeah. I didn't have a car. I didn't care. This happens how many albums in? Three. The first three records didn't sell at all. But...

The groundswell, the cultural groundswell, circus magazine, rock scene, raves, all that stuff, we were always on the cover. Yeah. And the concerts always did well. Sold out, yeah, multiple days anywhere. Because we went to Ypsilanti, Michigan. And do you ever go to Europe? The very first European shows were the Hammersmith Odeon, which sold out. We did a European tour in 1975. When we went to Japan in 77 for the first time, we broke the Beatles record and played.

four or five days at the Budokan, which was and continues to be the large arena. before bands played stadiums there. When we went to Australia the first time, we played two days per stadium down there. One in every 14 Australians bought tickets or albums. I know it was insane. We were trapped on the top floors of our...

Because they tried to take photos of us without our makeup. Nobody ever done that. We always protected our sort of Clark Kent Superman thing. And that was an idea from day one. We're going to never be seen without the makeup. It was Bill O'Coin who said, you've never seen Marilyn Monroe in a potato sack outfit without her makeup. That's why you have such a vivid. It was never like, oh, this is me without makeup. Nope. It ruins the thing. And you didn't know that.

Under Superman, it was this kind of ordinary Clark Kent kind of guy. So I'll never forget this. The first night, we're playing two days at Sydney Football Stadium. And then two days at the Melbourne stadium, football stadium. Till that time, nobody did that. Not the Beatles. Not there. And... The first night we're staying there, we have jet lag and everything. The shows are coming up in a day or two. And we have the curtains drawn.

and the sun is going down, and I hear a loud motor like a plane or a helicopter coming about to... crash into the top floor, which we had. So I parked the curtain a little bit and right outside my window is a helicopter with a TV crew trained on the windows trying to get photos of the band. Yeah. And the only way we could have some privacy as we take out these huge bolts.

into the harbor and fill it with food and chicks and all that stuff away from it. And, of course, you're in the middle of the harbor and smaller boats are circling the things. You basically experience speedle mania. that's what it was i i couldn't imagine you know when the beatles played at shea stadium they were on for 20 minutes And the sound system couldn't hear. All you could hear was just the screaming.

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Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. Let's hear a song from the second album. Chuck Berry. from that first show at the Hotel Diplomat. Amazing. Insane. I know. Insane. As far as I can see. Wow. Remember anything about this cover? second album yes i basically wrote let me go rock and roll by myself but paul i think threw in some stuff and Lennon, McCartney said, OK, I'll stick both times on.

So second record, we were constantly on tour. In those years, we did two albums a year and write the songs and tour. How many shows would you do in a year typically? 200 plus. 200 plus, plus two albums. Travel, rehearse, do all that. Write everything. All the time. Would you be writing on the road all the time? All the time. Because you were on the road all the time. Doing demos. We had a day off. You go in and you do a demo. There was no time. And the records were done in two weeks.

But the astonishing thing is it doesn't matter how unique and how... Well, you do stuff. We're like ants next to the Beatles. Lennon and McCartney, I keep going back to that. I know I can't shine their shoes. They'd write two or three songs. And they'd come in the next day and teach the guys in the studio and record all two or three songs, finished, done, mixed in one day. And Led Zeppelin I was recorded in 18 hours from beginning to end. How do you do that? Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

So second album cover, what do you remember? Oh, the cover is Norman Seif. Norman Seif was a brain surgeon out of South Africa. And he spoke, you know, that kind of Afrikaans. and came to L.A. for, you know, all the good times and the stuff, and he had a movie film studio. And he would, in the early days of videos and things, he would just take photos all the time. Very artistic guy. And that's totally his.

creation of, he was a big fan of Japanese pop art culture, and he was the one that did that. In fact, put our names. in Japanese on the covers so much so that that record immediately made us a big deal in Japan and in Asia because they thought we were Japanese. Wow. They thought we were Japanese and were shocked because they never saw us without makeup. Yeah.

And that's in modern, you know, there are different versions of English. If you say thee and thou and all that, you think, oh, that's not real. No, it was like conversational. Japanese. And during the photo sessions to get the back cover, I remember, and Paul is not a drinker, never has been. The other two guys, not so much. And that night during the photo session, we had like satiricon, you know, Fellini, everybody in costumes, horse heads and girls with no tops.

crazy stuff. Do you know what I mean by Fellini? Yes, of course. And Paul had... too much to drink, so much so that he was killing over and we had to prop him up when we were taking the photos because we were trying to do that. And I remember we didn't have limos or anything. We had a station wagon. And Bill O'Coin and I picked up Paul like a sack of potatoes and took him into the station wagon, put the seats down in the back, and put him in the back.

and locked the car so he wouldn't get in trouble. Amazing. Yeah. So, by the way, Ace Frehley started to indulge in his interest. in things that went up his nose and other things. And this was the first time any of us had been in L.A. So Ace met the wrong people. somehow he would attract or they would attract him.

And he was, you know, a rebel in that source. Whenever there's a red light, he'd go through at full speed. It just seems to be in the DNA. And he would never, from all my time with him, never drink socially. just excess everything peter as well would take at certain pro-collectivities. At any rate, Ace, through his own stories and in one of his own books, said that he rented his first car because he never owned a car. We were on tour. We didn't know. This was like...

The end of 74. And you're also coming from New York. And in New York, a lot of people don't own cars. It's not really a car culture. No, you just walk on the street or you hop a cab or go to subway. Exactly. And everything's... you know half hour away there's no traffic jams or anything and Ace rented his first car and decided, I'm guessing he had something in the system, to go up to Mulholland.

And I don't know if it was Coldwater Canyon or Laurel Canyon. He decided in the middle of the night, before we did the photo session tomorrow, to go down and take those tours as fast as he could. from his own admission and of course crashed into something and crashed his face half of his face into the wheel of the car so he was all

bloodied and black and blue and everything. Next day the show must go on. We have to do it. So what we did, and we have photos, he put on makeup only on half of his face. And then before Photoshop, They took a photo of the left side of his face and just duplicated it on the right side. Like a mirror.

like a mirror it still looks a little strange because everybody's face is a little bit different on one side than the other yeah that was one of the things and i remember at the end of the photo session for the back cover and front cover. Must have been one in the morning. We were staying at the Ramada Inn across the street from Casablanca Records.

and i remember coming in there was a swimming pool and in full dragon boots and diving into the pool Must have looked like some ethereal monster or something because I had the bat wings and the black and all that just swimming there. And we pretty much stayed awake that night. We had the second and third floor, and there was only a three-floor thing. And there were girls going from one room to the other. The good times before AIDS.

And when girls took birth control, and had a different mindset before feminism became a tool, and I fully support it. Everybody just loved life. It was just a much happier place, time. I don't remember divisions. I mean, there was the hippie stuff in the 60s because of Vietnam War.

but other than that everybody was how do i put it in life everybody was happy getting laid and not worrying about anything just enjoying life so the last song we listened to was let me go rock and roll let me go rock and roll from the second album which is hotter than hell both of those first two albums came out in 74 within Six months of each other. Amazing. And then next is the third album, which is Dressed to Kill. Yeah. And let's hear a song from that.

So I had a song, conceptually like Stephen King's Christine, which was a song about a car. And it was called, You Drive Me Wild. And I'll Drive You Crazy. He goes. You know, just straight ahead kind of Chuck Berry-esque kind of thing. And this is even predating Kiss, this song? That part of it? No, that was once KISS started. I was constantly writing. Always writing. We'd bring, yeah. And Paul, likewise, was always writing. And it came...

When you didn't think about it, it came easy. Would you have a guitar in the hotel rooms? All the time. Always. On the bus, and you'd bring a little... tape recorder and you you know just ideas and then neil bogart the head of the label said i'm going to produce your third album

we didn't have a title then we did the photo session right on i think 14th street and 5th avenue with bob gruen who became a landing photographer and all that And we were walking, somebody came up with the idea, let's put on suits and ties. and be on the streets and see how people react.

you know, make it kind of like strange days. Well, it's New York and they've seen it, been there, done that. Nobody looked twice at us. They just walked right by us. Amazing. Just kind of like, oh, I've got to get up. I feel like taking a ship. They're just walking. In fact, I didn't have. a suit and tie and all that. So I wore a bill of coins. In those days, I was really thin. So I wore bill of coins suit and tie, which barely fit me.

i was much taller than him and so you see the pants they're halfway up the leg and clogs because i didn't have regular shoes and clogs I think belonged to Ace Fraley. So there I am with socks, clogs, and short pants like they shrank in water. And then when we saw the photo, somebody came up with, oh, right, the name of the record is just a kill.

So Neil Bogart, who was a record man and knew a hit when he heard it, was pretty tone deaf. Didn't play an instrument, couldn't tell you what was it, but he was experienced enough to see. that when he would go to KISS concerts... They were out of their minds. They looked like us. It was almost like an African or Indian. tribal gathering because their faces would like war paint kind of thing.

And they would all be bobbing, you know, like a cult. Amazing. Mouthing all the words and moving together. When we'd move on stage that way, the whole audience would be doing that. You know, really nuts. Unlike other bands, of course, you have the Swifties and the Dead audience, and a lot of bands have their own thing.

But our thing was very cult-like, a gathering of the tribes. And he said, worse to the effect of, you guys... may not understand it, but I've been in the audiences and they're nuts for you. And you have everything going for yourself. We don't have hit songs or anything. You need to write, I remember, like it was yesterday, you need to write an anthem. And both Paul and I looked at each other and said, like, what's an anthem? You sort of know the word.

What do you mean? He goes, well, a song that says something about who and what you are, what you believe in. And when you take a look at how that applies to certain bands, especially Queen, we will rock you, we are the champions. Something about being aware of the fans and you like a football thing. Yeah, like a football thing. That's an anthem.

And we didn't know anything. So Paul and I are trying to figure out how to do that. So I played him, you drive me wild, I'll drive you crazy kind of a thing. I kind of like that. And then he went off and came back with... And he said, well, maybe put in a transitional thing. We'll figure out the words later. And then lift it with... And he came up with... Now if you write songs and you're aware of bars, only musicians know about this, you go...

two, three, four, one, one, two, three. So the last chord is a five bar instead of a four bar because the words go too long. If you know about bars, it comes in wrong. But if you tap your foot, you're not aware of it. So it's a four bar. except for the last chord, which is five. And something about that seems to make it even catchier for some reason. Yeah, there's a little tension at the end. I don't know why that is, but it definitely gives you the feeling of...

and party every day. Ah, it is a pause. In retrospect, it was always about the fans. Yeah. And then when you meet Mike McCready and... the metallica guys or lenny kravitz who was kicked out of school because he came in looking like me one day, Trent Reznor, I mean it just goes down like Lawrence Fishburne, all kinds of people to whom the band meant more than song. And therein lies the crux of a lot of the appeal and why.

We were able to do thousands and thousands of licensed products with our faces. where I'm madly in love with Aerosmith and, you know, all kinds of amazing bands. What you get is Stephen and the music. What you get with us is Disneyland with a backbeat. I can remember listening to I Want to Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day. I can remember I was in the gymnasium of my junior high school and I remember listening to it over and over again.

I want to say trying to understand it. I don't mean understand the words. And I don't mean understand the music. but understand what was happening. Why do I want to listen to this over and over again? This is really interesting to me. Keep going. Keep going. What's happening here? And I remember that experience of listening to it over and over. And it didn't relate to my life in any way, but something about the combination of the music and the sentiment of the words.

moved me at I don't know 13 or 14 years old however old I was at the time but I remember listening to it over and over and over again and just feeling like it made me want to know more It is a very strange thing, this music that encompasses blues, rock, country, all this stuff. maybe taught themselves their instruments and weren't classically trained and can't read or write music. But it really is kind of modern folk music.

like reflecting the times, the culture, the feelings, and all that stuff with lyrics. Lyrics, even if it's... I said something about something about the lyrics and the sound of the words. This cultural Zappa, who I wrote a song with. may have said it best, talking about music is like dancing to architecture. It's just a feeling. It just comes over you and it either gets you. When I hear Baby Workout by Jackie Wilson, I'm in it. I feel it. And when I hear classical music, I listen to it.

When was the first live album, Kiss Alive? The New Year's Eve, 1975-1976. Two albums a year. We were on tour. We didn't have enough time to go in the studio and do another one. This is after what we just listened to was the third album. So Alive came out after the third album? Within six months. Wow. And it was a double album. With a band who only has three albums. And in those days...

If you put out a live album, it's like if you played Las Vegas, your career was over. You had Wayne Newton and people like that. Only when your career was over, the Skyliners and the Flamingos, you'd put out a live record because you didn't have new material. It was unheard of for a band starting out to put out a live record. So we decided... Again, delusionally, not having any resume or experience, we decided to put out a double album

with a souvenir. Like you went to Disneyland, you got photos, not a lot of words, just a lot of photos of what the live experience was like and write personal notes to the fans from each of us. And in the records, we kept doing that, putting in like in Cracker Jack's box, you'd get the peanuts and the popcorn. And a surprise, I bought the Cracker Jack's boxes for the surprise thing, not for the peanuts and the popcorn.

And wash off tattoos and Love Gun would be a bang bang, you know, thing that you can go like that and it would make a bang nose. And of course, a thing you filled out. Where do you live? What magazines do you buy? All this stuff. sounds like marketing of course it is but it We got closer to the fans. Who are you? Where do you live? We want to know about you, too. Yeah. You know.

who are you kind of stuff and that connected the KISS army and stuff and the KISS army started in Terre Haute, Indiana. calls the local radio station and says WKRX. It might be WKRX. It could be wrong. why don't you play kiss my friend and the guy goes i don't know we don't play we play carpenters and you know on john denver we don't what is this kiss Oh, you got to check him out. It's the best thing to do. He goes, no, I'm afraid we can't do that. And he hangs up. And the kid calls back again.

Well, listen, if you don't play Kiss by 5 o'clock today, I'm going to have the Kiss Army surround you. There was a broadcasting station, a little one shack. outside of town so they could have their broadcast wires outside of town. We're going to have the KISS army surround you until you surrender and all that. The disc jockey, it was a one-man operation, calls the newspaper. And the newspaper says, yeah, whatever. Sure enough, after 5 o'clock, he didn't play it.

And God knows how many people surrounded this little shack. And it was on the cover of the Terre Haute newspaper. Kiss Army invades WKRP, you know, whatever. Wow. And that's where the Kiss Army, and by the way, after that, they played Kiss. Yeah, and that's where the name came from. It was not a marketing thing. It was created by the fans. If it's a KISS army, it's a voluntary army. And it got so crazy that we went to Flint, Michigan, because we kept getting letters from...

the football coach, and there's going to be a movie about this. I think Dave Grohl is going to be the director so far. That's what I hear. Great. I hope so. And it's called Cadillac High, Cadillac, Michigan, outside of Detroit. Small town where all the grown men or whatever had gone to Detroit to work in the auto industry. So there were very few. you know sort of grown people there the teenagers were homeless and stuff and the football team in high school

lost every single game they played. And this school teacher with a family English teacher comes into town looking for a job. and i'm an english teacher and you know i can i get a job kind of thing i got to support my family the principal says you know i think about football and of course The guy goes, oh, yeah, I know a lot about football. He goes, OK, you want to be the coach of the football? We have an opening. That's fine.

He didn't know anything about football. Needs a job. That's just a job. And he goes out in the field, meets the guys, and they're aimless and stuff. They start throwing the ball around, and immediately they go, let's do Deuce. Then he hears, okay, black diamond. He goes, hey, hey, guys, guys, what are you talking about? What is all this? Oh, no, there are plays, you know, where one guy goes to the left, and I throw it to him, and we know.

It's like secret language. It's by our favorite group, KISS. He goes, KISS? What's that? And he started to see the photos of the things like he didn't understand. He didn't know anything about football, didn't know about KISS. And he said to the guys, okay, that's what we're going to do. I'm going to put on a blast kiss, and our secret code between ourselves is going to be their song title.

And it's a matter of history. And so it's a real story. A real story. And ESPN did a two-hour special, which you can still go. They went undefeated to the state and national championship. And we started hearing about this, and the state senator and the governor and the local officials, all that stuff, you've got to come to Cadillac, Michigan, which we never heard of. And we were playing Flint.

michigan on the way to so and so we had a day off and we went okay we'll put makeup on and we'll pass them and show you two seconds of this we come into town And the whole town is in Kiss makeup. Mothers, daughters, the streets were Kiss Boulevard. I don't know how to describe it to you. It was like you landed on a Twilight Zone episode. And it looks like Earth, but not so much.

In the small town of Cadillac, Michigan, population 10,000, Cadillac High School's Friday night homecoming game in early October has long been a cherished tradition, as well as the homecoming parade hours earlier. But it's the parade for the Vikings that went through town in 1975 that has never been forgotten by anyone here. Because it looked like this. Unbelievable. Jim Neff is the man who brought the rock band KISS to Cadillac some three decades ago.

Back in 1974, he was an assistant coach with a problem. The Cadillac defense was finding itself back on its heels on the field because they were way too tight in the locker room before game. Back then, it was game face on, everybody was stern, and no one cracked a smile. It was pretty somber, and the kids were really down, and they weren't having any fun. I said, well, let's play some rock and roll.

I have the perfect band, because their name is KISS, and KISS stands in football for Keep It Simple Stupid. It's incredible. Insane. It's incredible. Now, when you open the middle of a live one, our two fans... holding a kiss homemade thing. Famous picture, I remember it. We didn't even have a gold record yet. And we met them, I don't know, 10 or 15 years later. And I'm proud to say one was a successful real estate agent and the other one's a doctor.

We later found out that night, after we came, they had the single largest amount of pregnancies in their history. So you're spreading goodwill. Somebody was spreading something, but it wasn't me. And so... We wrote rock and roll all night. And when that hit, by the way, it was not a hit on radio. It went so-and-so. We... Kiss never spent enough time in the studio. The quality wasn't good.

The producers weren't good. It wasn't until Bob Ezrin came in later on that we started to do better Sonic. Is that Destroyer? Yes. The fourth one. Where the arrangements got better. It was Ezrin who also... secretly worked really deeply in The Wall, which he barely got credit for. So we decided to do a live album as a souvenir.

as close as you can get to the live event. So throughout the record, the audience was screaming their heads off. That became Kiss Alive. Kiss Alive became the second... within a half hour platinum record of all time the very first Platinum record was New Year's Eve 1976, 75, 76, and it was Hotel California. Ours was a half hour later, a double album, multi-millions. And a live album.

It was a live record, too. Now, the platinum record, historically speaking, was invented as a promotion by Capitol Records for Grand Funk Railroad. They were outselling the Stones and everybody else. There were Times Square billboards. You know, for about two years, they played Shea Stadium. Opening was Humble Park. They were a big band for about two years. And Capitol Records. They gave away... But Platinum Records, which was just a promotional...

Because records, if you sold a million dollars worth of records at $3.39 per record, that would be a million dollars. So about 300,000 albums. But more and more records were selling 500,000. So gold became 500,000 LPs, long players. But then... Bands started to sell millions of records, so the RIAA took on platinum records, and the first two were a Hotel California single record and a live one, a double album.

And that Alive 1 begat Rock and Roll All Night live version, which came out and was top four, top five. So the hit version was not the studio version, but the live version. Yes. That's really interesting. The Frampton song was also one that was the live version. That's exactly right. And don't kid yourself. Kiss, engineered by Eddie Kramer. Yeah.

Frampton comes alive. Alive became the synonymous with, this is a double album. It's not the end of our career, but new and using the alive thing. And Eddie Kramer did that record too. And sure enough. They hit songs, the live record became like, and then everybody, Cheap Trick did live records and everybody, and they didn't wait until the end of their career to do a live album. And I gotta tell you this, because strange things happen.

certainly to us and to many bands we're in the middle of recording one of the shows at the forum and during the middle of the show all of us seeing all of a sudden you see a prosthetic leg it was a full leg with a with a sock on it and one sneaker. And it was being held in the front of the stage above. So we stopped the show.

And we looked at each other like, what are we supposed to do? And somebody gave us what was then called a magic marker before Sharpies, and we signed the prosthetic leg on the pink area. and we kind of held it in the front and somebody passed it back i guess when somebody took it you see hands and took it And I'm assuming the gentleman who sent it up on stage was leaning on somebody because he didn't have the use of two legs.

On another occasion, they were passing up a very young, close to being baby, with headsets on, like earphones. What are you going to do with that? Sign it or barbecue it? I don't know. You're passing a baby to the States. Yes, we did not. We refused it and just said, you know, kind of no. And... But clearly, do you think they were donating the baby to you guys? I hope, no, I don't think so. I think it was just, please sign my baby, I guess.

Amazing. Next we have the fourth album. I'll play a song first. Destroyer. I might skip the intro because it's really long. And it's not music. Can you hear the car? Yeah. Great song. Paul wrote that one about a live experience, about a fan who wants to see Kiss in Detroit Rock City. and dies before he gets there. Moving fast to a nine to five. Now, right after that section, there is a solo. Do you mind playing the solo very quickly? dual press 95. I feel so good, I'm so alive.

Now there's no band, just... 12 o'clock, I gotta rock. Chuck, I had blood staring at my eyes. Then it goes off to King of the Nighttime World and other anthems. Which is a great, great song. That solo. Bob Ezrin comes in and says, okay, there's songs like that, songs like that. Okay, here's the solo. And he goes... You guys aren't gonna play, it's just gonna be that melody and drums. and then it's going to be in harmony.

which bands didn't do. You know, later Iron Maiden and The Boys Are Back in Town, you'd hear that harmony. It's just no harmonies and solos. What the hell is that? It also sounds almost like classical music. Yeah, it's not blues. Spanish classical music. That's right, that's right. And that's all Ezra. And I never think of the... It's not blues. That's blues flat third and all that. That's all him. Also the bass part.

which reminded me, I can't play that bass part. That's Freddy's dead. Sounds like Percy Mayfield. It also reminds me of John Entwistle. Yes. But it's in the solo of the Who song. Is it My Generation? Yes, it is. In the middle, he does. He has a da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, and that's a real producer. Yeah. And by the way, originally, Paul had Detroit Rock City, and that was his ideas. Da da da da da da da da ba ba Fives had no one gonna die.

Oh, my God. No time to burn. But without the fear. Ain't got to know. Now I'm going to die. Get up. So it was all like, and it was Ezra who said, like, uh. It was that, you know, he gave it room. Yeah, it became... I don't know, bigger, almost more symphonic. And then he, Bob Ezrin, said, the song is about a fan who dies. At the end. So let's put in a car. He's starting up the car in the beginning. And at the end, it crashes and goes right into King of the Night. you The real one-two punch.

One guitar. I'm the king of the lifetime world. What a song. what a song but all the songs had a about the culture of the band and the fans. The first song is about a fan on the way to Detroit to see his favorite band, his music, his favorite songs, and he dies. Second one is about the feeling of it. I feel like the king and you're my headlight queen. And then we release Detroit Rock City as the first single.

In those days, there were B-sides. You'd get the single, the A-side, which you wanted radio to play, and you'd give the fans another song on the B-side. Well, the B-side was a song... We never imagined anybody would care because it didn't sound like kiss.

Beth, I hear you calling, but I can't come home right now. You know why? Because me and the boys are... playing all night what's more important your band or me actually the band is more important yeah yeah because they'll pay my rent you're just gonna soak up the yeah yeah and it was a very unromantic things which made it rock, but the sound was like a ballad.

So one of the very few times, didn't happen often, where radio turned the song over and started playing. And Beth became a hit. Massive. It won the People's Choice Awards and all this stuff. Let's hear a little bit of Beth. Ezrin heard the song. This middle section is Mozart. It's in public domain. And he integrated that in the middle.

Dick Wagner playing guitar on a few songs because Ace by that time had given in to his weaknesses and wouldn't show up in the studio. And I love Ace and I love Peter and I was just so... sad that happened to them. The fans hated me for, it's like your mom telling the kids that your fathers are drunk and a loser. Kids don't want to hear that, but it's the truth. All these decisions are just hurting himself. Nobody else. You know, everybody thinks... You can't get along without me. Actually,

Spirit tires are just as good as the real tires, and the car moves along just fine. How was the Destroyer album received? It stopped at 890,000 albums. And then when Beth kicked in... Nothing anybody expected. It became multi-platinum and sold. by the millions, like right away. And that's the first album cover that's actually cartoon. Is that correct? Yes. I'm afraid it's my idea. I said, you know, we're... I'm not against it.

I'm just saying to people who are musos, what they call it, we're the guitar and the drums. No, no, we're bigger than... Our instruments, we're like Marvel superheroes. That's what it looks like. Yeah. That's what it looks like. And so all the poses are directly from Jack Kirby. It will create a Fantastic Four in the Hulk. It looks like the Fantastic Four, except just this kiss. Yes.

And the idea being is, how do you separate yourself from people that define themselves by their instruments? It bears noting that perhaps the most musical out of all of them, the Beatles. were never on their covers with their instruments ever. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, it was just a suitcase and they're around it. It's because they're bigger than the instruments they play. Yeah. The next album was...

If we're counting, there have been four studio albums. Three studio, one live, and now we're up to the fifth studio. Very Beatles-esque Harmonies. Great song. And maybe my favorite KISS album cover. Yeah, that became iconic. That's Paul on lead guitar. Paul could also play in his range. I just want to say something that we started to discover.

not just who and what we are, but what we meant to the fans. So the word, the demon, the star child, the spaceman, the cat man, those were created by the fans. They started to refer to us as that. They never had names before that? No, we were just Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and so on. And the fans took it. We start to have Kiss comic books, Marvel comics, the biggest selling Marvel comics of all time, at $1.50 instead of $0.25.

And it was my idea to make them bigger size so that we'd be racked next to Time magazine because the smaller comic books were in a different rack. And not everybody read comic books. At any rate, we started... writing songs about ourselves. We started making fun of each other. I said, Paul, you always write silly love girl songs like Christine 16. I made it up on the spot. He goes, oh.

that's a good title christine 16 that's a good title so as soon as he heard that he was going to go and write a song oh i better go and write one so i wrote christine 16 fast and had the van halen brothers come in and you know do the demo and Then Paul said to me, yeah, all you ever write are monster songs. You know, I'm the God of Thunder and all this. Oh, what did you say? That's cool. God of Thunder. I'm the God of Thunder. I'm going to go around. No, but he finished it first.

Paul wrote God of Thunder, a modern-day man of steel, and I command you to kneel kind of thing. And it was Bob Ezrin. But you wrote it making fun of your character. Making fun. And I wrote Christine 16 making fun of Paul. Making fun of his. Yeah. Amazing. And I mean, you could say there's anything about Lennon McCartney. Lennon was like, all you ever write are love songs like Silly. And McCartney later on said, what's wrong with the Silly love song?

so when we were doing destroyer and ace didn't always show up unfortunately And it was time to record God of Thunder. It was Bob Ezra who turned to Paul and said, Gene's going to sing this one, not you, because you're not the God of Thunder. Gene is. It really hurt Paul. But then when we heard the track back, that became an iconic kind of a thing because it was a song about...

The band, Me, just like The Boys Are Back in Town by Thin Lazy is kind of like the feeling of, hey, we're back in town. We're going to raise some hell. And We Are the Champions feels like, hey, we're singing about like a football. It's about us. Yeah. And we will, we will rock you. It's a very anthemic. Yeah. And so I started writing more songs like that, like they call me Dr. Love, like that. And I remember going back to Crazy World of Arthur Brown. When I first heard that song, I went, what?

And it starts off with, I am the God of hellfire, and I bring you, and the name of the song is fire. By the way, you could have had fire, and all that song. But he, at the beginning, says, I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you fire. As a teenager, I went, what the hell? Because people didn't sing about themselves. Let's listen to Calling Dr. Love, same album. I remember writing Calling Dr. Love. At the Indianapolis Holiday Inn, middle of the night, I saw a Three Stooges cartoon.

And they're running back and forth from different rooms. And the view is down the hallway, calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, calling Dr. And they're going from one room to another. And I'm going, calling Dr. Love. calling Dr. Love, and then it just rhymed, because I've got the cure you're thinking of. And the song wrote itself like that, inspired by the Three Stooges. chorus. They think it's girls and Paul and I falsetto. Not sonically recorded well at all.

Dr. Love! It's like the Supremes. And I knew one of them well. How did you meet Dan Orell? How did I meet Diana? I was... We were at a party in LA. when the band decided to do four individual solo records and release all four solo records on the same day, which nobody had ever done before, during or since. Kind of stupid, but they all turned platinum. So I had this idea of filling up the solo record. I remember the rock and roll circus.

The Beatles or All You Need Is Love. They had everybody there. Jethro Tull and the Rolling Stones. And I loved that idea, that community of stuff. So I wanted to fill my solo record. with all kinds of people you'd never think of. So as I would meet Helen Reddy, who at the time was the face of feminism, I am woman, treat me. Every girl was like singing that song.

And Janicean, who I loved like crazy. There was a song called At 17. Beautiful song. Ugly Ducklings Like Me. What a song. And I remember seeing her when she was 14. Jamie is down. He can't get off the ground. Before she was signed. so i wanted her and all kinds of people showed up on that record i reached out to lennon mccartney they were busy jay lee lewis flew in but too late to be on the record and crazy slick and donna summer and rick nielsen everybody was on it

And I went to a government dinner. This guy, Jerry Brown, was running to be the governor of California. And he was there shaking hands. He wanted to meet celebrities. And Cher was there. I had never met her. and was a big fan, you know, Beat Goes On especially. Carol Kaye did that bass line. That became the hook. Carol Kaye sat me down. It's on YouTube. and showed me how if we got the right bass part it is the song you know hit the road jackets that's what you remember

From her side, Chastity, her daughter at the time, said, oh my God, you're going to that party? Gene Simmons is going to be there. Cher had never heard of me. She thought it was the actress Gene Simmons. The old actress, 1940s, I think. Yeah, she was married to Stuart Granger from Bo Brummel, all that.

And she walks up to me and she said, are you Gene Simmons? And I go, yeah. Nice to meet you and everything. And she sat down. We started talking. And she said, let me tell you a funny story. And I said, you know, I'm a really big fan. Those songs meant a lot to me because I Got You Babe is a teenage...

survival story. You know, they say we're young, but we don't know. But I got you, you got me. It was like this kind of surviving teenage love story. And I loved the lyric and the whole thing. And Sonny, as it turned out, wrote a lot of... a lot of songs with Phil Spector. And so I told her all that stuff. I knew about the wrecking crew, and we talked all night. I asked her, do you want to be on my solo record? I'm doing a solo record. She said, yeah.

And after the party, Cher asked me if I wanted to go with her. I didn't know where or anything, because my history is tainted, you know. So I hop in her limo, and Marsha Strassman, who used to be on... Mr. Cotter, a reality show, was Cher's best friend. Warn Cher. You don't want to go with this guy. I know all about him. Despite that fact, Cher and I went, and I remember staying up all night at Cher's house, and we just talked about, you're from Israel? What the hell is that?

They don't drink or smoke or get high because she was surrounded by that culture. It's Hollywood. So we very quickly started. She was on the record. She appeared. And we started living together for a few years. And then Christmastime. came up and I told her look I'm going to New York

I got a recorder to her. What do I get you for Christmas? I don't know what to get you. She said, call my best friend, Diana Ross. She'll take you shopping and whatever she buys, you know, she'll know what I like. This is my best friend. I got to New York. I called Diana. And you know where this is going. And I'd never met her before. Of course, I was in awe. The Supremes and Diana Ross and Motown and all that.

And I went up to her place and told her about it. She said, oh no, she called me and I'm going to take you shopping. Do you want to eat anything? Not so much. Food is okay, but I love cake. You like cake? Oh, yeah, I worship cake. Well, I've got some chocolate cake. You want some chocolate cake? I love it. She gave me a slice, and then she gave me a second slice. Literally. And then we became a thing.

lived together or had a relationship on and off. And needless to say, Sharon, Diana, you know, for a while, I think they're okay now. For a while, didn't speak with each other. Tell me about... the personality of Cher and the personality of Diana Ross. The DNA, it seems to me, is similar. Both women didn't suffer fools easily. Alpha female. A lot of women, and I've known a lot in the capital K biblical sense, use their femininity and their look.

to get what they want. And fair enough, you use what tools you have. And both Cher and Diana, it seems to me, unlike almost any other females, did not define themselves by their men. either marriage or relationships or anything. They did what they wanted to do, which explains how they were able to climb so fast and stay for so many decades.

And I don't care. You know, I will say whatever I want to say. I don't care about being canceled or who likes me or who not. I honestly cannot say a bad thing about Cher or Diana. They're wonderful, wonderful. mentally stimulating and just great. What was the gift that you got for Cher? Not a fucking clue. I don't remember. I don't shop well. It just means.

nothing to me. It's not that I don't appreciate it. Hey, every time there's a holiday or birthday or Christmas, my kids and Shannon, who I've been with for 41 years, I always beg them, please don't buy me anything. It goes in a closet or I give it away. I'm not a thing guy. Yeah. I mean, I wear some loud clothes every now and then, but I never buy them. What do you remember about the album cover?

I think it was Paul that had the title, Rock and Roll Over, because he liked the rollover kind of a thing. And it was Dennis Woolick, the art director at our business managers. a guy named Howard Marks' office, who had this idea that there's no up or down, that you could turn the record sideways or upside down, and it would also work. So he created that with an artist whose name I forgot. And it's become...

you know, iconic, beyond. I've seen many, many groups do that. It's so cool. And by the way, I'm proud to say that on the Kiss tribute album... We had everybody from Lenny Kravitz and Garth Brooks and everybody else, and I put together that record, so I'd be calling. Neil Young, you know, talked to, said, hey, I want Neil to sing a song. You want Neil to be on a Kiss tribute album? How about you be on a Neil tribute album? I said, okay, Neil first.

And then we'll do a song for that called Madonna's Off. I wanted her to do I Was Made For Loving You. That would be so cool. Great. Yeah. I had White Zombie and just everybody you can think of. And of course. Jimmy Iovine called and said, what are you doing talking to my acts directly? They're assigned, you know, to me. I'm going, hey, rappers do it. Bees do it. Why can't we do it? So we were lucky to get the artists we got. And one of the tracks was Calling Dr. Love.

Singing lead is Maynard, you know, from Tool and Perfect Circle. And on guitar is Tom Morello. And there were a lot of, so many cool people doing that. And it meant the world to me. because they did it from the point of view of the music being a soundtrack of their lives, because they grew up with it. I understand. The next album is the last album before the solo albums. And I will play you a song from that.

So that's an example of a song where the riff is the hook. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And there were quite enough of those. A lot of the songs were based around a riff, either like... That's God of Thunder. Everybody's playing that riff. This one.

Everybody would play the riff, whether you mask it with soap. But yeah, riffs had a lot to do with it. And, you know, I'm reminded my favorite band of all time, sometimes they hear... that's the bass line but play it with guitar it sounds like horn lines and the way I played bass I tried to follow in the way behind in the shadow, in the footsteps of McCartney, who played bass more in the way a string quartet works, which is that...

Unlike AC-DC, which is like if there's a song in A, the bass would go... I'm making it up. And underneath it would be... And the bass wouldn't move. It would be the railroad track. And they were maybe the best at doing that. And with the Beatles, you remembered... Melodic bass lines. Yes, like a string quartet. The cello had its own melody. Even if the drums was doing a beat and some of those McCartney, you know, Lady Madonna. There's the bass line.

You know, that thing. The whole song is a riff. And by the way, so is this. The bass doesn't do that though. The bass does... It's a very strange thing. It's actually wrong. Yeah. Because they wind up on the A. Worked out okay for him. Against a G, which is a passing dissonant. So this is the Love Gun album, and how would you say the band had changed from the beginning to Love Gun? We were selling out everywhere in stadiums and arenas and stuff. We had come back from Japan and Europe.

We had yet to play South America. When we went to South America, the first time... In 1981 or so, we played Baracaná, the largest stadium in the world. anywhere from 175 to 200 000 people and that was at the low point in the band there was a local opening band and that was it And by that time, Ace was out of the band. We had at least 10 different lineups.

Is that the first album, Love Done the first album, where it's not the original members? No. The original members were hanging in there, although we were having more and more problems with... Ace and Peter demands and showing up late and not doing that. No, the band, we were riding high. The Gallup pole, which used to mean a lot. We were the number one band in the world, per the Gallup poll, for three years in a row, 77, 78, 79.

Number two, I think, was Beatles, and then there was Led Zeppelin and Bee Gees and other bands. Unlike the other bands, some bands were selling more records. A few bands actually sold more tickets. But nobody touched us in licensing and merchandising. And we were making millions. So we went out and did another greatest hits collection called Double Platinum. When was Alive 2, though? Alive 2 was...

Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over, and Love Gun. Then Alive 2. Okay. Another three records, another live record. Also, multi-platinum, creating new... I think that was, at the time, my favorite of your albums was... just alive too. There are some good songs, Rockin' in the USA, All American Man, a few others. Ace Fraley did not show up for quite a few of those songs, so he got Bob Kulik, Rick Derringer. few other people and by that time you know crash

Not all was well in Paradise. And after Alive 2, we couldn't really get our act together. Peter Criss started to make problems. So in the meantime, right after that, we released Double Platinum, which was another greatest hits collection. You remember our fans.

kept getting younger and younger. New fans, because of the toys and the games, were discovering the band. So they didn't know about the... the early records no they just like oh double album and it was really cool cover it was silver yes yeah like mirror like the imprint By the way, copied from Uriah Heep, they had an album called Mirror Images or something where the faces were imprinted. You know, everybody gets inspired by everything.

We did a disco version of... strutters was strutter 79 or something and just same song just you know that kind of thing which didn't work at all on the double platinum so but on a live two millions flew out the door. But there was trouble in paradise, both Ace and Peter. And during that time, we did a movie that was in theaters. drive-in theaters. We caught it in Australia when we went back outdoors, packed with cars everywhere.

We replaced Peter first, whose drumming went down. We used to call him Mr. Misery or the Ayatollah Criscola. That was his original name. I was Gene the Nazarene. Oh, I want to grow up to be just like you. You're so important. You know that. thing and paul was the he she screw it on sometimes there was a thing in the media they thought paul pitched for the other side or was secretly a woman you know whatever all that stuff nonsense And Ace was high octane and other such names.

Clearly Ace and Peter were having problems and I always feel the pain that fans must feel. I mean my heart was broken when I heard Lennon going on about, you never wrote anything except my guy. Oh my God, you were childhood friends. Heartbreaking. When they turned on each other, you go, what? Don't mom and dad, you know, when they turn on each other. So I'm aware of it. So we have to get rid of Peter and Eric Carr, who cleans stoves in Westchester. It was Eric Caravello. We changed to car.

So it didn't sound like Mr. Bochka Loop selling fruit on a street corner. Hey, get your fruit over here. It's just not a rock-sounding name. Jews change their name. Nobody was born Bob Dylan, okay? On the other hand, nobody was born The Edge. I think I'm going to call my baby The Edge. And new members came and went. Eric was great, a real team player, and sadly passed.

He got a rare form of cancer, and he passed quickly, very, very fast. And then Ace, during the filming of the... kiss meets the phantom film he wouldn't show up also peter wouldn't show up on sundays we had to get stuntman there was an african-american stuntman who dressed up in his thing so he could do the stunts and everything and ace was nowhere to be found god knows where he went and this film was big and we started doing

an album called Creatures of the Night. Before then, we had another Greatest Hits album called Killers with four new songs, and they all kept selling. And then we hit rock bottom with Creatures of the Night in America.

i co-wrote a song called war machine with a new guy who had a hit record but they sped up and they thought it was a girl brian adams i had the riff and he and jim valance finished the song And then I wrote I Love It Loud, you know, kind of like this is what we're about, kind of like an anthem thing, which is still one of the songs which has been sampled by... rap groups and all that. And the record came out and it was a bomb.

250,000 albums, something like that, where we were multiple millions. And at the same time, we went to South America and played the largest shows we'd ever played. If you can imagine Anaheim Stadium four times the size. So much so that the... spotlights that were out in the audience were airplane landing lights because regular spotlights didn't reach the stage. Unbelievable. They would dissipate.

We were trapped in our hotel rooms. It was mania, and the army was our... So we went to armored personnel carriers with tank treads, and we're inside looking through peepholes. to see outside somebody was run over nobody stopped they just it was insane we played three outdoor shows And then when we left, the promoter, God bless him, absconded, took our equipment, and it took...

A court case, hey, it's South America. Took your equipment? Yeah, because he thought we should have paid less or we paid too much or whatever that is. But, you know, we went to court and got everything back. But it's, you know, it's the Wild West. It's South America. Again, at the same time, we came back after having played the biggest shows we'd ever played. So in certain parts of the world, and it's the same.

with any band that lasts long enough you can't get on a plane without getting turbulence of course you get more turbulence in the back than you do in the front and We had new members. Mark St. John came and left, and Bruce Kulick came. And it was Paul who came to me and said, you know, we're doing good stuff. Creatures of the Night was a decent record. It had some good tunes on it. Maybe it's time to take the makeup off. Wow, interesting. I thought...

I'd be lost without it because that became so ingrained. I knew who and what I was. It's like, what's Dr. Jekyll without Mr. Hyde? It was just a doctor. And we had a guy named Waring Abbott, a photographer. We had a confidential photo shoot where nobody would get copies. And we stood around without our makeup. And we were writing songs pretty good with new members. The Lick It Up record came out and we hit again. I went right back up without makeup. You know, less is more.

was there an unmasked album is it called unmasked before uh unmasked came after i was made for loving you and dynasty yeah and peter chris that was his last record he got credit for it he didn't play a single hit it was made for 11 years a really good song from the letterman show who was in another band called spider that a coin managed as well and he was a good solid drummer he played secretly did a coin manage you guys the whole time And shortly after that, by 83,

We stopped being managed by him, and later on he got sick. He passed away, unfortunately, from AIDS. He just wouldn't go to the doctor. Just awful, awful. And then our business manager took over business management, but no manager. We were managing ourselves. Is there a period of time though with Doc McGee or no? Doc McGee is after we decided to put the makeup back on again in 94, 95.

after all kinds of records, sold-out tours. We even played stadiums without the makeup. It was surprising. We didn't expect it, but... Still, it's like Kiss without makeup with effects and pyro and stagecraft. Yeah. And it worked fine. New generations ate it up. It was great. Then we did the KISS conventions and... I hired a guy named Tommy Thayer, who was in a band called Black and Blue. They asked me to produce.

their last two albums, which I did, and I recognized a talented guitar player and a professional who shows up on time to mix lists, checks it twice and all that stuff. It's so important in a band. and hired him to do whatever had to be done. So he became a road manager. We put together history books at my guest house. Sold it direct to the fans, no retail.

they sent cash we made millions you know all the publishers went why didn't i came to you you didn't believe in it so we had two volume one volume two and they were enormously successful And then right after that, we did the KISS conventions. I think it was my idea. The idea being that... Fans can never get close enough. And in those days, a $100 ticket was crazy. So we would take over the ballrooms of hotels.

which often they'd give us for free because they wanted the traffic, the food, fans staying over. And we called local Kiss tribute bands who would play there. And we would take plexiglass collectibles. and just showcase it and on stage say what do you want to hear here's a song acoustically so there's no big stage show question and answer, like a real fan thing. They were very successful. And you did that all over? Not just in one place? All over America. Interesting.

And MTV got wind of it and said, we'd like to do one in New York and record it. And we did. That became the unplugged, kiss unplugged thing with a... And Peter and Eric Singer, who was in the band, and Bruce Kulick. And it was like six guys, two original guys and that stuff. And it was very successful, big record and all that stuff. And the audience was packed with a white zombie, an anthrax guy, this guy, you know, because they grew up with the stuff.

And Paul and I looked at each other saying, you know, Ace and Peter aren't... in too bad of a shape. They look like they're clean. And so we looked at each other and said, do you want to... try a reunion you know we talked to them there was still some vestiges of demands i want this i want that And they agreed to it. At that point, I was booking some stuff. You know, we didn't have a manager. And we looked in the, in essence, the phone book.

and interviewed a few managers, Madonna's manager, this guy's manager, and Bon Jovi and Motley Crue happened to have this guy, Doc McGee, and we took both of those bands out on their first tours. And we liked what he had to say, and also it was a very... Hard negotiation. I think I was the asshole. You can't take from the gross. You can only take from the net after all costs. You've got to have some skin in the game. And he agreed, and we put the thing together.

In short order, the reunion tour became the number one tour, Gallup Stadium, the whole thing. The very first show was Tiger Stadium, which went clean in 45 minutes. And more and more, Ace and Peter started to fall back. Some people can kick the stuff. I'm not qualified, but some people can't. Either self-esteem issues or life isn't going their way, or even if it is going their way, you're rich and famous, what's the problem? No, I think I've got to numb myself.

and become dependent i never understood it i don't understand the appeal and i'm told if you drink too much your schmeckle won't work and why the would you want that I mean, think about it. You will throw up on your girlfriend's shoes, which she just bought. Next morning, you have a headache and your schmeckle won't work. What is that? Tell me about the last kiss shift. We kept talking about the end. Because we were acutely aware, basically Paul and I. as fans of this thing, this culture, this.

Because say what you will about classical music, I don't see a culture, a Ten Commandments of... what it all means. The Renaissance was a freeing of, you know, creativity. Country is a culture. It's how you dress, how you talk, what you believe in, church, your truck, your beard, all these kind of things. Hip-hop, for sure. So we were aware of... boxers and bands staying in the ring too long.

Because you just can't. Have you done it 50 years? Just to be clear. But you're still, look at me. I know. Come on, Ruben. I know. And the people show up. And they show up. They show up happy. I know I'd be popular in jail. I got it. There are a lot of people my age. Yes. I'm 75. You know, walking around with their walkers.

It bears noting that Mick Jagger, I think, is a little older than Joe Biden. Yeah. And he's doing two-hour shows running around on stage. I mean, I don't want to say... Not age. Part of it is DNA, your genes. And part of it is kind of like the joy of life. I've met 60-year-olds who act like they're 100. It is a mindset. When I wake up in the morning, it's just like, wow, look at this stuff. So Paul and I were talking about...

Peter Criss and Ace Frey, they came back in the band and by 2000 we did Dodger Stadium and this and that, all kinds of cool stuff. New Year's Eve, Dick Clark and all that and sold more records. a lot more licensing and merchandising, and we're talking about cartoons and movies and all that. And both Peter and Ace back in the band was just torture. Sadly, they were both in and out of the band three different times. How many times does life give you a chance to earn?

millions and millions and... And play music. And play music and have the time of your life and not worry about stuff. Just, you know, live the life of Riley, as they say. We thought, you know, the very last show of that tour, we got to get rid of the guys. And we thought, New Year's Eve, let's just end it because you can't. You can drive with some flat tires, but it's not convincing.

McCartney's still out there. That's great. Very few people his age should be on that stage. There's he. And bless B.B. King, he... went out on stage, sitting down. But rock is a certain thing. You've got to be on two legs. You've got to do something. If you're not running around, at least... something. So we decided, you know, go out while you're on top. Go out when the story is good. And we were going to end 2000, once Ace and Peter left for the third time.

And we took some time off and everything. And then the fans kept asking, why'd you stop? Well, Ace and Peter, while you got on without them with different members, we took the makeup off and everything, we came to see you and you sold out everywhere and your records were good. And we started to look at each other like, Yeah, what about that? And You know, the fire in the belly was relit.

do we dare hope against hope that we can i mean how many years do you think you can last here with new generations hair metal bands and grunge and new romance and Adam and the Ants, you know, all the new kinds of things. How can you stay relevant? Or just popular. Forget about relevance. Tommy Thayer, who was in Black and Blue, was also in a Kiss tribute band called Cold Gin. Yeah. And they did so well that they actually toured Japan as a Kiss tribute band.

and get, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 per night. Made a good living being a Kiss tribute band. And he knew all the songs and physically looked like ace. Have you ever seen a Kiss tribute band? Many. What's that like? And you can also see little people kiss tribute bands. There's many kiss and oh yeah, there's all female kiss called Pris and a few other variations. It's really quite amazing. There's genes addiction. which is a Seattle band made up of...

Green River and some of the Seattle bands, you'd note, and all of them are dressed like me. And when one of them spits fire, all five guys dressed like me spit fire at the same time, including the drummer. I'm not making it up. I wore the Jeans Addiction, get it? Jeans Addiction t-shirt for the longest time. And then... When Maynard and Morello did the track on Kiss My Ass, they called it Shandy's Addiction. Shandy was a pop song Paul wrote on one of the records, which was a hit in Australia.

So we took a look at this idea of we were born in New York City, 10 East 23rd Street. 10 blocks down, 10, from 33rd Street, Madison Square Garden. So we decided let's finish off. Christmas or Kissmas, 50 years after the birth of the band, 10 blocks down, let's do it at New York and only do one show. and film it and all that stuff and invite our friends. It'll be like a celebration.

And then the film crew and everybody in McGee convinced us to do two shows. We could have been there for a week or ten days. Better for the film to shoot more than one. Well, also, you don't know if a microphone's not going to work or you get a flat tire or whatever. So we did December 1, December 2 in New York. But by the way, like all things KISS, The Empire State Building lit up with our faces on it. Wow.

100 New York City cabs wrapped around with KISS imagery. If you went into the subway and you got a subway ticket, you had our faces on the subways. You went to get a pizza, the outside of the pizza boxes. We were our faces in your face. They were kiss pop-up shops. Basically, if you started a new religion and called it Christianity, that's what was going on. It was like a total takeover. What year was this?

this last December. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, we were, we just couldn't believe it. Amazing. Anywhere we went. I mean, there were people walking around the street of New York during the daytime. Because fans flew in from around the world, Japanese fans and all that stuff, during the daytime in full makeup. You know, we'd be going to the Empire State Building because we went up to the top where King Kong fell off and all that stuff.

Because in 76, we were on top taking photos when there were no guardrails hanging off the side. It's one of those photos that became a thing. And on the way there, we were seeing Kiss people on the streets. Amazing. You know, dressing early to go to the show. Do you feel any different on stage knowing it was the last one? Very emotional. Yeah. but also a little sad because

People who have been married, I'm guessing, a few times, but remember when it was real love and that magic of the thing, if it doesn't last, there's a sadness there. Sometimes... It's drugs and alcohol. Sometimes they just go apart. But when it was great, it's sad because not everybody survives life. Yes. And I'm still sad about a St. Peter who... even today can't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They were equally...

as important as Paul and myself in the formation of the band in those first few years. There's no question about it. It was a four-wheel drive vehicle. And then the air started coming out of two of the wheels. to the point where, as a matter of fact, when it was time for Peter to go, Ace voted. No, he's got to go. He can't play the drums anymore. And then Ace...

using his words, walked out of KISS. Even though we said, you can stay in KISS, have a solo career. We don't want a penny of it. Have your cake and eat it too. And he said to my face, No, I can't stay in the band. He said it in print, if I do another tour, I'm going to kill myself. That's verbatim. And I didn't understand what that meant. I didn't want to get into it. And then he said, you watch. I'm going to sell 10 million records.

I can't respond to that. I don't know what that meant, especially with, you know, logically saying the band, have your cake, eat it too. Of course. So what an amazing journey. Strangely and magically, and both shows were terrific, and people were crying. You have people from all ages. We had the long... you know on the throat you'd look around and

My poor mother didn't make it. She lived to be 94 years old, but every time we played in New York, With her thick Hungarian accent, she'd elbow whoever was next to her. You know, that's my sonny boy. Oh, my God. Don't get me started. And she'd be doing my hand signal along with everybody else in broken English. Rock and roar, rock and roar, you know, all that stuff. And singing, I want to rock and roll all night, you know.

What an amazing mom I had. She's with me every day. And the very end of both of those shows, we had made a deal with a company called Compound. who bought ABBA rights and put on this Avatar ABBA show in London, which has got millions of people going. It's incredible. I've seen it. Incredible. Whatever technology you saw there is now primitive. They are investing untold amounts. I don't want to say anything more than. You know what virtual reality is when you put those glasses on.

And you would swear your life that the ground just opened up and you have a chasm and you're falling and free fall. And you have this sense that what you're seeing is real. And by the way, all around you. Right? No matter where you look, up, down, yourself, your sense of reality. Now imagine that without glasses. Amazing. And I've seen it. And when will that be? By 2027, it's just so much exciting stuff. So in a lot of ways.

Entertainment itself and life itself is changing dramatically with AI and technology and all this stuff. There will still be room for live bands. playing live with the blues and all that. There's no substitute for that. But in other areas, the sky's the limit. No limit. Can I play you a song from your solo album? Which one? I got two. This one. Yeah. With the American Symphony Orchestra all wearing... No. Gene masks. Really? On a solo record,

The rest of the guys were smart. Peter not so much. Peter was doing R&B covers. which was not convincing and stuff. But Ace especially just went to his roots and did what he knew. Back in the New York groove. It was a good one. Which was a cover. I didn't know that. The Arrows, I think it was. I didn't know that. Yes. It was Eddie Kramer who said, why don't we do that song? And it still played in Yankee baseball games and everything. It was a big hit.

Paul likewise did a rock record with guitars and everything. I wanted, because I'd written so many songs, so many different styles. So there are ballads on there. There are symphony orchestras, there's things. And when I was 12 years old... And I told you I was delusional. I didn't have brothers or sisters. I had a lot of time on my own. I read comic books. and all about fantasy and science fiction, the 5,000 fingers of Dr. T, all this stuff that I just...

And when I saw the big Disney animated movie and little Jiminy Cricket steps up. That's another one of those perfect songs. It's called When You Wish Upon a Star. Here's how it starts. When you wish upon it, right at the top, I'm going, oh my God. And at 12, I didn't know anything about anything. When Jiminy Cricket, this animated little cricket, steps up and looks into the camera and starts singing, larger than life, I thought he was singing.

Only to me, like a magic friend, your dreams come true. I went out of that movie theater like I was touched by Jesus. You know, I don't... worship the guy i think he's a good guy but i went like it was a religious experience i remember that feeling of being inspired That you could be anybody and your dreams can come true. Yes. That's an amazing thing because other songs didn't have that. Yeah. When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. And when I finally did my solo record,

I rented the Concorde chair, and the kids and the nannies flew with me. We recorded it at Oxford Studios down the street from George Harrison and Eric Clapton. and all the big bands were there. I flew over all the best musicians who played. I played guitar on the record, not bass. Because I wanted to, and I could have whatever I wanted. And I had all kinds of stars on the record, singing backgrounds, and Donna Summer.

singing with me on Burning Up With Fever, which she was going to cover. And Giorgio Morota said, no, you're not going to do a Gene Simmons song. But all kinds of crazy stuff which goes against the, quote, rules. If you're in a rock band. You don't want to have Helen ready on the album. I didn't care. I wanted to. I always wanted to. You wanted to do what you wanted to do. That's what it's supposed to be about. Yeah. I wanted to have Lassie barking. I wanted to have the New York City Rockette.

tap dancing on Living in Sin at the Holiday Inn, which I wrote. And I was wanting to record on stage. at Radio City Music Hall Symphony Orchestra to do these big symphonic things. They also played on Man of a Thousand Faces. I wrote before Kiss. as an homage to my hero Lon Chaney Sr. who invented makeup and hunchback of Notre Dame. And he invented and created the flared nostrils, plastics, which nobody had done before. And I was so fascinated by the guy whose mother and father were...

Deaf and dumb have to communicate with sign language. And that's why he was such a great actor in silent films where you couldn't do anything except physically express that thing. In fact, the... image of me on stage with that thing is all Lon Chaney Sr. from London After Midnight. Photos of him because there's not a print remaining. of that original film about a vampire at night, including the bat wings. It's all Lon Chaney Sr.

And so I had to do When You Wish Upon a Star. I couldn't sing it. The guy that sang it was Ned Washington, I'm pretty sure, who may have written it. I have such a heartwarming song when you hear the original, when you listen, I'm going, oh my God, I don't have that kind of voice. And I remember being in the sound booth in England and in America at Cherokee Studios.

because we had to do overdubs and stuff and i had to plug in everything crying my heart out because it took me back to the 12-year-old kid. watching Pinocchio on 83rd Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, going to the movie theater alone. I saved up, I don't remember, 59 cents, whatever it cost. Nobody goes anywhere alone, but I didn't have brothers or sisters, and I was 12. I didn't have dates or anything. My mother was always working, and my father was not around. He ran out on us.

And alone in that movie theater I had... a semi-religious experience. The music and the visuals, but the message. Your dreams can come true. Then they have. Makes no difference who you are. It says that in the lyric. Me? Because how dare, how dare you're nobody speaking, hello, but not to say, you know, you speak with an accent, you come from nowhere. No, that doesn't matter. Your dreams can come true is an astonishing message I had to do.

Athenaeum is a new podcast on the Tetragrammaton Network. mind control program linking it to Charles Manson and the disturbing secrets buried in America's history from missing FBI files to Hollywood cover This is the story behind the story. available wherever you get your podcasts. Truth isn't just stranger than fiction. It's far more dangerous. Coming soon on the Athenaeum podcast.