As Gene Simmons sat in his dressing room at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 2, 2023, the final night of the End of the Road Tour, the singer-bassist of Kiss cleaned off his Demon makeup for the last time.
“I thought, ‘You know, I’m not going to get on stage for a while,’” Simmons says on a call from his Malibu home. “Just relax.”
Only one problem. “I can’t, you know,” he says. “It’s, you can’t stay away from it. It’s a great feeling. I’ve played the Superdome and the Coliseum, Dodger Stadium and Anaheim Stadium and the Whisky. All sizes, all shapes.”
Then he remembered that while Kiss might be done with touring after four years of farewell shows interrupted by the pandemic, the Gene Simmons Band, well, that’s a whole other thing.
Five months later, Simmons was back on the road, playing loose solo shows with musicians he’s known for years, the setlist all drawn from Kiss songs, most of them ones he sang lead on, and covers of songs such as Motörhead’s “Ace Of Spades,” the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” and Van Halen’s “House Of Pain.”
“It’s very strange, this love-hate relationship with touring and being on stage,” Simmons says. “When you tour your butt off, you can’t wait to get back home and do nothing. I mean, I have other things that keep me busy.
“But when you’re away from it, that feeling, that magic that happens on stage, there is no other feeling like that,” he says. “It’s not like being on a baseball team or in a boxing ring or even being the Pope.
“What we can do (in the Gene Simmons Band) that Kiss could never do is if I get a call, somebody says, ‘You want to play a gig tomorrow night at this place?’” Simmons says. “I go, ‘Sure!’ Just go to the airport with my bass and my guitar pick. It’s so easy. You just go, and it’s so much fun.”
When we spoke, Simmons had been preparing for a handful of Southern California shows that were subsequently postponed. New dates have not yet been announced.
He and Kiss co-founder, singer-guitarist Paul Stanley, later announced they will be in Las Vegas in November for the first official Kiss Army fan convention in 30 years. They’ll be joined by Kiss guitarist Tommy Thayer for a performance without the iconic Kiss makeup or drummer Eric Singer.
Kiss is also celebrating several significant 50th anniversaries this year. The albums “Dressed To Kill” and “Alive!” both arrived in 1975, as did the single “Rock and Roll All Nite,” which became Kiss’s signature song and the one that often closed the band’s concerts.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Simmons talked about how “Dressed To Kill” and “Rock and Roll All Nite” were created, why he finds it hard to relax, and what his Hungarian immigrant mother taught him about work.
Q: There’s a Kiss audio tour, a walking tour of sites in New York City for the 50th anniversary of “Dressed To Kill.” How’d that come together?
A: This was put together by Pophouse, the company that bought our underlying rights, and they’re magnificent. They’re putting together the event that’s going to be an experience called Kiss Avatars. That’s all I’ll say about it, but in about two years, people will experience something they’ve never seen or heard before.
It’s like at the beginning of the 20th century, if somebody put a pair of virtual reality glasses on you, you would think it was magic. You wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.
So they were the ones who put (the audio tour) together. They start at 10 E. 23rd St., where the band was put together at our loft. There are various stops in New York, including where the “Dressed To Kill” album cover was shot, a few blocks away on the street in New York, to Electric Lady Studios, where we recorded our first demo.
Q: What memories stand out about making “Dressed To Kill” at Electric Lady?
A: We didn’t know anything about the recording process. In those days, we were writing, recording and releasing two albums a year. I remember I wrote “Calling Dr. Love” on a bus going from Indianapolis to, oh my goodness, another city. Before we left, I was watching an old black-and-white Three Stooges movie. They were idiots, knuckleheads in the hospital playing doctors: “Calling Dr. Howard! Calling Dr. Howard!”
For some reason, Dr. Love popped out of my mouth. Then I rhymed it: “Because I’ve got the cure you’re thinking of.” The song wrote itself on the bus, traveling with the road crew, because in those days I didn’t want to fly, so I traveled with the road crew after they packed up the gear.
Q: All that road work paid off when you put out “Alive!” and the live “Rock and Roll All Nite,” which was first on “Dressed To Kill.” Suddenly, that’s a massive hit.
A: We were noticing a disconnect between album sales because we didn’t have a lot of hit singles. We didn’t try to write hit singles. It was about live, turning up the guitars and a raucous shaking of the heavens. But at the same time, we were breaking records all over the place with attendance. People were kind of like, “You gotta see this band!”
So the idea we came up with, ‘Why don’t we do a souvenir of our tours?” Like if you were there, a live album, double live album, with a tour book, photos, and stuff like that. That thing flew off the shelves like nothing you’ve ever seen. All of a sudden, we were playing stadiums.
Q: Tell me about writing “Rock and Roll All Nite” for “Dressed To Kill,” and later “Alive!” where it took off.
A: Neil Bogart [head of Casablanca Records] decided he wanted to produce “Dressed To Kill.” He was a record company president, didn’t know how to produce, was close to being tone deaf, but he knew a hit when he heard it.
And when Bogart entered the studio, he said, “What you guys need is an anthem.” We had no clue what that meant. What’s an anthem? He goes, ‘You know, kind of like a song you sing at a football game that says what you believe in.”
We’re touring while we’re discussing songs and everything, and it’s time to go to the studio. I turned to Paul and I go, ‘You know, I’ve got this song called “Drive Me Wild” about a hot car. “You drive me wild, I’ll drive you crazy.” Paul thought about the anthem thing and says, “That’s great, let’s finish that off. But it doesn’t say what we believe in.”
So he came back the next day and says, “What do you think of this? ‘I wanna rock and roll all night, and party every day,’” which is exactly what the band is all about. Then, like Frankenstein, we put the two pieces together and presto, you got a song.
Q: I’m sure as soon as you started playing that live you could see the crowd’s reaction.
A: Not only that, but we noticed that everybody wanted to sing along. So we changed the arrangement so that the guitars stopped. The song kept going just with drums so that the fans could sing along.
Q: One of the things that’s always struck me is your strong entrepreneurial spirit. You’ve always got some kind of business action going on. You’re not just hanging out at your house in Malibu.
A: Hanging out at any one of the six houses. I don’t say that to be, you know, cocky and boastful. It is a magical thing what Kiss has enabled us to have this magical lifestyle.
But truly, I often wonder what people do on vacations and weekends. What do you do when you’re not doing something? It sounds like wordplay. What do you do when there’s nothing to do? You eat, you take a crap, you watch “I Love Lucy” reruns. And then what?
If God gave you 24 hours of life, I would hope you got off your lazy butt, worked hard, helped somebody, did a little philanthropy, kissed a pretty girl. Do something! Leave a mark on the planet that you were here. Otherwise, time just passes and because we’re all just passing through at some point, you’re not going to be here. What did you do with your life?
Q: Where do you think that came from? Immigrating to this country from Israel after your mother escaped the Nazis in Europe?
A: My mother has always been the moral compass and the wisest person. Not the most educated person. She spoke in a very heavy Hungarian accent. Always wanted to know, “How is the orchestra?”
Point being that at 14 she survived Nazi Germany’s concentration camps while the rest of our family was all wiped out. The only thing she knew was how to survive. How do you survive? You work hard. So the work ethic.
My mother was a single mother. My father left us when I was about 6 years old, so all I ever saw was my mother getting up at the crack of dawn and coming home late at night. Six days a week, not five. But because my mother worked hard, we had food on the table and a roof over our head. I never forgot that.
Q: What did your mother do? Her job?
A: She worked at a sweatshop factory, which was illegal, that didn’t even have air conditioning or heat. In the winters, it was freezing, in the summer, boiling hot. She was a button and buttonhole maker. She’d meticulously take a button to the Singer sewing machine and then put the buttons on a coat, six buttons, and then hang the coat back on a different rack.
You make a half penny a button. No other things. No pregnancy leave, no holidays, no nothing. If she worked six days a week, she might make $100 a week.
Q: Oh, that’s a lot of buttons.
A: America was built by that work ethic. Before the infrastructure, before skyscrapers, before any of that stuff, America was built by people who worked all the time.