Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Like the proverbial rolling stone, Gene Simmons gathers no moss. As the fire-breathing, blood-spewing co-founding member of KISS, Simmons and creative partner Paul Stanley turned their group (along with original guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss) into an internationally recognized brand. The band sold hundreds of millions of albums, packed venues around the planet, and wielded enormous musical influence, all the while being marketing juggernauts when it comes to all things KISS.
Detractors will say Simmons is a rapacious businessman using his band’s distinctive logo and legacy to gin up profits in any and every way. Admirers will chalk up the former sixth-grade schoolteacher as being a savvy businessman, giving fans what they want. Truth is, the 76-year-old rocker falls somewhere in the middle. While KISS played their final show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on December 2, 2023, the man born Chaim Witz insists the band lives on when asked what life looks like post-KISS.
“Most people believe that KISS is over — we stopped touring,” Simmons said. “Truth is, we’ve been working for years on taking advantage of technology. A great company named Pophouse [Entertainment] bought the underlying rights — the makeup and stuff like that. Together, we’ve been working on advancing technology in ways that people could never imagine. For now, the placeholders are KISS avatars. What you’re going to be experiencing in the next two years will blow you away like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
Now, if you expected Simmons to sit on top of his considerable fortune and just watch the money roll in, then you’ve missed the point at best. He remains unable to resist “the pull of the stage.” What that looks like is now the Gene Simmons Band, a group of musicians Simmons has been touring with for several years, dating back to when he still had his day job with KISS. It’s a lean and mean operation of which he’s rightfully proud.
“My side band, they’re killers by the way,” he matter-of-factly said. “They’re multi-instrumentalists, and all sing lead. It’s really a terrific idea. We don’t have a manager. There are no trucks, no nothing. We just set up and play. We have the flexibility of doing requests someone may yell out. Or if we’re asked if we know “Tush” by ZZ Top, we’ll look at each other, it’s the key of G, let’s go and boom, you’re off to the races.”
He added, “We’re going to do material KISS that has never done. We’re going to do some stuff that maybe has never been recorded. The other thing we can do that KISS never did is pull fans up from the audience. Do you want to be a rock star? I may pull you up if you can play an instrument. Or, if it’s a kid that looks like he can hold his own on stage, I’ll pull him up. No rules.”
Simmons and his band will be performing at Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 13. Tickets are on sale now.
There is, of course, an upper-tier experience available to fans where you can become Gene Simmons’ roadie for a day that he admits “is not cheap” — the Ultimate Gene Simmons Experience tops out at $12,495.
“This is not for everybody,” Simmons explained. “We may only have one or two per show, but if anybody wants to know what it is, go to www.genesimmonsaxe.com. What you get to do is be my personal roadie for the day. Hang out with me in the hotel. We eat meals together. You can take videos, do whatever you want. Stand up, do comedy, whatever you like, travel with me to the gig. If you want to set up amps, sit in back of the drums, be on stage, and even video it (you can). Then I pull you up on stage. As a kid, I never had that opportunity. When I went to see The (Rolling) Stones, The Beatles, or anyone else, you couldn’t get backstage or get up on stage. I wanted to change the dynamic and open the doors. It’s like ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ at the end, you actually get to pull the curtain and see the wizard.”
All this drive can be traced back to someone who came over to the United States when he was eight. Stoked by the hunger to succeed that only an immigrant who came from nothing and wanted nothing more than to experience the American dream, the young Chaim Witz had his musical fuse lit by Chuck Berry, whose eulogy decades later.
“My mother and I were staying in the basement of her brother Larry Klein and his wife Magda in Flushing, Queens,” Simmons recalled. “I’d never even seen a TV set. I turned on the radio and this music came on — it might have been “Roll Over Beethoven.” I didn’t understand the words. I couldn’t speak English then. But my body started moving, and that was the profound difference. I couldn’t dance or anything. Your head just started nodding back and forth. I just remember the profound impact that music had on me. From then on, I just gorged myself on music everywhere.”
Later on, seeing The Beatles on the “Ed Sullivan Show” further inspired Simmons to go down a musical path. Straight edge at a time in rock-and-roll when it wasn’t a thing, Simmons says, eschewing booze, drugs, and even cigarettes is one of the ingredients to his longevity.
“It’s difficult to run a race when you’ve got stuff going on inside of you,” Simmons said. “Try putting sand in fuel and then pour it into a car. It’s not going to run very well, not for long. One of the books I wrote is called ’27: The Legend & Mythology of the 27 Club,’ about the 27 Club — Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, drugs, and alcohol. Self-induced. We had an advantage (in KISS) because we simply did not follow that lifestyle. And then we had an advantage because we happened to pick the right initial mixture of Ace and Peter.”
While he would never be the best bassist or songwriter, Simmons’ internal drive wouldn’t let him get outworked by anyone. Clichéd as it may sound, hard work was and continues to be the key to the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s success. “I’m an only child, so I have an advantage,” Simmons pointed out. “My mother, who was and continues to be my moral compass, had a belief in me that I never understood until I tried to do things, and I just kept succeeding. No matter what I tried to do, I succeeded beyond what I ever imagined because I wasn’t afraid of work. Most people want a job. I never thought of it that way. I just liked to work. The harder you work, the luckier you get. Most people want good luck. Good luck is passing. You may win the lottery once, but chances are that you’ll never win it again. But the guy who works all the time will do better than the guy who doesn’t. There’s no substitute for hard work.”