When Kiss bassist and co-vocalist Gene Simmons released his second solo album in 2004, he had no qualms about titling it Asshole. As Classic Rock found out when we spoke to the God Of Thunder around the album’s release, it was a description he was more than happy with.
Gene Simmons is the biggest asshole in the world. Not only does he freely admit it, he’s also inordinately proud of the accolade. It’s easy to see why Simmons became one of the most successful rock stars ever. With Kiss, he made some of the most popular rock music of the past three decades. We know this because Gene wheels out the statistics in every interview he does – including this one. A strange by-product of his stardom is that he has become far more attractive to the opposite sex than his modest looks would usually warrant. But then Simmons has charisma and money (and hence power), and of course he flaunts both at every available opportunity.
When it comes to interviewing the Kiss bassist/vocalist, you rarely know what you’ll get from him or what he’ll be like. I’ve spoken to him on a few occasions, and it all seems to be down to pot luck. The first time was in 1984. The magazine I worked for then wanted him to review the now-classic rockumentary movie (This Is) Spinal Tap for them. Simmons did so with incredible bad grace, commenting huffily that the film was “too close to home” in many respects.
But then almost a decade later, in San Francisco, he was friendliness personified – even showing an unexpected capacity for self-ridicule: during a discussion about bootleg records, he explained that he preferred audience recordings to those from the soundboard/mixing desk “because they have more atmosphere. You hear the kid next to the person who taped it saying stuff like: ‘Wow, didn’t Gene Simmons get fat?!’”
If we were at all cynical, then Simmons’s camaraderie might have been due to the predicament Kiss were in at the time. Keen to make a clean break from what he termed the “pop crap” that they had been releasing (“Kiss dozed off in the eighties,” concurred guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley), the group were at a crisis point in their glittering career.
Today, with Kiss having firmly re-established their place among the most profitable touring acts on the planet, any such charm offensive is unnecessary. During my 45 minutes with him at London’s plush St Martin’s Lane Hotel, Simmons comes across as conceited, opinionated, smug, boorish, opportunistic and, yes, more than just a little bit misogynistic. He is eminently quotable, but there’s something sleazy about the man. He’s amicable enough – to another male. But Simmons appears to take enormous delight in interrupting the interview to verbally lambast a female member of his entourage who has inadvertently incurred his wrath.
Gene Simmons once again has a firm agenda. And he takes some distracting from it. He’s in the UK on a flying visit to promote Asshole, his second solo album. Although not without its embarrassing moments (Beautiful, Now That You’re Gone and especially 1,000 Dreams), it’s a respectable enough rock album that benefits from being more focused than 1978’s mostly risible Gene Simmons effort.
Like its predecessor – which contained a mere handful of worthwhile tracks (Radioactive, Burning Up With Fever and Man Of 1,000 Faces) and an all-star cast that included Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Cher, Donna Summer, Bob Seger and Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter – Asshole owes a significant debt to the ‘outsiders’ who contributed to it. Black Tongue was co-written with the late Frank Zappa, and Waiting For The Morning Light’with Bob Dylan. Ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers and current Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro plays on a “cutting edge” version of The Prodigy’s Firestarter, and ex-Poison guitarist Richie Kotzen plays a bit part, as do former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick and current Kiss drummer Eric Singer.
As ever with Simmons and Kiss, there are a number of rumours that need to be addressed. The first is that the leaking of the title Asshole was a publicity stunt, and that the record is actually called something else.
“The album is definitely called Asshole, and I’ll tell you why,” Simmons begins. “It’s because people have called me an asshole for many years now. They say: ‘Gene Simmons has got so many girls and so many dollars, that guy’s a real asshole’.Translated in cockney: ‘I want to be Gene Simmons’. It either means that, or a term of affection for your friend, as in: ‘Come over here and meet Bob, he’s a real asshole’. It’s a word that’s always fascinated me.”
If your album is indeed to be called Asshole, monitors of the Trades Descriptions Act cannot possibly object.
Absolutely. I am an asshole. You know what an asshole is? It’s someone who tells the truth. You will always get further in life with lies, and by telling people exactly what they want to hear, but I’ve always been brutally honest. The reason it’s such a great title is that even The Pope has an asshole.
In fact I’m gonna be throwing asshole parties. Kiss is going back out on tour – we’re engaged on an endless tour. We did sixty shows with Aerosmith, which could’ve been [2003’s] number-one tour had we played a hundred, and we’ll be going to Australia, Japan and America from May to October. On every night that Kiss doesn’t play a concert I’ll be throwing an asshole party. And since I am the biggest asshole in the world I will be the one that determines who can or cannot attend. If you do get in, you will
officially be an asshole – I will give you a certificate to prove it. If you’re walking down the street and somebody says: ‘What are you, some kind of asshole?’, you can reply that yes indeed, that’s exactly what you are.
And yet you didn’t write the song Asshole yourself.
No. I bought it from a Norwegian group called Shirley’s Temple. I rearranged it, Pro-Tooled it, added some extra stuff, but took no writing credit. I didn’t feel that would’ve been fair.
What was it like to sit down with Bob Dylan and write Waiting For The Morning Light?
Nine years ago I called up Bob and said: ‘Hi, it’s Gene – the guy that sticks his tongue out’. He replied [in an accurate Dylan drawl]: ‘Hi. How you doing, Mister Kiss?’. He came over to my house, we sat and traded some guitar licks. He tends to play unusual chords. I expected I’d come up with the melody and that Bob would write the lyric, but the opposite happened. We had something inside a half hour. But I’d been trying to get him to write the words ever since.
You can’t hurry Bob Dylan.
He kept saying: ‘No, Mister Kiss, you do it’. And I’d like to thank him for pushing me, otherwise the song would still be incomplete. Apparently the song has the thumbs-up from the BBC. And it’s gratifying at this late date for anyone to give a crack about what I do.
A guy like me should have nothing to complain about. In England, Kiss and Gene Simmons never matched the heights we reached around the world. Everywhere else we walk on water. Kiss is America’s number-one gold-record award-winning group of all time. Only The Beatles and The Rolling Stones have more gold records. In England we do okay – just okay. We’ve had a few hits, but by and large Kiss is known as the big band from the other side of the Atlantic. That’s interesting, because we’re such Anglophiles.
I’ve yet to hear your version of The Prodigy’s Firestarter but I must admit the phrase ‘Whitney dressed up as Britney’ springs to mind.
That doesn’t apply. And I don’t care if it’s what you think. Kiss is supposed to be a meat-and-potatoes band of bass, guitar and drums, and yet when we go against the grain with a dance song [I Was Made For Loving You in 1979] it becomes our biggest hit; the same with a ballad that has no guitars [1976’s Beth].
The whole Whitney and Britney thing [pauses]… it’s about the fact that rules are made to be broken. My observation is that if you do so, you actually get bigger. For instance, Blur were a synth band until Song 2 made me go and buy their album. They went against the grain of who they were, and they exploded. My taste is actually very eclectic. I love all kinds of artists, from Patsy Cline to The Beatles, from Motown to Hoobastank.
Why did you choose that particular Prodigy song?
It was suggested by my partner at Sanctuary [Records], Merck [Mercuriadis], and I always liked the original. Even Smack My Bitch Up. I didn’t get their whole cockney thing, to me it sounded like Japanese. No matter how many words you use to describe Gene Simmons doing Firestarter, you’ll like it or you won’t. Dave Navarro’s all over it, and we even toyed with having Justin of The Darkness on there but we ran out of time.
Dweezil Zappa, Frank’s son, plays guitar on Black Tongue, the song you wrote with his late father.
The Zappa family – Gail [his widow], Ahmet [son], Moon [Unit, daughter] and Dweezil – sang the choruses with me, and we used a recording of Frank’s voice and some lead guitar licks from the original piece of music. I also played bass and sang lead – writing the lyric in the studio.
The timing of a song that has a chorus of ‘Weapons of mass destruction’ is rather apt.
It was written and recorded before America went off to Iraq. After President Bush began to use the term over and over again it became a cliché. I always thought the words had that vulgar display of power. Lyrically I’ve always been fascinated by a big, shadowy, all-powerful figure, whether it’s Beelzebub or the Devil.
Simmons and Stanley are the metal equivalent of Lennon and McCartney. Discuss.
[In Spinal Tap cockney voice] I never thought we were metal, so it’s a short discussion. We’ve always had too many choruses and harmonies, and we never sang about elves and dragons. We were always more influenced by bands like Slade.
In the first days of $immons Records, you bought the copyright to the US dollar symbol. Do you still own it?
The money bag? Oh yeah. It’s the logo for the label, my clothing line and my book-publishing company.
You’ve spoken quite disparagingly about finding fresh talent for the newly revamped $immons Records. Is that still the case?
[Nodding wearily] There’s horrible stuff out there. I am signing one act, a multi-instrumentalist named Bag. He’s a one-man band from Canada. Writes, sings and produces all his own stuff. But it’s a horrible time. People are detuning their guitars just because they think they have to. HIM are very interesting, and I’m crazy about their name. The kid [singer Ville Valo] looks good, too. I also like Jet. But bands like that are becoming fewer and further between. Bands are afraid of being tough and retaining their melody. My suggestion is that they pull out some old Led Zeppelin or Who records and listen to the guv’nors.
Next year you plan to release a 100-song boxed set of unreleased solo material.
That’s true. It’s been twenty-six years between solo records, and I write so much material. Every time we do a Kiss record, I write and fully demo twenty to thirty songs, using perhaps four or five of them. Sweet & Dirty Love [the opening track on Asshole] was written in 1978. I don’t throw anything away. Some stand the test of time, some don’t.
Speaking of which, when you appeared on MTV’s Cribs your house looked less like a home and more like a supermarket full of Kiss merchandise. Wasn’t that rather silly?
No. I love what I do. I’m very proud of Kiss, and it shocks me that other bands don’t collect themselves. I’m in the Gene Simmons business, and I am the biggest fan of Gene Simmons. I work very hard, even though I don’t look at it as a job, and I collect everything I’m involved in. Does that make me self-centred? You’re goddamn right. Who else am I gonna be the biggest fan of but myself? My house is a museum, and when you walk in you see everything from condoms to caskets [coffins]. At the start people used to say it was stupid, now they just go: ‘Wow’. I believe they also used to say the Earth was flat?
Your magazine, Gene Simmons Tongue, has been placed on ‘indefinite hold’. Can you explain what’s going on there?
Oh, it will be back. But right now if you go to www.genesimmons.com you’ll see I’m developing real estate in China; we have a fifty five-storey building, a one-square-mile shopping mall that’s underground and a twenty-mile-long beach resort. There’s so much going on. I’m buying a DVD manufacturing plant in Korea, and starting a film company called Sanctuary Pictures Television – no relation [to the record label] – and a television company that goes on the air at the end of the summer. There’s also my book-publishing company and $immons Records. …Tongue was an awfully good magazine, and we did five issues, but there just isn’t enough time.
When Kiss first toured Germany you had to modify the shape of the band’s logo so that the final two letters didn’t look like you were affiliated to the German SS. As a Jew yourself, surely that’s something you should’ve spotted before?
No. [Semi-sarcastically] It was clearly a lightning bolt. My mother was in a concentration camp, so I’d be the last one in the world to push that imagery. It was never intended.
You say you’ve slept with 4,600 women.
That’s not true. I didn’t sleep with all of them. Sleeping had very little the fuck to do with anything.
Okay, you claim to have had sex with that number. What does Shannon Tweed, your long-time partner…
[Interrupts] I don’t want a partner. That word implies that somebody is fifty per cent yours.
Well she’s also the mother of your children, Sophie and Nicholas. What does she think of such blatancy?
The thing about Shannon Tweed, who I’ve been very happily unmarried to for twenty years, is that she doesn’t play the female bullshit game. The female of the species only makes one or two eggs, while, as you know, the male manufactures billions of sperm. She doesn’t have the mind-set of: ‘He’s a catch, I’m gonna get my claws into him’. There are no male equivalents of the descriptions of how to get a female: ‘She’s a catch, I’m gonna catch her’. Men don’t do that. But for a female the goal is to capture a male, domesticate him and own him. Shannon doesn’t play that game, because very early on I told her – and the world – what type of a guy I am; animals piss on the ground to stake their territory. I’ve also stayed true to who I am. The rest of the world can go fuck itself for all I care. The only person I am answerable to is the one that gave me life itself: my mother.
Could you live with the situation if it were the other way around? Shannon’s a good-looking lady, how would you feel if she did the same with men?
The answer is yes, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not a case of whether I could live with it, but that I’d have to. You’re right, she’s a gorgeous thing. And regardless of whether or not you’re married and think you’re in a monogamous relationship or not, people will always go out and do whatever they hell they want anyway. You’re either faced with torturing yourself, torturing the other person, or lying. You may as well just live life and realise that some things are beyond your control, just let it go – these things really don’t matter.
Here in London, relationships seem to be based on where you’re going, who you’ve been with and what time you’re coming home. Let’s say you’re on a tropical island, like in the movie Swept Away. A couple – a bum and a high-class woman – find themselves away from civilisation, and all the laws of society go out the window. It’s all about survival. He’s horny, she’s horny, so they fuck. And everybody’s alive for another day.
So to you there’s no such thing as a love cheat?
No. The male of the species who has multiple partners is doing exactly what the blueprint is telling him to do. The only trouble with women is that they believe all the millions of sperm that the men produce are exclusively for them. And they’re wrong.
Whatever happened to the so-called ‘Kissettes’, the group of young American girls who used to follow the band around Europe?
As a matter of fact I saw one of them recently. She now has her own public relations company and has turned into a beautiful woman.
The Kissettes were originally four girls who were outside the hall when Eric Carr first joined Kiss [in 1980] with a petition. They were trying to prevent us from playing with Eric because Peter Criss was no longer in the band. But when they saw the new line-up they followed us to every show. The point is that fans do these things from their hearts, but they’re really not qualified to know the root of the problem.
Talking of which, Eric Singer has again become Kiss’s drummer, but Peter Criss insists that he received no formal notice of his contract not being renewed. As an original member, wasn’t Criss owed at least a phone call?
You’re assuming all sorts of things with that question. The God’s honest truth is that Peter’s press release is full of lies. We still love Peter, and during our sixty shows with Aerosmith he played pretty good. He played the drums well enough, but weakly. His stamina was gone, he was having B12 shots and had to submerge his arm in ice water at least every alternate day. In front of everybody he kept saying: ‘That’s it, it’s my last tour. I can’t physically take it any more’. We waited for the longest time for him to make his mind up – the lawyers even have records of the telephone calls – but no matter how many times we called we never heard back.
Twenty years ago I started saying in interviews: Peter Criss and Ace Frehley were drug addicts, but that Paul and I loved them and wanted them to stop using the stuff. The fans were absolutely furious. We were so un-rock’n’roll, we were sons of bitches. But it was called tough love. These people were losers, but it was like your father being a drunken bum – your mother would’ve been right to say it in front of the children. If somebody cries wolf once, twice or even three times, well… don’t always
blame the messenger.
So the contents of Peter’s recent press release were completely without foundation?
[Nodding] What a shame that he had to send it out. I hope that he never touches drink or drugs again. I only wish Peter happiness, and if he feels any better for making Paul and I sound like the bad guys in all of this then fine, I’m the one that made Peter so weak he couldn’t play any more. I fully accept the blame.
One of the apocryphal Kiss rumours is that Peter Criss was never a good percussionist, and that live you used drum tracks all along. True or false?
Completely false. We never used drum tapes, so help me God on the life of my son. As I said earlier, the tendency in life is to say what people want to hear. But remember, I’m an asshole so I’m telling you the truth.
Another much-loved former Kiss member, guitarist Ace Frehley, is following you into the movies by appearing in Remedy, a ‘darkly comic film noir’.
Yes, I saw that. And God bless him. I wish him all the happiness in the world, like the fans.
Any advice for Ace?
Stop drinking and getting high. The rest is easy.
I meant acting advice.
Well if he does that then the rest will follow. Stop it, Ace, and stand like a man. He has to stand up and say, I am a drug addict – and say it for the rest of his life.
According to reports coming from New York that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Yes. But in order to start on the road back he needs to acknowledge not ‘I was a drug addict’, but ‘I will be a drug addict every day until I’m a hundred’. If you don’t hear yourself say it you’ll never be cured.
You have a ‘new’ Ace Frehley in the band, Tommy Thayer, who looks exactly like the old Ace. Will you one day also decide to trade yourself in for a newer Simmons model?
As the days go by it’s quite possible. All the rules I’ve ever made for myself have been based on life as I know it. Lennon may have said it best – life is actually what happens to you while you’re busy making plans. When you were eight years old and finding out about sex: ‘You want me to put what where?! Oh, that’s disgusting, and I’ll never do it’. It’s only later on that it doesn’t get so disgusting any more.
So it a realistic possibility that you’ll phase yourself out of Kiss?
Why not? Just because it hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t mean that it won’t ever.
On the subject of Kiss’s highly lucrative ‘farewell’ tour [which began in 2000], did you feel you were shortchanging people who’d paid to see a bit of history?
Yes.
Do you envisage Kiss ever calling it a day?
Yes.
One-word answers, huh?
Well the answer to the second one has to be yes. At some point I’m gonna die. But do I think it will happen while I still have some dignity left? No. Or when I quit will I still look good? No. You’re gonna have to drag me kicking and screaming off that stage, because I love it too much. We definitely plan to outstay our welcome.
Even some of your fellow musicians have got in on the act of bitching about Kiss. Hanoi Rocks frontman Michael Monroe recently said: “Gene Simmons is the most conceited, fat, chauvinist pig I’ve ever encountered…”
[Interrupting] True.
But there’s more: “He probably has a ‘small-weenie complex’ based on his obvious need to constantly brag about how many groupie idiots he has ‘conquered’.”
It’s quite true. I’m hung like a second-grader. By the way who is Michael Monroe? Is he any relation to Marilyn? As a matter of fact, for a short time we were actually thinking of taking Hanoi Rocks out with us on the forthcoming tour. It’s a fun band.
But not any more?
No. I don’t care about people saying things like that – I’ve been in a band with Ace and Peter. Part of doing press is to say crazy things. Where would we be without Ace Frehley, Axl Rose and Courtney Love? You have to be completely insane to do this. If the world were just full of people like Gene Simmons, all anybody would ever do is brag about how much pussy they get.
Speaking about the farewell Kiss tour, Ginger of The Wildhearts recently said: “The levels that Kiss will plummet to disgrace themselves are still being mined. Kiss do not possess souls, instead they have tiny bank managers that control the host from within. Kiss are a disgrace”.
[Quizzically] The Wildhearts. I have some of their records, and I like them. They’re that band of drunks, aren’t they?
You could say that. But do you have any reaction to Ginger’s comment?
Of course, what he says is completely true. The only postscript that I could add to that is that Gene Simmons has a hundred million dollars, and Ginger doesn’t.
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 68