Gene Simmons
speaker
1,552 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 10 Dec
Gene Simmons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Yes, if you're lucky, because every kid in every poor neighborhood wants to be the baseball player or the football player and stuff like that, because 50 million, Carmelo Anthony made it. And for a while, I worked with Carmelo. They make all this money.
You don't see the tens of thousands and millions of carcasses on the side of the road that wanted to put all their eggs in one basket and achieve nothing. You only see the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, the winners. Oh, that means anybody can do it. That's a fallacy.
I didn't put the two and two equals four thing together. I was more an observer on life because in America, there were so many attention deficit disorders, so many different things going by. There was sports and television and radio and all that stuff going by. And so I worked. And when I was about 13, I came home. Yes, I worked on Sundays and Sunday nights.
I'm pretty sure it was the Ed Sullivan Show, unlike any show that's ever been on TV. At that time, in 1963, 64, population of America was 170 million people, about that. Now it's double that. It's 330 million. And the Ed Sullivan Show was so big, they had pooping elephants and comedians and puppet guys and, you know, one rock band for the kids.
And I remember coming home from work and my mother got one of those TV dinners. People have no idea what that is. But you buy them frozen because poor mom had to go work. She couldn't. And it was like this kind of like old shoes crunched into like burgers, peas and some mashed potatoes. And you pour the gravy and that was it. And I didn't know anything. I liked it. So I was eating it.
And ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles. And I'm going, what is that? And by the way, I've met the biggest stars in the world, especially musicians. They all point to that pivotal moment. Scientists call it a singularity.
All of a sudden, these feminine-looking guys with hair over their ears, because in those days, even shorter than your hair, you'd see the meat between the ear and the hairline above it, or like crew cuts. Yeah. and these guys talk like that here i work my fingers to the bone old like old what is that and they're small compared to ed sullivan and everything
you know, kind of feminine in a way because Americans were bigger and fatter and stuff. And these guys were all, you know, like bone thin and spoke strangely. I didn't understand. I was watching and I thought, gee, they look weird. And I remember my mother coming in and saying, gee, I think they look weird. And bango, at that moment I said, no, they're cool because my mother thinks they're weird.
You want your own thing. You don't want to do Lawrence Welk. You never heard of Lawrence Welk? Oh, my God. Kill me now. Oh, man. Lawrence Welk was on every Sunday, and it was mom and dad music. Okay.
Boy. And now we're going to do the polka.
Right.
I've been careful, so I win.
Well, more specifically, how to be Disney without the overhead. But it's not as difficult as people think it is because unlike other countries, all information is available for free online. to anyone who wants to put in the time and it was called it's the house of god otherwise known as the library don't forget that second r in the middle it's not library it's library
And I used to go to the library every day after yeshiva. I was studying to be a rabbi, but then I discovered girls. So I was in school, yeshiva, which means the sitting, the whole day. And afterwards I'd go to the library, which was only a few blocks down. And I'm the only guy I've ever met or talked to who's actually read the Encyclopedia Britannica, cover to cover.
I am the corniest, most boring guy at a party.
Even during college, I went to the State University upstate New York, took out my own bank loan, paid for it myself and all that. So afternoons, I'd be the lifeguard at the Pines Hotel up in the Catskill Mountains, otherwise called the Jewish Mountains, literally. Because every weekend you'd have Jerry Lewis there and like all these guys, Milton Berle.
And so I worked right after I'd finished classes and I'd go make some more money. And on the weekends, the Wicked, not Wicked Lester, but what was it called? Bullfrog beer. That was the college band, and we played covers and some of my original songs, which by then I learned how to write my own songs. Not very good. Two of them or so wound up being Kiss songs.
And during one weekend, I'd make more money with the band having fun with the chicks and the attention and all that than I would the whole week working. It started to make more financial sense Yes, I had more fun. And then I graduated in 1972 from the City University at Richmond College and started teaching sixth grade in Spanish Harlem.
Segway to being the assistant to the editor of Vogue magazine, assistant to the director of the Puerto Rican Interagency Council, a government-funded research and demonstration project, where I saved $23,000 by the time I was 23 years of age. I lived at home. Makes more sense. You want to meet in Chicago? Go to the Holiday Inn. Otherwise... Save your money. Yeah. Save your money.
lived at home when I didn't need to spend money. But of course I contributed a little bit. And we, I met another guy too. who shared the love of English music, which is really American music, anglicized. We were anglophiles, the Beatles and the Stones and Zeppelin and all that, and made our own pastiche, our own thing, like they did their own thing of American music. And by 1973,
Showing 181–200 of 1,552 · page 10 of 78
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