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
We got signed to Casablanca Records, a new record label.
23.
22.
Yes, it was.
We played clubs from nothing to everything. Really? Yes. We played New Year's Eve, Fourth on the Bill, at the Academy of Music in New York City, 1973-74. And two months after that, the first album came out. We were fourth on the bill. KISS, Teenage Lust, which was a local band, Iggy Pop, and Blue Oyster Cult. And on the first, by the third song, I'm Spitting Fire. We were full makeup.
My hair catches fire. And we're on the covers of all the magazines and everything. New band from Hellfire. And you know, all this kind of stuff. I was just glad to be alive.
but within a year and a half of coming out before mtv before cell phones we had still rotary calls superman was still going into that booth and changing of course people can't see him taking off his pants because he's in a phone booth while all this was happening within a year and a half were headlining Anaheim Stadium in Los Angeles. Wow. Yeah, just that overnight thing.
We had no hit singles, nothing. Really? Yes, it became what the Germans called Zeitgeist, the water cooler conversation. The way you spread your brand in those days were rock magazines, circus and raves and all these colorful magazines that had posters. And we were always on the cover because the rest of the band is just boring. Yeah, they're not visual.
So our brand and people, you know, the fans, we started selling out multiple days in arenas before we even had a gold record.
You're giving us too much credit. We didn't know anything.
But that's what happened. You were just rock and roll gypsies. Right. You were glad you didn't have to do nine to five.
And be in the same cubicle, doing the same thing.
None of that. Scientists either call it a singularity or an anomaly. We were rehearsing doing these songs that Paul Stanley and I wrote. Stanley Eisen. Eisenberger. Eisenberger. And I started writing and then Ace Fraley contributed a song or two. And as we heard, you know, this kind of sounds pretty good. And we had Peter Criss on drums and everybody could sing, everybody could play.
And then instead of doing a market analysis or anything, I recall clearly, because I never got hired drunk, one of us, and I can't tell you who, said, let's go down to Woolworths, which was like a department store. And it was around Halloween, I believe, and they had a lot of gimmicky things like plastic ice cubes with fake flies in the middle that you could stick in your girlfriend's strings.
Or whoopee cushions. You know what a whoopee cushion is? Yeah, yeah. Sit on it and make it part. Yeah, yeah. And we went down there and said, let's buy clown makeup. And we literally, almost like our hands were being directed, bought Steins, clown white, Steins, clown black, black stick.
Paul bought red lipstick, a few other things, and we went up to the rat-infested loft where we rehearsed and found ourselves hypnotically looking in the mirror and putting on makeup without anybody telling anybody what to do or what to think or do. It just... happened. It sounds suspicious. And then when we looked around the room, we were fascinated by, wow, that kind of... That kind of school.
Different. Yeah, different kind of cool. So much so that, and because I'm kind of a make a list, check it twice, find out I'm that kind of a guy, worked in offices all my life, there was no manager. So I was calling local gigs and clubs to try to get us. And then booked ourselves in for, I don't know, $35 a night to Coventry. And there was nobody there. We had my girlfriend, somebody else.
There was like five people. But for us, we were at Madison Square Garden. And then the second show was at the Daisy in Amityville, where they had Jaws and all that, and the Amityville Horror and all that in Long Island. And shortly thereafter, we got signed. We barely played any shows.
Breaking so much so that within two years of that we're breaking the Beatles record in Japan and playing Five days I think at the largest arena Budokan and before bands were playing stadiums were doing multiple days in Australia in stadiums 1980 1980 Where do you think you'd be if you guys didn't put makeup on that first day?
You mean if I wasn't in a band, or would KISS have done as well without the makeup?
Showing 201–220 of 1,552 · page 11 of 78
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