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
Like... If I'd have to say... Not as big.
You could ask the Beatles, what would you have gotten as far with the same songs and everything if you didn't have the matching haircuts?
It's always... Pieces of the puzzle that somehow fit that make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts, which are fancy words that says all of it helps.
And if you take like a house of cards, if you take any one of those, it's just one card, maybe all of it comes down. Interesting. It's so interesting to think about. I get paid a lot of money for this kind of stuff.
I was always aware that character was not the right thing. It's persona. Persona not alter ego or alter egos and by the way I know people get so upset when I keep bringing up the juice stuff But the idea of the alter ego was created by them also, okay all the superheroes Superman yes Batman the Hulk fantastic that were all created by Jews Who dress British think Yiddish?
the idea of the weak man and and the secret super-man. Der Ubermensch And all created by disenfranchised people who never felt powerful. So the superhero was created by those guys who were never lifting weights, couldn't dribble a basketball, but they owned the teams.
No, it happened very quickly, and you react to market. The smart people react to the market. And immediately, we didn't think about it, but fans started to make homegrown T-shirts. Oh, they want T-shirts. Let's make T-shirts. And they wanted... We were aware that if you were a... I don't know, a Joe Cocker fan or somebody, you didn't necessarily want to look like Joe Cocker.
and chose a fantastic artist. It was music. And somehow we didn't plan it. We want to be unique and all that's true, but we didn't quite understand the cultural significance of the idea that you may not be able to be in Kiss, but you can feel like it,
How many more tennis rackets did we sell because people bought those and put on Kiss makeup and pretended when they were 13 that they were in a band? Because just as soon as you, and I'll show you photos of, Lenny Kravitz, when he was 13, like all down on these people going, what did I do? He was kicked out of school for at 13 coming to school dressed like that. That's interesting.
But you wouldn't be kicked out of school for coming to school dressed like George Harrison. Right, right. Yeah. But that's not cool. No, it is cool, but it doesn't. There's nothing negative I can say about the Beatles, but market research. Market research is a strange thing. It makes assessments based on the way things actually are. So Mount Rushmore, you've heard of it.
Could you tell me who the four faces are? I've been there. Yeah, you've been there and you still don't know. Washington, yeah. It bears noting that market research says The four Kiss faces are more well-known on the entire planet than Mount Rushmore. That's great.
You can go to Africa, and as soon as they see one of the four faces, they say, it's Kiss.
If you show them one of Mount Rushmore's faces, they wouldn't know what it was. Yeah, yeah. That's astonishing, isn't it?
I was a regular, normal guy with regular appetites and nothing out of the ordinary, and never veered towards self-destructive behavior, never.
the band elevated itself to another level because sometimes of course an idea will come from left field and they go why don't you yeah you know you're right we should be doing that so no matter who you are
Especially in light of the fact that times change, tastes change, and different generations come into it. Cool is a moving target. So I give ourselves kudos... to be able to be flexible and move around and do that stuff as hair metal bands came in, thrash came in, new romance came, like all through all the different things. So we started co-branding.
Like Hello Kitty is one of the largest brands on the planet for young girls, for little girls. So Kiss Hello Kitty had about 1,500 co-licenses, everything from training bras to tissue paper to potato chips, you name it. And then we co-branded with Family Guy and Archie. We had Kiss Archie Comics and Astro Boy from Japan.
Hello Kitty would probably be the biggest. Because there were endless... And then they changed CEOs. Actually, the CEO flew in to LA. We had dinner. And he and I are sitting next to each other. We're talking about the future. OK, we're going to ramp up this. It's clearly working and everything. And he said, as soon as I get back to Japan on Monday, it was the weekend coming up.
I'm going to draw papers and we're going to do some big, big, big stuff. And then he passed away. And the new CEO just didn't see it. Oh, that's a bummer.
All of it. Music less because entire generations of fans don't pay for music. They download and voucher. Both of our kids, Nick and Sophie, are massive on Spotify and Schmodify and all the other childlike things. Words. Yahoo! Google. And Sophie, for instance, is managers, co-writes. She's co-writing a song right now with the writer who wrote, Do you believe in love? You know, for Cher.
Showing 221–240 of 1,552 · page 12 of 78
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