On Gene Simmons and commerce

The first time I met KISS was in the fall of 1981. I was at NYU and my roomate had a friend that worked in their management office. One day he got a call to say that the band was taping a promotional video for a new single and we were invited to come down to be a part of the audience. Remember, this is before MTV.

As a longtime member of the KISS army, I was raring' to go. As I've learned since, video shoots involve hours of waiting around with nothing to do. Didn't matter. This was KISS! We were herded into a soundstage that had the band's latest tour set up on it. The anticipation was intense. And then, there they were! In the flesh! But, oh my god!!!

I already knew that Peter Criss was gone and Eric Carr was now the drummer. That wasn't the problem. The problem was Ace had a weird page boy type haircut. Paul's hair was way shorter and he had a purple head band on. And Gene's hair was all matted down and in a pony tail. They looked like a new wave / hard rock disaster. But it was still KISS and I was finally going to meet them.

But wait, first they had to run through the song a few times. the clip was for the track "I" from what I would soon learn was the most horrible Music From The Elder. Paul spent the first 30 minutes teaching Ace the chords since, it seems, he was involved in recording the song. once the taping began you couldn't help but through the devil horns in the air. This was KISS and you want to make a good first impression.

During one of the breaks I mustered up the courage to go over and introduce myself to Gene. He was pleasant - in an arrogant kind of way. When I asked what was left for the band to conquer, he said they were putting together a tour of Russia. When I asked if they were concerned about the audience understanding them he said he didn't care just as long as they dished out the rubles. And then he pretended to flip out some bills "twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two..."

I've got even better KISS stories than that...