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The day Gene Simmons first encountered rock 'n' roll
A look at the nature of inspiration, via Gene Simmons moving to the US at eight, discovering rock music, comics and movies, and forming Kiss as a direct result.
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(Credit: Raph_PH)
Music Ā» From The Vault
Mon 27 January 2025 9:00, UK
As silly as it sounds, itās genuinely hard to imagine a world without rock ānā rollāa time before the term ārock starā existed, before pop music was taken seriously as an art form. A time before you could witness a man dressed like a sex dungeon Lord Zedd flying around a stadium stage, shredding on a burning bass guitar. Truly, what were we as a culture before Kiss entered the picture? Fittingly, their frontman, Gene Simmons, belongs to a generation that (vaguely) remembers that time.
Born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, he didnāt move to America until he was eight years old when his parents split, and his mother decided to emigrate to Queens, New York. When asked by Goldmine Magazine to put together a list of the ten albums that changed his life, in true Simmons fashion, the list began with a spiel explaining the exact context behind why those records changed his life.
Most of them come from the pre-to-early rock and roll period, which is the period of time that inspired Simmons the most. As he puts it, āI came to America with my mother in 1958, and I had never heard of rock and roll, and I actually had never seen a television set. We didnāt have one. We were very poor in Israel, and I never could have imagined that there was a magic box where people flew through the air and there were monsters and the Empire State Building and King Kong.ā
The very idea of pop culture and youth culture was more or less new to the young Simmons. When he puts it like that, itās easy to see where the very concept of Kiss comes from. Imagine moving to a new country and seeing all this new culture for the first time. Not only that, but you do so at an age where youāre old enough to understand it but young enough to be the target audience.
What else is Kiss but all that inspiration coming together in one place? Hearing the music of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and having it have just as much effect as reading a Fantastic Four comic or watching Godzilla fight Mothra on TV. Going to the movie theatre for the first time and watching Dr No or The Music Man, then coming home to see this bunch of Limeys on Sullivan calling themselves The Beatles.
After all, for all their fearsome image, Kissā music never really got past being a mix of Chuck Berry and early Beatles with a bit of glam heaviness thrown in for good measure. That is the nature of inspiration, though. We are, consciously or unconsciously, inspired by everything that surrounds us. Sure, Simmons rhapsodises about Little Richard and Ray Charles, but the music alone doesnāt bring Kiss to life.
The best part of it is that inspiration never stops. While Simmons moved to America and discovered all this for the first time, that doesnāt make his experience more or less meaningful than anyone else. It just meant he decided that all these things that were making his world a bigger, more exciting place could coexist as one entity. Really, anyone can do that, no matter where or when theyāre from!
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Gene SimmonsGlam rockKiss
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