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Ferengi Ambassador of Trade
G ene Simmons really needs no introduction. He is quite possibly the most identifiable bassist in the history of rock music. Even if you aren’t familiar with some of his iconic bass-lines, his demonic onstage persona has been entrenched in pop culture for four decades now. And though Kiss’s image has been a hallmark of the band’s career, it also often overshadows just how musically diverse they really are.
Simmons may espouse two of the three dictats of a life lived on stage and under the spotlight – sex and rock’n’roll; no drugs for him – but it may come as a surprise to many that he is as comfortable referencing Gilbert and Sullivan as he is the Beatles. With a 2014 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction notched in his belt and a solo box set titled Gene Simmons: Alter Ego in the final stages of completion, Simmons took a moment out of his ever-busy schedule to talk to BGM about his influences, his basses and the stories behind some of Kiss’s most iconic songs.
Simmons, born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel in 1949, was 13 years old when he first saw the Beatles on television. It’s a moment etched so vividly on his brain that it’s obvious it helped influence Kiss’s identity. “I remember thinking they looked weird,” he recalls. “They were very small people by American standards, and they looked feminine.” Simmons remembers them as having doll-like features, and that they didn’t seem to share any of the ethnic characteristics of New York City, where he moved at the age of eight. “They didn’t look Italian or Jewish or Greek or black. They didn’t even look like hoodlums.” His mother commented that they looked silly, and suddenly he realised that must mean they looked cool. “Because my mother thought they looked silly,” he emphasises.
Though initially challenged by their image, Simmons was aware that the Beatles made the perfect statement from a marketing perspective. “They looked like what they sounded like. I was watching the music. I was listening with my eyes and I noticed that the girls were screaming and that they were playing their own instruments.”
It was an epiphany for the young Simmons. Most groups at that time, such as the Temptations and the Four Seasons, were vocal groups with bands backing them up. “They wore suits like my father did,” he says. “But the Beatles looked like dolls with their Beatles suits and their Beatle haircuts. It was as if they’d all came from the same Beatle mother. That was the pivotal moment for me.”
With the Beatles as his muse, Simmons first learnt guitar before noticing that everybody wanted to be a guitarist: he decided he would have a better chance of joining a band if he played bass. “There were fewer people who wanted to do the bass thing: it was just pragmatism,” he admits. He points out that his hero, Paul McCartney, was also a guitar player first, in the Quarrymen, before they became the Beatles and he switched to bass.
Simmons says he has always played bass with a pick thanks to the simple fact that he didn’t know any better. “I didn’t know you were supposed to play with your thumb,” he confesses. Playing with a pick shaped his identity on bass, which he says is mostly a melodic approach. “If you’re glued to the kick drum, your melodies are limited,” he points out. “Clearly the bass in a string quartet doesn’t have to worry about a drummer: he’s busy playing his own melodies.”
He points to the Percy Mayfield tune ‘Hit The Road, Jack’, as another pivotal moment. “The bass riff is the whole song,” he says. “It’s not about the chords; everybody just plays ‘Bom, bom, bom, bom’ and it never goes into a bridge. The verse is the chorus and the chorus is the bridge. I’ll never forget that.”
Later came the Beatles, and, more specifically, McCartney. “I started to hear the Beatles riffs, where the bass riff was also what the guitars were playing, almost like horn parts. When I first heard those Beatles records, I realised that McCartney was different to the Motown bassists I was used to hearing. The Motown bassists were all about feel. You felt them and they made you tap your feet and groove, but you didn’t go around humming the bass-lines Carol Kaye or James Jamerson were playing. It was all feel. It’s about the rhythm, whereas you actually hum McCartney’s bass-lines. You hear the bass playing in your mind, because it’s memorable. Bass in Motown is a rhythmic instrument. There are a lot of inferred notes in the way they play. And I don’t infer notes. I play them.”
Kiss at Download Festival 2015. Photo by Tina Korhonen 2015, all rights reserved.
Info: http://genesimmonsaxe.com, www.kissonline.com
Words: Freddy Villano
Photography: Tina K
