eSGEe
Ferengi Ambassador of Trade
As iconic a persona as Simmons is, he has never been identified with landmark bass shapes such as Fender Precision or Jazz basses. Instead, he gravitated towards the meaty tone and big body of Gibson Grabbers and Rippers. These were eventually usurped by the Spector bass. He famously played, and adopted as his primary instrument, one of the very first Spector basses ever built. In fact, he claims it was number one.
“Some guy walked in when we were recording the third record, and he said, ‘Hi, I’m Stu Spector’. I was like, ‘Great, how did you get in here?’” Simmons laughs. Spector told the bassist that he was a fan and wanted to build him a bass. “He asked me what kind of bass I would like, so I said, ‘I hate it when I can’t reach up and do the kinds of slides that I like doing, like a little sugar coating.’ I wanted a fully exposed neck. There’s no reason why the body, like on a Fender bass, should leave about a third of the neck within the body: you can’t reach the top notes.” This was the impetus for the double horn that is now an integral design component of his own Punisher bass. Simmons refers to it as a uniform body, due to the way the double horns mirror one another and allow him to reach the upper frets. The Gene Simmons Punisher is a version of that first Spector.
Simmons has been manufacturing his own basses under the moniker Gene Simmons Axe Company since 1980. “I had one made because I noticed that musicians call their instruments, ‘Axe’,” he says, recalling his first bass. “So I did some research and found out that nobody had ever actually trademarked the term, even though it was in common usage. So I trademarked the word and then asked myself, ‘Why doesn’t a guitar look like an axe?’”
Kramer built the first few hundred of the original Axe basses and thereafter Jackson made some, but Simmons wasn’t satisfied, so he did the research and development himself. Today, each Simmons bass is handmade, starting at about five grand and you can even buy the ones he plays on stage – literally. If Kiss come to your city and you like the one Simmons is playing, you can buy that one.
Simmons says he has experimented with five- and six-string basses off stage, but never found them useful for his role in Kiss. “I’ve tried it, but it’s too many choices,” he says. “You ever go to a restaurant and you see the menu and you get a hundred choices? My sense is that the five- and six-string bass work better for different kinds of music, like jazz and prog rock. Four strings are plenty for me. I do play chords on some of the stuff. All you have to do is play the one and the five – and there’s your chord.”
When it comes to songwriting, Simmons says it’s not about riffs for him. “Many musicians often sit down and start aimlessly reading off the things they remember,” he states. “Like a Page lick or Clapton lick, and it’s sort of mindless. When I pick up an instrument it’s because I heard something in my head first, then I search for it.”
He adds: “You can tell an AC/DC song starts with Angus Young sitting down and strumming the chords,” he says. “There’s a process to what they do. There’s no process here. On Gene Simmons: Alter Ego, you’ll hear hundreds of songs that I never used in Kiss. Beatle-esque songs, other songs like Neil Young: just all kinds of stuff that never fit what we did. They were written on all kinds of instruments. There are no rules.”
People can be dismissive of Kiss’s music because the image is overwhelming, but Simmons emphasises that there is substance to the simplicity of their songs. “Yngwie Malmsteen is a very good guitar player, but nobody is walking down the street humming those riffs. Something that’s memorable is worth more than anything. Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’ guitar lick is the most played guitar lick of all time. When you really think about it, simple and good last.”
Gene Simmons reveals the origins of Kiss bass-lines, in his own words
Photo by Tina Korhonen © 2015, all rights reserved. No use without permission.
‘Strutter’ (1974)
“This started off as a song I wrote – before I met Paul – called ‘Stanley the Parrot’. It went B minor to G to D, with a B suspended. Paul heard the song and said the lyrics were stupid, so he suggested we take the chords and write something new. It was him who put the lyrics together. He came up with the bridge and I added the riff. [Original Kiss drummer] Peter Criss had a kind of swing, big band thing going on, and I didn’t want to do what a band like AC/DC would do, where the bass starts to pump. I felt like a robot. It didn’t swing. It didn’t go left and right. Now it has that McCartney-like descend. So, the bass-line doesn’t really follow the chords. The same thing happened in ‘Rock And Roll All Nite’ (1975). The bass is off on its own. It descends and ascends down from the chords and up to the chords. They’re not blues-based bass licks, if you see what I mean.”
‘Cold Gin’ (1974)
“This is us telling Ace [Frehley, original Kiss guitarist] that he can’t just be the guitar player in the band. We wanted everybody to sing, and we encouraged Ace. When he brought it in, it lacked a middle eight or a bridge. He had a verse and a chorus. I added the G flat part. That riff actually came from HMS Pinafore, the Broadway show by Gilbert and Sullivan. It owed the germ of the idea to musical theatre. But we couldn’t get him to sing that first song. He wanted me to sing it.”
‘Detroit Rock City’ (1976)
“This song was written by Paul and, originally, it was in double time, which meant the lyrics were connected; there was no stopping between the lines. It was [producer] Bob Ezrin who said, ‘Why don’t you sing, ‘Feel all right on a Saturday night’, then stop, stop, one, two, three, four, next lyric’, which left big gaping holes between the chords, like Thin Lizzy does in ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’. So, Ezrin said, ‘What about ‘Freddie’s Dead’ by Curtis Mayfield? That’s the bass riff that the guitar does at the beginning of the song. It’s not so much blues as it is symphonic or classical. The middle section is all Ezrin. That’s more big band, like Glenn Miller or Duke Ellington.”
‘Calling Dr. Love’ (1977)
“This started as a song called ‘Bad, Bad Lovin’’, which will be on my box set. I wrote it on guitar and it had the same basic chord structure. When I put the bass on, I was like, ‘Am I just going to pump it through, or am I going to do something?’ So I just started riffing, like a trombone does in a big band playing a John Philip Sousa march. I liked the riff so much we doubled it on guitar and eventually took away the chords, so that during the chorus all you hear is the riff. Only later on did Paul add those simple chords.”
‘I Love It Loud’ (1982)
“I have to confess that I’ve always been interested in Pete Townshend and ‘My Generation’: the way it starts off on B and stays on that chord but lets the A string hit against it. I always loved that. So I said, ‘What happens if I take that figure and write a whole song around it?’ Again, there’s not a lot of movement you can do there. But I tried to do what I heard in between the vocals.”
Info: http://genesimmonsaxe.com, www.kissonline.com
Words: Freddy Villano
Photography: Tina K
“Some guy walked in when we were recording the third record, and he said, ‘Hi, I’m Stu Spector’. I was like, ‘Great, how did you get in here?’” Simmons laughs. Spector told the bassist that he was a fan and wanted to build him a bass. “He asked me what kind of bass I would like, so I said, ‘I hate it when I can’t reach up and do the kinds of slides that I like doing, like a little sugar coating.’ I wanted a fully exposed neck. There’s no reason why the body, like on a Fender bass, should leave about a third of the neck within the body: you can’t reach the top notes.” This was the impetus for the double horn that is now an integral design component of his own Punisher bass. Simmons refers to it as a uniform body, due to the way the double horns mirror one another and allow him to reach the upper frets. The Gene Simmons Punisher is a version of that first Spector.
Simmons has been manufacturing his own basses under the moniker Gene Simmons Axe Company since 1980. “I had one made because I noticed that musicians call their instruments, ‘Axe’,” he says, recalling his first bass. “So I did some research and found out that nobody had ever actually trademarked the term, even though it was in common usage. So I trademarked the word and then asked myself, ‘Why doesn’t a guitar look like an axe?’”
Kramer built the first few hundred of the original Axe basses and thereafter Jackson made some, but Simmons wasn’t satisfied, so he did the research and development himself. Today, each Simmons bass is handmade, starting at about five grand and you can even buy the ones he plays on stage – literally. If Kiss come to your city and you like the one Simmons is playing, you can buy that one.
Simmons says he has experimented with five- and six-string basses off stage, but never found them useful for his role in Kiss. “I’ve tried it, but it’s too many choices,” he says. “You ever go to a restaurant and you see the menu and you get a hundred choices? My sense is that the five- and six-string bass work better for different kinds of music, like jazz and prog rock. Four strings are plenty for me. I do play chords on some of the stuff. All you have to do is play the one and the five – and there’s your chord.”
When it comes to songwriting, Simmons says it’s not about riffs for him. “Many musicians often sit down and start aimlessly reading off the things they remember,” he states. “Like a Page lick or Clapton lick, and it’s sort of mindless. When I pick up an instrument it’s because I heard something in my head first, then I search for it.”
He adds: “You can tell an AC/DC song starts with Angus Young sitting down and strumming the chords,” he says. “There’s a process to what they do. There’s no process here. On Gene Simmons: Alter Ego, you’ll hear hundreds of songs that I never used in Kiss. Beatle-esque songs, other songs like Neil Young: just all kinds of stuff that never fit what we did. They were written on all kinds of instruments. There are no rules.”
People can be dismissive of Kiss’s music because the image is overwhelming, but Simmons emphasises that there is substance to the simplicity of their songs. “Yngwie Malmsteen is a very good guitar player, but nobody is walking down the street humming those riffs. Something that’s memorable is worth more than anything. Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’ guitar lick is the most played guitar lick of all time. When you really think about it, simple and good last.”
Gene Simmons reveals the origins of Kiss bass-lines, in his own words
Photo by Tina Korhonen © 2015, all rights reserved. No use without permission.
‘Strutter’ (1974)
“This started off as a song I wrote – before I met Paul – called ‘Stanley the Parrot’. It went B minor to G to D, with a B suspended. Paul heard the song and said the lyrics were stupid, so he suggested we take the chords and write something new. It was him who put the lyrics together. He came up with the bridge and I added the riff. [Original Kiss drummer] Peter Criss had a kind of swing, big band thing going on, and I didn’t want to do what a band like AC/DC would do, where the bass starts to pump. I felt like a robot. It didn’t swing. It didn’t go left and right. Now it has that McCartney-like descend. So, the bass-line doesn’t really follow the chords. The same thing happened in ‘Rock And Roll All Nite’ (1975). The bass is off on its own. It descends and ascends down from the chords and up to the chords. They’re not blues-based bass licks, if you see what I mean.”
‘Cold Gin’ (1974)
“This is us telling Ace [Frehley, original Kiss guitarist] that he can’t just be the guitar player in the band. We wanted everybody to sing, and we encouraged Ace. When he brought it in, it lacked a middle eight or a bridge. He had a verse and a chorus. I added the G flat part. That riff actually came from HMS Pinafore, the Broadway show by Gilbert and Sullivan. It owed the germ of the idea to musical theatre. But we couldn’t get him to sing that first song. He wanted me to sing it.”
‘Detroit Rock City’ (1976)
“This song was written by Paul and, originally, it was in double time, which meant the lyrics were connected; there was no stopping between the lines. It was [producer] Bob Ezrin who said, ‘Why don’t you sing, ‘Feel all right on a Saturday night’, then stop, stop, one, two, three, four, next lyric’, which left big gaping holes between the chords, like Thin Lizzy does in ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’. So, Ezrin said, ‘What about ‘Freddie’s Dead’ by Curtis Mayfield? That’s the bass riff that the guitar does at the beginning of the song. It’s not so much blues as it is symphonic or classical. The middle section is all Ezrin. That’s more big band, like Glenn Miller or Duke Ellington.”
‘Calling Dr. Love’ (1977)
“This started as a song called ‘Bad, Bad Lovin’’, which will be on my box set. I wrote it on guitar and it had the same basic chord structure. When I put the bass on, I was like, ‘Am I just going to pump it through, or am I going to do something?’ So I just started riffing, like a trombone does in a big band playing a John Philip Sousa march. I liked the riff so much we doubled it on guitar and eventually took away the chords, so that during the chorus all you hear is the riff. Only later on did Paul add those simple chords.”
‘I Love It Loud’ (1982)
“I have to confess that I’ve always been interested in Pete Townshend and ‘My Generation’: the way it starts off on B and stays on that chord but lets the A string hit against it. I always loved that. So I said, ‘What happens if I take that figure and write a whole song around it?’ Again, there’s not a lot of movement you can do there. But I tried to do what I heard in between the vocals.”
Info: http://genesimmonsaxe.com, www.kissonline.com
Words: Freddy Villano
Photography: Tina K