Kiss and Make-Up Read online

  (photo credit 1.1)

  Copyright © 2001 by the Gene Simmons Company

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York.

  Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

  www.randomhouse.com

  CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  The KISS logo is a registered trademark.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Simmons, Gene, 1949–

  KISS and make-up / Gene Simmons.

  1. Simmons, Gene, 1949– 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography

  3. KISS (Musical group) I. Title.

  ML420.S5629 A3 2002

  782.42166’092—dc21

  [B] 2001042481

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-4523-5

  v3.1

  TO MY MOTHER, who gave me life and taught me to reach for the sky.

  TO SHANNON, NICHOLAS, AND SOPHIE, who taught me how to love someone other than myself.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Overture

  Great Expectations

  Israel (1949–1958)

  Rocket Ride

  Coming to America (1958–1963)

  Crazy Crazy Nights

  The Sixties and the Beatles (1964–1969)

  Flaming Youth

  My College Years (1970–1972)

  Let Me Go, Rock and Roll

  Hard Times in New York City (1972–1973)

  Nothin’ to Lose

  The Birth of KISS (1973–1974)

  Shout It Out Loud

  On the Road and on the Rise (1974–1975)

  Rock and Roll All Nite

  Alive! and Destroyer (1975–1976)

  I’m a Legend Tonight

  Love Gun (1976–1977)

  Then She Kissed Me

  Life with Cher (1978)

  Dirty Livin’

  Dynasty and Unmasked (1979–1980)

  Just a Boy

  A New Member Meets the (1980–1982)

  All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose

  Lick It Up and My Stint as a Movie Star (1983–1984)

  Trial by Fire

  A Death in the KISS Family (1985–1993)

  Reason to Live

  Face to Face with the KISS Army (1993–1995)

  Forever

  Reunions and Farewells (1996–2001)

  Discography

  Photograph Credits

  Photo Inserts

  (photo credit 2.1)

  OVERTURE

  Someday soon, just after the final chords of “Rock and Roll All Nite” ring out on the Shea Stadium stage, I will pick up my bass and exit stage right. After twenty-nine glorious and tumultuous years, years filled with the highest highs and the lowest lows, America will have seen the last of KISS onstage. America was our home. These were our people. And playing the final show will be bittersweet, to say the least.

  Thirty years before, there was no KISS. There was only Gene Simmons, an aspiring rock musician in New York City. Ten years before that, there was no Gene Simmons—only Gene Klein, a Jewish kid who lived in Queens with his single mother. And ten years before that, there wasn’t even a Gene Klein—only Chaim Witz, a poor boy growing up in Haifa, Israel. All those people, of course, were me, and I was all those people. I was born in Israel, saw the world change around me when I came to America with my mother, and then began to change myself, first my name, then my face. When I picked up a bass, it was a kind of transformation. When I put on face paint, it was a kind of transformation. And when I took the stage, it was the most profound transformation of them all. In the process, I managed to help steer KISS to the pinnacle of rock and roll: we would eventually stand right behind the Beatles in the number of gold record awards by any group in history.

  In my life story, I am the main character. But countless supporting characters have helped to define my life. First, there’s the woman who gave me life, my mother, who endured unspeakable horrors in the concentration camps of the Nazis and who used reserves of strength I can only imagine to survive and even thrive. Then there are my bandmates, my second family—Paul Stanley is like the brother I never had, and Ace Frehley, Peter Criss, Eric Carr, Eric Singer, Bruce Kulick, and others helped me to create and sustain KISS (and in some cases, did their best to undo what Paul and I had created and sustained). And last but not least—last and probably most—there is lovely, incomparable Shannon Tweed, and the two children of whom we are the proudest parents imaginable, Nicholas and Sophie.

  When I sat down to write my life story, I thought about it in terms of the books I had read. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my story is a story about power and the pursuit of it. I have always read everything I could get my hands on, especially books that taught me new things: religion, philosophy, history, the social sciences, and so forth. There are thousands of books, from African Genesis to World Lit by Fire, that recount man’s endless search for power. Ultimately, all conflict seems to center on it, on who has it and who wants it. I instinctively realized very early on that power was what I really wanted. Fame and riches are fine, but one can have both and still have no power. Power is something I craved from the time I first set foot in America. I was made fun of because I couldn’t speak English, or because I was Jewish, but it really came down to not having power.

  Someone, perhaps Machiavelli, once said that it’s better to be feared than loved. I understand that. Love is evasive. Love has its needs. You have to be giving. You have to be concerned with someone else’s happiness. Power is a clearer idea, a cleaner concept. I want to walk into a restaurant and be waited on. I want to have women want me, although not necessarily because I want them. Women understand this notion very well. A woman wants to make herself as attractive as she can, with makeup, clothing, and perfume, because she wants every man to want her, although she may not be interested in any of them. I realize that I’m painting with broad strokes here, but I stand by what I’m saying.

  I suppose one of the reasons I wanted power was so I wouldn’t get picked on. When I first came to America, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. The Robert Heinlein book spoke to me as no other book ever had. It was my story. I was singled out because I was different, because I didn’t speak English well, because I was alone. So I figured that I didn’t need anyone, didn’t want anyone, and had only myself to depend on. If I didn’t do the work and go and get it myself, it would certainly never be handed to me.

  The story of KISS, of Gene Simmons, is a story of ambition and good fortune, of an immigrant boy’s impossible dream realized. But it’s also a story of the world’s biggest rock band, which means that there’s plenty of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I can’t take credit for any of the drugs—I’m straight, never been drunk, not a single time in my life. But the sex? For much of my adult life, I had no girlfriends, although I had plenty of girls. More than plenty. At some point, I began to keep Polaroid snapshots of my liaisons to remember them by. In a certain way, I loved every one of them. But when it was over, it was over. No fuss, no muss. No agony. To date, I have had about 4,600 liaisons. And I have to say that they were all wonderful, that they all enhanced my life in so many ways. Food tasted better. I whistled and hummed. I was alive.

  Somehow, through all the craziness with women, despite the sheer numbers, I managed to become
a dedicated father. If this seems strange to you, think of how it seems to me. My father left my mother and me when I was still young, and I grew up convinced that I would never have children, in part because I remembered the pain of abandonment, in part because I lived in terror of repeating my father’s mistakes. Then I met a girl named Shannon Tweed. The next thing I knew, I was holding my son in the hospital, unwilling to give him up to the doctors. How do I reconcile the cocksman with the family man? The same way I reconcile the shy immigrant boy with the leather-and-studs Demon who climbed onstage to breathe fire. Every personality has contradictions, and a large personality has large contradictions.

  I have lived my life for myself. I’m not afraid to admit that. But I have also lived my life for the fans: for the faithful soldiers in the KISS Army, those who stood by us through thick and thin, through changing fashion, those who braved bad traffic and bad weather to come out and let us entertain them. When I first sat down to write this book, I was torn by whether I should tell the truth about their band: about the internal rifts and feuds, the personality conflicts and personality disorders. I was torn because I feared that the truth might ruin people’s perception of their heroes. And whatever else KISS was, it was about heroes, about magic, about believing in it and delivering the goods. You, the fans, have always deserved the best from us. It’s one of the reasons we introduced ourselves at every show with “You wanted the best, you got the best. The hottest band in the world, KISS.” In sickness and in health, whether we felt like it or not, we believed we had an obligation to get out there, play our hearts out, and give you everything we had.

  I believe that when children grow up, they should find out the truth about their parents. Those of you who believe in KISS need to know the truth. I know that a lot of the things you’ll read in this book will be hard to take. I know that some fans may get upset at me. I know that some members of the band will hate me more than ever and claim that everything between these covers is a lie, despite my memory, despite the documentation, despite the witnesses who will attest to the events.

  Either way, here’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

  great expectations:

  ISRAEL 1949–1958

  I was born August 25, 1949, in a hospital in Haifa, Israel, overlooking the Mediterranean. At birth, I was named Chaim Witz: Chaim is a Hebrew word that means “life,” and Witz was my father’s last name. Just a year earlier, Israel had become independent after roughly 100 million Arabs tried to prevent Israel from appearing on the world map.

  The war for Israel’s independence followed in the wake of an earlier war, World War II, and the terrible plan of the German Nazis to erase Jews from Europe and eventually from the world. My mother’s parents were Hungarian Jews, and my mother had grown up in Hungary during the 1920s and 1930s. When my mother was fourteen, she was sent to the concentration camps, where she saw most of her family wiped out in the gas chambers. While in the camps, she ended up doing the hair of the commandant’s wife, so she was shielded from many of the horrors that befell the other Jews. Having survived that horrific time, after the war she went to Israel. I think the survival instinct was so strong among that generation that, after leaving the camps, they couldn’t imagine failing at anything else, and so they set out for this strange new land.

  I was posing with my mother and a hammer—for some reason I loved hammers.

  Israel was a new country, only a year older than I was, and its existence was still very much in question. But I was unaware of all that. It was always such a part of my daily routine that I wasn’t able to separate it from any other aspect of my experience. For example, I remember that my dad, Yechiel (or Feri) Witz—who was physically imposing, at least six foot five—would come in on the weekends with his machine gun and put it on the kitchen table. The front lines were fifty miles away, and everybody, every male and most females, was in the army. There were no exemptions. If you lived there, you were in the army.

  We were poor, but I was chilly, so my mother sewed me this coat from the blanket I slept in. I was chewing on a pretzel here at age two.

  The gun on the table was one of the few things I remember about my father, because he wasn’t around very much. I do recall that he was this large, powerful being with a large, powerful presence. One vivid memory does stand out. Once there was a mouse in the house, and it ran across the room and under the couch, and I remember my dad picking up the couch and holding it up on one side with one arm while he was trying to shoo the mouse away with the other. I couldn’t believe it. A man lifting up a couch? This was like nothing I had ever seen before. It seemed impossible.

  Chaim, Flora, and Feri Witz.

  I had polio when I was a very young child, probably when I was about three years old. Apparently, I lost most of my muscle control from the waist down. The doctors were worried that it would get worse and sent me to the hospital. In the hospital, I was kept off the ward, in isolation, and when my mother and father came by, they had to communicate with me through a closed window. For some reason, even at that young age, I had a strong sense of what was proper and what was improper, and I knew that it was improper to go to the bathroom in your own bed. My mother potty-trained me early on. She showed me the toilet and explained what it was for. At that time, there were no diapers in Israel, and I learned quickly that the bed was for sleeping, and the bathroom was for your other business. It was very clear. In the hospital, in the ward, I needed to get out of the bed and use the bathroom. I complained and cried and complained some more. I knew I needed to get to the bathroom. I knew that any other solution to that problem was the wrong solution. But the nurse didn’t come, and somehow I managed to pull myself over the baby crib and did my business on the floor, while I hung on to the side of the crib. Then the nurse came. She wasn’t around when I was in trouble, but the minute there was poop on the floor, she came right by, and she started yelling at me, wondering why I had gone right outside the crib. And my mother stormed right in and screamed at her for not being there for me. “What did you expect him to do?” she said. “Go in his own bed? He’s a good boy. He knows better.” In her eyes, I could do no wrong.

  I was always a loner, even though I had friends. I spent time by myself, observing things, organizing the world around me in my own mind. For example, I was fascinated with beetles. In Israel, they had these huge Old Testament beetles. The beetles here in America are nothing compared to them. These Israeli beetles were the size of small dinosaurs, maybe two inches long. They were brightly colored and beautiful. They looked like jewels. And I used to tie sewing thread around the neck of these beetles and put them in matchboxes along with a little bit of sugar. The beetles would live there until I opened up the box, and then they would fly around, still tied to my thread.

  As I got older, I became less of a loner. Instead, I became more interested in showing off around other kids and getting attention. So I changed from the kind of kid who would be a falconer for beetles, letting them fly around at the end of a leash of thread, to the kind of kid who would put a beetle in his mouth and let it walk around in there. Other kids were amazed by that. They thought it was disgusting and brave. Most important, they couldn’t look away.

  Though I was born in Haifa, my family lived in a place nearby, a little village called Tirat Hacarmel, which is named for the original biblical Mount Carmel. And I remember as a kid climbing that mountain, which is more of a hill, really, rolling hills, similar to southern California’s hills. I remember going up the hill and picking cactus fruit when I was a kid, then climbing back down and selling the fruit at the bus depot for half a pruta, which is basically half a penny. (Cactus fruit are sweet and juicy on the inside, but have spikes on the outside. Their Hebrew name is sabra, and that’s what Israelis are called, because they, too, are prickly on the outside and sweet on the inside.)

  Living in Israel among all the other sabras was strange, especially in school, because Israeli classrooms taught this quirky mi
x of history, religion, and politics. Think of it: in class, we were taught about an old book called the Bible and were told that the events recounted in this book—incredible events, really—actually took place in the country where we were living. It was a strange notion to swallow and to understand. Because here was a whole book that talked about the creation of life, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the flood and the Exodus. And then we were told, “This is where it happened. You’re living in the place.” It was pretty heavy stuff.

  At the same time, I wasn’t really all that conscious of being Jewish in Israel, because almost everyone was the same as I was in that respect. Clearly there were Arabs walking down the street, and there were some Christians, but I was oblivious to all that. I was not aware of anything except being Israeli. You’d think that my mother, having just come through the war and the concentration camps, would have been consumed with what had happened to her, but she wasn’t. It was too painful for her to talk about. She never discussed the camps and rarely talked about her childhood in Hungary. All she ever talked about, and only every once in a great while, was that the world is a big place, and there are some good people and some bad people. To this day, I am amazed that she had that self-control. It’s proof that my mother, ethically, morally, and in all other ways, is a much better person than I will ever be. She had at that time, and still has, an abiding trust in humanity. She still believed the world is a good place, and that goodness prevails over evil more often than not. I don’t know that I would have had that point of view if I had lived through what she had.