Gene Simmons has always had a keen interest in money, and he has plenty of insights on the subject. “If you’re going to be miserable, it’s still better to be a rich, miserable person,” he said early in our conversation.
This philosophy partly explains why he has been performing solo concerts over the past couple of years since Kiss retired from touring. Simmons recalls his humble beginnings. “I’m an only child to my mother, and I grew up with the hard knocks of not being very romantic about what it all means,” he said on an upcoming episode of the UCR Podcast. “I developed a tougher skin and realized that everything was about the search for power and money, which is not a very romantic notion. But I didn’t want to be poor because I know what that felt like.”
“My mother worked at a sweat factory six days a week and survived the Nazi concentration camps in Germany. Life is tough, so the romantic, hippie view of life never worked for me,” he continued. “All I ever did was try to figure out how to become powerful and make lots of money, for survival. The only thing money ever does, really, is give you the freedom to do what you like. It’s about keeping you safe, paying for hospital bills, creating jobs, giving to charity. A poor person never gave me a job.”
While this logic partially applies to his career with Kiss, for Simmons, it goes further. “Throughout Kiss, fame was nice, but there are a lot of famous people who are relatively poor, and that’s not a lot of fun,” he explained. “But there are also a lot of industrial types whose names you don’t recognize who are very wealthy. It’s better to be rich than poor, it really is. And if you’re miserable, it’s still better to be a rich, miserable person. That’s all I ever tried to do.”
What Fans Can Expect From Gene’s Solo Shows
Last month, Simmons told UCR that staying away from the stage wasn’t an option for him, and he elaborated on those thoughts during our latest conversation. “I’m having more fun now in ways I never thought I’d have, without 60 people on the crew, without a private jet, without three triple-decker buses, without 20 tractor trailers—without a small city setting up with more firepower than some third-world countries, just getting up on stage and rocking out,” he said. “It’s like your favorite band rehearsing in a garage, and then the garage door opens and everybody in town rushes over and has a party.”
“It’s very flexible. There are no plans. I can pull up people from the audience. They can join me singing, if you can play an instrument, jump in if you know one of the tunes, dive in,” he continued. “You can Google ‘Gene Simmons Band, teenage guitar player, Parasite,’ and you’ll see some kid step up and rock out. There was a 15-year-old kid in Scandinavia who yelled out from the audience that he wanted to play the drums. [We] brought him up on stage and never rehearsed with him. ‘What do you want to play?’ ‘Christine Sixteen.’ ‘Do you know the song?’ ‘Oh yeah, I know this.’ You’ll see that he kills it. That’s half of the fun, the idea of band and fan and not having the moat around them. With these solo shows, anything can happen.”
Simmons and his band will begin their next series of tour dates starting May 2.