Saying Goodbye to Rock's Biggest Asshole
Gene Simmons is an unredeemable prick, but he changed my life for the better.
Gene Simmons doesn’t care if you call him an asshole. He considers it a compliment.
“I don’t think ‘asshole’ is a bad word,” he told me, with a smirk that rarely left his face. “It means you’re a leader. You’re out in the front of the line, making the big decisions. The followers are behind you, and when they look up, all they see is an asshole. Because that’s their only view. I’d rather be the guy in front who sees no assholes.”
It’s 2017, and I was backstage at the Park West Theater in Chicago, a few hours before Simmons was scheduled to take the stage. It was a solo show, not his usual gig gurgling blood and breathing fire for KISS. When I met him, he was dressed in street clothes; a leather jacket, way-too-tight jeans for a man in his late 60s, and sunglasses that didn’t come off even in a dark dressing room.
“I’m delusional in my sense of self,” Simmons told me, pausing to check himself out in the mirror. “I’m aware that I’m not the best-looking guy in the world. But I’m also aware that I could walk into any room in the entire world and walk out with anybody’s girl. That's just a fact.”
Whether you love him or hate him, the only rational response to almost everything that comes out of Simmons’ mouth is, “What a fucking asshole!” He has an essence to him that the Germans call backpfeifengesicht, a word roughly translated as “a face in need of a good punch.”
But he’s also a paradox. On the one hand, he's enviably successful. He’s rich—worth an estimated $300 million—and still regularly sells out auditoriums full of adoring fans. He’s had sex with thousands of women and still ended up with a devoted spouse, model Shannon Tweed. By every measure of success, he’s done pretty well for himself. But he’s done it all while being an unequivocal, unrepentant, grade-A asshole.
This is a guy who kept Polaroids of all 4,600 (his estimate) women he’s slept with and has no moral dilemma about selling merchandise with his face on everything from cologne and bicycle shorts to condoms and caskets. He’s composed songs about seducing teenage girls (“Christine Sixteen”) and sexy medical malpractice (“Calling Dr. Love”), he’s publicly mocked anyone who struggles with drug or alcohol addiction as “weak,” and during my encounter with him, he took obvious delight in demonstrating how he'd trained the Siri app on his phone to address him as “My Lord and Redeemer.”
He smiled at Siri’s assurances. “See?” he told me with a smirk. “She gets it.”
I despise everything Gene Simmons stands for. And yet, I’m weirdly emotional that he’s retiring. Or at least the Demon, his on-stage alter ego, is retiring. After the band’s December 2nd gig this weekend at Madison Square Garden, that’s it. KISS is done. “My hand on the Bible,” he told Rolling Stone. “It will be the final KISS-in-makeup appearance."
I’ve spent almost half a century making fun of that asshole. So why am I so verklempt that he’ll be hanging up his bejeweled, likely STD-infested codpiece for good?
When you think long and hard about your musical past, it’s easy to get embarrassed by the recurring motifs. Gene Simmons has popped up an awful lot in my life, far too often for it to be a coincidence.
In October of 1977, my uncle decided it would be funny to dress me up for Halloween like Gene Simmons. We spent most of the day getting the makeup just right and creating a costume with bat wings and platform boots. He used a sharpie to add tuffs of curly hair to my otherwise bald 8-year-old chest. When I joined my friends for trick-or-treating, they were speechless. They watched in slack-jawed wonder as I showed off the stage moves my uncle had taught me. I could do the guitar-solo-air-kick and the mood-enhancing-crotch-thrust and sing a handful of songs from KISS Alive II.
“God of thunnnnnder… and rock n’ roo-oo-oooooll,” I belted in my high-pitched prepubescent squeal. “The spell you’re unnnnnnder… is gonna rob you of your virgin sooooooul!”
It would’ve been ironic if I had any understanding whatsoever what the lyrics were about. Instead, it was just cute… depending on who you asked. Some of our neighbors thought it was adorable. Others made it clear that they weren’t amused by my one-boy performance of “Love Gun,” especially if they were Episcopalian. I don’t know why that was. Do all Episcopalians have phallophobia?
As the evening stretched on, the crowd dwindled to just me and a girl named Emily. She’d never given me so much as a second glance until that night. But now she was standing uncomfortably close and trying to hold my hand. And then, during my a capella performance of “Detroit Rock City,” as I flicked my tongue and punched at the air with my codpiece (really just a plastic ice cream bowl from Dairy Queen), Emily concluded that I needed to see her vagina immediately.
At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at. It was just a hairless mound which, based on what little I knew about human anatomy, should have contained a penis. Emily stood there—her panties around her ankles, holding her dress aloft like it was a boat sail and she was waiting for a gust of wind—and waited for some kind of reaction.
Lacking any other ideas, I stuck out my tongue and wagged it at her, screaming, “Rock and rooooooll!” I didn’t realize at the time how dirty that was. I was just following the script.
When I told my dad about it later, he just laughed. “I suppose you’ll be wanting a guitar now, huh?”
“Oh yeah, right,” I said, pretending to gag. “That's just gross.”
"Give it a few years," he told me with a wink. “You’ll be learning the chords to Led Zeppelin songs just so more girls will lift their dresses for you.”
That was the only thing my dad ever told me about sex.
Fast forward to the ‘90s, an unusually heavy Gene Simmons period for me. In 1993, I interviewed the KISS tribute band Strutter for San Francisco’s The Nose magazine—an indie version of Spy made for and by Gen Xers—and coaxed them into having philosophical discussions about homoeroticism.
In 1995, I came up with the brilliant idea of co-authoring a humor book with Joseph Campbell—kind of a “he said/ he said”—debating the myth symbolism in KISS songs, and even pitched it to a few publishers before a helpful editor informed me that Campbell had been dead for almost a decade.
In 1997, I went to a KISS reunion concert dressed in a freaking bandana and Gene Simmons’ makeup but only did half my face because I’m lazy. And then I offset my adoration by screaming unnecessarily long and smart-ass song requests. (“Play the instrumental ‘Escape from the Island’ from the unfairly panned 1981 album Music From The Elder!!”)
For much of the decade, I was obsessed with KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, the awful made-for-TV movie from 1978. I would constantly bring it up, especially around women I was attracted to. It was my canary in the coal mine. If she couldn’t hold her own in a spirited conversation about the hottest band in the world and their most spectacular failure, this clearly wasn’t somebody I wanted to watch die.
Because that’s part of the deal, right? You meet somebody, maybe hit it off, and then if you stick around long enough, you fall in love and get married, and eventually you have to watch them die. Or one of you does, anyway. Somebody is watching the other person die. That’s the whole deal of marriage. “Till death do us part.” In literally in the vows. That’s what you sign up for. At some point in this merger, you have to hold their hand and watch them disappear. Or be the one disappearing and they’re the last face you see. That’s a lot to ask of somebody. It’s not the kind of responsibility you go into lightly, and certainly not with somebody who doesn’t have an opinion about Ace Frehley.
I’d used the Phantom of the Park question on three different girlfriends. None of them liked or even vaguely remembered the movie. So that was the end of that.
But then I met the woman who would become my future wife. “I've never been able to get past Phantom’s ethical dilemma,” she asked during our first date.
“Which ethical dilemma?” I asked.
“That KISS has all these mutant superpowers, and they don’t do anything with them.”
“Well, that’s not true. They save the amusement park.”
“But only because the mad scientist tries to sabotage their concert,” she shot back. “They don’t use their powers for good. They weren’t concerned about saving humanity in general. Just the part that kept them from playing ‘Detroit Rock City’.”
I had no words.
“How different would our world be today if KISS had devoted themselves as a band to making the world a more gentle and compassionate place?” she continued. “What if they'd fought against corruption and defended the oppressed?”
“Instead of recording 'Love Gun’?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I mean, I feel like we would’ve been okay without that song. Without all of their songs.”
“You wouldn’t save some of Destroyer?” I asked. “Not even ‘Beth’?”
“Maybe ‘Beth,’” she conceded. “But if we lose every other song in their catalog and the only consequence is we end world hunger, or genocide becomes an antiquated idea, I feel like humanity made the right choice.”
That may’ve been when I fell in love with her. It’s not something I’ve ever admitted out loud, to her or anybody else, because it sounds insane. That’s not how normal people meet their life partners. It’s a sentiment you’d only expect from a guy with a van that’s suspiciously full of duct tape and rope. “We both have weird opinions about a made-for-TV movie with rock stars in kabuki makeup, so therefore I know I can trust you.” That’s just stupid. But it’s how I felt nonetheless.
Gene Simmons is an unredeemable asshole. But you know what? So was John Lennon. Morrissey is a fascist prick. Chuck Berry farted and peed in women’s faces, and then said (while being filmed), “Aw, baby, I can’t kiss you. You smell like piss.” Lou Reed, Michael Jackson, Axl Rose, Kanye West, Ryan Adams, the lead singer from Arcade Fire, they’re all fucking monsters. Think of the person who made the song(s) that affected you the most in your life, and I guarantee they’ve done something so repulsive it’d make you recoil in horror.
I was listening to David Bowie’s “Heroes” the other day, and it remains one of the most perfect love songs of our lifetime. I can’t hear it without getting goosebumps and tearing up like a lovesick teenager who just picked it as their personal anthem.
But then I remember Bowie had multiple affairs with underage teenagers, deflowering at least one (that we know of) who was just 14 years old. I have to block it out. Otherwise, it sucks all of the oxygen out of the song. Bowie was not a good human being. But his music is in my DNA.
So yeah, I’ve got complicated feelings about KISS retiring—particularly Simmons. He’s a smarmy asshole with absolutely no capacity for self-reflection or self-censorship, and he’s gone out of his way to make sure his music, which includes a few passably decent rock tunes, is taken about as seriously as a Kirk Van Houten cassingle. But for me, I see that Demon makeup and his iconic (and undeniably skeevy) tongue, and I remember that he’s the guy who introduced me to A) vaginas, and B) my future wife.
How many rock stars with stupid songs featuring clumsy penis metaphors can say that?
A good read. But can I borrow a feeling?