Gene Simmons of KISS is talking to Yahoo Entertainment about his new G² line of Gibson guitars and basses, which starts this month with the release of the Gund Thunderbird bass. But the conversation about the ax soon turns naturally to the guitar god Eddie Van Halen, whose 66th birthday would be this Tuesday, January 26th. Eddie tragically died last October after a long battle with cancer, and at that time Simmons was one of many colleagues to pay a tearful tribute.
But Simmons was not just a colleague – his role at the beginning of the Van Halen band’s career, when he discovered them playing in a Hollywood nightclub and offered to hire them and record their demos – is the stuff of rock ‘n legend ‘roll.
In a rare moment of modesty, the generally arrogant Simmons emphasizes: “All this [false] idea of ’you discovered Van Halen’ … the people who literally discovered the Van Halen brothers were their mother and father. After that, the two brothers grew up. Nobody gave them anything. They worked hard for it. They invested the years, paying off their debts. ”However, the KISS superstar admits that because he was there from the start, he may have put Van Halen on the right track – especially since he gave them some important business advice.
“I was invited in the 1970s … to go to a place called Starwood. My date that night was a young woman named Bebe Buell, who would then have a child with [Aerosmith’s] Steven [Tyler], Liv Tyler. And I was busy up there in the ‘soft ass’ section, all ‘who do you think you are?’ thing, despise everyone ”, Simmons recalls that fateful night, when the live show of the hungry young band from Pasadena surprised him. Simmons initially assumed that the “flood of things” and the “classical melodies” he heard emanating from the Starwood stage were created by several guitarists, and he was surprised when he realized that it was only Eddie Van Halen’s work.
“I ran to the front of the fence on the top floor, so I could see everyone below us – and there were only four guys on the stage,” Simmons marvels. “A guy [frontman David Lee Roth] he took off his shirt, defying gravity, jumping up and down. [Alex Van Halen had] giant drums, playing double bass drum. The bassist [Michael Anthony] she had the loudest voice I’ve ever heard, pure as a banshee. And then the guitarist – I didn’t know their names or anything – he steps up and starts doing these things and playing, which I’ve never seen before. … I had never heard a guitarist, certainly one Rock guitarist, do that. And he was playing not only fast and furious, but sometimes in harmony with the beats. I was so surprised. I was waiting backstage for the third song. “
By the time Simmons ambushed the members of Van Halen after his thrilling half-hour performance, he was “gushing”, asking them about his future plans – only to hear, “Oh, we have a guy outside. He is a yogurt maker and will invest in the band. ‘And I begged,’ Please don’t do this, please do not do it. Do not give any percentage of the band at the beginning. This may be the only profit margin you will see – that is, you will receive a dollar now and, like anything, later in life you will not make a profit and someone else will tell you what you can do. ‘So, the tale is that I offered to take them to New York, put them in a hotel and take them to the Electric Lady studios to produce a 24-track demo. And that is what I did. I signed them up for my company, Man of 1,000 Faces. ‘”
Simmons and Van Halen ended up recording 15 songs, including the first versions of “Runnin ‘With the Devil” and “On Fire”, as well as a now famous version of “House of Pain” that never appeared on any Van Halen album but Simmons says it’s “maybe my favorite Van Halen song”. Simmons is so proud of this track, in fact, that he even pauses the Yahoo Entertainment interview to bring it to YouTube and listen, describing it as “like a steamroller, like a falling locomotive. … And the most amazing thing is that almost everything live, the guitar, the solos, all those things. They were one of the few bands – AC / DC is another – one of the few bands that really sounds like the album. You know when you hear a record and you’re going to see a band live and ugh, is it never so good? No. They were like that. “
Simmons was incredibly excited about Van Halen’s demo sessions, which took place at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady and Village Recorder studio in Los Angeles, and he went to KISS manager Bill Aucoin at the time, hoping to bring the Van Halen for the Aucoin Fold management. But to his shock, no one at KISS camp shared his enthusiasm or vision.
“Aucoin, Paul Stanley, none of the guys in the band, Ace – they didn’t listen,” says Simmons, shaking his head. “They just said, ‘So what?’ I’m like, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m telling you, listen to Uncle Gene, I know what I’m doing. We will take them out, leave them open for us. They will be a mega-band, and we will be there with them too! ‘”But an indifferent Aucoin still passed. That’s when Simmons, the shrewd businessman, knowing he had a potential gold mine in his hands, had to make a difficult decision. It was then that he experienced another rare moment of humility.
“I had a choice, because they were assigned to me, to keep them locked up with my stuff, or to do the ethical thing, which is: ‘Guys, you owe me nothing. I’m tearing up your contract. You’re free to go, ‘”explains Simmons. He chose the latter, also giving his demo masters to the Van Halen brothers, although these officially unpublished sessions have been pirated and circulated for years under the title Zero Demos. “And, of course, in two months, they closed a deal with Warner Bros. and fired. ” Van Halen’s self-titled debut album, produced by Ted Templeman and released in February 1978, sold more than 10 million copies.
Simmons remembers the Van Halen guys as always down-to-earth: “Eddie was always like that – no rock star, no Gene Simmons ‘what do you think you are?’ sort of thing, none of that ‘oh, that guy is an idiot, he’s so full of himself!’ No, he was just a normal boyfriend, even when they became megastars, ”he says. Later, Simmons explains: “They kind of paid me, because when [KISS] I went to Japan on that tour, we went back to LA and I wrote some songs, new songs, ‘Christine Sixteen’ and two others, and I was going to the studio. I was in the habit of going in at night where the phone wouldn’t ring, no one called, no girl was around.
“And what happened was that I didn’t have time to make all the instruments, because normally I would go there, play drums and guitar and stuff, and then I would do everything. I called Alex or Edward and said, ‘I’m going to the studio, I have some songs. I don’t know what you are doing tonight. Want to come in and help me? ‘And they did, Alex and Eddie, and the’ power trio ‘was there and we recorded, ”continues Simmons. “It was in my safe, Gene Simmons Vault, the biggest box of all time – you can hear the trio doing it. In fact, I forced [Kiss guitarist] Ace Frehley, when we finally did [the KISS studio version of] ‘Christine Sixteen’, to copy Edward’s solo note by note – which, of course, he didn’t like very much! That is that’s good [Eddie] solo was. One take. “
Since Simmons is an experienced entrepreneur responsible for everything from giant boxed sets to his new partnership with Gibson G², one would expect him to be smug about the fact that he predicted Van Halen’s success, or that he would be criticizing himself for letting them go and not getting a share of the profit. But he insists: “No, nothing like that, nothing like that, nothing like that. I make a living and all my dreams have more than come true. … I did not give [Van Halen] your talent. I didn’t invent them. I happened to be there when that magnificent beast passed. I was there at the beginning; that’s all you can honestly say. If they had gone a little further and maybe made a few wrong turns initially, yes, it could have killed their career. So, maybe I said, ‘Don’t go this way, let’s go this way’, and that led straight to … I would like to think that this demonstration helped them close the deal with Warner Bros. But they owe me nothing. “
Check out Yahoo Entertainment’s extended interview on Gene Simmons’ Gibson G² collaboration, which has a family-oriented mission that could lead to the formation of the next Van Halen-style sister band:
Read more on Yahoo Entertainment:
· Wolfgang Van Halen debuts a musical tribute to his father Eddie: ‘I love and miss you, Pop’
· Patty Smyth on how she almost became Van Halen’s singer: ‘I went the way I should go’
· KISS revisits ‘The Phantom of the Park’, 40 years later – ‘Wow, that was weird’
· Sophie Simmons on finding her own voice: ‘I was just a normal pre-teen, and that was not enough for the industry I was born in’
· #NoMakeupSunday: When KISS showed their faces on MTV
· Yoshiki and Gene Simmons come together through the shared love of rock, Hello Kitty dolls
· Ace Frehley says he would participate in the KISS farewell tour ‘at the right price’
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Produced by Jon San, edited by Jason Fitzpatrick.