LIFE LESSONS
GENE SIMMONS
He is Kiss’s fire-breathing, blood-dribbling, tongue -waggling God Of Thunder, and this is what his time on Earth has taught him
WORDS: RICH HOBSON
EVERYBODY KNOWS GENE Simmons. Or at least, they think they know Gene Simmons. Kiss co-founder, blood-dribbler, tongue-waggler and possessor of one of rock’s biggest egos. But long before he became The Demon, he was Chaim Witz, a kid born in Israel and raised in America by a single mother, struggling to find his identity until he discovered rock’n’roll. Charming, witty and even a little self-deprecating, rock’s greatest self-promoter shares just what makes him tick.
MOM KNOWS BEST
“My father left us when I was about six or seven so I was raised by my mother, who was plenty. She taught me the most important lesson I ever learned, which is every day above ground is a good day. From her perspective, being a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II when she was 14, her words actually meant something. Good piece of advice for anybody out there: listen to your mom, she does know better than your friends who are amoebas and have no life experience.”
COMING TO THE UNITED STATES WAS ONE HELL OF A CULTURE SHOCK
“I was eight and a half years old when we first came to America. Everybody was fat and big and drove cars. And the buildings were huge. We came from a small town in Israel, there were no paved roads, there was nothing and we lived on rations of food. I went into the first supermarket, it was like a city of food, there were streets and avenues.”