PARTING SHOT
Illustration by BRITT SPENCER
GENE SIMMONS, OR GENE KLEIN, OR CHAIM WITZ (HIS HEBREW NAME) or the Demon, as he’s known to fans of the hard-rock band Kiss, used to teach sixth grade in Spanish Harlem before the band was founded in 1973. It convinced him that school is useless when it comes to teaching “mortgages or capitalism or the cost of marriage or the cost of divorce.” You know, the important things. Which is why the rock legend has written his eighth book, On Power: My Journey Through the Corridors of Power and How You Can Get More Power—a sort of Cliffs Notes that you can “stick in your back pocket and take wherever you go,” he says. “Sit on a toilet, on a plane, on a train and just leaf through it.”