GENE SIMMONS Praises ACE FREHLEY And PETER CRISS’s Early Musical Contributions To KISS

During an appearance on Billy Corgan’s new podcast “The Magnificent Others”, Gene Simmons reflected on the musical chemistry of the original KISS lineup, including drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley, both of whom originally split with KISS in the early 1980s, rejoined briefly in the mid-1990s, and hadn’t played with the band in more than 20 years before the conclusion of KISS’s farewell tour. Regarding Peter, Gene said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “He’s a throwback to when drummers had swing. So he was never a rock drummer. That certainly helped that sound, yes. If the kick was too heavy — [John] Bonham later; and Bonham got his thing from Carmine [Appice]. Look, everybody listens to everybody else, and you like this, you take a piece and your DNA then becomes your own, but it’s a pastiche.”On the topic of what it was like to play with Peter, Gene said: “We loved the feeling of it. It made the music seamless. But I have to tell you that Peter… We were all untrained musicians. Peter played by feel and didn’t play by verse-bridge-chorus ideas and didn’t quite understand that because he was not a songwriter. He didn’t play a musical instrument; drums are percussive, not musical. So literally, you can hear ‘Strutter’ or one of those songs and the pattern on the drums is different in the bridge, then it’ll go to a verse pattern, in the verse pattern he had in the middle of the chorus, or in the riff, and switch to a chorus pattern. And there’s some strange thing that worked at it, but not logically. I mean, when Keith Moon — he’s not Keith Moon; he couldn’t touch Keith Moon — but when Keith Moon played with THE WHO, you can’t quite figure out what the patterns are.”I’ll never forget [at one of the early KISS gigs], however good, bad or otherwise, Paul’s [Stanley, KISS frontman] out there putting on his Southern accent. ‘All right, y’all, we’re gonna do a song now,’ blah, blah, blah. ‘It’s called ‘Strutter’.’ And he’s talking about a girl walking down the street and he’s doing that thing, and I’m hearing, ‘Psst, psst, psst.’ And I turn around, because I’m a little bit in the dark. Paul’s got the spotlight, and Peter wants to say — and my hand to God — Peter goes, ‘Which one’s that one?’ And this is after we rehearsed it for a hundred times.”He was a feel guy,” Simmons explained. “You see the template and you’re about to play a song. You know where the bridge and the chorus are gonna be. Eight bars of this, then you do the riff. You know where you’re gonna go. Peter was just along for the ride.”As for his impressions of Frehley when the guitarist first auditioned for KISS, Simmons said: “He immediately tore open the doors of what could be, what should be, because we were in a rat-infested loft, maybe twice as big as this room, with egg crates that we stuck on the wall that still had some cracked eggs. And, of course, at night huge dinosaur cockroaches would come out. Oh, it was horrible. There were no windows and everything. But we didn’t care. We were doing this thing and, ‘Wow,’ we’re hearing that sound. And we auditioned players, and this guy comes in who plugs in… And Ace plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out. What are you doing? We’re talking.’ He was oblivious that there was another meeting going on, that he had to sit there civilly and wait for his turn. And when he got up, we said, ‘Okay, listen, pal, we’re gonna do a song called ‘Deuce’. Here’s the riff. We’ll do two verses, bridge. When the riff starts, I’ll point to you. You’ve heard it enough, and you do a solo based on the riff.’ He said, ‘Ah, okay.’ And he talked like that. And we’re going, ‘Boy, he’s a weird guy. He’s got one orange sneaker, one red sneaker. Just pigeon toed and all. Oh, boy, this guy is gonna be…’ And then he dug in. And his head, like he’s on stage, just that rubbery thing. And Paul and I looked at each other, ‘Wow!’ And you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you certainly know when you hear it and see it. And… it just kind of happened.”Gene added: “I’ll tell you a big bit of info is, Ace was so serious about his guitar playing, the solos, he would go home and learn and he would work out the guitar solos so that when he would play live or in the studio, they were parts just like [the rest of the songs]… He would play note for note with the right vibrato and everything. That’s when he was committed to it, and that’s one of the things live fans kept pointing to. ‘Wow, it sounds just like…’ You bet it is, ’cause he cared enough to learn his own solos… His influences spoke loudly: [Jimmy] Page and [Jeff] Beck.”Last June, Simmons was asked by Backstage Pass if there are any things that have happened over the past 50 years that he would handle differently if he could go back in time. He responded in part: “Well, I’m sad in retrospect — you know, hindsight’s 20/20 — I’m sad that I wasn’t more hard on Ace and Peter, the two original guys who played guitar and drums in the band.”Apparently referencing Ace’s and Peter’s troubles with drugs and alcohol, Gene continued: “I’d never been high or drunk and never smoked cigarettes, so I’ve always been an outcast in that way. The rest of the world seemed to be drug-fueled.”Ace and Peter… have as much credit for the beginning of the band as Paul and I do. There’s no question it was that chemistry. And they both had unique voices, unique personalities and all that. And they should have been here with us 50 or 55 years later and enjoying the fruits of their labor. But sadly, they’re not. And it’s their own doing. They were in and out of the band three different times. They were let go three different times because of the same old thing. It’s not even unique. Go to almost every band [and] you’ll find people ingesting stuff more than the bum on the street corner, except they’re richer and they can afford to ingest more. It’s sad.”Asked how he managed to not get sucked into the drug-fueled lifestyle of being a global rock star, Gene said: “Well, the word ‘no’ is in the dictionary. Just by observation, I’ve never seen anybody drunk be witty or intelligent. Have you? And people who are high sound like aliens. And people who smoke stink like ashtrays.”Look, I can understand if smoking or drinking or getting high would make you smarter, richer, made your shmeckel bigger, made you more attractive — all those things that we all wish we had. ‘I wish this. I wish that.’ But nothing happens, really. In fact, you’ll probably throw up on the shoes your girlfriend just bought. You won’t be witty. The next day your head will hurt, and if you drink enough, your shmeckel is not gonna work. So I don’t get it. Chances are pretty good you’re gonna get into a fight.”I remember when I was 13, 14, I used to go to these teenage parties where 16-year-olds would gather because I was always bigger, so they’d invite me,” Simmons recalled. “They’d think I was older. And like a vulture on the side, I’d just wait for the guys to get drunk and then just swoop in and take any girl I wanted.”KISS played the final concert of its “End Of The Road” farewell tour on December 2, 2023 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.KISS’s most recent touring lineup consisted of original members Simmons and Stanley, alongside later band additions, guitarist Tommy Thayer (since 2002) and drummer Eric Singer (on and off since 1991).[embedded content]