Kiss have sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, so let’s be candid, you don’t have anything to prove. You’re developing a talent show, Coliseum. Why do you want to produce a talent show?
Look, the numbers validate the form. They’ve all done very well and kudos to them for doing that. But it’s a fantasy. Just because you sing in the shower doesn’t mean you belong on The X Factor. The ones that make it and they’re good, Kelly Clarkson a few others are fine, they can sing well. Do you become an iconic artist? Do you rise to those levels where you can fill stadiums, people are interested in what cereal you eat in the morning? That’s another level. We can’t quite put our finger on it but it has to do with charisma, stagecraft, the right song at the right place in the right time, coming out of the right mouth.
Is the lesson than there is a big difference between just singing a song and the artistry of what it takes to be a star?
Well, a song is the first thing. Food can’t just taste good, it’s got to look good. Presentation is as much a part of it as anything else. It’s the construction, the craft, in what you look like, in what you do and perhaps Kiss is the extreme of all of them. Which is that you may not know a single song but they could be the foremost recognised faces on planet earth. You know that Sweden has a monarchy? Do you know what the king and queen of Sweden look like? The masses have no idea. But everybody there knows what Kiss look like.
So, you want to create a talent show that re-invents talent shows. What are you trying to achieve?
You have to be able to recognise what somebody’s got no matter what genre of music it is. There are no rules. The Everly Brothers and Led Zeppelin could walk onto the stage, they have nothing to do with each other but they are valid and completely self-defined in and of themselves. Abba has nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix but they both succeeded. Charisma, stage presence, stage craft. [Those] things aren’t linear. We don’t want to do a linear show. Neither Simon nor Garfunkel, originally, by themselves, have the goods. Together there was a sound.
Why evoke a coliseum? What does the ancient amphitheatre offer you?
We’re going to be making sure that the coliseum audience, in a big round circle, is going to have a lot to say. They’re going to be off the map. You’ll hear the roar of the crowd and the smell of the grease paint. And Caesar is always mindful that he’s got to curry the favor of the masses because they are the centre of his power. There is such a thing as executive privilege and just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it’s a qualified opinion. The different kinds of artists that have made it, they defy logic, the cookie cutter thing.
You’ve had your greatest success with a band. Do you think TV talent shows inherently favour solo artists and in that sense do you want to create a platform to discover great bands?
One Direction is one example where it has worked and worked enormously, but that’s due to Simon [Cowell] going, “I don’t like this. I don’t like that.” It’s important to note that all the rules that we think worked in the past are not going to work in the future. People get used to it. You have the attention span of gnats and either we’re going to reinvent the wheel or it’s going to be the same old, same old. You can stay at home and listen to music. Why go to a live event? Because you want to see that charisma and you want to see that thing. You want to experience it with a large number of people.
This is an extended story from ESPN The Magazine’s Feb. 2 Music Issue. Subscribe today!
ORDERING EYEBLACK BY the barrel isn’t part of the game plan for most professional football clubs, but all that changed the day a team agreed to call Los Angeles home. In August 2013, KISS frontman Gene Simmons and bandmate Paul Stanley brought the game back to the City of Angels when they cofounded the Arena Football League’s LA KISS. Not since the inception of the forward pass has the game undergone such an extreme makeover. Well, the fan experience part anyway. Despite a 3-15 record in their inaugural season, they have become the AFL’s marquee franchise. Here’s Simmons on the secret sauce behind the success:
Why KISS entered the world of football …
Well, opportunity knocks probably only once and you don’t get another chance. You don’t have to be a genius to look around in perhaps the second-largest market in America, Los Angeles, and see it doesn’t have a professional football team of any kind. Arena football is cool. For one thing, you don’t have to mortgage your home to buy tickets — $99 for season tickets, what’s wrong with that? It’s air-conditioned, no matter rain or shine or anything else. It’s comfortable. You don’t have to travel a mile for the food. If you want to pee, it’s right outside the door. It’s all good. It’s also much faster, much more in your face. It’s actually more aggressive. What we do is to make sure you don’t have a chance to dip your chips every time the ball goes down on the floor and people are huddling.
The goal of every LA KISS game …
To make it the Super Bowl every game. That’s exactly the idea because you have to be honest with yourself. Although there are a lot of football fans, there aren’t 100 million football fans, come on. Just like when you go to the Kentucky Derby, everybody that goes there doesn’t necessarily know anything about horse racing. They go there for the spectacle. It’s a must-see event. And if you take away the spectacle that is the Super Bowl, the music and the fireworks, if you take away all that, what do you got? How could you have cheerleaders without music? And when the guys run out to the field, isn’t that music that heralds their arrival? Don’t teams — if they are lucky — have their own anthem? Words to those anthems mean something: This is who we are, this is what we stand for. So that’s what we try to do, and we’ve been very successful because in one season, our very first one, we were the only team in the AFL to pull at least 10,000 people to every home game. That’s unheard of. What other AFL team had a reality show on the air? You’ve got to try to break new ground and not do what grandpa used to do. Welcome to the 21st century. Any fireworks that you see at a KISS show should be at our LA KISS events — it shouldn’t be just a football game; it should be an event!
What to expect at an LA KISS game …
We have full live rock bands — nobody playing tapes. When the band sings it’s real, it’s live. We have extreme sports people doing full 360-degree flips on motorbikes. We have our Junior KISS Girls who are 10 to 12 years old — cute as a button — and they all do their dance routines to music. We have laser light shows. Our dancers are A-level athletes. Some of them are hanging in iron cages 50 feet above the ground above the goalposts. The opening day we had our guys levitating down from the ceiling, 80 feet up in the air. Basically, if you mixed up KISS and football you’d get LA KISS, which is profoundly and accurately why it’s called LA KISS.
On Jon Bon Jovi’s and Motley Crue’s involvement with the AFL’s Philadelphia Soul and Las Vegas Outlaws, respectively …
Never heard of them. I know that one of the guys was involved in Arena football. I don’t know if the other guy respectfully is going to be involved, but I keep hearing the same things you do. But look, when you’re running a race you can never look over your shoulder to see who is behind you. You just run your race, look forward and be the best that you can be and good luck to anybody who wants to get into the game. But we’ve never lost in ventures. We’re serious about it. One of the first things that I tried to do was bring concerts and music and glamour and glitz to KISS ventures. I mean what’s Caesar coming back after a successful war without trumpets heralding his arrival? What is anything without music? What’s church without music? What is sports without music? Think about it: When these guys train, you think there is nothing going into their ears? I mean music is really the soundtrack of your life. Anything from Mantovani all the way to Chopin. But if you’re doing anything having to do with adrenaline, you’re probably listening to KISS.
Simmons on the state of the NFL …
Football has gotten bigger, and if football doesn’t watch what it’s doing, something else is going to come along, something more exciting. Maybe it’s Arena football, maybe it’s extreme fighting, whatever it is. Look, people have the attention span of gnats. Yes, there are team rivalries based on “my city is cooler than your city.” I get it, it’s always been about that, but you don’t have to do that just in football. It can be in anything. Listen, the NFL invited me to sing the national anthem in a few stadiums, including the game at Wembley Stadium in front of 80,000 people, and I was proud to do it, so the NFL does a great job. But hockey is exciting, so is basketball, so is lots of stuff. Everything can coexist, but if the only thing you’re doing is what you’re doing, you’ve got to give more and music is a good “more.” I don’t mean just something for your ears, I mean the visual experience of music. And this is nothing new.
Simmons on the state of MLB …
There is still a grandmother playing an organ of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I mean, really. You got to be careful, baseball used to be America’s pastime, but really it’s not anymore. A few years ago a consortium, including myself, tried to buy the Dodgers. And it is stuck in the muck and the mire. It’s stuck in the past: the outfits, the games. The first thing I wanted to do was to bring in baseball cheerleaders and have a theme song, like all this branding stuff. You should have heard the uproar, “Well that’s not how we do things!” Really? Says who? Who is the rule maker? Baseball is an exciting game, but while the pitcher is lining up and looking around to think about which ball to throw, everybody is just dipping their chips and talking to each other. I would speed it up. I would install a time limit. You’ve got to throw that ball whether you’re ready or not in 10 seconds or less. If not, it’s an automatic ball.
What to expect next season from LA KISS …
We are certainly going to scale back on special occasions. The ceiling levitation thing cost a fortune — 250 grand just to do the opening spectacle because there were so many fireworks. We can have people rappelling 100 feet up from the rooftop. We play at the Honda Center and some of the other arenas we play at have very high roofs, so anything is possible. Why can’t you do that with music, and people coming down in parachutes or jet packs? Give them a show!
On the response he’s received from the football community …
Not a clue. I never looked around, I never asked anybody how they feel about it. It’s beside the point. I’m sure there are lots of people that wish us well, and some people who don’t. I mean what’s Christmas without Scrooge? But you can’t let the Scrooges of the world stop you from having a good old time and enjoying Christmas. As far as I’m concerned, every day is Christmas — of course we call it KISSmas — and I’m the guy that brings the presents. I’m coming down your chimney whether you want me to or not.
On attempting to sign Tim Tebow to the team …
I was very vocal about it [circa September 2013]. We didn’t even talk about it as a team. I was just talking about it, not as a press angle or anything, but as a matter of ethics. If any one of our guys gets caught in a bar fight or impregnates a girl without being responsible, they are out. I don’t care how well you play. And remember when people, and the media, started making fun of him because he’s a religious Christian? So he gets down on one knee and crosses himself. What’s the problem with that? He’s a good family guy, doesn’t use drugs as far as we know, doesn’t kill or torture dogs and is not facing a murder charge. As far as I’m concerned, football could use more Tim Tebows. Clean it up! There are kids watching.
FOX News Radio’s Dave Anthony spends “A Few Moments WIth” legendary rocker Gene Simmons.
In this interview, the KISS frontman sits down to discuss his latest book “Me, Inc.” In the book, Simmons shares a lifetime of field-tested and hard-won business advice that will provide readers with the tools needed to build a solid business strategy, be the architect for the business entity that is you, and much more.
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE
Even if you don’t know Gene Simmons’s music, chances are you know his face–the one he’s trademarked, anyway. The Kiss cofounder and bassist has established a personal brand that encompasses everything from his band’s thousands of licensed products to his co-ownership of an Arena Football League team called the LA Kiss.
Simmons’s latest venture is a money book titled Me, Inc. (Dey Street Books, $27). In it, he explains his branding strategy, a message sure to resonate with anyone looking for a job in today’s market. The philosophy in a nutshell: Never forget that marketing yourself is every bit as important as what you bring to the table. “If a vacuum cleaner salesman rings at your front door, he will be selling himself first. The vacuum cleaner is secondary,” Simmons writes.
The ambitious book covers other money topics, too, including investing, saving and home buying. Simmons says he set out to write an abridged version of all the money advice you never learned in school. “They don’t teach you how to pay taxes, earn a living and invest,” he says. “They teach you Columbus discovered America in 1492. Great. I’m prepared for life now.”
But the book addresses these subjects mostly with familiar financial platitudes. Simmons tells you to live within your means and riffs on Poor Richard’s Almanack (two pennies saved is one penny earned post-tax). Don’t expect more than the Cliff’s Notes version of personal finance. When Simmons does go into detail, he occasionally appears a little out of his depth. Sure, you shouldn’t buy a house you can’t afford, but if everyone waited to amass a net worth four times the value of the home they want to buy, as Simmons recommends, it would spell the end of homeownership as we know it. His idea of a diversified investment portfolio quickly devolves from stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average to penny stocks.
With Me, Inc., Simmons offers a glimpse into the financial mind of a rock legend. But don’t quit your (many) day jobs, Gene. Leave financial advice to the pros.
“My Dad and my mom both gave me the two pieces of advice I live by,” budding fashion designer Sophie Simmons says, counting on her index and middle finger while we snack on dessert at Serendipity. “My dad always said, ‘There are no days off,’ and my mom’s advice was, ‘Don’t give a F**k what anyone thinks of you.’ I found that those are the keys to success. Since I work everyday, I come across opportunities others might not. And because I don’t care what people think of me, it allows me to be open about my beliefs, my body, my life and to take risks.”
At just 22 years old, Simmons is unapologetic about her business ambitions. Romantically linked to a string of hot bachelor actors and DJs and squeezed through the reality show wringer at a young age, her sights are now set on a more elevated, individual business brand that is miles away from her teenage temptress image. She has shaped herself as a triple threat. Already modeling and acting, later this year she will add songstress to her resume – following in the footsteps of her rock star father, Gene.
Last year she signed to One.1k (the K stand for Kitten), the unique arm of Scott Lipps’ and Craig Lawrence’s One Models, focused on promoting bombshells with a particular voice and a rabid social media following. Sophie’s modus operandi is body acceptance, she is known for her anti-photoshop preferences. “I’m not totally against it,” she hedges. “I understand as a model that I don’t always have the choice whether something is altered or not, but I always make sure to ask, and most of the time the photographer is happy not to do it. If there ever is an image that they do alter, I make sure that on my social media I put a disclaimer whether that be #photoshopped or just a note. I also ask that if a company refuses to leave the images unaltered, they put a disclaimer at the bottom of the ad, ‘This image has been altered.’”
While her fellow models may be out partying into the wee hours, Simmons always has her eyes on the prize. “I don’t go to clubs any more, I don’t see the point,” she says while we finish our desserts. “No one is closing a deal 2 AM at a club, at least not the kind of deal I’m interested in.”
Photos courtesy of Shirley Yu.
There is no doubting that Gene Simmons can be considered the best case scenario of the realization of the American dream. Brought to the United States by his mother as a child, Simmons learned early on the value of hard work and ingenuity. Simmons has forged an empire that includes one of the most successful rock bands of all time (KISS), a clothing line, restaurants, and various other commercially viable ventures.
Detractors of Simmons have labeled him brash and arrogant in the past, but this reviewer ventures a guess that they are either highly envious of his success or unaware of his incredibly humble beginnings.
Me, Inc. is a summary of his thoughts on life and success, and while it is not a typical business book (far too entertaining), it does have really actionable points on what it takes to be a success and get ahead. The average reader will have no problem getting through this book and with diligence, successfully applying his advice.
