The bizarre time Bob Dylan collaborated with Gene Simmons

Bob Dylan can work with anybody in the music world if he wishes. However, as he’s quite an intimidating presence, most wouldn’t even reach out to him with the hope of a possible collaboration in the pipeline because they knew the chances of Dylan agreeing would be slim to none.

Gene Simmons from Kiss didn’t think his chances of getting a reply were great, but that didn’t stop him from chancing his arm. The worst-case scenario is rejection or being ignored, but it was worth the risk considering the slight chance his hero would accept the opportunity. However, to Simmons’ surprise, Dylan was open to working with him.

If you ask any artist for three names they’d like to work with, Dylan would likely be on their list. Simmons got one step further than most and got in touch with the singer-songwriter’s management to put forward an offer he expected Dylan to refuse.

t was 1991, and Dylan was in-between projects with time on his hands which meant he would entertain opportunities that he’d usually not think twice about, which was fortuitous for the Kiss singer. In 2004, their creation ‘Waiting For The Morning Light’ was finally unearthed and appeared on Simmons’ second solo album, A**hole.

Speaking to The Pulse of Radio about the experience, Simmons recalled how the collaboration came about: “Everybody buys lottery tickets. What are their chances of winning? Not much. So what? There is a chance you can win, and I’m like that. So I called his manager: ‘Can I speak with Bob?’ ‘What do you wanna talk to him about?’

“‘I… I wanna write a song with Bob.’ And all of a sudden within two days, an unmarked van shows up at my house, and Bob gets out with an acoustic guitar in his hand, and tells his driver, ‘I’ll see you at the end of the day,’ comes up, and we start strumming. I mean, it was just like that.”

While dissecting their collaboration with Billboard, Simmons spoke about how he and Dylan worked together. He said: “Bob came up with the chords, most of them, and then I took it and wrote lyrics, melody, the rest of it… We understood each other right away. He picked up an acoustic guitar, and we just tossed it back and forth, ‘How ’bout this, how ’bout that?’

“And he started to strum, because he – at least with me – tended to talk and strum guitar at the same time. And as soon as I heard the first three or four chords, I went, ‘Wait, wait, what’s that? Do that again.’ So I went and started to write a lyric around that.”

Listen to ‘Waiting For The Morning Light’ below.