Saturday, April 24, 2010

Gene Simmons Interviewed Part One


Just in time for Kiss' triumphant return to Europe with the never ending (we hope!!) SONIC BOOM Tour, Gene has been interviewed by RUSHONROCK. Here is part one of that interview...

(from Rushonrock.com)
With rock and roll legends Kiss due to land in the UK next week we caught up with The Demon – aka Gene Simmons – for a typically entertaining chat.
The veteran bass player and rock solid businessman still looks good in a pair of platform heels and boasts the steely thighs of a 30-year-old.
You can catch him and rest of the guys from Saturday May 1 in Sheffield and the across the UK in Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and London.
For Simmons rocking is his business – and business is good.
Look out for Part Two of our Gene exclusive next week.

rushonrock: Sonic Boom proved to one of the albums of 2009 but it was a long time coming. Do you wish you’d released a new record sooner?

Gene Simmons: I don’t think we should have done something sooner. I say everything in its time. If you’re a farmer and you bring your stuff to market before it’s open – when it’s closed – then nobody buys it. It’s the first rule of commerce. And what I’m in is actually called the music business. It’s not called music. Everybody thinks ‘great I’ll just do music’ but what about the business?

rushonrock: So why was 2009 the year to take your stuff to the market?

GS: When we thought about releasing Sonic Boom we thought where is our retail partner? There are no real record stores anymore so as a band we have to ask ourselves where can we sell our product? And once we got Wall-mart on board it gave us the chance to pay attention, without worries, to the record.

rushonrock: What worries could you possibly have?

GS: I will be damned if I’m going to allow somebody from Newcastle College to download the new record for free after we’ve spent six months of our lives working on it. Kiss is not a charity and we don’t pretend to be.

rushonrock: So it was a six month, rather than a six year project?

GS: We were in South America playing stadiums last April and on the off days we started strumming a few guitars and coming up with the bits – the backbone or what we call the clothing of the songs. But by June we started rehearsing and in July we recorded it and then we were done.

No comments: