PHOTO BY BARRY LEV I NE
Original KISS members Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, Paul Stanley and Peter Criss will play a sell-out concert tonight at Tiger Stadium with Sponge and Alice in Chains.
THE DETR OIT JEWIS H NEWS
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G
ene Simmons remembers,
with some fondness, his days
as a youth, studying Torah
and Talmud at Yeshiva Torah
V'Das in New York.
But it's a stretch to consider how that
might have prepared him for his cur-
rent career — breathing fire, spitting
blood, wearing demonic makeup and
stomping around on 8-inch platform
heels as the bassist for the rock band
HISS.
So how did the Haifa-born Simmons,
whose real surname is Klein, make the
transition? Call it a pre-bar mitzvah
epiphany.
"I saw a Spanish girl who lived on my
street, with hair down to her butt, jump-
ing rope," remembers Simmons, 46,
whose father still lives in Israel. "She
was 14, and I was 12. It was like slow
motion; all I saw was her hair flying in
the air. And ever since then, I've been
trying to figure out how to appeal to
that."
For Simmons and KISS-mate Paul
Stanley (born Stanley Eisen), like hun-
dreds of other future rock 'n' rollers, the
answer came when the Beatles per-
formed on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in
1964.
"The girls were going out of their
minds," Simmons says. "I said, That's
a good job. You get paid and the
girls go out of their minds.' "
"But I saw more going on there," he
adds. 'There was the music, the content,
the creativity. You cannot deny, nor do
I want to, the absolute raw power of be-
ing able to manipulate the audience in
any way you wanted. They're there for
you to play with. I love that."
Simmons, Stanley and a succession
of bandmates have been doing just that
since 1972, when they decided to form
a group whose members would paint
their faces and put on the best py-
rotechnic display rock 'n' roll had ever
seen. At the time, it seemed a bit over
the top; now it looks like a stroke of ge-
nius to the tune of more than 75 million
albums sold during the intervening
years.
Simmons and Stanley have operated
KISS with shrewd business acumen,
jettisoning musicians when drug or al-
e cohol addictions compromised their tal-
ents, removing the makeup when it lost
impact (1983) and taking an active role
in extra-musk endeavors such as KISS
fan conventions and tribute albums.
Tonight at Tiger Stadium, they un-
veil their latest move — the return of
the original KISS lineup (with guitarist
Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss),
back in makeup and trotting out a stage
spectacle that Stanley likes to refer to
as "rock 'n' roll on steroids."
"I now declare the stage show back;
please, God, give me value for my mon-
ey," says Simmons. "We intend to stay
true to the spirit of KISS — we'll take
every song they want to hear, as many
of them as we can put in there, with
every effect they've either heard about
or come to love and — bang! — merge
the modern technology with it. We'll ba-
sically go where no band has gone be-
fore.
"Hey, I like that."
There's no question fans have been
waiting for this. So far, the real py-
After 17 years,
Gene Simmons, Paul
Stanley, Ace Frehley and
Peter Criss of KISS will
rock roll all night in
their first reunion tour.
GARY GRAFF SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS