Friday 16 March 2012

Under The Influence: Gene Simmons (Kiss) 


I’m a child of The Beatles. They created this sort of hybrid white version of American music. They could do it all - Little Richard, country, pop, soul, psychedelia. They had no rules. That had a major effect on me.
Gene Simmons.com

Seeing them on TV, on the Ed Sullivan Show … was like a combination of religion and music and I don't know what else. The clocked stopped for me; everything stopped. It was like in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the apes went up to the monolith and touched it: a quantum leap forward. All of a sudden I understood what my fate was, what I had to do.
Guitar World (Jan 1996)

There is no way I’d be doing what I do now if it wasn’t for the Beatles … It blew me away that these four boys [from] the middle of nowhere could make that music.
CBS News.com

It's been said many times before, but I'll say it again: Kiss wanted to be the American Beatles. All those other British bands – the Stones, the Small Faces, The Kinks – were all fantastic obviously, but The Beatles were the motherlode. Two guitars, a bass and a drum. They made it all look so simple. And it was – for them. The rest of us have just been playing catch-up ever since.
Classic Rock magazine

The Beatles were a big slice of our lives, and [Across The Universe] is one of the most hauntingly lilting songs I’ve ever heard. I don’t know what it means to this day, but I don’t care. The song works as word imagery. Lennon sings this half-tone movement back and forth repeatedly; it’s like the two-note theme from Jaws. Lennon did that in a lot in his songs, including I Am The Walrus. It’s very unusual, but effective.
Lava Magazine

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