KISS' Gene Simmons reveals moment "Rock and Roll All Nite" was born and reflects on being a "chameleon"
For more than half a century, KISS' Gene Simmons has been one of the most recognizable figures of rock and roll. Simmons rose to stardom as the "demonic" bassist and co-lead singer of the rock band formed in New York City in 1973.
"All my life I've been a chameleon. Everything is a costume," Simmons said in an interview for "CBS Mornings" that aired on Wednesday.
But his devilish make-up and theatrical persona are a stark contrast to his very humble upbringing as the son of an immigrant single mother. Long before he became a KISS icon, he was known simply as Chaim Witz, meaning "life" in Hebrew.
The road to KISS
KISS' Gene Simmons reflects on his childhood in an interview with "CBS Mornings."
CBS Mornings
"You want to be in a rock band?" Simmons recalled his mother asking. "That's not going to fly, babe."
Before moving to New York at age 8, Simmons was born in Israel – a child of Jewish refugees from Hungary. His mother, Flora Klein, survived the Holocaust.
"After the horrific unimaginable life my mother went through where she saw her entire family, our family, wiped out in front of her face, every decision I was going to make I thought about my mother first," Simmons said.
Simmons vowed to be there for his mother every step of the way, reminding himself, "Don't break your mother's heart. Don't do it."
He said it was an observation his mother made that inspired him to be a musician. While watching The Beatles perform on "The Ed Sullivan Show" one night, Simmons recalled his mother coming in and commenting in Hungarian.
"I'll never forget this…she said something like, in Hungarian, 'They're really weird people.' And at that point, I thought they're cool," Simmons said.
The birth of "Rock and Roll All Nite"
After making some money from singing background for other artists at New York City's Electric Lady Studios, Simmons and his pal Paul Stanley went on to form the legendary band KISS in their early 20s.
Eddie Kramer, who worked with The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, agreed to produce and engineer their first demo. But they struggled in obscurity until a challenge from their label's president led to one of the most famous lines in rock history.
While buying frozen hot dogs and a can of beans in San Francisco, Simmons recalls Stanley turning to him and humming some of the lyrics to the song that would later become the iconic 1975 hit "Rock and Roll All Nite."
"We were in San Francisco, we went downstairs to buy frozen hotdogs and a can of beans. And Paul said, what do you think of this?"
"That's really good. What do you got? He goes, 'That's all I've got,'" said Simmons after Stanley sang the chorus. They eventually put more verses together.
"And that's how the song was born," he said.
By 1977, following the release of their concert album "Alive!" They were one of the most famous bands in America. Today, KISS has more gold albums than any other American band and has sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
Though KISS retired from performing as a band, Simmons, now 75, is currently on tour.
"You're running a race in a sense, the race of life and the finish line is coming up right ahead of you. What are you going to do? Slow down, or are you going to speed up?" Simmons said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
3 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Sydney Sweeney's jeans pun is not a ‘Nazi dog whistle,' but that DHS campaign? It might be
Thanks to a lazy pun that's as uninspired as the jeans it's meant to sell, a series of American Eagle Outfitters ads starring 27-year-old actor Sydney Sweeney have sparked a culture war. In one of several videos associated with the retailer's campaign, the accomplished performer who also happens to be a blond bombshell says, 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,' she says, as the camera pans from her blue denim outfit to her blue eyes. In another video, Sweeney defaces an American Eagle billboard that reads 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,' crossing out the word 'jeans' and replacing it with 'genes.' Jeans. Genes. Get it? Of course you do. It's as basic as it gets. But that didn't stop folks from assigning incredible complexity to the ads. American Eagle Outfitters is now accused of leaning into the language of eugenics to sell its mall wear. Eugenics is the absurd and bigoted theory that the human race can be perfected (i.e. made more Caucasian) through selective breeding. Eugenics gained traction in the early 20th century, most notably in Nazi Germany, where Hitler sought to create a master Aryan race, perpetrating unspeakable atrocities including the Holocaust. Now there's an argument across social media: Did Sweeney and the retailer play fast and loose with eugenics to sell jeans? Or is it just another distraction from a much scarier reality that 'the great replacement theory' — a touchstone conspiracy among white supremacists that an 'inferior' non-white population will displace them — is driving American policy and state-sanctioned actions? I pick Option 2. Sleuthing for hidden white-power messaging in an otherwise playful commercial is easier than contending with the militarized xenophobia right in front of us. It's happening on our streets, where immigrants with no criminal record are being kidnapped, then locked up and, in many cases, deported with no due process. Too heavy? Let's get back to the jeans/genes (again, who thought this pun was clever?). Commentary about the ad has proliferated across social media, where lefties, MAGAs and nondenominational Sweeney haters are chiming in, calling the ad a 'Nazi dog whistle,' an excuse for a 'woke freak out,' more evidence that 'Western ideals of beauty' still dominate, and indisputable proof that Sweeney should remain a perennial target for those who still can't separate the actor from the insufferable characters she played so well on 'Euphoria' and 'White Lotus.' The American Eagle Outfitters' fall campaign features 'the Sydney Jean,' which was created in partnership with Sweeney, and revenue from sales of the jeans will be donated to the Crisis Text Line. According to its website, it's a 'nonjudgmental organization that champions mental well-being and aims to support people of every race, ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, socioeconomic status, and other backgrounds.' Hardly Third Reich fare. Yet the clothing line's ad has been called 'regressive' and racist, and one critic wrote in Slate: 'These days, a blond, blue-eyed white woman being held up as the exemplar of 'great genes' is a concept that maybe shouldn't have made it past the copywriters room.' Never missing a chance to complain about complainers, White House communications manager Steven Cheung posted: 'Cancel culture run amok. This warped, moronic and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They're tired of this bull—.' Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly took the opportunity to troll the opposition when she wrote Tuesday on X, 'I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her 'good genes.'' It's not the first time Sweeney's actions have been used as fodder in a culture war. Her 2024 hosting gig on 'SNL' included a sketch where she was dressed as a Hooters waitress, complete with ample cleavage. The skit satirized her standing as a sex symbol. MAGA bros saw it as the end of woke because Sweeney is 'hot' and she made a joke about her boobs. Yes, even that was politicized. So now that I've spent all this space explaining the unnecessary freak-out over a jeans ad, can we focus on a campaign that should spur just as much, if not more, condemnation? The Department of Homeland Security has been posting images on its X account with captions that the father of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, would have approved. On July 23, the DHS posted an image of a 19th century painting titled 'American Progress' depicting Manifest Destiny, the religious belief that it was the right and duty of the United States to expand from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The DHS caption (with its curious usage of uppercase letters): 'A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.' If you aren't Indigenous, of course. A week or so before that, 'A Prayer for a New Life,' artist Morgan Weistling's westward-expansion-era scene featuring a white family in a covered wagon making their way across golden plains. The DHS shared the image with the caption, 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage.' Aside from getting the name of the painting wrong, they inferred that this was the heritage we all share. There was no footnote for First Lady Melania Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, Vice President JD Vance's wife, Usha, SCOTUS' Clarence Thomas and millions more whose American origin story doesn't resemble 'Little House on the Prairie.' So can we freak out about that, instead? Apparently not, because now armchair Nazi hunters are pivoting to a Dunkin' Donuts ad featuring 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' star Gavin Casalegno, who delivers a tongue-in-cheek monologue about his role as the 'king of summer.' 'Look, I didn't ask to be the king of summer, it just kinda happened,' he says. 'This tan? Genetics.' Maybe just stick with the Ben Affleck Dunkin' ad, where nary a g-word is spoken.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
Rose Leiman Goldemberg, 97, dies; her ‘Burning Bed' was a TV benchmark
Ms. Goldemberg was working as a playwright in the mid-1970s when she sent a few story outlines to an unusually receptive television producer. One of them, a drama about immigrants set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910, caught his interest. It became a television movie, 'The Land of Hope' (a title Ms. Goldemberg hated), which aired on CBS in 1976. It centered on a Jewish family and their Irish and Italian neighbors. There were labor organizers, gangsters, and musicians, and a rich uncle who wanted to adopt a child to say Kaddish for him when the time came. Such an ethnic stew was a stretch for the network, and critics loved it. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'A thoroughly charming surprise,' John O'Connor wrote in his review for The New York Times. Advertisement As a pilot for a series, 'The Land of Hope' went nowhere, but it made Ms. Goldemberg's reputation, and she began receiving stories to be turned into scripts. 'Where did you spring from?' one network executive asked her, she recalled in a 2011 interview for the nonprofit organization New York Women in Film & Television. 'As though I were a mushroom.' It was Arnold Shapiro, the veteran producer, writer and director behind 'Scared Straight!,' a well-received TV documentary about teenage delinquents being brought into contact with prison inmates, who sent Ms. Goldemberg 'The Burning Bed,' a 1980 book by The New Yorker writer Faith McNulty about the case of Francine Hughes. Advertisement Hughes's story was horrific. For 13 years, she had been terrorized by her alcoholic husband. One day in March 1977, after a brutal beating, she called the police in their Michigan town. Two officers responded and then left, saying there was nothing they could do because they hadn't witnessed the attacks. That night, the beating resumed, and Hughes's husband raped her. When he fell asleep, she doused the bed with gasoline, lit a match, and set the bed on fire. Then she put her children in the car and drove to the county jail to report what she had done. Her husband died that night, and Francine Hughes was charged with first-degree murder. Nine months later, a jury pronounced her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The verdict made national headlines. Fawcett, the pinup star of 'Charlie's Angels,' the frothy crime series, was already attached to the project; she had shown her dramatic chops in 'Extremities,' an off-Broadway production about a woman who exacts revenge on her rapist, and wanted to continue working in that vein. Yet the project was initially turned down by all three networks. When it was resurrected, by NBC, in one of those complicated scenarios particular to Hollywood, Shapiro was somehow left out of the production. The movie aired in October 1984, to mostly critical acclaim. (Paul Le Mat played the husband.) It was seen by tens of millions of viewers, and NBC's ratings soared, pulling the network out of third place and putting it on top for the first time in a decade. Fawcett, Ms. Goldemberg, the producers, and even the makeup artist were nominated for Emmy Awards, and the movie set off a national conversation about domestic abuse. Women's shelters, a rarity in those days, began opening all over the country; the film was shown in men's prisons; and Ms. Goldemberg was often asked to speak to women's groups. Advertisement Inevitably, as she recalled in 2011, 'someone would say, 'I couldn't talk about my own abuse until I saw the film.'' She added: 'It wasn't because of me. It was a wonderful performance by Farrah, and the timing was right. It was just a remarkable confluence of the right things happening at the right time.' Still, Ms. Goldemberg began fielding entreaties from other actresses who wanted her to write star vehicles for them, projects akin to 'The Burning Bed.' She did so for one of Fawcett's fellow angels, Jaclyn Smith, cowriting the TV movie 'Florence Nightingale' for her. Broadcast in April 1985, it did not have the same impact as 'The Burning Bed'; most critics found it soapy and forgettable. A Lucille Ball vehicle fared much better. Ball wanted a script about homelessness, and when she and Ms. Goldemberg met at her Beverly Hills house, Ball laid out her terms: She wanted to play a character with some of the personality traits of her grandmother, and named for her. Ms. Goldemberg came up with 'Stone Pillow,' a television film about a homeless woman named Florabelle. In his Times review, under the headline 'Lucille Ball Plays a Bag Lady on CBS,' O'Connor called the movie 'a carefully contrived concoction' but praised Ball 'as wily and irresistible as ever.' Advertisement Rose Marion Leiman was born on May 17, 1928, on Staten Island, N.Y. Her mother, Esther (Friedman) Leiman, oversaw the home until World War II, when she became an executive secretary at Bank of America; her father, Louis Leiman, owned a chain of dry-cleaning stores in New Jersey. Rose earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Brooklyn College, where she had enrolled at 16, and a Master of Arts in English from Ohio State University. She married Raymond Schiller, a composer who followed her from Brooklyn College to Ohio State, in 1949; he later became a computer systems designer. They divorced in 1968. Her marriage, in 1969, to Robert Goldemberg, a cosmetic chemist, ended in divorce in 1989. Her first television-related job was at TV Guide in the 1950s, writing reviews of shows airing on what was then a new medium. She eventually began writing plays. Ms. Goldemberg is survived by a son, Leiman Schiller, and three stepchildren, David Goldemberg, Kathy Holmes, and Sharanne Goldemberg. This article originally appeared in
New York Post
a day ago
- New York Post
Kash Patel's country singer girlfriend fends off ‘disheartening' conspiracy theories she's honeypotting the FBI boss
FBI director Kash Patel's girlfriend Alexis Wilkins has been forced to fend off the 'incredibly disheartening' conspiracy theories that she is honeypotting the bureau's head honcho for a foreign government. The 26-year-old country artist said the skeptics are contorting her backstory, even as she acknowledged she can 'understand' it. 'I think people see certain pieces and I get it,' Wilkins told the 'Megyn Kelly Show' on Wednesday. Advertisement 'They want to connect things, they want to justify, some of the pain that they've been through watching the last four years, and there's pieces of this that, you know, I can understand,' she continued. 'I think that they've taken just these pieces of evidence that you laid out and tie them together in all of the wrong ways.' 4 FBI director Kash Patel's girlfriend Alexis Wilkins denied being a spy for a foreign government. Getty Images Advertisement 4 Alexis Wilkins expressed her frustrations at dealing with conspiracy theories about her relationship with FBI Director Kash Patel. The Megyn Kelly Show / YouTube Conspiracy theories about Wilkins exploded on the internet after the Justice Department and FBI's July 6 memo about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which concluded that the evidence suggests Epstein killed himself in prison and did not keep an 'incriminating client list.' Some of the trolls speculated that the Arkansas-raised singer was a Mossad agent intended to compromise Patel, 45, and at least one of them misidentified her as Jewish. Advertisement One thread used to make that conspiratorial leap is Wilkins' work for PragerU, a conservative nonprofit that seeks to educate the public on key political issues. The CEO of PragerU, Marissa Streit, previously served in the Israeli army. Wilkins is Armenian and Christian and does not appear to have any known ties to Israel. 4 Alexis Wilkins began dating FBI Director Kash Patel years before he began leading the bureau. Getty Images Advertisement When Kelly asked point-blank whether she was a spy for any foreign government, Wilkins replied, 'Definitely not, that is a firm no on that front.' Earlier this month, the country singer ripped into the online conspiracy theorists, raging that they are 'farming' for attention 'because their engagement dried up after Trump's win.' 'It's disappointing to see people with no real contribution to political discourse spin ridiculous conspiracy theories out of thin air,' Wilkins bemoaned in an X post. 'These accusations are obviously insanely ridiculous.' Patel and Wilkins met at a friend's event in Nashville in 2022 and began dating several months later in early 2023. 'We just happened to meet,' Wilkins recounted, noting that the 19-year age gap she has with him always felt irrelevant. 'I have always liked [him], when I met him, I just liked that he was so, so honest,' Wilkins gushed. 'He's exactly who he is all the time. His character is incredible. His values are incredible. 'We both are very patriotic. So obviously there are things there that we definitely agree on, but he's just the most honest, you know, most integrity I've really experienced in a person, he's fantastic.' Advertisement The country singer, who hosts a Rumble show, acknowledged there's 'not enough information out there about me to glean a real conclusion on all of this kind of vigilante research.' She mused that those gaps have given room for internet trolls to fill with conspiracy theories, which she lamented as 'incredibly disheartening.' Patel has been 'very frustrated' and 'unhappy' with the hate and suspicion directed her way over the Epstein drama, Wilkins said. 4 Alexis Wilkins revealed that FBI Director Kash Patel is frustrated that she's taking heat. Getty Images Advertisement She also underscored that Patel's work on the Epstein drama is 'limited to the government side' and that she has 'no awareness besides what everyone else is seeing.' 'If people stop calling me a spy, absolutely,' she replied when asked if she wants to see more Epstein files released.
