“In a very strange way, Kiss became a very big band without hit songs,” the bassist told Michael Franzese in a new interview about their quick rise to fame. “It was about the live shows.”
He continued, “And if people are curious, if you go to YouTube, we would literally blow away any act that dared put us on stage. We’d just blow them off the stage.”
“Some of it was smart. We had a Kiss logo that was about six or seven feet tall; these bright lights that spelled out Kiss. And nobody hung their name above them like a Las Vegas show,” Simmons also shared.
KISS has always been known for its massive stage shows. Still, Simmons doesn’t plan to do it in his solo shows. “No managers, no private jets, no 20 tractor trailers, no 60-man crew, no huge shows — and the pyro alone for every [KISS] show is ten grand, sometimes 50 [thousand dollars] if you go outdoors. Enormous, enormous costs for doing that,” he recently told on the Behind the Setlist podcast.
Gene further explained, “It’s almost as if you decided to rent some amps in a garage and plug in, and then everybody from the neighborhood comes in … It’s very informal and a lot of fun.”
Brent Woods, Brian Tichy, and Zach Throne play with Simmons on tour. Woods also manages the band’s travel and concerts, with an assistant handling business.
They have a spring tour in 2025, starting on April 28 in Tallahassee, with a stop at the Count Basie Center in Red Bank, New Jersey, on May 5, and ending on May 24 in Houston.
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