e’s the fire-breathing God of Thunder. To the public at large, KISS’ Gene Simmons is the stalking bass-playing monster in dragon boots who howls at the moon. As for his listening habits, based on his dark, vampiric stage character, one would assume that his musical meter leans toward the heaviest of rock. But in reality, Simmons’ musical tastes are surprising and varied, as you’ll discover. Before we attended to the task at hand, Simmons insisted upon educating us, stressing the importance of roots music as the foundation of rock and roll: “As a preamble, when I first came to America as an eight-and-a-half-year-old boy, this was pre-Beatles. I came to America with my mother in 1958, and I had never heard of rock and roll, and I actually had never seen a television set. We didn’t have one. We were very poor in Israel, and I never could have imagined that there was a magic box where people flew through the air and there were monsters and the Empire State Building and King Kong. I never imagined. And the first music I heard in America was Chuck Berry and Little Richard and all that. I actually met Little Richard a few times and took my son Nick to see Little Richard. We went
