Unlike many john Rock legends, Gene Simmons did not grow up in a base where music filled the halls.
"It was a unruffled household," Simmons said. "I come from a broken home. My father leftfield us when I was 6 or 7 geezerhood old, and my mother worked from sun up until sundown, so there was never any music at home."
Instead, he observed rock 'n' roll music "naturally" by listening to the tuner. Simmons aforementioned the early rock he listened to "crawled into my blood."
Born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, in 1949, Simmons was the only child of his mother, Florence Klein, a holocaust survivor. Simmons and his mother immigrated to the United States when he was 8 years old. They settled in Queens, N.Y., and Chaim adopted a more American-sounding name: Eugene.
Simmons attended Richmond College in New York and graduated with a degree in education. After college he had a number of positions: He was a sixth-grade teacher in New York's Spanish Harlem, an assistant to the editor in chief of Glamour magazine, and a deli cashier.
In 1973, Simmons colonized on his real heat. Along with his friends Peter, Paul and Ace, he formed the band Kiss.
The idea behind the band was that they would "admit no prisoners." While Simmons admits that "we didn't quite know what that meant," the group took on a bold bravado
onstage that made it famous.
"At the beginning, this was a four-headed wolf called 'Kiss' that had the balls to get down up onstage and grab the existence by the scruff of its neck and proclaim. 'You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest band in the human race,'" Simmons said. "The rally cry, the manifesto, is 'Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day' � it's a feel-good manifesto of a party."
Simmons' onstage fictitious character is known as "the Demon," which came from the documentary "Man of a Thousand Faces," about Lon Chaney, a silent film legend.
Simmons resides in Beverly Hills, Calif., with his
