The first time Kiss’s Gene Simmons saw AC/DC play live was on a summer night in August 1977 at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles, and he remembers it as if was yesterday. “I’d never heard of AC/DC, and I thought it might be a gay band,” Simmons recalls, noting that in America ‘AC/DC’ is a slang term for bisexuality.
What he discovered instead was the most straight-shooting of rock’n’roll bands, both in terms of the simplistic drive of the music and the overtly heterosexual content of Bon Scott’s lyrics. Among the songs that were regularly in the band’s set back then were Whole Lotta Rosie (about a generously proportioned groupie), Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be (about a woman messing with Bon’s head) and The Jack (about an STD passed around the band by a female admirer).
AC/DC’s performance that night connected with Simmons on a visceral level.
“I was blown away,” he says. “No minor chords here, mate - just major chords hitting you in the balls! It was all - as you say in England - meat and two veg. I was just mesmerised by this band. Bon Scott was a force of nature with his shirt off, drinking. It was like a homeless crazy guy had jumped up on stage. He never had that sort of rock-star sheen, or any kind of showmanship. It just felt like a stream-of-consciousness expulsion of his inner demons on stage.”
Simmons saw a similarly manic quality in Angus: “When the lights went out at the end of each song, Angus was still going crazy, doing that Chuck Berry thing during the blackouts with nobody watching. And I said to myself: this is the real deal. This is a guy that does it because he feels it inside.”
After the show, Simmons went into full schmooze mode in the band’s dressing room.
“In those days I wore seven-inch heels even when not on tour,” he says, “so I was towering over Angus, who is a tiny human being. He said: ‘Oh, you’re that Kiss bloke with the tongue!’ I said: ‘Yeah. I need to talk with you.’ I had a limo outside and I convinced him to come with me to Ben Frank’s, a twenty-four-hour restaurant where touring musicians would eat and hang out before they went to the Rainbow to pick up chicks.
"Angus ordered beans and frankfurters, and I remember him picking up a frankfurter with his left hand and biting into it on one side of his mouth because he had a load of teeth missing. I was talking my head off, like a fan. I said: ‘You’re coming on tour with us!’”
AC/DC subsequently opened for Kiss on the Alive II tour, a handful of dates in December 1977. Simmons remembers how he and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley would thrill to the sound of AC/DC thumping through their dressing-room wall: “We would pause putting on the make-up to talk about this band. It was three chords, kick, snare, kick, snare - bang! We were stunned by the simplicity and the brilliance of it. So my recollections are fond. Was a fan, still a fan.”
Simmons is not inclined towards sentimentality. As he often says: “It’s called the music business for a reason.” During the course of Kiss’s 50-year career, only he and Paul Stanley were ever-present in the line-up. For the last 20 of those years they had drummer Eric Singer and lead guitarist Tommy Thayer made-up like original members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley. When the band’s End Of The Road farewell tour concluded at New York’s Madison Square Garden on December 2, 2023, they revealed the future of Kiss: as digital avatars in a virtual stage show in the style of ABBA’s hugely successful Voyage.
“At the end of the day, people want to hear the songs,” he says, “and that’s more important than who’s in the band. AC/DC have had what, over twenty different members? Kiss have had different line-ups, just like football teams have different line-ups, and if you’re a fan of the team, you’re a fan of the team.
“With Van Halen in the early days, David Lee Roth was God. On stage nobody could touch him. So you couldn’t imagine Van Halen without Roth. But you know what? Life actually happens while you’re busy making plans. And AC/DC, without Bon Scott, became an even bigger band. So rules are pretty much made to be broken. Could AC/DC still be AC/DC with Axl Rose? Sure they could! Because it’s either convincing or it’s not.”
For Simmons it’s all a matter of perspective. “If you’re fourteen years old and crazy about AC/DC, a new line-up doesn’t affect you the same way as somebody who’s had that band as the soundtrack of their life for twenty, thirty, forty years.”
What he says in conclusion is the importance of knowing when to quit. He is proud that Kiss went out on a high with their final tour, but, as he admitted, the tour was hard going for man in is seventies. His stage outfit, with body armour, weighs 40 pounds. “And then you’ve got to spit fire, fly through the air and do that for two hours!”
He notes the physicality of how Angus performs on stage, and warns: “Soon it’s going to come to an end, because Mother Nature always wins. So quit while you’re ahead. Because whether you’re Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson, the best of the best, if you stay in the ring too long some loser is going to come out there and knock you out.
“We stopped after fifty years. That’s enough. You made your money. Get off the stage before the jokes come. Respect the stage, love your fans, and go out on top. Don’t be the fat, bloated Elvis in Las Vegas. Don’t do that.”
