Nightline Playlist: Gene Simmons
Kiss' lead singer tells "Nightline" about his "take no prisoners" approach.
Feb. 23, 2008— -- Unlike many rock legends, Gene Simmons did not grow up in a home where music filled the halls.
"It was a quiet household," Simmons said. "I come from a broken home. My father left us when I was 6 or 7 years old, and my mother worked from sun up until sundown, so there was never any music at home."
Instead, he discovered rock 'n' roll music "naturally" by listening to the radio. Simmons said 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 settled on his real passion. Along with his friends Peter, Paul and Ace, he formed the band Kiss.
The idea behind the band was that they would "take 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 beast called 'Kiss' that had the balls to get up onstage and grab the world by the scruff of its neck and proclaim. 'You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest band in the world,'" 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 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 partner of 24 years, Shannon Tweed, and their two children. These days, the Simmons family is featured in its own A&E reality show, "Gene Simmons: Family Jewels," now in its third season.
