(Credits: Far Out / Casablanca Records)
The problem with inspirational artists of the highest order, is that the size of their talent can also haunt you. Jimi Hendrix is inspiring upon first listen, but try to play a lick by him and you’ll soon find yourself traipsing your Fender down to the pawn shop.
This was the issue that Gene Simmons first faced when he thought about an improbable future in rock ‘n’ roll. “The irony was that I noticed if I was gonna be in a band, I didn’t see myself as a lead singer,” he told Rock Cellar. “Physically I was too big and I didn’t see guys my size doing that.”
It was an age of slight and flighty British invaders, and sadly, he didn’t see himself represented under the spotlight, adding, “I was also heavier as a kid, so I didn’t see guys my size fronting bands.”
But beyond size, it was also his singing that came into question. He knew he was no Aretha Franklin and even the likes of Paul McCartney had a certain acrobatic quality to his performance. He required a punkier role model.
Thankfully, he found them fairly quickly. He knew he “could sing well enough”, but ‘well enough for what’ was the question until two new straightforward stars entered the frame. Suddenly, as a youngster, he knew he was “at least as good as Eric Burdon and Mick Jagger, those guys, who sing pretty straight ahead.”
While Burdon’s power could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces, and its the low rumbling, clenched-first performance that makes ‘House of the Rising Sun’ one of the era’s finest vocal takes, what Simmons took from him and flouncy Jagger was that you could swing from the hip with a melody without too much formal technicality and still pull it off.
As he quipped, “I mean, anybody can sing ‘Satisfaction’. There’s no vocal histrionics on it.” Even Keith Richards agrees with that, saying that he was jealous of the fact that The Beatles had four singers in their band, and The Rolling Stones didn’t even have one. As harsh as that joke might’ve been on Jagger, the guitarist is equally quick to recognise his swagger.
Attitude was something that Simmons noticed was strutting onto the scene in spades. “So I immediately joined bands,” he says. “The first band I joined might have been the Missing Lynx and then I really hit my stride with a group called the Long Island Sounds and then after that we had a group called Cathedral which had a Hammond B-3 organ.”
Adding, “By that time I’d been starting to write my own songs or co-writing songs. One of the early ones was a song called ’She’, which Kiss later recorded for the Dressed to Kill album.”
The rest, as they say, is ancient history.
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