Unlike many stone legends, Gene Simmons did not turn up in a household where music filled the halls.
"It was a quiet household," Simmons said. "I come from a broken in home. My father left hand us when I was 6 or 7 years old, and my mother worked from sun up until sundown, so in that location was never any music at home."
Instead, he discovered rock 'n' roll music "naturally" by listening to the wireless. Simmons said the early rock he listened to "crawled into my blood."
Born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, in 1949, Simmons was the only tyke of his mother, Florence Klein, a holocaust subsister. Simmons and his mother immigrated to the United States when he was 8 geezerhood old. They settled in Queens, N.Y., and Chaim adopted a more American-sounding name: Eugene.
Simmons attended Richmond College in New York and gradational 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 of Glamour magazine, and a food shop cashier.
In 1973, Simmons settled on his real passion. Along with his friends Peter, Paul and Ace, he formed the band Kiss.
The mind 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 bluster
onstage that made it famous.
"At the beginning, this was a four-headed wolf called 'Kiss' that had the balls to acquire up onstage and seize the earthly concern 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
