An Interview With Gene Simmons

Image: Tyrone Kerr/FilmMagic

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After partying like a rock star for the past 35 years, Gene Simmons is surprisingly reticent about some things. Sure, he’ll boast that he’s had sex with 4,800 different women—all meticulously counted and cataloged, apparently—and he’ll rant about almost any issue at the slightest provocation.

But at 58, the Israeli-born Kiss frontman (who spent his early childhood in Haifa as Chaim Witz, the son of a Holocaust-surviving Hungarian mother) becomes as shy as a blushing schoolgirl when the subject is his money.
    
“I’m not here to dispel anybody’s rumors either up or down about assets I have. Those are sort of private issues,” Simmons demurred in an exclusive interview with Portfolio.com over the phone from Bilbao, Spain, where Kiss was in the midst of an eight-month world tour.  
 

L.G.: Excellent. So let's get started. You've been pretty vocal about internet downloading of music, and you've had some critical remarks to make.

G.S.: That's like saying, "You're pretty vocal about a nuclear holocaust."

L.G.: [Laughs] But, Gene, it's happening, there's nothing we can do about it—

G.S.: Oh, you can't? No, you're wrong.

L.G.: Tell me why you're not like some horse-and-buggy guy complaining about the automobile?

G.S.: Oh, no, no, no, I think it's very clearly a matter of worldwide theft. And that what's needed—consortium is not just a big word like gymnasium. [It would include] rights holders, writers, publishers, record companies, or at least the entities that now hold the assets of those companies, which have since gone belly-up and have enormous debts—my sense is a trillion dollars of lost income. Hundreds of thousands of people thrown out of work by music fans who decided, one way or the other, by hook or by crook, to stop paying for content. There's no difference between that and movies or anything else that you own. So you're Norma Kamali and you design an outfit, and your name is your brand and your ownership—and your name is your signature. Nobody else should be free to sign your name and your signature to a check and cash it, not without your permission, and certainly not without you getting paid. What's missing is repercussions for bad behavior. Jail time, taking peoples' homes, cars. I mean legitimate hardcore penalties for theft.

L.G.: Well, if you have millions upon millions of people around the world doing this, particularly—

G.S.: That means that there are possibly trillions of dollars which can be collected.

L.G.: Sure, but what is the enforcement mechanism? Who has the resources to go chase down teenagers in their houses and haul them out in handcuffs?

G.S.: In order to fight a big army, you need a big army. So that means all the writers and the publishers and the people on one side who have been stolen from need to get together and go after the people who have stolen from them. But that also involves carriers—YouTube, everywhere else where content is put out that doesn't pay for it—and it doesn't just involve individuals. They get the stuff delivered through entities that are making a good living. It's a parasitic life form. But by the way, I'm not so much complaining as an individual, because I'm rich and famous—I'm filthy rich-and that's good.

L.G.: Sure.

G.S.: And that's what America is all about-to aspire, to work and then get paid for your work and blah blah blah.

L.G.: Let's agree that artists certainly deserve the fruits of their labors.

G.S.: Let's.

L.G.: And the ancillary people, the producers, technicians, etcetera. But are you suggesting that you put together some private sort of civil-litigation force, or what?

G.S.: Oh, in all areas. I think you tug on the shirtsleeves of the legal system and, at the same time, start class-action suits.

L.G.: I see. So a Team America: World Police for the music and record business.

G.S: Well, there is one for drugs—there didn't used to be.

L.G.: How successful has the one for drugs been, Gene?

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