The Nerve Of Gene Simmons

 The KISS bassist recently stated during a panel at the MIPCOM Convention in Cannes, France, that the music industry should literally sue anyone and everyone who has ever illegally downloaded music off the internet. The cow-tongued Simmons spewed:


Make sure your brand is protected. Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don’t let anybody cross that line…The music industry was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.




Well thats understandable, Gene is simply making a comment about the struggling economy and increasingly shrinking job market in the music industry. Mr. Simmons is concerned about the families who rely on music industry based careers so they can not just support their community, but bring home a steady paycheck so they can feed their families. Even when he charges them $50 for KISS Mr. Potato Heads, $200 for an autographed KISS comic book, $80 for a KISS dartboard (unfortunately without Gene's face on it) and $5000 for an autographed KISS casket, so when these poor unemployed executives die of starvation, perhaps their loved ones will shell out five grand for a fucking coffin.

Unfortunately "Anonymous," a group of hackers housed within the depths of 4chan, didn't understand Gene's concern for the common man. So what did they do? Shut down Gene's personal website with a denial of service (DOS) attack. Anonymous became widely known after their sudden takeover of The Church of Scientology's website, as well as the posting of their own youtube video, Message to Scientology, which now has over 4 million views. After Gene's site once again became available, he posted:

Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers. Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say “adventurous” young people, who feel they are above the law.


And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off.


First, they will be punished. Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend.


We will soon be printing their names and pictures.


We will find you.


You cannot hide.


As I write this article (Oct 18 at 5pm) Gene's website is still down from a second DOS attack, and I say bravo! But in all seriousness, suing your everyday teens and young adults who merely download music in order to save time, money and to enrich their own lives is not the way to handle the slow death of an increasingly obsolete business model. Support the bands you love by seeing them live, buying CD's and merch from them personally, letting them crash on your floor or even just sending them a message on Myspace letting them know how much their music means to you. These are the actions that keep bands playing and writing new material. Buying their CD at Best Buy, shipped by a distributor, who license the music from a record company, who pay a manufacturer to make the CD, doesn't help the band financially. I'm by no means anti-record company or anti-business, because they deserve something for their hard work as well, especially if they embrace the evolution of the industry and focus on innovation. Gene represents what is wrong with the industry today; money hungry, trigger happy and completely out of touch. And these are the reasons why when you type Gene Simmons is an asshole into Google, you get 2,510,000 results.

Dressed To Kill

This is your lucky day because, Paul Stanley of KISS answers fans questions.




"I'm not sure that when Kiss plays its last show, I'll be playing." - Paul Stanley


The following was conducted using fan-submitted questions at Washburn.com.

Some of the highlights are included below:

Fans Questions = Q:
Paul Stanley = A:

Q: What ever happened to that awesome Rhinestone Flying V that you used on the Rock and Roll Over Tour?

A: I still have that guitar and its brand spanking new grandson is onstage with me every night on the Sonic Boom Over Europe tour.

Q: We've never seen you play a Fender. Do you have any specific likes/dislikes about them?

A: I have a couple of terrific Stratocasters and although I love playing them, they are not part of what I do or the school that I come from, but in the right hands, they are understandably one of the true icons of rock 'n roll.

Q: Do you ever sell and/or intend to sell some of the guitars in your personal collection?

A: I have in the past sold quite a few of my guitars and the ones that I have retained are ones that are connected to me both sonically and emotionally and have a much deeper personal value to me.

Q: Do you have any tips on how I can improve my singing technique?

A: It's always important to support your voice from your torso and diaphragm and keep it out of your throat. Too many aspiring singers shred their throats thinking you can squeeze notes out of it. You can't. The more you can incorporate your head tone, supporting it with your diaphragm and chest, the more you'll avoid wrecking your throat!

Q: Do you do anything special to keep the wear and tear on your guitars to a minimum?

A: Nothing. Like women and many other things in life, a lot of things look better from a distance than up close. My guitars take a beating on tour.

Q: What advice would you give to your son Evan about playing guitar and making music?

A: My son is a phenomenal guitar player and my only advice to him early on was to dig as deeply into the roots of what he loves and discover where it all started, rather than being consumed with copying the current guitar hero per se. I made that point to him by reminding him that Jimi Hendrix didn't start by playing Purple Haze.

Q: For the Sonic Boom Over Europe tour, will you play some medleys like you did in 2001 in Australia???

A: There are no medleys in the current show, but I think that this is by far our best show and set list to date.

Q: When will KISS be coming to my town?

A: Keep checking the Kiss website. We will be announcing US shows probably within the next few weeks. We are in the midst of our European Sonic Boom Over Europe Tour and have decided that we're having too much fun to stop.

Q: My question concerns the BEST BALLAD KISS ever recorded. Why was �Nothing Can Keep Me From You� not released as a single? It is much better than Aerosmith's �I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing�. I feel you were robbed of a #1 single.

A: I believe it actually was, and sometimes the resistance we've met at radio has made airplay impossible, but ultimately, you all listen to what you choose.

Q: There has been some KISS tablature published throughout the years. Does KISS give the companies the exact tablature?

A: As close as some of them may be, there are obvious subtleties that are missing. The challenge, whenever playing someone else's music is to find the nuances. When you do, you unlock "that door".

Q: What is your songwriting process?

A: With writing, I tend to come up with a musical idea first and then build on that both lyrically and musically. My lyrics tend to come from stream of consciousness and organically what sings over chord changes or a riff and then it's just a matter of filling in the blanks.

Q: What do you think about bootlegs?

A: I think that any time someone steals what isn't theirs; it's criminal and should be dealt with accordingly. Nobody has the right to sell what isn't theirs. Nobody has the right to decide how much your work is worth, what you deserve or what you should get. The whole notion of bootlegs and file sharing is as criminal and ridiculous as me calling stealing your car, sharing transportation. You can't sell what you don't own.

Q: Is it true, that there one day will be an official "KISS The NEXT Generation???

A: The band has never been stronger, had better reviews, bigger turnouts, or had more fun. There is no end in sight and we are proud of where we've been, thrilled with where we are and excited by where we're going.

Q: If KISS were to play their last show, would Ace and Peter play?

A: I'm not sure that when Kiss plays its last show, I'll be playing.

Q: If Eric Carr were still alive, what would be the chances of him still being in the band?

A: That's too hypothetical a question. His loss was a tragedy and it's pointless to hypothesize.

Q: What do you think of Anomaly? And is the reality show with Ace a go?

A: Honestly, I've never heard the whole album. For me, the most important thing is that Ace is alive and hopefully doing what he loves. As far as a reality show, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Q: Is it true that Eddie Van Halen wanted to join KISS and that Eddie Van Halen wrote the guitar solo for Love Gun?

A: I have no knowledge of that being so. No, Van Halen was not a known band at that time, so that would be impossible. The solo was actually based on a solo from a song called "We Ain't Got Nothin� Yet" by the Blues Magoos.

Q: Do you have material for future new album?

A: Yes. We had such a great time making Sonic Boom and it was so easy, effortless and the results were so terrific that there doesn't seem to be much doubt that we will do another.

Q: When can we expect the next studio record?

A: No idea, but I'm sure within the next year or two.

Q: Do you have any plans for releasing more live footage DVDs?

A: There is a Kissology 4 in the works.

Q: What are your future solo plans?

A: I currently have no solo plans; when KISS is firing on all cylinders, that's good enough for me.

Paranoid?

The Conversation (1974) is the slowly-gripping, bleak study of electronic surveillance and threat of new technologies that is examined through the private, internalized life of a lonely and detached expert 'bugger.' The conspiracy thriller is an effective character study that exposes the emerging conscience of an estranged eavesdropper whose work once resulted in the death of three people:

Harry Caul...an invader of privacy. The best in the business. He can record any conversation between two people anywhere. So far, three people are dead because of him.

The timely, low-budget cinematic masterpiece of the 1970s was written, produced and released by director Francis Ford Coppola before and during the Wategate era (and between his two Godfather films) - a time of heightened concern over the violation of civil liberties. Its claustrophobic themes of the destruction of privacy, alienation, guilt, voyeurism, justified paranoia, unprincipled corporate power and personal responsibility effectively responded to growing, ominous 20th century threats of eavesdropping to personal liberties.

The haunted surveillance expert, who pursues a case (seemingly of marital infidelity) that demonstrates his rarified human emotion, discovers that he has become the victim of his own technological profession and intrigue by film's end. [His last name, 'caul', literally means the protective, embryonic membrane that sometimes covers the head of a child at birth.]

After his phenomenal success with The Godfather (1972), Coppola's technically-brilliant, absorbing film was a critically-acclaimed work, but it failed at the box-office. In the 1974 Oscar competition, The Conversation competed for Best Picture with Coppola's own sequel The Godfather, Part II (1974). It had a total of three award nominations (without any wins): Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound (Walter Murch and Arthur Rochester). Notably, there were two against-type roles of young stars from Lucas' American Graffiti (1973): the philandering/murderous role of a socialite by Cindy Williams, and the duplicitous role of a corporate executive assistant by Harrison Ford.

The marvelous sound work on the film was deserving of an Oscar for Best Sound for its effective sound-mixing of interdependent elements: taped conversations, muffled voices, background and other mechanically-generated noises, musical/piano accompaniment (Harry Caul's signature theme) and other ambient sounds. The film has some similarities to director Michelangelo Antonioni's provocative Blow-Up (1966), Brian DePalma's thriller Blow Out (1981), Tony Scott's Enemy of the State (1998), and Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002). And the bloody scene in the bathroom paid homage to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).

Vinnie Vincent

Who knew Vincent Cusano wrote two great Kiss albums at a time most thought they sucked balls. Didn't you wonder why all of a sudden they were heavy again? Why they were playing heavier more agressive music? In walks Vincent to take Ace's place to start recording their new opus "Creatures Of The Night".Gene was too busy licking Cher or Diana Ross bungy and Paul was dining with Lisa Hartman to take full command of the metalness of the album, ever so willing to stay afloat with every new trend, Kiss decided they wanted to go in a more heavy direcion. I wonder what Eric Carr was thinking of this circus. Ace stumped for ideas and too smashed to be creative had to take a seat on the sidelines. They even used his photo for the 1982 lp as well. While Vinnie went on to acheive more fame with his own project Vinnie Vincent Invasion, Vinnies work remains unparallel to his work on those two Kiss albums.