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Gene Simmons remembers discovering - and mentoring - Van Halen

Gene Simmons played a formative role in the early career of Van Halen. He recently spoke to Yahoo Entertainment about when he first heard the band in the late 70s at a place called the Starwood.

"I heard this kind of flurry of stuff in between classical melodies and sometimes in harmony," Simmons said. "And you know, the sense I got was, wow, there's a few guitar players up onstage playing harmony and ... I ran to the front of the fence or whatever on the top floor, so I could see everybody underneath us. And there were only four guys on stage."

Of guitarist Eddie Van Halen's finger-tapping technique, he said, "he was playing not only fast and furious, but sometimes it's an harmony on tapping. I was so astonished."

Video Transcript

LYNDSEY PARKER: Next week is what would have been Eddie Van Halen's birthday and I really would love to talk with you about the fact-- the story came up around the time when he so tragically passed in October, the story of your involvement in Van Halen. I want to know about when you first saw them and what it was like and what it was like to be there?

GENE SIMMONS: Yeah. I was invited in the '70s, about '77, to go to a place called The Starwood. My date that night was a young lady named Bebe Buell, who would then go on to have a child with Steven, Liv Tyler, and I was busy upstairs in the ass [BLEEP] section, the "who do you think you are" thing, looking down on everybody else. And I heard this [MIMICS GUITAR] this kind of flurry of stuff. And in between classical melodies and Sondheims and harmony, and you know, the sense I got was, wow, there's a few guitar players up on stage playing harmony and doing weird stuff.

I ran to the front of the fence, or whatever, on the top floor so I could see everybody underneath of us, and there were only four guys on stage. One guy had his shirt off and was defying gravity, jumping up and down. Guy on drums, playing double kick, [MIMICS DRUMS], you know, all of this stuff. Bass player with the highest voice I've ever heard, real pure like a banshee. And then the guitar player. I didn't know their names or anything, and he steps up and starts doing this stuff and tapping, which I'd never seen before. Later on, I learned some of the jazz players were doing that-- the Johnson Brothers song, but I never heard a guitar, certainly a rock guitar player, do that.

And he was playing not only fast and furious, but sometimes doing harmony on tapping. I just, I was so astonished. I was waiting for them backstage by the third song. I mean, right away, I just, I was gushing, saying, look, forget about me for a second, what are your plans? What are you doing? Oh, we got a guy outside, he's a yogurt manufacturer and he's going to invest in the band. And I begged them, please, don't do that. Please, don't do that. Don't give away any percentages of the band at the outset. That might be the only profit margin you'll ever see, which is to say, you'll take $1 now and, like anything, later on in life, you're not going to see a profit, and somebody else is going to have a say in what you can do.

So the short story is, I offered to fly them to New York, put them up in a hotel, take them to Electric Lady Studios, produce a 24-track demo. And that's what I did. I signed them to my company, Man of 1,000 Faces. And the guys were just sort of matter of fact. Hey, how are you doing? And Eddie has always been like that. No rock star airs. None of that Gene Simmons "who do you think you are" kind of stuff. [CHUCKLES] None of that, oh, that guy's an ass [BLEEP], he's so full of himself. No, he was just a regular sweetheart, even when they became megastars.

And they set up live in the studio and I remember renting an SVT Ampeg, 300 sticks deep, watt RMS bass rate for Michael. And we overdrove it, so you got [MIMICS GUITAR], all that stuff. And slowed the tape down, [VOCALIZES]. That was yours truly, just saying, hey, how about this? Connect two songs, [VOCALIZING] so "Running with the Devil" ran into "House of Pain." Do you have a computer in front of you?

LYNDSEY PARKER: I have a phone to look up things.

GENE SIMMONS: Put on your phone, go to Google and put in Gene Simmons, Van Halen, "House of Pain," and play it. It's one of 15 songs we recorded. They never recorded this version. It's like a steamroller, like a locomotive coming down.

LYNDSEY PARKER: This?

GENE SIMMONS: Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's maybe my favorite Van Halen song ever. The astonishing thing is, they never put it on a record. But to thing that people will be shocked to hear is, mostly what you hear when you picked up that demo-- if you go to YouTube, I didn't post it. Somebody else, maybe one of the engineers, stuck it-- I gave my master's to the brothers. They own it. The astonishing thing is, almost all of it is live-- the guitar, the solos, you know, all that stuff. It was one of the few bands-- AC/DC is another one-- one of the few bands that actually sounds like the record. You know when you hear a record and you go see a band live? Ah, never quite good because there's fancy knobs. Nope, that's who they were.

LYNDSEY PARKER: So what happened after that, because the story that I've heard is that you went to your manager, Bill Aucoin, and you wanted to manage them or have them be part of that fold?

GENE SIMMONS: The manager, Aucoin, Paul Stanley, none of the guys in the band, Ace-- nope, they didn't hear it. They could just go, so what? I'm going, no, you don't get it. I'm telling you. Listen to uncle Gene. I know what I'm doing. We're going to take them out, open for us, they're going to be a mega band, and we'll be there, also, with them. Nah, I don't hear it. So I had a choice of-- because they were assigned to me-- keeping them locked up with my thing or doing the ethical thing, which is, guys, you don't own me anything. I'm tearing up your contract. You're free to go.

And of course, within two months, they got a deal at Warner Brothers and skyrocketed. And they kind of paid me back because, when we went to Japan on our tour, we came back to LA and I've written a few new songs at the time-- "Christine Sixteen" and two others-- and I was going to go into the studio-- I had this habit of going in at night where the phones didn't ring, nobody cared, none of the chicks were around-- and what happened was I didn't have enough time to do all the instruments. Because usually, I'd go in there, play some drums and guitar and stuff and then do it all.

I called [INAUDIBLE] Edward, I said, I'm going to the studio. I got some songs. I don't know what you're doing tonight, but you want to come in and help me? And they did. Both Alex and Eddie came down and the power trio was there, and we recorded-- it was on my vault-- Gene Simmons vault thing, the largest box set of all time. You can hear the trio doing that. In fact, I forced Ace, when we finally did "Christine Sixteen," to copy Edward's solo note for note, which, of course, he wasn't thrilled about. That's how good that solo was, one take.

LYNDSEY PARKER: So when Van Halen took off, after you went your separate ways, professionally, how did you feel about that? I mean, there must have been part of you that felt like, see, I told you so, like a little smug. But was there another part of you that was like, damn it?

GENE SIMMONS: Nope, none of that.

LYNDSEY PARKER: You should've listened to me. None of that?

GENE SIMMONS: None of that. No. I make a living. All my dreams have more than come true. I'm always grateful for everything I've got and just, you know, pride. You just want to feel like I didn't give them their talent. I didn't reinvent them. I happened to be there as this magnificent beast you sort of walked by. This whole idea of "you discovered Van Halen," the people who literally discovered the Van Halen brothers were their mom and dad.

LYNDSEY PARKER: Well, yeah.

GENE SIMMONS: After that, the two brothers made of themselves what they worked hard to become, which is, nobody handed them an estate. Nobody handed them anything. They worked hard for it. They put the years in, paying their dues. I was there at the beginning. That's all you can honestly say. Would they have gone on a while longer and maybe made some wrong turns, initially? Yeah. It might have killed their career, actually. So maybe I've said, don't go this way, let's go this way, and that led right into-- I'd like to think that demo helped them get the Warner Brothers deal, but they owe me nothing.