Gene Simmons discussed exiled KISS drummer Peter Criss in a new Magnificent Others interview with Billy Corgan.
“He’s a throwback to when drummers had swing. So he was never a rock drummer. That certainly helped that sound, yes. If the kick was too heavy — [John] Bonham later; and Bonham got his thing from Carmine [Appice]. Look, everybody listens to everybody else, and you like this, you take a piece and your DNA then becomes your own, but it’s a pastiche.”
On playing with Peter Criss, Gene said: “We loved the feeling of it. It made the music seamless. But I have to tell you that Peter… We were all untrained musicians. Peter played by feel and didn’t play by verse-bridge-chorus ideas and didn’t quite understand that because he was not a songwriter. He didn’t play a musical instrument; drums are percussive, not musical. So literally, you can hear ‘Strutter’ or one of those songs and the pattern on the drums is different in the bridge, then it’ll go to a verse pattern, in the verse pattern he had in the middle of the chorus, or in the riff, and switch to a chorus pattern. And there’s some strange thing that worked at it, but not logically. I mean, when Keith Moon — he’s not Keith Moon; he couldn’t touch Keith Moon — but when Keith Moon played with THE WHO, you can’t quite figure out what the patterns are.
“I’ll never forget [at one of the early KISS gigs], however good, bad or otherwise, Paul’s [Stanley, KISS frontman] out there putting on his Southern accent. ‘All right, y’all, we’re gonna do a song now,’ blah, blah, blah. ‘It’s called ‘Strutter’.’ And he’s talking about a girl walking down the street and he’s doing that thing, and I’m hearing, ‘Psst, psst, psst.’ And I turn around, because I’m a little bit in the dark. Paul’s got the spotlight, and Peter wants to say — and my hand to God — Peter goes, ‘Which one’s that one?’ And this is after we rehearsed it for a hundred times.
“He was a feel guy,” Simmons explained. “You see the template and you’re about to play a song. You know where the bridge and the chorus are gonna be. Eight bars of this, then you do the riff. You know where you’re gonna go. Peter was just along for the ride.”
He also discussed his reaction to Ace Frehley when the guitarist first auditioned for KISS, Simmons said: “He immediately tore open the doors of what could be, what should be, because we were in a rat-infested loft, maybe twice as big as this room, with egg crates that we stuck on the wall that still had some cracked eggs. And, of course, at night huge dinosaur cockroaches would come out. Oh, it was horrible. There were no windows and everything. But we didn’t care. We were doing this thing and, ‘Wow,’ we’re hearing that sound. And we auditioned players, and this guy comes in who plugs in… And Ace plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out. What are you doing? We’re talking.’ He was oblivious that there was another meeting going on, that he had to sit there civilly and wait for his turn. And when he got up, we said, ‘Okay, listen, pal, we’re gonna do a song called ‘Deuce’. Here’s the riff. We’ll do two verses, bridge. When the riff starts, I’ll point to you. You’ve heard it enough, and you do a solo based on the riff.’ He said, ‘Ah, okay.’ And he talked like that. And we’re going, ‘Boy, he’s a weird guy. He’s got one orange sneaker, one red sneaker. Just pigeon toed and all. Oh, boy, this guy is gonna be…’ And then he dug in. And his head, like he’s on stage, just that rubbery thing. And Paul and I looked at each other, ‘Wow!’ And you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you certainly know when you hear it and see it. And… it just kind of happened.”
“I’ll tell you a big bit of info is, Ace was so serious about his guitar playing, the solos, he would go home and learn and he would work out the guitar solos so that when he would play live or in the studio, they were parts just like [the rest of the songs]… He would play note for note with the right vibrato and everything. That’s when he was committed to it, and that’s one of the things live fans kept pointing to. ‘Wow, it sounds just like…’ You bet it is, ’cause he cared enough to learn his own solos… His influences spoke loudly: [Jimmy] Page and [Jeff] Beck.”
