Tuesday, September 4, 2007

KISS on NPR

One of the more hilarious things I've listened to is an interview of Gene Simmons (from Kiss) by Terry Gross on NPR. You can also read the transcript (although this is not quite as funny as the audio.)

Here are a couple of snippets:
(...keep in mind that Gene Simmons speaks here without a sense of humor, something Terry Gross discovered during her interview with him in February, 2002...)

Terry Gross: Did you pattern your makeup on comic book heroes?

Gene Simmons: Um...my makeup came as a result of a lot of things, all things Americana. Godzilla, horror movies, science fiction...uh, Black Bolt, which was an Inhumans Marvel comic book, and science fiction certainly. So it's comic books, sort of, all things sort of American pop culture. The rest of the guys in the band had different notions. Paul put on the red lips and the star over his eye as a kind of a exaggeration of what he thought a rock star was, because he always wanted to be a rock star. I was never interested in being a rock star. I always wanted to be Boris Karloff. And Ace -- who's the spaceman in the group, you know -- has delusions of grandeur, and perhaps gravity doesn't quite affect him in the same way, which is to say that he doesn't have good equilibrium, which is a big word, come to think of it. Just like "gymnasium." This is NPR. That's why we're using big words.

At one point Terry asks Gene Simmons why he has had over 4,000 exploits with women. He replies very matter-of-factly, "...The first, "man" -- and women -- if man was predisposed to be monogamous, and we all lived in caves at that point, there were one or two alpha males, and the rest were females. Either way, if we were monogamous, within one or two generations, we would all be cross-eyed and retarded. Get it?"

Got it. We don't all want to end up retarded. This is about species 'evolution'...which is a big word too.

~flutterbyblue

1 comment:

Chic and Charming said...

When my hubby ran out last night to get some fried dumplings as a late night snack, he heard another aging rocker interviewed on NPR. According to him Alice Cooper was a much more cooperative, but still very interesting guest. I wonder if there was some sort of gross has been rock star interview marathon this weekend.