Gene and Bobby; Photos: N/A
Kiss‘ Gene Simmons has an “everyone look at me” type of character, and the only time that ego fell was that one time he wrote a song with Bob Dylan, according to a new interview with Simmons’ bandmate Tommy Thayer.
It was around 1991 and both Kiss and Dylan were aging, but that didn’t stop Simmons from acting “like a kid” in Dylan’s presence.
“One day,” Thayer said, “I got a call from Gene and he says, ‘Get a drummer and keyboard player and meet me down at Cherokee Studios at 7 p.m. tonight — we’re going to record with Bob Dylan’.”
Thayer couldn’t believe it. But sure enough, he showed up at the studio and there was Dylan, his girlfriend on his arm.
Thayer said the iconic singer-sonwriter was “quiet and eccentric, but friendly.”
Simmons, on the other hand, was too excited to hide it.
“He won’t mind me saying this, but I’ve never seen Gene be anything but ‘I’m Gene Simmons and I’m the center of the universe,'” Thayer said of that night. “But around Bob Dylan has was like a kid just happy to be in the room.”
The song the guys were probably working on was “Waiting for the Morning Light,” which was on Simmons’ 2004 album, Asshole.
Simmons apparently remembers the chemistry of that night very well:
“Bob came up with the chords, most of them, and then I took it and wrote lyrics, melody, the rest of it,” Simmons told Billboard in 2003. “We understood each other right away. He picked up an acoustic guitar, and we just tossed it back and forth – ‘How ’bout this, how ’bout that?’ As soon as I heard the first three or four chords, I went, ‘Wait, what’s that? Do that again.’ So I went and started to write a lyric around that.”
Simmons may have been smitten by Dylan, but Thayer is not totally innocent of that either. After the writing session, he took the strings from the guitar they’d been sharing and kept them as souvenirs.
He still has the strings today.
Listen to “Waiting for the Morning Light” below, followed by a video of Simmons’ cover of Prodigy‘s “Firestarter,” that was housed on Asshole as well, aside that Dylan co-write, just to remind you how batshit crazy Simmons is.