When it comes to Kiss, you can always count on Gene Simmons to blow his horn louder than anyone. The group’s bass guitar player is know for his brash and boastful comments about the group’s success both on record and onstage since he and cofounder Paul Stanley dreamed up the act in the early 1970s.
In fact, there’s only one other group that Simmons puts above Kiss. And on a recent episode of The School of Greatness podcast, the Kiss bassist gave them high praise indeed.
“The Beatles are above and beyond anything that anybody’s seen in music over, oh, 200 years?” he says. “Easily. Not since the Renaissance.”
You might expect Simmons to focus merely on the group’s success — the hits, the fame… the money.
But the bassist is also a songwriter in his own right, and he’s studied the work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison thoroughly to appreciate what they brought to the modern repertoire of popular music.
For example, he points to the major-sixth harmony that appears on the final “yeah" in the group’s 1963 hit “She Loves You.”
“‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,’” Simmons sings. “That last chord is a sophisticated chord, if you know about music. It’s almost like a jazz chord — unheard of in rock music!”
In fact, it was so unusual that Beatles producer George Martin tried to push the group away from it. He’d actually heard it before — in the music of the Andrews Sisters, a popular singing group from music's previous generation.
"We took it to George Martin and sang 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeeeaah ...' McCartney recalled in the Beatles Anthology, “and that tight little sixth cluster we had at the end. George said: 'It's very corny, I would never end on a sixth'. But we said, 'It's such a great sound, it doesn't matter.”
Simmons also points to the Beatles’ tendency to get right to the hook, unlike other songwriters of their era.
“[The Rolling Stones’] ‘Satisfaction’ is one of the great songs,” he says of the tune, which features Keith Richards playing his electric guitar through a fuzz pedal, “yet it takes about 40 seconds to get to the first ‘I can’t get no.’” Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” he adds, takes about 50 seconds to get to the chorus, where the song’s title is finally sung.
The Beatles, meanwhile, tended to get to the hook quickly, sometimes at the start of a song. He imagines John Lennon bringing a new tune to the others.
“‘I just wrote a new song,’ ‘What is it called?’ ‘It’s called “Help!”’ ‘How does it go?’ ‘It goes like this: “Help! I need somebody. Help!”’”
And that’s just one example. He also cites others — “Michelle,” “Hey Jude,” and “Yesterday” — to demonstrate how frequently the technique occurred in the group’s songs.
“There’s not even an introduction,” he says. “Nothing.
“Who writes songs like that? It’s undeniable, their writing.”
Interestingly, aside from “Help!,” every song he gives as an example was composed by McCartney. It turns out Simmons has high praise for his fellow bass player.
“McCartney, especially, by far is the most successful songwriter in all of recorded history,” he says, noting that more than a thousand musical artists across numerous genres have covered his song “Yesterday.”
Simmons has previously stated his admiration for McCartney, saying “I couldn’t shine his shoes.”
“To this day when I'm listening to ‘Dear Prudence’ or some of those other great Beatles songs, you remember the bass part. You’re aware of what the bass is doing.
“That doesn’t happen with the Rolling Stones.”And I love the Stones!”
“With McCartney, it's like a string quartet. You have the high notes over there playing, but you can hear what the cello is doing. And maybe his approach to bass playing has to do with the fact that he was a guitar player first and foremost.”
He adds that, just as McCartney started out playing guitar, so did he. The only reason Simmons switched to bass, he said, was to improve his marketability in a world full of guitarists.
Not surprisingly, Simmons put McCartney at the top when he listed his picks for the three greatest bass players of all time in 2023. The others? Motown maestro James Jamerson and Wrecking Crew legend Carol Kaye.
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