Long before Van Halen were famous, Kiss bass guitar player Gene Simmons played a role in their story.
By the mid 1970s, Van Halen had landed a regular performance spot at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip, and their popularity led to the need for a demo tape. One of their early supporters, radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, urged Simmons to catch the group in action. Simmons liked what he saw and heard and decided to produce their demo.
Consisting of 29 tracks, the tape, titled Zero, was cut at Village Recorder in Los Angeles, with post-production and overdubs taking place at Jimi Hendrix’s old studio, Electric Lady, in New York City. Simmons was keen to manage Van Halen, but he wanted them to change their name to Daddy Longlegs, which the band rejected.
In the end, it wouldn’t matter. Kiss’s management vetoed Simmons, saying Van Halen “had no chance of making it.”
Gene and Van Halen parted ways, but Eddie Van Halen and Gene remained close friends. Eddie not only appreciated Gene’s belief in Van Halen but also trusted his business acumen.
And if Gene is to believed, when Eddie decided to bolt from Van Halen in 1983, he turned again to Gene. By then Van Halen had become the biggest thing in hard rock, and Eddie was reshaping the sound, technique and look of electric guitar.
But behind the scenes, Ed had grown tired of his own group. The source of his irritation was a familiar figure: David Lee Roth. As Alex Van Halen has stated in his memoir, Brothers, Roth was jealous of Eddie’s popularity and wanted more control over the group’s musical direction. Eddie was not confrontational. Rather than set Roth straight, he decided he needed to leave Van Halen.
But where to go?
According to Simmons, he chose Kiss.
As the Kiss cofounder revealed during a 2023 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, “Eddie called me out of the blue: ‘Gene, I’ve got to come down and see you. I'm having a miserable time,’ and all that.
“So, I said, ‘Come on, down.’
“‘Can we go to lunch?’
“‘Yeah, there's a place right across the street. Let's just go in there.’
“And we’re sitting having lunch before we started in the studio at one or two o’clock.
“And Eddie says, ‘I want to join Kiss.’
“‘Wow! You're not serious?’
“‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can't take Roth. He's driving me nuts,’ and all this stuff.”
The timing was certainly excellent to make such a pitch. Gene and Kiss cofounder Paul Stanley were unhappy with the group’s newest addition, Vinnie Vincent, who had replaced founding guitarist Ace Frehley. Better yet, Kiss were preparing to perform unmasked, meaning Eddie wouldn’t have to appear in makeup.
But as tantalizing as the prospect of hiring the world's most famous guitarist might have been, Gene knew it a bad idea. If Eddie was unhappy fighting Roth, he would be doubly displeased dealing with two bosses — Gene and Paul — in Kiss.
Gene set Eddie straight.
“Basically, the conversation was, ‘You're out of your mind. You got to rough it out. Every band’s got, you know, the ups and downs,’” Gene told Stern. “‘It's called Van Halen. It's your band! You gotta stick it out.’”
Eddie took Gene’s advice to heart. But there was one more surprise in store for Gene that day.
After lunch was over, Eddie accompanied the bassist back to the studio, where Paul Stanley was waiting. While there, Eddie decided to share a demo of a new song he had cut: “Jump.” The song would mark Van Halen’s foray into using synthesizers, as Eddie played an Oberheim OB-X synth to perform the song’s main riff.
“And then we came into the studio and he played us a demo of this song, ‘Jump,’” Gene recalled. “Just with synthesizers."
Simmons recalls being dumbfounding at the thought of rock's greatest guitar player putting his six-string talents on the back burner for a synthesizer.
"And we were looking at each other going, ‘So you're going to add guitars?’
“And he goes, 'No, that's it. That's the whole song!’”
Stanley, who was present, recalled telling Ed, "You're the greatest guitar player. What are you doing on the keyboards?"
"Jump" would go on to become Van Halen’s biggest hit, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. By then, of course, Eddie had been convinced to add one of his outstanding guitar solos to the song, making it the best of both worlds for fans of pop and virtuoso guitar playing.
To be fair, Simmons' story has its shares of detractors, not the least of which is the man himself.
“Not that I know of,” Eddie told Alan K. Stout of The Times Leader in 1995 when asked if he intended to jump ship and join Kiss. “Unless I was so fucked up I don’t remember?…”
If the world was denied the sights and sounds of Eddie Van Halen in Kiss, have no fear that we’ll ever be denied Kiss. The group, which stopped touring at the end of 2023, are preparing to perform again in Las Vegas November 14 to 16, 2025.
Paul Stanley spoke with Guitar Player and told us big things are planned for the show, which he said is essentially a landlocked Kiss Kruise, the seabound venture the group launched in 2011.
“I think everybody is going to be very excited,” Stanley said. “Whether it’s the Kiss Army, the Navy, the Kruisers, or fans, in general, it’s turning into something that everybody has loved and that we’ve nurtured over the last 12 years.
"So I’m looking forward to it. More will be coming shortly, and I think all the announcements are going to make everybody that much more excited.”
