“The Beatles are above and beyond anything that anybody’s seen in music over 200 years”: Gene Simmons names The Beatles as some of the greatest musicians of all time
Kiss have firmly left their stamp on the world of glam rock, but they carved out their sound thanks to the music legends that came before them. In fact, Gene Simmons insists that rock and roll wouldn’t be the same today without The Beatles.
Speaking on The School Of Greatness, the Kiss bassist named The Beatles as some of the greatest musicians and songwriters in musical history. “The Beatles are above and beyond anything that anybody’s seen in music over, oh, 200 years?” he says. “Easily. Not since the Renaissance.”
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As proof of the band’s genius, he points to how unlikely it was for a group of lads from Liverpool to succeed in the industry. “You have to understand, they only existed for seven years and they came from a place that was a pool filled with liver – Liverpool – where nothing ever happened,” he explains. “High unemployment rate, no experience, no resume, no nothing!”
Despite the circumstances, The Beatles were able to toy with music in a way few had before them. “‘I wanna hold your hand’, ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,’” he sings as evidence. “That last chord, that minor ninth, is a sophisticated chord, if you know about music. It’s almost like a jazz chord – unheard of in rock music!”
He then points to other ‘great’ rock songs in comparison to The Beatles, noting how the Liverpool stars rarely teased their audience. “[The Rolling Stones’] Satisfaction is one of the great songs… yet it takes about 40 seconds to get to the first ‘I can’t get no…” he says. “[Cream’s] Sunshine Of Your Love takes about 50 seconds to get [to] ‘I’ve been waiting so long’.”
The Beatles, on the other hand, always cut to the chase. Simmons re-imagines how the lads might have written the 1965 track, Help!: “‘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!’”
He then points to Yesterday, Michelle, and Hey Jude to further back his case. “There’s not even an introduction, nothing,” he explains.
“Those are what I’d call perfect songs,” Simmons insists. “Not only that, but the title of the song is the first word of the song… it’s the most memorable song and it’s the last word in the song… Who writes songs like that? It’s undeniable, their writing.”
He then praises Paul McCartney in particular. “McCartney, especially, by far is the most successful songwriter in all of recorded history,” he says. “There have been over a thousand different artists who’ve [covered] just Yesterday…”
Simmons has shared his love of The Beatles numerous times in the past. Last year, he told Guitar World that McCartney was his biggest bass influence, and he has also previously selected the band’s 1968 self-titled ‘White Album’ as one of the 10 records that changed his life.
“It’s one of my favourites because you’re seeing turmoil within perhaps the greatest band that ever existed that recorded its own music, where each member was a star,” he told Goldmine magazine in 2023.
“You could hear and feel the disjointed sense of that album, although clearly the songs shined and the playing and the production was terrific,” he continued. “It’s interesting that Abbey Road perhaps was the greatest Beatles album, and they were breaking up at that point, but somehow that had a more unified thing. But just for crazy out there music, it’s gotta be the White Album.”
He also claimed that rock ‘n’ roll is “still dead” on The Zak Kuhn Show last year, begging the question: “Who are the new Beatles?”
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