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“I said, ‘Eddie, you can’t go up on stage. This thing’s out of tune.’ He goes, ‘I’ll show you’”: Gene Simmons recalls a backstage moment with Eddie Van Halen
“He literally bent the neck into tune. Which I’d never seen done before. And live, he’d constantly be doing that.”
Image: Getty Images
Kiss bassist Gene Simmons has looked back on a moment he shared with the late Eddie Van Halen early on in Van Halen’s career.
Speaking in a recent interview with Artists On Record Starring ADIKA LIVE!, Simmons says that the memorable exchange took place backstage just before they were set to perform.
“I said, ‘Hey Ed, do you mind if I play some licks on your guitar?’ He said, ‘Sure’, the rocker recalls [via Ultimate Guitar]. “So, he gave me the guitar, acoustically. Obviously, it’s not plugged in. I tried playing a few chords, and it was way out of tune. I said, ‘Eddie, you can’t go up on stage. This thing’s out of tune.’ He goes, ‘I’ll show you.’”
As Simmons explains, “[Eddie] took the guitar back, he constructed his guitar. He took a neck from another guitar that he liked because of the feel of the fretboard, and he connected it to a Schecter or a Stratocaster of whatever that body was, put different pickups on it.”
“He in essence made that guitar. And that neck had give. He literally bent the neck into tune. Which I’d never seen done before. And live, he’d constantly be doing that.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Simmons also speaks about the time he invited Van Halen into the studio to demo some tunes that he personally financed and produced.
“I did demos with Alex and Eddie Van Halen, actually. You can Google and shmoogle it,” says the musician. “And the guitar solo in Christine Sixteen, note for the note, I had Ace [Frehley] learn that solo. And he was furious. ‘I want to write my own solo!’ ‘Yeah, but it’s not as good. Eddie’s got a better one.’ And to this day, those notes, that was Eddie’s note-for-note solo.”
In other news, Gene Simmons is set to headline Brazil’s Summer Breeze festival this April in what would be the bassist’s first performance post-Kiss. Joining Simmons is his solo band, whose lineup includes guitarists Brent Woods (Sebastian Bach, Vince Neil) and Zach Throne (Corey Taylor), along with drummer Brian Tichy (Whitesnake, Billy Idol, Foreigner).
Last year, Kiss closed out their four-year-long End Of The Road farewell tour with the announcement that the band’s members will live on “eternally” as digital versions of themselves — following in the footsteps of ABBA with their hologram Voyage shows.
That said, fans will have to wait a while more to catch those high-tech avatars in action for the band has announced that the first concerts featuring their avatar alter egos won’t be here till 2027.