“The Beatles are above and beyond anything that anybody's seen in music over 200 years
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.”
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.
Source:guitar.com/Emily Swingle
