WASHINGTON — Kiss rocker Gene Simmons gave blunt advice on Tuesday to the music-loving son of Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California during a Senate hearing on legislation to pay recording artists.
“My youngest son. His name is Diego. He’s ten years old. He has quickly fallen in love — not with the bass, but the electric guitar,” Padilla told Simmons at a Senate hearing where the rocker testified.
“What advice do you have for him?”
“Have a fallback position,” Simmons deadpanned, prompting the Senate hearing room to erupt in laughter.
“And I say this seriously,” Simmons continued after the attendees quieted down, “because since the advent of downloading and file sharing, where artists are actually getting minuscule amounts, barely able to get by.”
Simmons, 76, did give the tyke a tip by noting that he saved up money to launch Kiss while working first as a teacher, at a real estate firm and as some sort of assistant to a Puerto Rican government official.
“I was making $23,000 a year when that meant a lot of money. But doing the Jewish way of living with your mother, not paying rent, and so on. So I amassed a large enough amount so that I could support the band. We were forming together without managers and everything else.”
Simmons later asked Padilla what kind of music his son liked.
“Heavy metal,” the senator replied.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual property invited Simmons, who formed Kiss in New York City in 1973, as well as radio broadcasting and music royalties executives to Capitol Hill to debate legislation that would pay artists and music recorders when their hits are played on AM or FM radio.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) grilled a radio broadcasting executive for his opposition to the American Music Fairness Act elsewhere in the hearing.
“This is an issue of fairness. This is an issue of meeting the constitutional prerogative,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told Henry Hinton, Inner Banks Media president and CEO, in a key exchange.
“You have to compensate creators. They have that right,” added the Tennessee Republican who represents the interest of American musicians in Nashville.
“And sir, broadcast has blocked this,” Blackburn continued. “You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t have access to spectrum. You wouldn’t be in business if the FCC didn’t give you a license. You wouldn’t be in business if there was not music to play.”
Hinton, who serves on the board for the National Association of Broadcasters, told Blackburn he was more than willing to come to Nashville to meet with music creators in the future.
Simmons, who as a rocker is not a typical figure seen in the halls of Congress, charmed senators on both sides of the aisle throughout the hearing with his genial demeanor and snappy one-liners — without ever acknowledging the slightest doubt that the bill would pass Congress.
“We are going to pass this bill. It is bipartisan. You will do the will of the people because 70% of the United States of America in a recent poll said, ‘We want this injustice cured,’” he told the lawmakers.
In a more serious aside, Simmons — who was born in Israel and was the child of Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust — also explained that he was advocating on behalf of the many emerging artists, since he’d “done very well because America gave a first generation legal immigrant the chance to do well.”
The Kiss frontman, who was honored at the Kennedy Center Sunday, made the case that the legislation was necessary to protect American artists above others because they have given the world the soundtrack of their lives.
“We’re only talking about AM and FM radio and paying our Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, even my newest, best friend George Strait, who’s a co-winner of, proud winner of the … Kennedy Honors,” Simmons said.
“I told him, ‘George, do you know one of your biggest songs, “Amarillo,” which has been broadcast on AM and FM radio hundreds of thousands of times? Do you know you never got a penny for any of those broadcasts?’ He looked around. He said, ‘What do you mean?’” he recalled, before turning the episode into a reflection on the actions of broadcasters.
“How do you defend that, Mr. Hinton?” asked Simmons of his fellow witness in the hearing. “God bless him. We all live in America. We disagree, but he’s wrong.”
The Kiss frontman added elsewhere: “When you work hard and you get to the top, what do you got? Zippo. Rooney. That’s not the American way.”
“There are wars going on and everything, but our emissaries to the world are Elvis and Frank Sinatra. That is who,” he also said. “And then when they find out we’re not treating our stars right — in other words, worse than slaves.”
“Slaves get food and water. Elvis and Bing Crosby and Sinatra got nothing for their performance. We got to change this now for our children and our children’s children. And I know you will,” he concluded.
“The president will sign this once all you guys respectfully get your act together and put this across the board. Let’s do the right thing. God bless America.”
