Simmons maintained dreams of stardom, but he also didn't want to disappoint his mother, who urged him to get his college degree. This led to a series of bands for Simmons, including Long Island Sounds and Bullfrong Bheer. The group, fronted by Simmons, won a school talent show and gave Simmons a modicum of fame.
He thought, "If I go start a band, maybe the girls will scream at me." So, while attending Joseph Pulitzer Middle School, Simmons and a couple of friends created a band called The Missing Links in order to get the attention of their female classmates. In his autobiography, Kiss and Make-up, Simmons admits his musical interests came while watching The Beatles on television one night. It was during this time that he began to develop an interest in music. Interest in MusicĪfter a year in the yeshiva, he transferred to a public school in Jackson Heights.
He studied rigorously while his mother worked at a button factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He quickly learned English through comic books and television and entered the Hasidic theological seminary, called yeshiva, at the age of nine. After entering the country, Simmons changed his name to Gene because it was easier to pronounce, and took his mother's surname of Klein. In 1958, when Simmons was 8 years old, he and his mother immigrated to New York to live with relatives in Flushing, Queens. As a result, he quickly became fluent in Turkish, Hungarian, Hebrew and Spanish, in order to communicate with caregivers. Flora found work in a coffee shop and often left Simmons in the care of babysitters. Simmons' mother began raising him alone, and the family continued struggling in poverty. The family would never reunite, and Simmons would not see his father again. Eventually, Simmons' parents agreed to separate, with Yeichel leaving for Tel Aviv to look for work. Yeichel and Flora's marriage began to dissolve shortly after Simmons' birth, mainly over arguments about money. It was there that she met carpenter Yeichel Witz, the man who would eventually become Simmons' father. After the end of World War II, Flora headed to Israel. His mother, Flora, was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, who watched her family die in the concentration camps when she was only 14 years old. Simmons was born Chaim Witz on August 25, 1949, in Haifa, Israel. Simmons later pursued interests in fashion, publishing and acting, and starred in the A&E reality TV show Gene Simmons Family Jewels. He was in several bands before co-founding KISS with Paul Stanley in the 1970s. Musician Gene Simmons first decided he wanted to be in a band while in middle school, after watching girls scream at The Beatles on television.
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