In an interview with MusicRadar, Gene Simmons revealed that Eddie Van Halen once offered to join KISS during a period of tension with his Van Halen bandmate David Lee Roth, but that they ultimately turned him down.
“It happened in 1982. It was when KISS was doing a record called ‘Creatures Of The Night,’” Simmons said.
“Creatures of the Night” was the first album KISS recorded after guitarist Ace Frehley left the band. In his absence, KISS brought in several guitarists during the sessions, including Vinnie Vincent, who would later step in as Frehley’s replacement.
Around the same time, Van Halen released “Diver Down,” a period marked by growing friction between Eddie and Roth. It was then that Eddie reached out to Simmons about possibly joining KISS.
“Eddie told me, ‘Roth is driving me nuts. I can’t take it. I gotta leave. I know you’re looking for a lead guitar player. Do you want me in the band?’” Simmons recalled.
“Where Eddie lived, it wasn’t far away. So he got into his Jeep and came to the studio. Him driving that Jeep was the scariest thing in the world – it had no doors and he’d drive at 100 miles an hour. It was insane,” he continued.
“So he came down and we had lunch across the street, and then he came into the studio and heard some of the tracks and was like, ‘Oh, I really like that!’”
When Eddie asked about joining KISS, Simmons encouraged him to instead work on keeping Van Halen together.
“I said, ‘Eddie, a band is worse than a marriage. You’re going to have ups and downs and stuff. But with Van Halen, everything begins and ends with you – it’s all about the guitar. And likewise for AC/DC or Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page – those riffs, that’s the backbone of what it is. That’s the sound. It’s a point of view which is not necessarily the point of view of KISS.’”
Explaining himself, Simmons added: “There wouldn’t be room for Eddie in KISS. It would be like putting Jeff Beck or Hendrix in AC/DC. Hendrix would suck up all the oxygen. He needed just one bass player and a drummer so he’d got that room without a rhythm guitar player there.
“Eddie was like Hendrix in that sense. He needed a lot of room. With Van Halen it was a lot of room for the guitar player to take up, and there just wasn’t that room unless we wanted to gut what KISS was all about. And Eddie would have taken over.”
Looking back on the decision, Simmons maintains that he made the right choice.
“Morally, I think I did the right thing, which is telling Eddie, ‘You’ve got to stick it out. No matter what the problems are in the band, you’ve got to hang in there.’ It’s never easy. You take a look at [Mick] Jagger and [Keith] Richards, who had their ups and downs, or [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney, who were childhood friends.
“But you don’t let the band break up, even if it means switching lead singers. And in the end, that’s exactly what Eddie did.”
Three years later, in 1985, Van Halen replaced Roth with Sammy Hagar.
“I love Roth. And that’s still my favorite era of Van Halen,” Simmons said. “But you can get another lead singer, and when Hagar joined, it may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but they became a bigger band.
“Likewise, when AC/DC sadly lost Bon Scott, they became one of the biggest bands in the world. So that rule: ‘You can’t lose the lead singer’. Actually, you can!”
