by Christine Lorraine Morgan, July 5, 2024

The infamous rock group Kiss stormed into the sleepy city of Erie, PA On Oct. 16, 1990 amid censorship controversy on the local level. The hubbub was regarding Kiss’ stop in Erie during the group’s steamy “Hot in the Shade” tour.

It was under these circumstances that my interview with Gene Simmons took place downtown at the Erie Civic Center. There was only myself and one other reporter in attendance, who was also female.

When Simmons first entered the room and saw that we had set up three chairs in a triangle to talk with him, he grabbed a stack of about seven extra chairs and placed it upon the single chair we had selected for him. He then sat on top of the pile of chairs, and extended his legs outward so that one foot was on my chair, and the other was on my colleague’s chair.

At that point I knew it was going to be an eye-opening experience talking to this notorious legend. And it was.

We asked Simmons about the local outcry to censor and/or stop the show from going on. His reply was as brilliant as his foot-to-chair setup.

I don’t recall his exact verbiage, but he brought up the Bible and mentioned that in this holy book, “everybody begat everybody else” so he wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.

Until last year, the whereabouts of the original negatives from pictures taken during this interview were unknown. Luckily, they were discovered recently and the images below were produced from those negatives. Except for one, none of these semi-candid images were ever seen by anybody but me and the guy in the darkroom in 1990. One of them was published in a small weekly newspaper called The Millcreek Sun.