In a TV appearance yesterday, KISS frontman Gene Simmons addressed questions about whether the iconic heavy-metal band might perform at the January 20 inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.
Simmons seemed more interested in promoting his new Rock & Brews restaurant chain and the band’s upcoming world tour in its 43rd year than talking about the festivities following the the presidential and vice-presidential swearing-in ceremony, however.
Even though Trump — a former Democrat and independent who ran for president as a Republican — mixed with celebrities for most of his career, there has been a lot of media chatter about entertainers performing or often refusing to perform at his inauguration, which will probably be a non-story by January 21 given the ever-evolving news cycle.
When the Fox & Friends crew asked Simmons about the alleged KISS inauguration performance or nonperformance, the bass guitarist and former Celebrity Apprentice contestant said that he gets similar inquires everywhere he goes and was not tongue-tied in expressing dismay that the post-election environment continues to be so politicized, The Daily Caller and various other media outlets reported .
“Why does anybody give a squat what a guy in a band thinks about or anything like that. The last thing I want to do is ask President Obama what he thinks about Led Zeppelin. As far as I know, nobody ever called me. I know Donald Trump, I know our president-elect well enough I suppose. I never got a call. The problem with even talking about this is everything has become so polarized. People should just give it a rest and stop trying to use politics, or what our president-elect means or doesn’t mean, as some kind of tool. Look, a wake-up call is that Al Qaeda…and all the other bad guys of the world actually don’t make a difference between Republicans and Democrats or anybody, they just don’t like Americans. So, maybe we should all sign up for the American political party and get used to it — we have a president-elect, now let’s move on.”
Left unasked by the panelists was whether anyone else in the band or the group’s agents received a call from the Trump people, however.
“If you live in America, you are at the inauguration,” Simmons added about the unifying symbolism of the event for all U.S. citizens.
“There’s going to be a new president-elect, and everybody just take a rest,” he asserted in an apparent reference to those, many of whom in the entertainment field, who still can’t accept the results of the election, which came as a shock to many news outlets, media pundits, and celebrities who were apparently relying on flawed polls rather than the facts on the ground in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania.
Simmons immigrated to the U.S. at age 8 from Israel with his mother, whose Hungarian family was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. “We should all just take a deep breath and get on with our lives. We should be blessing this hallowed ground called America everyday. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be fine…,” Gene Simmons concluded.
See clip below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXQ3EXf3yso
In a recent encounter with the Simmons family, wife Shannon Tweed — seemingly not a Trump fan based on her reaction to the question about the inauguration in the clip below — told a TMZ cameraman, however, that KISS politely declined to perform for Trump, with Simmons singing a somewhat different tune, as it were, from his Fox & Friends comments when he noted that the group will be touring Europe when the inauguration is taking place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN3ux9DSpoc
In an appearance earlier this month on the Fox Business Network, the rock star recommended that his fellow entertainment industry colleagues stop whining (“shut their pie hole”) about Trump’s Electoral College landslide win over Hillary Clinton and that the media should be paying no attention to their complaining in the first place.
In a behind-the-scenes interview with Trump inauguration officials, Breitbart News explained that that the event will be scaled back to three official balls (rather than 10 that occurred under Obama) and that the traditional Commander-in-Chief ball will expand to include police and other first responders, military families, and wounded veterans as well as active-duty soldiers.
“The inauguration itself will be less focused on the donor class and ritzy Washington insiders as in years past and more focused on the regular working class people across the country for whom Trump has become the champion.”
[Featured Image by gotpap/STAR MAX/IPx via AP Images]