The 1984 song Gene Simmons considers the height of hard rock: “There’s nothing better”
Gene Simmons isn’t usually one to give out compliments all that easily.
He’s bashed everyone from Santana to Axl Rose, and even offered Keith Richards a backhanded compliment, saying, “Respectfully, if Keith Richards, who I can’t tell you how much I admire him, but if he got into my outfit, he would pass out in half an hour.”
The man has been venerated by rock fans for the last couple of decades, and no one gets into that position without picking up at least a little bit of an ego along the way. Despite Simmons’s head often being the size of a third-world country, he at least knew a great song when he heard ‘House of Pain’ by Van Halen for the first time.
In his view, rock – especially hard rock – should be grand and bold. As he bemoaned back in 2021, “Rock is dead. And that’s because new bands haven’t taken the time to create glamour, excitement and epic stuff.” That’s everything that he thought ‘House of Pain’ nailed. And he found it deeply inspiring even if it did arrive a decade on from Kiss’ own debut single.
Looking at where Simmons came from, it’s not that easy to see him as a Van Halen fan right off the bat. The entire mentality behind most of Kiss’ early work revolved around the bluesy rock and rollers of the day like Humble Pie and Led Zeppelin, and while there are traces of that in the California rock band’s work, they were never going to be considered the kings of the blues by any metric.
Then again, anyone usually is gobsmacked the minute that they even hear five seconds of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing. He was already leagues above anything that another guitarist could hope to do, and while Simmons was thinking like a businessman when cutting their demo, there’s a good chance he also saw a legend that could eventually take over Kiss in terms of influence.
When lining up the lineage of rock history, Van Halen’s timeless hits picked up where Led Zeppelin left off. Judging solely on the Roth era, their material took just as many chances behind the scenes and included massive changes in tone once Eddie got used to playing the piano on some of their iconic records.
That appreciation was hardly surprising. Simmons had played a pivotal role in Van Halen’s earliest days, financing and producing a demo in 1976 after spotting the band at the Starwood in Los Angeles. He was enamoured from the off, telling the Los Angeles Times that even when Eddie was just a youngster you “couldn’t believe your ears”.
In fact, the group had far more great songs than they knew what to do with, and ‘House of Pain’ went all the way to the early days before they had a record contract. They had been used to working on fleshing out their material on each record, but after laying on the demo they cut with Simmons years ago, they finally found time to dust it off when working with pop-friendly material on 1984.
While Kiss was going through their own reinvention around this time by taking off the makeup, Simmons had to admit that ‘House of Pain’ was miles above most other rock songs from that time, telling Guitar World, “My favourite Van Halen song of all time is that unreleased ‘House of Pain’. There’s nothing better, and that includes ‘Eruption’. That thing is like a locomotive that’s going down the track without being able to stop.”
In fact, this song may have been integral to keeping 1984 such a classic record. Yes, ‘Jump’ and ‘I’ll Wait’ are classics for damn good reasons, but if it weren’t balanced out by songs like this and ‘Panama’, it would have probably looked like far more of a sell-out move than what it ultimately became.
If anything, the track served as a decent bookend to the group’s career with Roth. The days of Sammy Hagar weren’t that far away at this point, so it’s almost poetic for them to finish one of their last Roth-era records with a song that dated back to when they started it all.
