When Gene Simmons attacked Geddy Lee on tour
Bands have always been known to be pushed to their limits whenever they go on tour. As much as those few hours onstage may be the highlight of every single day, it can sometimes get monotonous having to compromise with the same people every night so everything goes off without a hitch. Even though Rush barely had a harsh word to say about each other whenever they went on the road, Geddy Lee was on the receiving end of a nasty altercation with Gene Simmons during one of their first tours.
In the early days of Rush, there was uncertainty about their prospects for a successful headlining tour. While songs like ‘Working Man’ found some success in their local Canadian circuit, it wasn’t until they were discovered by a major radio station in Cincinnati that their career gained significant momentum.
After ditching original drummer John Rutsey for Neil Peart on the album Fly By Night, the band quickly garnered the attention of Kiss when they were going through their first major tours up north. Whereas the band had been in tune with the sounds of Yes and Genesis, all Simmons heard was the sounds of blistering hard rock.
When talking about taking them on tour, Simmons told Beyond the Light Stage, “We thought, ‘What the hell is this? This is like Canadian Zeppelin’. We said we wanted that band to open Canada for us”. After getting a few stadium shows under their belt supporting Uriah Heep, the power trio got an education of what touring life was like once they saw the backstage configurations of the band.
Compared to the lude activities going on behind closed doors, Rush was incredibly tame, only looking to get stoned whenever they could and occasionally partying with Ace Frehley and Peter Criss when they had the chance. Once Lee decided to play a practical joke on the band, Simmons was not going to take kindly to his female company being disturbed.
After playing a joke on Frehley by wearing a bag over his head, Lee started to escort some of the ladies in the band’s hotel rooms out when Simmons came swinging, recalling in My Effin Life, “Gene followed, grabbed me, and pushed me against the wall, demanding to know why I’d given them the boot. ‘Hey man,’ I said, ‘they were bumming everyone out!’ He said, ‘Yeah, but…’ and he angrily shared with me a few words that could only be described as a lesson in female anatomy”.
Since Rush was never known to be confrontational, the band did the next best thing to get back at Simmons: they wrote a song about him. In response to the Kiss ballad ‘Goin Blind’, the band included a joke song on their next album as a piss-take of Simmons’s love song called ‘I Think I’m Going Bald’.
None of those dustups stopped the fantastic bond between both groups, though. Despite playing to opposite crowds every time they played live, Kiss and Rush would remain friendly with each other up until the Canadian icons decided to hang it up after their tour for Clockwork Angels.
