UPDATE TO BELOW STORY.......
Gene Simmons admits he doesn't know how to describe the avatar show KISS are working on, but that's not stopping him from talking about it.
On The Zak Kuhn Show podcast, which can be heard below, he said, "It'll be seen around the world. And I'll try to describe it. When you put on virtual glasses, you get a 360-degree experience. Wherever you turn your head, you're in that universe; you're in a parallel universe, if you will. You could be in the land of dinosaurs or falling off a cliff or you pick your head up to the sky and you see the sky. And you lower your chin and you look like a chasm with your feet falling. So you actually believe, to the extent that you shut off your mind, that you're actually in that world. Now imagine not wearing glasses and having that experience."
Asked how it stacks up against ABBA's avatar show, Voyage, he said it will "totally blow [it] away... Technology is growing by leaps and bounds… The future is here. Artificial Intelligence now fixes itself and teaches itself. And so the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds even where the ABBA show was. You could swear ABBA was live on stage, but you have to look straight forward. If you look to the left or right, you can see your neighbor sitting behind you or next to you. And so you have that kind of, 'Oh, this is reality. And what's on stage looks like reality.' But as you know, with 3D glasses, virtual glasses, your sense of what's real and what's not is skewed. So there's all that."
No word on when the show will be ready. Until then, Simmons continues to tour with his solo band, with more dates scheduled for the spring.
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KISS brought their five-year End of the Road tour to its conclusion a year ago yesterday -- December 2nd -- which was a Saturday. (It started on January 31st, 2019, in Vancouver, Canada, and has gone around the world for a total of 13 legs and 250 shows.)
Held at Madison Square Garden in their hometown of New York City, they've marked the anniversary by posting on YouTube a 20-minute highlight video, which includes the video they premiered that night of them as fantasy-based superhero avatars performing their 1991 cover of Argent's 1973 song, "God Gave Rock 'n' Roll to You," along with a QR code taking you to their new website and the special announcement, which was that they will be the first U.S. band to stage an avatar show, similar to what ABBA is doing in London with their Voyage production.
Still no word on when and where this next phase of the band will launch, but Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have posted a video promising "amazing things" to come because "KISS is forever."
And, while Stanley has yet to return to the stage, Simmons did tour this year with his band and will do more dates in 2015.
Check out his post about it here from Gene's official Instagram page.
Speaking of Gene Simmons......
Three months after the release of Reagan, the bio-pic on actor and 40th President of the United States Ronald Reagan, hit theaters, comes the video of Gene Simmons crooning the American standard "Stormy Weather" from the film.
Commenting on the song, which was recorded by the likes of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, Simmons tells Newsweek, "It seemed to me during the scenes where Ronald Reagan was sitting with [actress and his first wife] Jane Wyman at the club, there would probably be music playing in the background. I was actually thrilled that the producers thought my version of the song would work in the scene."
The video intersperses scenes from the movie with Simmons in the studio.
And as for Reagan, Simmons was a fan, calling him a "great American" who will "certainly go down in future generations as one of America's great presidents...
"Interestingly, and I suspect the masses didn't know this about President Reagan, he started off as an actor, joined the Democratic Party, then became disillusioned with the Democratic party and joined the Republican party."
Bob Dylan also has a song in the film as his cover of Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In" can be heard over the closing credits.