KISS bassist/singer Gene Simmons recently did an interview with the Professor Of Rock talking about a variety of topics including the stories behind some of the band’s biggest songs. KISS’ highest charting U.S. single came in 1976 and was far removed from what fans had come to expect from the group at that point. “Beth” reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the ballad helped propel what many consider the band’s best album from their original lineup, “Destroyer.”
While original drummer Peter Criss is credited as a co-writer on the song, Simmons said “The Catman” had little to do with the song’s creation. “The history of ‘Beth’ is that Peter and I were in one limo, and Ace and Paul were in another, and we were going from Flint, Michigan to a little place called Cadillac, Michigan, which is a few hundred miles from Detroit,” Simmons said. “So, in the limo, Peter starts humming (the opening melody to what would become ‘Beth’). I’m, like, ‘What is that? That’s a nice melody. What is that?’ He goes, ‘Oh, it’s a song I wrote called ‘Beck’.’ B-E-C-K. ‘So how’s it go?’ ‘Beck, I hear you calling,’ and so on and so forth. And I remember at the time, I said to him, because we had started working with Bob Ezrin, ‘Why don’t you bring up that song? By the way, what are the chords to that?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Oh.’ I thought that was peculiar.”
Simmons continued: “So, Peter had a tape of it. He brought it up to Ezrin. But before then, I suggested in the car, ‘Why don’t you change it to ‘Beth’, because when you say ‘Beck’, that hard syllable stops the melody. ‘Beck, I hear you… Beck, I hear you…’ There’s a ‘ck’ in there that it’s not smooth. ‘Beth’ is a much smoother way. And ‘Beth’ is a much more romantic idea. Actually, the lyrics are very clever. It’s about guys in a band rehearsing and the girlfriend bugs the guy, ‘Hey, when are you coming home?’ And he says to her, ‘I’m not coming home anytime soon, ’cause me and the boys are gonna be playing all night.’ You know, almost like, ‘What’s more important? Your band or me?’ ‘Actually, bitch, it’s the band. You’re not gonna change my life. They will.'”
Simmons said that the mythology behind ‘Beth’ isn’t the true story on who actually wrote it. “Peter does not write songs,” Gene explained. “He doesn’t play a musical instrument. Drums are not a musical instrument, by definition. They’re called a percussive instrument. Really important — sometimes extremely important in a band. It was for us. But you cannot play a drum fill that can be copywritten, but you can come up with a riff that you can own and a melody and a lyric. Those can be copywritten, but nothing you do on drums will prevent anybody else from directly copying whatever you did and applying it to another song. Okay, that’s number one. Number two, as far as I know, Peter plays no other instruments that I’ve ever seen. Not keyboards, six-instruments at all. Peter’s got a great whiskey voice in the early days.”
So who actually wrote the tune? “The person who wrote ‘Beth’ and ‘Baby Driver’ and one or two more was a guy named Stan Penridge,” Gene continued. “Stan Penridge was with Peter in a group called Chesea. They had a record out, actually, I think it was on the MCA. So, Peter did not write ‘Beth’. And he did not write ‘Baby Driver’. Stan Penridge wrote that. But through politics and — hint, hint, nudge, nudge — and I wasn’t there when the conversation went down, Stan Penridge apparently agreed that Peter’s name would go in the songwriting credit. It appears first — Peter Criss, Stan Penridge… Or Peter Criss, Bob Ezrin, Stan Penridge, or the other way around. But Peter’s first. Peter had nothing to do with that song — nothing. He sang it. And to fix all the mythology and the gossip and the outright lies, it was Bob Ezrin who said, ‘I wanna do this like (The Beatles’) Yesterday’,’ more like a string quartet and piano. So more acoustically, because the melody in the song demanded it. And we’d never done that. We never thought we’d be doing a song like that, but we all went, ‘Sure.'”
Simmons concluded: “So, the mythology of ‘Beth’ is exactly that: mythology. The real story is Peter was lucky enough to be in the same place at the same time as a guy who wrote a song called ‘Beth’, and then Bob Ezrin, when he heard the song, went home before it was recorded, and then Bob added the middle section of the piano, which was taken legally, as it’s public domain. I believe it was a Mozart piano concerto. And that is the story behind ‘Beth’.”
Check out Simmons’ full interview below.
