Joel’s Brain Blurps

A couple of weeks ago, I was scheduled to interview Gene Simmons for Radar, mostly talking about his reality show on A&E. The interview was scheduled for a Monday at 3 PM. The night before, I had gone out for dinner and got back at around 9:30. Right before 10 PM, I heard the phone ring, and I saw “Private caller” on my caller ID. Anyone who’s done celebrity interviews before knows that most of them have unlisted home numbers, so seeing “Private caller” on your caller ID is a sure sign that the caller isn’t a telemarketer or other annoyance. So, I decided to answer out of sheer curiosity. Here’s what I hear on the other end:

“Is this Joel? This is Gene Simmons.”

Yikes. He was calling to do the interview with me about 17 hours early. I told him that I was expecting him to call tomorrow afternoon. He said something about lawyers and bill payers and having not knowing where the day was going to take him tomorrow, so he can call me back if I want, but there was no guarantee. So I decided to just do the interview on the spot; I scrambled around and hooked up my recorder while I had the phone down on my table (so this means I put Gene Simmons on hold).

When I picked the phone back up, we had a good talk… he got annoyed at me once or twice, which is something I knew would happen based on some of the questions I wanted to ask. But overall it went well; I even got some good quotes out of him about politics and Sean Penn and that kind of stuff.

For some reason, I wasn’t that annoyed that he called early. It freed up my Monday afternoon tomorrow, and I got a good lead for my article.

The finished interview just got posted this morning. Interesting stuff.

I’m looking forward to hearing my friend Dan’s reaction to this interview; he’s a KISS fanatic, and he pasted the walls of our freshman dorm with pics of Gene, Paul, and company. Because of that, I was probably one of the rare people who listened to KISS right along with the college stoner staples like Pink Floyd. Hopefully he — and my buddy Mihir, who still goes to KISS concerts with Dan to this day — enjoys this.