Gene Simmons

Gene Simmons (born Chaim Witz (pronounced Haium) on August 25, 1949) is an Israeli-born American hard rock bass guitarist and vocalist. He is best known as "The Demon," his blood-spitting, fire-breathing, and tongue-wagging persona in the hard rock band Kiss, an act he co-founded in the early 1970s. Simmons also contends that he has "never been high, drunk, or smoked in (his) life."

Simmons was born in Haifa, Israel, and emigrated to New York City at the age of eight, with his mother Florence Klein—a Jewish Hungarian immigrant and the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. His father Feri Witz, also Jewish, had abandoned his family years earlier. When Simmons was young, his mother's long absences while working two jobs in order to make ends meet left emotional scars which gave him a strong desire for wealth. After arriving in the U.S., he took the name Eugene Klein (later Gene Klein), Klein being his mother's maiden name. In the late-1960s, he changed his name again, to Gene Simmons.