“You hungry?” Simmons asked.
“We waited all day to eat,” Dwayne replied. “We’re going to eat $12,500 worth of food, brother.”
Inside the venue, soundcheck was in progress. (Simmons’s current band consists of three relatively young hard rock vets.) Zach strapped on a guitar to play an original composition titled “Dad’s a Dork,” with accompaniment from the drummer Brian Tichy. Then Dwayne got behind the kit, launching into the opening of Kiss’s “I Love It Loud.”
“You know, that wasn’t bad,” Simmons said. “It wasn’t good, but …” Everybody laughed.
Simmons and his new assistants made their way to a low-ceilinged basement lounge for takeout dinner from a local Italian place. Dwayne brought up that he and his son had watched an interview in which Simmons — an infamous Lothario — recounted losing his virginity, at age 13 or 14, to a married woman on his newspaper delivery route. “She asked me to sit down on the couch,” Simmons offered. “And the next thing I knew, I was —” He paused, then asked Zach to cover his ears (he obliged) before finishing the story.
The conversation turned to the hefty cost of the roadie for a day experience. Simmons dismissed the haters. “There’s free market, supply and demand,” he explained. “People want to do it, you do it. You buy a Rolls because you want a Rolls, but a Volkswagen will get you there, too.”
For the next two hours, the Rosados had Simmons’s undivided attention, though he didn’t always have Zach’s. (The teen didn’t seem particularly interested in the rocker’s explanation of a limited liability corporation.) Simmons gamely answered all their questions about life and music, occasionally calling up a visual aid — including a photo of himself with the Dalai Lama and a portrait of his late mother, a Holocaust survivor — on his phone (protected by a Kiss-branded case, naturally).
