Last month we spoke to the man himself, Gene Simmons, who is gearing up to hand-deliver the Vault Experience to his fans all over the world. A massive collection of music and memorabilia housed in a 38-pound vault. You can read more about the enormous set here, and the first part of our interview with Gene, here. And, stay tuned 'cos we hear that the Australian Vault delivery dates are being announced any day now! 

Given his expansive career, we would imagine that to pick out the best bits from 50 years is quite the job and requires quite a bit of focus, and requires a whole team to get it done, but it was important to Gene to keep the entire project quite personal. 

"There’s a full-color book, fifty thousand words, and I wrote em all, and all the pictures are from my collection. It talks about where I wrote the songs, which hotel I was in, what was going on who was there, so on and so forth. For me, it’s sort of a personal diary with home photos where I get to open it up and just show everybody. I didn’t want this stuff to come out after I was dead and gone if you see what I mean, I want to celebrate it while I’m here with the fans.

I did it all myself, that’s part of the thing that made it so personal for me. I remember every moment I was in the studio, often, when I couldn’t get the guys from KISS or anybody else to play on the demos, I wound up playing all the instruments, and of course, that always took longer. And when I could get into the studio with like, ya know people like the Van Halen brothers or something it would always go faster of course. In the days of when we had to hide our faces and we couldn’t go out in public, all I could do was stay in the rooms, and in those days there wasn’t cable television so all you could do was watch TV and when the TV went off, I wrote songs, what else was there to do?

As you may have heard I’ve never been high or drunk in my life, so all I did was work, and it’s still the same philosophy. But I will tell you, it’s sitting in front me, the Gene Simmons Vault, and I wanna tell you… if I could use a superlative... I know this is a family show, but when I look at it, I just think... holy shit! I mean despite the fact your girlfriend has been lying to you all these years, saying that size doesn’t count, I wanna tell you.. this is, this is HUGE."

The vault itself is actually huge! Standing at 3 feet tall on metal castor wheels with a leather bound book that is 6 inches thick, fans won't fully appreciate the scale until it's in front of them. For the SUPER-Super-fans in the US, they are able to purchase the $50,000 experience whereby Gene actually comes to their home!

"Well, here’s the thing, when I was a kid, I couldn’t expect Lennon or Elvis to show up at my home. So at my expense I hired the insurance guys, the travel, ya know stuff like that, and, for 50k, fifty thousand dollars, you get all your friends at your house and we have a party together, wherever it is, I will come to you and we can have something together.

Now before that, there’s another thing you can do, if you want to; what Spielberg does with his movies before he puts it out, he’ll show his friends, like a focus group, do they like it? change it? make it longer? don’t let the girl die? all that, then after, he changes the movie to suit them.

What I wanna do is, I’m inviting people come and sit in the studio with me, close to your home, play the material, and tell me if the fade is too long, like this song here, stick it to the end over there,  because it’s like the deck of cards, how you design, what goes first, second either enhances or detracts from the experience. So, you can be an executive producer on the genesimmonsvault.com box set. If that’s what you’re into, get to the site, and find the details, if not, don’t worry, 3 of them were sold immediately so now we’re trying to find arrangements for times and all that, but we’ll figure out all that later."

In our experience, we've never quite seen any music artist go to this length to give fans such an intimate and memorable experience. Visit https://www.genesimmonsvault.com/ for more info. 

"This is the Godzilla of them all."