Gene Simmons has looked back on the time he stuck his tongue down Adam Sandler’s throat at a party several years ago.
The KISS legend explained while speaking to actor Adam Lupis on Thursday (March 12) that he was at a charity event Sandler was hosting when a band was playing on stage. The actor asked Simmons if he’d play a couple of songs himself and he agreed to.
“Adam’s in there because he’s a real rock fan, jumping up and down, and somebody was taking a photo of us,” Simmons explained. “I wanted to turn Adam into my bitch, so I stuck my tongue almost down his throat.”
Sandler himself seemed to see the funny side, and told Conan O’Brien the tale from his perspective in 2019 – though from his side, it happened at one of his Christmas parties.
“We’re on stage playing a KISS tune [and Simmons] pulls out the tongue,” he said at the time. “The tongue comes out, 7-incher. [He] starts coming at the Sandman with the tongue, and I’m playing along, and then I’m like, ‘Oh man, he’s getting real close.’”
He added: “Came at the Sandman, big tongue right to me. I think he gave me a couple of licks. I took it like a man.”
The anecdote comes weeks after Simmons made headlines for his comments regarding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The musician, who was inducted with KISS in 2014, hit out at the inclusion of hip-hop while on the Legends And Leaders podcast last week, lamenting “the fact that Iron Maiden is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when they can sell out stadiums, and Grandmaster Flash is.”
He also asked why Led Zeppelin haven’t been inducted into the ‘Hip-Hop Hall of Fame’, adding, “It’s not my music, I don’t come from the ghetto. It doesn’t speak my language.”
Among those to criticise him was Chuck D, who was inducted with Public Enemy a year before Simmons and KISS.
“Everything else other than rock, when rock ‘n’ roll splintered in the ’60s, is the roll,” the rapper told TMZ. “Soul music, reggae, hip-hop, which is rap music. Hip-hop is a culture, so it embodies sight, sound, story, and style.”
“But music, the vocal on top of the music, has already been determined. So that’s the roll, that’s flow, that’s the soul in it. KISS are rock gods, but they don’t have a lot of roll to them.”