Ex-Guns N’ Roses Guitarist ‘Couldn’t Tell If KISS Were Girls’

Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal formerly of Guns N’ Roses discussed KISS on the Guitar Hang podcast.

“Well, I was born in Brooklyn [New York], and then at a pretty early age, and this is what really did it, is at five years old, we moved to the next borough over to Staten Island, which was all just deer and rabbits before it became a bunch of angry people, too many people in a small place. And I moved into this neighborhood. I was five years old. And there were all these kids my age; it was perfect. So we would just knock on the door and just come on in and we just hang out in each other’s houses.

And I would go over their house and there would just be albums, vinyl everywhere, lying all over the floor from their parents, their older brothers and sisters they all had. So, just at that age, just out of curiosity, you see this big square of artwork, you’re, like, ‘What is this?’ And you go and you put on the vinyl on the turntable, you drop the needle, you sit on the bed and you stare at the speakers like you’re watching TV with your ears and just listening. And there was such great stuff all the time just lying around that at an early age, [I was] getting exposed to — Beatles and their solo albums and Elton John and Queen and all kinds of things. So one of them, at five years old, it was a new album that had just come out. And I was over at my friend Bob’s house. And he had teenage sisters, and one of them must have gotten this album. And it had these… They had long hair.

I couldn’t tell if they were guys or girls ’cause they had painted faces. And I was, like, ‘What are they? What’s this?’ And it just looked interesting. So we popped it on and it was KISS ‘Alive!’. And it changed everything. It warped my fragile little child mind. And I heard it and immediately it’s, like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but that’s what I wanna do.’ And it just inspired so much. I was just so amazed by what I was hearing and what I was imagining and envisioning. And it made me want to do that.”