Rock and Roll Hall of Famer group KISS have recently performed an acoustic, sans-makeup charity gig to help raise money to fund a military museum in Oregon. The concert raised over one million dollars for the project, a museum which will be named after the father of guitarist Tommy Thayer.
During the past three years, the legendary seventies rock group have been contributing to the effort led by the Oregon Historical Outreach Foundation to build a military museum in Oregon. The charity concert, which featured the band without their signature makeup, was the first concert that the group actually performed in since teaming up with the Historical Society to build the museum. The museum, which will cost an estimated fifteen million dollars, got a big boost from Kiss’ unplugged performance, with the gig netting over one million dollars to the effort. A reported twenty thousand of that amount stemmed from an auction of a guitar that Paul Stanley had used since the late eighties.
The museum is a project which is of particular importance to the band. Guitarist Tommy Thayer’s father was a brigadier general tasked with freeing the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. One of the survivors that were rescued by Thayer’s father may very well have been Gene Simmons’ mother, although this hasn’t been confirmed. Simmons himself feels that the museum holds more significance than just being a building with a bunch of old guns in it:
A museum is a living history book, because young people today and the future generations can’t just read books or watch it on video because it’s unemotional. Going into a building and seeing remnants, vestiges of what it all means just cuts out all the sound and images on the outside world, lets you focus a little bit and makes you understand that this is real life and death stuff, and America exists, as far as I’m concerned, as the last bastion of hope for all of humanity on all of Planet Earth.”
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