ESPN The Magazine’s February 2nd Music Issue features an extended interview with Gene Simmons of KISS,  who along with bandmate Paul Stanley, brought Arena Football back to the City of Angels when the founded the L.A. KISS in 2013. Despite a 3-15 record in their inaugural season, they have become the AFL’s marquee franchise. Here’s an excerpt of Simmons on the secret behind the success: 

Why KISS entered the world of football…

"Well, opportunity knocks probably only once and you don’t get another chance. You don’t have to be a genius to look around in perhaps the second-largest market in America, Los Angeles, and see it doesn’t have a professional football team of any kind. Arena football is cool. For one thing, you don’t have to mortgage your home to buy tickets — $99 for season tickets, what’s wrong with that? It’s air-conditioned, no matter rain or shine or anything else. It’s comfortable. You don’t have to travel a mile for the food. If you want to pee, it’s right outside the door. It’s all good. It’s also much faster, much more in your face. It’s actually more aggressive. What we do is to make sure you don’t have a chance to dip your chips every time the ball goes down on the floor and people are huddling."

The goal of every LA KISS game…

"To make it the Super Bowl every game. That’s exactly the idea because you have to be honest with yourself. Although there are a lot of football fans, there aren’t 100 million football fans, come on. Just like when you go to the Kentucky Derby, everybody that goes there doesn’t necessarily know anything about horse racing. They go there for the spectacle. It’s a must-see event. And if you take away the spectacle that is the Super Bowl, the music and the fireworks, if you take away all that, what do you got? How could you have cheerleaders without music? And when the guys run out to the field, isn’t that music that heralds their arrival? Don’t teams — if they are lucky — have their own anthem? Words to those anthems mean something: This is who we are, this is what we stand for. So that’s what we try to do, and we’ve been very successful because in one season, our very first one, we were the only team in the AFL to pull at least 10,000 people to every home game. That’s unheard of. What other AFL team had a reality show on the air? You’ve got to try to break new ground and not do what grandpa used to do. Welcome to the 21st century. Any fireworks that you see at a KISS show should be at our LA KISS events — it shouldn’t be just a football game; it should be an event!"

To read the article in its entirety, click here.