by Dee Snider
As night fell, due to the ice travel became even more dangerous, and as we got closer and closer to our destination in the Catskill Mountains, the roads became downright treacherous. Our pace slowed to a crawl, but credit to our intrepid driver Kenny (who had now been on the road close to twelve hours) for ultimately getting us to our destination safely.
The travel time certainly didn’t go to waste. We talked the hours away and got to know each other. I was really hitting it off with Kevin John Grace, probably because he was closest to my age from Long Island and less worldly than the other three. We were both rubes from the suburbs.
While I barely remember any of the conversations we had during that drive, I do remember one clearly. The band was currently going under the name Twisted Sister ’76, to acknowledge the new lineup and capitalize on the coming US bicentennial celebration. (Anybody remember the hubbub about that?) The band was even draping the stage in American flags and had a new Twisted Sister ’76 logo of a topless girl with a flag on her chest. Jay Jay (always the pragmatist) informed me that with three-fifths of the band (assuming I was brought in) being new, after the bicentennial the band was changing its name. What?!
New guy or not, I couldn’t sit by and watch this even being discussed as a possibility. I told him that he was way too close to be objective. As an outsider, I could attest to the value of the name within the club scene, and long-term, the name Twisted Sister was priceless. Not only for the band-defining imagery it conjured up, but for the cleverness of the play on words and the sibilance of the two words together. Twisted Sister! I’m sure I didn’t explain it quite as eloquently as that, but I got my point across, and I think it made sense to Jay Jay. Changing the name was never discussed again.
WHILE THE AFOREMENTIONED QUEEN were my favorite new band, a number of other groups were helping to define me as a vocalist and a performer. I loved a lot of the bands of the glitter rock scene. Bowie, Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, Sparks (anyone? Anyone?), Sweet, the New York Dolls, and others were regulars on my turntable, but here are the Big Three: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper. The original Alice Cooper band for their attitude and showmanship, Black Sabbath for their riffs and menace, and Led Zeppelin . . . because every member of the band is a god!
If any one band is responsible for my turning to the heavier side, it’s Led Zeppelin. If any one vocalist is responsible for sending me screeching into the stratosphere, it is the amazing Robert Plant. I had a poster of Robert hanging over my bed throughout high school, so I would literally bow down before him every time I got in bed. And if I, as a singer was known for one thing, it was for doing a hell of a Robert Plant impersonation.
The tristate bar/club scene was all about playing covers. There was virtually no place to play original material, and the club-going audience didn’t want to hear any. Sad, really. Bands were expected to be human jukeboxes, playing the songs people knew and wanted to hear. The hits. When it came to rock bands and rock music, no band was bigger than Led Zeppelin. Bands went to incredible lengths to play the most accurate renditions of Zeppelin songs, and the audiences demanded it. Playing Led Zeppelin poorly was sacrilege. The funny thing is, I remember seeing Led Zep on their 1977 tour and being stunned by how “inaccurate” they were live. Sorry, boys, but if a bar band played your music the way you did that night, they would have been tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. Seriously.
That said, if a bar band could play Led Zeppelin fairly well, they could work, and that I could sing the shit out of Zep songs had always been my meal ticket.
On February 2, 1976, the day of my audition, we ran through a bunch of songs that we all knew, but I know it was my versions of “Communication Breakdown” and “Good Times Bad Times” that sealed the deal. I could sing Led Zeppelin well, and that (to business-minded Jay Jay French) was money in the bank.
A short time after my audition, Jay Jay asked me to step outside with him into the cold winter night. He was complimentary about my audition, but then laid down the rules:
(1) He owned the name Twisted Sister. (This after planning on abandoning it not twenty-four hours earlier.)
(2) He owned the PA system.
(3) Charlie Barreca, the band soundman, was a member of the band.
Apparently, the grand plan was that Jay Jay would play guitar, manage the band, and be the songwriter, and Charlie would be the soundman, tour manager, and producer of the band’s records. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Jay and Charlie came up with this brain fart while smoking a joint on a beach in Bermuda. Must have been really good shit.
Jay Jay was planning on reforming Twisted for a third time, and he knew his old friend Charlie (literally. Charlie was ten years older than Jay) had done sound on a Grateful Dead documentary that had never seen the light of day. (Sounds qualified to do live sound and studio recording to me.) There you have it. Proof positive that marijuana makes you stupider.
After laying down the law with me—to which I agreed readily—Jay Jay says, “All right . . . we’ll see how it goes.” What? What does that even mean? Was I in the band or not? That was how it was left. With that uncertainty, I sort of joined the band that would take me to the top. This lack of security for my position with the band is another piece in the dysfunctional relationship that ultimately developed between them and me.
Having been kind of welcomed into the band, I went back inside to join my sort of bandmates. I sidled up to Kevin John Grace at the bar to share my goodish news and bond a bit more with my new drummer. As I begin chatting with Kevin about our new relationship and how we were going to rock, Jay Jay French comes up on the opposite side of me and whispers in my ear, midsentence, “Don’t get too friendly with him; he’s being kicked out.” Yikes! Trying not to give anything away to Kevin as we continued to speak, I wondered about “job security” in this band. Clearly, we were all replaceable.
VIEWING THIS OPPORTUNITY AS a new beginning for me in a new life, I approached Jay Jay French for some sage advice. I already looked up to this guy. “I want this to be a fresh start for me,” I told Jay. “I want a new first name. What do you think I should call myself?” He looked at me seriously and said, “Let me think about it.”
The next day as we passed each other on the stairs leading up to our rooms, Jay Jay says to me, “What about Dee, like Dee Dee Ramone, but just Dee?” I thought about it for literally a second and said, “I like it. Tell everyone not to call me Danny anymore.” And that was it. Dee Snider was born. God help everybody.
7
wild enema nozzles
I was eased into the show over the next few weeks as I learned more of the band’s cover material. They had a few original songs that I hated (“TV Wife,” “Follow Me,” “Company Man,” “Can’t Stand Still for a Minute”), but in the seventies tristate club scene, you couldn’t even announce you were playing an original. You’d introduce it as an obscure track from a popular band. “Here’s one from Deep Purple’s first album!” If your original song was good, in between sets people would come up to you and say, “I love that Deep Purple song!”
Besides my taking over the vocals on existing material, the band added songs (starting with more Led Zeppelin) that better showcased my voice. Material that didn’t work for me (such as the Kinks, Stones, and Dave Mason) was cut from the sets. The song list wasn’t the only evident change. Visually, I was ready to explore the more glam side of rock that I felt defined the name Twisted Sister. While I had worn costumes onstage before, they were nowhere as feminine as the direction I was headed, and I had never worn any makeup.
Now, in 1976, at the age of twenty, I was not nearly as secure in my heterosexuality as I am now. No, it’s not that I thought I might be gay, it was just the suburban, adolescent fear of people thinking I might be gay that I wrestled with. That said, I was anxious to embrace the whole thing, but from a more theatrical Alice Cooper direction than a gender-bending David Bowie one. Building off a pair of thigh-high, black-leather, five-inch platform boots
(very Alice), I pulled together whatever “borderline” feminine outfits I could, without going over the line (read: flaming homosexual.) These consisted of mostly black and white leotards, jumpsuits, and some leftover glitter clothing from my Peacock days. My most outrageous outfit was the aforementioned boots, black stockings, cutoff black shorts (think Daisy Dukes), long sleevelets, and a T-shirt that said I’M DEE, BLOW ME.1 Okay, that outfit was pretty tranny-ish. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
Makeup-wise, I was as safe and cautious as possible. Jay Jay (my mentor at that time) showed me how to apply base (foundation), and I would put some gray on my eyelids (going for a bit of a speed-freak thing) and reddish circles on my cheekbones like a doll. It was a start.
Joining Twisted Sister, I thought I was entering the real world of rock ’n’ roll excess. Jay Jay would tell tales of Twisted’s early days (all of two years before), filled with sex, drinking, and drugs, and I would listen enraptured, but I wasn’t seeing much evidence of it now. The guys all had steady girlfriends, Kenny Neill was sober, Jay Jay French had pretty much stopped drinking and getting high, Kevin John Grace was a hayseed like me, and while Eddie Ojeda did like to party, with his high-waisted baggies, disco hair, and Gibson 335 hollow-body guitar, he seemed more Latino than rock. Bummer. Still, I felt rock ’n’ roll excess was imminent.
WE WERE BOOKED TO play a club in Levittown, Long Island, called Hammerheads. For some reason most of the bars we played had a nautical theme. No matter if they were on a beach or hundreds of miles away in the mountains, a ridiculous percentage of them were filled with portholes, bulkheads, fishing nets, and Lucite-covered bar tops with shells and loose change suspended in them. Hammerheads was no different.
At one of our early shows, as at most places we played at that level, we were sharing the dressing room with another band. Both groups were at the club in the late afternoon to sound-check. None of the guys in Twisted had heard of our opener before—they weren’t from our area—but they seemed cool enough. While the guys in my band were onstage setting up their gear, I went down to the dressing room to hang up my stage clothes. The guys from the other band were already in there, and as I hung up some of my more “feminine” stuff, one of their band members asked suggestively, “Hey, man, are you into wild enema nozzles?”
What?
While I didn’t know what a wild enema nozzle was, I knew each word in the phrase, and it gave me a fair idea that something wasn’t kosher. Shaken, I uttered something pithy like “Thanks, I’m good,” and, trying not to appear too panicked, ran upstairs.
Jay Jay and Eddie were on their way down to the dressing room, so I grabbed Jay, pulled him to the side, and frantically told him about my experience. Jay Jay just laughed. In what would be an ongoing issue for me with the senior members of my band, I was treated like a stupid kid from Long Island and not taken seriously. That would eventually change (that’s an understatement!), but if ever they felt justified in treating me that way, it was right then.
“Hey, Eddie,” Jay called to his worldly friend, “wait’ll you hear what Dee just told me.” As we walked downstairs together, Jay told Eddie about the other band’s question, and now both of them mocked me, singing, “Wild enema nozzles! Wild enema nozzles!” I implored them to believe me.
As we entered the dressing room, filled with the other band’s members—wait a minute. Let me rephrase that—filled with the other band members (better), Jay Jay and Eddie were well into their second chorus of “Wild Enema Nozzles” (a great name for a song now that I think about it).
Hearing them, the other musicians lit up. “You guys are into wild enema nozzles?”
Jay and Eddie stopped singing. “What?” Eddie gulped.
“Wild enema nozzles,” the morally corrupt band leader replied. “Check ’em out.” With that, he pulled out a black attaché case, opened it, and, behold, neatly presented were all shapes, colors (mostly pastels), and sizes of definitely wild enema nozzles, and tubing and different-size (pint, quart, gallon) enema bags! Even Mr. Porn, Jay Jay French, was stunned silent.
The other band were “adventurous” sexually, and beside their personal deviant behavior at home (you know, the usual S&M, bondage, fetishism, and early pornographic filmmaking), they quite enjoyed giving each other enemas in the bathroom before they went onstage. Sometimes they even shared one thanks to a Y-shaped, two-headed wild enema nozzle.
Well, Eddie and Jay Jay—no longer laughing—demurred and shuffled out, leaving me with this gang, who were actually cool and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. They answered my many questions and even gave me a really nice wild enema nozzle to take home (kind of a consolation prize) in case someday I cared to experiment. I never used it (sorry to disappoint), but I still have it deep in the bottom of a box of memorabilia somewhere. Man, is that gonna raise some eyebrows when my grandchildren find it after I’m gone!
TWISTED SISTER WORKED FIVE nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, doing four fifty-minute sets a night. I have always been extremely hard on my voice, so I would do the first three sets with the band each night, and they would do the fourth set without me, Jay Jay and Eddie handling the vocal chores.
Within weeks of my joining the band, two things happened. As promised, Kevin John Grace (Twisted Sister drummer #2) was kicked out of the band (he didn’t have what it took to go the distance) and was replaced by drummer #3. Unlike my dear friend Jay Jay, who I feel trivializes the importance of the five core members of Twisted by constantly talking about the band members who were in the band before we even had a record deal (thus underlining that he is the only original member of the band), I want to give the credit and respect to the guys who, as a unit, got us to the top. A. J. Pero is the only drummer that matters, and he played on all of the biggest and best Twisted Sister records, so I’m not going to spend time talking about the five drummers that came before him. Plus, I hated drummer #3.
The second thing that happened was, after years of high singing, I began to lose my upper range and falsetto voice.
For those who don’t know, a man’s falsetto is that high, “feminine” voice we all have, which, if properly developed, can be used as your actual singing voice. In classical music you can become a countertenor, which is essentially a male soprano. Some of the world’s favorite rock voices have used this “developed falsetto voice” and made it their signature. Case in point: Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses.
I had a natural tenor (high) voice, but my highly developed falsetto allowed me to sing songs sung by women and the highest of rock vocalists. Not anymore. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been singing with a throat infection and had damaged by voice. My falsetto disappeared—as did my Robert Plant impersonation—and my range disintegrated. Losing the voice that had defined me my whole life (and got me in Twisted Sister) could have/should have been a death blow to my drive and musical career. I didn’t miss a beat.
I began to channel my inner Alice Cooper.
WE HAD YET TO hit our stride or find our own audience, but we were getting there, opening up for some of the biggest bands in the club scene, such as the Good Rats, and Baby. We even opened for some legendary performers, such as Tommy James of the Shondells (“Mony Mony,” “Hanky Panky”) and Leslie West2 of Mountain (“Mississippi Queen”). I remember our first big show opening for the Good Rats. They were a great local band that actually had albums out, on major labels, but still played the tristate club scene pretty exclusively. Why didn’t they make the jump to the national scene? I can only speculate.
Back in the seventies, if you were a popular band playing the tristate club scene, it was lucrative. How lucrative? The bigger bands could make $1,000 or more a week, per man . . . cash! (A level Twisted Sister would soon get to.) By today’s standards, that’s a weekly salary for each band member of about $3,500, tax-free. You had twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-old musicians making the pre-tax equivalent of a quarter-million dollars a year! And that’s for bands with five members. Some top bands out there had thre
e! You do the math. The top club bands’ members were driving Corvettes and Mercedes, buying expensive houses, and literally living like rock stars. In every local scene, there are musicians who think it is the be-all and end-all, and that they are the shit. Well, Dee is here to break it to you . . . it isn’t, you’re not, you never were, and you never will be. Sorry, dude.
My guess is that the Good Rats just couldn’t come to terms with the reality of “going on the road.” You’d make little or no money,3 be away from home and your family for months on end (some of the Good Rats were married and had kids), travel around the world in rent-a-cars or vans (initially), and share shitty motel rooms with two, three, or four other sweaty guys. (Where do I sign?!) So let’s see, sleep in your own bed every night, have money, drive a Mercedes sports car, and live in an expensive house . . . or five guys in an Ugly Duckling rent-a-car, drooling on each other in their sleep?4 Decisions, decisions. So the Good Rats stayed home.
OUR FIRST TIME OPENING for the Good Rats was at the 1890’s Club, in my hometown of Baldwin. My parents were going to come to the show, but since they would have a couple of my younger brothers with them, instead of coming inside they planned on standing outside the club and listening through the walls.
Now, at this early stage of our career, we had only one roadie, Ritchie the Face, and Charlie Barreca, our soundman, but they couldn’t do it alone. Twisted Sister was still unloading the truck, setting up, performing all night, then tearing down and loading our own gear. It sucked. While plentiful, our equipment was nowhere near the mountain of gear it would eventually become with stacks of amps, PA towers, and a full light show. Hell, at this point our light show consisted of Ritchie the Face flicking the wall switch for the club stage lights. Impressive.
That opening night, with my parents perched outside the club listening by an air vent, Ritchie the Face flicked the switch and Twisted Sister hit the stage to a packed club. We launched into our then show opener, “Drivin’ Sister” (modified to “Twisted Sister”) by Mott the Hoople, and tore it up! When the song was over, a thousand people just stood there, completely silent, in shock. (It was exactly like the reaction to “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers.)