Shut Up and Give Me the Mic

by Dee Snider

  The tickets for our March 16, 1979, show sold out in less than a day. To make sure the record industry didn’t miss our incredible achievement, we took out a full-page ad in the premier music industry chart magazine Billboard. Every record company committed their top people well in advance to be at the show. How could they not? Twisted Sister was doing the undoable, and clearly we were the next big thing.

  Never ones to take anything for granted, we decided to pull out all the stops. New costumes for everyone (including multiple costume changes for me), a full-on theatrical light show with staging to match. Spending thousands of dollars that we had not taken as salary (except for Eddie), we self-financed everything, including two massive flashing signs that read DISCO and SUCKS, made to bring home our current battle cry.

  In the late seventies, disco was king, and Twisted Sister had always been on a mission to destroy it. From smashing disco albums onstage with sledgehammers (often putting holes in the stages) to burning Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever posters, to electrocuting and hanging various disco stars in effigy onstage, we, the “Rock ’n’ Roll Saviors” (one of our biggest songs back then), were spreading the good word: Disco was dead! Long live rock! Though that hanging thing did get us in a bit of trouble one night.

  While most of our shows were in suburban areas, we played some rural areas as well. There was one club in upstate New York where the local rockers really loved us. We would pack that place. One night, after a blistering, disco-crushing set, the audience reaction was particularly off the charts. We had finished by hanging disco maven Barry White in effigy, then tossing “his body” into the crowd. The audience tore the dummy to shreds and absolutely lost their minds.

  At the end of the night, we were talking with the club owner about the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction, and he casually says, “You can never go wrong with hangin’ a nigger.” What?! Idiots that we were, it never dawned on us that it could be interpreted as anything else. We quickly explained that hanging Barry White in effigy was purely symbolic, reflecting our attitude toward disco music as an art form. We certainly weren’t racist. We had a Puerto Rican guitarist in the band and one of our former drummers was African-American.1

  “You hung a nigger,” the club owner reiterated. “People around here love that.”

  Needless to say, it was the last night for that.

  STAGING A ONE-OFF CONCERT event such as at the Palladium required the same effort a major attraction would put into staging an entire tour—and all the expenses as well. We endlessly rehearsed the band and crew, doing full production runs in a huge rehearsal studio. This was our shot and we could leave nothing to chance.

  The night before the big show, we rented the Palladium theater—at tremendous expense—so we could have a dress rehearsal on the actual stage where we were going to make our stand. Twisted Sister was making its own luck. But that night, at rehearsal, the completely unexpected happened. Eddie Ojeda had a grand mal seizure onstage.

  All of a sudden, in between songs, Eddie dropped to the floor and started violently convulsing. Unconscious, he was rushed to the hospital, and just like that—although we didn’t know it yet—our runaway train of a career had been completely derailed.

  Eddie recovered surprisingly quickly and we rescheduled our show for April 6; it seemed simple enough. If only. What we didn’t realize was, top record executives’ schedules are planned well in advance. Because of this, every key person who was to attend on March 16 could not attend three weeks later, so they sent their underlings, some as insignificant (to our careers) as their secretaries.

  The second thing that happened, which virtually no one (except maybe Nostradamus) could have predicted, was the music scene changed. In the three short weeks between Eddie’s collapse and our rescheduled concert, minimalist “new wave” had arrived, and no one wanted to know about some grandiose, over-the-top, big-production, heavy-metal band.

  ON APRIL 6 THE rescheduled show went off without a hitch. The place was packed, the response from the fans was staggering . . . and the record industry couldn’t have cared less. Only one label was interested, but they needed a repeat performance—a formality, they assured us—to seal the deal.

  Though we were a bit shaken by the limited response from the record companies, we knew it only took one label to say yes, and Epic Records was major. The label president wanted to see us perform, but there was a catch: we had to stage the full concert production at eleven o’clock in the morning just for him. Are you fucking kidding me?

  It wasn’t just the time of day (I didn’t get up until the middle of the afternoon), but the expense of restaging this “showcase” was astronomical. The band was still reeling from the expense of Eddie’s cancellation. Epic Records assured us we would be reimbursed, and again, this was just a formality; we were going to be signed.

  I hated the idea of doing this—it was insulting to ask us to perform like that—but when the day arrived, with only a few hours’ sleep I got up at 6:00 a.m., so I could be ready to rock by showtime. It takes me two hours to prepare for any performance, so at 9:00 a.m. I was at SIR studios, putting on my makeup and warming up my voice. By 11:00 a.m. we were dressed and waiting for Epic Records to grace us with their presence.

  At 11:30 a.m., the asshole rolled in with two others and, without a word, sat down on a couch set up in the middle of the room in front of the stage. We launched into our show and performed the entire ninety-minute concert set, including audience-participation numbers—which they didn’t participate in—as a “formality” for getting signed to Epic Records; it was a done deal.

  When we finished our show, the Epic Records label president and his cohorts walked out without saying a word to the band. I wanted to verbally and physically tear that piece of crap apart.

  YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT happened next. Yep. Epic Records passed on the band, saying we were “dinosaurs” and no one was interested in “arena rock” anymore. And they didn’t reimburse us for the expenses of the private showcase. Needless to say, the president of Epic was added to my PAMF list. The prick.

  Of course, as the band continued on after our “Epic” failure, we convinced ourselves that being rejected by every label in the country was merely a bump on our road to stardom. The marketplace had completely changed, and industry insiders said there was absolutely no interest in a band like ours. Oh, yeah? Try telling that to the thousands and thousands of rock fans who were coming to see Twisted Sister in the clubs every week. Twisted Sister wasn’t just a big band in the tristate scene, we were the band in the tristate scene. Our achievement at the Palladium that night sent our status on the local scene into the stratosphere. Playing to thousands of people every week we were affecting the musical tastes of a generation of rock fans in the region and the music future generations internationally would listen to. How can I say something as insane as that? Read on.

  Twisted Sister was defining the local music scene and setting the standard by which other bands were being judged. Clubs were built to accommodate our crowds and staging needs, and the young musicians who would be the future of rock were flocking to study everything we did. In our audience, or in bands opening for us on any given night, were members of Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Billy Idol’s band (Steve Stevens), Kix, Poison, Anthrax, Overkill, and more. Even the original Metallica—then totally unknown—opened for Twisted Sister at one of Metallica’s first East Coast gigs in front of almost four thousand people.2

  Twisted Sister was defining what would become hair metal, thrash metal, and the coming new wave of heavy metal in the United States. Even punk bands found inspiration in what we were doing. For years Green Day played “We’re Not Gonna Take It” in their set.

  This explains the disconnect you’ll find between people’s perceptions of my band. If you lived and grew up in the Northeast (or in Western Europe), you were aware of the effect and importance of Twisted Sister. If you were from the rest of the country (and world), your awareness began and ended pretty much with our coup
le of hit records, and we tend to be dismissed as a one-hit wonder or a flash in the pan.

  With rejections coming in almost daily from out-of-touch record execs sitting in high towers in big cities, the visceral response of thousands of rabid rock fans each night told us to stay the course. I mean, who better knew what record buyers wanted to hear—suits in the city or the kids who actually bought the damn things?! We were reminded daily that the record-buying public was dying for recorded music from Twisted Sister.

  In July of that summer, Twisted Sister was asked to play in a Long Island amusement park’s weekly concert series. Every Tuesday night, a local band was hired to give a free show in the huge parking lot behind Adventureland in Farmingdale. The average weekly attendance was about three or four hundred people, but we were told that one of the bands (I think the Good Rats) drew around eight hundred. Twisted knew we could draw a lot more than that, and we pulled out all the stops (as usual) to make this the concert event of the summer. We even hired a plane to pull a sign over the beach, the weekend before, to help get the word out.

  The night before the Adventureland show, Twisted Sister was invited to a going-away party for a mutual band friend, Barry Ambrosio. Barry was a well-liked local musician who had been busted for cocaine possession and had to do time. A local club was booked to house all of Barry’s friends, and a couple of notable rock stars were there as well: Billy Joel and Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple and Rainbow.

  Meeting these two hugely successful musicians was eye-opening for me. Where Blackmore was weird, standoffish, and unlikable, Joel was the exact opposite. Welcoming and self-deprecating, with virtually no ego, despite his multiplatinum status, Billy did everything to show how gracious and down-to-earth a star can be. When people spoke of Ritchie, it was with disgust and loathing. With Billy, it was only with praise and admiration.

  After the party that night I reran the experiences I had had with both rock luminaries. I started to wonder how I came off to people and what they said about me after I left. In my heart I knew the answer: I was way more of a Ritchie Blackmore than a Billy Joel. I vowed to make a change, promising myself I would be more like Billy. I kept that promise . . . but it did take me a few years to put it into full effect.

  HAVING ARRIVED AT A new level of success and stardom, the band decided we needed to hire an official “road manager.” He would handle a lot of the stuff that was starting to overwhelm Jay Jay. As good as he was at handling the band’s club business, he was our guitarist first and needed to focus his attentions on that, not dealing with club owners and the minutiae of Twisted gigs.

  A longtime friend of the band, Joe “Atlantis” Gerber,3 was brought on to handle the job. He had no prior experience, but Joe was smart, trustworthy, a good friend, and looking to get out of the audio business and into the world of rock ’n’ roll. Did he ever.

  The Adventureland show was Joe’s first day on the job. It was a bit different from the typical club show, but pretty straight-ahead as shows went. Crew sets up, band arrives for sound check, band gets ready for show, band performs. After that, the crew tears down, band goes home, and the road manager settles up (collects the money) with the people who hired us. It’s not rocket science.

  After sound check that evening, I headed into the trailer provided as a dressing room behind the stage to start getting ready. About an hour before showtime, Joe Gerber came into the trailer, white as a ghost. Continuing to apply my stage makeup, and without acknowledging his condition—it was his first day—I asked, “How’s it lookin’ out there, Joe?” Since I never left the dressing room, I always wanted to know how the crowd was.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve been in here since sound check. Why?” My curiosity was piqued.

  “Take a look for yourself.”

  I got up from my seat in front of the mirror and peered out the trailer-door window.

  Now I knew why Joe was so pale! A sea of people were waiting for Twisted Sister to hit the stage. The parking lot was so jammed with fans that they had climbed onto the roofs of adjoining warehouses to better see the band.

  The Long Island newspaper Newsday would report the next day that attendance at our Adventureland show was more than twenty-three thousand! This was for an unsigned local band! It should be noted that Kiss was playing to two-thirds of a house at Madison Square Garden that night. I can only imagine how many people would have been at our show if Kiss weren’t playing.

  The massive crowd caused all sorts of problems. There wasn’t nearly the parking needed (especially since the massive back parking lot was being used for the concert), and people were abandoning their cars miles away so they could see the show. The security for the event was woefully understaffed, and as a result, a lot of damage was caused by the riled-up, overcrowded, unsupervised fans, and Twisted Sister got all the blame. We were banned from all outdoor shows in the Northeast for years after on account of the problems with the crowd that night.

  The show was an incredible success and only added to the band’s growing legendary status. No one could compete with Twisted Sister—apparently not even Kiss! Twisted Sister would not be deterred by corporate rejection, and though we were being dismissed as a “regional phenomenon,” we pushed on. This said, we weren’t complete idiots (we were “incomplete” idiots).

  We knew it couldn’t last forever. There was no way to make a real career out of our local microcosm of rock stardom. The band needed to do something to make the leap from local legend to rock icon, but I couldn’t see what. That’s when Twisted Sister’s devoted fans brought us our next windfall on our path to the top.

  16

  o come, all ye faithful

  As a songwriter, I was beginning to focus my writing method. I quickly figured out I couldn’t be limited by depending on my modest guitar-playing skills.1 Even without a true understanding of any musical instrument, my mind was capable of at least imagining more inventive musical parts. My strength is melody. Some great songwriters write the lyrics first, but I quickly discovered that for me it only produced monotonous melodies. Case in point, “Lady’s Boy,” the flip side to Twisted Sister’s self-released “Bad Boys of Rock ’n’ Roll” single.

  My best work always came from the songs that I wrote the title to first. I’d take a song title that made a statement or captured an attitude I was looking to convey, decide on the feel I wanted for the song (fast, slow, swaggering, headbanging, etc.), then I’d just let it flow out of me. I am blessed with a mind that can constantly create, so I trained myself to only turn it on (like a faucet) when I had some way of capturing the idea. Too many times I had come up with a great song or concept in my head and been unable to later remember it. Very frustrating.

  I would continually build a list of good song titles, and when I was ready to write, with recorder in hand, I would look at a title and see if I got any inspiration from it. If I didn’t within a couple of minutes, I would move on to the next title. If I got an idea, I would sing the parts into the recorder. Usually an idea would start with the drumbeat or groove for the song, then I would sing the guitar part, followed by the song’s verse, bridge, then chorus. Sometimes I would even come up with the release (that part of some songs that only happens once) on the first try. More often than not, some of the key words or lines of the song would just pop out of my mouth. When they did, I would use them as the starting point and inspiration for the rest of the lyrics. I would repeat the above method for my entire list of song titles, which usually stood at about fifteen or twenty at any given time.

  To gain objectivity, I wouldn’t listen to the tape again for some time. The other reason for that is, with a cassette filled with ten, fifteen, or twenty song ideas, I needed to have time to take notes as I listened, so I would remember where the best ideas were contained.

  The average person always seems to imagine that songs are written and created in a complicated process. Unlike romanticized television and movie portrayals of bands and artists, the reality of it
is mostly mundane and undramatic. People expect the birth of a great song to be much like childbirth itself, some intense, painful, loud experience with a lot of people yelling and cheering the idea on, until it finally comes into the world and is given a name. I don’t think the idea of me, alone, singing in a quiet falsetto into the built-in microphone of a cassette player, would be satisfying to the average music fan, but that’s the reality.

  The process would get even more primitive when I needed to transfer my good ideas from the original tape. I would cue the song idea up on my handheld cassette player, hold it up to the built-in mic on my boom box, hit RECORD on the boom box, PLAY on the handheld, and record from one machine to the other. I’d repeat the process with all of the ideas I wanted to work on, until I had a new cassette tape with just them. Hysterical, really.

  I guarantee, if you heard any of these tapes I made with my singing softly on them, you would be hard-pressed to make anything out of what was on them. But that’s how I did it. I am blessed with the ability to create virtually effortlessly and endlessly. I’m never at a loss for ideas.

  Don’t let my having only a couple of hits fool you. Hit records are no reflection of songwriting ability or quality. Making a song a hit is a whole other process, in most ways beyond the control of the creator. Some of the best things I’ve ever written have never even been available to the listening and buying public.2

  IN 1979 I WAS songwriting in the spare bedroom of our tour manager Joe Gerber’s apartment. I don’t remember the exact reason I was writing there, but I’m sure I couldn’t get any privacy at my apartment. Suzette and I always had roommates. During that writing session, working off my song-title list, I wrote just the chorus of a song that would change me and my band (and the world if you count the butterfly effect) forever.