Shut Up and Give Me the Mic

by Dee Snider

  When it was finally time for our set, we solemnly walked the long stadium hallway leading to the stage, heading to our doom. The end of our intro tape (AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top [If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll]”) played, and the band walked out onto the stage. The instant the British fans saw us, they began to react hostilely. Before we had played our first note, arms throughout the crowd were cocked to throw bottles, cans, and more at us . . . then Lemmy Kilmister walked onstage. The crowd was shocked to see him and froze midthrow. Lemmy’s voice is notoriously unintelligible to untrained—especially, not British—ears, but his fans heard exactly what he said.

  “These are some friends of mine from America. Give ’em a listen.”

  That was all it took. A dozen hoarse words from a U.K. rock god and Twisted Sister was given some blessed breathing room to prove our worth. We launched into a blistering set of what we did best, but with one caveat. Over the years, I’d slowly been losing the more campy elements of my live performances. The more I discovered my inner badass—and realized that pretty boy were two words that would never be used to describe me—the Frank-N-Furter trappings of the early Twisted Sister years had gradually disappeared. On that day, during that performance, in front of that crowd, the last vestiges of camp went completely out the window, and I fully released my true inner monster . . . and I never looked back. The ovation from the Motörhead stadium crowd was staggering, and when we finally left the stage, we knew the Demolition Squad had done it again.

  Ten minutes after our set was over, we were sitting in our dressing room, cooling down, feeling good about what we had done, laughing and making a lot of noise. At first, I thought I heard thunder. Oh, shit! Was it going to rain? But the thunder was rhythmic . . . and there were voices. Joe Gerber told everyone to quiet down, and it all became clear.

  “Twisted! [STOMP-STOMP!] Sister! [STOMP-STOMP!] Twisted! [STOMP-STOMP!] Sister! [STOMP-STOMP!] Twisted! [STOMP-STOMP!] Sister! [STOMP-STOMP!]”

  We could hear the crowd still chanting for more! This was the greatest ovation of our careers! What I’m about to tell you next is a violation of trust, but I won’t mention the person’s name, and I think thirty years is the statute of limitations on something like this. Someone from the Motörhead camp came to me and said they overheard Lemmy saying “This is the first time I’ve ever been afraid to go on after a band.” I couldn’t believe it. No way. This was Motör-head. Impossible. The door to our dressing room opened and in walked Lemmy. He came straight up to me and said, “I introduced your band . . . now you introduce mine.” Holy shit! Me introduce Motörhead at their headline stadium show?!

  And that’s just what I did. I walked out onto the stage, and the crowd went absolutely mad. Twisted Sister had won over their little, black heavy-metal hearts. I introduced Motörhead, then went to the side of the stage and headbanged to every song along with all the other fans. Halfway through their set, Lemmy turns, points to me, and says, “This one’s for him. It’s called ‘America.’ ” For me?! The crowd cheered and Motörhead roared into the song.

  A day that had started out as a nightmare had turned into an incredible dream. After six and a half years, five guys from the New York area—led by a rube from Long Island—had arrived. I will always be grateful and have nothing but love for Lemmy Kilmister and the kindness he showed my band and me that day. If he had not done what he did, there could have been a very different outcome, and our career might have ended before it began.

  23

  scarred for life

  Flying high after our slam-dunk performance at Wrexham, we headed back to London to mix our album at Whitehouse Studios and take photos for the album cover.

  Originally, the record was going to be called You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll (after our song of the same name), but Secret Records’ president, Martin Hooker, had a change of heart. For some reason, at that time, songs and album titles with the words rock ’n’ roll in them were out of vogue in the UK. Hooker was fearful that Twisted Sister’s first record would be rejected before it even got out of the gate. With that kind of overly cautious approach, I’m surprised he didn’t ask us to change our name. As that time, it was oft noted by rock critics that bands whose name began with the letter “T” (Tank, Terraplane, Tygers of Pan Tang) were doomed to fail. Be that as it may, “You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll” was removed from the track list, and Under the Blade chosen as our new album title. Why? Because it was one of our most sound-defining songs, a fan favorite . . . and fucking metal!

  The idea for the cover art came from the photographer (I think). When we arrived at the studio, a backdrop, with a swinging axe painted on it, was already hanging for us to throw shapes in front of. The guys posed intensely and I did my (new) thing for the camera. Fresh off my performing revelation at the Motörhead festival, I now knew exactly what my audience wanted and I gave it to them. I was a full-on rock ’n’ roll monster.

  The back-cover photo was taken without our makeup and costumes to establish a core belief of the band: we were not hiding. Twisted Sister wore costumes to enhance our live performances, more as a special effect. By putting a photograph of us without our makeup and costumes on the back cover, we felt it instantly communicated the message. The band didn’t want this point to be lost.

  One other precedent I insisted be set from album one—my lyrics had to be printed on the inside record sleeve. I pride myself on my atypical heavy metal messages and wanted people to know exactly what I was singing about (or at least have a shot at understanding). I made an effort to use traditional heavy imagery to communicate more positive, empowering, and inspirational messages in many of my songs. “Bad Boys (of Rock ’n’ Roll)” was about being misjudged and standing tall as an individual. “Sin After Sin” was a warning about the path of evil (the first of many). I knew that most listeners would never get past the dark imagery, but some would. I wanted them to know what I was saying.

  I TOLD YOU PETE Way was the Man and pretty much friends with everybody. You want more proof? We were mixing Under the Blade one night, the door to the studio opens and, completely unexpected, in walks Ozzy Osbourne. No bodyguard, no posse, nobody at all . . . just the Ozzman. Clearly feeling no pain, he and Pete exchanged the greetings of longtime friends, and Ozzy explained that he had just shot his dog (or had to go shoot his dog—I can’t remember which) for biting his wife (Thelma, not Sharon). Pete made the unnecessary introduction of Ozzy to our stunned band, then cranked up our mix of “Destroyer” for Ozzy to check out. Ozzy seemed to like it (he should have, it’s one of my most Black Sabbath–influenced songs), and then he proceeded to hold court.

  Ozzy was in the middle a major rebirth on the Blizzard of Ozz tour, and his career was firing on all cylinders. His band had just played a major UK homecoming, in front of thirty thousand head-bangers with Motörhead, at the “Heavy Metal Holocaust” festival at Vale Park, and the man was flying high again (pun intended). Ozzy had every right to feel vindicated. Since nearly fading into obscurity after leaving Black Sabbath, Ozzy had fought his way back to the top, and he told us—at length—all about it. (“I saw my empire crumbling all around me!”)

  Not that we minded. He was Ozzy fucking Osbourne, for God’s sake—he was Mr. Heavy Metal!

  Meeting and hanging with Ozzy was the capper on an amazing first trip to Great Britain, and the recording of our first album. The Ruff Cutts EP was ready for release, and the Under the Blade album was headed for final postproduction.. Before we left for home—my wife had a bun in the oven—we had one more bit of business. We needed to perform at the legendary Marquee Club in London for all the rock press to see. They had heard about our taking of the Wrexham festival, but we wanted them to witness the power of Twisted Sister for themselves. If only the weather had cooperated.

  In the early eighties (and still today to some degree), air-conditioning and refrigeration in Europe weren’t up to US standards. For sure we are a wasteful bunch, but the UK was at the opposite extreme. Things we Amer
icans see as necessities were/are considered luxuries over there. You need to request ice for your drink at a bar, and then they’ll drop one cube in your glass. Ask for another and they’d look at you as if you were insane. It wasn’t unusual to walk into a butcher shop and see raw meat sitting uncovered or unrefrigerated on a counter, with flies crawling on it. Open the door of a soda cooler for a cold drink and it would be warm inside. And air-conditioning? Don’t make me laugh! To this day, only the best hotels in Europe have air-conditioning, and you still have to check with the hotel to make sure it’s available. To be fair, Europe doesn’t get quite as hot as it does in the States, but when it does, people literally die from the heat. Case in point . . .

  Twisted Sister’s first true performances in Great Britain were two nights in August at the legendary Marquee Club. The Wrexham festival was a month earlier, but that was a supporting slot, with a short set, and in the daytime. We would be headlining the Marquee shows at night. We’d finally get to use dramatic stage lighting and play our full set.

  The Marquee Club is essentially London’s CBGBs, but with a much longer history and a more amazing roster of bands who have played there such as Hendrix, Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and the Who. The Rolling Stones were fired from there. You get the picture. Twisted Sister’s selling out two nights at the Marquee—without any recorded product—was a major statement about an emerging rock band.

  The average high temperature in London in August is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Quite a bit different from New York. That summer, a heat wave hit London during the days of Twisted Sister’s Marquee shows, topping out in the low eighties. This was certainly manageable for a bunch of New Yorkers used to anywhere from the nineties to over a hundred degrees. That was until we met our match in the Marquee Club.

  Like any nightclub, the Marquee Club had no windows, but unlike the clubs we were used to playing in the States, the Marquee had no air-conditioning either. Not that the air-conditioning in a packed, smoke-filled club (remember when it was legal to smoke in public places?) on a hot summer night did much to cool things off, but at least the clubs started out cool. Not the Marquee.

  While I was in the dressing room getting ready for the show, it already felt hot and humid, but seeing our crew rushing in and out dripping with sweat, and saying things like “It’s gonna be a hot one,” started to get me concerned. I was used to being drenched by the end of a show,1 but not before I had even hit the stage.

  The club was packed, wall to wall. Between the hype in Sounds and Kerrang!—the UK’s enormously popular weekly and monthly rock magazines, respectively—and the buzz about our performance at Wrexham, every headbanger worth his or her salt wanted to see the Bad Boys of Rock ’n’ Roll.

  Suddenly, the door to our dressing room opened and in walked Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead.

  After the show we did together, Lemmy became an ardent supporter of Twisted Sister, coming to many of our gigs, introducing us and sometimes jamming with us as well. Lemmy had been around for a long time and seen it all. From rocking to the Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, to being a roadie for Jimi Hendrix in his early days, to touring the world with just about everybody with Motörhead, Lemmy Kilmister is a true rock ’n’ roll dog. He was blown away by Twisted Sister, and to have Lemmy recently tell me I am one of the three greatest front men he’s ever seen—and the best at speaking to an audience—is one of the greatest compliments I have ever received. But I digress.

  The time came for us to deliver our goods to the rabid crowd, and we did in true Twisted Sister style . . . for a few minutes.

  The first thing that hit me—like a wave of nausea—was the fetid smell of the crowd. Packed shoulder to shoulder, in one sweaty mass of denim and leather, their odor was palpable, and almost unbearable. We would come to learn that this was the 80’s default smell of a British metal crowd, but I can’t say it ever became something we got used to. That said, the heat was something else entirely. The air was so thick, we could barely breathe: the temperature and humidity, unbearable; unlike anything we had ever experienced before. When the stage lights came on (the ceilings in the Marquee are low so the lights are close to the band), they felt like the heat lamps. As the set went on, it became more and more difficult to sing or even move. Eventually I begged Joe Gerber (doing double duty during that era as our light man), over the mic, to keep most of the lights off.

  It wasn’t just the band who were suffering. The audience, packed tightly together, were dropping like flies. People were being carried out of the club and taken to hospitals. It was a total nightmare. When we finally got to the end of our seventy-five-minute set, I could barely move. I stumbled off the stage, a sweat-soaked mess, with the rest of my band, collapsed in a chair, and did something I had never before done and haven’t done since . . . I cried.

  I cried out of frustration and anger at being unable to give people the kind of performance I was capable of. I cried because, in our first true performance for an audience that had heard and expected so much, I had failed to deliver. I cried because, in my mind, everything had built up to this moment, and in front of the rock press and the heavy metal elite I had failed. I cried over being defeated by an unseen enemy that, try as hard as I might, I could not beat. Lemmy—and others—came in to congratulate us, but wound up consoling us instead. There are no worse critics of Twisted Sister than the members of Twisted Sister. I believe it is what makes us so great live. The dressing room vibe seemed like somebody died rather than a celebration after a sold-out rock show.

  The next day—the second of our Marquee shows was to be that night—the reviews came out in the dailies. They were great. They acknowledged the brutal conditions in the club and couldn’t believe the band were able to perform at all. The audience was incapacitated, yet somehow Twisted Sister was able to rock on. We were so caught up in the misery of trying to perform, we were unable to be objective about the situation. The fans and press loved us!

  That night, we got huge fans (the rotating kind, not the fat kind) for the stage, blowing over trays of ice (primitive, yes, but technically air-conditioning), and reduced the wattage and re-aimed all the lights onstage to cool things down a bit. It worked. It was still hot, but it was bearable.

  After that first show—for decades—I could not perform without feeling some kind of air blowing onstage. If I didn’t, and it started heating up, I would begin to have flashbacks of that terrible night and start to panic, feeling as if I were suffocating. That show scarred me for life.

  Oh, yeah, one other thing. We found out later that the managers of the Marquee Club had turned on the fucking heat—during a heat wave in August!—so people would drink more! Sometimes I just want to kill somebody. . . .

  24

  i can’t believe they threw a shite

  Word of the knockout punch Twisted Sister delivered at the Wrexham show in late July quickly spread throughout the UK rock scene. While we were back in the US enjoying life with our families, awaiting the release of Under the Blade, a call came into our management office—the Reading Festival wanted to add us to the bill!

  England’s Reading Festival used to be the premier rock-music festival in the UK. It’s still a major player, but now there are a bunch of other equally competitive festivals. Unlike Castle Donington’s “Monsters of Rock” (all heavy metal and now known as the Download Festival), Reading always mixed things up, having more than thirty bands, playing different types of rock music at the three-day event. (Now Reading offers as many as fifty bands.)

  We were stoked to be asked to perform at such a prestigious event. The lineup that year was the festival’s heaviest yet, including Y&T, the Michael Schenker Group, and Iron Maiden.

  Our Ruff Cutts EP had just been released, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity for us to make further inroads within the UK metal community, promote the EP, and build anticipation for our September album release. Leaving Suzette behind, again, heavy with child, we jetted back to England for a weekend romp at Readi
ng.

  We would be taking the stage in the early afternoon for a short set, but we made sure to stack the deck in our favor. (Twisted Sister were never ones to fight fair.) A call was put in to our friend and producer Pete Way, inviting him to join us on our last song of the set, a cover of the Rolling Stones classic “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (but I Like It).” Twisted Sister had been closing shows with an anarchic rendition of the song for years, and it had always been a crowd-pleaser, but why not bring out a bona fide English heavy metal legend to further legitimize us? Pete was currently in the studio rehearsing with Fastway, so he suggested bringing Fast Eddie Clarke along to jam as well. Even better!

  We arrived at Reading at just past noon, a few hours before our set, and the place was already up and rocking. On this third day of the event, more than thirty-five thousand people were in attendance. Finally, a bigger crowd than we had ever played to on our own. The band and I made our way to the stage to get a better look.

  With a large camping area off to the right, the two stages were side by side, and the huge crowd was split between them. The people who wanted the best view of the band currently on would pack themselves in front of that stage. The people who were more interested in the band coming up next would wait impatiently in front of the second stage while it was being set up. This way they could still see the band currently on while securing a good spot for the next band. This alternating system allowed for no major break between bands.