Shut Up and Give Me the Mic

by Dee Snider

  Leader of the Pack includes a subtle—yet major—change from our past videos. One I didn’t make consciously, but speaks volumes: Twisted Sister never performs as a band in the video. We never even got close to musical instruments. In all our previous videos, they ultimately came back to our doing what we did best: rocking out. Not in this one. I’m not even going to speculate what that meant, but I’m sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with the “psychological ramifications of this subconscious decision.” It was definitely a creative mistake on my part. Twisted Sister should always have remained heavy metal rockers first and foremost. Period.

  The second of our Come Out and Play videos, for “Be Chrool to Your Scuel,” was expensive and incredibly involved. My idea was for a young teacher (Bobcat Goldthwait) to be struggling to connect with his class. Completely disrespected by the students (as so many young high school teachers are), the young teacher finds solace by listening to his favorite band, Twisted Sister, on his Walkman in the teachers’ lounge. Yes, it did cross my mind that I had the teacher being mean to the kids in the “I Wanna Rock” video, and now I had the students being mean (sort of) to the teacher. To me, Twisted’s music had mass appeal, and this was a way of communicating that. Doing that may have been yet another in a series I like to call Dee Snider’s Greatest Mistakes.

  Back to the video concept. While listening to our music, the teacher falls asleep and dreams that he’s become Dee Snider, his coworkers become the other members of Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper, and the school has turned into a “zombie high.” Great idea, right? Executing it was a whole other thing. Not only did we need a school that we could trash, paint up, and “cobweb” for our set, but we needed a school full of students to become zombies and fill our classroom, hallways, gymnasium, and cafeteria scenes.

  Once again, I had to have the best. As a fan of the Dawn of the Dead and the horror genre in general, I knew there was only one man for the shoot’s special effects makeup: Tom Savini. The man was (and still is) a horror-movie makeup legend, and he wrote the book on zombies. No one else would do. Tom agreed to do the video and to act as well (you’ve seen him in such movies as From Dusk till Dawn and Grindhouse: Planet Terror). He was cast as the teacher who turned into Alice Cooper, who was already locked in for the video shoot. Bonus.

  Filling the school with students turned zombies wouldn’t be a problem. We had so many fans turn out when we announced an open call for I Wanna Rock, we had to bring in the police to control the situation. Twisted Sister was a bigger band than ever; the turn-out for this open call was going to be out of control. Because of my high profile and the expected large crowd, Marty Callner thought it best I sit this casting call out. Marty and his team, along with the security force hired to control the crowd, could handle it. I remember seeing Callner and his crew off that night; Marty was carrying a bullhorn so he could address the anticipated massive crowd.

  When they returned a couple of hours later, the whole production crew seemed pretty dejected.

  “How’d it go? What happened?” I asked.

  “Nobody was there,” Marty answered.

  Click.

  “What do you mean, nobody was there?” I asked, completely confused.

  “Nobody showed up for the open casting call. Don’t worry, we can hire a whole bunch of extras.”

  Nobody showed up? What was the deal with that? I had heard the radio announcements and saw the large ad in the local music paper. There was no way people didn’t know about it. Why didn’t they come? I had so many other production and recording issues to deal with that I stopped thinking about it immediately. It had to be a fluke.

  With Bob Goldthwait, Alice Cooper, Tom Savini, and Lainie Kazan as the lunch lady, the Be Chrool to Your Scuel shoot was incredible. The transformation of the school and Tom Savini’s zombifying of our extras1 was world-class. It took so long to make them all up, and filming the first day went so late, we asked our zombies if they would wear their makeup home, sleep in it, and come back “camera ready” the next day. Every one of them agreed and had a tale to tell the next morning.

  Be Chrool to Your Scuel turned out to be one of our best videos. Too bad nobody got to see it.

  THE COME OUT AND PLAY initiative was a huge undertaking and required a large injection of cash, far greater than the band could afford or the record company was willing to lay out. I would accept only the best for every aspect of the project. The money would roll in after the release of the Come Out and Play album and the tour commenced. As far as I was concerned, money was no object.

  Emulating the specialty album covers of my heroes Alice Cooper, the COAP cover was a custom-ordered, one-of-a-kind, embossed pop-up cover. Besides all the obvious expenses of the design and the mechanics of the cover, the COAP record featured a TS manhole cover with me popping out of it when the manhole cover was lifted. No faux, miniature manhole covers for Twisted Sister. For the cover photo shoot I insisted on an actual cast-iron manhole cover be made with a twelve-by-twelve-foot piece of asphalt “street” poured for the manhole cover to sit in. Now that’s heavy metal (and asphalt).

  To give the graffiti art used on the front and back covers an authenic look, we hired a team of top New York graffiti artists. They worked on the album cover, designed our individual logos for the graffiti wall, did the graffiti art on our stage set, and even graffitied my stage outfits for the tour.

  The back cover of the album was a project and a half. I wouldn’t accept the band members’ graffiti logos being drawn in on the photo after we were shot in front of the wall. I insisted it had to be authentic, and we rented an empty lot with a wall that our artists “tagged.” The painting of the huge wall and the photo shoot took two days, but we didn’t account for a major problem that arose.

  Graffiti artists are territorial, and to have a group of artists from another part of New York City come in and start tagging up walls nearly caused a full-blown turf war. Security had to be hired round the clock to keep the art from being messed with and to protect everyone from potential attacks. The minute the photo shoot was done, the wall was painted over and everything calmed back down.

  The worldwide COAP tour needed to be grandiose. My idea for the stage set was an inner-city street, complete with sidewalk. The design included a three-story brownstone apartment building with accessible upper windows for performances during the show, there was a candy-store front for Eddie to come out of, a junkyard for Mark the Animal to enter the stage from, and a burned-out car for Jay Jay to climb out of, all under an elevated train trestle. The “street” (performing area) even had a re-creation of the album-cover manhole (this one of wood so I could lift it without humiliating myself) for me to crawl out of and onto the stage. A.J.’s drums were painted and designed to look like garbage and paint cans that “emerged” through the front doors of the brownstone at the start of each show. It was fantastic!

  I wanted the stage to look and be lit like a Broadway set and not a rock show. All lights, amplifiers, speaker cabinets, and other equipment were hidden so as to not ruin the theatrical look of the production. Bringing to life this vision was a massive undertaking.

  Once again, Suzette designed and made all the stage costumes, and with no budgetary limits, she outdid herself. For the first time the band (other than me) got out of spandex and into tattered denim, which started a new trend in the hair metal world. Throughout the history of Twisted Sister, Suzette’s designs were innovative and influenced a lot of the styles of the eighties, but she gets virtually no credit for it.

  As you might imagine, it was incredibly expensive to design and then build and transport a show like this from city to city. It required a huge crew, an unprecedented amout of semitrucks and buses, and, of course, everything had to be the best of its kind. Read: a lot of money. I didn’t care. We were Twisted fucking Sister, one of the biggest bands in the world (I thought), and this was going to be my ultimate creative statement and hopefully . . . the end of my rock ’n’ roll career.


  Those of you in the know are probably thinking, He wanted the album and the tour to be a flop? Of course not. As I wrote that statement, I actually chuckled, because it’s the first time I realized I had been granted my wish, but not the way I wanted it. Thanks, Satan. I’m kidding!

  I had always planned on retiring from rock ’n’ roll by the age of thirty-five and living happily ever after. I’d often stated this in interviews and even proclaimed it in response to a question at the Senate hearings. Senator Rockefeller questioned my ability to monitor my then three-year-old son’s music when he was twelve if I was always on the road. I replied, “To be perfectly honest, nine years from now I am going to be well retired.” Well retired. At best I envisioned one more album and tour after this one, so I knew I needed to make this one count.

  So where did we get the money to finance this? Not being a numbers guy I can’t give you all of the specifics, but I do know the record company laid out their “normal” investment (advancing money for the recording budget and some video costs that we would have to repay) and the band put in what we could. We also got some money from the distributors of the coming home video, but the big influx of cash came in the form of the largest advance ever given to a band by a merchandising company.

  Winterland Productions of San Francisco was the biggest rock ’n’ roll merchandising company at that time. They—like pretty much everybody else—knew Twisted Sister’s follow-up record and tour to the Stay Hungry album was going to be huge. They wanted to handle our merchandising and agreed to give us a million-dollar advance on future sales to secure it. This was just what we needed to make the whole initiative happen, and everyone agreed to put the entire advance into the production. The band did not take one dollar for ourselves. We should have been committed—I mean, we were that committed.

  Our deal with Winterland had one caveat. Their lawyers insisted we each sign the contract personally and not as a corporation, making us individually liable for the total advance. I’m not sure I understood this fully at the time, but even if I did, I would have signed anyway. There was no way in a zillion years it was going to fail. But fail I did.

  I don’t think any manager or attorney worth his salt should ever let his client sign personally for something like this, no matter how much the artist insists he wants to. I was then a charging rhino on a mission, and nobody could have changed my mind about anything, but someone should have got the most powerful tranquilizer gun available and brought me down before I signed on that dotted line. But in fairness to them, I guess they (our manager and lawyer) may have “drank the Kool-Aid,” too. They all believed Dee Snider and Twisted Sister could not fail.

  But I did. Big-time.

  COME OUT AND PLAY was to be released just before Thanksgiving, and the preorders from record stores were huge. Whereas they had initially bought five, six, or maybe a dozen copies of Stay Hungry before its release, this time out they were buying thirty, forty, fifty, or even a hundred copies in anticipation of high seasonal demand. This was the first of our albums to be available in the brand-new compact-disc format—the ultimate stocking stuffer—so stores were ordering LPs, cassettes, and CDs. Everyone was sure COAP would be the holiday gift for the rocker in your house.

  Upon its release, the “Leader of the Pack” single got a great reception at radio and MTV, with hundreds of stations adding it to their playlist and MTV making the video the Hip Clip of the Week, immediately putting it into heavy rotation. I remember watching the world premiere of the video on MTV, and the VJ, Mark Goodman, introducing it, saying, “Here it is, for the first time anywhere, another Twisted Sister cartoon video.”

  Click.

  Cartoon? Twisted Sister wasn’t a cartoon. Were we? That certainly wasn’t what I was going for.

  The day “Leader of the Pack” was released to radio, I did an all-day tour of every rock station in Twisted Sister’s power base, the tristate area, to launch the single. In a limo accompanied by my bodyguard, Vic, and an Atlantic Records rep, we started at the crack of dawn and drove from station to station all day long. I expected fans to be lined up at the stations to meet me when I arrived. No such luck. The lack of fans shocked me. What the hell was going on?

  Click.

  Then came the day I heard “Leader of the Pack” on the radio for the first time. As the music went straight from another popular rock track into our song, “LOTP” sounded terrible. Not only did it not pop, but the song sounded as if it had fallen into a hole. No way would it ever catch the ear of the casual radio listener.

  Click.

  The actual demand for the Come Out and Play album was anything but impressive. It was selling, but it certainly wasn’t flying out of the stores. But everything is relative, isn’t it? When we were starting out, we were lucky if a record store carried three or four copies of our album. Before SoundScan (computerized tracking of sales) started being used in the ’90s, record company reps would call the stores each week to see how the product was selling, if the three of four copies were gone, and the store had been asked by a few more people for the album, the record-store salesclerk would say something like “We can’t keep it on the shelves!”

  Impressive words to hear about a band.

  Now, cut to our fourth album, with thirty or forty albums on the shelves. The same store might have sold twenty copies in the first week, but when that call came from the record company and the clerk looked and saw twenty copies still on the shelves, he probably said something like “We still got a pile of ’em.” It gives quite a different impression, doesn’t it? And yet we had sold five times as many albums as before!

  I remember when AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock album came out, it was the follow-up to their 10-million-plus-selling Back in Black (it’s now at 45 million copies worldwide). Expectations were so high that when it sold only 3.5 million copies, the record industry called it a failure. Three and a half million copies!? For Those About to Rock a flop!? Twisted Sister was suffering from this same industry mind-set (though certainly not on the same level).

  No doubt I am making excuses for the record’s sluggish sales, but I’m just trying to show how much this record had going against it.

  And it got worse.

  As we headed into the holidays, having just finished a week of full rehearsals on our massive new stage set for our upcoming tour, I was filled with uncertainty. Advanced ticket sales for our coming shows were soft. Yet, I was still sure that once we got on the road and got to do what we do best—performing live—everything would fall into place and the Come Out and Play master plan would ultimately be the massive success it was destined to be.

  If only.

  44

  and then the other shoe dropped

  Despite growing concern about the future of the Come Out and Play album and tour, I still headed into the holidays feeling like a rock star. If anything, I’m adaptable. I can always find a way to rationalize my situation or position myself to continue to move forward. Hell, that’s how I got Suzette. The same out-of-control ego that got you (meaning any struggling musician) to the top won’t allow you to believe or acknowledge that you might be losing your star. I was a rich, famous rock ’n’ roll star and nothing could or would ever change that. So I thought.

  Christmas was upon us, and Suzette, Jesse, and I went to see the Rockefeller Center tree like a true rock star and his family; we took a limo. While Jesse and Suzette got out to visit the tree, I peered at it through a slightly lowered window, so nobody would see me. I could almost smell it. As I peered, my driver (childhood friend Russ DiBenadetto) said to me, “Howard Stern was talking about you today.”

  “Who’s Howard Stern?” I honestly didn’t know. I’d been a rock ’n’ roll vampire since 1974. I never listened to the radio in the daytime.

  Howard was doing afternoon drive (2:00 to 6:00 p.m.) on K-Rock, and though he was rapidly creating quite a name for himself, he wasn’t nearly the juggernaut he would become a few years later.

  “He was talking abou
t how ugly he thinks you are,” Russ continued.

  “Oh, yeah?” I chuckled. My skin had become so thick over the years that nothing like that could affect me. There’s an old saying, “Any press is good press.” As long as they get my name close to right (the mispronunciation Schneider does get a bit annoying), they can say whatever the fuck they want . . . as long as they don’t try and say it to my face.

  “Yeah,” Russ went on, “he’s gonna be on the David Letterman show tonight.”

  “Really.” I turned to look out the window on the opposite side of the limo. We were parked right in front of 30 Rockefeller Center1—where Late Night with David Letterman was shot each day. “What time is it?” An idea was formulating in my head.

  “Five o’clock—why?”

  I had been on Letterman’s show earlier that year and knew their filming schedule. The nightly show was shot around five each afternoon.

  “I’m gonna give Howard Stern a little taste of reality.” With that, I bolted from the car and headed into 30 Rock.

  Besides that I was one of the most recognizable faces in rock (and this was New York, my power base), the staff knew me from my appearance. This being a very different time securitywise, I was immediately welcomed by the NBC staff and escorted up to Letter-man’s studio. I got off the elevator and was again received with open arms by everyone who worked on the show.

  “Where’s Howard Stern?” I asked.

  Assuming I was a friend, they directed me to his dressing room. I angrily pounded on the door, shouted, “Howard Stern!” then threw it open.

  Inside were an attractive black woman (Robin Quivers), a fairly normal-looking, semi-long-haired guy (Fred Norris), and a tall, glasses-wearing, small-Afroed, mustached geek (nothing like he looks today) with a look of terror on his face. It had to be Howard Stern.