by Dee Snider
When things came apart, rather than pull together with the one person who had been unfailingly supportive of me for my entire career, I built a wall between us and drove her away. Why would Suzette want to be with a loser like me? As my career spiraled downward, I became convinced it would be better for Suzette—and Jesse—if I went on alone.
I truly believe Suzette and I are one of the great love stories of our generation. We were destined to be together, and clearly our lives joined for reasons known . . . and not yet known (who knows what our children or children’s children will achieve?). Now at more than thirty-five years together, I am more convinced of that than ever. Yet I nearly threw it all away—including my son and the subsequent birth of our other three children—because I was too proud to accept, or admit, I needed help. And Suzette was the one person who had been helping me all along.
I BECAME CONVINCED THAT everything would be set right with the release of my next record. But what should that record be? Since Twisted Sister had become more of a mainstream act and the metal community had essentially turned its back on us, I believed my next move should be an even more mainstream album. And I was sure my next release should be a solo album. I didn’t have any intentions of quitting Twisted Sister, I just thought taking a break from the band and doing my own record was the smart move to make. It would give Twisted a break publicly and—I believed—allow us to mount a comeback in a couple of years after the dust settled.
I planned on calling my side project Me and the Boys, and it was going to be very different from Twisted Sister. For starters, I planned on having a keyboard player and a saxophone player (my experience with Clarence Clemons had a great effect on me), and the songs I was writing were much more pop-influenced. I was listening to and studying a lot of Bryan Adams, feeling his mix of rock and pop would be the right balance for me. I even envisioned a radical image change, seeing this band as a bunch of guys you’d find hanging around the local 7-Eleven wearing ripped jeans, Converse All Stars, T-shirts, and jackets—almost an early punk look. That’s the photo I wanted for the album cover.
While I worked on the songs for the record, I continued to film episodes of Heavy Metal Mania for MTV, worked on my book, Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide, and my first screenplay,2 and spent a lot of time hanging out on The Howard Stern Show.
HOWARD AND I, ALONG with Suzette and his wife, Alison, started socializing and became friends. Not only did our relationship grow, but our involvement in the show as well. I say our because while I was having my influence on the Howard Stern Show content, Suzette was helping Howard develop his image.
From the time I first met and then heard Howard on the radio, I couldn’t understand why he looked the way he looked. I’d say to him, “You’re a pirate on the radio; why the hell do you look like an accountant?” Howard asked how he should look, and Suzette and I showed him. In the beginning, I would give him some of my clothes to wear. Suzette became his stylist, taking him out shopping, picking his clothes, and cutting his hair. I convinced him to start wearing sunglasses instead of plain glasses.
“Why?” asked Howard.
“Because it will make your nose look smaller,” I said. Hey, it works for me.
In his movie Private Parts, by the eighties Howard already had his “brunette Dee Snider” look happening.3 That was creative license taken by the writer of the screenplay, necessary for the story arc of the movie. In reality, Howard’s full-blown, eighties hair-metal look didn’t peak until much later. Thanks to Suzette.
A major influence I had on the Stern Show was the introduction of comedians to the regular show mix. My buddy Bob Goldthwait was on tour and coming to New York City to do a show. I told him about the Stern Show and how I thought it would be a great place for him to promote his appearance. Bobcat said he was in. When I called Howard and suggested he have Bob on, he told me he didn’t have comedians on the show because “all they do is shtick.” I told Howard a whole new school of comedians were out there, like Bobcat and Sam Kinison, who were sharp and improvisational. Howard wasn’t convinced, but agreed to give Goldthwait a try. Bobcat killed on The Howard Stern Show, and as a result of his repeat appearances and success, it led to Howard’s bringing on Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, Gilbert Gottfried, Pat Cooper, and more. Great comedians became a staple on the show (and still are) and are responsible for some of Howard’s most legendary broadcasts.
With the band unexpectedly off the road, and time on my hands, I began to appear regularly on Stern’s show and had some pretty legendary appearances myself. Howard’s show had moved back to mornings, so since I lived fairly near him, I would go to his house at 5:00 a.m., and we would limo (driven by Ronnie, his legendary driver, of course) into the city. Howard would meditate for the half-hour ride, while I sat fairly comatose—it was five in the damn morning! Starting at 6:00 a.m. I would sit in as a show member for the entire five-hour broadcast, then Howard and I would limo back home. Some weeks I did this multiple times. I loved the original team of Howard, Robin Quivers, Fred Norris, Jackie Martling, and Gary Dell’Abate and couldn’t get enough of just hanging out and joking around with them for hours on end. I felt like a member of the team, and I was honored to be treated like one by all who were involved. It was an incredible experience. This camaraderie was what had been missing for so many years for me in my band.
Howard Stern was the first person to recognize my value beyond singing with Twisted Sister. As my music career began to backslide and the entertainment industry backed further and further away from me, the Stern Show continued to have me on. One day I asked Howard why, and he said, “Dee, it doesn’t matter to me who you are, it’s what you are. I’ve had huge stars offered up to me for interviews and I have passed because they are boring on the air. You’re great on the radio. The listeners love you.”
Not only did I really need to hear something like that at a dark time, but appearing on Howard’s show eventually led to my doing voice-over work, my own radio shows, television shows, making movies, and more. Howard not only championed me with agents and producers, but by my being on the show, people started to realize I had more to offer than “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Thanks, Howard. I love you, man.
46
how do you say “holy shit!” in russian?
My first book, Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide, wasn’t my idea. I was approached by Doubleday Publishing to write a sequel to a popular book from the fifties called ’Twixt Twelve and Twenty by a singer named Pat Boone. Being a popular artist of the time whom—apparently—young people related to, his book on growing up was a bestseller. The editors at Doubleday saw me as a modern-day (Pat Boone?) pop figure whom kids would listen to. I’d never thought about doing a book like that, but accepted the challenge . . . and the check. Since at that time I wasn’t up to the task of writing the book myself, I was assigned a rock journalist named Philip Bashe to work with.
Phil did extensive interviews with me on a wide range of teen-related subjects, from cliques in school, to masturbation, to coping with death, and I gave him my insights and opinions at length on all of them. His job was to translate the interview tapes and put them into book form along with any pertinent facts and information (such as Suicide Prevention hotline numbers or how to contact Planned Parenthood) that would be useful to my readers. I wanted the book to read as if a big brother or cool uncle were talking to you, not be overintellectualized—like this book—just straight talk, in terms a teen could understand.
When Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide was released, with the exception of the Christian Science Monitor (which denounced the book because it was pro-choice), everyone from Psychology Today to Circus magazine said it was the best book ever written on growing up. It was head and shoulders above everything else out there, and a godsend for teens. Every other book was written by a teacher, psychologist, doctor, parent, or minister.
Several years later, the brother of Twisted Sister’s incredible assistant manager (and future Widowmaker manag
er), Pam Rousakis, came back from a summer college-exchange program in the then Soviet Union.
“They’re using your book as a textbook,” he said.
“The Teenage Survival Guide?” I asked. It was the only book I had written, but I must have heard him wrong.
“Yes. It’s being used as a textbook.”
“In a Soviet college? No way.”
“I’m not kidding you. I couldn’t believe it either.”
Tommy was not the kind of guy to mess around with something like that, but still . . .
A few years after that, I received word my book was being released in installments in the only Soviet teen magazine. Was that even possible?! In the mideighties the only Soviet television channel had held up a photo of me, with all of my makeup on, saying, “This is Daniel Dee Snider, from Baldwin, New York. He is a typical example of American decadence. You can’t tell if he is a man or a woman.” Maybe in the Soviet Union you couldn’t. I could just picture some massive, steroided-out Soviet shot-putter gazing lovingly at my photo in his gym locker: “Look at Dee Snider. Isn’t she beautiful?”
I still could not believe they were reading my book behind the Iron Curtain . . . until I met a Russian fan who brought me all of the issues of the Soviet teen magazine my book was in.
After the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union came apart at the seams, my agents received a call from a Russian publisher who wanted to release my book in hardcover. A deal was cut and the book was released. The original picture of me on the cover with my mass of long, blond, curly hair had been removed and replaced with a “jazzy” drawing of some “happening” teens. Not long after that, I got a call for an interview with the Moscow Times. They wanted to know how it felt to know that every Russian child had to read my Teenage Survival Guide. My book was mandatory reading!?
To this day, I hear from people (American and Russian) who tell me how my book helped them when they were growing up and changed their lives. Copies, if you can find them, can go for hundreds of dollars. Go figure. My own kids have read the book on their own and say it is great but gives them a bit too much information about their dad. Nobody needs to know about the first time their father masturbated. Back then, I just tried to be as honest and as frank as I could be with my readers. Now with four kids and grandchildren, I don’t know if I could still be that honest about my teen years, but I’m glad I was.
WITH MY MUSICAL CAREER in a tailspin, having quit Heavy Metal Mania because I was overexposed (and MTV didn’t want to pay me), and with my marriage crashing and burning, somehow both my management and record companies convinced me to make the next bad move in my career: turn my solo album into a Twisted Sister record.
I don’t remember how they convinced me, but in the depths of a deepening functional depression, I was becoming less and less sure of myself. Not even a year after Twisted Sister’s and my fall from grace, we went back into the studio and started to work on a new album, this time with legendary Ratt producer Beau Hill. Guaranteed by Atlantic Records’ president that the label was going to get totally behind Twisted’s new album and reestablish the band, Hill signed on to a sinking ship.
During the band’s relative hiatus of several months, A. J. Pero had quit Twisted Sister to do a solo album with a band called Cities. While I always knew he was unhappy about “playing like a monkey” (read: simple, straight drumbeats) as he called it, I could never understand why he quit. Twisted Sister wasn’t doing anything at that time, why not just do the Cities record as a side project? We were getting weekly salaries the entire time we were on break, he could have collected his check while working on the Cities album, which paid nothing.
Years later, when I finally got to ask him that question, A.J. explained to me that when he told Jay Jay he wanted to do a side project, Jay Jay told him he couldn’t stay in Twisted Sister and play with Cities; he would have to make a choice. With things in Twisted Sister being so uncertain, and A.J. wanting to play and show people his range as a drummer (believe me when I tell you, A. J. Pero can play absolutely any style), he resigned. Twisted Sister’s next drummer, Joe Franco, is an incredible journeyman drummer (he wrote the book on double bass drumming, the standard in the industry, used at the Berklee College of Music) and a longtime friend to us all. He had been in the band the Good Rats during our club days, but had moved on to work with a ton of other recording bands, including Canada’s Chilliwack and Atlantic recording artist Fiona, Beau Hill’s then love.1 He was a perfect fit.
Love Is for Suckers musically reflects the more commercial direction I wanted to take my solo record in, while lyrically reflecting my dour mental state. I was mad at the world and saw no future in my relationship with Suzette. By the time we started recording the album in New York City, I was ensconced in a hotel and never went home.
In a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, Suzette and I agreed to see a counselor. With over ten years in the relationship and an amazing son together, a lot was riding on a potential divorce. The minute the therapist started talking to me, it became woefully apparent where—or should I say, with whom—the problem lay.
Surprise, surprise! I was the one with the total career crash-and-burn. Instead of clinging to my relationship with my always-supportive wife and partner, I was lashing out at her, along with everybody else in my world. The doctor said I needed to spend time working with him one-on-one before he could address any problems Suzette and I were having as a couple. I accepted his diagnosis, but I told him no way was I starting down a lifetime path of weekly therapy sessions so I could slowly sort things out. I arranged to see him every day for two or three hours straight, until we figured it out, and sure enough, the doctor and I made it through the muck and mire of a lifetime of personal issues.2 By the end of recording in the spring of 1987, Suzette and I were back together and on our way to being stronger than ever . . . and she was pregnant shortly thereafter. Too bad I can’t say the same thing about Twisted Sister. Being back together and stronger . . . not pregnant.
THE MISGUIDED RECORDING OF Love Is for Suckers as a Twisted Sister album did absolutely nothing to improve my situation with the band. It only made things worse. Maybe the whole group should have gone into therapy.
While the album was technically a Twisted Sister record, I didn’t do anything differently recording it than if it were my solo album. I made a more commercial-sounding record, brought in outside musicians for various parts, and used what I wanted from the Twisted Sister arsenal of talent. I’m not saying it was all as simple as that—I still had to play all sorts of games politically—but ultimately that was the result.
To make it even less of a Twisted Sister record than it already was, I/we decided to take off our war-paint makeup and tone down our costumes to fit in with every other hair band out there at that time. Brilliant! The band that had essentially created the hair metal genre was abandoning their look to fit in with the bands that came after them. Idiot. I was even doing photo sessions in pastel colors and acid-washed jeans, wearing Converse All Stars. How not Twisted Sister was that!?
Love Is for Suckers, while a great record with hit potential, was not a Twisted Sister album. Sure, there are definitely some “twisted” moments (“Wake Up the Sleeping Giant” for one), but with the songwriter of Twisted Sister (me) writing the songs after only writing Twisted songs before that, and Twisted Sister playing the songs, the TS sound and attitude was going to come through somehow.
The album was released in August, and—prepare yourself—Atlantic Records didn’t pull out all the stops! What a shocker. The label did go through all the motions of a record release. We shot a typical hair-metal video for our single “Hot Love” with former Billy Joel and the Hassles/Attila drummer turned video maker Jon Small (best known for his video work with Billy Joel). Upon release, the video was immediately put into “nonexistent rotation” on MTV. Sure, Twisted Sister helped establish and define MTV as a network, and I cocreated and hosted what would become the hugely successful Headbangers Ball, but
what had we done for them lately? Pricks.
The album’s promotion was limited, as was any kind of real record-company push. To quote Beau Hill, “I went looking for the record in the stores and found one copy under a half-eaten hamburger in the stockroom.” Not quite the full-court press he’d been promised by El Presidente.
To be fair to all guilty parties involved, in the summer of ’87, Twisted Sister was still suffering from the drubbing we had taken in 1986. Not nearly enough time had passed for the dust to have settled and the metal community to be ready and open to the return of Twisted Sister. This is why I wanted to do a solo album. I believed it would have been a success—which it more than likely would not have been—but more important than that, it would have given the band and the fans a chance to catch our breath, regroup, and come back much stronger in, say, 1988 or ’89. I believe if we had followed my plan, Twisted Sister would not have broken up. Sure, we would have been crucified, had the flesh ripped from our still-quivering carcasses and our bones stomped to dust by grunge in the early nineties . . . but we wouldn’t have broken up!
The Love Is for Suckers tour didn’t last long and was depressingly disappointing. Touring with the then rising Great White and TNT, I was reminded of our first tour with the band Blackfoot, who were then at the end of their career. I looked at them as has-beens, and here we were in the same position. After the glory of the Stay Hungry tour and the—albeit failed—magnitude of the Come Out and Play world tour, traveling now from city to city, a shell of our former, powerful selves (using Stryper’s leftover stage ramps because they were cheap!), was pathetic and sad. To make matters worse, our friend and soundman, Charlie “Sixth Sister” Barreca, and the band’s longtime road/tour/co-manager and friend, Joe Gerber, were no longer working with the band.
Joe Gerber had quit after being denied a long-promised “piece of the action.” He had always been assured by the band that his years of dedication and service would be rewarded; Joe trusted us to do the right thing. When the band finally sat down before the release of Come Out and Play to decide what to give him, the majority voted (not me) to give Joe an insulting bonus structure with a cap that gave him an ice cube’s chance in hell of making any real money. Joe’s then girlfriend, Stacey Sher (former Creamcheese Productions’ production assistant, now a big-time Hollywood producer), called the failure of the COAP album and tour “the curse of the cap.” Hurt by the band’s vote of no confidence, Joe, being the professional he is, stayed through the COAP tour, then left.