Shut Up and Give Me the Mic

by Dee Snider

  “I thought stickering your record was optional?” I said.

  “It is, and our distributors label their records,” Ric Wake told me. “Some stores won’t carry an explicit record without a sticker.”

  One of my fears about these warning labels was coming true. Labeling your record wasn’t exactly optional if stores wouldn’t carry your record if you didn’t. Even worse, some stores were using the label to segregate records or, even worse, not rack or even carry the record. And in a real catch-22 with some stores, if you didn’t label your explicit record they wouldn’t carry it, and if you did label it, they wouldn’t carry it. That’s not much of a fucking option, if you ask me!

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ric added, “it’s not a sticker, its part of the artwork.”

  What!? Was he fucking kidding me!? Indignity heaped upon indignity. They took the art on the cover and made the warning label a physical part of it, something that could not be removed after purchase. The idea boggles the mind! These conservative assholes were taking it upon themselves to mutilate an artist’s vision. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Blood and Bullets cover art was a work of genius, but the very thought of doing something like this was an insult to artists everywhere.

  “You either do it or they won’t distribute your CD,” Ric finished after listening to a long, expletive-laced tirade from me in need of its own PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker.

  If I had known about this in advance, I would have made the PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker the album cover and put a sticker-size square of the album art on the sticker.

  That’s what’s known as irony.

  49

  pissin’ against the wind

  In the spring of 1992, Widowmaker’s Blood and Bullets was unleashed on a literally unsuspecting public by fledgling indie label Esquire Records. After a four-and-a-half-year absence from the music scene, Dee Snider—sort of—had a new band and album out. Say muthafuckin’ hallelujah!

  By the summer, the CD had made enough inroads on the scene that the band was ready to tour. In August, after a week of rehearsals, Windowmaker (the first radio ad for the band mispronounced our name) made our premiere performance at the Live Wire nightclub in Stanfordville, New York. It was essentially my first time back onstage in almost five years. I never thought I would be away for so long.

  Widowmaker toured through the end of 1992, slowly building awareness of my new project and album sales. We had crossed a major indie-record plateau of fifty thousand CD sales and were starting to show signs of life, when the final final nail was driven into the coffin of my creative career and financial stability. Esquire Records closed its doors. Actually, they didn’t close their doors as much as the Canadian government seized all their property and chained their doors shut. Esquire Records’ Canadian financiers had raised their money in a questionable manner, and the Canadian authorities weren’t happy about it.

  With the death of Widowmaker’s label came the end of the record’s availability, the end of the tour, and the end of the band. Just like that, I was finished and out of options. No more record-company or publishing-company advances (I was deep in the red), no more credit-card cash advances or charging (the cards were all maxed out), no more lines of credit or loans (I was a bad credit risk). I was 100 percent, absolutely, without a doubt, totally done. Check and fucking mate.

  I RETURNED TO MY wonderful family—my oasis—for the holidays and, in 1993, began desperately trying to figure out my next moves . . . of which I had none. I was further delving into screenplay writing (something I had started after my experiences with making rock videos) and was working on my third screenplay, The Junk Squad. A family film, based on my kids and their friends in our Coral Springs neighborhood, I would eventually sell it (a couple of times to different studios, but it was never produced), but that wouldn’t happen for years.

  The last of our house-sale money was running out, and I began to make desperate financial moves such as selling our possessions, cashing out retirement-plan money, and selling the valuable Disney stock my father had given me for the kids.

  When I met Suzette, I knew if I could win her heart, I would have someone who loved me for me and be with me through thick and thin. Well, things had gotten paper-thin, but there was never the slightest doubt that she would stay by my side through these darkest of times. We started out with nothing, got everything, and now, even though we’d/I’d lost it all, Suzette still stood shoulder to shoulder with me. I had written the Desperado song “Ride Through the Storm”1 about her, and since Bernie Tormé and I had created it in 1988, things had gone from bad to way worse.

  The storm had turned into a Category 5 hurricane.

  Obviously, we could no longer afford our beautiful rental house in Florida, so in the summer of ’93, Suzette and I went up to New York and searched for a much more economical rental to move our family into. I couldn’t foresee any work for me in Florida (I didn’t even know what kind of job I could get) and thought my chances for some kind of employment were better back North.

  The rental houses we went to see were terrifying. Impoverished living conditions in downscale neighborhoods were all we could afford. I couldn’t imagine living in them and having people sooner or later figure out it was the Dee Snider, lead singer of the multiplatinum band Twisted Sister, living there. That my poor family had to suffer as well for my failings made me feel even worse. The true humiliation of this next massive step down began to set in.

  Having run out of time and options, and about to lock in one of the awful choices Suzette and I had found, a brand-new real estate ad appeared in the paper. In the realm of what we were dealing with, it seemed too good to be true: a suitable house for rent in a good school district, for the right price. We rushed to see it immediately and snapped it up. All things considered, it was perfect. Well, at least it wasn’t horrible.

  Whereas professional movers had moved us down to Florida in August of 1990, in the last week of August 1993, we packed up all of our belongings, loaded up a couple of rental trucks, and with the help of Suzette’s brother Billy, moved our stuff back to Long Island ourselves. Our family and friends met us at the other end and helped us stuff thirty-five hundred square feet of furniture and possessions into a nineteen-hundred-square-foot house. We had sold off all but one of our cars—the pink Jeep—and downsized what we could, but still we had a basement filled with stuff we hoped would one day furnish our own house again.

  WITHIN ONE WEEK OF cramming my family and what was left of our belongings into our run-down Long Island rental house, my dog was run over by a car and killed. Are you fucking kidding me?! It was like living some terrible country song: “I lost everything, then my dawg dieeeed!” What a freakin’ nightmare! This was how things continued to spiral downward, yet I still wasn’t defeated. Why? Because my wife and children were all fine, and I was healthy and strong enough to get up each day and try again. This was and still is my sole criterion for staying positive and continuing to fight.

  Picture the reverse: I had all the money, fame, and success in the world, but my family life was a mess. To me, that is the definition of true tragedy. Sure, we all want and hope to have it all, but it doesn’t always work like that—especially not for me . . . then.

  With no income to support our family, Suzette immediately stepped up and got a part-time job at a local hair salon. Though loath to do it, she did because it needed to be done. Imagine you’re working in a beauty parlor, washing someone’s hair, and through conversation (or gossip) they find out you’re Dee Snider the rock star’s wife. You can predict the question that followed every time: “Why are you working here?” The mainstream views rock ’n’ roll stardom the same way aspiring rock stars view it . . . as a finish line. Most think that once they’ve heard people on the radio or seen them on television, they must be set for life. If only.

  The money Suzette brought in working part-time at a salon surely helped, but it wasn’t
enough to pay all the bills, and I certainly wasn’t going to put the weight of the family’s well-being on her shoulders alone. But if I couldn’t record or perform music, what else was I qualified to do? As my mind raced through the terrible few job choices a former rock star with no other talents, training, or abilities could do, an opportunity was presented to me. Albeit a humbling one.

  My brother Matt and his wife, Joyce, had a few businesses going and needed an office assistant to answer phones, do some light bookkeeping, and make calls. This menial labor paid just $5 an hour. Matt knew I was looking for some kind of work, but was hesitant to even mention it to me, for fear he might insult his rock star older brother. When he did, I jumped at the offer.

  Though the job paid terribly, it had two valuable aspects: my brother’s office wasn’t in a public area, and since this was the early nineties and computers were not as ubiquitous as they are today, Matt said I could tell people I was there using his office computer to work on my new screenplay. I’d be an employee undercover!

  With only one car in the family, I couldn’t leave my wife and children without transportation. Fortunately, my brother’s office wasn’t too far away. Every morning, I would get on my bicycle and ride the four miles to work, passing through a cemetery on the way. This brought me back to the perspective Marty Callner had made me aware of that day almost ten years earlier in LA: at least I was still aboveground!

  BETWEEN THE COUPLE OF hundred bucks I was making each week and the money Suzette was bringing home, we were barely squeaking by—and we still had debts. Looking at our second bankruptcy in less than five years (only I had gone bankrupt the first time; now we would have to bankrupt Suzette), I wanted to make every effort to work something out before reneging on what we owed and completely destroying what was left of our credit.

  I contacted the Better Business Bureau’s debt-consolidation arm to discuss their helping me somehow get our creditors to ease up on us. The only way the BBB would take a look at my situation was for me to bring my “books” to their Manhattan offices and meet them face-to-face. This was my worst nightmare! I could not imagine a more embarrassing situation, but I had to do it. I had no one to blame for the financial mess we were in but me. I almost wished I’d drank and got high, because then I could at least blame my screwing up on the alcohol and drugs.

  I gathered up all the financial records, tax returns, and bank statements showing my economic demise, got on the Long Island Rail Road, and rode into the city. At the BBB, I sat with all the others suffering from overwhelming debt and waited my turn. Even with my hair pulled back and wearing a baseball cap, I was sure everyone there recognized me, though no one said anything. Why would they? Would any of them in their wildest dreams—would I, in my wildest dreams, for that matter—imagine that Dee Snider from the multimillion-record-selling rock band Twisted Sister would be sitting next to them on the Better Business Bureau’s debt-consolidation bench?

  When my turn came, I entered the office and laid out my case. I danced around the issue of exactly what I had done as an entertainer to make a living.

  Finally the examiner asked, “What kind of entertainer were you?”

  “A singer.”

  “What kind of singing do you do?”

  “Rock.” I wasn’t giving away any more than I had to.

  “In a band?”

  “Yes,” I said, fighting the tide.

  I could see she was clearly getting tired of playing Twenty Questions. “Mr. Snider, what band did you sing with?”

  “Twisted Sister,” I mumbled.

  Thankfully, my caseworker was unimpressed. That was probably the only time I was happy someone didn’t care.

  After going over all the numbers and my situation, she concluded the BBB could do nothing to help me. My only recourse was to file for bankruptcy . . . again. This time it would not be some luxurious, high-end, everything-handled-by-the-best-lawyers, lose-nothing-and-come-out-smelling-like-a-rose bankruptcy. This was going to be a DIY, down-and-dirty, starting-over-from-the-bottom bankruptcy. The only upside was we had already bottomed out and had nothing left to lose.

  Starting over again is every bit as ugly as you might imagine. Thrift shops become your friends (and thank God for ’em), and cutting coupons is a must. You can’t do anything unless you find a deal or a sale—everything is done on the cheap—and what a treat all-you-can-eat buffets are. The kids love ’em.

  Don’t get me wrong; there’s no shame in doing these things. It was some of the smartest money-handling we ever did. It’s just that after having struggled so long, and having finally made it to the top, to have lost it all and fallen so far . . . living this way was a constant reminder of my epic failure.

  The toughest part for us was the impact it would have on the kids. All parents want their children to have the best of everything; especially the things they never had. To have to say no to our kids was terrible. It made us feel like bad parents. We wouldn’t even let them come into a convenience store with us because we didn’t have the money to spare to get them a piece of candy. We were that fucking broke!

  Both a blessing and a curse when you are doing poorly is the out-pouring from family and friends. While you welcome the help and appreciate their “donations,” you feel even worse about yourself and loathe their pity. One of those donations was from my brother Doug. He had a 1984 Toyota minivan (oddly the year of my greatest success) he had bought from our brother Matt (and still owed two payments on) he used for his hardware/lawn-mower store as a service vehicle. Doug and his employees had run the odometer up past 135,000 miles and put huge holes in the floor. The car still ran great, but looked and smelled like shit, so Doug was going to get rid of it. He asked me if I would like to have it. I jumped at the offer.

  With a little elbow grease, some pieces of sheet metal for the holes in the floor, and a hand-cut carpet, Galileo (the nickname I gave it because it looked so much like the space shuttle on the original Star Trek television series) was ready to transport our tribe wherever we needed to go. We were grateful to have it.

  ONE DAY SUZETTE CAME to me with another idea for how she could make some extra money. Brides-to-be and their wedding parties often paid to have their makeup and hair done for the big day; she had seen many of them come into the beauty parlor where she worked. Suzette thought she could make money going to brides’ homes the day of their wedding, and doing them up for a fee. Other than the fact that I would be sending my wife and mother of my children into total strangers’ houses, it sounded like a good idea. We were desperate. All she needed were customers, so I printed up flyers to put on windshields of parked cars at the same local catering hall we had had our wedding reception at eleven years before. I had officially hit rock bottom.

  As I headed out that night, I didn’t allow myself to feel bad. I still had “it.” That feeling of completion I had discovered driving with my young family all those years ago. With the exception of Suzette’s and my near breakup several years earlier, I had never lost “it,” and through all the ups and downs, “it” had been the one constant that kept me going. As long as I had Suzette and the kids—and they were happy, safe, and healthy—I had it all. And as long as I could get up each day and continue to fight the good fight—providing for them the best that I could—I had nothing to gripe about. Whining and complaining creates negative energy, and I am all about staying positive. With Suzette, Jesse, Shane, and Cody in my life, a roof over our heads, and food in our bellies—while there was plenty more to achieve and want—I had everything I needed.

  I still had “it.”

  Epilogue

  Unbelievably, things did get worse. By the mid-nineties my sole obvious talent became obsolete. With the advent of grunge, it was as if I had spent my entire life studying and working in a field of medicine where the disease had been cured. The record-buying public no longer had any interest in the way I sang, performed, looked, or wrote songs. Heavy metal—especially my brand—could not have been deader.

&nb
sp; I released a second Widowmaker record, this time on the fledgling CMC Records (thanks again to Ric Wake, Pam Rousakis Praetorius, and company), Stand By for Pain. This great record tried to embrace the changing times, but as one MTV executive put it, “Kids want their own rock ’n’ roll heroes, not their brothers’.” Maybe not true in Ozzy Osbourne’s case, but certainly in mine.

  Since I needed to do other things to pay the bills, I couldn’t commit the time Widowmaker needed to make it happen. I did allot a couple of months to tour and help promote the CD, but we were cut short when our drummer, Joe Franco, got his hand slammed in a van door on our way into a show. This was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Things hadn’t been going well, and I was tired of pulling into towns for a show1 only to find no CDs in the stores. The record company support was pitiful. My brother Mark, who had gone from radio production to record promotion, observed that my even being aware of how much product was in the stores meant I was getting too old for a young man’s game. He said the same conditions most certainly existed in the early days of Twisted Sister, but I was too naive to know any better and just continued to smash my heavy metal head against the wall until the band’s fans and the record stores demanded our album. Young Dee Snider didn’t “allot” time for a tour and call local record stores to find out how many pieces of “product” were in the bins. Young Dee Snider put his head down, dug in his five-inch heels, and charged.

  Mark was right.

  Yet another of my brothers, Matt, when I related my maddening need to prove that I wasn’t a one-hit-wonder, uttered these life-changing words: “Does it have to be music?”