by Dee Snider
THIS STORY IS MINE.
I’m the guy that gave it all to beat the odds, left everything he had on the stage each night, didn’t screw around on his woman, took care of his kids, and was sober enough to remember it all and write about it . . . myself.
The one thing that has surprised and confused me, though, is my unlikely transformation into a “beloved public figure.” How did the unpopular kid, who grew up to be the angry young man, who became the ’80s poster boy for the evils of rock ’n’ roll, arrested for profanity and assault, and boycotted by parents and religious groups, become the likeable mensch he is today?
shut up and give me the mic
DEE’S NOT GONNA TAKE IT
As lead singer and songwriter of Twisted Sister, Dee Snider became the poster boy for heavy metal, hair bands, and the wild side of rock. Now, in his twisted new memoir, he reveals the real stories behind the crazy makeup, the big hair, and badass hits like “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock.”
A classically trained countertenor who sang with his high school choir, Dee remembers the day he decided he was “not gonna take it” and stopped caring what people thought about him. Following in the footsteps of his idols Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, Dee jumped from band to band before meeting Jay Jay French and Twisted Sister. But it wasn’t until he met his costume-designing soul-mate Suzette that they developed his unique style. Dee’s hard work finally paid off with an impressive resume that includes: a monster hit record; smash MTV videos; a long-running radio show, “The House of Hair”; appearances in film (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Howard Stern’s Private Parts, StrangeLand) and television (Growing Up Twisted, Celebrity Apprentice); and a starring role in Broadway’s Rock of Ages. He even authored a teenage survival guide that was required reading in Russia!
In his journey from every parent’s worst teenage nightmare to Renaissance man, Dee avoided the usual pitfalls associated with rock stars. But that didn’t stop Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center from targeting him—a fight that led him to testify before Congress with Frank Zappa. He may have been slapped with a Parental Advisory warning label, but, through it all, Dee stayed positive and focused on being the best he could be.
Filled with entertaining anecdotes and candid confessions, Shut Up and Give Me the Mic takes you through the good times and bad with a heavy metal star who worked as hard as he played, and who did it all for his wife, four kids, and millions of “SMF” (Sick Mother F******) fans.
DEE SNIDER is the lead singer and songwriter for the multiple-platinum-selling heavy metal band Twisted Sister. He is also a noted reality show star, radio personality, and voice-over talent, as well as a screenwriter and author of the book Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide. He has been married to his wife, Suzette, since 1981. Visit www.deesnider.com.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
• THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •
Facebook.com/GalleryBooks
Twitter.com/Gallery_Books
JACKET DESIGN BY FLAMUR TONUZI DESIGN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © JEFF KATZ LOS ANGELES STUDIO
COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER
shut up and
give me the mic
Thank you for purchasing this Gallery Books eBook.
Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Gallery Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Dee Snider
Note to Readers: This work is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of his experiences over a period of years. Some dialogue and events have been re-created from memory and, in some cases, have been compressed to convey the substance of what was said and what occurred.
“Burn in Hell”: Words and Music by Daniel Dee Snider. Copyright © 1984 by Snidest Music. All Rights in the United States Administered by Universal Music—Z Melodies. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
“We’re Not Gonna Take It”: Words and Music by Daniel Dee Snider. Copyright © 1984 by Universal Music—Z Melodies and Snidest Music. All Rights in the United States Administered by Universal Music—Z Melodies. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Lyrics for “Tasty” by Peppi Marchello. Copyright © 1974. Publisher: Uncle Rat Music.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books hardcover edition May 2012
GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Designed by Jaime Putorti
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Snider, Dee
Shut up and give me the mic : a twisted memoir / Dee Snider.—1st hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Snider, Dee. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.S6728A3 2012
782.42166092—dc23
[B]
2012000597
ISBN 978-1-4516-3739-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-3741-0 (ebook)
For Suzette
Your undying and selfless love, support, and devotion helped all my dreams come true. I could never have done it without you . . . and I wouldn’t have wanted to.
I love you, forever. . . .
Contents
Forewarned
Prologue
Chapter 1: I’m Gonna Be a Beatle
Chapter 2: ”This Boy Can Sing!“
Chapter 3: No, No, a Hundred Times No
Chapter 4: To Be or Not to Be
Chapter 5: Crash and Burn #1
Chapter 6: This is Twisted Sister?
Chapter 7: Wild Enema Nozzles
Chapter 8: Oh, Suzy Q . . .
Chapter 9: The Demolition Squad
Chapter 10: So This Is Christmas
Chapter 11: The Gauntlet Is Thrown
Chapter 12: Leaps and Bounds
Chapter 13: That “Just Jailed” Look
Chapter 14: I’m Just a Sweet Transvestite
Chapter 15: You’re Gonna Burn in Hell
Chapter 16: O Come, All Ye Faithful
Chapter 17: I’m Snider Than you Are
Chapter 18: Bang the Drum Slowly
Chapter 19: The Doldrums
Chapter 20: I Got You Babe
Chapter 21: Drums, Drums, Drums, Drums!
Chapter 22: Lemmy Kilmister: Fairy Godmother
Chapter 23: Scarred for Life
Chapter 24: I Can’t Believe they Threw a Shite
Chapter 25: Man-O-Wimp and the New Flower Children
Chapter 26: It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll . . . But They Like It
Chapter 27: The Price
Chapter 28: Welcome to the Real World
Chapter 29: Welcome to the Promised Land
Chapter 30: That’s a Horse of a Different Color
Chapter 31: The Ayatollah of Rock and Ro
lla
Chapter 32: The Guarantee
Chapter 33: Twenty Pounds of Shite in a Five-Pound Sack
Chapter 34: The Game Changer
Chapter 35: What the Hell Did He Just Say?
Chapter 36: Why Does the Rain Smell Like Pee?
Chapter 37: Have Some Cheese, Ratt!
Chapter 38: How the Hell Did I Get Both Platform Shoes in My Mouth?
Chapter 39: “These Times They are A-Changin’”
Chapter 40: A Rock Star Is Born
Chapter 41: “Click Click Boom!”
Chapter 42: “Mr. Dee Snider . . . the Twisted Sister”
Chapter 43: What Do You Mean “Nobody Showed Up?”
Chapter 44: And Then the Other Shoe Dropped
Chapter 45: “We All Fall Down”
Chapter 46: How Do You Say “Holy Shit!” in Russian?
Chapter 47: “Putting the ’Desperate‘ in Desperado”
Chapter 48: “Whadaya Mean you Didn’t Listen to the Record?”
Chapter 49: Pissin’ Against the Wind
Epilogue
Photographs
Thank-Yous
Photo Credits
Endnotes
Forewarned
Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
People never seem to get tired of hearing about it. I guess that’s the great promise (or failure) of rock ’n’ roll. Not for me, but for most people. If that’s the only thing you’re interested in, this ain’t the book for you. Anger, violence, love, and rock ’n’ roll is more like it.
If the only things that float your boat are journals from drug-addled, ex-junkie, sex-addicted rockers, forget it. Those books are bullshit anyway. Have you ever known a junkie? They can’t remember what they did thirty minutes ago, let alone thirty years ago. They kept a journal? And you believe them? Real heroin addicts can’t hold their own dicks; forget about a pen or pencil. And who isn’t addicted to sex? What a scam.
I’m the guy that gave it all to beat the odds, left everything he had on the stage each night, didn’t screw around on his woman, took care of his kids, and was sober enough to remember it all and write about it . . . himself. The only things clouding my memory are the years and a storyteller’s natural tendency to embellish for the better enjoyment of the reader. But no lies.
This is a true story of childish dreams, great struggle, Job-like perseverance, ascension to dazzling heights, megalomaniacal obsession, and a mind-numbing, brutal fall from grace. It’s also about an undying love and dedication between a man and a woman that—though sorely tried—withstood it all. It’s Rocky I, II, III, IV, and the first half of V all rolled into one.
From the vantage point of reinvention and reclamation of my former status, it’s almost hard to believe I was ever that far down. Almost. The physical and emotional scars of my life-wreck remind me just how truly catastrophic my epic failure was . . . and how I never want to do that again. Hell, if a video of my fall were available on YouTube, it would have like a billion hits. My story should inspire and be a cautionary tale at the same time. I hope.
Though I am best known for being the front man for the seminal eighties hair band Twisted Sister, since my return to grace I have done movies, television, radio, and Broadway, been the national spokesperson for a major charitable organization, and even had a town named after me. No mean feat for a two-hit wonder (sorry to disagree with you, VH1) who had been written off as dead and buried by 1987. I know some people out there are still scratching their heads at my even being around. And writing a book? Ha! Trust me, I’m self-aware. I’m not sitting here all puffed up on my “amazing” achievements. I don’t put much importance in what I’ve done, but hopefully something is to be learned from how I did it or didn’t do it. And I do know there are three sides to every story. That’s right, three. Yours, theirs . . . and the truth.
This story is mine.
The one thing that has surprised and confused me though is my unlikely transformation into a “beloved public figure.” How did the unpopular kid who grew up to be the angry young man, who became the eighties poster boy for the evils of rock ’n’ roll, arrested for profanity and assault, and boycotted by parents and religious groups, become the likable mensch he is today? Alice Cooper—a man who has experienced this same strange phenomenon—says that people just got used to us. “If you stay around long enough, you become a part of Americana,” he once told me. “People just expect us to be there.” Kind of like Norm from Cheers, I guess. (Everyone in the bar yells, “Dee!”) Any way you explain it, after years of rejection, final acceptance, then wholesale abandonment, it did take a bit of getting used to. But I have.
Prologue
i just kept hoping i’d wake up
It’s raining. Great. Way to make a bad situation even worse. It’s 1993 and as I sit inside my beat-up, over-135,000-mile 1984 Toyota minivan (anything but “rock star”), I read the flyers one last time: HAIR & MAKEUP FOR WEDDINGS. CALL SUZETTE, then our phone number. Simple, to the point, and a way for Suzette to make a hundred bucks for a couple of hours’ work on a weekend. Nothing like pimping out your wife’s talents.
Loser.
I pull the hood of my sweatshirt tightly over my head, not just to protect me better from the rain, but to keep people from recognizing me. Almost ten years after my heyday, and even with a hat and glasses on, people are still coming up to me every day and saying “Hey, aren’t you . . . ?” Damn this face! I remember working with Billy Joel and him saying, “Being rich and famous is tough; being poor and famous must really suck.” He was right. Think Billy’s putting flyers on cars tonight?
But that was a decade ago, and I was sitting on top of the world with my band Twisted Sister. We were chart toppers, worldwide media darlings, with a multiplatinum-selling album and international tours. I was the poster boy for heavy metal. I had nice cars, boats, and an expensive house in an upscale neighborhood. We had a housekeeper and a nanny, landscapers, maintenance men, and accountants who paid my bills. I had charge accounts in every store, bodyguards, and first-class everything.
Now it was the ’90s, and I had lost it all. Everything. Except for the truly most important things in life—my wife and kids . . . and I had to provide for them.
Enough stalling, it’s time to get it over with. Spring weddings mean late-winter wedding expos at local catering halls. I step out of the minivan into the night and the bone-chilling rain. Slipping into the secured parking area, I begin to put flyers on windshields. I move fast, not because it’s cold or to finish the job quickly . . . I just don’t want anybody to see me.
Along the way I run into another guy putting flyers on cars . . . and he offers me a job! He’s impressed how fast I work. If only he knew.
Suddenly, I’m spotted by a security guard and I run. Not because of what he will do—throw me off the property?—but because I’m afraid he’ll recognize me and say, “Hey, you’re Dee Snider. What happened to you?”
As I run, I think for the millionth time, How the hell did I come to this?
1
i’m gonna be a beatle
Did you see ’em last night?! Did you see ’em?!”
Russell Neiderman, the kid I despised most in our neighborhood, was brimming with uncharacteristic, nonconfrontational excitement. It was 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, and all the kids waiting at the bus stop in Freeport, Long Island, were abuzz.
“Did I see who?” I responded, confused by the neighborhood bully’s unusual enthusiasm.
“The Beatles!”
On February 9, 1964, four guys from Liverpool, England, lit up the country with their groundbreaking appearance on the original “Must See TV,” The Ed Sullivan Show. More than 70 million people tuned in to see the show that Sunday night, but I was apparently the only person who didn’t see it. Why? Because my father had banned television in our house. Earlier that year, my father proclaimed (conveniently after our television had broken) that we had all become obsessed with TV and were going to get back to basics: readi
ng, playing board games, building models, etc.
On the upside, I was introduced to comic books and learned to build balsa planes from scratch. On the downside . . . while rock ’n’ roll history was being made, I was building a fucking puzzle!
At the bus stop, I was more than a little confused by the fuss. “The Whatles?” I asked.
“The Beatles,” Neiderman emphatically corrected me. “They’re a rock ’n’ roll group. Everyone was screaming!”
That was all I needed to hear.
BORN ON MARCH 15, 1955, in Astoria, Queens, New York (Not Austria! Astoria), I was the oldest of six children and the firstborn grandchild on my mother’s side of the family. From the day of my birth, and for a little more than a year afterward, I was the golden child. The center of attention and adoration, I could not have been more doted upon by my mother, father, grandparents, aunts and uncles . . . until the deluge began. My mother (and her siblings) started dropping babies as if it were a contest. My mom delivered six babies in eight years. I was not only quickly shoved aside for my more adorable and needy brothers and sister, but more and more expected to fend for myself.
At times, growing up in the Snider household was like living in a madhouse—especially when my father wasn’t around. I clearly remember one rainy day, looking at my mother holding a crying baby in each arm (Mark and Doug), my devilish, five-year-old brother, Frank, chasing my screaming, four-year-old brother, Matt, around her in circles, and my seven-year-old sister, Sue, complaining loudly about something. My mom looked as if she were about to lose her mind. That woman has earned every twitch and neurosis she has!
I went from being the center of attention to being “the oldest” before I was even aware of what had happened, but I still had a desperate need to be the epicenter. So when, at the ripe old age of almost nine, I heard the words “Everyone was screaming” spill from Russell Neiderman’s ofttimes foul mouth, I knew what I had to do. I announced to everyone at the bus stop, who I’m sure didn’t even listen, “I’m going to be a Beatle.” My die had been cast and I didn’t even have the slightest idea what a Beatle actually was!
