Shut Up and Give Me the Mic

by Dee Snider

  Word had spread like wildfire in Texas, and the Southern conservatives were in an uproar. It didn’t help that by the time we reached East Bumfuck—or wherever we were—the story being reported by the local news had mutated. Now they were saying I had invited underage girls in the audience up on stage to perform oral sex on me! Much worse.

  Apparently the New York street colloquialism suck my muthafuckin’ dick didn’t translate well in the South. When we arrived at the venue, the police were there in force with complaint forms already filled out to arrest me the minute I spewed one word of profanity.

  Joe Gerber was working the phone trying to hire a local attorney to represent the band’s interests in this situation. No luck. While every lawyer in a hundred-mile radius passed on the offer to represent us, one attorney, upon hearing who was looking to hire him, hung up with a curt “Why don’t you suck my muthafuckin’ dick,” said with a full-blown Texas drawl. So much for Southern hospitality.

  Controlling my vulgarity has never been a problem for me, but not cursing that night just to save my ass didn’t seem right. That’s when I remembered seeing author Gore Vidal on the Johnny Carson show years before. In 1974 he was promoting his new book, Myron, the sequel to the controversial Myra Breckinridge. In Myron, protesting a recent US Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, Vidal used the names of the Supreme Court justices who had voted in favor of censorship to replace offensive words in the book. (Justice) Burger = bugger, (Justice) Rehnquist = dick, and so on. I thought it was a brilliant idea—and the perfect solution to my problem.

  When we hit the stage that night, cops and various other city-government officials were everywhere. After our first song, I took a moment to point out the authorities in the house and explain to the crowd why they were there. One profane word and I would be arrested. Then I informed the audience what I was going to do instead of cursing.

  “What’s the mayor’s name in this city?!” I shouted.

  “Miller!”3 the crowd screamed.

  “Well, anytime I say Miller, I mean the F-word!” I railed. “When I say Miller, I mean—” I pointed my microphone at the crowd.

  “Fuck!” they shouted.

  “When I say Miller, I mean—”

  “FUCK!”

  “And when I say mutha Miller,I mean—”

  “MUTHAFUCKER!”

  I then picked a couple of other local officials’ names for shit and ass.

  The police and town fathers were besides themselves. They could do nothing but wait for this New York heavy metal asshole to slip up. But I didn’t. Being clean and sober, I am always in complete control of my faculties, and I pranced, danced, teased, and taunted, but I never uttered a single curse word that night. The audience was cursing a blue streak, but not me.

  Oh, I laid “I’m a sick muthafu-fu-fu-fu-Miller!” out there a couple times, but those were deliberate. Twisted Sister delivered a killer show and lived to rock another day. Until we got to the next city and our show had been canceled because of my arrest. Not much we could do about that.

  STAY HUNGRY WAS A huge record all over the world, and other countries (and our international record label) were clamoring for Twisted to tour. We had done some shows in Europe in the very beginning of the Stay Hungry tour, but to actually play in the countries where our record was now a hit would have taken it to the next level. Not to mention gotten us out of the United States, where we were—unbeknownst to us—on the verge of becoming overexposed. Instead, we opted to special-guest on Iron Maiden’s North American tour and go back, for a second or even third time, to places and regions we had already been. This was Twisted Sister’s first major conscious misstep. I don’t remember whose decision it was, but I’m sure I had a major hand in it.

  We’d been supporting the album for eight months, and I was tired of the road. When you tour outside the United States, you are stuck in whatever country you are in, which for me was a nightmare. At least while touring in the United States, when we had a few days off, I could fly home or even fly Suzette and Jesse in so I could see them.

  Case in point: In October of ’84, Twisted Sister headlined a show at the Sunrise Musical Theatre near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The theater was near where my wife and son were staying with her mother. Not only were Suzette, Jesse, and her entire family going to get a chance to see me in concert, but we had a couple of days off following and I was going to spend time with my wife and baby son.

  The show itself was memorable for a few reasons. I remember the shock of hitting the stage and seeing Suzette’s mother, aunts, and grandmother in the front row! I had told the promoters to “take care of my wife’s family,” and in an effort to show me respect they gave these middle-age and elderly women seats right down front, in the epicenter of the insanity (the last place you want to see family for a variety of reasons!).

  As I performed “Stay Hungry” to the rabid mob, I was running offstage and barking out orders to my crew to get my in-laws the hell out of there. They were quickly moved to safer seats in the balcony.

  During the show, the frenzied crowd started tearing the ceiling and wall tiles down, and I stopped the show and called them on it. The Sunrise Musical Theatre is a legendary venue where the greats, including Frank Sinatra, have played. The beautiful place was quite a contrast to the shitholes we usually had to perform in. Now, I’m the first to trash a dump; my attitude has always been:

  DEE SNIDER RULE #3

  Treat me like an animal and I’ll behave like an animal. Treat me with respect, I will act respectfully.

  Sort of a variation on Dee Snider Rules #1 and #2.

  I explained to the crowd how I didn’t like going to concerts in or playing in shitholes, and if we tore this theater up, not only wouldn’t we get to have shows in nice places, but the Sunrise would become a shithole, too. Needless to say, the vandalism stopped.4

  The band had the next day off, and I got to spend some precious time with Suzette and Jesse. My first order of business was to go out with them for breakfast (I loves me some breakfast!). Jesse, now two, resisted sitting in the car seat. He tried every trick he knew (stiffening up, going limp, kicking and screaming, etc.) to keep me from getting him locked in.

  No match for his old man, Jesse was ultimately secured, and I got in the driver’s seat and started the car. From behind me I heard:

  “Not gonna take it anymore, Daddy!”

  Suzette and I looked at each other, stunned by our infant’s proclamation of rebellion. I quickly recovered, spun around, and said, “Write your own song, kid!”

  See the cool stuff I would have missed out on if I were in Europe on tour when I should have been?5

  40

  a rock star is born

  Stay Hungry was now double platinum in the United States (2 million records sold), and at various degrees of gold, platinum, and multiplatinum in Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand, with no sign of stopping. To pass the time on the road, I would calculate the songwriting royalties I was making with each passing week of massive record sales. All my years of focus, commitment, and effort had finally paid off. I was a rich, famous rock ’n’ roll star.

  With the band’s exploding popularity came increased media attention. Twisted Sister certainly was an oddity with our groundbreaking videos, hair, makeup, costumes, and songs of rebellion, but none in the band more so than me. Add that I was married, had a kid, and claimed to be clean and sober, and the interview requests for me poured in.

  The Long Island newspaper—which I’d hated delivering as a kid—sent a reporter out on the road with Twisted Sister to do a cover story on me for the Sunday edition (more on this later). Rolling Stone had legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz do a photo shoot with us for their interview. Entertainment Tonight flew in a reporter to do a feature on me, and I was on Late Night with David Letterman. The pièce de résistance was People magazine.

  For People’s feature they sent me back to my alma mater, Baldwin Senior High School, with a reporter and photog
rapher for a visit. You can imagine the pandemonium when one of the biggest rock stars of the day—a former student—pulled up in a limousine, on a school day with a bodyguard and reporters and photographers.

  As I entered the building and walked through the commons area—through which I had crossed daily as a student completely unnoticed—it was like the Pied Piper leading the rats: a swarm of kids followed me everywhere I went. The reporter wanted to take photos of me in my place of high school solace, the choir room. As the mob followed me down the hall, whom should I spot sweeping the floor but one of the guys from the loading dock who used to call me Rock Star. Korvette’s department store—which my coworkers were hoping to be working for until they retired—had gone out of business, so this was his current place of employment. I stopped right in front of my old “friend,” who was leaning on a broom like the one I used to push at Korvette’s. The entire procession piled up like a traffic jam behind me.

  “Hey, man, it’s me, Rock Star,” I said as if it were just the two of us. “I’m a rock star!”

  “I know,” he replied, a stunned look on his face.

  “So, how are you doin’?” I asked without a bit of sarcasm.

  My former coworker muttered something noncommittal, since how he was doing was pretty obvious.

  The crowd behind me in the hall was growing and beginning to get impatient.

  “I gotta go do this photo-shoot thing for People magazine,” I said matter-of-factly. “Tell the ol’ crew Rock Star says hey.”

  With that, my entire entourage piled past my former antagonist and followed me down the hall.

  They tell you that revenge isn’t satisfying. I’ll be damned if it’s not! It is so sweet!

  MY FIRST ROCK-STAR PRIORITY was to find a place for my family and me to live that was safe, secure, and appropriate for a man of my newly achieved means. Suzette and I set out to find a new home with various criteria, but the most important for me was—I did not want to be able to hear traffic of any kind! That and the schools.

  As for my dream car, I’m a motorhead, and for a few years I had been dragging a basket-case muscle car—a 1969 Boss 302 Mustang—from place to place, wherever Suzette and I moved. I had big plans to restore this rare ’Stang one day, so I was always sure my rust bucket had a garage to protect what was left of the car. A fact that was not lost on my then future wife.

  “So my car,” said Suzette, “the car that we depend on—sits outside in the cold, rain, and snow, while your car—that doesn’t run—has its own garage?” She wasn’t too happy about this arrangement.

  Understanding her justifiable frustration, I tried to assuage her concerns. “Your car is great, but this is one of the ten rarest Mustangs. I have to protect it.” That logic only worked for so long.

  As the years went by, Suzette—now the mother of my child—became more and more annoyed by this indignity. “We live in a studio apartment, we can’t even afford a room for our baby, and we’re paying for your piece-of-shit car to have a garage?”

  When Suzette put it that way, it did seem kind of fucked-up, but I was undeterred. “It’s a collector’s item. Think of it as an investment. One day it will be worth a lot of money.”

  That didn’t impress my young, sharp wife either.

  When the band finally “struck oil,” as I like to call it, all plans of me personally restoring the Mustang went out the window (I suck with a wrench, anyway) and Plan B went into full effect. Now that I was a rock star and had money, I would spend whatever it took to make my car perfect. And I did. In fact, I spent more having the premier Mustang restoration shop in the world (Randy DeLisio at Superstang in Clyde, New York) and the top Boss Mustang engine builder (Denny Aldridge at Aldridge Motorsports in Portland, Oregon) restore my car than I would have paid to buy a 1969 Boss 302 Mustang already restored. But that wouldn’t have been the same. I wanted my car—the one I had been dreaming about for years—to be restored, and money was no object. I actually had the motor flown from Oregon to New York so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to be shipped by truck. Now that’s rock ’n’ roll!

  MY MOST ARROGANT, SELF-SERVING rock-star purchase I ever made had to be a gym.

  In the early eighties, when Suzette and I shared that slimy apartment with my brother Matt and sister, Sue, I was an emaciated mess—especially compared to my gymnast/bodybuilder younger brother Matt.

  Jay Jay had a theory that girls wanted to be with rockers because we all look like we’re about to die and they want to be the last to be with us. But as I looked at my brother’s amazing physique, I knew I had to do something about mine. Matt suggested I go to the gym he frequented, Iron Masters in Massapequa, Long Island.

  Not long after I started going, the gym’s manager started letting me work out for free. The owner, Jim Penney, virtually never came by, so no one would be the wiser. This worked for me because I didn’t have the money to afford a gym membership, and getting in for free encouraged me to keep training.

  One day, I was at Iron Masters training on the cuff, and in walks the Jim Penney, in all his massive bodybuilding glory. Jim was a steelworker (hence the name of the gym) and was a real-life, tough muthafucker. He perused the sign-in sheet and paid members list and quickly figured out I didn’t belong. Making an example of me in front of everyone, Jim loudly outed me for being a deadbeat and, after thoroughly humiliating me, kicked me out. Completely embarrassed, just before I exited—and with a safe distance and a counter between me and the ironworking monster—I said with a shaky voice, “One day I’m gonna own this place, muthafucker!” Then I ran as fast as I could with the sound of Penney’s deep laugh ringing in my ears.

  I never forgot that day or my promise, and as soon as I struck it rich, as luck would have it, I discovered Iron Masters was up for sale. I called my people and bought the place.

  In a passive-aggressive move of disdain toward Jim Penney, I refused to go to the closing to sign the ownership papers. I wasn’t going to let that scumbag have the pleasure of saying he sat with the Dee Snider. (I know, I know, I was an egomaniacal asshole.) I sent Suzette with my attorney to take care of the final details. My wife told me afterward that throughout the closing Penney kept saying, in disbelief, “He said, ‘One day I’m gonna own this place, muthafucker!’—and now he does.” Now, that’s rock ’n’ roll!

  It wouldn’t be long before Jim Penney had the last laugh. He had thrown me out of his gym for essentially stealing from him. I was the scumbag, not him. As an absentee owner, I would have to deal with people working out and not paying en masse. After losing six figures on the gym and adding significantly to problems that nearly ended my marriage, I would be forced to close the place a few years later. This was in the late eighties, and I’m still writing off the loss on my taxes thirty years later! All I have to show for once owning a gym is a good story to put in this book. Winning!

  THE FIRST QUARTER OF 1985 consisted of more touring with Iron Maiden, shooting another video, and some Twisted Sister headline shows, including a run through Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

  Our third Marty Callner video was for “The Price,” the ballad on the Stay Hungry record. This was before the heavy-metal power ballad became a cliché and the lead track for every new metal band (eventually going one step further and getting “unplugged”).

  Ballads had always been a great way to connect the mainstream rock audience with metal. Affairs of the heart, or any kind of emotional torment, produces forceful and dramatic feelings. The power guitar chord, thunderous bass, pounding drums, and wailing vocals of heavy metal speak to those emotions like no other music form outside of a full-blown symphony orchestra. From Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” to Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed” to Nazareth’s “Love Hurts,” heavy metal has always had great success at radio with its ballads. “The Price” was right in the pocket with all those other records, and we had every reason to expect it to be another hit.

  Marty and I decided we should go not only with a performanc
e video but with a stripped-down Twisted Sister as well. “The Price” was a heartfelt song (remember its inspiration?) and the makeup and costumes sort of trivialized its true meaning. The idea was to shoot the song with Twisted in street clothes during a sound check, then show the band performing, full-on, in concert later in the song. The video was filmed at the War Memorial Coliseum in Rochester, New York, during a couple of days’ break from our tour with Iron Maiden.

  Stay Hungry producer Tom Werman was a great believer in the “radio mix” as key to the success of a single. The thought behind this was that most people experience a new song on the radio for the first time. Unlike more deliberate music listening, blasted on your car or home stereo, radio listening is usually at a lower volume and in the background. When listeners hear something that catches their ear, they reach for the volume knob and turn it up for a better listen. That is the real way many people discovered new music.

  While songs were usually mixed in the studio at higher volumes through monster—or at least home-size—stereo speakers (this of course predates the iPod), this kind of mixing can be misleading for what the song will actually sound like on the radio. Some record producers only mix for the radio. Case in point, Todd Rundgren. He produced the entire Meat Loaf Bat Out Of Hell record so that it sounded good on a radio. I’m sure he figures anything sounds good when you crank the volume.

  To his credit (did I actually just say that?), Tom Werman liked to do a separate “radio mix” for released singles, working on small speakers at low volume to create a mix that would “pop” when listened to in the background. Tom wanted the song to catch your ear even if you weren’t focused on it. He even had a car-radio speaker he would plug in and test the mix on, then he would take a tape out to a car with a normal stereo system in it and listen to it again there.

  In an effort to get “The Price” out quickly, Atlantic Records never notified Werman of its imminent release, and Tom didn’t get to do his special mix as he did for “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock.”