TWISTED SISTER: HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR THIS BAND NOW?

TWISTED SISTER: HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR THIS BAND NOW?

Renaldo Migaldi

Ladies and gentlemen. I give you Twisted Sister. You've heard their songs. you've seen their videos, and maybe you've even caught their live show. The sight of their lead singer, Dee Snider. who's big and tall and tough and loud and wears stone-age clown makeup and long flowing blond curly locks-the sight, shall we say, stirs your imagination. Yes. let the

dull and uninquisitive have their oohs and ahhs over the Princes and Boy Georges of this world, but that Snider—now there’s a fellow with character. A real man. And can he sing? Oh my, why he can positively scream! And shake his mane around and make funny faces too.

What’s that? Do I hear somebody... laughing? How unwise of you. For at this very moment, Mr. Snider is sitting here preparing for a concert tonight, taping up a big eight-stitch gash in his foot that he got roughhousing with his bandmates on the bus the other night. In a few hours’ time he will be jumping around and screaming for several thousand restless and possibly drunk teenagers at an arena in the suburbs of Chicago, so it’s important that he work himself into the proper state of mind. As you know, he and the band play loud thumping screaming heavy metal music that thrives on the sudden release of a million million tons of bottled-up adolescent fury—so in order to scream well, Mr. Snider has to get himself very mad. If he hears you laughing, there’s no telling what will happen! Wipe that grin off your face, friend, and listen up.

“I’m terminally angry, I think,” Snider says. “I have a very bad problem with that. Backstage I think about my problems, I think about my anger—we come out on stage, and we are mad! We are are mean!”

Tonight, though, building up a good steaming head of rage is going to be a little bit harder than usual, since Snider and his cohorts have just happened upon a rather soothing piece of good news. “I don’t know if you know this,” he tells me, “but the album just went double platinum.” He leans back in his chair: “Ahhhhhhh! It’s incredibly satisfying!”

Indeed it must be. Considering that Twisted Sister put in more than their fair share (eight years, actually) of time beating their heads against the wall on the Long Island, New York club circuit, it’s genuinely amazing that the group managed to hold itself together all that time instead of disintegrating into a heap of muttering discouragement. Indeed, Snider remembers that when the big record company man finally came along and stuck a contract offer in their faces, the Twisteds didn’t exactly howl with glee—their response was more like a big yawn, since they’d previously had a number of almost-deals from other labels fall through at the last minute, and now they were leery of getting their hopes up.

All that hard luck is in the past now, though. Take one decent Slade imitation with a melody borrowed from the Ronettes’ “Baby I Love You” (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”), one chunk of ranting teenage neurotica (“I Wanna Rock”), some “social comment” of highly questionable value (“Street Justice,” an endorsement of vigilante mob action), and a big load of traditional HM thump ’n’ screech, and you’ve got Stay Hungry, the record that changed Dee Snider’s life.

“I have less problems now,” Snider says. “We were given resistance up until this year. This is the first year of satisfaction. I mean, I don’t really have much to complain about. People aren’t treating me like an asshole, they’re not laughing at me anymore. I’m not getting in fights every other day because some little fucker thinks that I’m there to be made a joke of, a joke at my expense, walking down the street, because I look different. I don’t take that shit, I don’t get it anymore.”

Snider still has a lot of memories of beIn the bad old days, Snider found himself turning for solace to loud screaming bashing music. “The escapism part of rock ’n’ roll was a big deal to me when I was growin’ up, and still is. When you watched Alice Cooper or Bowie, you didn’t think about mom and dad, peers, work, school, money—you didn’t think about anything. It was total absorption. You were in Alice Cooper Land. You were in Bowiesville. And for that hour and a half, I didn’t think for a minute about all the shit that bothered me from day to day. And after it was over, I went back to it. Given that breathing space, I felt that much better.

ing made fun of, of being an oddball, a misfit. Especially in high school. “I was a total outcast. One of those people that nobody knows even exists. I tried, literally tried, to hang out with every group. I was always very athletic—one of the things that meant a lot to me was when the captain of the football team asked me my senior year, when we were playing football in gym, why I didn’t go out for the team, that they could have used me. The reason I didn’t go out was we didn’t have a lot of money. I had to start working when I was 12, selling papers, and if you have to work every day you can’t go out for after-school sports. But I also didn’t have the jock mentality, y’know, the world is shaped like a football and that’s all that matters. I mean, I like sports, but there’s a lot more to life.

“I tried to hang out with greasers, dirtbags, whatever you wanna call ’em—I liked cars, I liked bikes, I liked that aspect of it. But they were into beating people up for no reason, just to harrass people, and I never could get off on that. I was also too smart—y know, with a lot of the dirtbags, getting bad grades was part of the thing. You’d feel embarrassed ’cause you got B’s and an A.

“Freaks? Well, I was kinda freaky looking and I was into music, but I didn’t do drugs, and that they could not understand. I never did any drugs. That’s my individual thing, my personal thing.

“So I just found myself with a coupla friends, sort of in my own world. And it bummed me out for a long time—it wasn’t until I was 16 years old that it really hit me that it doesn't matter what these people do. What makes what they’re doin’ so right, and what I’m doin’ so wrong? Where do they get off telling me how to dress, how to act, what to be? And I’d look at myself in the mirror and say: ‘How cool! They don't know it, but I’m cooler than every single one of those people.’ And once I realized and appreciated what I was worth, and didn’t give a shit anymore, people sensed that confidence, and they started to become friendly with me. But by that point, I didn’t need it anymore. Then I got in my first popular high school band, and here are all the cool guys and all the different cliques, dancing to my band—all of a sudden I was startin’ to be cool, but by that point I was already gone.

“You know, sometimes I look at the make-up and it looks kinda like a clown.” -Dee Snider

“Now I try to express that to people— it’s bullshit, man. It seems so fucking important at the time, when you’re in school—but after it’s all over and you look back on it, it’s bullshit. Those people who were the cool people, they’re nothing now. High school was the peak of their life. They wear the ring, and they still look back on the good old days. I don’t look back on the good old days—I don’t look back on last year! High school is the bad old days.”

“I base everything Twisted does on how I felt. Just trying to recreate that feeling for people with the costume and with the make-up, going that extra step, not looking like the average person on the street onstage. When we decided to combine glitter and metal together, because we were basically aggressive, masculine performers, we figured for shock value we would wear grotesquely feminine makeup and clothing. We used to be into wearing grotesquely feminine make-up and clothing. We used to be into wearing much more feminine clothes, and camping it up more, to fuck people up. And then somebody would start it up with me and I’d be out in the audience fighting, in a fucking negligee. But getting that reaction out of people, that was what Twisted Sister thrived on. But then, when my wife started making costumes, no longer was it stuff taken from a big woman’s shop. Now you could have costumes, that slowly developed and started to become something—not feminine, not masculine, just sort of...flashy.

“Society’s very strange—most people get abused, and when they get their shot, they abuse. ” -Dee Snider

“You know, sometimes I look at the makeup, and I say, god, it looks kinda like a clown. And I guess a clown is there to get an effect out of the audience, there to entertain people. And on those levels, Twisted Sister is similar. The makeup and costuming—in a clown’s case, it’s used to make you laugh. In Twisted Sister’s case, we’re not going for the laughter— we’re just trying to create an atmosphere on stage that is different from everyday life.”

Snider sees Twisted Sister’s music as serving not only as escapism for his audience, but also as an important outlet for people’s pent-up aggressive impulses. “For me, there were times in suburbia where you felt like you wanted to kill something. You’re angry, you’re frustrated, you’re confused, you’re hostile, you have problems up the ass, and you wanna kill something. So I would come home every day, lock the door, put on a record, and I’d jump around and go wild, air guitar and air vocalizing in front of a mirror, sweating. And I’d feel better.

“I know this is what rock ’n’ roll did for me. It’s what rock ’n’ roll still does. It’s mock violence, not real violence. Y’know, people use the term, ‘I’ll kill him,’ regular. Everybody. It doesn’t mean, like, I’m really gonna kill him. It’s violent phrases, but it sounds meaner, and by vocalizing the violence you’re releasing the tension. ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ has implied verbal resistance, it implies, ‘We’ll fight, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll fight’—but I don’t mean actually like mixin’ it up.”

People who complain about too much violence in the media are, Snider feels, missing the point. “Everybody wants to blame everybody else for the problems. They want to blame the leaves on the trees for the roots. Example: Why are there violent TV shows and violent movies? Because violence sells. Why does it sell? Because people want to see violence. If people did not want to see violence, Hollywood would not provide the movies—because they only make movies to make money. So where does the problem lie? In the movie company, who just makes the pictures for the people who want ’em? Or should we really be looking at the reason why people desire violent movies? Aha! Well, if you wanna look at that, then you have to start looking at upbringing. And society. And parents and teachers. And all of a sudden, the pointed fingers of the Moral Majority turn around back at themselves! And they don’t want that. They don’t wanna follow the circle around. They wanna blame the leaves for the problem with the tree. They’re afraid that if they look at it too closely, it comes back to them, and they are the problem. They are responsible to make the changes. I’m not sayin’ one person is responsible for everything. But we each hold a little bit of responsibility.

‘‘Man is a violent creature. He naturally deals with things in a violent manner, and anger is a natural thing and frustration is a natural thing, and releasing that has to happen.

‘‘I think about my father. He was very tough on the kids. And I believe that the way he treated us was not a result really of what we were doing, but a result of his own personal problems. If it was a tough day at work, he’d come home from work and take it out on the kids. It’s standard fare. People gotta let it go, and they take it out on the wrong people, usually. Hey, if my father had listened to Black Sabbath, gone up to his room and locked the door, jumped around in front of a mirror for awhile—maybe he wouldn’t have done it.”

Dee Snider became a father recently, and it’s going to give him a chance to put his ideas into practice. “I definitely was brought up in a heavy-handed fashion, it definitely fucked me up, and I definitely won’t do it to my kid. Y’know, society’s very strange—most people get abused, and when they get their shot, they abuse. But I definitely have taken many, many lessons from what I’ve experienced and handled the situations accordingly.

‘‘In Twisted Sister, we get approached by a lot of charities. People want us to use our position to help better mankind or whatever. And I think that definitely when you’re in a position like this it’s good to do. But I think people will be surprised when they see the charity we align ourselves with—we’re trying to align ourselves with abused children. I think that directly correlates to what Twisted Sister is saying.”