CARLOS CAVAZO The first single from the Metal Health album was “Bang Your Head.”
SPENCER PROFFER I thought Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head” could be an anthem for the time. But it was a bitch to get it played. I had to mortgage relationships in a couple of markets. I called program directors personally. And there were only four or five markets in the country that played “Bang Your Head.” They put it on the air and within two to three days that record soared to be the most requested record on their stations. And that was the beginning. Then a guy I was socially friendly with named Les Garland became head of programming at MTV. Les called me up and he goes, “Hey man, you’ve got a really cool record happening in Texas and Oklahoma. Would you give me a video?” I said, “Sure.”
CARLOS CAVAZO That was actually the first video we ever shot. It was filmed at some art college in Simi Valley. It was kind of a weird experience. I didn’t know that MTV was even a big thing yet.
SPENCER PROFFER Les put it on the air at three in the morning, the phones went berserk. Four days later he moved it to midnight, the phones went berserk. Five hundred thousand units later my friends at CBS, they were my best friends, man. I couldn’t do more for them!
FRANKIE BANALI After we started touring we came back to L.A. and did the video for “Cum On Feel the Noize.” And that one busted the doors open.
RUDY SARZO MTV influenced everything. All of a sudden everything was image-driven. Even bands like the Police, they had so much talent but they were also very image-friendly. All you had to do was grab a camera and shoot those guys horsing around in the studio and you had a hit. For bands like us that were colorful and had a lot of personality, MTV was the perfect tool.
RICK KRIM (executive, MTV) It felt like it was something bigger and broader than an Iron Maiden video. Iron Maiden made some entertaining videos, but it wasn’t for the masses, it certainly wasn’t for girls. I’ve got to believe there was a good female audience who liked “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and a lot of the stuff that was to follow. Because they were pop songs with heavy guitars.
FRANKIE BANALI Dee has been really complimentary about how he had heard “Cum On Feel the Noize” and that was in part how Twisted Sister developed “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
DEE SNIDER It was totally influential. “Cum On Feel the Noize” was a big hit, and I said, “Let’s steal the structure.” Drum, chorus, song kicks in. Audience participation was always paramount to me. And not to take anything away from Frankie Banali, because he’s a dear friend, but I wanted to next-level that shit.
TOM WERMAN Doug Morris, the president of Atlantic, called me at home. And he said, “I have this band that has had some success in Europe but I can’t get arrested with them here, and I feel that you’re the only guy who can make a hit with this band.”
JAY JAY FRENCH We knew that Werman was there with us because Doug Morris said so, and Doug Morris was the key to the band’s future. Because you make Doug happy, you make it all happy. We all understood that.
DEE SNIDER Let it be known that when we were doing Stay Hungry I was in the studio fighting every day with Tom Werman to keep him from killing my band.
TOM WERMAN All I could figure out was that when I came into the picture, Dee had been working on the band for seven years, putting his heart and soul into it and getting nowhere, and so finally, I’m introduced into the picture, they have a huge hit, and I get the credit. And he’s pissed. He’s like Trump.
JAY JAY FRENCH Tom didn’t like some of the songs that Dee wrote and wanted us to do Saxon songs. Dee always brings it up. “Motherfucker, he wanted six Saxon songs!” We had a fight.
DEE SNIDER He didn’t want “We’re Not Gonna Take It” or “I Wanna Rock” on the album.
TOM WERMAN I thought “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was a little bit like a nursery rhyme.
DEE SNIDER I remember Tom’s sitting in a folding chair in the studio, and I’m on one knee, because I’m trying to talk in his ear. I’m going, “Tom, trust me.” He goes, “It’s so, like, a kid song.” I said, “It’s going to be more aggressive when we record it.” And literally, he says, “I don’t care. If you want it on the record that bad, fine.”
TOM WERMAN They claim that I didn’t want to record it. That I wasn’t going to allow them to record it. Producers don’t have that kind of power. They hire me, for Christ’s sake. The band is hiring you, they can fire you!
DEE SNIDER “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the single, was released a couple of weeks before the video hit, and we had 145 radio adds the first week. An incredible amount. But the video by Marty Callner was like adding rocket boosters, or fuel injection to a hot rod. No one had done anything like it before. And it showed the band. It was a game changer at MTV.
MITCH SCHNEIDER Marty Callner made everybody look like a fucking million dollars—better than they ever have in their life. He had done specials for HBO, and when he was shooting videos, he carried those lighting techniques into that. It looked cinematic because he was somebody who was shooting big-time shit.
DEE SNIDER Les Garland cut off the whole front end of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” He said, “This isn’t a rock video. This is method acting.”
SPENCER PROFFER Quiet Riot went out on tour with Black Sabbath during the “Bang Your Head” period. Once the record went gold, we said, “Let’s open it up, let’s put out ‘Cum On Feel the Noize.’” That record was a hit and we sold seven million albums. It kicked Synchronicity out of the top spot. It was the first metal record to hit number one. The record that nobody wanted to touch. And not only at the label—nobody in the entire industry.
FRANKIE BANALI November fifteenth was the day after my birthday and we were playing Rockford, Illinois. Before the show our manager came up to us in the dressing room and said, “We just got the Billboard numbers for next week and Metal Health is going to be number one. You’ll be jumping over Michael Jackson’s Thriller and knocking the Police’s Synchronicity out of the top spot.” We were dumbfounded. I mean, it went from absolute silence in the dressing room to us screaming and yelling and dancing like fools. And the guys in Black Sabbath came in with a case of champagne. And we drank the entire case.
CARLOS CAVAZO And then Sabbath start cracking open bottles and somebody had some cocaine and we’re all fucking snortin’ and drinkin’. And then we had to go on and do our show. I was like, “Oh my god, I can’t even play right now!” I was stiff as a board. I had to drag my hand around that guitar neck. It was horrible. I never did that again.
ZAKK WYLDE (guitarist, Zyris, Ozzy Osbourne) I saw Quiet Riot open for Black Sabbath at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. And Quiet Riot, you would’ve thought it was their show. Without a doubt. Metal Health was huge. It was the height of the power of that record. When they played “Bang Your Head” the houselights went on, it was twenty thousand people with their fists in the air. When they got done playing, it was like you just witnessed the headliner. It was that crushing.
SPENCER PROFFER Then they went out on the road with Loverboy. And Loverboy was a huge pop band. So we opened up the demographic to an even wider audience. When the band got on pop radio they blew up big-time. But all of this was by design. Which is not to say I knew how big it would get. I just wanted to get it on the radio and make a dent. Who knew it would be the biggest debut rock record of all time until Guns N’ Roses happened?
JAY JAY FRENCH Quiet Riot was responsible for all of us. The success of Quiet Riot allowed the success of everybody else.
DEE SNIDER The day Stay Hungry went platinum we were out in the Midwest somewhere. Y&T was our support, and I think Lita Ford was in there, too, underneath Y&T. Not literally—figuratively. But we were there at soundcheck and we were told the record was platinum. We just started doing this big sort of rumble with the band and crew, just going around chanting and screaming, “Platinum! Platinum! Platinum!” That was huge.
FRANKIE BANALI Everyone around us on the charts, it was Lionel Richie, it was the Police, it was Michael Jackson, it was everybody that had nothing to do with hard rock at all.
DEE SNIDER I remember getting a fan letter saying, “My favorite bands are Kajagoogoo, Duran Duran, and Twisted Sister.” And I was like, “Ruh-roh.” That was a moment where we said, “This is wrong. These three names shouldn’t be on the tongue of this fourteen-year-old girl.” I was not ready for that.
JAY JAY FRENCH MTV did us the biggest disservice on the planet. It gave us this super-Technicolor, larger-than-life thing in America. And it was overwhelming.
RICK KRIM Twisted made enough entertaining videos. A lot of their videos had the same vibe to them, so I guess at a certain point it could be, “That’s what Twisted Sister is.” But that’s what they wanted.
FRANKIE BANALI I mean, there just wasn’t really any rock at the time, heavy metal, whatever you want to call it. There had been bands before us like Van Halen and Def Leppard, but there is no question that once the Metal Health record went to number one and the single was number five and we sold millions of copies—which was unheard of for most bands, and certainly at the time unheard of for a hard rock or metal band—we really opened up the door for everyone else. Because what happened is at that point, every manager, every accountant, every attorney, every booking agent wanted whatever was going to be the next Quiet Riot.
RIKKI ROCKETT Quiet Riot really, truly saved rock ’n’ roll. A lot of people don’t give them credit for that. Because at that time people were still stuck … They just wouldn’t let go of the new wave stuff. But the hard rock, heavy metal, rock ’n’ roll surge, Quiet Riot started that.
RUDY SARZO The ’80s MTV generation hard rock and metal bands, at least the first ones, they were actually bands from the ’70s. I mean, there was a version of Ratt named Mickey Ratt at the same time as Quiet Riot in the late ’70s. Great White was there. The Dokken guys were around. Nikki Sixx was playing with London. So it wasn’t like Quiet Riot made it big and all those bands like Mötley Crüe and Dokken decided to get together. We had all gigged together, and we had been through the same merry-go-round with the record companies, that whole “You guys are never going to make it.” Right. Of course. But you know, we all just had to be ourselves.
DEE SNIDER Kevin DuBrow once said to me—we were having dinner together—“Don’t you hate that these fucking bands, all these fucking bands, they’re together a couple years, they get a deal, and they have an album and they’re out on tour? Don’t you fucking hate that?” I looked at him and I said, “Are you kidding? Kevin, I wouldn’t wish what we went through on my worst enemy.” He was shocked by my saying that. I go, “It took the fucking joy out of it for me.”