4

“JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE SAYS YOU SUCK DOESN’T MEAN YOU DON’T SUCK”

JAY JAY FRENCH (guitarist, Twisted Sister) We started Twisted Sister in New Jersey in 1972 as a direct response to the New York Dolls and David Bowie. I thought, There’s no Jersey version of the Dolls. There’s room for one more. Of course, there wasn’t room for one more because the Dolls were a colossal commercial failure … and nobody wanted another version of a colossal failure. Then there was a period where Twisted Sister was a Rod Stewart–ish kind of band with another singer named Rick Prince. When Dee Snider finally joined in 1976, he introduced harder stuff like Alice Cooper and the shock rock stuff.

DEE SNIDER (singer, Twisted Sister) When I joined Twisted Sister, they were playing a couple of Jay Jay French originals, but Jay Jay said, “We have to announce them as, like, deep cuts.” Like he’d say, “This is off an early Deep Purple album.” You would have the odd person come up and go, “I really liked that Deep Purple song you played.” But you couldn’t even say you were playing it. It was that taboo.

JAY JAY FRENCH Bar bands that play covers tend to be behind the curve because they’re solely reactive to and trying to catch up with the current trend of music. Twisted Sister was with makeup, then we were without makeup, and then we were with makeup, then we were in kind of transvestite-ish Rocky Horror–type makeup, then we were in shock makeup, then we were in glam makeup. We were always behind the curve.

EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA (guitarist, Twisted Sister) We used to play everything within a hundred-mile radius, and every club was packed, so it’d be four or five nights a week. There were people that used to follow us everywhere, no matter how far we went.

DEE SNIDER Clubs like Hammerheads, for example, had maybe a five hundred to seven hundred capacity and closed and reopened with like a two thousand to three thousand capacity to accommodate the audience that we had. And they would literally bring our crew guys in to tell them what the club needed in order to have Twisted Sister play there—size of stage, power, dressing room positioning—because we were very specific about what we wanted. The club owners knew that if they had Twisted for a weekend and Zebra for a weekend they could make their nut in those two weekends. And then the rest of the bands, lesser bands, would fill things in.

EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA We played Fountain Casino, Speaks, Hammerheads—those were the three biggest clubs. And also we played at the Chance in Poughkeepsie a lot. Eventually we started doing the Civic Center because we could do it, even without a record deal.

DEE SNIDER Some of the club owners were pretty mobbed up, and we borrowed money from them on occasions. They would help finance us if we were doing something, like a recording or like when we had to go to England because we had a chance to be on TV. We’d come back and do a weekend or a couple of shows and pay them back. They loved us, and we had no problem. A bunch of those guys were at my wedding!

VITO BRATTA (guitarist, Storm, Dreamer, White Lion) Around 1978 or ’79, I was in a high school band called Storm with Nicky Capozzi, who would also be the original drummer in White Lion. The band only played originals, and it was insane stuff, because you had one guy who was into David Bowie, one guy who was into King Crimson, one guy that was into Rush, and one guy that was into Van Halen. And we blended that. We were doing Seattle before there was a Seattle. That band broke up, and right around that time, I went to see Twisted Sister at the Rock Palace on Staten Island. Dee Snider would stop the show if there was somebody in the front who wasn’t getting into it. He would say, “Hold on, hold on, hold on! Everybody stop!” And he’d put a spotlight on the guy. I was in the front row with my arms crossed, studying everything because I’m a gearhead: “There’s a Shure 57 on the drum set. Okay, he’s got a Marshall hundred-watt head. He’s got DiMarzio pickups in his Les Paul…” So Dee stops the show and the spotlight is on me. He chewed me a new one from the stage and humiliated me, but it was all in good fun. It was part of the show.

DEE SNIDER I crucified him. I just destroyed him from the stage.

KEITH ROTH (musician; radio personality, Siriusxm; Electric Ballroom Host) Dee really fucked people up. I honestly believe that some of those people he singled out are on a couch right now with their therapist still talking to them about it.

VITO BRATTA Afterwards, I’m going out to the car at the end of the night and I hear, “Hey!” And it’s Dee Snider. And I’m like, “Oh, shit. What’s he gonna do, beat the shit out of me?” He goes, “Hey, you look like a rock guy. What do you do?” I says, “Well, my band broke up.” He’s asking me about it. I says, “Yeah, we do all originals. I’m not going to do this cover stuff.” Meanwhile, it was like an insult to him, because they did half and half. And he’s like, “Listen, if you’re doing all originals, you’re never going to play anyplace in front of people. You’ve got to mix it up. You got to get out there.” So, because of that, I said, “All right, I’m going to get on the same circuit as you.”

DEE SNIDER I’ve talked to Vito about this, and he said that was like a life-changing moment. He sort of checked himself at that point, and I’m like his hero. Honestly, I was just being a dick!

VITO BRATTA I went searching for a band, and I found Dreamer.

DANNY STANTON (singer, Takashi; President, Coallier Entertainment) Dreamer had a buzz and they were good-looking guys, so the girls would show up. When I saw them, I immediately thought that Vito was very Punky Meadows–esque and should have been in Angel. He was tall, lanky, he had the long hair.

STEVE WEST (drummer, Hot Shot, Danger Danger) The drinking age was eighteen, so with a fake ID you could go see a band if you were sixteen, you know what I’m saying?

KEITH ROTH We all had the fake IDs from Playland in Times Square. Once in a while you would sneak into a Jersey club, and being at that age, it was larger than life. Getting in to see Zebra or Twisted Sister was like a home run.

BRUNO RAVEL (bassist, Hot Shot, White Lion, Danger Danger) I actually went to see Twisted when I was probably fourteen. I took my brother’s fake ID and went to Speaks out on Long Island. It changed my life. They had an energy and they just kind of bowled you over in an unashamed, non-forgiving way. They were basically like, “If you don’t like us, fuck you. You’re the one who’s missing out.” They almost kind of hypnotized you into thinking, like, Oh shit. If I don’t like these guys, I’m an idiot! It was like a bullying thing, but in an endearing kind of way. But the main thing that made Twisted Sister stand out from the other bands on Long Island was their shtick. The way they spoke onstage, Dee and Jay Jay were like a comedy team. I could just sit there and listen to the raps in between songs. Forget about the playing. I didn’t even care about the playing. I just wanted to hear them talk because they were so funny.

EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA The Fountain Casino in New Jersey was an event hall that also did a lot of big catering jobs. It was one of those really big rooms where all these panels would open up and the place would get bigger and bigger. And they used to have to open up every wall for us. I remember getting five thousand people in there on a Wednesday.

VITO BRATTA It was a great scene, and a lot of guys came out of it. We were all friends. Every Monday night at the Fountain Casino was a band, Steel Fortune, which was Dave Sabo from Skid Row.

DAVE “SNAKE” SABO (guitarist, Steel Fortune, Skid Row) We would open up for Dreamer at the Fountain Casino. Vito was really low key, but he was really, really funny. I used to have an MXR six-band EQ on the stage floor and I was really meticulous about it—you know, making the most incremental movements on the sliding faders to make this EQ perfect. Steel Fortune would come out and we’d go into the first song and it’d sound nothing like how I set it. And I’d look over and all the sliders are pushed all the way down and Vito’s on the side of the stage, laughing his ass off. So he would sabotage me all the time. But I love that guy.

KEITH ROTH Steel Fortune played whatever they felt was fab, like “Neon Knights” and “Children of the Sea” by Sabbath. I was really impressed … but then again, I was fifteen.

MARK WEISS (photographer) The bands seemed pretty happy with packing it in these clubs …

DAVE “SNAKE” SABO I remember I went to one of Twisted Sister’s SMF [Sick Mother Fucker] parties at the Fountain Casino. There was easily two thousand people there. And the party started on, like, a Sunday afternoon and went all the way through until the club closed. I was there with my buddy Jim, who was the original guitar player in Skid Row, and we were there the whole day. I loved Twisted Sister.

DEE SNIDER Well, we were making $1,000 a week, cash, and I did the research—in today’s money, that would have been about a salary of, like, $370,000 a year, taxable. Of course you’re driving Mercedes. You’re driving Corvettes. You’re buying houses. And all these other bands that are driving Mercedes and Corvettes and buying houses, they think they’re actually rock stars. They’re living it. They’re doing coke. They got the groupies. They got everything. But they’re not stars except in this microcosm. I mean, Twisted had bodyguards. We had unlisted phone numbers and had to lose fans on the way home, so they couldn’t find your house.

TOM KEIFER (singer, Guitarist, Saints in Hell, Cinderella) It was so lucrative on the East Coast and the cover bands were so popular, it was like living the fantasy without doing the work to create your own music. But I just felt that as long as you’re doing that, you’re imitating other people and not developing your own thing. The best you could do is maybe, in a night where you would play three or four sets, sneak in, “Hey, here’s one of ours.”

RANDY JACKSON (singer, Guitarist, Zebra) A lot of clubs would say, “Don’t do any originals, we just want covers.” So we would just go ahead and play the originals, but we just wouldn’t announce them. It was a good way to see how the songs were going over, and that’s a good indicator of whether a song is working or not.

VITO BRATTA At eighteen years old I was making a living playing, doing covers in Dreamer. Club owners knew that when we played, we sold out the club. We did one hour of Black Sabbath and all this stuff. And at the end, when we were getting tired, I said, “Let’s try some originals.” It never happened.

DAVE “SNAKE” SABO I couldn’t believe that Twisted weren’t signed. They sold out the Palladium in New York but they still couldn’t get a record deal.

JAY JAY FRENCH None of the labels would touch us, and I don’t necessarily think that they were wrong. Just because someone says you suck doesn’t mean you don’t suck. We could have sucked. We generally were not ready for prime time. When we were ready for prime time, we were ready for prime time.

EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA I don’t think we were worried about how popular new wave was in the late ’70s and early ’80s because at that time, you had hard rock bands like Aerosmith and Judas Priest, so there was a market for both, even though the new wave thing was big.

TOM KEIFER On the Northeast club circuit we were on, it was kind of a trend at the time to really push the envelope visually, even with cover bands. The band I was in, Saints in Hell, took a lot of inspiration from the Plasmatics in the attitude and the look. We had a pretty wild front man, and he’d breathe fire and cut himself onstage with glass.

BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE (guitarist, Kix) We basically started out as a cover band. Especially at the end of the ’70s, punk rock and new wave was big.

STEVE WHITEMAN (singer, Kix) There were clubs all over Maryland, so you could make a living just playing in Maryland. We were definitely into Led Zeppelin, the Stones. We played a little bit of everything. We played the Clash. We played Devo. We played Rod Stewart. Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, Grand Funk, Deep Purple—you name it, we played it. The first time we heard AC/DC, we loved them.

BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE We hadn’t even heard of AC/DC yet, and a friend of ours turned us on to them. When we started covering them, this is probably around ’79, before Highway to Hell broke them in America, we played the whole of the Let There Be Rock record—every song on there. And it was funny because not too many people were aware of AC/DC at that point, so when we started playing those songs, people thought they were ours.

STEVE WHITEMAN We used to do a club called the Wharf in Waldorf, Maryland, that was six nights a week, five sets a night. Man, did that make us mad-ass tight.

BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE It was right on the water and had an outside porch thing. It burnt down at some point.

STEVE WHITEMAN I remember one time playing in front of one guy on a Tuesday night. All night long. And we kept going to the owner, “Can we please just knock this off?” And he wouldn’t let us.

BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE This guy would watch the clock, you know? He was really relentless. And our set couldn’t be short, it had to be right on time.

STEVE WHITEMAN By the time Friday and Saturday rolled around, we were a little fried, and our voices were a little fried, so the biggest crowds got to see the band at its worst.

BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE For some reason there was a spot where there was a hole in the stage. And we were doing “Whole Lotta Love,” and when it got to that “way down inside” thing, Steve would go and stand in the hole, and sing the rest of the song from there!

STEVE WEST We were just out of high school, and just playing the scene and learning how to do it. And eventually, that morphed into Bruno and I starting our own bands and cutting our hair short and becoming a new wave cover band called Hot Shot doing Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls and all that for a couple of years. We were playing five nights a week and that’s how we made a living. It was great. Then that morphed into more of an AOR thing. We were playing Night Ranger, 38 Special, ZZ Top, whatever was happening. That ended when they raised the drinking age to twenty-one.

BRUNO RAVEL The audiences were cut literally in half, maybe even more.

MARK WEISS With the drinking age change, I think all these bands started honing in on doing originals, trying to be rock stars, MTV, go to the West Coast, that whole thing.

EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA We got signed just in time because the drinking age went from eighteen to twenty-one and a lot of these places were going disco and doing DJs and that whole scene in New York dropped out. We left and went to England to record the first album. It was really tough for some of the other bands on the circuit … They had to break up.