You can find snobs in the unlikeliest of places. Four years ago, I was at Madison Square Garden for a concert by Furthur, a Grateful Dead spin-off with guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Phil Lesh. Some guy in his mid to late forties was sitting next to me with his teenage son. Most crowds at anything associated with the Dead are extremely friendly. I had even been offered a joint by someone sitting next to me at a Further show I’d seen earlier that year at Radio City Music Hall. (I declined. Not my thing. Plus, Radio City was essentially one giant joint anyway with all the smoke, so everyone ended up getting high.)
The guy at MSG and I started talking about music. I mentioned that I had seen a bunch of shows that year, having been fortunate enough to see Paul McCartney (for the first time), U2, Soundgarden and other memorable performances. But I didn’t mention those acts. You would have thought I’d at least bring up the previous Furthur show. For some reason the first concert that came to mind was Twisted Sister, as I had seen them at the Best Buy Theatre about six months earlier. His demeanor suddenly went from low-key affable to frigidly perplexed. It was as if I had loudly farted in the middle of the conversation.
“Oh, that’s Dee Snider, right?” It was more of a judgment than an inquiry. After confirming that Snider was indeed part of the band, the discussion just kind of petered out. Twenty minutes into the show, he and his son would walk further down the arena for better seats. Deadheads are supposed to be high, not high and mighty. One would be hard-pressed to find a more permissive environment than a “Dead” show. You can get away with a lot of things: drug use, questionable hygiene and dancing/lyric pantomiming that would give Jerry douche chills in his grave. However, admitting to seeing Twisted Sister in the 21st century is apparently not one of them.
Hearing the sad news about Twisted Sister drummer A.J. Pero’s death made me think of that night at the Garden and especially the time I saw them on April 29th, 2011, oddly enough the same day as the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Two nights later, President Obama walked to the podium like he was auditioning for Ocean’s Fourteen and announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces. If that happened just forty-eight hours earlier, the euphoric eruption from the tough, hard rock/heavy metal New York crowd would have blown the roof off the Best Buy.
It was a Friday evening in Times Square, a perfect milieu (pardon my French) for hard rock royalty. The atmosphere was good-natured and jovial, but with all the tattooed testosterone, you got the feeling that just one wrong move could have turned the Theatre into a frenzied saloon from a John Wayne western. The Dead and all their offshoots have their loyal “Deadheads.” Twisted Sister, on the other hand, have their deeply devoted “SMF’s.” And the “Sick Motherfucking Friends of Twisted Sister” were out in full force. At one point during the show Dee Snider mentioned something about Russia. “FUCK RUSSIA!” responded one gentleman. It was that kind of night.
Despite the shenanigans and slight whiff of potential violence, the evening had been rooted in altruism. The show was a benefit for the Pinkburst Project, raising money to cure Uveitis, one of the leading causes of blindness. It hit close to home for the band, as Samantha French, the teenage daughter of guitarist/manager Jay Jay French, has the disease. It’s not unusual for Twisted Sister to fight the good fight. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Dee Snider (along with John Denver and Frank Zappa) speaking out against censorship at the PMRC Senate hearings. You could see the smirks on everyone’s faces when he came out, particularly Sen. Al Gore (we would all become acquainted with this look soon enough). Snider, sensing how he would be perceived, strutted out with a Long Island-sized chip on his shoulder. From the annoyed puss on his face you knew he wanted to remove the self-satisfied, condescending smiles of the politicians and their wives with his bare hands. Instead he accomplished something far more significant; articulately making his case opposing album ratings and coming across as a thoughtful, intelligent human being in the process.
The year before, Mark Metcalf for all intents and purposes reprised his role as Neidermeyer from Animal House for the videos of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock.” The hearings were almost a bizarro dramatic sequel to Animal House directed by Frank Capra. Tipper Gore even bore a slight resemblance to Verna Bloom, who played Dean Wormer’s wife. Snider and the music industry lost the battle but won the war. Ratings did end up on albums, but their placement only struck up even more interest and curiosity from the young people Tipper and company were trying to “protect.” Twisted Sister was correct. You really can’t stop rock’n’roll.
In 2000, their open letter to doofus Atlanta Brave relief pitcher John Rocker was a finely-worded middle finger to his ignorant comments regarding New York, in particular his distaste for, as he put it, “foreigners.” Twisted Sister got involved as they requested he no longer use “I Wanna Rock” when he took the mound. They mentioned that the group was made up of individuals from Jewish, Italian and Latin backgrounds and expressed pride in coming from such a diverse part of the world. Most impressive, they were able to accomplish this without any ultra—liberal, phony pretentiousness. Years later there would be a scene from the incredible film Silver Linings Playbook that reminded me of that letter. It’s the scene in the parking lot when the asshole Eagles fans make prejudiced comments about the Indian gentlemen with Bradley Cooper and his group. Shea Whigham, as Cooper’s older brother, leaps into the fray and shouts, “Leave the fuckin’ Indians alone!” Granted, they were still “the fuckin’ Indians” to him, but like the band, he wasn’t merely patting himself on the back and paying lip service to the notion of diversity. He was living it and in this instance, risking bodily harm for it.
First and foremost though, Twisted Sister are a killer live band. When they did their 1983 anthem “You Can’t Stop Rock’n’Roll,” it was impressive to see A.J. Pero in person replicate the tempo shift during the guitar solo, when the song suddenly grooves along like Aerosmith’s “Nobody’s Fault.” During “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” Yankee great Bernie Williams joined them on guitar. Even more remarkable, they brought out a deaf Rabbi named Darby Leigh to sign “The Price,” one of the best power ballads from that era. The Rabbi was deaf since birth but found inspiration from Twisted Sister’s lyrics. It was a moving moment, but you had to laugh at the end when Snider summed up the absurdity of the circumstances by simply saying, “Thank you, Rabbi Darby.”
Snider was hilarious the entire night. When he felt he wasn’t getting enough energy from the crowd, he yelled, “Come on people! I’m a fifty-six year old man running around like a maniac!” He joked about people constantly standing up, then sitting down, then standing up again in the balcony, comparing them to Churchgoers. “Turn to page 75 in your hymn books. All Rise for ‘Burn in Hell.’”
Considering the fractured past of the band, the fact that this night was so upbeat or even happening in the first place was somewhat improbable. Most bands have conflicts. But when you have guys from Long Island pissed at one another, it’s whole other level of tension. Bassist Mark “The Animal” Mendoza (nee Glickman) and Dee Snider grew up there. Mendoza hails from West Hempstead and Snider from Baldwin. I grew up in Rockville Centre, the town over from the latter and close by to the former. We can be a passionately angry group of people. Just ask Massapequa’s Alec Baldwin. When we don’t like someone, we really don’t like them. In their Behind the Music episode, Mendoza says that after Twisted Sister broke up in 1987, he was so furious at Snider that “I wanted him dead. I wanted to see him die. Not by me, I didn’t want to kill him. But if he got into a plane crash or a car wreck or something, yeah, well good. Good riddance to an asshole.”
In the ‘80s, Mendoza was a skinny guy with curly hair and makeup, a Nassau County version of Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sometime after the spilt he got a lot bulkier, grew a beard and slicked his hair back in a ponytail, looking like retired U.S. Navy Seal commander/author Richard Marcinko. Instead of playing the bass, there are times where he’ll punch the strings. If Twisted Sister ever win a Grammy, you can bet Kanye will stay glued to his seat.
Twisted Sister are a profile in persistence, able to overcome poisonous personal tensions, bankruptcy, Senate wives, disinterest from their own record company, snooty perceptions (even from a Deadhead) and all sorts of trials and tribulations. Now they’re dealing with the passing of one of their own, the first of the gang to die. After a few weeks discussing the future, they announced that former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy (another Long Island native) would fill in for their remaining 2015 tour dates and 2016’s “Forty and Fuck It” farewell tour. If this truly is goodbye and “fuck it,” the music will always survive. It bears repeating; you can’t stop rock’n’roll. Twisted Sister are a testament to that.
Matt Leinwohl