twisted sister tour history

• Additional Artists
• Notable Equipment

Search form

You are here, twisted sister.

Twisted Sister is an American heavy metal band from Long Island, New York. Musically, the band implements elements of traditional heavy metal bands such as Iron Maiden and Judas Priest along with a driving hard rock style that is similar to AC/DC.

Upcoming Shows

• Site Search
• Privacy Policy

Tour Date Search

www.TourDateSearch.com

Wed, Apr 24, 2024

Shows: 1022 Earliest: Mar 23, 1973 Latest: Jan 26, 2023

On this day in tour history

-- Back to Top of Page --

Follow Tour Date Search : Facebook | Twitter

Search | Artists | Upcoming Shows | Contact | Donate | Links |--> Site Search | Privacy Policy

Twisted Sister: An Unpublished History

Twistory: The story of how five rock and roll thugs from New York City defied the odds, donned hideous outfits and fought their way to the top.

“I have to tell you,” says Jay Jay French, sitting back and taking a moment to reflect on the more than 30-year history of his band, the New York glam-metal act Twisted Sister. “I honestly don’t think I could have written a script as weird as this.”

This writer, for one, couldn’t agree more. It’s the summer of 2006, and I’m sitting with French in the living room of his apartment, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. On this day, the 54-year-old guitarist is dressed in blue jeans and a loose-fitting t-shirt; he has on a pair of reading glasses and is sporting close-cropped, spiky brown hair. The following weekend, he will put on an outfit similar to the one he wore for the period surrounding Twisted Sister’s 1985 album Come Out and Play, with full makeup and a now necessary wig, and walk onstage in Kavarna, Bulgaria. He and his band mates will play a two-hour set of bouncy, anthemic pop-metal that includes songs like “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” “You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll” and “I Wanna Rock”—songs that, apparently, the entire world knows by heart—and thousands of crazed Bulgarians will scream along to every word. Shortly after walking offstage, French and the rest of Twisted Sister, which is rounded out by the well-known mid-Eighties lineup of Dee Snider, guitarist Eddie “Fingers” Ojeda, bassist Mark “The Animal” Mendoza and drummer A.J. Pero, will board a plane for the 5,000-plus mile trip back to New York. They’ll return to their families and day jobs, and the next time they see each other, they will most likely be standing in another airport, preparing to head to another gig in another place very far from home.

“Over the past few years we’ve been traveling all over the world and headlining these huge festivals in countries like Spain, Mexico, Finland, Greece—places where we’ve never even played before,” says French. “And we’ve been drawing bigger crowds than we ever did back in the Eighties.”

It’s a bizarre development in a career that has been packed with them. Music fans are familiar with the most well-known points of Twisted Sister’s story: One of the first bona fide stars of the MTV generation, the band, outrageously dressed and led by the wildly over-the-top Snider, were for a short time in the mid Eighties among the biggest and most recognizable acts in rock and roll. They scored big with their third album, 1984’s Stay Hungry, thanks in large part to the cartoonish videos for the singles “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock,” but were eventually done in by a combination of overexposure and long-simmering inter-band jealousies and resentments.

But that’s only one component of Twisted Sister’s long and varied history. There was also the many years prior to their success spent toiling in the bars and clubs of New York and its surrounding areas, an era marked by innumerable member changes, a seemingly unending string of record label rejections and a slew of alternately tragic and strangely fated scenarios. And there was the band’s post-breakup period, a time when most of the members shunned the limelight—and each other.

In recent years, there has been the reunion, an event that no one in the band imagined would be so successful, or for a long time, would even happen. When it became a reality in the early 2000’s, Twisted Sister chose to return to the scene purely as a nostalgia act, a surprising, but ultimately wise, move; over the past few years the band has received an overwhelming response from massive audience in almost every part of the world. That this has been a part-time endeavor (they have scheduled shows largely during the summer festival months and often around jobs and familial obligations) has resulted in a situation where the members—save for Snider, who still lives very much in the public eye—have forged an existence that seesaws between that of their halcyon Eighties days and the earlier, pre-fame years: They live the rock and roll high life one day, and in obscurity the next.

Get The Pick Newsletter

All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!

• “It’s become this weird, part-time super-stardom type of thing,” says French. “On the weekends, I’ll get dressed up, go onstage, look out at a sea of people and essentially play the part of ‘Jay Jay French from Twisted Sister.’ But come Monday, I’m back at work, on the phone going, ‘Yes, what can I do for you?’ ”
• Adding to the list of strange developments was this fall’s A Twisted Christmas, a collection of the band’s interpretations of ten Yuletide classics. A holiday-season U.S. tour followed, which also served as their farewell sendoff, Snider having stated that 2006 would be his final year with the band. If this is indeed the case, then for all involved, the reunion proved a success—and not just in terms of tickets sales.

“Twisted came in with a roar and went out with a whimper the first time around, and that always bothered me,” says Snider, reached by phone a few weeks after returning from Bulgaria. “Considering how uproarious, obnoxious and uncompromising we were, we should have spontaneously combusted. There should have been nothing left but five pairs of boots and some globules of protoplasm! Instead it just fell apart. That was one of the purposes of reuniting—to repair some relationships and end this thing on a better note. Thankfully, it looks like we’ve achieved that.”

Twisted Sister’s uproarious, obnoxious and uncompromising story begins with a young music fan named John French Segall. As a teenager growing up in New York City in the late 1960’s, Segall, who would years later change his name to Jay Jay French, spent much of his time taking in Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers Band concerts at the legendary Fillmore East, in Manhattan’s East Village, and teaching himself to play guitar like his idols, English blues-based rockers like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. That all changed in the fall of 1972, when the 20-year-old received three albums in the mail in conjunction with a magazine subscription offer: David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes and Lou Reed’s Transformer. Segall, a self-described “long-haired hippie with John-Lennon glasses,” was instantly smitten with the overt sexuality and suggestive androgyny. “I looked at those album covers and my life came crashing down around me,” he says. “I thought, This is me.”

The young guitarist ditched the glasses, cut and dyed his hair blond and set out on the road to glitter-rock glory. In the fall of 1972, he answered an ad in the Village Voice placed by another pair of rehabilitated hippies named Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, who were looking for a lead guitarist for their new band, Kiss. Coincidentally, Segall had earlier that same year auditioned for the two, then known as Gene Klein and Stanley Eisen, respectively, when they were still playing with their former outfit, Wicked Lester. “They had been doing the hippie thing the first time we met,” he says. “The music was much softer, and they had beards. I remember Gene coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re Jewish. I’m Jewish too, and I’m changing my name.’ ” Although Stanley and Simmons this time informed Segall that the lead guitar slot had just been filled by a musician named Paul “Ace” Frehley, he was invited to the band’s loft on 23rd street in Manhattan to observe a rehearsal. “I sat on a chair in this empty room and watched them perform the songs that basically became the first Kiss album,” he says. “They didn’t have the makeup yet, but they had the platform shoes and these big Marshall stacks. I was just stunned.”

By December of that year Segall had found his own band, a New Jersey-based glam-rock covers act named Silver Star. The group was comprised of an odd cast of characters—singer Michael Valentine was an alcoholic who would often walk offstage mid-song to have a drink at the bar, while drummer Mell Starr took great delight in telling the story of how his brother, Al Anderson, had landed the guitarist slot in Bob Marley’s Wailers by “dressing like a Jamaican” and speaking in a native patois—but Segall nonetheless was finally playing the music he loved. First, however, a few modifications were in order. Taking a cue from Kiss’ Simmons, he changed his name to the ethnically ambiguous Johnny Heartbreaker, and eventually to Jay Jay French. More significantly, Silver Star adopted the moniker Twisted Sister, a fitting name, seeing as how the band’s image went well beyond the standard glam getup of platform heels and feather boas and into the territory of full-on female impersonation. “We tried to look as feminine as possible,” says French. “I even shaved my legs.”

The glam rock movement was reaching its zenith in the U.S. when the newly christened Twisted Sister made its live debut in March, 1973, performing a set of Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed and Rolling Stones covers. Over the next two years the band kept up a consistent six-days-a-week show schedule, often playing as many as five sets a night, throughout New Jersey, suburban New York and the surrounding areas. The crowds were increasing in size, but the band members’ wild personalities eventually proved an insurmountable obstacle. After a gig in Massachusetts, an inebriated Valentine pulled a loaded gun on Starr and was fired, one in a series of substance abuse-related lineup changes. Things gradually devolved to the point where French, an able guitarist but by no means blessed with much vocal ability, found himself fronting the band, selecting songs based on whether they were easy to sing. It all became too much for the driven—and staunchly sober—guitarist, and in the fall of 1975, Twisted Sister called it quits. “We broke up and I took a job waiting tables in a restaurant,” says French. “I thought I had played my last show.”

That was hardly the case, as within months French, clearly not one for the blue-collar life, resurrected Twisted Sister, this time enlisting, among others, former bassist Kenneth Harrison Neill and a guitarist from the Bronx named Eddie Ojeda. But with glitter rock now on the wan, and French still croaking his way through “Walk On the Wild Side,” gigs were becoming less frequent. A change was clearly in order. “Our agent at the time said to me, ‘You’ve gotta do some Zeppelin,’ ” says French. “ ‘That’s what people wanna hear now.’ ”

Enter ex-Peacock singer Daniel “Dee” Snider, a 20-year-old former choirboy from Baldwin, Long Island, with the pipes and the personality—not to mention the hair—for the job. Brash, extroverted and wildly charismatic, Snider had an outsize ego that matched his robust frame. “He didn’t drink or smoke, but he was out of his mind,” says French. “A crazy, over-caffeinated, manic depressive, dysfunctional guy, but also very driven and professional.” He pauses. “A lead singer, you know?” Snider, for his part, sees things a bit differently. “I was a little ostracized right from the start,” he says. “Jay Jay and Eddie were a few years older than me. They were city guys. I was this rube from Long Island. They already had a bit of a name, and I wanted to join their band. And they treated me like a kid. So I felt I had to prove myself.”

For all the underlying friction, the new version of the band (completed by drummer Tony Petri, who was brought in after their previous sticksman was unable to pull off the Grand Funk Railroad cowbell-classic, “We’re An American Band”) had undeniable chemistry, and signaled the beginning stages of the classic Twisted Sister lineup. Snider’s formidable presence, not to mention his aggressive onstage persona, fostered by a desire to prove his mettle both to the audience and his fellow band members, injected new life into the group. In addition to Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk tunes, Twisted Sister began incorporating into their sets the music of artists that Snider loved, including Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper, and their glitter/glam appearance slowly morphed into something “a little more Rocky Horror,” says French. The harder-edged look and sound resulted in Twisted Sister becoming, says Snider, “the first hair-metal band.”

Over the next few years, Twisted Sister developed into one of the preeminent club acts in the Tri-State area. The band was playing upwards of 250 shows a year, often multiple sets each night, to a growing legion of fans that they dubbed the Sick Motherfuckers, or SMF’s. Onstage, they played the role of hell-raising, hard-living rock and rollers, but in reality the band functioned with a high level of discipline. “This was the drill,” says French. “We would get to the bars at six in the evening to do our sound check, then we’d have dinner and wait to go onstage. We’d play the set—or sets—hang out a bit, load out the gear and get home around six in the morning. We’d sleep until one or two in the afternoon, wake up, maybe rehearse, run some errands and then get in our car and drive to the gig. That was what we did every single day, for years. Nothing ever changed.”

By late 1976 the band was doing well enough to rent a house in Massapequa, on Long Island. “We were making so much money in the clubs that we found this nice place in an upper-class area, with central air and a pool,” says Snider. But in keeping with the no-nonsense attitude with which they conducted their lives, the house was far from the debauched sex-and-drugs-den one would have expected. “I think we threw one party at that house, a fourth of July thing that almost got us all arrested,” says French. “And I remember joking around with Dee, saying, ‘We should smoke a joint so that we can at least tell people we’ve done drugs. That wasn’t our thing. We didn’t party—we played.”

That staunch work ethic was paying off. By 1978 the band, now with ex-Dictators—and former Twisted Sister roadie—Mark “The Animal” Mendoza on bass (Kenneth Harrison Neill abruptly quit after announcing he had become a born-again Christian), was pulling in anywhere from two to five thousand people per show, playing consistently at venues like Hammerheads in West Islip, Long Island, the Gemini in Westchester, New York and the Fountain Casino in Aberdeen, New Jersey. In addition, Snider had begun to find his voice as a songwriter, and Twisted Sister’s sets were now comprised of larger amounts of original material, including Dee-penned anthems like “I’ll Never Grow Up, Now!” and “Bad Boys (Of Rock ’N’ Roll)”—hooky pop-metal tunes that were perfect for rousing a crowd and inspiring sing-alongs.

Unfortunately, the band wasn’t inspiring many record labels. They recorded a number of demos throughout the late Seventies, and in 1979 even landed a session with renowned Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin producer Eddie Kramer at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, which yielded a seven-inch single with the songs “I’ll Never Grow Up, Now!” and the more aggressive “Under the Blade.” Neither that single nor a subsequent one garnered any label interest. “We were turned down more times than a bed sheet in a whorehouse,” says French.

Not surprisingly, the band’s image proved to be a major sticking point. Punk and everyman arena rock were the sounds of the day at the end of the Seventies, and there was little regard for a veteran group of heavily made-up glam rockers—particularly one that looked like a gang of linebackers dressed in cheap drag. If Twisted Sister met with a detractor while performing in a bar or club, any strife was easily avoided—“We’d call the guy up onstage, and he’d see me, Dee and Mendoza standing there, each about six-foot-ten in our heels, and just shut the fuck up,” says French—the labels, however, could not be handled in such a manner. Rejection letters included criticisms that ran the gamut from “unable to apply makeup correctly” to “platform boots are too high.” One commented that the band was too much like Alice Cooper and Kiss, but not enough like Meatloaf and Boston, while another stated that Snider looked like a “poor imitation of Roger Daltrey.” “We heard every excuse in the book,” says French. “I remember one rejection letter that just said, We can’t sign them—the singer’s pants are too pink.”

The obvious question, then: Why not just ditch the outdated glam look altogether? “It’s not like we didn’t think of that,” says Snider. “When we were on what I think was our sixth attempt to go to the majors, we did a photo shoot for what we were gonna call the ‘Have It Your Way’ press kit. There was going to be a photo of us in full makeup and gear, and another in our street clothes. It was just like, ‘All right. This is Twisted Sister. If the makeup is really bothering you, we’ll take it off.’ We were at our wit’s end. But right around that time is when we started getting attention overseas, and landed our indie deal over there.”

The contract Twisted Sister was offered was with a small British punk imprint called Secret Records, which was turned on to the band after their “Under the Blade” seven-inch single (which, faced with no other options, the band released on their own TSR label) began charting in the British rock paper Sounds. Engaged by the song’s driving, punk-metal rhythm—similar in style to that of the bands who were part of the then burgeoning New Wave of British Heavy Metal—Secret president Martin Hooker flew to New York in December, 1981, to take in a Twisted Sister performance at the Manhattan Civic Center. Hooker loved what he saw, and after the show went backstage to offer them a deal. “We didn’t react at all,” says French. “So he walked out of the dressing room and said to our manager, ‘I don’t understand. I just told these guys I’m signing them.’ Our manager said, ‘You don’t really get the history of this band. Just send the contracts.’ ” Hooker did, and in April, 1982, ten years after forming in the suburbs of New Jersey, Twisted Sister signed with Secret and headed to England to record their debut album.

A four-song EP, Ruff Cutts, as well as series of shows supporting British metal legends Motorhead (during which time Twisted earned the support and endorsement of the band’s singer, Lemmy Kilmister) preceded the fall 1982 release of the band’s full-length debut, Under the Blade. Produced by ex-UFO bassist Pete Way and featuring new drummer A.J. Pero, the album included such Twisted Sister standards as “Bad Boys (Of Rock ’N’ Roll),” “I’ll Never Grow Up, Now!” and the title track, as well as the AC/DC-style three chord anthem “Shoot ’Em Down,” the galloping “Tear It Loose” (with Motorhead’s “Fast” Eddie Clarke on guitar) and the ultra-slow, ultra-heavy “Destroyer.” The record received promising reviews—Sounds called the band “metal megastars in the making”—and Twisted Sister were featured in Kerrang! and other top metal magazines of the day.

But as had been the case too many times in the past, every step forward was met with a devastating step back. On the eve of a tour with NWOBHM greats Diamond Head, Secret Records went bankrupt, and Twisted Sister were, once again, a band without a label. “We were back in New York when we got the word,” says French. “So now we couldn’t get back over to England to tour. We decided it was over at that point. We couldn’t handle it any longer. We played one more show the weekend of Thanksgiving, on Staten Island, and then we were going to call it a day.”

Once again, however, fate intervened at the last minute. Mark Puma, Twisted Sister’s manager at the time, convinced the band to scrape together enough money to return to the UK to appear on a popular new television show called “The Tube.” At the filming, Puma bumped into Phil Carson, an Atlantic Records executive who was there with one of his clients, Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones. As luck would have it, Carson had recently received an enthusiastic letter in regards to Twisted Sister from a young Atlantic employee named Jason Flom—a letter he had summarily thrown in the garbage. Additionally, the head of the label’s New York division, Doug Morris, had told Flom, in no uncertain terms, that Twisted Sister “sucked radically.” Nonetheless, Jones, who was living in New York at the time, had heard “Shoot ‘Em Down” on local radio station WPLJ and suggested that Carson check them out. He did, and soon after approached the band at a show at London’s Marquee with the intention of signing them.

“I looked at Carson and said, “What label do you work for?’” says French. “When he told me it was Atlantic, I just thought, Of all the record companies he could have said … I figured that we were done.” Turned out they weren’t. Carson alerted Doug Morris of his new discovery, to which, says French, “Morris went, ‘Fine, you deal with them. I don’t want to know anything about it!’ ” He laughs. “And that’s how we got signed to Atlantic Records.”

The band’s first album for the label, 1983’s You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll, only increased their standing in the U.K. They appeared on the long-running British show “Top of the Pops” and played that year’s Donington festival alongside acts like Meatloaf, ZZ Top and Whitesnake. In the U.S., however, things were slower going. “The band had been around for years, but people didn’t know who we were,” says Snider. “I remember playing out in the Midwest and fans coming up to me going, ‘Where’s your British accent?’ ”

You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll did eventually find some success stateside, thanks in part to a somewhat humorous video for the title track, in which the band performed the song inside a beat-up van while being chased by two nefarious looking men. The clip garnered airplay on the infant MTV network, the beginning of a relationship that would play a huge role in helping to make their next album, 1984’s Stay Hungry, a mainstream smash. “Around that time Doug Morris said to me, ‘You guys toured a year without any support and you proved yourself. Now I’m going to put money behind you. I’ll make you one of the biggest bands in the world,’” says French. “And most people don’t know this, but back then Warner Bros. [Atlantic’s parent company] had a financial stake in MTV. So anything that Atlantic gave them, they were going to play—there wasn’t all that much to play, anyway. So we did the right videos at the right time.”

By 1984, MTV had begun to rival radio in terms of its importance as a tool for breaking new acts. And as far as the network was concerned, the more outrageous a band’s look, the better. As a result, in the early Eighties a new wave of image-conscious glam-metal acts, which included bands like Motley Crue, Ratt and Quiet Riot, was benefiting enormously from heavy MTV exposure. But none of these bands embraced the concept, and potential, of the video as expertly as did Twisted Sister. Their clips for the Stay Hungry tracks “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” were three-minute slapstick comedies, full of humorously over-the-top violence and colorful, larger-than-life characters. Both featured the band members, in full glam regalia, facing off against a parent/teacher authority figure in a Wile E. Coyote-type battle of wills, and were set to a perfect pop-metal soundtrack. The songs, like all of Twisted Sister’s recorded material, were penned by Snider, and like the majority of his work, were anthemic, catchy and ideal for riling up a club full of SMF’s; now they were stimulating kids in their living rooms all over the country. After more than a decade of struggling, Twisted Sister had finally found their moment. In what seemed like overnight, Twisted Sister were famous, their faces plastered in every magazine and all over television.

But it was one person’s face in particular. As the band’s star rose, Snider’s exploded. Being the frontman, this was, to some degree, expected. But given Snider’s natural exuberance and gregariousness, he gradually began to be perceived as a personality separate from his band, and became a celebrity in his own right. (It didn’t help matters that the Stay Hungry album cover, originally conceived as a full-band photo, in the end featured only Snider, a crazed look on his face and wielding an oversized bone). Resentment began to set in. “The rest of us wouldn’t have cared if Dee had bothered to, you know, at least acknowledge that he saw what was going on, and the role that we all played in making it happen,” says French. “But he didn’t. He just ran with it.”

“Certainly I was a megalomaniac,” says Snider. “But I always had been. It just got worse when I was proven right. Here I was writing all these songs and driving this vehicle, and then all of a sudden I was getting all the attention as the songwriter, the crazy one, the frontman, the creative force. And that really alienated the rest of the band. It’s really unfair, but that’s how it is in most cases.”

In addition to a marked discrepancy in terms of the amount of attention the band members received, there was also a widening financial gap. As Twisted Sister’s sole songwriter, Snider was reaping the majority of the monetary rewards from their newfound success. “By the time we got a deal I had written 100 songs or so, and no one ever questioned that they were my songs,” he says by way of explanation. “Then all of a sudden they had value. But as far as publishing, no one asked [for a percentage], and if they did I wouldn’t have shared it—I didn’t feel that I had anybody to share it with. They were clearly my songs. And the other guys was never discouraged from submitting their own, they just never did.”

When all was said and done, Stay Hungry had sold upwards of two million copies and produced three hit singles. But, says French, what should have been a triumphant moment felt like anything but. “I think Stay Hungry was a dividing line. As the record got bigger and bigger the band got unhappier and unhappier. I remember the day I was told it was double platinum. I was like ‘Yeah? So what.’ After all that time, I didn’t even care. I was pissed off that I couldn’t enjoy it. I mean, people think of us as an Eighties metal band, but we weren’t. We were a Seventies bar band that happened to make it in the Eighties—we had absolutely nothing in common with guys like Motley Crue and Dokken. I was already 30 years old, and we had played so much, and done it for so long.”

Twisted Sister was on the outs without one another, and also feeling increasingly disconnected from the poppy hair-metal scene they were now a part of. “In the new MTV world, we quickly became defined as the ‘Teen Anthem Band,’ ” says Snider. “And that was detrimental to our longevity.” Veteran Twisted Sister fans had become disenchanted by the band’s now cartoonish image, while, on the other hand, inflammatory watchdog organizations like the Tipper Gore-led Parents Music Resource Center were attacking them (along with acts like W.A.S.P., Motley Crue and AC/DC) for incorporating what they deemed to be inappropriate lyric content and imagery in their songs. This led to an unusual moment in September, 1985, when Snider, dressed in jeans and denim jacket, his long hair flowing wildly and teeth shaved into fangs, appeared on the floor of the U.S. Senate, alongside Frank Zappa and John Denver, to defend his band. In one particularly humorous exchange, Senate member and future vice president Al Gore, in response to Snider’s proclamation that his band’s fan club was named the Sick Motherfucking Fans of Twisted Sister, asked the singer if it was a “Christian group.”

Snider’s bold—and surprisingly lucid—performance before the Senate helped to bolster his band’s flagging credibility, but in the end proved merely another instance of the image outshining the music. The rot had set in. Twisted Sister’s next album, 1985’s Come Out and Play, featured a minor hit single in a cover of “Leader of the Pack,” a song they had first recorded back in the Seventies, but overall was a critical and commercial disappointment. Their 1987 follow-up, Love Is For Suckers, barely registered on the music landscape, and it is open to debate how much of the band, other than Snider, even performs on it. Originally planned as a solo effort, management and Atlantic pressured Snider into making Suckers a Twisted Sister effort, but the final product is one in name only. A.J. Pero had left the band at that point, and was replaced by Joey Franco, whose drum tracks on the album were largely the result of programmed beats. Most egregiously, hotshot studio guitarist Reb Beach, who would soon gain fame playing with Winger, was credited with “additional guitars.” According to French, this is something of an understatement, as he claims that both he and Ojeda played very little, if at all, on the record. “Dee made it clear he wasn’t happy with our abilities as musicians,” says French. “He and [producer] Beau Hill wanted a contemporary sound, which at that time meant shredding guitar solos, which is not what Eddie and I do. Reb was Beau’s go-to guy for all the records he produced, so our services weren’t really required.” Things got so bad that at one point French, the band’s founder and sole original member, alleges he was threatened with being fired from his own group. “But I didn’t even care that much,” he says. “I had a marriage that was falling apart simultaneously, I was dealing with a lot of other issues. I kind of said, it’s time to move on. It had been 15 years. I had played thousands of Twisted Sister shows. I was tired.”

“Throughout our career, Twisted had a horrible habit of never confronting one another with our problems,” says Snider. “We would go to management and bitch and moan, and they would basically put a band aid on it, but not treat the real wound. So over the years those wounds festered and basically developed into cancer. It wasn’t so easy to treat at that point, and everybody’s issues ran deep.”

A video was released for the single “Hot Love,” and a tour was launched in support of the album, but tickets sales were abysmal. Snider, who was no longer on speaking terms with French or Mendoza, made clear his intentions to leave the band, and after a show in Minneapolis in October, 1987, Twisted Sister simply came to a halt, mid-tour. “We could have finished it off, but there was no reason,” says French. “No one was even coming out to the shows. It just didn’t pay to keep going.” The band officially continued as a business entity until early 1988, but there was no farewell, no big send-off, no nothing. Twisted Sister exited the scene so quietly that few seemed to notice they were gone. For a band that had endured so much over its 15 years in existence, it was a tragically anti-climactic end.

Over the ensuing years only Snider remained in the public eye, first leading a pair of metal bands, Desperado and Widowmaker, and then emerging as a successful radio and television personality and screen writer, in particular for the 1998 horror movie Strangeland. The rest of the band members eventually picked up day jobs. French, who had managed Twisted Sister sporadically throughout their career, started up his own companies, French Management and Rebellion Entertainment, where he worked with artists like the nu-metal act Sevendust, while Mendoza found employment in law-enforcement. It wasn’t until 1996, when Snider and French reconciled after not speaking for almost a decade, that any signs of life in the Twisted Sister camp emerged, and even then the future looked tenuous. Over the next few years, the band played sporadically at special events, and recorded a new song, “Heroes Are Hard to Find,” for the soundtrack to Snider’s Strangeland—though they all tracked their parts separately, working at different times in the studio.

But as the band members gradually repaired their relationships, disaster struck once again. Individual interviews conducted with band members for a 2001 episode of the VH1 series “Behind the Music” revealed how much animosity still lingered; Mendoza, in an infamous moment, went so far as to state that for a long time he had wanted Snider dead. “I remember watching the show on TV and thinking, ‘This is bad.’ ” says French. “It was sort of edited to make it look like we hated each other more than we did, but at the same time, there was so much real bitterness that was exposed. I figured there was no chance of a reunion after that.”

There was, and soon. That November, the band members looked beyond whatever resentments had once again been brought to the surface to help out with an important cause, performing, alongside other New York artists like Ace Frehley and Anthrax at New York Steel, a 9/11 benefit held in Manhattan to raise money for the New York Police & Fire Widows & Children’s Fund. With little in the way of rehearsing, and dressed in t-shirts and jeans, the band pulled off an inspired set. Afterwards, they again went their separate ways, but reaction to the band’s performance was so positive that offers started coming in from festival organizers in Europe, looking to book Twisted Sister for the following summer.

Thus began the official reunion. But, unlike other hard rock acts that, in recent years, have sought to fit into the current music landscape, Twisted Sister made no attempt to present themselves as a contemporary band. They commissioned costumes based on their Eighties-era looks, with accordingly appropriate makeup and hair, and performed only their most well-known and beloved classic songs. “Let’s be honest,” says Snider. “Nobody cares about the new stuff—they don’t want to hear it, and they certainly don’t want to buy it. They just want the songs they loved when they were growing up.” “The minute you go, “this is a new song,” says French, “everyone’s off to the bathroom. So we just decided to say, ‘Here it is—1984. You want it, we’re more than happy to give it to you. Two hours of everything you want to hear, all killer, no filler. No bullshit.’ ”

Over the next few years the band played to audiences of both old and new fans on both sides of the Atlantic (including occasional, non-costumed gigs for which they were billed as ‘Bent Brother’). Though the response in the U.S. was impressive, in Europe it was overwhelming, with the band headlining festivals in front of tens of thousands of people. “The reaction was insane,” says French. “We first broke in Europe, but after that were always much bigger in the States. But it seemed to shift. Now we’re huge over there.”

As for why they seemed to be drawing as big, if not bigger, crowds than they did back in the Eighties, French has a theory: “Twisted Sister has a reputation for being a great live act. We played more than 9,000 concerts throughout our career; we played more shows before we got signed then most bands play, period. So when we get up onstage, people know they’re going to see an incredible show.” On another front, the band issued a slew of releases, including remastered studio albums, demos and live performances and a tribute disc. In an effort to repair a sore spot, in 2004 they re-recorded Stay Hungry—this time titled Still Hungry—which, in addition to improved production quality, featured, as was originally intended, a full-band shot on the album’s cover. All the while they continued to tour sporadically, juggling rock and roll and home life. But living a dual existence had become too much for Snider, who finally announced that 2006 would be his last year with Twisted Sister. “Doing Twisted again was great,” he says, “but in a way it completely destroyed my home life. This past summer I just wasn’t around. We were traveling all over the world and playing to hundreds of thousands of people, which was great. But I have a job, I have a wife, I have kids. It was too much. I had to call it a day.”

With the band’s legacy no longer in question, and the members’ relationships with one another stronger than perhaps at any time in the past, it would seem to be that the Christmas album and tour will stand as Twisted Sister’s official swan song. But, as has been the case so often throughout the band’s history, things don’t always go as planned. As Snider admits, “you never know what the future holds.” He laughs. “I know I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m done, but it’s like Al Pacino said in The Godfather [Part III]: ‘Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in!’ ”

Thank you for reading 5 articles this month**

Join now for unlimited access

US pricing $3.99 per month or $39.00 per year

UK pricing £2.99 per month or £29.00 per year 

Europe pricing €3.49 per month or €34.00 per year

*Read 5 free articles per month without a subscription

Prices from £2.99/$3.99/€3.49

“A lot of people don’t know cheap guitars require the same energy, and resources to make as an expensive guitar”: How this Danish guitar company is turning factory rejects into some of its finest builds

“No-one had brought an electric guitar in the church before… it caused a bit of a stir”: Patti Smith on her controversial first gig – and why rock belongs to the people

“We played a bunch of really awkward shows with both of us staring at our tuners the whole time and then we broke up for 15 years”: Math-rock pioneer Mike Kinsella on his unlikely journey to cult guitar hero status with American Football

Most Popular

• Statistics Stats
• You are here:
• Twisted Sister
• Tour Statistics
• Song Statistics Stats
• Tour Statistics Stats
• Other Statistics

All Setlists

• All setlist songs  ( 1092 )

Years on tour

• 2023  ( 1 )
• 2016  ( 20 )
• 2015  ( 10 )
• 2014  ( 14 )
• 2013  ( 10 )
• 2012  ( 10 )
• 2011  ( 17 )
• 2010  ( 18 )
• 2009  ( 18 )
• 2008  ( 13 )
• 2007  ( 9 )
• 2006  ( 30 )
• 2005  ( 30 )
• 2004  ( 24 )
• 2003  ( 23 )
• 2002  ( 1 )
• 2001  ( 2 )
• 2000  ( 1 )
• 1987  ( 13 )
• 1986  ( 47 )
• 1985  ( 42 )
• 1984  ( 106 )
• 1983  ( 69 )
• 1982  ( 50 )
• 1981  ( 31 )
• 1980  ( 71 )
• 1979  ( 26 )
• 1978  ( 198 )
• 1977  ( 14 )
• 1976  ( 28 )
• 1975  ( 5 )
• 1974  ( 23 )
• 1973  ( 118 )

Show all tours

• 2010 South American Tour  ( 5 )
• A Twisted Christmas 2006  ( 13 )
• A Twisted Christmas 2008  ( 2 )
• A Twisted Christmas 2011  ( 2 )
• Come Out and Play  ( 47 )
• Farewell Tour  ( 10 )
• Forty and F*ck It  ( 19 )
• Love Is for Suckers  ( 13 )
• Stay Hungry  ( 148 )
• Stay Hungry 25th Anniversary Tour  ( 9 )
• Under the Blade  ( 24 )
• You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll  ( 58 )
• Avg Setlist

Concert Map

• Apr 23, 2024
• Apr 22, 2024
• Apr 21, 2024
• Apr 20, 2024
• Apr 19, 2024
• Apr 18, 2024
• FAQ | Help | About
• Terms of Service
• Ad Choices | Privacy Policy
• Feature requests
• Songtexte.com

Twisted Sister: the improbable story of Stay Hungry

The story of Stay Hungry, Twisted Sister's biggest album, is one of bitter fights between the band and their producer and label

Dee Snider's neck veins bulge as he emits an evil chuckle. The ringlet-haired Twisted Sister frontman is trying to regale fans at the Rock & Blues Custom Show in Derbyshire with the story behind one of Twisted Sister’s biggest hits, but he’s hit a memory block.

“What was the name of that fucking asshole?” he enquires of nearby Jay Jay French. Fortunately, the grinning guitarist recalls the tale’s protagonist only too well. “Rob Dickins… that’s heavy on the ‘dick’,” glares Snider with theatrical venom. Given his colourful garb and painted face, not to mention the crowd’s cheering of every exaggerated syllable, the singer’s malevolence could be pantomime-like. However, something in the tone of Dee’s voice is just a little too disturbing.

Snider tells the crowd: “When we first played We’re Not Gonna Take It to Rob Dickins, the boss of our record company at the time, he didn’t think it would be successful. What a fucking asshole – it was a Top Ten hit all over the world. Maybe it didn’t sound enough like Kajagoogoo?”

We’re Not Gonna Take It turned Twisted Sister into megastars in their United States homeland. The Stay Hungry album from which it was lifted eventually sold six million copies worldwide, fuelled by the group’s charismatic videos. However, as you’ll have gathered, their relationship with Atlantic Records was often strained, Snider slamming the US company’s refusal to make the previous album’s I Am (I’m Me) a single as “another brilliant record company decision”; it was the band’s biggest UK single, reaching number 18 in the charts.

It was Atlantic that put forward the name of long-time Cheap Trick/Ted Nugent/Blue Öyster Cult/Molly Hatchet collaborator Tom Werman to produce Stay Hungry . The band maintain that the idea backfired, alleging that Werman told them its songs weren’t good enough and even tried to persuade them to record cover versions instead.

Though they hid the scars extremely well, Twisted Sister were in the process of unravelling at the time of the birth of Stay Hungry . Vanity on the part of Snider and jealously from French, guitarist Eddie ‘Fingers’ Ojeda, bassist Mark ‘The Animal’ Mendoza and drummer AJ Pero were eating away at their very foundations. The group would manage just two further studio albums – Come Out And Play (1985) and Love Is For Suckers (1987) – plus a solitary five-date UK tour in-between.Twisted Sister went their separate ways shortly afterward, bitter acrimony keeping Snider and French apart until a misdirected gold disc for You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll , the preceding album to Stay Hungry , accidentally got them talking again in 1996. Indeed, during a VH1 Behind The Music special on the band, Mendoza admitted that he’d actually wanted to see Snider dead.

Now fully reconciled, the fivesome have gigged in America and on the Continent, though almost two decades had slipped by since they trod the boards in the UK. Snider and company seem genuinely regretful of the lost years.

Classic Rock Newsletter

Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!

“Promoters in the UK said nobody wanted us here,” Dee informs a sold-out Astoria Theatre in London the night after the Rock & Blues Custom Show. “The ones that turned us down can suck my dick. In fact, there’s the deal – if they suck all our dicks then we’ll come back.”

A concerned Mendoza enquires whether said booking agents are male or female, and Snider quips: “Just close your eyes. Pretend you’re in prison.” All joking aside, how much longer this reunion might last has yet to be decided. Indeed, you may even have already missed your final fix of Twisted Sister.

But there’s also some good news. In perhaps the most intriguing development of all, the group’s disappointment at the production of Stay Hungry has manifested itself in a 20th Anniversary re-recording of the disc, overseen byMendoza. Titled Still Hungry , the expanded edition contains revised takes of the original 10 tracks, plus bonus material.

Twisted Sister had their work cut out, following the success of their first major label album, 1983’s You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll (an independent debut called Under The Blade, on Secret Records, had introduced them to the world 12 months earlier). After a decade’s worth of gigs on the East Coast’s Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the band’s critically acclaimed raids upon the UK snagged them a deal with Atlantic, despite American label boss Doug Morris calling the band “the worst fucking piece of shit in the world”.

A self-financed appearance on British TV show The Tube had sealed the deal, a modest $60,000 being allocated for them to make …Rock ’N’ Roll . However, when the recordings came in at $4,500 over budget, Atlantic vowed to sit on record in the States till the group generated the shortfall themselves.

In the UK it was far different, I Am (I’m Me), The Kids Are Back and the title track all became hit singles, and the band made a triumphant appearance at Monsters Of Rock in 1983. So ’til the thumbs-down from Dickins for We’re Not Gonna Take It , hopes had been high that this run would continue. Everyone agreed that the sessions for the next album, which took place on the East and West Coasts of America during February and March 1984, were crucial to the band’s future.At the time, Dee Snider admitted that Tom Werman hadn’t topped the band’s wish list of producers, despite his reputation for working on Mötley Crüe’s S hout At The Devil . (He would also guide Dokken, Poison, Lita Ford and Stryper, among others. 

Confides French: “I think our first choice for Stay Hungry had been Bob Ezrin [Alice Cooper/Kiss/Pink Floyd] but he was unavailable. Failing that we wanted Mack or Roy Thomas Baker [Queen]. The idea of using Tom came from Doug Morris. We were finally starting to get some respect from Atlantic after we sold 100,000 copies of You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll, and in the Christmas week of 1983 Doug told me he had been mistaken about us. He said: ‘Next year I’m gonna make you one of the biggest bands in the world‘.So he wanted us to go with the hot guy.”

Snider is adamant that not only was Tom Werman the wrong guy, but that the album would have exploded no matter who had been behind the console. “We’d have been as huge as we became, no matter what,” he believes. “Using some pop producer was not the key to having a hit record. Tom told me that he worked with us for the money. At least he was honest. The sickening part is that the guy still gets royalties from us.”

When Werman heard that the band were re-recording Stay Hungry, he got his retaliation in early, instigating a bitter internet squabble with the comment: ‘It’s harder to make a hit record with a band like Twisted Sister than with a band like The Eagles, because The Eagles know what they’re doing‘. In a web posting, Snider retaliated: ‘Werman should shut the fuck up before I fuck him up’.

Only marginally more diplomatically, French responds: “I say it’s harder to have an album produced by Tom Werman that’s successful than one that’s not. You may not believe this, but Tom and I are still friends. He’s trying to discredit our talent, but great songs will always be great songs, and that’s what we had. Truth be told, he wasn’t even at the sessions for most of the time. He constantly fought with Dee, and it was the engineer [Geoff Workman] who essentially produced the album.”

‘Animal’ Mendoza was another notable absentee. Snider: “On You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll , Mark was in the studio so much that he was credited with assisting [producer] Stuart Epps. He’d sat side by side with Pete Way [the UFO bassist who produced Under The Blade ]. He’d have sat side by side with someone of Max Norman’s stature, but when he heard we were using Tom Werman he was mortified, and refused to be around beyond playing the bass and doing his job.”

Werman accuses the band of revising history, claiming that they were perfectly happy at the time with his work. This theory is given credence by Snider’s 1984 proclamation that the album was “a classic Twisted Sister effort, hard and fast, and full of anthemic power”. Jay Jay objects, however.

“We never liked the way that Stay Hungry sounded,” he insists. “It was so anaemic. In fact, none of our records sounded all that great to me. They had to be thinner than we’d have liked in order to get on the airwaves. It worked for radio, but just wasn’t representative of the band we were.”

Being native New Yorkers, the quintet had begun work contentedly at the Record Plant, but while they were laying down the framework of the song Burn In Hell there was a fire (according to French; Werman insists the story is untrue). Switching to Cherokee Studios on the other side of the country, they felt less comfortable, despite the hotter weather. Indeed, Snider later told an interviewer that sandbags were piled up behind the door to exclude “all that wimpy LA nonsense”. But city culture was the least of their problems.

“There was huge friction between us and Tom,” relates Jay Jay. “He drank, we didn’t. He was the rock star, we weren’t. We would show up to work at noon and he’d roll in whenever he felt like it. And the fact that this producer nixed pretty much everything we had – including We’re Not Gonna Take It , I Wanna Rock and The Price – to bring in covers says everything about his ability to chose a hit song.”

Snider picks up the theme, the anger growing as he speaks: “I spent my days in the studio fighting with Werman, trying to keep some semblance of who we were. I had to beg him to include those songs. On the first day he brought in Saxon’s Strong Arm Of The Law and Princess Of The Night and told us we should record them instead. I replied: ‘Yeah, they’re great songs – I heard them last week when we did a show with Saxon‘. He thought that because nobody in America knew them, we could get away with recording them.”

Finishing touches were added to the record at a studio owned by Quincy Jones. “Michael Jackson’s Thriller was recorded there and was still on the charts, and the engineers gave us all sorts of fascinating stories about Michael,” grins French – but his overriding recollection of the record’s completion is a final playback session. “When we heard the finished versions of I Wanna Rock and We’re Not Gonna Take It, Geoff Workman said he’d stake his reputation that Stay Hungry would sell at least two million copies.”

Climate-wise, with Van Halen ( 1984 ), Iron Maiden ( Powerslave ), The Scorpions ( Love At First Sting ), ZZ Top ( Eliminator ) and the reunited Deep Purple ( Perfect Strangers ) all scoring huge hits that year, there would never be a better window of opportunity for an album like Stay Hungry.

“We knew that,” nods Jay Jay. “But when the record was finished I didn’t think to myself: ‘Wow, that’s 20 steps ahead of what we’ve done’. I still believe that You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll was the better record of the two. But I knew that the force of the movement would make it happen. Every record label seemed to have their own hair-metal band lined up like jets on the runway. Every month a different jet would head off and strike its target. We were in the right place at the right time, with the most dynamic frontman around. There were so much hairspray above Los Angeles in 1984 it was pretty intoxicating.”

So given the fact that the band’s big breakthrough had come in the UK, there was much shock that Stay Hungry failed to match the British sales of You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll .

“The biggest record of the band’s career flopped in England,” confirms Jay Jay. “The single [ We’re Not Gonna Take It] was nowhere near as big as I Am (I’m Me) [numbers 58 and 18 respectively]. It went double platinum in the States, and we sold so many records in Sweden that we received a plaque that had previously been awarded to Michael Jackson and ABBA. After our previous year’s appearance at Donington, you’d have expected Twisted Sister to have played Wembley Arena on that tour, but the sales didn’t warrant it, so we decided to play Hammersmith Odeon instead.”

According to Snider, Rob Dickins’s vehement opposition to We’re Not Gonna Take It extended to vetoing an advance mail-out of the new single to journalists and radio stations.

“The envelopes were addressed and stuffed when the postage bill landed on his desk,” he relates. “It was probably about £10,000, but pound for pound he’d have got his money back. When the record came out, nobody here [in the UK] knew about it. I was doing interviews and being told the band’s time had passed, but all over the world it was a hit. In Sweden on a promotional tour I was picked up by a limo and taken to the presidential suite of the best hotel. 

"The record was exploding; I was signing autographs for Björn Borg and the King and Queen of Sweden. The next day in England, there’s a cab to the bed and breakfast I’m staying in, I did a depressing series of interviews and then had the weekend off. So I called Sweden to ask if they’d have me back. When I got back over there, I was a god again.”

Another important factor to consider was the growing tension between Dee Snider and the rest of the group. What’s commonly overlooked is that Twisted Sister had existed for three hard years before Snider joined them in 1976. Speaking to Classic Rock last February, Snider acknowledged that his appointment was unusual, stating: “Jay Jay never [even] told me I was in the band. He just said we’d give it a try, and that I should remember he owned the band’s name. To a certain extent, I was alienated.” Nevertheless, Dee gradually took over the group, becoming their focal point, songwriter and main spokesperson.

“It caused problems,” Snider stated in the same article. “I’d taken my cue from Alice Cooper: if they [the other band members] ran around, I ran around more. The guys were solid musicians, but none of them was Eddie Van Halen, and I was the creative force. Jay Jay even accused me of calling every magazine in the world and telling them to print pictures of me, not the band. I looked at him in disbelief – I couldn’t have done that, even if I’d wanted to.”

By the group’s final days, Eddie Ojeda had been ousted with French, claiming “Dee wanted a supergroup of Yngwie Malmsteens”. When it came, the ending was ugly in the extreme. “Dee even tried to fire me,” added Jay Jay. “He then got up, smashed the table and said: ‘I fought for the power, I’ve got the power and I’m never gonna give it up‘. I prayed for ticket sales to bomb – and they did, everywhere. I was happy to see the fucking thing die.”

Twenty years later, when asked to reappraise the contents of Stay Hungry track- by-track, Dee and Jay Jay respond very differently indeed. French gazes for a while at my vinyl copy of the record, lost in thought.

“You know what?” he says finally, for once almost lost for words. “The band was starting to disintegrate – the rot set in and it never got better. So I don’t feel particularly comfortable trying to talk you through those songs.”

You’d expect Snider, who wrote all the words and music, to have far more to say, and you’d be correct in that assumption, but the memories that the album conjures up are equally mixed. Snider once told me: “With We’re Not Gonna Take It , I was singing about my father and schooldays, but it was also about Jay Jay. Certain things that had gone on had made him into another authority figure.” 

He now adds: “At this point I was starting to spend a lot of time on my own. I had a vision, and I pursued it so ruthlessly that I didn’t see the cracks. I just didn’t notice that Mendoza wasn’t rooming with me any more. Some of the guys liked to party and I never did, so we didn’t hang out as much. As my celebrity started to take off, the band were relegated to sideman status – though you must believe that wasn’t my intention. There are a lot of things that I wish I’d done differently. I admit that I was pretty maniacal.”

The entire Stay Hungry album had actually been written during the You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll sessions at Sol Studios in Reading, Berkshire, owned by Jimmy Page. Being away from loved ones placed everyone under an extra degree of pressure, though it enabled Twisted Sister to pursue their goal.

“It was a great time for the band, but sometimes a very lonely one,” explains Dee now. “I didn’t have the money to fly my wife and child in to be with me, so I wrote The Price about the way I was feeling. It came to me in the bathroom at Jimmy Page’s studio; it was the only place that Satan wouldn’t be hanging out. Did you have enough pentagrams on the wall there, Jimmy?”

Snider had written the chorus of We’re Not Gonna Take It in 1980, during the band’s club-band days. He’d also been opposed to including Horror-Teria (The Beginning) on the album as it had been intended for a rock-opera he was working on (“Don’t worry, it’ll never see the light of day,” he now grins). Werman also persuaded the band to record Don’t Let Me Down , having earmarked it as the album’s first single. Dee also chuckles heartily at the recollection that Atlantic preferred Burn In Hell . 

It was only the intervention of Marty Callner, who’d directed videos for The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and Pat Benatar among others, that swung things for We’re Not Gonna Take It .“Marty sent Doug Morris a telegram,” explains Snider. “It said: ‘Working on the first single, W e’re Not Gonna Take It . Stop. This one’s going straight to the top. Stop. Marty’. When the company saw that money was being spent, they had no choice but to do things our way.”

The record’s title track was dedicated to and inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1976 movie of the same name. Indeed, Twisted later sent Arnie a platinum disc for Stay Hungry , and performed at a political rally on his behalf last year. “I’ve admired Arnold since his bodybuilding days,” comments Dee. “He said he wanted to become the world’s greatest bodybuilder, a famous Hollywood actor, a millionaire businessman and always planned on going into politics. He made these goals a reality.” Arnie also adopted We’re Not Gonna Take It as his official song when he campaigned – successfully – to become governor of California.

S.M.F. was, of course, an acronym for ‘Sick Motherfucker’, which Snider penned as a tribute to the loyalty of the fans. “I should’ve written it years earlier,” he says. “It was about them, and for them.”

It’s a little-known fact that during the early 1980s MTV was owned by American Express and Time-Warner, the latter the parent company of Atlantic Records. So Twisted Sister’s videos received saturation coverage. It also helped that the promos for We’re Not Gonna Take It and I Wanna Rock were masterclasses in kitsch. The idea of casting Mark Metcalf as his National Lampoon’s Animal House character Douglas C Neidermeyer was nothing less than inspired. 

Who could forget the militaristic father bullying his son (“Whaddya wanna do with your life?”), or the way said teenager blasts his oppressor clean through the window with a simple guitar strum and a snarl of: “I wanna rock”? The notion of the fat kid getting his revenge on Neidermeyer, who transforms himself into a schoolmaster, was the perfect vehicle for the band’s message of personal freedom, effortlessly tapping into the youthful angst and confusion that every adolescent has felt. French is happy to give all the credit to Snider.

“Dee is a visionary,” says the guitarist. “For several years his ideas were totally in tune with the masses. He and Marty Callner pretty much wrote the storyboards.”

Neither French nor Snider will admit to a shred of embarrassment at the cheese factor of Neidermeyer blowing himself up with grenades, falling through the floor and being covered in cement.

“Ratt had a floor collapsing in their Round And Round video,” shrugs Jay Jay, “so if you think about it, everything silly was up for grabs. There were a lot of lame-ass videos in the 80s, but ours were pretty sophisticated. They’ve stood the test of time; the only real problem with their silliness being that Twisted Sister was a heavy band. That’s a misconception that we still sometimes have to overcome.

“I’m still incredibly proud of the videos, but by the time they went on to heavy rotation at MTV the band had stopped talking to each other,” adds French sadly. “We were operating on auto-pilot. And it only got worse. So it was important for us to go back and re-record the album as friends.”

As well as a sonic facelift, Stay Hungry has received a visual overhaul. As French explains, the original artwork of a lone Snider gnawing at a bone only inflamed the politics of a group already frustrated by the attention the singer was receiving.

“The photo that appears on the back of the record – the band without make-up – was supposed to be used on the front,” he states. “The idea, which came from Mark Mendoza, was that behind each of us, there would be a ghosted image of that guy in make-up. We were in this dilapidated warehouse, with no food to eat and dreaming of becoming rock stars. But at the shoot a lightbulb got in the way, and this was in the days before Photoshop.

“That was just issue one,” he adds. “So Dee and [photographer] Mark Weiss did the famous bone shot, and that got used instead. In Dee’s mind he had become the sole image of what the band was. It became symbolic of the beginning and the end of the band.”

Twisted Sister’s decision to disassemble their biggest-selling album and piece it together again, Frankenstein-like, is a bold one.

“When we got back together, we had 20 years of perspective,” French reflects. “We thought: ‘God, this record sounds terrible. It would be so great to re-record it’. Our initial plan was to slap a new version of Stay Hungry on to the back of a DVD, but once we got into the project it became more and more important.”

So what would Twisted Sister say to those who accuse them of messing with history; tampering unnecessarily with a product that’s already legendary in its sphere? Not a lot after one has removed the expletives, it would seem.

“We’re the artists – we want to reinterpret it. The original’s still out there to be bought,” responds French, seemingly taken off guard by the question. “A lot of people criticised Let It Be… Naked [a 2003 edition of The Beatles’ farewell from 1969 stripped of producer Phil Spector’s orchestrations and choirs]. This is Twisted Sister’s Let It Be… Fuller , or even our Let It Be… Less Nauseating. To me, the original Stay Hungry is just unlistenable.”

“We didn’t do this for anybody but ourselves,” agrees Snider. “We don’t think it’ll sell millions of copies or reactivate our career. The songs and arrangements are also pretty much the same; what’s different about S till Hungry is the attack.”

The accompanying DVD attempts to explain the decision to return in 1999, over 10 years after they split up. “You think it was easy to reunite this band? It was not,” Snider told a rapt Astoria during the band’s summer visit. “How tense was the first rehearsal? ‘Animal’ was carrying a gun, I swear to God.” In fact, the first Twisted Sister performance in 13 years was a spontaneous, three-song affair at a party to honour A&R man Jason Flom, just about the only person at Atlantic in the US to have taken the group seriously at the start.

“In the year 2001 the five of us still hadn’t been in a room together again,” relates French. “We agreed to play for Jason, but in usual Twisted Sister fashion a band member didn’t make it to our only rehearsal. So we ran things through in a kitchen half-an-hour beforehand – if you’d told me it would work out like that, I’d have said you were out of your mind.”

Just 150 people witnessed this event, but although the band wore jeans and T- shirts they still brought the house down. Scenes of them jamming I Wanna Rock with Kid Rock, ex-Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach and Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray are included on the DVD, plus footage from a higher-profile spot at the Hammerstein Ballroom show of 2001 that raised funds for dependants of New York fire-fighters lost in the Twin Towers terror strikes. Clearing out the vaults, the DVD also shows TS playing before US troops in Korea. As French quite rightly points out, the fact that the quintet are performing better than ever before validates the re- ploughing of old furrows.

“We’re going to great pains to freeze a moment in time,” he stresses. “Twisted Sister is iconic for a specific era, it’s something we’re very proud of. Maybe it’s good that we imploded when we did, because we didn’t get burnt out and tired like so many other bands. You’ll hear that on these heavier new versions of the songs.”

When it became evident that Still Hungry was destined to become what French calls “a stand-alone CD”, extra audio material was added. To that end, Never Say Never and Blastin’ Fast & Loud – both abandoned at Werman’s insistence during the original Stay Hungry sessions, but posthumously pieced together for the 1999 Club Daze Revisited anthology – are among the material that’s been exhumed. Both had lain in the vaults until the newly reunited group went back to complete them. 

As well as cutting Heroes Are Hard To Find from the soundtrack of Snider’s 98 movie Strangeland, they’ve recorded new versions of Come Back, You Know I Cry, Rock ’N’ Roll Saviours and Plastic Money – all material performed countless times in the East Coast fleapits, though never available ’til now in studio form. “We’re re-using the Club Daze… versions,” explains Jay Jay. “We could have re-done them from scratch, but the original drum tracks from 1984 still existed. It would have been way too expensive to rip those out and graft everything back on.”

Discussing the long-term future of Twisted Sister is when ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ begin to surface. Before last summer’s festival appearances in Sweden and Germany it had been stressed that the reunion was only likely to last for a year. But 12 months later, the quintet spread their wings further to include shows in the UK. So what gives? The answer is complex.

The type of show they prefer to stage costs money, so they’ve also taken to playing smaller-scale gigs in street clothes under the name of Bent Brother (think about it). Obviously, however, it’s the full make-up time-warp experience that the fans crave. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the band don’t generate enough money from their reunion endeavours to live for the other 10 months of the year – since they broke up, Mendoza has worked in law enforcement, Ojeda and Pero both have regular employment, French runs an artist management company and Snider’s House Of Hair radio show is syndicated to 170 stations across the States – so nobody is under the delusion that they can just pick up where they left off with Love Is For Suckers. (although it should be pointed out that the album doesn’t feature Pero, who’d been replaced by Joe Franco).

“There’s a plan to take us through the next two years,” reveals Jay Jay carefully. “We still don’t play too much, because our responsibilities only allow us to work at weekends. Last year we did 15 shows, this time it’s 18. Next year we’re committed to just one show, headlining the Bang Your Head Festival in Germany. We’ll continue if the size of the venues are right and the money makes sense.”

“We’re talking about [doing this again] next year, but unless certain things change then I don’t want to do this any more,” Snider tells me, away from the rest of the band in an Astoria dressing room. “I’ve been doing really well for myself in radio and TV, voiceovers for commercials. In the UK people probably thought I’d died, but in the US Dee Snider has become quite a brand name. Coming back to Twisted Sister was not an economic thing; more of a cut in pay. But the band had ended on a very bad note and it was all about closure.”

Given the admittedly cagey positivism of Jay Jay French and the sheer enjoyment that the entire band seem to exude while they’re on the boards, Dee’s comments are a little shocking.

“The 90 minutes on stage is magic, but the logistics are horrible,” Snider elaborates. “We’re not making the kind of money to allow for the Bon Jovi or Aerosmith approach to rock’n’roll. We’re like weekend warriors. When the plane flights aren’t first class and there’s no air conditioning in the ground transportation, then I just think: ‘Why the fuck am I doing this?’. I’ve told the management, fix it or I ain’t doing it [next year]. It doesn’t have to be private jets, just a modicum of comfort. If the money’s not there to do it properly, why would we do so again?”

Strong words. But if those hiccoughs get to be ironed out, how much longer does Dee think Twisted Sister could keep going?

“I don’t wanna do it,” he says flatly. “I don’t need this for my ego. I’ll be 50 next year; do I think I can do it then? Yeah. Do I think I could do it at 60? Hopefully. But I don’t wanna find out the hard way. I wanna leave people with great memories of us – jaws on the floor. That’s what I hope we’ve been doing on these dates.”

This was published in Classic Rock issue 73

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.

"We would go in there and eat the turkeys and whatever else we found": Heart kept themselves from starving in their early days by stealing Bachman Turner Overdrive's food

"Somebody has to be the kind of songwriter who doesn’t give a shit if he gets called pretentious." Ian Anderson on the inspiration behind Jethro Tull's RökFlöte

Ozzy Osbourne, Foreigner, Peter Frampton and more to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

Most Popular

• Moscow concerts Moscow concerts Moscow concerts See all Moscow concerts ( Change location ) Today · Next 7 days · Next 30 days
• Most popular artists worldwide
• Trending artists worldwide

• Tourbox for artists

Search for events or artists

• Sign up Log in

• Get the app
• Moscow concerts
• Change location
• Popular Artists
• Live streams
• Popular artists

Twisted Sister tour dates 2024

Twisted Sister is currently touring across 1 country and has 1 upcoming concert.

The final concert of the tour will be at Pitcher in Düsseldorf.

Currently touring across

Upcoming concerts (1) See nearest concert

Past concerts.

Oefenbunker

Parque Fundidora

Badlands Pawn Gold and Jewelry

View all past concerts

Recent tour reviews

The show was amazing. You would think Dee Snider is still 20 years old when he jumps around on the stage. They played a really long shot being that it's the last time they're going to play in the US

Report as inappropriate

My first show with seeing Twisted Sister they were opening for Iron Maiden at Long Beach Arena back in 1984.....that was back in the day, concerts and bands were still amazing.....you lined up a day before to get your tickets, awesomeness doesn't even begin to express just how very awesome this concert was.....they say you can never go back, but just show up to an old school concert...."THEY" ARE WRONG!!!!!

There are very few frontmen who command attention quite as successfully as Dee Dee Snider. Dressed in incredible stage outfit, a face full of makeup and swaying blonde hair, it is not exactly what you imagine a lead singer of a metal core band to look like yet it totally works as his eccentric personality and commanding appearance means he is able to handle the whole audience as one entity with complete ease.

He has such twisted aggression when addressing the crowd and can enthuse them to jump along to the likes of 'The Kids Are Back' with a sheer flick of his guitar and a crude insult thrown in their direction. The more they are baited, the more the audience throws themselves into the music and create mosh pits at the band's feet during 'You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll'. The whole venue is awash of sweat and adrenaline before the band wrap up the evening with a momentous extended 'Burn In Hell' really demonstrating the instrumental prowess before a punchy 'I Wanna Rock' once again throws the audience into a sense of mayhem, just the way Twisted Sister like it.

• Most popular charts
• API information
• Brand guidelines
• Community guidelines
• Terms of use
• Privacy policy
• Cookies settings
• Cookies policy

Get your tour dates seen everywhere.

• But we really hope you love us.

• Album Release Calendar
• Festival Guide
• Heavy History

Twisted Sister to Reunite Again in 2024, But Only for One Reason

Twisted Sister  singer Dee Snider  has revealed that the glam metal group will reunite again in 2024. But only to play political rallies and reclaim their signature 1984 hit, "We're Not Gonna Take It," he indicated.

Twisted Sister's  Jan. 26 reunion at the Metal Hall of Fame  was their first concert since the band  called it quits in 2016 . But in a new interview, Snider, an outspoken advocate for free speech , suggested the only reason Twisted Sister would return in 2024 is to underline exactly what causes he supports. After all, the 68-year-old rocker already lets politicians on both sides of the aisle  use "We're Not Gonna Take It."

Watch the video toward the bottom of this post.

"Next year, you're gonna see some Twisted Sister reunions at different political rallies that need our support," Snider tells Yahoo Entertainment . "The band has a concern that the song is being co-opted by the extreme right … and we want to make sure that people still know it's a song for everybody and it does not represent that selfish micro group."

READ MORE: The MTV Series That Dee Snider Blames for Helping Metal's Demise in the '90s

He continues, "It is really for the mass people, the moderate people, the people that just want to live their lives, be themselves and not have people tell 'em they can't be themselves. So, I think you'll see us at political rallies and stuff like that. We'll be out there next year."

Dee Snider's Views on Free Speech

Since Snider is so supportive of free speech, he lets both conservative and liberal candidates use "We're Not Gonna Take It." But the Twisted Sister icon clearly lands on one side of the political spectrum himself.

"I will never censor somebody and say, 'You can't use the song,'" Snider says. "I will say that I do not support your use of the song, but censorship I will not support. I just want people to know I'm not aligned with them."

He elucidates, "Like, QAnon uses  ' We're Not Gonna Take It'   for all their little videos … and I have to speak out and say, 'No, I do not stand with QAnon.'"

Snider underscores, "I do not stand with the January 6-ers who use the song. I do not stand with the anti-maskers who use the song. I do not stand with the anti-vaxxers who use the song. I do stand with the teachers who use the song. I do stand with the people looking for intelligent gun control who use the song."

He adds, "I do stand with [the LGBTQ+] community and will applaud. They're using the song in the right spirit. It was not for selfish purposes. It was for everybody. Everybody should be allowed to express themselves freely without being shot with assault weapons, without being banned for wearing makeup."

Dee Snider Talks About Drag Bans

"Let's talk about the drag bans," Snider says of proposed bills currently working their way through GOP-led state legislatures that ban drag show performances.

READ MORE: Why Twisted Sister Guitarist Eddie 'Fingers' Ojeda Wasn't at the Band's Reunion

Last month, Tennessee became the first U.S. state to enact such a law . Senate Bill 3, also called the Tennessee drag ban, prohibits public "adult cabaret performance" in the state .

"My band would not be allowed to perform," the Twisted Sister singer remarks. "We would fall under that heading, the new rule, if they pass these rules — men wearing lipstick, nail polish and makeup. So, do I stand with the [LGBTQ+/drag] community? 100 percent."

Snider illustrates, "I was heterosexual, and I still had a lot of issues with a lot of people because I wore the things I wore in the '70s and even into the '80s. So, I've been on the receiving end. I get what they go through. … I'm very in favor of free expression on every level. And I will stand with the community if they ask me to."

Under the video, see a list of rock and metal bands touring in 2023. Get  Loudwire's newsletter and the  Loudwire app  for the latest rock and metal news.

Twisted Sister's Dee Snider Talks to Yahoo Entertainment - April 6, 2023

Twisted sister, "we're not gonna take it" (music video), your guide to rock + metal bands touring in 2023, more from loudwire.

The Iron Men of Rock and Roll

• LIVE SHOWS 2015
• LIVE SHOWS 2014
• LIVE SHOWS 2013
• LIVE SHOWS 2012
• LIVE SHOWS 2011
• LIVE SHOWS 2010
• TWISTED LINKS
• LEMMY 1945-2015
• METAL MELTDOWN 5/30/15
• A.J PERO TRIBUTE VIDEO
• SMF SLAMBOARD
• SLAMBOARD ARCHIVE
• ARMADILLO ROAD REPORT
• PINKBURST PROJECT
• DEE SNIDER’S RIDE
• WE ARE TWISTED F***ING SISTER!
• METAL MELTDOWN VEGAS
• 40 AND F*CK IT T-SHIRTS
• ASG TWISTED SISTER GUITAR
• MGMT/BOOKING

Here we go, babies. The End.

So this is how it ends. When I wrote that very first road report—a deliriously excited story about my trek to what to me seemed like the far reaches of the universe—New Jersey—I never imagined that there would be another show, let alone another decade plus a few extra years. I remember that day as […]

A word from the road…

Here we are, my babies, at the beginning of the end. I feel I owe you all, my faithful readers (both of you) an explanation for the lack of activity on the blog this summer. With my new status as full-on crew member, my responsibilities have increased which has resulted in the most ironic of […]

Nova Rock, Pannonia Fields, Austria 12-June, 2016.

Alright, so I was wrong. THIS will be the shortest road report ever. I can honestly say this–I escorted our band onto the stage–and I escorted them off and into the vans. THAT is all I saw of the show. Unfortunately for me, the dressing rooms were a shuttle ride from the stage, and so […]

Sweden Rock 2016 10-June, 2016

And here we are, babies. The beginning of the end. The first full show of Forty and Fuck It Farewell Tour. I almost hate starting the tour with Sweden Rock because it is such a well-run festival that almost every other festival pales in comparison. But alas, we begin. I can almost guarantee that this […]

Sweden Rock 2016 Setlist

1. What you don’t know 2. The Kids Are Back 3. Burn in Hell 4. Destroyer 5. Like a Knife in the Back 6. You Can’t Stop Rock n’ Roll 7. Fire Still Burns 8. I Am, I’m Me 9. I Wanna Rock 10. The Price 11. I Believe in Rock n’ Roll 12. Under […]

Here we go! Vegas Rocks! Hair Metal Awards, 15-May, 2016 Las Vegas

well, well, well…hard to believe it’s been a year but here we are, back and gorgeous, in beautiful downtown Las Vegas! Welcome back to what will be the final installments of the Armadillo Road Report, Twisted Sister edition, the end of road, Forty & Fuck It Farewell Tour. You’ll note that these reports-to-come will be […]

Twisted Sister in Vegas Sunday Night!

Welcome back folks for the kickoff of the long awaited Forty and Fuck It! Farewell Tour.  Stay tuned–the first appearance will be a special show in Vegas–Twisted Sister are the honored guests at the Vegas Rocks Hair Metal Awards Show Sunday May 15th at the Eastside Cannery Casino in Las Vegas.  Note: our boys in pink […]

Psssst…tap….tap…tap… is this thing on?

Testing testing, 1..2…3…   Are we ready to go live?

Get ready Rockfest!

Are you ready Barcelona?  Twisted Sister is coming back to kick your asses one more time!

Toreboda Festivalen, Toreboda, Sweden, 2-July, 2015

Well, well, well babies. Here we are in one of my favorite places: Sweden.  And let me tell you, I didn’t think anything would top Bulgaria’s show, but the little town on Toreboda blew US away. Let me back up, here. After another 48 hour work day, we landed in Gotenborg Sweden, a really fun […]

• Next »