Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (22 page)

In July of that summer, Twisted Sister was asked to play in a Long Island amusement park’s weekly concert series. Every Tuesday night, a local band was hired to give a free show in the huge parking lot behind Adventureland in Farmingdale. The average weekly attendance was about three or four hundred people, but we were told that one of the bands (I think the Good Rats) drew around eight hundred. Twisted knew we could draw a lot more than that, and we pulled out all the stops (as usual) to make this
the
concert event of the summer. We even hired a plane to pull a sign over the beach, the weekend before, to help get the word out.

The night before the Adventureland show, Twisted Sister was invited to a going-away party for a mutual band friend, Barry Ambrosio. Barry was a well-liked local musician who had been busted for cocaine possession and had to do time. A local club was booked to house all of Barry’s friends, and a couple of notable rock stars were there as well: Billy Joel and Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple and Rainbow.

Meeting these two hugely successful musicians was eye-opening for me. Where Blackmore was weird, standoffish, and unlikable, Joel was the exact opposite. Welcoming and self-deprecating, with virtually no ego, despite his multiplatinum status, Billy did everything to
show how gracious and down-to-earth a star can be. When people spoke of Ritchie, it was with disgust and loathing. With Billy, it was only with praise and admiration.

After the party that night I reran the experiences I had had with both rock luminaries. I started to wonder how
I
came off to people and what they said about me after I left. In my heart I knew the answer: I was way more of a Ritchie Blackmore than a Billy Joel. I vowed to make a change, promising myself I would be more like Billy. I kept that promise . . . but it did take me a few years to put it into full effect.

HAVING ARRIVED AT A
new level of success and stardom, the band decided we needed to hire an official “road manager.” He would handle a lot of the stuff that was starting to overwhelm Jay Jay. As good as he was at handling the band’s club business, he was our guitarist first and needed to focus his attentions on that, not dealing with club owners and the minutiae of Twisted gigs.

A longtime friend of the band, Joe “Atlantis” Gerber,
³
was brought on to handle the job. He had no prior experience, but Joe was smart, trustworthy, a good friend, and looking to get out of the audio business and into the world of rock ’n’ roll. Did he ever.

The Adventureland show was Joe’s first day on the job. It was a bit different from the typical club show, but pretty straight-ahead as shows went. Crew sets up, band arrives for sound check, band
gets ready for show, band performs. After that, the crew tears down, band goes home, and the road manager settles up (collects the money) with the people who hired us. It’s not rocket science.

After sound check that evening, I headed into the trailer provided as a dressing room behind the stage to start getting ready. About an hour before showtime, Joe Gerber came into the trailer, white as a ghost. Continuing to apply my stage makeup, and without acknowledging his condition—it was his first day—I asked, “How’s it lookin’ out there, Joe?” Since I never left the dressing room, I always wanted to know how the crowd was.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve been in here since sound check. Why?” My curiosity was piqued.

“Take a look for yourself.”

I got up from my seat in front of the mirror and peered out the trailer-door window.

Now I knew why Joe was so pale! A sea of people were waiting for Twisted Sister to hit the stage. The parking lot was so jammed with fans that they had climbed onto the roofs of adjoining warehouses to better see the band.

The Long Island newspaper
Newsday
would report the next day that attendance at our Adventureland show was more than twenty-three thousand!
This was for an unsigned local band!
It should be noted that Kiss was playing to two-thirds of a house at Madison Square Garden that night. I can only imagine how many people would have been at our show if Kiss weren’t playing.

The massive crowd caused all sorts of problems. There wasn’t nearly the parking needed (especially since the massive back parking lot was being used for the concert), and people were abandoning their cars miles away so they could see the show. The security for the event was woefully understaffed, and as a result, a lot of damage was caused by the riled-up, overcrowded, unsupervised fans, and Twisted Sister got all the blame. We were banned from all outdoor shows in the Northeast for years after on account of the problems with the crowd that night.

The show was an incredible success and only added to the band’s growing legendary status. No one could compete with Twisted Sister—apparently not even Kiss! Twisted Sister would not
be deterred by corporate rejection, and though we were being dismissed as a “regional phenomenon,” we pushed on. This said, we weren’t complete idiots (we were “incomplete” idiots).

We knew it couldn’t last forever. There was no way to make a real career out of our local microcosm of rock stardom. The band needed to do something to make the leap from local legend to rock icon, but I couldn’t see what. That’s when Twisted Sister’s devoted fans brought us our next windfall on our path to the top.

16

A
s a songwriter, I was beginning to focus my writing method. I quickly figured out I couldn’t be limited by depending on my modest guitar-playing skills.
¹
Even without a true understanding of any musical instrument, my mind was capable of at least imagining more inventive musical parts. My strength is melody. Some great songwriters write the lyrics first, but I quickly discovered that for me it only produced monotonous melodies. Case in point, “Lady’s Boy,” the flip side to Twisted Sister’s self-released “Bad Boys of Rock ’n’ Roll” single.

My best work always came from the songs that I wrote the title to first. I’d take a song title that made a statement or captured an attitude I was looking to convey, decide on the feel I wanted for the song (fast, slow, swaggering, headbanging, etc.), then I’d just let it flow out of me. I am blessed with a mind that can constantly create, so I trained myself to only turn it on (like a faucet) when I had some way of capturing the idea. Too many times I had come up with a great song or concept in my head and been unable to later remember it.
Very frustrating.

I would continually build a list of good song titles, and when I was ready to write, with recorder in hand, I would look at a title and see if I got any inspiration from it. If I didn’t within a couple of minutes, I would move on to the next title. If I got an idea, I would sing the parts into the recorder. Usually an idea would start with the drumbeat or groove for the song, then I would sing the guitar part, followed by the song’s verse, bridge, then chorus. Sometimes I would even come up with the release (that part of some songs that only happens once) on the first try. More often than not, some of the key words or lines of the song would just pop out of my mouth. When they did, I would use them as the starting point and inspiration for the rest of the lyrics. I would repeat the above method for my entire list of song titles, which usually stood at about fifteen or twenty at any given time.

To gain objectivity, I wouldn’t listen to the tape again for some time. The other reason for that is, with a cassette filled with ten, fifteen, or twenty song ideas, I needed to have time to take notes as I listened, so I would remember where the best ideas were contained.

The average person always seems to imagine that songs are written and created in a complicated process. Unlike romanticized television and movie portrayals of bands and artists, the reality of it is mostly mundane and undramatic. People expect the birth of a great song to be much like childbirth itself, some intense, painful, loud experience with a lot of people yelling and cheering the idea on, until it finally comes into the world and is given a name. I don’t think the idea of me, alone, singing in a quiet falsetto into the built-in microphone of a cassette player, would be satisfying to the average music fan, but that’s the reality.

The process would get even more primitive when I needed to transfer my good ideas from the original tape. I would cue the song idea up on my handheld cassette player, hold it up to the built-in mic on my boom box, hit
RECORD
on the boom box,
PLAY
on the handheld, and record from one machine to the other. I’d repeat the process with all of the ideas I wanted to work on, until I had a new cassette tape with just them. Hysterical, really.

I guarantee, if you heard any of these tapes I made with my singing
softly on them, you would be hard-pressed to make
anything
out of what was on them.
But that’s how I did it.
I am blessed with the ability to create virtually effortlessly and endlessly. I’m never at a loss for ideas.

Don’t let my having only a couple of hits fool you. Hit records are no reflection of songwriting ability or quality. Making a song a hit is a whole other process, in most ways beyond the control of the creator. Some of the best things I’ve ever written have never even been available to the listening and buying public.
²

IN 1979 I WAS
songwriting in the spare bedroom of our tour manager Joe Gerber’s apartment. I don’t remember the exact reason I was writing there, but I’m sure I couldn’t get any privacy at my apartment. Suzette and I always had roommates. During that writing session, working off my song-title list, I wrote just the chorus of a song that would change me and my band (and the world if you count the butterfly effect) forever.

We’re not gonna take it

No, we ain’t gonna take it

We’re not gonna take it anymore

That’s it. I couldn’t figure out the rest of the song. It makes me laugh when people cite that song as the “selling out” point of Twisted Sister, when we became “fat cats” and went commercial. In 1979 I couldn’t have been more broke and the band was desperately struggling. The inspiration for that song came from genuine emotion—anger and frustration. It couldn’t have been more real, which I suspect is one of the reasons it resonated so soundly with the rock audience.

I’m pretty sure I immediately knew I’d created something amazing (which was confirmed when I listened back much later), but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I didn’t have any ideas for the rest of the song. Which was probably for the best. I think now, if I had completed “We’re Not Gonna Take It” back in ’79, when I first wrote the chorus, it would most likely just have been fodder for some ill-fated demo tape, or sacrificed on the altar that was our first indie record,
Under the Blade
. It’s doubtful the song would ever have become the juggernaut that it is. The way things worked out, the world will be singing it long after I am gone and forgotten. Hopefully my heirs will still be collecting the royalties! I have often thought of using those royalties to set up a “rhinoplasty trust fund” so future generations of Sniders who inherit my considerable proboscis can afford relief.

I wouldn’t finish “We’re Not Gonna Take It” until 1983. In the meantime, Twisted Sister needed a new, more professional demo tape to play for the record companies, and into our lives walked engineering/producing legend Eddie Kramer. Literally.