Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (24 page)

No matter how maniacal I got, my tough, little, Italian hottie refused to allow me to get away with any of my arrogant, asshole shit in our private life. It couldn’t have been easy, but she remained (and remains) the singular grounding force in my life.

THE NEW DECADE ARRIVED
and the cloud over Twisted Sister continued to darken, as did my disposition. The energy from the release of our first single quickly dissipated, and the fans’ attention began to wander. They had joined our mad parade to rock stardom, and when the payoff for our endless chest pounding and fist pumping didn’t come, I’m sure we started to look like we were full of shit.

While we continued to scramble and clamor for record company attention, now we had to work even harder to sustain our tristate popularity as well. The early part of 1980 called for a masterstroke of some kind, and in the spring of that year I came up with just the thing.

AMONG THE MANY NAMES
and phrases used to describe Twisted Sister (besides
fags
and
assholes
), “the Bad Boys of Rock ’n’ Roll” was
one that stuck. Following the template of “I’ll Never Grow Up, Now!” I wrote our new battle cry using that exact turn of phrase. With the song as a spearhead, I worked with Suzette to create a new look, then revamped our staging, lighting, merchandise . . . everything.

The one thing the band still lacked was a definitive Twisted Sister logo. Since the top design agency had delivered total garbage, this time, we decided to work with someone local and younger; someone who would let me have input on the work. I don’t remember exactly how we found Ellie Hradsky, but we did and I laid it out for her. We were not only looking for the ultimate Twisted Sister logo, but it needed one specific quality—carvability. Like the Van Halen
VH,
the Twisted logo needed to be cool enough that fans would want to carve it into their desks, and simple enough that they could.

Working closely and combining our ideas, Ellie and I finally came up with a great design. A bent and stylized
T
connected to a bent and stylized
S
, forming one diamond-shaped symbol. It was simple, strong,
and eminently carvable
. It was the definitive Twisted Sister logo.

In May we released our second single on Twisted Sister Records, “Bad Boys (of Rock ’n’ Roll)” backed with “Lady’s Boy,” emblazoned with the new “floating” TS logo, and launched our “Bad Boys of Rock ’n’ Roll” tour of the tristate. It was just what the doctor ordered and reinvigorated our local career. The record companies . . . not so much.

Our management made another go-round with all of the major—and minor—labels of note, with a new press kit, demo tape, and offer: if any A&R person or record company executive was willing to come to the suburbs and see our band, we would provide them with a limo and dinner. Seems fair enough, right? We made this offer to every single credible industry person . . . and we had
one
taker: Reen Nalli, president of ATCO Records. She was limoed from Manhattan to the Mad Hatter nightclub in Stony Brook, Long Island, and in that packed club, she saw Twisted
fuckin’
Sister do what we did every night . . . light up the record-buying public! At the end of the evening, Reen got back into her limo, pledging to sign our band to ATCO. She knew we were going to be the next big thing . . . until she got to work on Monday morning.

The problem with people—successful people especially—is they tend to second-guess themselves. Reen was convinced by what she saw that Friday night on Long Island, and when she got to work on Monday in New York City, and started telling people about an amazing new band, I’m sure her subordinates and coworkers were pumped.

“Really?! Who is it?!” they must have clamored to know.

“Twisted Sister!” I bet Reen said with great excitement. After all, she’d discovered the next big thing, and nobody else knew about it.

“
That bar band?
They’re a regional phenomenon. Everybody passed on them already. They’re a joke” are just some of the wonderful accolades I’m sure Reen heard
from people who had never even seen the band!

At this point self-doubt began to set in.
What if I’m wrong? What if I’ve made a terrible mistake?
Reen even received a call from her superior at Atlantic Records, ATCO’s parent company and a label that had soundly rejected us a couple of times already, telling her to forget about this Twisted Sister silliness. Did she really want to take a chance of looking foolish by signing a band that looked like us? She didn’t . . . and the phone calls to our management about signing us soon ceased.

You have to keep in mind this is 1980. Glitter rock was over. “Hair metal” didn’t exist yet—Twisted Sister were the sole purveyors of that glitter/metal amalgam. There was no Mötley Crüe or Ratt or Poison. Even Kiss had made a disco record (which I can’t believe their fans ever forgave them for) in a desperate attempt to regain favor. We were in uncharted waters. Signing a band such as Twisted would take a lot of ’nads . . . or simply the belief in your own eyes and ears. Unfortunately, those kinds of record men and women are few and far between.

Twisted Sister were heading toward the end of 1980, still unsigned, with only a pile of rejection notices to show for our whole Bad Boys initiative. There was, however, one glimmer of light. An adventurous young English rock photographer named Ross Halfin was in New York, on assignment, I believe, to cover a bunch of English and Australian metal bands currently touring in the United States. He ran into a couple of female heavy metal fans somewhere who insisted he come see this amazing band playing in New Jersey.

God, I love our fans!
They carried the torch for our band when no record company would touch us.

Ross walked into our show and was knocked out by what he saw. A new wave of British heavy metal was brewing, and whadaya know . . . a young American band was waving the new wave of heavy metal flag, too. He whipped out his ever-present camera and snapped away. The photos made their way back to the home office, and on Ross’s word about how great we were, editor Geoff Barton published a shot of me in the
Sounds
music paper.
And English metal fans took notice.

18

B
y September of 1980 a couple of major things in my personal life came to a head. My terrible money-managing skills caused me to get—once again—into a ridiculous amount of debt. I don’t know what it was about me (besides that I’m foolishly optimistic), but I
always
owed somebody money. When I was a kid, it was friends, and as a young man, it was friends and landlords and phone companies and insurance companies and . . . you get the picture.

The funny thing is, I didn’t drink, do drugs, gamble, or spend a lot of money on my fiancée (Suzette was incredibly low-maintenance and not big on jewelry)—all the typical things people blow money on. I was just insanely irresponsible with the limited money I made.

Cases in point: Some credit company gave me my first credit card, with a $500 limit on it, and I bought a dog with the entire $500 the first week! What?! Another time the bank mistakenly credited my account with several hundred dollars, and what did I do? I immediately withdrew the money and spent it on . . . stuff. Of course the bank discovered the mistake and I had to pay it back over time. I was an idiot.

By the end of my third year in New York City, I was deep in debt (for a twenty-five-year-old) and had to give up the apartment. It had always been too expensive for what I was making, which was the key to my economic crisis. But it had been across from Suzette’s school!

SUZETTE, OUR TWO DOGS
(Tosha, Suzette’s birthday-gift white German shepherd, and Woofie, my credit-card-bought chow chow), our three cats, and I moved back to Long Island and into a three-bedroom storefront apartment with my brother Matt (and his then fiancée, Joyce, and their black Lab), and various people in the third room. One couple had a Saint Bernard! It was like living in a kennel. Keeping the animals apart, feeding and walking them (sometimes on the roof of the neighboring business), required military-like planning and execution. But split three ways, the rent in the “Wantagh Roach Motel” was low enough that we could afford to live and I could pay off my debts.

Another upside: after being engaged for a few years, Suzette and I decided we would get married when I finally straightened out my financial problems.
¹
Good incentive.

The other thing I was finally coming to terms with was the dark path my life had been on. The violence, the arrests, my eye-opening experience with Billy Joel, and the repeated questioning of my Christian beliefs by my born-again friends, the Hausers, were all finally having an effect. I was, and still am, a Christian, but clearly my behavior didn’t always support those beliefs. I could be a nasty, cynical, angry asshole, and it was spilling over into my personal life. Moving out of New York and digging myself out of debt was the beginning of a new page for me. I could now separate truly negative and evil thoughts from my natural intensity and drive. I was
starting
to become more of the person I wanted to be. Even though I had a long road ahead of me—and I would falter along the way—at least I felt I was finally on it.

BACK IN AUGUST OF 1980
, drummer #3 tried to take our dislike for each other to the next level and introduce violence to our relationship.
It wasn’t major; actually it’s almost comical in retrospect. I had always attested that drummer #3 was not a good guy, yet nobody else saw it. He was so good at appearing innocent, the others started to think
I
was the bad one for trying to get drummer #3 in trouble. Realizing the reverse effect my finger-pointing was having, I stopped my active campaign.

DEE LIFE LESSON