Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (26 page)

DO YOU KNOW WHAT
the Doldrums are? They’re a region of calm winds, centered slightly north of the equator. With virtually not a breeze to speak of, sailboats can get mired in them for mind-numbingly long periods. Now, imagine being stuck there . . . with a hole in your boat. That was 1981 for Twisted Sister.

After the failure of our second Palladium show, not only were we dealing with, once again, essentially no label interest, but our local fan base was beginning to erode. You can only scream “We’re gonna make it!” for so long before people start to think of you as “the band that cried wolf.”

Throughout the Doldrums we continued to work on ways to freshen things up on every level. I realize now that this time saw our most creative advancements as a band, which may be what ultimately led to our breaking out.

Staging-wise, we made some significant changes. I got the idea for what came to be our signature stage look: the pink, barbed-wire chain-link fences. The idea was to create a prison yard or inner-city schoolyard vibe for the band onstage. The fans loved it.

Suzette started hitting her stride with the band’s stage clothes as well. Her method of designing and creating for artists (she’s worked with other people besides Twisted Sister) has always been to help them look their best at how they want to look. Suzette will guide
you and give you input, but she understands that if you don’t feel confident in how you look, it will affect the way you perform. If sometimes that means sending an entertainer out looking terrible, so be it . . . as long as the performer
thinks
he or she looks great. Savvy?

This said, Suzette had known for a long time that the whole “sweet transvestite” thing would not ultimately work for Twisted. I was starting to finally figure that out for myself, too. I couldn’t help but notice that when I picked photos of myself to use for promotion, they were always the “pretty” shots, which had no connection to the reality of how I looked. When fans would present me with a gift (as they often did) of some blown-up and beautifully framed photo of me, it was always some hideous shot of me snarling or screaming or just looking generally insane. Clearly, they saw me differently than I saw myself. Suzette’s costume designs for the band (always with my and the band’s approval) were starting to look less femmy and a lot more tough. Belts and straps, buckles and tatters, were becoming prevalent, and the band’s stage outfits were becoming unified. Sure they were still spandex, but they were harder-looking. We now had costumes that complemented each other’s, and we even started to establish colors that represented each of us. I was pink, Jay Jay was yellow, Eddie was red, Mark was green and animal fur (get it?), and our drummer “du jour” was blue.

Our sound started to become more defined as we got turned on to new five-piece, two-guitarist metal bands. Judas Priest and AC/DC became templates for the twin-guitar sound we wanted, and my songwriting began to better reflect it.

SONGWRITING IS LIKE ANY
craft: the more you do it, the better you get at it. Since we were constantly in need of new originals, I was always working on songs . . . and I was starting to home in on our band’s sound.

In recent years, Twisted Sister has released more “postmortem”
¹
CDs/DVDs than Tupac Shakur. My least favorite of the bunch, orchestrated by Jay Jay French and Mark Mendoza, are
Club Daze Volumes 1 & 2.
The first time I listened to this early original material of mine (forget the songs of Jay Jay’s that I always hated), I was stunned.
They suck!
No wonder we didn’t get signed. I apologize to our fans who grew up with that stuff and love it (some of our early fans like it better than the stuff we became famous for), but as the songwriter, I have to be honest and recognize that it is weak.

The good news was, I was getting better—a lot better. All of the writing—and rejection—was making me work harder at my craft. Interestingly, nobody else in the band was contributing any ideas. Though I was still very much a loner when it came to creating my own songs, I had become confident enough in my ability that I would have been willing to work with the guys on their ideas. But with me pumping out an endless—and growing—stream of original material, the band seemed to be content to let me do the work.

Jay Jay always felt he deserved more than the rest of the band because he was the sole founding member left, he owned the name, and most important, he had managed the band for the first few years. He still worked closely with our manager, Mark Puma. The other band members didn’t want to give Jay Jay anything, but I recognized the value of his additional contributions.

Publishing is the money a songwriter gets when his or her songs are sold in any capacity. My songs had not sold a thing, and my publishing was worth zero dollars, but I knew it would be profitable one day, so I gave Jay Jay 15 percent of what I would make. It was the right thing to do . . . and I knew it would keep him from ever thinking of submitting any more terrible songs.

Eddie “Fingers”
²
Ojeda submitted all of one song from 1976 to 1983, “Working on You Baby.” I’m not sure why. Eddie is a riff master, and I begged him to record a bunch of riffs for me that I could write from, but he never did. Once I started to make money from my publishing, Eddie gave me a couple of things to work on, which
I did, but they didn’t make the
Stay Hungry
record. As I said, songwriting is a craft. By the time Eddie decided to get his ass in gear, my craft was way more developed than his. He never even submitted a song after those last two.

Mark “the Animal” Mendoza will tell you that I would never listen to or consider his ideas. I swear to you on my children’s lives that is not true. I remember one night in particular, sitting with Mark in the dressing room of the Detroit nightclub, in Port Chester, New York, putting on our stage makeup together and his telling me he had some song ideas. I told him to just give me the ideas on tape and I would see if I could do something with them.
I swear.
Mark was my best friend. There was no reason I wouldn’t want to work with him.

Not being a musician beyond playing a little guitar and drums, my songwriting tends to suffer when it comes to its musicality. Sure, I have had my moments (“Under the Blade,” “You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Burn in Hell”), but for the most part my songs are strong on melody, but simplistic musically. I would have killed for some more musical ideas from the guys in the band. Maybe I was just overwhelming the guys with my output? Or maybe they just didn’t have any real ideas.

DURING THE DOLDRUMS, WE
did have some brushes with record deals, but they were nothing, little companies, with oddly ambiguous names. An ill-fated deal with Combat Records never came to fruition. I only remember that the guy who let Twisted Sister slip through his hands from that company was fired when the band finally broke in the UK. Then there was Camouflage Records. How’s that for an ambiguous name? The president of Camouflage, Peter Hauke, flew to the States to see our band, loved us, and right then and there worked out a deal with our manager. He then got on a plane with the intention of finalizing our deal once he got back to Germany. On the flight back, the president, a robust twenty-six-year-old man, had a total circulatory system collapse, and Camouflage Records was shut down. Set and match.

With our slimmest of leads overseas drying up, we turned once again to the labels in the States for another try. But how do you go
back to companies who have already said no several times? Faced with the choice of packing it in or continuing to do the only thing we knew how to do, we came up with what he called the Burger King approach to shopping a deal: “Have it your way.” In desperation, as a last-ditch effort to get US record-industry attention, we put together a new demo and press kit with two different photos of the band. One with makeup, and one without. We didn’t care about why they signed us as long as we got a freakin’ deal.

The “no makeup and costumes” photo session was pretty funny because I put on “just a touch” of makeup for the session. You know, base, blush, light eye shadow, mascara, eyeliner, lip gloss; just the necessities. I looked more like a drag queen—and creepier—in those photos than in the regular Twisted shots. Ha!

Thankfully the “Have it your way” never saw the light of day . . . we were saved.

SOMEWHERE DURING THE DOLDRUMS
the band performed its two-thousandth show together.
Two thousand shows!
People were always asking me (when we made it to “the Bigs”) how I got so good at handling audiences. They had no idea of my band’s history and assume that Twisted Sister had been together a few years, mainly rehearsing and doing the occasional show. Say what you want about playing in a cover band, but all those years and all those sets prepare the hell out of you for live performances. Dealing with forty thousand angry headbangers at Castle Donington is nothing compared to five hundred post-happy-hour drunks at a club on the Jersey Shore during the Memorial Day weekend. Now that’s a tough audience!

REMEMBER THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT?
Remember what I said about Twisted Sister’s fans being our greatest asset? Remember that English rock photographer, Ross Halfin, our fans brought to a show in Piscataway, New Jersey, and how he took photos that were put in the biggest UK rock paper,
Sounds
?
Flutter, flutter, flutter
(the sound of a butterfly’s wings).

Not only did the English metal fans start to take notice, but so did the
Sounds
editorial staff. Editor Geoff Barton sent a punk/metalhead staff writer, Garry Bushell, to find out what all the Twisted Sister hubbub was about in the States. In the spring of ’81, Garry showed up at a club in New York, was completely blown away by the band and the fan reaction, and headed back to Great Britain filled with Twisted tales. He wrote about his Twisted experience in America, creating further interest in the band in England. Thankfully, the butterfly flutter was stirring into a breeze that would change the course of the band’s life forever. And it was about fucking time!

20

I
n the midst of the Doldrums and all this career insecurity and worry, one of the greatest things in my life happened. After being engaged for three and a half years, living together for four, and dating for five and half years, Suzette and I got married!

I never was one for thinking things through or looking at the big picture. I tend to “use the force” and go with what my gut—or whatever body part is doing the talking—tells me. I screw up from time to time, but in the scheme of things, my overall hitting percentage is definitely Hall of Fame worthy. While I always figured I would hold off on marriage and a family until my musical career was better situated, the way things were going, I couldn’t wait any longer to get my
real
life started.

Getting married and having a family was always a major part of my life’s plan (okay, sometimes I did look at the big picture), and though the world, and my peers, viewed having a family and being a rock star as mutually exclusive, I never did. To me, that was the promise of being a rock ’n’ roll star—living the way you wanted to, without the limitations or rules of a traditional life.

Though I’d only just finished ridding myself of debt and had no money saved and no real financial support from our extended families to pay for it, I charged headlong into getting hitched. Did I mention I wanted to have a big wedding? Suzette will be the first to tell you that while she wanted a traditional wedding, I wanted a
big
wedding. I was consummating the greatest conquest of my life—getting Suzette Gargiulo to marry me—and I wanted everyone we knew (and then some) to bear witness!