Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (27 page)

To this day, if someone asks me what the greatest achievement of my life is, I respond, “Getting Suzette to love me and be my wife.” That’s the truth. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. You don’t think so? I got a girl who had absolutely no interest in me—was repulsed by me—to love me, marry me, have my children, and stay with me for more than three decades. That’s a miracle. Becoming a rock star was tough, but at least rock ’n’ roll showed signs of accepting me from day one. I always believed, and knew, I could go the distance with music. With Suzette, not so much.

I can see now that the lengthy planning of our wedding (and finding a new place to live and furnishing it) helped to keep me sane during this dark career time. It gave me something else important to focus on and made me feel that my life was going someplace even if my career wasn’t.

During all the ups and downs of my career, my home life has been a singular stabilizing and grounding force. In my darkest times, I always had Suzette (and my kids) there for me, and during my career highs, they have always kept me from getting carried away with my own self-importance. Thank you for that, Suzette.

OUR WEDDING DATE WAS
set for the fall, and while we dealt with all the details of having a three-hundred-person wedding, my rock ’n’ roll life continued. Part of the “Have it your way” plan was a new demo tape, and that meant new, original songs. During this time the seminal Twisted Sister songs “Shoot ’Em Down” and the aptly titled “You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll” (amongst others) were created. As Twisted Sister’s songwriter, I was hitting my stride. During those demo recording sessions, the band also recorded a song I wrote as a wedding present for Suzette, “You’re Not Alone (Suzette’s Song).”
¹

I presented it to her at our reception.

ON OCTOBER 25, 1981
, Suzette and I had a traditional wedding in a beautiful little church, in Huntington, Long Island. With Mark “the Animal” Mendoza as my best man and Wendy Cohen (now Yair)—Suzette’s best friend, who helped keep us together—as her co–maid of honor along with Suzette’s sister Roseanne, we pledged our undying love to each other. Actually, I’m not so sure about Suzette. She was so nervous on the day that when repeating the vows, she said, “I take Mr. Snider to be my husband. . . .” I think she may be married to my dad!

Suzette and I started down the path of holy matrimony in the best style we could afford at the time . . . at least from the neck down. My bride looked absolutely stunning, but with me in my white tuxedo and Mendoza in his “morning” tuxedo, you would swear our big-haired heads were photoshopped onto other bodies. If Photoshop existed in 1981.

With some financial help from Suzette’s father on the reception (with an assist and temporary loans from Jay Jay French and Mark Puma), we had a legendary party! The reception was packed with family, friends, business associates, and other people who for the life of me, when I look back at our wedding pictures, I don’t know who they are! What a motley crew. The classic Brooklyn/Staten Island Italians of Suzette’s family with the suburban Eastern European Snider family, our rock ’n’ roll friends, and the borderline thugs who were the invited club owners were quite a sight. But to a man, woman, and child, it is still talked about as one of the greatest weddings anybody has ever been to.

Suzette wanted our wedding song to be “I Got You Babe” by Sonny & Cher, but I felt it made a joke out of our relationship—the lyrics hit too close to home. We wound up using some Stevie Wonder song I don’t even remember. Suzette was right; “I Got You Babe” would have been perfect.

Thanks to my parents, the next day we headed off to Jamaica for a much-needed honeymoon/vacation, and I started “planting the seeds” for our next big adventure. Get it? Planting? Seeds? Do I have to draw you a picture!?

IN DECEMBER 1981, MARTIN
Hooker, the president of the British indie label Secret Records, contacted our manager about Twisted Sister. The writer from
Sounds
magazine, Garry Bushell, had been so impressed with the band that he reached out to Martin and gave him our demo tape. (Thank you, Garry!) Martin Hooker loved the tape and wanted to see the band immediately.

Coincidentally, Twisted was giving a concert a few days later at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, about seventy-five miles north of New York City. Twisted had a huge following in the Hudson Valley region of New York State and had sold out the over-three-thousand-capacity arena multiple times. Martin Hooker seized the opportunity to see the band in a concert environment (as opposed to a club), and a few days later he was landing at JFK International Airport and being driven upstate.

We did what we always did, and the Secret Record’s president was appropriately impressed. He came backstage with our manager, Mark Puma, and told us that he was going to sign the band. Our reactions were
. . . controlled.

“Cool.”

“Great.”

“That’s nice.”

Confused, Martin Hooker left the dressing room with our manager. He knew our history. He knew how long we’d been trying to get a deal. Yet, when he told us he was ready to record an album with us, we were anything but enthusiastic.

“They’re happy, Martin,” explained Puma. “It’s just that they’ve had so many near misses and collapsed deals, they find it hard to get their hopes up.”

It was true. Besides . . . Secret Records? Talk about ambiguous. We’d never even heard of the label.
Must be because it’s so secret!
Handshake, Camouflage, Secret—what we wouldn’t have given for a label with a name that didn’t sound like Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” sketch when you told somebody about it.

“What label did you sign with?”

“It’s Secret.”

“C’mon, you can tell me.”

“It’s Secret.”

“I promise I won’t tell anybody.”

“I told you, it’s Secret!”

You get the picture. Martin Hooker headed back to the UK promising to make good on his word, and we prayed that something tragic wouldn’t happen to the fine young man before he did.

Though Secret Records
did
eventually sign us, these things tend to take a long time and leave you guessing if they will ever get done. With our track record, we didn’t bother to get our hopes up.

As Twisted Sister continued to slog its way through the winter, the ugliest time of year to play, a notable bright light was shining in the darkness . . . and it wasn’t an oncoming train. In March of 1982, Suzette and I found out she was pregnant with our first child. With a floundering career, a small weekly salary, and a studio apartment, we couldn’t have been happier!

Some people say babies are good luck. I’m a believer. From the moment I found out Suzette was pregnant, things, unbeknownst to me, began to get better.

21

W
ith drummer #5 turning out to be everything we hoped
he wouldn’t be
, the search began for his replacement. Joey Brighton was destined to be the Pete Best of Twisted Sister. Once again by invitation only, myriad drummers made their way to the rehearsal studio to see if they might be the chosen one, and we held our breath and prayed.

One of the toughest failed drum auditions for me was Neil Smith of the original Alice Cooper band. We had known Neil for a quite a while. As I was a
huge
Alice Cooper fan, just being friendly with the guy was an honor. His band’s music changed my life. As we were looking for a new drummer, we thought, how cool would it be if Twisted Sister was joined by a rock legend like Neil Smith?! Neil was currently in a band, Flying Tigers, playing a lot of the same venues as us. I put in a call to Neil, and he said he would love to join Twisted. Now, there was just the formality of the audition—or so we thought.

Neil came down to the studio with his own roadie and massive road cases. Inside were his legendary mirrored drums! These were the first-ever mirrored drums, which saw the world on the Alice Cooper
Billion Dollar Babies
tour, and we had all seen them gracing the pages and covers of so many rock and music magazines. They were amazing, and as a fan I was in awe of having
the
Neil Smith
playing my songs, on those drums, with my band. It was absolutely surreal
. . . until he started to play.

Neil Smith is an innovator as a drummer whose style helped change the face of modern drumming. He bridged the gap between the styles of the sixties and the early seventies and what came to be contemporary heavy-rock drumming (in the eighties). But that was the problem. Heavy drumming had evolved, and Neil’s transitional style just wasn’t right for the band. No matter how bad we wanted this to work, it just didn’t. The call I had to make to Neil Smith, one of my childhood heroes and now a friend, to tell him he didn’t pass the audition, was one of the toughest phone calls I ever had to make. Man, did that suck.

Somewhere along the way in our search for drummer #6, a friend of the band’s gave me a tape of a drummer friend of his. “This guy’s amazing,” he said with his thick Staten Island accent. “You should check him out.”

I took the cassette tape—it didn’t have a case and wasn’t even labeled—and threw it into my gig bag with my stage clothes. It quickly sank to the bottom.

Months later, on my way out of my apartment to a dentist appointment, I was looking around for something to take with me to listen to.
¹

I spotted the cassette tape of the drummer that had been getting banged around in my gig bag (I can’t believe I didn’t lose it). I grabbed it—not expecting much—and took it with me. As I sat in the dentist’s chair with dread, my mouth filled with dental apparatuses, fighting to keep my mouth open,
I heard a powerhouse of a drummer!
I couldn’t believe it. This guy’s tape had been in my bag for months.
²
If I thought he sounded good now, imagine how much I would like him when I wasn’t getting my teeth drilled.

Tony Pero, from Staten Island, New York, officially auditioned for Twisted Sister and impressed the hell out of us. With arms like ham hocks, this guy hit the drums harder than anyone else I had ever seen. And he could play technically, too.
He could play anything!

Tony had been a child prodigy, taking lessons from greats, like Gene Krupa. By the age of ten he’d already toured Europe playing with a big band. This son of a bitch could play! He was the perfect complement to Mendoza’s pummeling bass playing, and musically the two of them connected immediately. This was the missing piece to the Twisted Sister sound.

But there was one problem.

Tony Pero’s name, and physical appearance, were close to drummer #3’s. I didn’t want people to mistakenly think he was drummer #3, and I couldn’t bear to call him by the same first name. I explained my dilemma to Tony and asked if he had a middle name. He did, Jude. Thinking quickly, I asked how he felt about being called A.J. instead of Tony. Sure, we already had a Dee and a Jay Jay, but can a band ever have enough names that are initials?

I don’t know if Tony actually had a problem with it or not, but he
really
wanted to join our band and agreed to the change. Twisted Sister had finally found its perfect musical match.