Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (39 page)

It should be noted, an advance is just that: money given against your share of future earnings. While it’s a great thing to get, it’s only
your own money
being given to you ahead of time. Of course, the company is taking the risk that you may not sell enough to pay it back, but they get a larger percentage of the total receipts for extending you this courtesy. Few young artists can resist the offer of an advance. It’s usually the first time you ever see a sizable amount of money in your career.

Upon returning home from the Blackfoot tour, I had my first chance to do something with the publishing advance for the
You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll
album. I had already had the immense pleasure of depositing said check into my bank account. With my son’s first birthday approaching, the fact that I had now been away for more than seven months of his life was not lost on me. Not to mention, my young wife had been left to raise him on her own. At last I was in the position to start to making good on the promise of being a rock star. That fall we bought our first house and a brand-new car.

After being mostly in the red my entire adult life, it felt great to walk into a place and tell them what I wanted and how I wanted it, but it was the start down a slippery slope.

IN AUGUST OF 1983
, Twisted Sister was booked to play the legendary Monsters of Rock Festival, Castle Donington, in the UK. Not only was this the premier heavy metal event for a band like ours to play, but after the amazing response we’d had with our album and singles earlier in the year, Twisted Sister’s playing Donington would be a triumphant return to Great Britain.

The bill spoke volumes about how far we’d come. It was the original Whitesnake (with Jon Lord, Ian Paice, and Cozy Powell), Meat Loaf (his career was dead at that time in the United States, but
in Europe he was still a viable
heavy metal
act—go figure), ZZ Top, Twisted Sister, Dio, and Diamond Head. Just nine months earlier, we were going to open for Diamond Head, and to be higher on the bill than a legend and hero such as Ronnie James Dio was just amazing.

The Castle Donington audience were of the same ilk as the Reading crowd, expressing their dissatisfaction—or whatever—by throwing things at the bands, crews, metal-DJ/host Tommy Vance (who wore a lacrosse helmet for protection when he was onstage)—pretty much anything that moved. We were sure that our major success in the UK would keep the “shite” throwing to a minimum, but when we hit the stage, it was worse than Reading. It was raining garbage!

We couldn’t believe it! The band and I had every reason to believe that the headbangers in the UK liked us. But let’s do the math. Say we were beloved; what would you say is a great percentage of a festival audience to like us? Ninety percent? Surely even the Beatles couldn’t expect a much greater number than that. Which means, in a crowd of over forty thousand people . . . four thousand didn’t like the band. Do you have any idea how much stuff four thousand people can throw? I do. It was off the hook! So much garbage and food and so many liter bottles—filled with everything from dirt to piss—were descending onto the stage while Twisted Sister was on, some of the guys in the band wanted to walk off.

In an ultimate act of futility, the intrepid Joe Gerber jumped off the stage into the front section of the audience and began running through the crowd, punching the people throwing things in the face! I asked him later what he could possibly have hoped to accomplish against so many aggressors, to which Joe responded, “Hey—that section stopped throwing things!” I love that guy.

No way were we walking off the stage. It would have meant admitting defeat, and Twisted would never have lived it down. Instead, I resorted to my effective Reading Festival rap and challenged the entire crowd to a fight. By that time, everyone had heard about my now legendary Reading ploy and weren’t backing me as they had at Reading. They threw even more stuff. Thinking quickly, I pulled out an old nugget I’d used in the tristate clubs on occasion, albeit on a much smaller scale.

“How many friends of Twisted Sister do we have here?!”
I bellowed.

Ninety percent of the crowd went wild.

“Well, we’re stuck on this stage and some assholes out there are throwing stuff at us, and there’s nothing we can do about it!”

Our fans heartily booed the “throwers.”

“All I know is, if we were out there and somebody was throwing shit at you, we’d kick their ass!”

The crowd roared.

“But we’re not out there . . . you are! So if you see somebody throwing stuff at us . . . kick their ass! And if they’re too big to beat up on your own, get a bunch of your friends, pull ’em to the ground, and kick the fucking piss out of them!”

The crowd went absolutely insane.

We launched into the next song with a vengeance. As Twisted Sister played, fights erupted throughout the massive crowd. At one point, a large fire started blazing for some reason. It was out of control! But nothing further was thrown.

The rest of our set went incredibly well, with the Donington metalheads rocking Twisted Sister–style. When we got to the big audience-participation part of “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” after getting the crowd to throw their fists in the air and scream, “I like it!” . . . I decided to up the ante.

“This time when I say ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll,’ I want you to scream ‘I like it’ . . . and jump!”

The crowd laughed.

“I’m not kidding!”
I said as if I’d read their minds.
“I know not everyone will have the balls to do it. Some of you are worried someone might laugh at you! Poor babies!”

The crowd laughed, cheered, and jeered.

“The true sick muthafucking friends of Twisted Sister will jump! Are you ready to jump,
SMF
s!?”

The crowd were beside themselves with excitement.

“Then let’s do it! ‘I know it’s only rock ’n’ roll, but—’ ”

Allow me to tell you what happened next by quoting the words of the writer from
NME
(
New Musical Express
) who reviewed our set at the festival.
NME
is no friend of heavy metal—they pretty
much hate it all. After brutally tearing Twisted Sister’s set apart in her review, the writer said of the last moments of “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” “I have to admit, seeing 40,000 punters, leaping into the air in unison,
is a sight and memory I will take to my grave.
”

It
was
incredible. Too bad they were all so drunk the entire crowd fell over like dominoes!

WITH THE FALL AND
winter approaching, the band had a lot more work to do. On the plus side, Twisted Sister was selling a steady three thousand records a week—not too shabby for a band with no record company support. Every Monday, during the weekly Atlantic Records telephone conference with all of the national reps, the New York office was forced to hear tales of how Twisted Sister had come into some region and totally dominated—our record was flying off the shelves. While it was nice knowing how much that had to annoy the powers that be, it changed nothing for us as far as support from Atlantic went. We were still on the road, completely on our own.

Meanwhile, Twisted Sister was starting to get noticed on MTV. Not that they were playing our video all that much, but they did use a piece of it in a heavily played promotional clip for the network, and people were noticing. Outside of the tristate area I kept hearing, “Hey, you’re that guy from the MTV commercial!”

MTV struck gold with heavy metal. The very idea of music television was to add a visual element to the already-existing musical one. Many hugely successful recording artists had nothing to offer on that front. The first song played on MTV, “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, was prophetic to say the least. When people got a good look at artists such as Joe Jackson and Supertramp, their careers were over. There was a reason Joe Jackson’s biggest record had his shoes on the cover . . . and it wasn’t just the album title. MTV needed bands and artists with a visual element, and they readily found it in heavy metal. For metal bands, giving a compelling, live visual performance had always been a priority, and the imagery of much of the music lent itself to rock video. MTV’s embracing of heavy metal as a staple of their video playlist was key to the major
breakthrough eventually experienced by the coming wave of bands, and what later became known as “hair metal.”

OUR FALL RUN OF
dates paired us up with Queensrÿche, fresh out of their rehearsal space, as our opening band. We didn’t know much about them, other than that they had a pretty cool four-song EP out on a major label and were getting some radio play and MTV rotation. When Twisted arrived in our beat-up van at the venue in Kansas City for our first show together, we pulled alongside a shiny, new tour bus. Whose the hell was that? Once we got inside, we found out.

Queensrÿche was one of those bands whose record company support was the exact opposite of ours. Their label, EMI, was giving them everything they needed to make sure they succeeded. To quote their then manager, “We told the label if you want them to be rock stars, you have to treat them like rock stars.” Amen. If only someone had told our label the same. Not only did this band, fresh out of their Seattle basement, doing their
third
live show that night, have a tour bus, they had new equipment, stayed in nice hotels, and each had a credit card just in case he needed anything! Try as we wanted to hate them, we couldn’t. They were all cool, unpretentious guys who had drawn the long straw when it came to record companies. It wasn’t their fault our label sucked.

That night, we took Queensrÿche to school. Not intentionally; it’s just what Twisted Sister does. You have no idea how many bands and front men stand on the side of the stage, or out by the sound-board, studying the band and me (right, Jon Bon Jovi?), trying to figure out the secret of how we did what we did (and still do).

Queensrÿche opened the show in Kansas City that night, looking and sounding great. They were well rehearsed, dressed, equipped, and staged and went through their set with mechanical precision. Then Twisted Sister went on. During our usual chaotic sixty-minute set, pandemonium ensued. Two women climbed onstage and had a spontaneous “strip-off” to one of our songs, and a guy in the audience I’d verbally been tearing to shreds decided he wanted a piece of me. He climbed onto the stage to attack me, and I one-punched him
back into the crowd. Through it all, Queensrÿche stood side-stage, watching the whole thing, their mouths agape.

As Twisted left the stage at the end of our show, guitarist Chris DeGarmo grabbed me. “Is it like that every night?!”

“Only the good ones,” I said, and ran off.

All in all, the Twisted Sister/Queensrÿche tour went well. Some shows were wetter than others (the sprinkler system went off in the packed club during our set in Chicago), and rumor has it, the Queenrÿche boys were a bit disenchanted with some of the more clublike venues they were playing (poor babies), but Twisted Sister was kicking ass and selling records.

In November, during the final weeks of our tour with Queensrÿche, our manager got
the call
. The president of Atlantic Records in the US wanted to meet with the band.

30