Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (61 page)

Our deal with Winterland had one caveat. Their lawyers insisted we each sign the contract personally and not as a corporation, making us individually liable for the total advance. I’m not sure I understood this fully at the time, but even if I did, I would have signed anyway. There was no way in a zillion years it was going to fail. But fail I did.

I don’t think any manager or attorney worth his salt should ever let his client sign personally for something like this, no matter how
much the artist insists he wants to. I was then a charging rhino on a mission, and nobody could have changed my mind about anything, but someone should have got the most powerful tranquilizer gun available and brought me down before I signed on that dotted line. But in fairness to them, I guess they (our manager and lawyer) may have “drank the Kool-Aid,” too. They all believed Dee Snider and Twisted Sister could not fail.

But I did.
Big-time.

COME OUT AND PLAY
was to be released just before Thanksgiving, and the preorders from record stores were huge. Whereas they had initially bought five, six, or maybe a dozen copies of
Stay Hungry
before its release, this time out they were buying thirty, forty, fifty, or even a hundred copies in anticipation of high seasonal demand. This was the first of our albums to be available in the brand-new compact-disc format—the ultimate stocking stuffer—so stores were ordering LPs, cassettes,
and
CDs. Everyone was sure
COAP
would be the holiday gift for the rocker in your house.

Upon its release, the “Leader of the Pack” single got a great reception at radio and MTV, with hundreds of stations adding it to their playlist and MTV making the video the Hip Clip of the Week, immediately putting it into heavy rotation. I remember watching the world premiere of the video on MTV, and the VJ, Mark Goodman, introducing it, saying, “Here it is, for the first time anywhere, another Twisted Sister
cartoon
video.”

Click.

Cartoon?
Twisted Sister wasn’t a cartoon. Were we? That certainly wasn’t what I was going for.

The day “Leader of the Pack” was released to radio, I did an all-day tour of every rock station in Twisted Sister’s power base, the tristate area, to launch the single. In a limo accompanied by my bodyguard, Vic, and an Atlantic Records rep, we started at the crack of dawn and drove from station to station all day long. I expected fans to be lined up at the stations to meet me when I arrived. No such luck. The lack of fans shocked me. What the hell was going on?

Click.

Then came the day I heard “Leader of the Pack” on the radio for the first time. As the music went straight from another popular rock track into our song, “LOTP” sounded terrible. Not only did it not pop, but the song sounded as if it had fallen into a hole. No way would it ever catch the ear of the casual radio listener.

Click.

The actual demand for the
Come Out and Play
album was anything but impressive. It was selling, but it certainly wasn’t flying out of the stores. But everything is relative, isn’t it? When we were starting out, we were lucky if a record store carried three or four copies of our album. Before SoundScan (computerized tracking of sales) started being used in the ’90s, record company reps would call the stores each week to see how the product was selling, if the three of four copies were gone, and the store had been asked by a few more people for the album, the record-store salesclerk would say something like “We can’t keep it on the shelves!”

Impressive words to hear about a band.

Now, cut to our fourth album, with thirty or forty albums on the shelves. The same store might have sold twenty copies in the first week, but when that call came from the record company and the clerk looked and saw twenty copies still on the shelves, he probably said something like “We still got a pile of ’em.” It gives quite a different impression, doesn’t it? And yet we had sold five times as many albums as before!

I remember when AC/DC’s
For Those About to Rock
album came out, it was the follow-up to their 10-million-plus-selling
Back in Black
(it’s now at 45 million copies worldwide). Expectations were so high that when it sold
only
3.5 million copies, the record industry called it a failure.
Three and a half million copies!? For Those About to Rock
a flop!? Twisted Sister was suffering from this same industry mind-set (though certainly not on the same level).

No doubt I am making excuses for the record’s sluggish sales, but I’m just trying to show how much this record had going against it.

And it got worse.

As we headed into the holidays, having just finished a week of full rehearsals on our massive new stage set for our upcoming tour,
I was filled with uncertainty. Advanced ticket sales for our coming shows were soft. Yet, I was still sure that once we got on the road and got to do what we do best—performing live—everything would fall into place and the
Come Out and Play
master plan would ultimately be the massive success it was destined to be.

If only.

44

D
espite growing concern about the future of the
Come Out and Play
album and tour, I still headed into the holidays feeling like a rock star.
If anything, I’m adaptable.
I can always find a way to rationalize my situation or position myself to continue to move forward. Hell, that’s how I got Suzette. The same out-of-control ego that got you (meaning any struggling musician) to the top won’t allow you to believe or acknowledge that you might be losing your star. I was a rich, famous rock ’n’ roll star and nothing could or would ever change that. So I thought.

Christmas was upon us, and Suzette, Jesse, and I went to see the Rockefeller Center tree like a true rock star and his family; we took a limo. While Jesse and Suzette got out to visit the tree, I peered at it through a slightly lowered window, so nobody would see me. I could almost smell it. As I peered, my driver (childhood friend Russ DiBenadetto) said to me, “Howard Stern was talking about you today.”

“Who’s Howard Stern?” I honestly didn’t know. I’d been a rock ’n’ roll vampire since 1974. I never listened to the radio in the daytime.

Howard was doing afternoon drive (2:00 to 6:00 p.m.) on K-Rock, and though he was rapidly creating quite a name for himself, he wasn’t nearly the juggernaut he would become a few years later.

“He was talking about how ugly he thinks you are,” Russ continued.

“Oh, yeah?” I chuckled. My skin had become so thick over the years that nothing like that could affect me. There’s an old saying, “Any press is good press.” As long as they get my name close to right (the mispronunciation
Schneider
does get a bit annoying), they can say whatever the fuck they want . . . as long as they don’t try and say it to my face.

“Yeah,” Russ went on, “he’s gonna be on the David Letterman show tonight.”

“Really.” I turned to look out the window on the opposite side of the limo. We were parked right in front of 30 Rockefeller Center
¹
—where
Late Night with David Letterman
was shot each day. “What time is it?” An idea was formulating in my head.

“Five o’clock—why?”

I had been on Letterman’s show earlier that year and knew their filming schedule. The nightly show was shot around five each afternoon.

“I’m gonna give Howard Stern a little taste of reality.” With that, I bolted from the car and headed into 30 Rock.

Besides that I was one of the most recognizable faces in rock (and this was New York, my power base), the staff knew me from my appearance. This being a very different time securitywise, I was immediately welcomed by the NBC staff and escorted up to Letter-man’s studio. I got off the elevator and was again received with open arms by everyone who worked on the show.

“Where’s Howard Stern?” I asked.

Assuming I was a friend, they directed me to his dressing room. I angrily pounded on the door, shouted, “Howard Stern!” then threw it open.

Inside were an attractive black woman (Robin Quivers), a fairly normal-looking, semi-long-haired guy (Fred Norris), and a tall, glasses-wearing, small-Afroed, mustached geek (nothing like he looks today) with a look of terror on his face. It had to be Howard Stern.

“What the fuck did you say about me, you muthafucker!?” I screamed as I charged like the Zuni Fetish Doll in Karen Black’s
Trilogy of Terror.
The others looked on in shock as I grabbed Howard
and slammed him against the wall. Howard cowered in terror, as he should—I’m a big, scary guy.

Then I started to laugh.

“You’re not mad?” Howard asked, not trusting my change of attitude.

“Of course not. I don’t give a shit what you say. [As long as it’s not to my face.] I was just fucking with you.”

With that, we started talking. Howard was a year older than me, grew up in the town next to mine, was best friends with a guy from my neighborhood (Dr. Lou), and had even hung out in the same park I did (Coes Neck Park). In an effort to impress the man with the hugest mane in rock, Howard produced a photo of himself from his high school days, with extremely long hair.
I remembered him!
He was the tall white guy with crazy long hair who played basketball with all the black guys. When I told Howard how I used to look (big, frizzy-brown, parted-in-the-middle Afro, with a mustache), he remembered me as the guy with the crazy hair he used to see playing paddleball next to the basketball courts.

As we continued to talk, it became clear we were kindred spirits. We had both been with our women for years, didn’t drink or do drugs, lived pretty near each other on the North Shore, and he had a daughter (Emily) the same age as Jesse.

Having no real friends of equal stature, I thought Howard and I might be able to hang. He was a geek, but seemed like a pretty cool guy. I was a cool guy—who used to be a geek. I suggested we get together with our wives and kids sometime, and we exchanged phone numbers. Howard and I didn’t meet again until a few months later, but I heard he—true to what I would discover was his form—went off the next day on how he always wanted a rock-star friend, and whom does he get?
Dee Snider.
As it turned out, he could have done a lot worse.

WHEN WE REHEARSED THE
Come Out and Play
world tour with the full stage production for the first time, it was positively stunning. The New York street-scene set, the dramatic lighting, the insanely powerful opening with each band member emerging from a different
set piece, was something to behold. Twisted Sister had reinvented the wheel of a dramatic metal stage show. Too bad we never thought to film its short run for posterity.

Every other element of my elaborate, layered concept was perfect, too. From the album packaging to the costumes, the merchandising, the tour program, and the home video, each aspect of it was executed perfectly.

On January 8, we launched the tour in Binghamton, New York, to half a house. Even with a strong opener in up-and-comers Dokken, the numbers weren’t good. Ticket sales were light across the board for our upcoming shows, too. We were headlining arenas and not coming close to selling out. I kept telling myself that we were just having a soft start, and once word of our amazing show spread and we got closer to the actual show dates, ticket sales would pick up. They had to.