Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (62 page)

Before a show, I always got into my attack mind-set. I was preparing for battle. Metal audiences can be notoriously tough, and I believe you need to show them who’s the boss from the get-go, or you can be eaten alive. When I hit the stage that first tour date in Binghamton, ready for a war, I was greeted with squeals of delight from the young pop-rock fans who had come to see us. They liked us, they really liked us.

To make matters worse, the set list I had designed for the tour was our typical metallic assault—light on the pop metal, heavy on the real metal. It was the totally wrong set for this crowd. They were completely confused by such songs as “The Fire Still Burns” and “Tear It Loose.” They wanted to hear the fun, funny songs.

Twisted Sister’s core metal audience was gone.

Clunk!

The final tumbler in the combination lock of the undoing of our career fell into place, and the sound was deafening. The true SMFs, our original fans, the diehards who had been with us from the very beginning . . . had abandoned us. I know they felt we had abandoned them.

The next show, I completely scrapped the set list I had written (and staged) for the tour and made it much “happier.” We needed to cater to the audience we had, not the one we wished we had.

A confusing thing about the tour was the media fanfare before
each show. It didn’t jibe with the weak ticket sales. In every city, the press demanded I hold a press conference (I never did them with the band). With all this interest from the mainstream press, I couldn’t understand why our ticket sales weren’t stronger. Around the fourth or fifth show it hit me.

After answering the usual barrage of questions about the Senate/PMRC hearings, I stopped the proceedings and asked a question of the media. “Does anyone have a question about Twisted Sister, our album, or the tour?”

Silence.

It dawned on me that none of the press or media seemed to care about my band. Frank Zappa and Tipper Gore were making the talk-show circuit, continuing the debate about censorship and keeping the subject very much alive, but I had no interest in doing that. I was a rock star, not a politician.

That was the last press conference I did as we continued to perform night after night to lightly attended shows. Starting in the Northeast, we were performing in our strongest region, so we had some glimmers of hope. Two sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall and a nearly sold-out arena in Philadelphia, but as we moved farther out of the Northeast, our numbers began to plummet.

We had so much working against us. As I said before, being the poster boys for everything that was wrong with rock, we became the band parents forbid their kids to see. And most of our new audience needed Mommy and Daddy’s permission (and sometimes their escort) to attend our shows. Perfect.

Then there was the city in Texas that had actually passed a law specifically to keep Twisted Sister out. Banning any concert performance that promoted the occult, drugs and alcohol, bestiality, deviant sex, or violence, the town’s fathers were sure they’d covered all the bases needed to keep my band and me out. When—knowing that our music and philosophy had nothing to do with those things—we booked a date anyway, the concerned parents of the community came to our show and sat right in the front row, ready to file complaints and have us shut down and arrested the minute we broke the new law. By the end of the show those front-row parents were
literally
onstage rocking with us.

The day after we left, the local politicians adjusted the law to limit the decibel level at concerts. It was so limiting we could never return. Twisted Sister could not get a break.

One month into our planned “never-ending” US tour, we were bleeding money. We couldn’t admit that the tour was a complete flop, so I faked a throat polyp and we canceled the remaining dates. Deep in debt, and knowing we had no way to raise the kind of money we needed to repay Winterland (the merchandise company that gave us our million-dollar advance), we still had no choice but to cut our losses. We
said
we would regroup and finish the tour once spring and summer came—a much better time for rock tours in the States—but we were fooling ourselves. It would never happen.

I WENT HOME IN
defeat. No doubt I had been knocked down hard, but I still refused to accept the reality of what was happening to the band and me. We were done. We had struggled for so long to make it, and now—less than two years from the time we broke through—we were on our way out. Apparently we had been for some time. Therein lies the problem. Every aspiring performer—of any type—dreams of making it, viewing it like some sort of finish or goal line. We see ourselves taking that victory lap or spiking the ball, then living happily ever after. No one tells us “making it” is just another point on the journey.
Sustaining it
is a whole other thing. But that’s just not in the cards for most of us.

The life span for the success of most bands back then was three to five years; these days it’s more like one to three. The Ozzy Osbournes, Eric Claptons, and U2s of the world are the exceptions, not the rule. They are the .000001 percenters. The rest of us? We’re gone before we really get anything.

When you don’t break until your third or fourth album, you are in debt to your record company for all the recording budgets, videos, tour support, and whatever other bullshit they’re allowed to charge against your account that has accumulated over the years, you are deep in debt, baby. One big-selling record only serves to pay it back. You need to sustain your career to make any real money.

My songwriting royalties were sacrosanct—with the exception of some creative bookkeeping and royalty adjusting by the record company. But I still made a lot of money from record sales. The rest of the band were just arriving at the plateau where the real money starts to come in, but there was no plateau for Twisted Sister—just a sheer drop off the other side.

So why didn’t I throw on the brakes, reduce my spending, and save all the money I had made? Are you kidding? I was a rock star, this was my dream, and the ego that had kept me going through all the disappointments of my career—the ego that had convinced me I was going to make it—would not allow me to accept or believe that the band’s current circumstances were definitive. I could have given you a dozen reasons why things were going to turn around and get better. No one could talk any sense into me.

I went home, laid low, and continued to live large. The rock and mainstream press had run with our tour cancellation due to my “throat operation,” and to be caught in a bald-faced lie would only add significantly to the problems the band was having. Already some asshole manager of other bands was out there—who some say is a real mensch—calling up industry people saying we were lying about the reason for our canceling the tour and that it and the album were a total failure.

With “Leader of the Pack” tanking at radio and on MTV, we needed to unleash our secret weapon,
Be Chrool to Your Scuel
, sooner than originally planned. To our shock and surprise, not only did MTV ban the video, but our record company pulled the plug on the
Come Out and Play
album entirely.

The president of the label—the guy who had never wanted to sign Twisted Sister in the first place—decided not to release a follow-up single to the failed “Leader of the Pack”! This was insanity. We had sold 5 million records worldwide on
Stay Hungry
, and he wasn’t going to give our new album a second shot?!

It seemed that El Presidente used MTV’s “banning” of our video to justify his position. No MTV, no “Be Chrool to Your Scuel” single release. No single, no continued support for
Come Out and Play
.

As we desperately tried to figure out a way around MTV’s edict, we made a mind-blowing discovery. While on the surface, MTV’s rationale for the banning of
BCTYS
was its “horrific content,” the
truth was far more horrific. One of the new top dogs at MTV was a former Atlantic Records junior executive. We were told that he had received word from Atlantic Records, his old employer, telling him to make sure Twisted Sister’s
Be Chrool to Your Scuel
video never saw the light of day. To me, that was the final nail in the coffin of our career.

45

T
he cancellation of the North American
Come Out and Play
tour was like a death nobody wanted to acknowledge or mourn. We all just went home and waited for the European leg of the tour. Twisted Sister’s
Come Out and Play
tour of Europe was long overdue, and a huge success, but it was too little too late.

If we had spent more time overseas on the
Stay Hungry
tour, we might have avoided the massive overexposure in the States and built our draw even more in Europe. All of our shows were selling out there, and the
Come Out and Play
record was doing well—better than
Stay Hungry
in some countries.

Even in the UK, where that WEA exec had hamstrung the
Stay Hungry
record by cheaping out on postage, Twisted Sister was experiencing a surge in popularity. While attending one of two sold-out nights at the legendary Hammersmith Odeon, and hearing the ovation for “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” said exec was overheard saying, “Maybe I should have got behind that record.” Asshole.

The success of the European tour gave Twisted Sister a glimpse of what might have been, and a brief reprieve from the reality of failing in our largest territory and homeland.

I now know, I not only miscalled and mishandled the success of the band in North America and around the world, but I continued to do all the wrong things careerwise for years to come. I don’t want to make excuses, and I certainly won’t point fingers at anyone
but myself, but success definitely clouded my judgment. Not until I hit rock bottom six years later did my sight finally begin to clear. But I still had a lot of long, hard falling to do.

Twisted Sister’s final shows of the
Come Out and Play
tour were in Italy. Now earlier that year, in April, under the command of President Ronald Reagan, the United States had run retaliatory air strikes against Libya for its bombing earlier that same month of a Berlin disco frequented by US soldiers. While from afar Americans applauded this show of strength, Twisted Sister discovered Europeans weren’t so crazy about the idea of US jets dropping bombs in their backyard, so to speak. When you are only hundreds of miles away from things like that, you feel the effects a lot more than when you’re thousands of miles away. Some Europeans were outwardly unhappy with their feelings toward Americans at that time—in particular, the Italians.

We received word that in Italy some American bands were being spit on, and one band had their tour bus set on fire (no one was injured). Upon hearing this, we wanted to cancel our shows there. I knew if confronted like that by some Italian assholes (in this instance), I would not be able to just turn the other cheek and walk away. It’s my nature to “return fire,” so to speak, and I could see where, in this current political climate, that could lead to no good (possibly incarceration far from home). Pulling out of the two Italian shows seemed to make the most sense.

Instead, our management opted to have us met at the airport by a phalanx of bodyguards, who surrounded us (à la Prince and the Revolution at the Grammys) and escorted us everywhere we went, making sure there were no problems. That worked for me.