Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (69 page)

I could not have been more blown away by this insane gesture. The idea of someone raising the capital, opening facilities, hiring staff, and setting up distribution just for me still has me shaking my head in disbelief to this day. But that’s what Ric did.

When I was finally ready to begin recording a new album, the project had another huge setback when Bernie Tormé was admitted to the hospital because a black spot was discovered on his lung during a routine chest X-ray. When Bernie awoke—in an oxygen tent—from his biopsy, through the tent he heard his doctor say, “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
Uh-oh.
Those are words you never want to hear in a hospital.

The good news was the spot on Bernie’s lung wasn’t cancer, it was just a spot. The bad news? They had punctured Bernie’s lung during the biopsy. As a result, Bernie had a long hospital stay ahead of him, followed by more recuperation and an extended period of being unable to fly. The pressurized cabins of airplanes might cause his lung to collapse again. Bernie Tormé could not be a part of my new band. Were we living under a black cloud or what?!

Upon the high recommendations of a number of people I respected, guitarist Al Pitrelli was enlisted to replace Bernie. Al had
worked with quite a number of major and minor artists, most notably Alice Cooper during the
Trash
album and tour (and since with Megadeth and the Trans Siberian Orchestra), and had everything we needed for the type of band we were putting together, except one: his personality. I found Al to be an arrogant, self-important SOB, and I predicted to Marc Russel and Joe Franco that he wouldn’t last six months with me. I was wrong. Al Pitrelli lasted for two records and tours, would later help create and record the Van Helsing’s Curse project with Joe and me, and remains a good friend to this day. Sorry, Al; I misjudged you.

The music of my new band consisted of Desperado-era Tormé/Snider outtakes, some rerecorded Desperado
Ace
album tracks, a cover of a classic Howlin’ Wolf song (“Evil”), and a couple of Pitrelli/Snider originals, including what would become our first single and video, “The Widowmaker.”

The song title was taken from an ill-fated Luther Grosvenor aka Ariel Bender (Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople) and Bob Daisley (Rainbow, Ozzy Osbourne) band of the same name. Oddly, the father of my bass player, Marc Russel, had been the tour manager for the original Widowmaker.

When wrestling with a name for the new band, Ric Wake said, “Why don’t you use the name of your song and call the band Widowmaker?”

We explained that there had already been a band called Widow-maker.

“I never heard of them,” said Ric. “Were they popular?”

“No,” I replied.

“When were they around?”

“In the mid-seventies.”

“That’s like twenty years ago!” Ric exclaimed. “Who gives a shit?!”

In fact, virtually nobody cared but Marc Russel, who was taught to play by the Widowmaker bassist, Bob Daisley.

“My dad will ‘take the piss out of me’
²
if I’m in a band called Widowmaker,” Marc complained. “I can’t do it.”

I thought for a minute, then responded, “What if I get Bob Daisley’s blessing?”

Marc said that would make him feel a bit more comfortable, so I got Daisley on the phone.

“Hey, Bob, this is Dee Snider. How would you feel about me using the name Widowmaker for my new band?”

“I don’t give a shit,” Daisley replied. “We did fuck all with it!”

Blessing received.

We weren’t the first to recycle a band name. Irish guitar god Gary Moore had a band called Skid Row long before the American band of the same name, and there was a Trixter before the New Jersey band of the same name started singing “Give It to Me Good.” We weren’t the first and sure as hell wouldn’t be last.

Widowmaker was born.

With the album-cover artwork would come the next indignity. I was informed that due to the lyrical content of the CD, the complex cover design (better in concept than execution) that I had worked so hard on with Esquire Records’ art department would need to have a
PARENTAL ADVISORY
label on it. I couldn’t believe it.

“I thought stickering your record was optional?” I said.

“It is, and our distributors label their records,” Ric Wake told me. “Some stores won’t carry an explicit record without a sticker.”

One of my fears about these warning labels was coming true. Labeling your record wasn’t exactly optional if stores wouldn’t carry your record if you didn’t. Even worse, some stores were using the label to segregate records or, even worse, not rack or even carry the record. And in a real catch-22 with some stores, if you
didn’t
label your explicit record they wouldn’t carry it, and if you
did
label it, they wouldn’t carry it.
That’s not much of a fucking option, if you ask me!

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

“Oh, yeah,” Ric added, “it’s not a sticker, its part of the artwork.”

What!? Was he fucking kidding me!?
Indignity heaped upon indignity. They took the art on the cover and made the warning label a physical part of it, something that could not be removed after purchase.
The idea boggles the mind!
These conservative assholes were taking it upon themselves to mutilate an artist’s vision. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the
Blood and Bullets
cover art was
a work of genius, but the very thought of doing something like this was an insult to artists everywhere.

“You either do it or they won’t distribute your CD,” Ric finished after listening to a long, expletive-laced tirade from me in need of its own
PARENTAL ADVISORY
sticker.

If I had known about this in advance, I would have made the
PARENTAL ADVISORY
sticker the album cover and put a sticker-size square of the album art on the sticker.

That’s what’s known as irony.

49

I
n the spring of 1992, Widowmaker’s
Blood and Bullets
was unleashed on a literally unsuspecting public by fledgling indie label Esquire Records. After a four-and-a-half-year absence from the music scene, Dee Snider—sort of—had a new band and album out. Say muthafuckin’ hallelujah!

By the summer, the CD had made enough inroads on the scene that the band was ready to tour. In August, after a week of rehearsals,
Windowmaker
(the first radio ad for the band mispronounced our name) made our premiere performance at the Live Wire nightclub in Stanfordville, New York. It was essentially my first time back onstage in almost five years. I never thought I would be away for so long.

Widowmaker toured through the end of 1992, slowly building awareness of my new project and album sales. We had crossed a major indie-record plateau of fifty thousand CD sales and were starting to show signs of life, when the
final
final nail was driven into the coffin of my creative career and financial stability. Esquire Records closed its doors. Actually, they didn’t close their doors as much as the Canadian government seized all their property and chained their doors shut. Esquire Records’ Canadian financiers had raised their money in a
questionable
manner, and the Canadian authorities weren’t happy about it.

With the death of Widowmaker’s label came the end of the
record’s availability, the end of the tour, and the end of the band. Just like that, I was finished and out of options. No more record-company or publishing-company advances (I was deep in the red), no more credit-card cash advances or charging (the cards were all maxed out), no more lines of credit or loans (I was a bad credit risk). I was 100 percent, absolutely, without a doubt, totally done.
Check and fucking mate.

I RETURNED TO MY
wonderful family—my oasis—for the holidays and, in 1993, began desperately trying to figure out my next moves . . . of which I had none. I was further delving into screenplay writing (something I had started after my experiences with making rock videos) and was working on my third screenplay,
The Junk Squad
. A family film, based on my kids and their friends in our Coral Springs neighborhood, I would eventually sell it (a couple of times to different studios, but it was never produced), but that wouldn’t happen for years.

The last of our house-sale money was running out, and I began to make desperate financial moves such as selling our possessions, cashing out retirement-plan money, and selling the valuable Disney stock my father had given me for the kids.

When I met Suzette, I knew if I could win her heart, I would have someone who loved me for me and be with me through thick and thin. Well, things had gotten
paper-thin
, but there was never the slightest doubt that she would stay by my side through these darkest of times. We started out with nothing, got everything, and now, even though we’d/I’d lost it all, Suzette still stood shoulder to shoulder with me. I had written the Desperado song “Ride Through the Storm”
¹
about her, and since Bernie Tormé and I had created it in 1988, things had gone from bad to way worse.

The storm had turned into a Category 5 hurricane.

Obviously, we could no longer afford our beautiful rental house
in Florida, so in the summer of ’93, Suzette and I went up to New York and searched for a much more economical rental to move our family into. I couldn’t foresee any work for me in Florida (I didn’t even know what kind of job I could get) and thought my chances for some kind of employment were better back North.

The rental houses we went to see were terrifying. Impoverished living conditions in downscale neighborhoods were all we could afford. I couldn’t imagine living in them and having people sooner or later figure out it was
the
Dee Snider, lead singer of the multiplatinum band Twisted Sister, living there. That my poor family had to suffer as well for my failings made me feel even worse. The true humiliation of this next massive step down began to set in.

Having run out of time and options, and about to lock in one of the awful choices Suzette and I had found, a brand-new real estate ad appeared in the paper. In the realm of what we were dealing with, it seemed too good to be true: a suitable house for rent in a good school district, for the right price. We rushed to see it immediately and snapped it up. All things considered, it was perfect. Well, at least it wasn’t horrible.

Whereas professional movers had moved us down to Florida in August of 1990, in the last week of August 1993, we packed up all of our belongings, loaded up a couple of rental trucks, and with the help of Suzette’s brother Billy, moved our stuff back to Long Island ourselves. Our family and friends met us at the other end and helped us stuff thirty-five hundred square feet of furniture and possessions into a nineteen-hundred-square-foot house. We had sold off all but one of our cars—the pink Jeep—and downsized what we could, but still we had a basement filled with stuff we hoped would one day furnish our
own
house again.

WITHIN ONE WEEK OF
cramming my family and what was left of our belongings into our run-down Long Island rental house, my dog was run over by a car and killed.
Are you fucking kidding me?!
It was like living some terrible country song: “I lost everything, then my dawg dieeeed!” What a freakin’ nightmare! This was how things continued to spiral downward, yet I still wasn’t defeated. Why?
Because my wife and children were all fine, and I was healthy and strong enough to get up each day and try again. This was and still is my sole criterion for staying positive and continuing to fight.