Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (12 page)

I
was eased into the show over the next few weeks as I learned more of the band’s cover material. They had a few original songs that I hated (“TV Wife,” “Follow Me,” “Company Man,” “Can’t Stand Still for a Minute”), but in the seventies tristate club scene, you couldn’t even announce you were playing an original. You’d introduce it as an obscure track from a popular band. “Here’s one from Deep Purple’s first album!” If your original song was good, in between sets people would come up to you and say, “I love that Deep Purple song!”

Besides my taking over the vocals on existing material, the band added songs (starting with more Led Zeppelin) that better showcased my voice. Material that didn’t work for me (such as the Kinks, Stones, and Dave Mason) was cut from the sets. The song list wasn’t the only evident change. Visually, I was ready to explore the more glam side of rock that I felt defined the name Twisted Sister. While I had worn costumes onstage before, they were nowhere as feminine as the direction I was headed, and I had never worn any makeup.

Now, in 1976, at the age of twenty, I was not nearly as secure in my heterosexuality as I am now. No, it’s not that I thought I might be gay, it was just the suburban, adolescent fear of people
thinking
I might be gay that I wrestled with. That said, I was anxious to embrace the whole thing, but from a more theatrical Alice Cooper direction than a gender-bending David Bowie one. Building
off a pair of thigh-high, black-leather, five-inch platform boots (very Alice), I pulled together whatever “borderline” feminine outfits I could, without going over the line (read: flaming homosexual.) These consisted of mostly black and white leotards, jumpsuits, and some leftover glitter clothing from my Peacock days. My most outrageous outfit was the aforementioned boots, black stockings, cutoff black shorts (think Daisy Dukes), long sleevelets, and a T-shirt that said
I’M DEE, BLOW ME
.
¹
Okay, that outfit was pretty tranny-ish. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.

Makeup-wise, I was as safe and cautious as possible. Jay Jay (my mentor at that time) showed me how to apply base (foundation), and I would put some gray on my eyelids (going for a bit of a speed-freak thing) and reddish circles on my cheekbones like a doll.
It was a start.

Joining Twisted Sister, I thought I was entering the real world of rock ’n’ roll excess. Jay Jay would tell tales of Twisted’s early days (all of two years before), filled with sex, drinking, and drugs, and I would listen enraptured, but I wasn’t seeing much evidence of it now. The guys all had steady girlfriends, Kenny Neill was sober, Jay Jay French had pretty much stopped drinking and getting high, Kevin John Grace was a hayseed like me, and while Eddie Ojeda did like to party, with his high-waisted baggies, disco hair, and Gibson 335 hollow-body guitar, he seemed more Latino than rock. Bummer. Still, I felt rock ’n’ roll excess was imminent.

WE WERE BOOKED TO
play a club in Levittown, Long Island, called Hammerheads. For some reason most of the bars we played had a nautical theme. No matter if they were on a beach or hundreds of miles away in the mountains, a ridiculous percentage of them were filled with portholes, bulkheads, fishing nets, and Lucite-covered bar tops with shells and loose change suspended in them. Hammerheads was no different.

At one of our early shows, as at most places we played at that level, we were sharing the dressing room with another band. Both groups were at the club in the late afternoon to sound-check. None of the guys in Twisted had heard of our opener before—they weren’t from our area—but they seemed cool enough. While the guys in my band were onstage setting up their gear, I went down to the dressing room to hang up my stage clothes. The guys from the other band were already in there, and as I hung up some of my more “feminine” stuff, one of their band members asked suggestively, “Hey, man, are you into wild enema nozzles?”

What?

While I didn’t know what a
wild enema nozzle
was, I knew each word in the phrase, and it gave me a fair idea that something wasn’t kosher. Shaken, I uttered something pithy like “Thanks, I’m good,” and, trying not to appear too panicked, ran upstairs.

Jay Jay and Eddie were on their way down to the dressing room, so I grabbed Jay, pulled him to the side, and frantically told him about my experience. Jay Jay just laughed. In what would be an ongoing issue for me with the senior members of my band, I was treated like a stupid kid from Long Island and not taken seriously. That would eventually change (that’s an understatement!), but if ever they felt justified in treating me that way, it was right then.

“Hey, Eddie,” Jay called to his worldly friend, “wait’ll you hear what Dee just told me.” As we walked downstairs together, Jay told Eddie about the other band’s question, and now both of them mocked me, singing, “Wild enema nozzles! Wild enema nozzles!” I implored them to believe me.

As we entered the dressing room, filled with the other band’s members—wait a minute. Let me rephrase that—filled with the
other band members
(better), Jay Jay and Eddie were well into their second chorus of “Wild Enema Nozzles” (a great name for a song now that I think about it).

Hearing them, the other musicians lit up. “You guys are into wild enema nozzles?”

Jay and Eddie stopped singing. “What?” Eddie gulped.

“Wild enema nozzles,” the morally corrupt band leader replied. “Check ’em out.” With that, he pulled out a black attaché case, opened it, and, behold, neatly presented were all shapes, colors
(mostly pastels), and sizes of definitely wild enema nozzles, and tubing and different-size (pint, quart, gallon) enema bags! Even Mr. Porn, Jay Jay French, was stunned silent.

The other band were “adventurous” sexually, and beside their personal deviant behavior at home (you know, the usual S&M, bondage, fetishism, and early pornographic filmmaking), they quite enjoyed giving each other enemas in the bathroom before they went onstage. Sometimes they even shared one thanks to a Y-shaped, two-headed wild enema nozzle.

Well, Eddie and Jay Jay—no longer laughing—demurred and shuffled out, leaving me with this gang, who were actually cool and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. They answered my many questions and even gave me a really nice wild enema nozzle to take home (kind of a consolation prize) in case someday I cared to experiment. I never used it (sorry to disappoint), but I still have it deep in the bottom of a box of memorabilia somewhere. Man, is that gonna raise some eyebrows when my grandchildren find it after I’m gone!

TWISTED SISTER WORKED FIVE
nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, doing four fifty-minute sets a night. I have always been extremely hard on my voice, so I would do the first three sets with the band each night, and they would do the fourth set without me, Jay Jay and Eddie handling the vocal chores.

Within weeks of my joining the band, two things happened. As promised, Kevin John Grace (Twisted Sister drummer #2) was kicked out of the band (he didn’t have what it took to go the distance) and was replaced by drummer #3. Unlike my dear friend Jay Jay, who I feel trivializes the importance of the five core members of Twisted by constantly talking about the band members who were in the band before we even had a record deal (thus underlining that he is the only original member of the band), I want to give the credit and respect to the guys who, as a unit, got us to the top. A. J. Pero is the only drummer that matters, and he played on all of the biggest and best Twisted Sister records, so I’m not going to spend time talking about the five drummers that came before him. Plus, I hated drummer #3.

The second thing that happened was, after years of high singing, I began to lose my upper range and falsetto voice.

For those who don’t know, a man’s falsetto is that high, “feminine” voice we all have, which, if properly developed, can be used as your actual singing voice. In classical music you can become a countertenor, which is essentially a male soprano. Some of the world’s favorite rock voices have used this “developed falsetto voice” and made it their signature. Case in point: Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses.

I had a natural tenor (high) voice, but my highly developed falsetto allowed me to sing songs sung by women and the highest of rock vocalists. Not anymore. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been singing with a throat infection and had damaged by voice. My falsetto disappeared—as did my Robert Plant impersonation—and my range disintegrated. Losing the voice that had defined me my whole life (and got me in Twisted Sister) could have/should have been a death blow to my drive and musical career. I didn’t miss a beat.

I began to channel my inner Alice Cooper.

WE HAD YET TO
hit our stride or find our own audience, but we were getting there, opening up for some of the biggest bands in the club scene, such as the Good Rats, and Baby. We even opened for some legendary performers, such as Tommy James of the Shondells (“Mony Mony,” “Hanky Panky”) and Leslie West
²
of Mountain (“Mississippi Queen”). I remember our first big show opening for the Good Rats. They were a great local band that actually had albums out, on major labels, but still played the tristate club scene pretty exclusively. Why didn’t they make the jump to the national scene? I can only speculate.

Back in the seventies, if you were a popular band playing the tristate club scene, it was lucrative. How lucrative? The bigger bands could make $1,000 or more a week,
per man . . .
cash! (A level Twisted Sister would soon get to.) By today’s standards, that’s a weekly salary for each band member of about $3,500, tax-free. You had twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-old musicians making the
pre-tax equivalent of a quarter-million dollars a year! And that’s for bands with five members. Some top bands out there had three! You do the math. The top club bands’ members were driving Corvettes and Mercedes, buying expensive houses, and literally living like rock stars. In every local scene, there are musicians who think it is the be-all and end-all, and that they are the shit. Well, Dee is here to break it to you . . . it isn’t, you’re not, you never were, and you never will be. Sorry, dude.

My guess is that the Good Rats just couldn’t come to terms with the reality of “going on the road.” You’d make little or no money,
³
be away from home and your family for months on end (some of the Good Rats were married and had kids), travel around the world in rent-a-cars or vans (initially), and share shitty motel rooms with two, three, or four other sweaty guys. (Where do I sign?!) So let’s see, sleep in your own bed every night, have money, drive a Mercedes sports car, and live in an expensive house . . . or five guys in an Ugly Duckling rent-a-car, drooling on each other in their sleep?
⁴
Decisions, decisions. So the Good Rats stayed home.

OUR FIRST TIME OPENING
for the Good Rats was at the 1890’s Club, in my hometown of Baldwin. My parents were going to come to the show, but since they would have a couple of my younger brothers with them, instead of coming inside they planned on standing outside the club and listening through the walls.

Now, at this early stage of our career, we had only one roadie, Ritchie the Face, and Charlie Barreca, our soundman, but they couldn’t do it alone. Twisted Sister was still unloading the truck, setting up, performing all night, then tearing down and loading our own gear. It sucked. While plentiful, our equipment was nowhere near the mountain of gear it would eventually become with stacks of amps, PA towers, and a full light show. Hell, at this point our light
show consisted of Ritchie the Face flicking the wall switch for the club stage lights. Impressive.

That opening night, with my parents perched outside the club listening by an air vent, Ritchie the Face flicked the switch and Twisted Sister hit the stage to a packed club. We launched into our then show opener, “Drivin’ Sister” (modified to “Twisted Sister”) by Mott the Hoople, and tore it up! When the song was over, a thousand people just stood there, completely silent, in shock. (It was exactly like the reaction to “Springtime for Hitler” in
The Producers
.)

Suddenly someone in the crowd shouted, “Fag!”

I strode (all two steps) to the front of the postage-stamp-size stage and glared threateningly at the crowd. “Who said that?!” I shouted into the mic. No response.
Coward!
⁵
The heckler properly dealt with, we launched into our next song and rocked on.

I was still living at home, and the next day when I got up and saw my parents, they asked me, “What happened?” Confused and still groggy from a late night, I said, “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?” They told me how they waited outside, watching hundreds of kids pack into the club. When my band finally went on, they heard our first song, but when it was over, they didn’t hear any response. “Where did everybody go?”

We opened for the Good Rats a number of times after that, each time winning over their audience a bit more. The night came (again at the 1890’s Club) when we blew them off the stage, and that was the last time we shared the bill with them. Eventually, they wrote and recorded a song about Twisted Sister called “Don’t Hate the Ones Who Bring You Rock ’n’ Roll,” which is still in their set to this day. Yes, the Good Rats (with only the original lead singer) are still playing the local club scene, and, no, the money is not what it used to be. Not even close.