Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (21 page)

The band’s star was on a meteoric rise. We knew Kenny’s decision to leave could not have been easy for him, but the question of whom to replace Kenny with was not nearly as hard for us to make. Mark “the Animal” Mendoza, formerly of the seminal punk band the Dictators, was our bass roadie at that time and first and only choice for filling Kenny’s “platform” shoes.

As I said, Mark and my paths had crossed before, but we became friends when he came down to the clubs to see Twisted during his breaks from touring with the Dictators.

The Dictators were signed to a major label, and they toured with the likes of Kiss, Blue Öyster Cult, and lots of other coliseum attractions of the day. The Dictators were where Twisted Sister very much wanted to be. That we were Mark’s band of choice when he was home meant a lot to us.

When Mark quit the Dictators, we were coincidentally looking for a bass tech/roadie. Upon hearing of the job opening, Mark approached us and said, “If I can’t play in a band, I’d rather roadie for a band than work a day job.” Now that’s the rock ’n’ roll attitude! He was more than qualified for the job, was a friend of the band’s, and had the utmost respect for Kenny. Mark was quickly hired and was a great—albeit overqualified—addition to our crew.

After months of his working on the side of the stage watching the band and Kenny every night, Mark’s transition to being in the band was pretty seamless. While we rehearsed the music with Mark, Suzette worked miracles turning a bearded, biker Dictator into a clean-shaven Twisted Sister.

Kenny departed in December of 1978, and Mark stepped in without missing a beat. In Mark I found a peer, agewise (he is a year younger than me) and in background (he, too, had grown up in the suburbs of Long Island), and a brother in my love for heavy metal. To paraphrase
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. . . “And what happened then? Well, in Twisted Sister they say, when Mark ‘the Animal’ Mendoza joined, the band’s heavy-metal heart grew ten sizes that day.”

And I loved it!

With Mark Mendoza in the band and our wagon hitched to
(what we thought was) Mark Puma’s formidable “horse,” a game plan started to come together. Now we just had to focus our assault on the record companies.

DID I MENTION THAT
I was becoming a monster? Oh, yeah, I was. My hostility toward the world was growing at an astronomical pace. My new friend, band bodyguard and Suzette and my roommate (NYC year three) Roger and I were pushing each other to much darker places. I had met Roger after an extremely violent gang-like battle at a club Twisted Sister was playing, and we fed off of each other’s worst qualities (and senses of humor). What I had been holding back from a lifetime of indignities (I admit, some perceived) was surfacing with each passing day. I used the band’s growing popularity to fire off venom-filled tirades from the stage each night, toward the illusive “they.” They could be parents, teachers, adults, politicians, cops, disco assholes, stuck-up chicks, or anybody in the club who wasn’t participating, or whom I perceived to have an “attitude.” Unknowingly, I was creating a classic “us against them” scenario, with the rockers positioned as the underdogs railing against their oppressors. It worked amazingly well. I just wish I could claim to have known what I was doing. Then again, it was probably the genuineness of my hostilities that sold it to the crowd. I was a vicious, profanity-spewing nightmare with a growing hatred that was coloring my worldview. And the audience loved it! I was becoming the people’s champion (before the Rock!).

My anger was not limited to the stage. At the management office, I had the secretary keep an ever-growing list of people and organizations I was going to get even with (“Karen, put so-and-so on the list!”), and I had a saying to go with my mania: PAMF—“payback’s a muthafucker!” (a far cry from PMA, I admit). I even had T-shirts made with
PAMF
on them. I was nuts. Using my rage and hatred to drive me on, I sank my fangs into the task as hand: world domination.

Twisted Sister’s grand plan was to “clean up” and properly package our current demo tapes, then showcase for the entire record
industry at once. How? By booking ourselves into and selling out the prestigious, three-thousand-seat New York Palladium, an unprecedented achievement by an unsigned band. We knew our rabid fans would pack the place.

The tickets for our March 16, 1979, show sold out in less than a day. To make sure the record industry didn’t miss our incredible achievement, we took out a full-page ad in the premier music industry chart magazine
Billboard
. Every record company committed their top people well in advance to be at the show. How could they not? Twisted Sister was doing the undoable, and clearly we were the next big thing.

Never ones to take anything for granted, we decided to pull out all the stops. New costumes for everyone (including multiple costume changes for me), a full-on theatrical light show with staging to match. Spending thousands of dollars that we had not taken as salary (except for Eddie), we self-financed everything, including two massive flashing signs that read
DISCO
and
SUCKS
, made to bring home our current battle cry.

In the late seventies, disco was king, and Twisted Sister had always been on a mission to destroy it. From smashing disco albums onstage with sledgehammers (often putting holes in the stages) to burning Bee Gees and
Saturday Night Fever
posters, to electrocuting and hanging various disco stars in effigy onstage, we, the “Rock ’n’ Roll Saviors” (one of our biggest songs back then), were spreading the good word: Disco was dead! Long live rock! Though that hanging thing did get us in a bit of trouble one night.

While most of our shows were in suburban areas, we played some rural areas as well. There was one club in upstate New York where the local rockers really loved us. We would pack that place. One night, after a blistering, disco-crushing set, the audience reaction was particularly off the charts. We had finished by hanging disco maven Barry White in effigy, then tossing “his body” into the crowd. The audience tore the dummy to shreds and absolutely lost their minds.

At the end of the night, we were talking with the club owner about the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction, and he casually says, “You can never go wrong with hangin’ a nigger.”
What?!
Idiots that we were, it never dawned on us that it could be interpreted as anything
else. We quickly explained that hanging Barry White in effigy was purely symbolic, reflecting our attitude toward disco music as an art form. We certainly weren’t racist. We had a Puerto Rican guitarist in the band and one of our former drummers was African-American.
¹

“You hung a nigger,” the club owner reiterated. “People around here love that.”

Needless to say, it was the last night for that.

STAGING A ONE-OFF CONCERT
event such as at the Palladium required the same effort a major attraction would put into staging an entire tour—and all the expenses as well. We endlessly rehearsed the band and crew, doing full production runs in a huge rehearsal studio. This was our shot and we could leave nothing to chance.

The night before the big show, we rented the Palladium theater—at tremendous expense—so we could have a dress rehearsal on the actual stage where we were going to make our stand. Twisted Sister was making its own luck. But that night, at rehearsal, the completely unexpected happened. Eddie Ojeda had a grand mal seizure onstage.

All of a sudden, in between songs, Eddie dropped to the floor and started violently convulsing. Unconscious, he was rushed to the hospital, and just like that—although we didn’t know it yet—our runaway train of a career had been completely derailed.

Eddie recovered surprisingly quickly and we rescheduled our show for April 6; it seemed simple enough. If only. What we didn’t realize was, top record executives’ schedules are planned well in advance. Because of this, every key person who was to attend on March 16
could not
attend three weeks later, so they sent their underlings, some as insignificant (to our careers) as their secretaries.

The second thing that happened, which virtually no one (except maybe Nostradamus) could have predicted, was
the music scene changed.
In the three short weeks between Eddie’s collapse and
our rescheduled concert, minimalist “new wave” had arrived, and no one wanted to know about some grandiose, over-the-top, big-production, heavy-metal band.

ON APRIL 6 THE
rescheduled show went off without a hitch. The place was packed, the response from the fans was staggering . . .
and the record industry couldn’t have cared less.
Only one label was interested, but they needed a repeat performance—a formality, they assured us—to seal the deal.

Though we were a bit shaken by the limited response from the record companies, we knew it only took one label to say yes, and Epic Records was major. The label president wanted to see us perform, but there was a catch: we had to stage the full concert production at eleven o’clock in the morning just for him
. Are you fucking kidding me?

It wasn’t just the time of day (I didn’t get up until the middle of the afternoon), but the expense of restaging this “showcase” was astronomical. The band was still reeling from the expense of Eddie’s cancellation. Epic Records assured us we would be reimbursed, and again, this was just a formality; we were going to be signed.

I hated the idea of doing this—it was insulting to ask us to perform like that—but when the day arrived, with only a few hours’ sleep I got up at 6:00 a.m., so I could be ready to rock by showtime. It takes me two hours to prepare for any performance, so at 9:00 a.m. I was at SIR studios, putting on my makeup and warming up my voice. By 11:00 a.m. we were dressed and waiting for Epic Records to grace us with their presence.

At 11:30 a.m., the asshole rolled in with two others and, without a word, sat down
on a couch
set up in the middle of the room in front of the stage. We launched into our show and performed the entire ninety-minute concert set, including audience-participation numbers—which they didn’t participate in—as a “formality” for getting signed to Epic Records;
it was a done deal.

When we finished our show, the Epic Records label president and his cohorts walked out without saying a
word
to the band. I wanted to verbally and physically tear that piece of crap apart.

YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT
happened next. Yep. Epic Records passed on the band, saying we were “dinosaurs” and no one was interested in “arena rock” anymore. And they didn’t reimburse us for the expenses of the private showcase. Needless to say, the president of Epic was added to my PAMF list.
The prick.

Of course, as the band continued on after our “Epic” failure, we convinced ourselves that being rejected by every label in the country was merely a bump on our road to stardom. The marketplace had completely changed, and industry insiders said there was absolutely no interest in a band like ours.
Oh, yeah?
Try telling that to the
thousands and thousands
of rock fans who were coming to see Twisted Sister in the clubs
every week
. Twisted Sister wasn’t just a
big
band in the tristate scene, we were
the
band in the tristate scene. Our achievement at the Palladium that night sent our status on the local scene into the stratosphere. Playing to thousands of people every week we were affecting the musical tastes of a generation of rock fans in the region and the music future generations
internationally
would listen to. How can I say something as insane as that? Read on.

Twisted Sister was defining the local music scene and setting the standard by which other bands were being judged. Clubs were built to accommodate our crowds and staging needs, and the young musicians who would be the future of rock were flocking to study everything we did. In our audience, or in bands opening for us on any given night, were members of Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Billy Idol’s band (Steve Stevens), Kix, Poison, Anthrax, Overkill, and more. Even the original Metallica—then totally unknown—opened for Twisted Sister at one of Metallica’s first East Coast gigs in front of almost four thousand people.
²

Twisted Sister was defining what would become hair metal, thrash metal, and the coming new wave of heavy metal in the United
States. Even punk bands found inspiration in what we were doing. For years Green Day played “We’re Not Gonna Take It” in their set.

This explains the disconnect you’ll find between people’s perceptions of my band. If you lived and grew up in the Northeast (or in Western Europe), you were aware of the effect and importance of Twisted Sister. If you were from the rest of the country (and world), your awareness began and ended pretty much with our couple of hit records, and we tend to be dismissed as a one-hit wonder or a flash in the pan.

With rejections coming in almost daily from out-of-touch record execs sitting in high towers in big cities, the visceral response of thousands of rabid rock fans each night told us to stay the course. I mean, who better knew what record buyers wanted to hear—suits in the city or the kids who actually bought the damn things?! We were reminded daily that the record-buying public was dying for recorded music from Twisted Sister.