Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (30 page)

The back-cover photo was taken without our makeup and costumes to establish a core belief of the band: we were not hiding. Twisted Sister wore costumes to enhance our live performances, more as a special effect. By putting a photograph of us without our makeup and costumes on the back cover, we felt it instantly communicated the message. The band didn’t want this point to be lost.

One other precedent I insisted be set from album one—my lyrics had to be printed on the inside record sleeve. I pride myself on my atypical heavy metal messages and wanted people to know exactly what I was singing about (or at least have a shot at understanding). I made an effort to use traditional heavy imagery to communicate more positive, empowering, and inspirational messages in many of my songs. “Bad Boys (of Rock ’n’ Roll)” was about being misjudged and standing tall as an individual. “Sin After Sin” was a warning about the path of evil (the first of many). I knew that most listeners would never get past the dark imagery, but some would. I wanted them to know what I was saying.

I TOLD YOU PETE
Way was the Man and pretty much friends with everybody. You want more proof? We were mixing
Under the Blade
one night, the door to the studio opens and, completely unexpected, in walks Ozzy Osbourne. No bodyguard, no posse, nobody at all . . . just the Ozzman. Clearly feeling no pain, he and Pete exchanged the greetings of longtime friends, and Ozzy explained that he had just shot his dog (or had to go shoot his dog—I can’t remember which) for biting his wife (Thelma, not Sharon). Pete made the unnecessary introduction of Ozzy to our stunned band, then cranked up our mix of “Destroyer” for Ozzy to check out. Ozzy seemed to like it (he should have, it’s one of my most Black Sabbath–influenced songs), and then he proceeded to hold court.

Ozzy was in the middle a major rebirth on the
Blizzard of Ozz
tour, and his career was firing on all cylinders. His band had just played a major UK homecoming, in front of thirty thousand head-bangers with Motörhead, at the “Heavy Metal Holocaust” festival
at Vale Park, and the man was flying high again (pun intended). Ozzy had every right to feel vindicated. Since nearly fading into obscurity after leaving Black Sabbath, Ozzy had fought his way back to the top, and he told us—at length—all about it. (“I saw my empire crumbling all around me!”)

Not that we minded. He was Ozzy fucking Osbourne, for God’s sake—he was Mr. Heavy Metal!

Meeting and hanging with Ozzy was the capper on an amazing first trip to Great Britain, and the recording of our first album. The
Ruff Cutts
EP was ready for release, and the
Under the Blade
album was headed for final postproduction.. Before we left for home—
my wife had a bun in the oven
—we had one more bit of business. We needed to perform at the legendary Marquee Club in London for all the rock press to see. They had heard about our taking of the Wrexham festival, but we wanted them to witness the power of Twisted Sister for themselves. If only the weather had cooperated.

In the early eighties (and still today to some degree), air-conditioning and refrigeration in Europe weren’t up to US standards. For sure we are a wasteful bunch, but the UK was at the opposite extreme. Things we Americans see as necessities were/are considered luxuries over there. You need to request ice for your drink at a bar, and then they’ll drop
one cube
in your glass. Ask for another and they’d look at you as if you were insane. It wasn’t unusual to walk into a butcher shop and see raw meat sitting uncovered or unrefrigerated on a counter, with flies crawling on it. Open the door of a soda cooler for a cold drink and it would be warm inside. And air-conditioning? Don’t make me laugh! To this day, only the best hotels in Europe have air-conditioning, and you still have to check with the hotel to make sure it’s available. To be fair, Europe doesn’t get quite as hot as it does in the States, but when it does, people literally die from the heat. Case in point . . .

Twisted Sister’s first true performances in Great Britain were two nights in August at the legendary Marquee Club. The Wrexham festival was a month earlier, but that was a supporting slot, with a short set, and in the daytime. We would be headlining the Marquee shows at night. We’d finally get to use dramatic stage lighting and play our full set.

The Marquee Club is essentially London’s CBGBs, but with
a much longer history and a more amazing roster of bands who have played there such as Hendrix, Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and the Who. The Rolling Stones were fired from there. You get the picture. Twisted Sister’s selling out two nights at the Marquee—without any recorded product—was a major statement about an emerging rock band.

The average high temperature in London in August is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Quite a bit different from New York. That summer, a heat wave hit London during the days of Twisted Sister’s Marquee shows, topping out in the low eighties. This was certainly manageable for a bunch of New Yorkers used to anywhere from the nineties to over a hundred degrees. That was until we met our match in the Marquee Club.

Like any nightclub, the Marquee Club had no windows, but unlike the clubs we were used to playing in the States, the Marquee had no air-conditioning either. Not that the air-conditioning in a packed, smoke-filled club (remember when it was legal to smoke in public places?) on a hot summer night did much to cool things off, but at least the clubs started out cool. Not the Marquee.

While I was in the dressing room getting ready for the show, it already felt hot and humid, but seeing our crew rushing in and out dripping with sweat, and saying things like “It’s gonna be a hot one,” started to get me concerned. I was used to being drenched by the end of a show,
¹
but not before I had even hit the stage.

The club was packed, wall to wall. Between the hype in
Sounds
and
Kerrang!
—the UK’s enormously popular weekly and monthly rock magazines, respectively—and the buzz about our performance at Wrexham, every headbanger worth his or her salt wanted to see the Bad Boys of Rock ’n’ Roll.

Suddenly, the door to our dressing room opened and in walked Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead.

After the show we did together, Lemmy became an ardent supporter of Twisted Sister, coming to many of our gigs, introducing us
and sometimes jamming with us as well. Lemmy had been around for a long time and seen it all. From rocking to the Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, to being a roadie for Jimi Hendrix in his early days, to touring the world with just about everybody with Motörhead, Lemmy Kilmister is a true rock ’n’ roll dog. He was blown away by Twisted Sister, and to have Lemmy recently tell me I am one of the three greatest front men he’s ever seen—and the best at speaking to an audience—is one of the greatest compliments I have ever received. But I digress.

The time came for us to deliver our goods to the rabid crowd, and we did in true Twisted Sister style . . . for a few minutes.

The first thing that hit me—like a wave of nausea—was the fetid smell of the crowd. Packed shoulder to shoulder, in one sweaty mass of denim and leather, their odor was palpable, and almost unbearable. We would come to learn that this was the 80’s default smell of a British metal crowd, but I can’t say it ever became something we got used to. That said, the heat was something else entirely. The air was so thick, we could barely breathe: the temperature and humidity, unbearable; unlike anything we had ever experienced before. When the stage lights came on (the ceilings in the Marquee are low so the lights are close to the band), they felt like the heat lamps. As the set went on, it became more and more difficult to sing or even move. Eventually I begged Joe Gerber (doing double duty during that era as our light man), over the mic, to keep most of the lights off.

It wasn’t just the band who were suffering. The audience, packed tightly together, were dropping like flies. People were being carried out of the club and taken to hospitals. It was a total nightmare. When we finally got to the end of our seventy-five-minute set, I could barely move. I stumbled off the stage, a sweat-soaked mess, with the rest of my band, collapsed in a chair, and did something I had never before done and haven’t done since . . .
I cried.

I cried out of frustration and anger at being unable to give people the kind of performance I was capable of. I cried because, in our first true performance for an audience that had heard and expected so much, I had failed to deliver. I cried because, in my mind, everything had built up to this moment, and in front of the rock press and the heavy metal elite I had failed. I cried over being defeated by an unseen enemy that, try as hard as I might, I could not beat.
Lemmy—and others—came in to congratulate us, but wound up consoling us instead. There are no worse critics of Twisted Sister than the members of Twisted Sister. I believe it is what makes us so great live. The dressing room vibe seemed like somebody died rather than a celebration after a sold-out rock show.

The next day—the second of our Marquee shows was to be that night—the reviews came out in the dailies. They were great. They acknowledged the brutal conditions in the club and couldn’t believe the band were able to perform
at all
. The audience was incapacitated, yet somehow Twisted Sister was able to rock on. We were so caught up in the misery of trying to perform, we were unable to be objective about the situation. The fans and press loved us!

That night, we got huge fans (the rotating kind, not the fat kind) for the stage, blowing over trays of ice (primitive, yes, but technically air-conditioning), and reduced the wattage and re-aimed all the lights onstage to cool things down a bit. It worked. It was still hot, but it was bearable.

After that first show—for decades—I could not perform without feeling some kind of air blowing onstage. If I didn’t, and it started heating up, I would begin to have flashbacks of that terrible night and start to panic, feeling as if I were suffocating. That show scarred me for life.

Oh, yeah, one other thing. We found out later that the managers of the Marquee Club had turned on the fucking heat—during a heat wave in August!—so people would drink more! Sometimes I just want to kill somebody. . . .

24

W
ord of the knockout punch Twisted Sister delivered at the Wrexham show in late July quickly spread throughout the UK rock scene. While we were back in the US enjoying life with our families, awaiting the release of
Under the Blade
, a call came into our management office—the Reading Festival wanted to add us to the bill!

England’s Reading Festival used to be the premier rock-music festival in the UK. It’s still a major player, but now there are a bunch of other equally competitive festivals. Unlike Castle Donington’s “Monsters of Rock” (all heavy metal and now known as the Download Festival), Reading always mixed things up, having more than thirty bands, playing different types of rock music at the three-day event. (Now Reading offers as many as fifty bands.)

We were stoked to be asked to perform at such a prestigious event. The lineup that year was the festival’s heaviest yet, including Y&T, the Michael Schenker Group, and Iron Maiden.

Our
Ruff Cutts
EP had just been released, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity for us to make further inroads within the UK metal community, promote the EP, and build anticipation for our September album release. Leaving Suzette behind,
again,
heavy with child, we jetted back to England for a weekend romp at Reading.