Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (38 page)

FROM THE MOMENT WE
played Salt Lake City, our first non–East Coast stop in America, I knew this axiom would always hold true:

DEE LIFE LESSON

Great heavy metal fans are fans of great heavy metal, no matter where they are from.

It’s always held true. Along the way, some people have warned me that Twisted Sister wouldn’t be as successful in non-English-speaking countries, believing that all of our success in concert stemmed from my ability to verbally interact with and incite a crowd. Not only is that a total pile of jealousy-driven bullshit, but Twisted Sister has been able to win over virtually any crowd—no matter what language they speak. As long as they want to rock, we can rock ’em!

City after city, Twisted Sister—the opening band on a three-band bill—were taking the show. Blackfoot were a great Southern rock band with a couple of big songs, but they were on their way out. Krapus were a typical, AC/DC-esque, also-ran metal band, who understandably never did much in the United States. Twisted Sister were pure aggression, with everything to lose. We were the band to beat.

Having to see Krapus and their tour manager backstage and not say or do anything was tough. Being at the hothead stage of my career, and coming off incendiary live performances each night, I was pretty much terminally angry. With great effort I would walk past PU or the Krapus band members without so much as a hostile glance at them. But those were the rules for being on the tour, and I was keeping my eye on the prize.

That wasn’t good enough for Krapi’s asshole American-tour manager. He decided to try to push my buttons and make me snap. That was one way of stopping Twisted Sister from making his band of Lilliputians look bad every night! One night, as I walked offstage, their tour manager was waiting for me with a big smile offered me
a towel and said, “Great show, Dee!” What the fuck!? Was he kidding?! Without a word I walked past him and went to the dressing room.
The fucking asshole!
The next night, he did the same thing . . . and the night after that . . . and the night after that. Each occasion I did the same thing: bit my tongue, refused to take the bait, and walked past the piece of shit. I knew what he was up to.

After about a week of this, I got a call from my manager. Puma had received a call from our agent saying he was getting reports that I was being rude to Krapus.
What!?
Not being able to get me to break, their tour manager was using our nightly
lack of exchange
to try to get the band and me tossed off the bill! That was it! I didn’t give a shit if we lost the tour! It was bad enough that I had to endure being around them each night without confronting them; now they wanted me to smile and be nice! Fuck that!

Quickly calming me down, Joe Gerber (who I know would have had my back in a second if I ever threw down with Krapus) decided he would take one for the team and be friendly to the tour manager and Krapus, intercepting him each night before he got to me. We made it through the rest of the tour without any further problems.

TWISTED SISTER BECAME AN
international sensation; Krapus an also-ran. My career continues to thrive; Krapus is a dime-a-dance shadow of their limited past. Life is filled with shades-of-gray decisions that move you forward on your path to ultimate success, and the memory of most of those choices fades with the passing years. But not that one. Accepting that tour with Krapus, and never truly avenging the way they treated my wife, still haunts me and will until the day I die.
I should never have done it.

29

B
y the summer of 1983, Twisted Sister had been fighting the good fight for glitter-rock-infused heavy metal for almost seven and a half years. Fighting for our right to rock the way we wanted to rock, at times we felt we were up against insurmountable odds. Discovering the burgeoning new wave of British heavy metal certainly gave us hope, a much-needed boost, and reason to keep believing, but it was still a struggle.

In August, the band and I drove through the heat of the night to Los Angeles, for the first time. With the sun coming up behind us, coming out of the Mojave Desert and the San Gabriel Mountains, we were at last in range to tune in the LA radio station KMET and discovered Iron Maiden’s “Flight of Icarus” playing. We could not believe it! We had heard that heavy metal was big in Los Angeles and KMET had garnered the nickname K-Metal, but we never imagined it would be like this. Metal on the radio in the morning? We had reached the promised land!

We pulled into West Hollywood to find a major metropolis that had completel
y
embraced heavy metal. It was actually in style! Heavy music and headbangers had
never
experienced this before; our music was being accepted on a cultural level. Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of this acceptance. Kids walking down the street were imitating the style of dress of their rock heroes, more often than not that of David Lee Roth of Van Halen. And the women? Metal had
never been that big with the female rock audience, but they, too, had found the style and attitude in it, particularly from Pat Benatar. Pat wasn’t metal, but she definitely rocked and had attitude. The girls were totally hooking into that. But something didn’t feel quite right.

As I read the local papers, saw the billboards and marquees, and simply met the metal fans in LA, it became clear they were more into the look and attitude of heavy metal than the music. They were clearly more interested in stylized heavy-metal bands and less so in the traditional “denim and leather.” Mainstay Sunset Strip clubs such as Gazzarri’s openly advertised bands with “only the best-looking guys” to entice the local rock chicks. Where the girls go, the boys follow. Much of the LA metal scene was hollow—like the facades of Hollywood sets—mostly about style and not substance.

This is not to say there were no real metalheads or metal bands in Los Angeles. Slayer—one of heavy metal’s Big Four—were from Huntington Park, just outside LA, but I could see what was fueling the Sunset Strip scene . . . and it wasn’t the heaviness of the music.

Los Angeles was set to brand its own specific form of heavy metal, and Twisted Sister was a perfect fit for the LA metal scene at that time. We were a metal band first and foremost, but stylized with our extreme makeup and costumes. Eddie and Jay Jay certainly had female appeal, and I was just . . . Dee. While I most definitely fell short in the “pretty boy” department, I was an over-the-top wild man, and the LA metal scene loved that. But for how long?

Usually when we hit the stage as the opener on a three-band bill, the venue would be maybe half to two-thirds full. Not in LA. When we took the stage at the Hollywood Palladium that night, the place was wall-to-wall. While there was interest in Krapus, the buzz on Twisted Sister was huge. Metal fans out there had been hearing about us long before our
You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll
or even
Under the Blade
albums had been released. Word of the East Coast phenomenon, the makeup-wearing heavy metal band, had reached the Left Coast when we were still in the bars.

We did our usual thing (including verbally tearing apart an arrogant LA elitist in the VIP balcony who deliberately dumped her ashtray on the crowd below), and after the show we got our first exposure to the whole
Hollywood thing.
Local notables all wanted to meet the band, and even a fellow up-and-comer from a band
we’d heard about called Mötley Crüe, came back, excited to meet us. I remember Vince Neil asking me if his girlfriend “da jour” could come back and take a picture with me (“She’s a big fan!”).

The big surprise was when Atlantic Records’ West Coast senior VP, Paul Cooper, came backstage to meet us. Resplendent in an expensive suit, manicured, tanned, coiffed, and walking with an elegant-looking cane, he told us how much he enjoyed the show. Stunned that any executive from Atlantic Records US had come to see us period (hadn’t he got the memo?), I expressed my appreciation, especially considering this was clearly not his cup of tea.

That upset him. “Not my cup of tea? My cup of tea is making money. Your band is going to make this label a lot of money.
You’re my cup of tea.”

I liked this guy! To have an Atlantic Records exec—who wasn’t Phil Carson—say that meant the world to us. And seeing firsthand the heavy metal explosion that was happening in Los Angeles gave us incredible hope. After missing the boat in 1979 (when Eddie had his seizure and new wave took hold), it looked as if, four years later, the music scene was finally coming back around. Twisted Sister was going to have a real chance.

IN SEPTEMBER OF ’83
, my childhood dreams of being a rich, famous rock ’n’ roll star started to become a reality. I already had a degree of fame and was
technically
a rock ’n’ roll star (at least to some people), but the rich part had definitely been eluding me. With the signing of Twisted Sister to Atlantic Records came two other economic pieces to every band’s rock ’n’ roll pie: a merchandising deal and a music-publishing deal. While Twisted Sister shared the monetary signing advance and proceeds from merchandise sales, that wouldn’t be the case with the songwriting/publishing advance.

Since many hit songs are not written by the band or the artist performing them, the songwriters get an independent royalty (free of all record company recoupment) per song, per record sold. As the band’s sole songwriter,
all
of the publishing money and the five-figure advance coming with it from the publishing deal was mine. While some bands take the all-for-one, one-for-all approach to royalties
and share them equally (Black Sabbath, Van Halen, etc.), I didn’t consider sharing the wealth with my bandmates for a second (other than the 15 percent of my publishing royalties that I had given Jay Jay). I was finally receiving compensation for all my hard work and sacrifice.