Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (52 page)

THE DECADE OF DECADENCE
didn’t just happen on a whim. Like all things, it was the effect of a significant cause . . . the Reagan Era. When Ronald Reagan was elected president, the country took a sudden, wildly conservative turn. I now know the ultraconservative element never goes away, only lies in wait for its opportunity to pounce, but back then it felt as if it sprang out of nowhere. Add to that, thanks to Reagan’s ill-fated concept of trickle-down economics (George Bush Sr. took it on the chin for that brain fart), the economy got a steroid shot in the arm and money flowed (until the economy stopped doing the ’roids). Those were exciting times.

But for every action there is an equal (or sometimes stronger) reaction, and the more conservative mainstream America got, the more flagrantly the youth wanted to disregard it. It was a perfect storm. Never was there a form of music more steeped in wretched excess, over-the-top behavior, and hedonism than what became known as hair metal. It was just what the rock ’n’ roll doctor ordered. To once again paraphrase the movie
Animal House
, Reagan Era conservatism called for a really stupid gesture on somebody’s part . . . and eighties rockers were just the guys and girls to do it!

People often ask me what I think of current trends in music, and for the past twenty-five years or so I’ve said the same thing: “Not enough middle finger.” Since my heyday, I’ve liked a lot of contemporary heavy music. I even liked grunge—the hair-metal slayer—but in the 1990s and 2000s—and even still today—there’s just too much whining and complaining about how life sucks, and not enough middle finger. B in the D (back in the day) we didn’t complain about stuff, we railed against it, and if we couldn’t do anything about it, we shook our “junk” in its face. That was the youth attitude of the time, and eighties metal bands exemplified that fuck-you state of mind.
We weren’t gonna take it!
(See how that works?)

Though woefully misunderstood, Twisted Sister was the visual and musical embodiment of what the kids wanted and everything conservative America feared—in-your-face, outrageous, rebellious behavior. We were a threat to every value they stood for . . . or so they thought.

BY THE FALL OF
1984, a change had happened to Twisted Sister’s following that we weren’t yet fully aware of. We had gone from being the scourge of society—a true underground phenomenon—to “pop rock stars” seemingly overnight. Thanks to the wild success of our videos and the catchiness of our singles, our audience had expanded and attracted mainstream rock fans and a lot of younger kids. The range of a typical Twisted Sister audience now went from hard-core high-school- and college-age metal fans to their younger brothers and sisters, some of who didn’t even like heavy metal.
Houston . . . we have a problem.

Speaking of Houston, Twisted Sister was on the road again in the South and Southwest, and the turnouts were huge. We were a bona fide sensation. While our audience may have been broadening, as a band we had not changed one iota. With our heads down and still putting our shoulders into it, we were giving our fans the same anger-fueled, profanity-laced live show we’d been giving since our days in the biker bars of Long Island. We were anything but mainstream.

Twisted Sister’s October 6 concert, at the Civic Center Arena in Amarillo, Texas, was like any other. An aggressive, obscenity-filled, headbanging frenzy for a packed house of rabid SMFs . . . and moms and dads escorting their teenage and preteen children.
Uh-oh.
Toward the end of the show, I got into a confrontation with some hater in the crowd and verbally went off on him in typical Dee Snider style. Nothing out of the ordinary for a Twisted Sister show. The phalanx of Amarillo police waiting for me when I got off the stage, however . . . that was different.

Apparently, one of the parents in the audience, escorting her fourteen-year-old daughter to the show (commendable), had filed charges against me for my obscene language, and I was being arrested. When my tour manager inquired what exactly I had said that upset her, he was informed that the phrase “suck my muthafuckin’ dick” had pushed her over the top. I had said it to that guy who was harassing me.

To put this in perspective, I open every show with “If you’re
ready to kick some ass, we are Twisted fuckin’ Sister!” This woman sat through over an hour of profanity that would have given Richard Pryor, in his prime, a run for his money,
then
she decided to press charges? Nice parenting, Mom.

The Amarillo police were kind enough—and wise enough—to allow me to change out of my stage costume and makeup before taking me downtown. They didn’t want a scene. I got a bit of verbal harassment from them while I changed, but they stopped once I told them my father was a cop. Once I was in my “street clothes,” they slipped me out of the building hoping none of our fans would notice. For the most part they didn’t. At the precinct, I was booked on charges of “profane and abusive language,” fingerprinted, photographed (can I get a few of those in wallet size?), and released on $75 bail.
Seventy-five dollars!
What the hell kind of bail was that!? I’m a
bad
man!
²

My arrest made news all over the world. But it wasn’t until we got to the next venue that the seriousness of what had happened the night before hit us.

Word had spread like wildfire in Texas, and the Southern conservatives were in an uproar. It didn’t help that by the time we reached East Bumfuck—or wherever we were—the story being reported by the local news had mutated. Now they were saying I had invited underage girls in the audience up on stage to perform oral sex on me! Much worse.

Apparently the New York street colloquialism
suck my muthafuckin’ dick
didn’t translate well in the South. When we arrived at the venue, the police were there in force with complaint forms already filled out to arrest me the minute I spewed one word of profanity.

Joe Gerber was working the phone trying to hire a local attorney to represent the band’s interests in this situation. No luck. While every lawyer in a hundred-mile radius passed on the offer to represent us, one attorney, upon hearing who was looking to hire him,
hung up with a curt “Why don’t you suck my muthafuckin’ dick,” said with a full-blown Texas drawl. So much for Southern hospitality.

Controlling my vulgarity has never been a problem for me, but not cursing that night just to save my ass didn’t seem right. That’s when I remembered seeing author Gore Vidal on the
Johnny Carson
show years before. In 1974 he was promoting his new book,
Myron
, the sequel to the controversial
Myra Breckinridge
. In
Myron
, protesting a recent US Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, Vidal used the names of the Supreme Court justices who had voted in favor of censorship to replace offensive words in the book. (Justice)
Burger
=
bugger
, (Justice)
Rehnquist
=
dick
, and so on. I thought it was a brilliant idea—and the perfect solution to my problem.

When we hit the stage that night, cops and various other city-government officials were everywhere. After our first song, I took a moment to point out the authorities in the house and explain to the crowd why they were there. One profane word and I would be arrested. Then I informed the audience what I was going to do
instead
of cursing.

“What’s the mayor’s name in this city?!”
I shouted.

“Miller!”
³
the crowd screamed.

“Well, anytime I say
Miller
, I mean the F-word!”
I railed.
“When I say
Miller
, I mean—”
I pointed my microphone at the crowd.

“Fuck!”
they shouted.

“When I say
Miller,
I mean—”

“FUCK!”

“
And when I say
mutha Miller,
I mean—”

“
MUTHAFUCKER!”

I then picked a couple of other local officials’ names for
shit
and
ass
.

The police and town fathers were besides themselves. They could do nothing but wait for this New York heavy metal asshole to slip up. But I didn’t. Being clean and sober, I am always in complete control of my faculties, and I pranced, danced, teased, and taunted, but I never uttered a single curse word that night. The audience was cursing a blue streak, but not me.

Oh, I laid “I’m a sick muthafu-fu-fu-fu-
Miller
!” out there a couple times, but those were deliberate. Twisted Sister delivered a killer show and lived to rock another day. Until we got to the next city and our show had been canceled because of my arrest. Not much we could do about that.

STAY HUNGRY WAS A
huge record all over the world, and other countries (and our international record label) were clamoring for Twisted to tour. We had done some shows in Europe in the very beginning of the
Stay Hungry
tour, but to actually play in the countries where our record was now a hit would have taken it to the next level. Not to mention gotten us out of the United States, where we were—unbeknownst to us—on the verge of becoming overexposed. Instead, we opted to special-guest on Iron Maiden’s North American tour and go back, for a second or even third time, to places and regions we had already been. This was Twisted Sister’s first major
conscious
misstep. I don’t remember whose decision it was, but I’m sure
I
had a major hand in it.

We’d been supporting the album for eight months, and I was tired of the road. When you tour outside the United States, you are stuck in whatever country you are in, which for me was a nightmare. At least while touring in the United States, when we had a few days off, I could fly home or even fly Suzette and Jesse in so I could see them.

Case in point: In October of ’84, Twisted Sister headlined a show at the Sunrise Musical Theatre near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The theater was near where my wife and son were staying with her mother. Not only were Suzette, Jesse, and her entire family going to get a chance to see me in concert, but we had a couple of days off following and I was going to spend time with my wife and baby son.

The show itself was memorable for a few reasons. I remember the shock of hitting the stage and seeing Suzette’s mother, aunts, and
grandmother
in the front row! I had told the promoters to “take care of my wife’s family,” and in an effort to show me respect they gave these middle-age and elderly women seats right down front, in
the epicenter of the insanity (the last place you want to see family for a variety of reasons!).

As I performed “Stay Hungry” to the rabid mob, I was running offstage and barking out orders to my crew to get my in-laws the hell out of there. They were quickly moved to safer seats in the balcony.

During the show, the frenzied crowd started tearing the ceiling and wall tiles down, and I stopped the show and called them on it. The Sunrise Musical Theatre is a legendary venue where the greats, including Frank Sinatra, have played. The beautiful place was quite a contrast to the shitholes we usually had to perform in. Now, I’m the first to trash a dump; my attitude has always been:

DEE SNIDER RULE #3