Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (6 page)

Somewhere out there in the school closets of America, I’m sure some dusty Strawberry Wristwatch LPs still exist. That’s what our choir directors named us; it was the psychedelic era. Were
they
on psychedelics? That would explain our shitty deal. I wonder if anyone knows (or cares) that they are Dee Snider’s first recordings.

Oh yeah; I took my 150 bucks and with an additional $15 kicked in from my dad (thanks) bought my first, real electric guitar: a Gibson SG Special. Now I was starting to rock.

THE PINNACLE OF MY
“all talk, no action” band experience came toward the tail end of junior high. I now had a band called Brighton Rock, consisting of myself on guitar and vocals, Rich Squillacioti on drums, Phil Knourzer on bass (finally a bass player!), and Timmy Smith on lead guitar. Rich and I had an interesting life experience with Timmy before he joined the band.

Timmy was our only cool friend, who, at fourteen, smoked so many nonfiltered cigarettes, he had yellow, nicotine-stained fingers. When Rich and I decided that the only way we were going to get
girls was to smoke (yeah, that was the problem), Tim took us out one day to teach us how, starting us on filtered Tareyton cigarettes to ease us into that harsh world. After an afternoon filled with chain-smoking, acting cool, and dealing with the bad taste, breath, and cigarette smell on our bodies, Rich and I decided if we had to smoke to get girls, we would be celibate. Life lesson learned.

Like many of my bands before, Brighton Rock
never
rehearsed, but we talked a good game. We sat together every day at lunch, discussing how we would rock, and acting like the Beatles and the Monkees. One day Phil came in with amazing news. They were having a dance at his church and he got us the gig! While church dances were a typical venue for young bands, Phil went to the Unitarian Church, which was the hippest of the churches, making this booking that much cooler. This would be my first gig ever.
I had finally arrived!
Sure we had never rehearsed, but the show was six months away, plenty of time to put a set together.

As the weeks and months rolled by, we promised each other we would rehearse, but something always kept us from getting together. For some reason or another, over six months we could not find even
one
day for a rehearsal. I don’t know about the other guys, but I was a full-of-shit, chronic procrastinator who always put everything off until the last minute. Up until that time, I viewed being in a band as effortless, as something that just somehow “happened.” Boy, was I wrong.

The week of the show, the reality that time had run out hit us, and the undeniable fact that we couldn’t do a whole show on our own set in. We still figured we could rehearse a short set at the church the
day of the show
, but we knew we needed someone to headline.

Some of our best friends, and a true inspiration to Brighton Rock, were an actual performing band called Armadillo. The same age as us, these guys were advanced; read,
they weren’t full of shit and actually took lessons and rehearsed.
They were such an early inspiration, I want to make sure I recognize them individually: Doug Steigerwald on guitar (more on him later), Denny McNerney on drums (still a dear friend of mine), Mike Graziano on bass, and the much older (he was in high school!) Don Koenig on vocals. These guys could play, and their performance of Black Sabbath’s “Black
Sabbath” was not only my introduction to heavy metal, but scared the living crap out of me. Amazing.

My band approached the guys in Armadillo (sitting at
their
band table during lunch) and asked if they would headline the Unitarian-church show that weekend, and they accepted. Joy of joys, we were saved! Now all we had to do was rehearse a short set the day of the show.
Ha!

Saturday arrived and we loaded in nice and early so we could get maximum rehearsal time before the dance. Timmy brought his older (equally nicotine-stained) brother with him to play harmonica. We hadn’t even worked out a set list! For the first time we attempted to run through songs we all mutually knew and—surprise, surprise—we all only knew
three
songs. We rehearsed our “set” for a while (a couple of hours, tops) and were stunned to discover—
we sucked!
I couldn’t believe it. How was that possible? We
talked
about our band all the time.

We were such garbage that we instantaneously renamed our band just that, Garbage (predating the much more popular band Garbage by about three decades). I remember Phil literally throwing his bass on the floor in anger, and instead of continuing to rehearse and work on the songs (why do that?), we did what any all-talk, no-action band would do: we went around to all the posters in the building, crossed out the name
Brighton Rock
, and wrote in
Garbage
. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our time to perform came all too soon, and we headed out onto the stage (the floor of the church gathering room) to face a full house of kids sitting on the floor, waiting to be rocked. Somebody introduced the band to the confused crowd (“Ladies and gentlemen, we are Garbage!”), and we launched into the funeral dirge that is Donovan’s “Atlantis.”
What a shitty opener!
We made it through the song, to a tepid response from the crowd, at which point Phil and I decided that we had had enough.
What the hell were we thinking?!
Being closest to the exit, without a word to the other band members, Phil and I walked off. Not realizing his bass guitarist and rhythm guitarist/lead vocalist had left the stage, Rich counted off the next song, and he, Timmy, and Timmy’s brother (let’s just call him Stainy) started playing the next song without us. Stunned by what
was going on, Phil and I watched as this catastrophe continued to unfold. Heaven forbid we go back out onstage.

The audience was more than a little confused, and as the remaining band members slowly realized Phil and I were no longer onstage (what was in those cigarettes they were smoking!?), they stopped playing and, one by one, walked off. What a debacle.

Backstage, we stood in stunned silence, too overwhelmed by the harsh reality that had just hit us. And then it got even worse. The door to the backstage area opened and in walked
my father.
Unbeknownst to me, after years of listening to me prattle on about my bands and music, he had decided to come, unannounced, and check out my first show. I looked at him, he looked at me, he shook his head in disappointment and disgust, then walked out without saying a word. To this day, that show has never been mentioned or discussed.

I could not have been more humiliated or embarrassed. That experience scarred and changed me for life. I vowed to never,
ever
perform again unless I was completely and thoroughly rehearsed and ready. Only in recent years have I even considered getting up and “jamming” with another band. I had fucked up big-time. My bluff had been called and I had no one to blame but myself. I now knew that if I wanted to be a rock star, it would take hard work and perseverance. Nobody was going to hand me fame and fortune.

FROM THAT POINT ON
, all of my many bands rehearsed, a lot. Along the way I discovered a new axiom:

DEE LIFE LESSON

A band is only as good as its weakest link.

How? When I realized I could get into a lot better bands if I just sang rather than insisting on playing sucky guitar as well. While being able to play a little guitar has over the years served me well (I
would always translate my vocally composed Twisted Sister songs to guitar and show them to the band), the time had come to free myself and become the wild-man performer I knew I was meant to be. Hell, one of the reasons I sucked on guitar was because I moved around too much to play well, but I looked good doing it!

My father fought my pursuing a career in music more than ever. After what he had witnessed, why wouldn’t he? He couldn’t have been more disappointed in the path his oldest son was taking. Once I had given up playing baseball completely and started growing my hair out (after an ugly, forced-haircut incident in the beginning of tenth grade), my dad pretty much gave up on me. He barely talked to or even acknowledged me for years. Things didn’t get better until my younger brother Mark showed an intense interest in baseball and my father could once again focus his fatherly pride and support on something he understood.

In fairness to my dad, he was raised during the Great Depression, a time when dreams were shattered, not achieved. He was raised to believe that the only way you get anything in life is by fighting and clawing every inch of the way, and that dreams don’t come true. Well, he was right about the first part. Add that to rock ’n’ roll being alien entertainment to his generation, and I can understand his resistance. I don’t think my father was truly proud of me until only recently, when I did my run on Broadway in 2010. A Broadway star was a concept he could understand. My going after a pipe dream of a career in rock ’n’ roll was, from his point of view, watching his child heading for massive disappointment and self-destruction.
Man, was he wrong!

The man did pretty much everything he could to stop and discourage me. Though outward displays of rebellion were met with swift, forceful punishment, he could not stop the growing fire inside me. I remember one time my father banned me from rehearsing with my then band, The Quivering Thigh. So I took up jogging. Each night, dressed in running clothes, I would leave the house, jog several miles to rehearsal, rehearse with the band for a bit, then jog home. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

By my junior year in high school, I was playing dances and parties occasionally, while most of my buddies in Armadillo had moved on to a new band, Harvest, and were already out playing clubs at
night—even though they weren’t even old enough to drink. Harvest’s lead guitarist extraordinaire, Doug Steigerwald, was a longtime friend, altar boy at my church, and a true inspiration to me. I was always in awe of him. Both having
S
last names, we sat next to each other each morning in homeroom. One day he was recovering from a late night of rocking and I was blathering on (as usual) about my band, his band, rock music, and anything else that remotely related to our common passion. Finally Doug, who was on the quiet side, said, almost as a revelation to himself, “You’re really serious about making it, aren’t you?”

“Yeah!” I responded in disbelief. I’d been annoying him about it for years. He was just realizing this? Doug’s next, Yoda-like words to me affected me like few others. I’ve reflected on them, followed them, and repeated them often over the last four decades. “Don’t let anybody stop you from moving toward your dream. Not family, not friends, not girlfriends . . .
nobody.
The minute you let
anyone
stop you from moving forward, you are
finished.
Try not to be shitty about it, but whatever you do, do not let anyone stop you.”

I sat there dumbfounded by Doug’s profound statement, the words etching into my psyche. A couple of years later I would watch my dear friend Rich Squillacioti literally cry when we replaced him in our band because he just wasn’t good enough to take us to the next level. If I’d allowed our friendship to prevent what was right for my career and the band, that would have been the end of me, too.

To this day, I don’t know what was going on in Doug’s life to have him make such a pronouncement, but it must have been heavy. A few years later, Doug would abandon his dreams of rock stardom and join the US Air Force after being seriously ripped off and lied to by some music-industry asshole. Doug loved music, but like many, he couldn’t take the ugliness of the business. They call it the music
business
for a reason.