Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (66 page)

Bernie and I bonded over thoughts for a new group. I didn’t want to be a solo artist. I never wanted to be a solo artist. Rock ’n’ roll is meant to be played by a band, and with Bernie I now had the cornerstone of a new band that would not only take me back to the top, but show the world I was anything but a lucky, flash-in-the-pan one-trick pony who had stumbled upon his success.
Within a few weeks, Bernie Tormé came over to the States to begin the long, overly drawn-out process of songwriting, putting together the band, and recording our first album.

But I still had to deal with that pesky little bankruptcy thing.

BANKRUPTCY IS A SCARY
word, but I quickly learned there are two different kinds:
rich people’s
and
poor people’s.
I was in the former category at that point—I would learn about the latter soon enough.

People with money and resources lose virtually nothing in this ridiculous process. By hiring the best bankruptcy law firm in the business, I was carefully guided through the—totally legal—process of protecting the majority of my assets and turning nothing of significance over to my creditors. Besides a missing Jeep and Cadillac hearse from my driveway, I wouldn’t even have known anything had happened. My house, the vast majority of my possessions, my song catalog/rights—pretty much everything was secured and untouched by the proceedings.

My current economic condition (cash poor) was perfect for what I was about to go through. The bankruptcy allowed me to negate pretty much all of the contracts I was tied to—including the Winterland licensing deal—and start completely over with a clean slate. You would think that a bankruptcy would make potential business partners wary of getting involved with me, but it was just the opposite. Businesses viewed my being postbankruptcy as a positive. As far as they were concerned, I was unencumbered by past relationships and financial responsibilities . . .
and I couldn’t go bankrupt again for ten years.

The bankruptcy was long and drawn-out, but once it was finalized, I was free to make new record and publishing deals. Despite the ultimate failure of Twisted Sister, I found quite a bit of interest in my new project and a small bidding war between labels. Ultimately, I signed a pretty handsome deal with Elektra Records, courtesy of A&R man Brian Koppelman.

Brian Koppelman was a hard-core, original SMFF of TS and son of music-publishing magnate Charles Koppelman. While still in college working on his law degree, Brian had discovered Tracy
Chapman. The success of Tracy’s record got Brian a top A&R gig with Elektra and made him a young voice to be listened to by the completely disconnected upper-level execs. The timing couldn’t have been better for me to connect with Brian.

Having grown up on Long Island, Brian had seen Twisted Sister forty-five times in the clubs before we ever even had a record deal. This was my first opportunity to pick the brain of one of these original Twisted SMFs, and I asked Brian why he had come to see my band so often.

“Because I believed you believed,” he said with idiot-savant clarity.

What the hell did that mean? I pushed for an explanation.

“When I saw you on that stage, singing and raging about how you guys were going to make it—and with such conviction—I had no choice but to believe in you and follow.”

Wow. Talk about the power of positive screaming.

His belief in me now spilled over to my new project, and Brian landed Desperado (my new band’s name) a major deal.

I JUST SUMMED UP
a year and a half of my life in a handful of pages. If only it were that easy. From the time I left Twisted Sister to the time I signed a new recording contract was a long, frustrating, snail’s-paced period with the singular bright spot being the birth of my second son, Shane Royal Snider, on February 29, 1988.

Nineteen eighty-eight was a leap year, and seeing how Suzette was due around that time, I told her how cool it would be to have a leap-year baby. Suzette said she would see what she could do and—always the accommodating wife—delivered our second child on the day.

Suzette had gone back to school to get her hairdressing license to enhance her value as a professional makeup artist, prior to Shane’s birth. She returned to finish the required thousand hours of training shortly after having the baby. Being off the road and home for a prolonged period for the first time, I got to take care of Shane while Suzette was in school (with the help of our nanny) and experience so many of the things I hadn’t been there for with Jesse. While I loved
the opportunity to bond with my newborn, it did emphasize just how much I had missed with my first. A mixed blessing.

THE ROAD TO PUTTING
my new band together wasn’t nearly as rewarding. Bernie and I wrote more than a hundred songs together while waiting for all my financial problems to resolve. Cowriting with someone for the first time, I discovered how having an actual musician creating the musical parts took my songs to a whole new level. It added an entire dimension previously lacking in my music.

I’d like to apologize to the guys in Twisted Sister for not making them a part of the songwriting while I was in the band. Unfortunately, the way our relationships evolved over the years precluded me from working with anybody. It would take massive success and leaving the band to finally free me of all the emotional baggage we developed and allow someone else into my process. And trust me, it didn’t happen overnight.

On the upside, writing all of those songs and working together for many months allowed Bernie and me to focus our vision for what the band should be. It went from an extension of my
Me and the Boys
concept with keyboard and saxophone, to a power trio with vocals, à la Led Zeppelin.

The Desperado band was finally fleshed out with a young English bass player Bernie had worked with named Marc Russel, and former Iron Maiden basher Clive Burr on the drums.

I had always been a fan of Clive Burr’s creative playing style. Say what you will about his replacement in Maiden, Nicko McBrain (a great guy and a great drummer), but Clive Burr helped define the Iron Maiden sound that has been the template for everything they’ve done since. Those first three albums he played on are still the core of Iron Maiden’s legacy. They owe Clive a lot and, to their credit, do show their appreciation. Clive has become ill in recent years, stricken with multiple sclerosis, and Iron Maiden have been incredibly supportive and generous. They are a good bunch of guys.

With still no record deal in hand, and floating an entire band’s weekly salaries, I headed to the UK to rehearse, demo songs, do a photo session (true to our name, the band had taken to dressing like
Wild West outlaws, complete with spurs), and whatever else needed to be done with the new band toward the end of 1988. During the two-month stay, Desperado would perform what would turn out to be its only show ever, at a club in Birmingham under the pseudonym The Clinky Bits, referring to all the “jingling” our spurs and jewelry did.

With my new band musically tight and ready to rock, I returned home for the holidays, waited for the Elektra deal to be locked in, and the contracts drawn up. This took months and months. It was maddening. All the while, my financial situation—which had been cleared up less than a year earlier—was quickly eroding.

By the time the deal was done and signed, it was too late. I’d been supporting first Bernie Tormé, then the rest of Desperado, and all the ancillary expenses (housing, equipment, plane flights, per diems, etc.) since the end of 1987. As we prepared to head into the studio to record, almost two years later, I was already back in debt. The huge advance and budget from Elektra for the first album wasn’t enough to save me.

On top of everything else, Suzette and I had an unplanned, wonderful surprise: she was pregnant with our third child.

Just before preproduction was to start on the new album, I finally made a decision I should have made long before. We had to sell our house and downscale. I say
I
made the decision because I tried to keep the severity of our economic troubles from Suzette, partly because I didn’t want her to worry, but mostly because I didn’t want to hear her tell me the obvious: we needed to do something drastic to fix it.

In my defense, I thought about selling the house (which had doubled in value since we had bought it) a number of times, but my manager kept persuading me to hang on to it. “Real estate is gold,” he would say, and it was. But he was thinking in terms of how he, an average guy, would handle things: hang on to your home at all costs and cut back on every other aspect of your spending. I couldn’t do that . . . I was a rock ’n’ roll star. I had a public image to keep. Seriously. Perception is reality, and if people still perceive you as a rock star, you are one. If the public sees you as a broken-down valise, that’s what you are. Plus, I had no doubt, as soon as I got the Desperado record out, everything would be fixed, I would be back
on the top of the charts, and all of my monetary problems would be solved.

As I headed up to Woodstock with the band and our producer, Peter Coleman, in October, to begin recording, even though I had come to terms with the need to sell our house, in my heart of hearts I was sure that it wouldn’t be necessary. Suzette, on the other hand, now knew full well the seriousness of our situation and set to work preparing the house to be sold. Being the dollar-conscious woman she is, Suzette wouldn’t spend more money we didn’t have to hire people to do the work. Five and a half months pregnant, she did everything herself, no matter how big the job.

FOR SOME SCHEDULING REASON,
we had a couple of days off in the beginning of December. Suzette had been killing herself preparing our house to be sold. I was constantly telling her to take it easy, I would hire people to do these strenuous jobs, but Suzette’s not one for waiting. She continued to work and push way too hard. Suzette was on a mission to get the house ready for sale right after the winter holidays. Each month that passed we were falling deeper into a financial hole. Just before I came home that week, I called to find out she had literally been on all fours, scrubbing the kitchen floors. She was more than seven months pregnant!

I was heading back up to Woodstock the afternoon of December 7, but first I went with Suzette to her ob-gyn appointment for her routine monthly checkup on her pregnancy. Suzette lay on the table, her feet in the dehumanizing stirrups, and her longtime gynecologist, Dr. Deborah Zitner, began her examination.

Suddenly the doctor’s face went white. “You need to get to the hospital immediately.”

We were stunned by this pronouncement, the full reality of what this could mean not even beginning to hit us.

“Okay,” I replied calmly, “we’ll just stop off at our house and pick up Suzette’s things.” We lived only fifteen minutes from the doctor’s office.

Still white as a sheet, Dr. Zitner said, “
No
. Don’t stop off for anything. You’ve got to go directly to Schneider Children’s Hospital.
They have specialists that can help you. You’re going to have this baby today.”

Completely confused, and now more than a little freaked out, we got in our car and headed to SCH instead of our local hospital, which was down the block. We were familiar with the hospital. It was almost an hour away. Jesse had been born at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and Schneider Children’s Hospital was their specialized wing for premature births and babies with birth issues. Having to go there was not a good thing.

When we arrived at the hospital, they were expecting us and rushed Suzette into a room. A doctor came in shortly after and proceeded to scare the living shit out of both of us.

He explained that not only was Suzette partially dilated (meaning the beginning process of childbirth had begun), but the placenta (the sac holding our unborn child) had broken loose and descended down the birth canal. Normally, after a forty-week,
full-term
(fully developed) pregnancy, the mother-to-be’s water breaks (the placenta breaks), and the baby descends through the birth canal, free of the sac. Our baby was still in the sac, not full-term, and already beginning to exit my wife’s vagina. That’s why Dr. Zitner was so unnerved. She saw the baby, in the placenta, beginning to birth in her office!

As if that weren’t already enough, in a now standard practice for doctors to protect themselves from any potential malpractice litigation, our obstetrician (he actually was a cool guy) told us the litany of things that might possibly be wrong with our about-to-be-prematurely-born baby . . .
including death.

One of the great things about a normal, full-term pregnancy is that by the time a woman gets to that last month of carrying her child, she is so tired of it, and all its indignities (shortness of breath, low-back pain, swollen feet, heartburn, headaches, sweats, frequent urination, difficulty sleeping . . . do I need to keep going?), she is more than ready to go through whatever it takes to give birth. Hell, give her a scalpel and she’ll take the baby out herself. Obviously I’m grossly exaggerating, but it’s to make a point. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, by the end, most women are ready to give birth.

Unfortunately, at under thirty-three weeks into her pregnancy—a full seven and a half weeks early—Suzette was not nearly at that point. Given that, along with the panicked look on Dr. Zitner’s face
and the grocery list of nightmarish things that could be wrong presented by our new doctor, she was—understandably—freaked-out. I wasn’t having the baby and I was freaking. We would not know the health or condition of our child until it was delivered, and that was positively terrifying. We were completely blindsided by this premature birth.