Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (7 page)

Armed with this newfound knowledge, I headed off into the unknown, knowing where I was going, but not how I was going to get there.

4

W
hile music was a constant in my life, my place, in the complex system of cliques and social circles in high school, was anything but constant. I was always struggling to fit in with some crowd. I wanted to be accepted. Since I wanted to look like a badass, and I had a connection through my nicotine-stained friend Timmy Smith, at first I tried to hang with the troublemakers. We called them dirtbags or greasers. While I liked their vibe, I just couldn’t get into picking on people for the hell of it (a prerequisite), and my solid C average was off-putting to the other guys. Report-card day would come, and we’d all stand around comparing grades. “I got three F’s and two D’s,” one lowlife would brag. “Oh, yeah, I got four F’s and one attendance failure,” another piece of shit would boast. “What did you get, Snider?” “Straight C’s,” I would mumble, hoping they wouldn’t notice. “Whoa . . . get a load of the big brain on Snider!” I just didn’t fit.

Needless to say, my 2.0 grade point average and lack of interest in Mathletes and Chess Club wasn’t making any inroads for me with the intellectuals in school either. I did have an A average in gym, but I had to work every day after school (no weekly allowances in the Snider household), so I couldn’t go out for after-school sports and I didn’t think the world was shaped like a football. That meant being a jock was out. You would think, since I was in bands, that hanging with the “freaks” (rockers, stoners, artsy kids) would
have been a natural fit, but it wasn’t. I didn’t drink or get high. They just looked at me as if I were weird.

That I didn’t drink or party was a deal breaker with a lot of the cliques. Partyers just aren’t comfortable with people who are sober. They don’t trust them. So, when I wasn’t at school, working, or rehearsing with my bands, I pretty much kept to myself or hung with my few outcast buddies.

Why don’t I party? Ah, the million-dollar question. Well, I don’t drink because I had a bad experience when I was fourteen. I got so smashed I couldn’t get off the floor and swore that if the good Lord above ever let me walk again, I would never touch demon alcohol. I kept that promise until a few years ago, after reading so many good things about the health value of having a glass of red wine with dinner (Jesus drank wine). You should have seen the faces of my family and friends the first time they saw me pick up a glass. They thought it was a sign of the Apocalypse!

As for drugs, I’ve always known I have an obsessive personality, and if I started doing drugs, I wouldn’t be able to control myself. Besides, I’ve never really had a problem “letting myself go.” I was always a crazy kid, and at first the people I knew who partied would say “Snider, we want to see what you’re like high.” Then after spending a bit more time with me, they would say “On second thought,
we don’t.
”

Am I anti-drugs-and-alcohol? Not really. I’m just anti-asshole. If you can party and remain who you are or become a looser, more fun version of who you are, God bless you. But if when you party, you become some shape-shifting, obnoxious asshole who doesn’t know when to quit . . . you, I can live without.

The unfortunate thing is, society has created an environment where people don’t feel comfortable letting themselves go unless they’re high or have a few in them. How many times have you been somewhere and asked someone, or been asked by someone, to do something such as dance or sing and heard, or said, “Just let me have a couple of drinks.” Why? Because society dictates that it’s okay to get crazy, silly, or act foolish if you’re high. It gives you an excuse to embarrass yourself. “Oh, I was soooo wasted.” If I climb on top of a bar, pull out my dick, and piss on the floor and I’m drunk, they put
me in a cab and send me home. If I do the same thing and I’m sober, they say I’m crazy and I get my ass kicked, arrested, or both. That double standard creates a dangerous environment.

I’ve been clean and sober my whole career. People see the way I dress, act, and perform and assume I’m wasted. “Dude, you must be so high,” people say to me, admiring my crazed state. When I tell them I’m stone-cold sober, they look at me as if I am insane. What a fucked-up world! If you want people to stop getting drunk and high (especially kids), you need to change the way society perceives it. Stop making it an acceptable excuse for poor behavior. Stop portraying it as cool. And stop viewing outgoing behavior when you’re not high as weird. Then you’ll see some changes.

Add my nonpartying attitude to my already confused persona and you had a complete outcast. By my junior year in high school I had tried to fit in and fell out of, or was kicked out of, every group or clique. Yes, I had my other outcast friends, but I wanted to be popular, or at least a part of some character-defining group.
¹

I felt as if I were fading away, becoming just a part of the background to the beautiful people living exciting lives. Then I decided I wasn’t going to take it. One day I just realized that if I didn’t resist—if I didn’t refuse to go quietly into the night—I would become just another nameless, faceless person in the world. I made a conscious decision that day that I would no longer give a shit what other people thought. I didn’t need their approval or acceptance, and I’d rather be alone and happy than just another follower in some lame-ass clique. I decided that I was going to be me, and—I know this sounds corny—that’s the day my life began.

From that day on, I was me—or at least the me I was going to become. It didn’t happen that instantly. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more I forced myself to be whom I wanted to be and not give a shit what others thought, the more of a reality it became.

About that same time, I came up with a new, personal motivation
concept: PMA, or positive mental attitude. I kid you not. I believed that if I thought and acted positively, positive things would happen for me, and my positive thoughts would become reality. I still do. I now know that’s just another form of self-fulfilling prophecy, but when I was sixteen, it was more my becoming aware of the power of positive thinking. From that time on (and to this day), when people asked me how I was doing, I didn’t say “Okay,” or even “Good,” I said “Excellent!” Even when I wasn’t. This mind-set has taken me everywhere, and when things were bad, it kept me from wallowing in self-pity and negativity and focused on the promise of what lay ahead. And it kept people wondering what the hell I had going on that they didn’t know about. Besides, it sure beat the hell out of such mantras as “It’s just one of those days,” “It’s just my luck,” and “Murphy’s Law.” To hear kids reinforcing these negative thoughts in their young, fertile minds is simply maddening to me. Thinking like that sets you up for a lifetime of accepting failure. Screw that!

DEE LIFE LESSON

PMA: positive mental attitude. Life will be great because I say it will!

“PMA” became my daily mantra and a source of great amusement to my father. Whenever things weren’t working out for me, he was quick to throw PMA in my face or beat me to the positive punch and say with disdain, “I know, I know, PMA,” before I could. He never deterred me. From time to time, he still mentions PMA, but it’s more in amazement and recognition that my approach to living has paid off and I was right. Even if I hadn’t been right . . . what’s the advantage of living life with a negative attitude?

With newfound self-confidence, my mission was clear: move forward. I was living the “Doug Steigerwald success axiom.” Each band I formed or joined was a step in the direction
to the top
—and nobody,
no thing
, was going to stop me.

In my senior year of high school, I was in a band called Dusk, along with my perennial drummer, Rich Squillacioti (this is the band where I bid him farewell), and my best friend and fellow outcast,
guitarist Don Mannello.
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Joined by keyboardist Mark Williamson and bass player James “Dino” Dionisio, we had the distinction of being the most popular
new rock
band in the school. I make that distinction because there was a fifties tribute band (the fifties were all the rage in the seventies) called The Dukes, who were also popular. More about them later.

Because Dino Dionisio was the toughest guy in the school (he had once thrown a guy
over
the roof of a car), I was able to take my newly discovered I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think attitude to a new level. For the first time I explored what some would pejoratively call “fag” things such as wearing sparkles, women’s jewelry, pink clothes, and dancing around onstage. This was all a part of the popular “glitter rock” movement of the time, but for a kid in a suburban high school, to wear stuff and perform like that at a dance was pretty risqué. Thanks to Dino, I not only got away with it, but all the cool kids danced furiously to my band, cheering, requesting songs, and a lot of the hot girls looked at me for the first time as if I wasn’t a total loser. I had a steady girlfriend by then, but it was nice anyway. Oh, yeah . . . fuck you all.

I graduated from high school in 1973, on the honor roll (I finally applied myself), and headed off into my future without ever looking back. Other than for my time in the concert choir
³
and maybe drama club, I had absolutely no “glory days.” I didn’t go to the prom or even buy a yearbook.

With my buddy Don Mannello (this time on bass) we formed a new band called Harlequin, but I also enrolled at the New York Institute of Technology, majoring in communications. Due to pressure from my parents and a girlfriend, I went to school as a “safety net” in case I didn’t make it in rock ’n’ roll. I figured if I couldn’t make records, I would play them, so I went to school to learn to be a disc jockey. I know . . . foreshadowing.