Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (11 page)

To most Long Island kids, Manhattan is pretty intimidating. This was the midseventies and New York was anything but “the safest big city in America.” It was the exact opposite. This was the Manhattan
portrayed in
Serpico, The French Connection
, and
Death Wish
, when Harlem was
Harlem
and Forty-Second Street was filled with hookers, sex shops, and XXX theaters. Pre-Disney. Manhattan in those days was riddled with “bad areas” and you needed to know your way around to avoid potential problems. I had rarely been there except for parades with my parents, occasional school trips, and a couple of concerts. On one of my more recent visits, the guys in Harlequin and I had nearly gotten jacked by a gang one night in Central Park, after a Uriah Heep concert (back when they literally used to stop anyone from entering the park at night because it was too dangerous). I was not a NYC fan.

Jay Jay lived on the Upper West Side, where he was born, raised, still lives today, and, I’m sure, they will carry his body out of one day. Hey, nobody gives up a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. In 1976, this was the lower edge of Harlem and
not
a safe place.

The three of us arrived at Jay’s place and parked the car. To the best of my recollection, Kevin stayed with the car to watch our stuff (what he would have done if someone tried to rip us off, I don’t know. Hit him with a galosh?), and Kenny and I headed upstairs to get Jay.

Jay answered the door wearing glasses, overalls, a sweater, and white Capezio dance shoes. What the hell was going on!? This was not the tall, cool glitter rocker I had met six months before! He was doing some last-minute packing for the trip and invited me into his room to talk.

While I waited for him to get ready, I was introduced to a level of pornography I had never before experienced. This was the seventies, and my exposure was limited to
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazines; porn was not my thing. It was Jay Jay’s. He had imported porn magazines with photo exposés that were staggering to a twenty-year-old bumpkin from Baldwin, Long Island. I’ll never forget the one with a beautiful, blond (Swedish?) woman who, after a long day at work, comes home . . . to do five guys at once. The shot of her with one guy in each hand and the other three in each of her orifices mystified me for a long time. I had so many questions. Talk about your first impressions.

Our next stop was the Bronx to pick up Eddie Ojeda. Now, if New York City was intimidating, the Bronx was a whole other level.
I’d only seen it portrayed in movies like
Fort Apache, the Bronx
and heard about it in terrible stories on the news; never in a flattering light. I was more than a little nervous to go there.

Eddie Ojeda is Spanish/Puerto Rican. Growing up in lily-white Baldwin (we had three “Negros” in the whole school), I didn’t really know any Hispanic people (I did have one Mexican friend named Carlos), but again, I had seen their portrayals on television and in films. Not so flattering.

When we arrived at Eddie’s family’s apartment building on Jerome Avenue, the place was buzzing with activity. Just like in the movies. We pulled up in front and Jay Jay jumped out to go inside to get Eddie. I was amazed at how casually this bizarre rocker/farmer/dancer (Jay was now wearing a fur-trimmed coat) walked through all the commotion in front of the building and went inside. Fearless. As we sat and waited (forever), it seemed emergency sirens were constantly going off. So far this experience was doing nothing to dissipate my fears or preconceptions.

Suddenly I heard someone screaming. I turned and saw a woman burst out of the front door of Eddie’s building, with her hands covering her face and blood pouring out.
What the fuck!?
Police and emergency vehicles arrived, all hell was breaking loose . . . then Jay Jay and Eddie casually walked out of the building, chatting and laughing as I sat in shock.

Sporting a “disco haircut” and wearing a long, herringbone tweed coat, Eddie did not look rock ’n’ roll, but he seemed pretty cool. I quickly impressed him by asking if his last name was actually pronounced
O-hey-da
(three years of mediocre grades in Spanish, finally paying off), and he proceeded to reinforce every stereotype I had about Puerto Ricans.

Before we had driven a block, Eddie asked if we could pull over at a check-cashing place so he could get some money. He used the money to purchase a bottle of booze at a liquor store conveniently located next door, then drank it with a brown bag around it!
Are you kidding me!?
Could he have been any more ethnic? This was atypical behavior for Eddie, and to this day he cracks up when he thinks of how it must have looked to a twenty-year-old, culture-shocked kid from the suburbs. Thanks, Eddie.

Now that we had the whole band, we began our
supposed
two-hour
drive upstate to the Turtleneck Inn. The operative word being
supposed
.

As night fell, due to the ice travel became even more dangerous, and as we got closer and closer to our destination in the Catskill Mountains, the roads became downright treacherous. Our pace slowed to a crawl, but credit to our intrepid driver Kenny (who had now been on the road close to twelve hours) for ultimately getting us to our destination safely.

The travel time certainly didn’t go to waste. We talked the hours away and got to know each other. I was really hitting it off with Kevin John Grace, probably because he was closest to my age from Long Island and less worldly than the other three. We were both rubes from the suburbs.

While I barely remember any of the conversations we had during that drive, I do remember one clearly. The band was currently going under the name Twisted Sister ’76, to acknowledge the new lineup and capitalize on the coming US bicentennial celebration. (Anybody remember the hubbub about that?) The band was even draping the stage in American flags and had a new Twisted Sister ’76 logo of a topless girl with a flag on her chest. Jay Jay (always the pragmatist) informed me that with three-fifths of the band (assuming I was brought in) being new, after the bicentennial the band was changing its name.
What?!

New guy or not, I couldn’t sit by and watch this even being discussed as a possibility. I told him that he was way too close to be objective. As an outsider, I could attest to the value of the name within the club scene, and long-term, the name Twisted Sister was priceless. Not only for the band-defining imagery it conjured up, but for the cleverness of the play on words and the sibilance of the two words together.
Twisted Sister!
I’m sure I didn’t explain it quite as eloquently as that, but I got my point across, and I think it made sense to Jay Jay. Changing the name was never discussed again.

WHILE THE AFOREMENTIONED QUEEN
were my favorite
new
band, a number of other groups were helping to define me as a vocalist
and a performer. I loved a lot of the bands of the glitter rock scene. Bowie, Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, Sparks (anyone? Anyone?), Sweet, the New York Dolls, and others were regulars on my turntable, but here are the Big Three: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper. The original Alice Cooper band for their attitude and showmanship, Black Sabbath for their riffs and menace, and Led Zeppelin . . . because every member of the band is a god!

If any one band is responsible for my turning to the heavier side, it’s Led Zeppelin. If any one vocalist is responsible for sending me screeching into the stratosphere, it is the amazing Robert Plant. I had a poster of Robert hanging over my bed throughout high school, so I would literally bow down before him every time I got in bed. And if I, as a singer was known for one thing, it was for doing a hell of a Robert Plant impersonation.

The tristate bar/club scene was all about playing covers. There was virtually no place to play original material, and the club-going audience didn’t want to hear any. Sad, really. Bands were expected to be human jukeboxes, playing the songs people knew and wanted to hear. The hits. When it came to rock bands and rock music, no band was bigger than Led Zeppelin. Bands went to incredible lengths to play the most accurate renditions of Zeppelin songs, and the audiences demanded it. Playing Led Zeppelin poorly was sacrilege. The funny thing is, I remember seeing Led Zep on their 1977 tour and being stunned by how “inaccurate” they were live. Sorry, boys, but if a bar band played your music the way you did that night, they would have been tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. Seriously.

That said, if a bar band could play Led Zeppelin fairly well, they could work, and that I could sing the shit out of Zep songs had always been my meal ticket.

On February 2, 1976, the day of my audition, we ran through a bunch of songs that we all knew, but I know it was my versions of “Communication Breakdown” and “Good Times Bad Times” that sealed the deal. I could sing Led Zeppelin well, and that (to business-minded Jay Jay French) was money in the bank.

A short time after my audition, Jay Jay asked me to step outside with him into the cold winter night. He was complimentary about my audition, but then laid down the rules:

(1) He owned the name Twisted Sister. (This after planning on abandoning it not twenty-four hours earlier.)

(2) He owned the PA system.

(3) Charlie Barreca, the band soundman, was a member of the band.

Apparently, the grand plan was that Jay Jay would play guitar, manage the band, and be the songwriter, and Charlie would be the soundman, tour manager, and producer of the band’s records. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Jay and Charlie came up with this brain fart while smoking a joint on a beach in Bermuda. Must have been really good shit.

Jay Jay was planning on reforming Twisted for a third time, and he knew his old friend Charlie (literally. Charlie was ten years older than Jay) had done sound on a Grateful Dead documentary that had never seen the light of day. (Sounds qualified to do live sound and studio recording to me.) There you have it. Proof positive that marijuana makes you stupider.

After laying down the law with me—to which I agreed readily—Jay Jay says, “All right . . . we’ll see how it goes.” What? What does that even mean? Was I in the band or not? That was how it was left. With that uncertainty, I sort of joined the band that would take me to the top. This lack of security for my position with the band is another piece in the dysfunctional relationship that ultimately developed between them and me.

Having been
kind of
welcomed into the band, I went back inside to join my
sort of
bandmates. I sidled up to Kevin John Grace at the bar to share my
goodish
news and bond a bit more with my new drummer. As I begin chatting with Kevin about our new relationship and how we were going to rock, Jay Jay French comes up on the opposite side of me and whispers in my ear, midsentence, “Don’t get too friendly with him; he’s being kicked out.” Yikes! Trying not to give anything away to Kevin as we continued to speak, I wondered about “job security” in this band. Clearly, we were all replaceable.

VIEWING THIS OPPORTUNITY AS
a new beginning for me in a new life, I approached Jay Jay French for some sage advice. I already looked
up to this guy. “I want this to be a fresh start for me,” I told Jay. “I want a new first name. What do you think I should call myself?” He looked at me seriously and said, “Let me think about it.”

The next day as we passed each other on the stairs leading up to our rooms, Jay Jay says to me, “What about
Dee
, like Dee Dee Ramone, but just Dee?” I thought about it for literally a second and said, “I like it. Tell everyone not to call me Danny anymore.” And that was it. Dee Snider was born. God help everybody.

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