Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (35 page)

“I Am (I’m Me)” was released on my twenty-eighth birthday, and Phil’s plan worked like a charm. All of London and the surrounding areas were plastered with giant pink-and-black posters of my screaming head, announcing the single’s release, and “I Am (I’m Me)” was soon flying out of the shops. The most popular of the extra tracks was the uncensored recording of “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (but I Like It).” More than one heavy metal fan was turned on to the band when they heard that track for the first time. (Right, Sebastian Bach?)

Still finishing our album at Sol Studio, we got the word that legendary heavy metal DJ Tommy Vance would be debuting our single on his national BBC weekly radio show. We were stoked! Tommy
Vance was
the
national voice of metal at that time, and we knew the core metal audience would all be listening.

The night of his show, we gathered around the radio, waiting for Tommy to introduce our song to Great Britain for the first time. When it finally came time, Tommy gave the proper buildup for an anticipated release and started the record . . .
at too slow a speed!
Having received the twelve-inch version of the single, he had assumed that it was an LP to be played at 33
¹
/
₃
rpm. It was in fact intended to be played at the same speed as a seven-inch single, 45 rpm. Like most radio DJs, Tommy wasn’t actually
listening
to the music he played. Once a song starts, DJs (as I now know from personal experience) turn down the studio volume and busy themselves getting the next song ready, setting up commercials, talking to people in the studio, etc.

The band and I sat, listening in agony, as our song played on at almost half speed. It was barely distinguishable as a song! This lasted for a seeming eternity until suddenly Tommy Vance stopped the record, opened his mic, and said, “Oops. That can’t be right. Sorry about that, lads. [He knew we’d be listening.] Let’s try this again.” With that, Tommy restarted our song and played it at the right speed, in its entirety.

Years later, I ran into somebody who was listening that night. He said when “I Am (I’m Me)” first came on, he thought,
This is the heaviest fucking song I have ever heard!
He was disappointed when Tommy Vance corrected his mistake.

As we hoped, “I Am (I’m Me)” jumped right into the Top 20, putting us squarely in the sights of the mega weekly music show
Top of the Pops.
At that point, for close to twenty years, it had been
the
televised show on which to get your band noticed, but—primarily because their records didn’t make it into the top of the charts—it rarely featured heavy rock bands. It was an amazing opportunity to get our name and music out there, and to jam heavy metal down the throats of the mainstream.

Doing the show was unique. Due to union rules, you (any appearing act) were expected to go into a studio, of your choosing, and rerecord your entire track in one afternoon, under the watchful eye of some union representative. This new recording of your song
would be the one you lip-synched to when you were on the show. Understand, it takes days to get just the sounds for your record, let alone to record every part and mix the damn thing. Twisted Sister is just a straight-ahead metal-rock band. Can you imagine how long it takes to record a Pink Floyd single? This said, the whole “rerecording” thing was a ruse. Toward the end of your session, the union watchdog would
conveniently
step out of the room, allowing the recording artist to slip in the original master. The union got its money, and the artist got to lip-synch to the original track. Freakin’ ridiculous!

Our first of three visits to
Top of the Pops
stunned Great Britain, and not because of my horrendous first attempt at lip-synching.
¹
Despite the fact that we were on with Boy George and Culture Club, the
TOTP
viewers were mortified by our appearance and demeanor. Us?! Of course the metal fans loved having one of their own on the show for a change. Keep in mind, the UK had all of four television stations back then, so there wasn’t a lot to choose from. Whether you liked it or not, on Tuesday nights
Top of the Pops
was the show the entire country tuned in for.

Meeting Boy George for the first time was interesting. He was the poster boy for everything headbangers loathed about insipid pop music. I had used him and his band as a target of my vitriol in my UK on stage rants, vowing to punch him in the face if I ever ran into him. Imagine my surprise when I found out Twisted Sister and Culture Club would be on
Top of the Pops
the same week.

As I walked down the hallways of the
TOTP
studios, who should suddenly step out of a dressing room? The Boy himself, in all his glory. Before I could utter a word, Boy George says, “So where’s the slap?”

I was totally thrown.
He knew that I said I was going to hit him.
“What?”

“The slap.
The makeup.
Where’s your makeup?”

Turned out, Boy George
was a Twisted Sister fan
and had been following us since our first album. Go figure. And therein lay the problem.

DEE SNIDER RULE #1

You like me, I like you.

DEE SNIDER RULE #2

You don’t like me . . . we got a problem.

Clearly, Boy George fell well inside the protection of rule number one. So much for hitting him.

TWISTED SISTER WOULD PERFORM
two more times on
Top of the Pops
. Once more for “I Am (I’m Me)” and again for our second single, “The Kids Are Back.” We would perform on the show with other up-and-coming international stars such as the Eurythmics, Dexys Midnight Runners, Kajagoogoo, and the Thompson Twins. Why I even bother to mention them will become clear later.

THINGS WERE GOING BETTER
than expected in the UK. We had two Top 40 hits, our album was high in the charts, and Twisted Sister was on the covers of all the rock magazines and even spilling over into pop and mainstream press. Even better, it was almost time to go home, and I would return victorious. I couldn’t wait to be reunited with my wife and baby boy.

Unfortunately, that was going to have to wait a bit longer. Twisted Sister was so hot, Phil Carson wanted us to stay in the UK another month, do a headline tour of Great Britain, and film a video for our next single, the title track from our album. MTV, then only a year and a half old, was going to be a force to be reckoned with, and Phil saw the writing on the wall. Before we headed back to the United States (where I’m sure he knew we would get little help from Atlantic Records US), he wanted us armed with this latest tool in breaking a band.

Having been away from home for close to three months, the last thing I wanted to do was spend another month overseas. I had missed Valentine’s Day, my birthday with my family, Suzette’s and my anniversary, and I’d had all of about two phone calls home my entire time away. I was homesick! But this was the opportunity and the support from a record label the band had been looking for; there was no way I could pass it up. I broke the news to a
way
too understanding and supportive Suzette, and Twisted Sister hit the road in the UK.

THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF
rock ’n’ roll, many bands have had “band jackets” with the band name and whatever other information they care to impart (person’s name, tour, etc.). These jackets—usually baseball-style, satin or something along those lines—conveyed the upbeat, clublike feel of a group and its surrounding organization. Twisted Sister was anything but an upbeat club. More of a hardened “band of brothers,” it was us against the world. We viewed ourselves as outlaw rockers, descending upon an unsuspecting community and leaving devastation in our wake. Because of that, we decided to have “colors” like a motorcycle club, instead of jackets.

The band colors were black and pink, so of course those had to be the predominant colors of our back patches. The top rocker read
TWISTED
and the bottom rocker said
SISTER
. The
TS
logo over the pink and black rings made up the center patch.

Twisted Sister always had a sense of humor and an appreciation for the absurdity of how we looked. Putting the “registered trademark” symbol on our logo and having a patch that said
RB
(rock band) instead of the traditional
MC
(motorcycle club) was our way of giving a little wink, while also making it clear we were not a motorcycle club. Most people got that.

Only a handful of people (maybe two dozen in total) have ever been given a set of patches by us, and those earned them through their loyalty and dedication to the band.

While out on the
You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll
UK tour, we did a show in Nottingham, home of the legendary Sherwood Forest. It
was strange to arrive in a town so much a part of history. You just assume these places don’t exist, but like Sleepy Hollow, New York, Nottingham is a very real place. Who would have thought we’d run into problems with a motorcycle gang there? Then again, that is where Robin Hood’s Merry Men hung out. After our show that night, as we were getting ready to leave, Joe Gerber came into the dressing room to share a concern. A Nottingham motorcycle club had seen our Twisted Sister colors and were demanding we take them off while on their
turf
. Some gangs can be very territorial and view another club’s wearing colors as confrontational.
²
We understood the club’s concerns, but there was one problem—we were a fucking rock band! No motorcycles, just guitars.