Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (60 page)

“Leader of the Pack” was going to be our first single and video. I was positive this was the track that would break down any barriers left for Twisted Sister and bring us to the level of Springsteen, Prince,
and Madonna. No, I’m not kidding! I believed that I/we were the band that could bring metal to the mainstream.

It should be noted that El Presidente of Atlantic Records was one of the few people who (openly) questioned my choice of this song. In a long phone conversation in which I refused to listen to any opinion but my own, he said to me, “This track will either make Twisted Sister the biggest band in the world, or it will kill your career.”

Click.

I assured my confused record company president there was nothing to worry about. Twisted Sister had been playing “Leader of the Pack” since our club days; it was on our earliest release,
Ruff Cutts.
Our core audience was guaranteed to love it. The original, Shangri-Las version was a bona fide, number one, worldwide megahit in 1964 and had stood the test of time. Virtually everyone was familiar with the Shangri-Las original. This was the track to lead with, I insisted. Just wait until he saw the video.

Continuing with the idea of including movie icons as video guest stars, Marty and I came upon comedian Bob Goldthwait. Bob had just become a breakout star with his role as Zed in
Police Academy 2
and was blowing up as a stand-up comic. An offer was made through his agents and he took the role. “Bobcat” and I quickly became close friends.

The opening scene for
Leader of the Pack
was shot in a storefront, Halloween night, on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood—smack-dab in the middle of the annual Halloween Parade. Like the same parade in the West Village of New York, it is dominated by the local gay community, who let it all—sometimes literally—hang out. It’s a great time.

I remember sitting inside a commercial van on the street outside the video location hiding from the throng of celebrators, with the doors open so I could still see what was going on, when a drag queen walking by spotted me, spun around, and started singing, “You’re gonna burn in hell!” Awesome! Wait . . .
what?

The connecting footage for all four videos was shot in Los Angeles at a torn-down steel mill where the “future world” scenes from the
Terminator
movie had been shot. It called for the reuniting of the featured actors in all three of our “acted-out” videos and the one to
come. Dax Callner (the boy who transformed into me in
We’re Not Gonna Take It
), Bob Goldthwait (the shopkeeper in
Leader of the Pack
and soon-to-be teacher in
Be Chrool to Your Scuel
), and the fat kid (I wish I could remember his name!) from
I Wanna Rock
were all reunited.

Leader of the Pack
includes a subtle—yet major—change from our past videos. One I didn’t make consciously, but speaks volumes: Twisted Sister never performs as a band in the video. We never even got close to musical instruments. In all our previous videos, they ultimately came back to our doing what we did best: rocking out. Not in this one. I’m not even going to speculate what that meant, but I’m sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with the “psychological ramifications of this subconscious decision.” It was definitely a creative mistake on my part. Twisted Sister should always have remained heavy metal rockers first and foremost. Period.

The second of our
Come Out and Play
videos, for “Be Chrool to Your Scuel,” was expensive and incredibly involved. My idea was for a young teacher (Bobcat Goldthwait) to be struggling to connect with his class. Completely disrespected by the students (as so many young high school teachers are), the young teacher finds solace by listening to his favorite band, Twisted Sister, on his Walkman in the teachers’ lounge. Yes, it did cross my mind that I had the teacher being mean to the kids in the “I Wanna Rock” video, and now I had the students being mean (sort of) to the teacher. To me, Twisted’s music had mass appeal, and this was a way of communicating that. Doing that may have been yet another in a series I like to call Dee Snider’s Greatest Mistakes.

Back to the video concept. While listening to our music, the teacher falls asleep and dreams that he’s become Dee Snider, his coworkers become the other members of Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper, and the school has turned into a “zombie high.” Great idea, right? Executing it was a whole other thing. Not only did we need a school that we could trash, paint up, and “cobweb” for our set, but we needed a school full of students to become zombies and fill our classroom, hallways, gymnasium, and cafeteria scenes.

Once again, I had to have the best. As a fan of the
Dawn of the Dead
and the horror genre in general, I knew there was only one man for the shoot’s special effects makeup: Tom Savini. The man
was (and still is) a horror-movie makeup legend, and he wrote the book on zombies. No one else would do. Tom agreed to do the video and to act as well (you’ve seen him in such movies as
From Dusk till Dawn
and
Grindhouse: Planet Terror
). He was cast as the teacher who turned into Alice Cooper, who was already locked in for the video shoot. Bonus.

Filling the school with students turned zombies wouldn’t be a problem. We had so many fans turn out when we announced an open call for
I Wanna Rock
, we had to bring in the police to control the situation. Twisted Sister was a bigger band than ever; the turn-out for this open call was going to be out of control. Because of my high profile and the expected large crowd, Marty Callner thought it best I sit this casting call out. Marty and his team, along with the security force hired to control the crowd, could handle it. I remember seeing Callner and his crew off that night; Marty was carrying a bullhorn so he could address the anticipated massive crowd.

When they returned a couple of hours later, the whole production crew seemed pretty dejected.

“How’d it go? What happened?” I asked.

“Nobody was there,” Marty answered.

Click.

“What do you mean, nobody was there?” I asked, completely confused.

“Nobody showed up for the open casting call. Don’t worry, we can hire a whole bunch of extras.”

Nobody showed up?
What was the deal with that? I had heard the radio announcements and saw the large ad in the local music paper. There was no way people didn’t know about it. Why didn’t they come? I had so many other production and recording issues to deal with that I stopped thinking about it immediately. It had to be a fluke.

With Bob Goldthwait, Alice Cooper, Tom Savini, and Lainie Kazan as the lunch lady, the
Be Chrool to Your Scuel
shoot was incredible. The transformation of the school and Tom Savini’s zombifying of our extras
¹
was world-class. It took so long to make them
all up, and filming the first day went so late, we asked our zombies if they would wear their makeup home, sleep in it, and come back “camera ready” the next day. Every one of them agreed and had a tale to tell the next morning.

Be Chrool to Your Scuel
turned out to be one of our best videos. Too bad nobody got to see it.

THE COME OUT AND PLAY
initiative was a huge undertaking and required a large injection of cash, far greater than the band could afford or the record company was willing to lay out. I would accept only the best for every aspect of the project. The money would roll in after the release of the
Come Out and Play
album and the tour commenced. As far as I was concerned, money was no object.

Emulating the specialty album covers of my heroes Alice Cooper, the
COAP
cover was a custom-ordered, one-of-a-kind, embossed pop-up cover. Besides all the obvious expenses of the design and the mechanics of the cover, the
COAP
record featured a TS manhole cover with me popping out of it when the manhole cover was lifted. No faux, miniature manhole covers for Twisted Sister. For the cover photo shoot I insisted on an actual cast-iron manhole cover be made with a twelve-by-twelve-foot piece of asphalt “street” poured for the manhole cover to sit in. Now that’s heavy metal (and asphalt).

To give the graffiti art used on the front and back covers an authenic look, we hired a team of top New York graffiti artists. They worked on the album cover, designed our individual logos for the graffiti wall, did the graffiti art on our stage set, and even graffitied my stage outfits for the tour.

The back cover of the album was a project and a half. I wouldn’t accept the band members’ graffiti logos being drawn in on the photo after we were shot in front of the wall. I insisted it had to be authentic, and we rented an empty lot with a wall that our artists “tagged.” The painting of the huge wall and the photo shoot took two days, but we didn’t account for a major problem that arose.

Graffiti artists are territorial, and to have a group of artists from another part of New York City come in and start tagging up walls nearly caused a full-blown turf war. Security had to be hired round
the clock to keep the art from being messed with and to protect everyone from potential attacks. The minute the photo shoot was done, the wall was painted over and everything calmed back down.

The worldwide
COAP
tour needed to be grandiose. My idea for the stage set was an inner-city street, complete with sidewalk. The design included a three-story brownstone apartment building with accessible upper windows for performances during the show, there was a candy-store front for Eddie to come out of, a junkyard for Mark the Animal to enter the stage from, and a burned-out car for Jay Jay to climb out of, all under an elevated train trestle. The “street” (performing area) even had a re-creation of the album-cover manhole (this one of wood so I could lift it without humiliating myself) for me to crawl out of and onto the stage. A.J.’s drums were painted and designed to look like garbage and paint cans that “emerged” through the front doors of the brownstone at the start of each show. It was fantastic!

I wanted the stage to look and be lit like a Broadway set and not a rock show. All lights, amplifiers, speaker cabinets, and other equipment were hidden so as to not ruin the theatrical look of the production. Bringing to life this vision was a massive undertaking.

Once again, Suzette designed and made all the stage costumes, and with no budgetary limits, she outdid herself. For the first time the band (other than me) got out of spandex and into tattered denim, which started a new trend in the hair metal world. Throughout the history of Twisted Sister, Suzette’s designs were innovative and influenced a lot of the styles of the eighties, but she gets virtually no credit for it.

As you might imagine, it was incredibly expensive to design and then build and transport a show like this from city to city. It required a huge crew, an unprecedented amout of semitrucks and buses, and, of course, everything had to be the best of its kind. Read: a lot of money. I didn’t care. We were Twisted fucking Sister, one of the biggest bands in the world (I thought), and this was going to be my ultimate creative statement and hopefully . . .
the end of my rock ’n’ roll career.

Those of you in the know are probably thinking,
He wanted the album and the tour to be a flop?
Of course not. As I wrote that statement, I actually chuckled, because it’s the first time I realized I had
been granted my wish, but not the way I wanted it. Thanks, Satan.
I’m kidding!

I had always planned on retiring from rock ’n’ roll by the age of thirty-five and living happily ever after. I’d often stated this in interviews and even proclaimed it in response to a question at the Senate hearings. Senator Rockefeller questioned my ability to monitor my then three-year-old son’s music when he was twelve if I was always on the road. I replied, “To be perfectly honest, nine years from now I am going to be well retired.”
Well retired.
At best I envisioned one more album and tour after this one, so I knew I needed to make this one count.

So where did we get the money to finance this? Not being a numbers guy I can’t give you all of the specifics, but I do know the record company laid out their “normal” investment (advancing money for the recording budget and some video costs that we would have to repay) and the band put in what we could. We also got some money from the distributors of the coming home video, but the big influx of cash came in the form of the largest advance ever given to a band by a merchandising company.

Winterland Productions of San Francisco was the biggest rock ’n’ roll merchandising company at that time. They—like pretty much everybody else—knew Twisted Sister’s follow-up record and tour to the
Stay Hungry
album was going to be huge. They wanted to handle our merchandising and agreed to give us a million-dollar advance on future sales to secure it. This was just what we needed to make the whole initiative happen, and
everyone
agreed to put the entire advance into the production. The band did not take one dollar for ourselves. We should have been committed—I mean, we were
that
committed.