The Hook Rocks celebrates the 40th anniversary of Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry with the legendary Dee Snider He discusses what lead up to the bands big break, and how it impacted a generation. A few excerpts from the chat follow...
On Public Enemy being inspired by Twisted Sister: "Chuck D of Public Enemy said if there wasn't a Twisted Sister, there wouldn't be Public Enemy. Okay, because he used to come see our band and loved our rebellious attitude, that in your face attitude Twisted had and he went and formed his hip hop band inspired by Twisted Sister. So we were affecting people years before the world discovered us with our big breakthrough in 1984."
On opening for Iron Maiden and the fall of rock in the '80s: "Seven o'clock, the arenas were full. Nobody was showing up late cause they were there to see Maiden and didn't give a shit about Twisted Sister. This was where men were men and they wore makeup and high heels and, and, it was all just accepted as metal, which is what you said in the very beginning, all of a sudden it became this thing, this race to see who could unplug their Marshall stack and pick up an acoustic guitar and... You know, if you're not, if you're playing a ballad and it's on an acoustic guitar, it's not metal anymore in any fashion, in any fashion. So, you know, a video didn't kill the glam rock star glam rock killed itself."
On the impact of the US Festival had on rock music in the '80s: "We had already broke in the UK and we were already touring again, you know, we're in clubs, but I mean, they're packed wall to wall. And this is the, the best kept secret in the music business that these bands, this heavy metal music was beyond bubbling up, because you already had Judas priest out there and Van Halen out there. You know, it wasspilling over as you know, but it was ready to explode. And again, just like our record company president who joined the party and made it look like he was a part of it, it was happening with or without him, and these people just jumped on the bandwagon. So when the US festival happened, I remember... God bless Steve Wozniak. I believe Wozniak was the one who put his money into the US festival. Was it not? Yeah. He had the Metal Day, which was the biggest day. Out of all the three days or four days they had, Metal Day was the biggest day. So then you saw all these bands up close, personal, right? The message went out to young people like you and we were already there and waiting."
On the possibly reuniting Twisted Sister: "As a result of all the bands retiring and dying, the offers get bigger and bigger for the holdouts to come back. And we retired in 2016, I think it was. So we're on eight years now of not playing with no intention of coming back. But at certain some point you got to say, 'well, how can I say no to that?' Is it there yet? No. Is it getting close? Yeah. Is there talk amongst us? Well, in the event that the numbers do get there and they sure as hell seem to be going in that direction, how are we going to do this? So there's a little bit of that conversation, and that's both physically how we're going to do it. And, you know, on a number of other levels."
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