Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider on Destroying Disco, Why Lemmy Was an ‘Angel’
You won’t hear a single note of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” in the new documentary We Are Twisted Fucking Sister! — nor, for that matter, will you hear anything else from Stay Hungry, Twisted Sister‘s multi-platinum 1984 album.
That’s because the immensely compelling doc (directed by Andrew Horn, who previously directed The Nomi Song, an award-winning 2004 documentary about the late German performance artist Klaus Nomi) focuses entirely on the 10 years of toil, frustration and disappointment that preceded the outrageous New York heavy metal band’s commercial breakthrough. A legendary act in the clubs of suburban New York, Connecticut and New Jersey during the 1970s, Twisted Sister regularly played to thousands of fans a night, yet ultimately had to make their mark in the U.K. before anyone in the U.S. music industry would take them seriously.
“Andrew was taken by the Rocky-esque nature of the story,” explains Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider. “And I think that’s what makes the doc have greater appeal than to just Twisted Sister fans; it talks to a broader audience about struggle and commitment. Too many music documentaries are just like, the band gets together, they make it, they break up, and then they reconcile — that typical Behind the Music thing. And this film is anything but that!”
We Are Twisted Fucking Sister!, which includes hilarious and revealing interviews with Snider, Twisted Sister guitarists Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda, bassist Mark “The Animal” Mendoza and late drummer A.J. Pero (who passed away in March 2015) — as well as plenty of riotously entertaining footage from the band’s Seventies Tri-State club heyday and their embattled early-Eighties forays into the U.K. — will be released on February 19th via Music Box Films. Shortly before the film’s release, Snider spoke with Rolling Stone about the band’s tumultuous club days, how Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister may have been an angel in disguise, and Donald Trump’s recent use of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as a campaign song.
What was it like to watch your past laid out on film like that?
Well, it was weird [laughs]. I remember everything, and I know the whole story, but what really captured my attention was to watch myself … the only word I can use is ‘sour’. Like, I come in as this innocent, 20-year-old kid who has the typical rock & roll dream: “I’m gonna get in a band, we’re gonna write some songs, people are gonna like us, we’re gonna get a deal, we’re gonna be rich and famous, and life is gonna be wonderful!” And I watched myself harden and get angrier and angrier as the years went by, and we just got rejection after rejection after rejection. When I joined Twisted, I was like, “This is the band! This is the one! We’re going to go the distance!” And we did — it just took a decade [laughs]!