Free Shut Up and Give Me the Mic by Dee Snider Page B

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 vocalistand 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