One of the most recognisable faces in hard rock and heavy metal in the 1980s, when he fronted the multi-million-selling Twisted Sister, Dee Snider admits he wasn’t always the nicest person to be around at the height of his fame.
““Ask my wife and my bandmates if I was always such a nice person!” he suggests in the new issue of Metal Hammer. “I was a real asshole in the 80s, but I feel much better now! There’s nothing like a good humbling to have it all taken away from you and nearly losing everything, which I did in the late ’80s and early ’90s. All the money was gone, the band was gone, my wife nearly left me. It woke me the fuck up.”
Elsewhere in the feature, which sees Snider facing questions from Metal Hammer readers, the topic of a decades-old feud between Twisted Sister and Manowar is addressed. The enmity between the two bands started when Manowar guitarist Ross ‘The Boss’ Friedman told the UK music press that he considered Snider’s former band “a joke” and said “Back in the States, Twisted Sister play wet T-shirt competitions and dollar beer nights”. Snider’s response to the guitarist was blunt: “My fist, your face.”
- “I called Gene Simmons. He said: ‘How the hell did you get this number?!’ That was when I got the idea that we weren’t going to be best buddies”: Dee Snider’s wild tales of Robert Plant, Frank Zappa, Freddy Krueger and Kiss
- “Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to talk to me. They thought I would be right for the part of The Terminator”: WASP frontman Blackie Lawless’ wild tales of Lemmy, Gene Simmons and The Village People
“There was a time when I wanted to punch Manowar,” he admits. “We told them to meet us in [London’s] Covent Garden, and we were gonna have fisticuffs. They didn’t show up because they knew I wasn’t kidding. I was in my 20s, I was crazy.”
“Would I do a Manowar cover? Probably not, even though we’ve patched things up and we’re not enemies, let’s not go crazy!”
For more of Dee Snider’s words of wisdom, pick up the new issue of Metal Hammer.
Also inside the latest issue are brand new features with Iron Maiden, Alien Weaponry, Employed To Serve, Carcass, Health, Dordeduh, Between The Buried And Me and much, much more. Order your copy now.
