Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (47 page)

I was not prepared for what came next.

36

H
aving been hugely popular in the tristate area, I thought I knew what being famous was. We had thousands of fans clamoring to get into our shows and meet us, we needed bodyguards, our phone numbers were unlisted, and I had to pull my hair back and wear a baseball hat to be less detected on the street. That’s a rock star, right? Sure . . . but an average rock star. What I was becoming—totally unbeknownst to me, mind you—was something very different.

It felt great to come back to
my house
, with my wife and son waiting for me. Suzette loved our first little place (it only had two bedrooms) and put her heart into making it look great. Jesse was now almost two years old and a real handful. Coming and going the way I did offered me a unique view of my son’s development. People do a third of their life’s growth in the first three years of their life, so Jesse’s mental and physical leaps—while to Suzette seeming incremental—to me were in huge spurts and a bit overwhelming. I was missing out on so much.

My first night home, I got in my car to run for some milk or something, and I put on the Long Island rock station WRCN. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was playing. Fair enough. It was a Long Island radio station and we were a Long Island band; they
should
be playing our song. On a whim, I flipped over to the other Long Island rock station, WBAB. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was playing. I’ve
never been a gambler, but I decided to go for the trifecta. I spun the wheel one more time, hitting the button for the big New York City rock station and . . .
“We’re Not Gonna Take It” was on there, too!
All three rock radio stations in my listening area were blasting my band’s song!
We had arrived!
As cool as that feeling was, things soon got creepy and weird.

Suzette, Jesse, and I were shopping at a grocery store, for the first time since I’d got back from Europe, when we heard frantic, hushed calls over the store’s PA system for people to “check out aisle three.”

“That’s the aisle we’re in, Suzette. There’s nothing here.”

A little bit later we heard, “Check out aisle five.”

“That’s the aisle we’re in, Dee. There’s nothing going on.”

Then a few minutes later: “Aisle seven!”

Hey, that’s the aisle we’re in,
I started to say, but then it hit me.

As we checked out at the register, kids were arriving in droves on their bicycles and smooshing their faces against the glass to look in and see me. This is what I always wanted, but the reality was a bit surreal and even disconcerting. It’s one thing to have your every move watched when you are performing, but it’s uncomfortable when you’re just going about your daily business. We got in our car quickly and drove off. It was cool in a weird sort of way.

The next night, Suzette and I decided to take Jesse out to one of those kid-friendly restaurants with rides and stuff. I wasn’t home much, so I wanted to have a nice family evening with my wife and son. We walked in the place and Jesse immediately ran (as any toddler will do) toward some colorful plaything. We weren’t five steps in when I realized the entire restaurant had stopped what they were doing, turned, and were frozen, staring at me in shock. Suddenly, the freeze broke, and the wild-eyed masses started to move as one toward me. Realizing this was going to turn into a personal appearance—not a night out with the family—I told Suzette to grab Jesse and we ran for our car.

That was the last time we did anything normal as a family for a long time.

I was becoming more of a star than I ever dreamed of. I wanted to be a rock star, but didn’t expect Beatlemania kind of stuff. There was definitely a bit of a mania with Twisted Sister . . .
and it was
all being directed at me.
When I went back out on the road with Twisted a short time later, I sent Suzette and Jesse down to Florida to stay with her family. Our quiet neighborhood street, with our quaint suburban house, had become a busy thoroughfare as the word got out where I lived. Cars raced down the block, people honked their horns, shouted and blasted my music. Some even parked outside at night and played Twisted Sister’s entire song catalog. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to hear when I wasn’t recording or on tour playing my music.

And those were the people who liked me. I remember getting a call from my sister-in-law, Roseanne, who was house-sitting. She told me she had awoken the night before because she thought she heard something at the back door. As Roseanne approached the door, she heard the sound of rain.
Funny,
she said to herself,
the weather didn’t say anything about rain.
When she peered out the window . . . some guy was pissing on my back door! Clearly, he wasn’t a fan.

We hadn’t been in our awesome little corner house on the street for nine months and we
had
to leave. It wasn’t safe for my wife and especially our baby boy; and it wasn’t fun. Everyone wanted to party with Twisted Sister’s wild front man, but being wild was what I did for a living. It was the last thing I wanted to do when I got home.

ONE OTHER SAD SIDE
effect of becoming “a star” is the way some friends and family treat you.

Caught up in a world of runaway success, you need those closest to you to be a stabilizing force. Suzette sure was. No matter how popular, successful, or famous I got, she remained unimpressed. I’d come home from the road pretty much “floating” into the house, I was so high on being a “rock god,” and she would bring me right down to earth. After the initial warm (often passionate) welcome home, the minute I would get egotistical about my accomplishments, Suzette would respond with something like “That’s great. Now go and empty the diaper pail, it smells like shit.” Instant ego deflation; message received. She couldn’t have been happier I was successful, but I was home now, her husband and her child’s father. There was
no place for egomaniacal bullshit. That is the stabilizing consistency that has kept my feet (fairly) on the ground. Suzette is the one constant in my life. Other people . . . not so much.

When you are a struggling musician, you remain on par—if not below par—with all the people you know. You have always been the one with “a dream,” but the odds of your making it were slim to none, so everyone assumes this will be your place in their world: struggling artist. When suddenly you break through, and all the money and celebrity you’ve worked so hard for comes, it creates a major imbalance between you and them, and they can’t help but be affected.

In fairness to those around me, while I wanted them to treat me as they always had, with success I’d proven to the world I was right about the best parts of me . . . and I wanted them to forget the worst. Especially those old stories that made me look so uncool (and human). I guess I was complicit in their change of attitude toward me. This said, does
anybody
want to be reminded of the
embarrassments
of their youth? I rest my case. The fact remains, most of those closest to me
were
affected by my success, and it changed our relationships. I was no longer being held to the same standard.

One of the saddest experiences I had involving this was with a close childhood friend, Eddie G. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, and through high school Eddie was one of my closest. We had lost touch after he graduated medical school in podiatry, got married, and moved south to Nashville to open up a “drive-through podiatry center.” This was a joke, of course. Eddie was funny. When Twisted Sister broke big and we were finally going to be playing down South, I reached out to Eddie to reconnect. I could not wait to see my dear friend and share a bit of normalcy.

The day of the show in Nashville, I rushed to answer a knock on my room door. I was expecting Eddie, and though I was half-dressed and looked like hell, who cared? He’d seen me at my worst growing up; I wasn’t making a personal appearance. As I opened the door, there was a camera flash. When my eyes cleared, there stood Eddie with his wife—holding a camera—with uncomfortable, frozen grins on their faces. What was up with that?

Undeterred, I warmly invited them into my room, anxious to catch up and laugh with an old friend. No such luck. Eddie and his
wife remained frozen and uncomfortable the entire visit, snapping candid photos of me at the most inopportune times. No matter what I did to try to make them feel at home, they could not relax and act normal. At this point in our rising career the band still stayed at motels, not hotels, so I took my guests to the laundry room with me. What could be more normal and less rock star than doing your laundry?
Flash!
They took a shot of me folding my damn underwear.

That’s how our day together began and ended. I never saw Eddie again. A sad casualty of fame and fortune.

TWISTED SISTER HIT THE
road
hard
, and this time there was no looking back. With our record and our career taking off, we toured relentlessly for the next ten months. This is the part of every rock ’n’ roll memoir where eighties rock stars tell you their stories of sex-crazed, drug-and-alcohol-fueled rock ’n’ roll debauchery. After all, it was the “decade of decadence.” I have none of those stories to tell.

For a lot of reasons my rock ’n’ roll life was so different from that of my peers. For one, I was married and had a kid and a traditional home life. That meant something to me, and I didn’t want to screw it up.
I didn’t.
More than thirty-five years later, I look at my peers’ lives and am extremely happy with the choices I made and grateful to have an amazing wife, family, and life. Then there was my attitude to performing. I said it earlier, but it bears repeating:

If you have anything left after a performance, you cheated your audience. Period.

When I left the stage, I collapsed in my dressing room, guzzling bottles of Gatorade to rehydrate. Then, after warming down my voice, I’d get changed and go straight to the back lounge of our tour bus—no socializing for me. My voice was so shot every night from screaming my lungs out that I couldn’t afford to strain my throat talking to people in smoke-filled rooms over loud music. I had to rest.

Making sure I had eight hours of sleep each night to recover (no way was I doing drugs to sustain the energy I needed to perform), I’d wake up in pain every morning, my body aching from my aggressive stage performance the night before. I’d down a couple of cups of hot
coffee to loosen my strained and closed-up throat, then climb into a steaming-hot bath. I had to soak my muscles and joints to loosen them up, and the steam from the bath further loosened my vocal cords. This ritual went on every night and day . . . and I was only in my twenties! Once I could move and speak again, I’d start my day. A day of interviews, travel, sound checks, and mentally and physically preparing myself for the next show. Some party, huh?

My mind-set was
terrible
. People always ask Suzette if she traveled on the road with me back in the day. “Hell no!” she tells them. “He was the most miserable bastard to be around. I hated going to visit him on tour.” I
was
miserable. It was almost as if I were punishing myself for something. I don’t know what.

Mentally I viewed myself as a “hit man” and conducted myself as such. I preferred to arrive in town in the middle of the night and slip into an out-of-the-way hotel, unnoticed. I didn’t want to be hounded by fans hanging and partying outside the hotel, sneaking into the lobby and hallways, banging on my door and calling my room (and they would). I needed to be undisturbed so I could get ready for the “hit.”