Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French has claimed that Iron Maiden once refused to play after them at a festival because they were intimidated.
Speaking on an episode of his podcast The French Connection (via Ultimate Guitar), French revealed that Iron Maiden were put off by the reaction from Twisted Sister fans.
“Do you remember when Iron Maiden chose to not follow us with that excuse they had to catch a show the next night? And they asked, ‘Would you please just close the show?'” he began, speaking to Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider.
He continued: “This was in Spain. All of a sudden, they’re headlining, we’re the special guests, and we get, ‘Oh, Maiden’s got 14 trucks and they got this thing, would you just kind of… They need to get off early’.”
“And the reason why they did this – and you know this is true – the fact is, how many times at a festival did we finish playing and whoever the poor suckers were who followed us had to deal with fans singing ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ in between their songs.”
“It happened all the time. I mean, if you had to be on stage to hear in between your songs, songs being sung by the audience by another band, that’s a tough thing to deal with.”
French went on to claim that other bands also chose to let Twisted Sister close festival sets, including ZZ Top.
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“Most people just went, ‘You know, you close.’ I remember one night, ZZ Top was headlining over us, and here’s what I imagine the conversation was…”
“They said to [ZZ Top frontman] Billy Gibbons, ‘Well, you guys are going out at 10, but if you want, Twisted can go on…’ Billy’s probably going, ‘I’ll take the 8 o’clock.’ And he took the 8 o’clock slot.”
Check out ‘We’re Not Gonna Take it’ by Twisted Sister:
