Jay Jay French has said that Twisted Sister were worthless when Dee Snider joined the band in 1976.
During an appearance on Talk Toomey, the guitarist spoke about the band’s early days and revealed that after a show that occurred around the time that Snider joined, their agent’s 10% commission was only equal to $3.40.
“When Dee joined the band [in 1976, four years after the group was founded], our agent said to us that the name Twisted was worthless. We were big at one point, then we crashed early on before Dee came in,” he shared.
“We went from making $150 a night to $600 a night, and then I remember one night we made $34, my agent came to get $3.40 as commission, which really sucked, really pissed me off.
“And he came and got $3.40, and when Dee joined, my agent said, ‘You should consider changing the name because the name is dirt.'”
Despite their agent’s recommendations, the band members decided to stick with the name ‘Twisted Sister’. However, they dabbled with the idea of rehauling their image.
“When I heard Dee sing – because he could sing Zeppelin perfectly – I knew that the band could resuscitate itself as a cover band by doing Zeppelin and Alice Cooper.
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“Dee was really a great singer, so that was that. We never thought about changing the name of the band, but we did think about taking all the makeup off for a short period of time.
“We did a whole photo-shoot in just t-shirts and jeans thinking the record label was put off by the image, and that was in 1980.
“There’s a photoshoot from 1980, we said, ‘We’ll send them out with ‘Bad Boys of Rock N’ Roll’ or something,’ because they’re obviously not reacting well to the shock transvestite-y image, so we did that,” French said.
But, the photoshoot didn’t set the scene for a new-look Twisted Sister, and the rock band decided to stay true to their roots.
“We never performed without it [makeup], except once for a Halloween show in 1978, that would be funny. Halloween, everybody else is going to be in costume, so that was one time we went on in t-shirts and jeans in a bar.
“But those were the two instances where we were going to take drastic action as far as that was concerned. Of course, then the big drastic action was stopping in ’88, kinda calling it a day.”
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