TWISTED SISTER frontman Dee Snider admits he wasn’t always the nicest person to be around in the 80’s and early 90’s.
“Ask my wife and my bandmates if I was always such a nice person!” he tells 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.”
Also, the topic of that decades-old feud between TWISTED SISTER and MANOWAR came up. The whole thing apparently started when MANOWAR guitarist Ross ‘The Boss’ Friedman told the UK music press that he considered TWISTED SISTER to be “a joke” and also said “Back in the States, Twisted Sister play wet T-shirt competitions and dollar beer nights”. Snider’s response to Ross was simply: “My fist, your face.”
“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 the full interview check out the latest issue of Metal Hammer.