“We’re not gonna take it anymore” – so Dee Snider (Twisted Sister) once sang at the top of his lungs. The song that was famously displayed in the 1980’s kids smash hit movie Flight of the Navigator, is back in the headlines – and he still has long stringy blonde hair. Turns out Dee has some choice words for men who appear to be frontmen, but Dee says they are NOT. Let’s see why Dee has come to this conclusion.
According to Ultimate Guitar, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider was interviewed by Andrew Daly for Ultimate Guitar. Among other topics, Dee was asked to clarify some of his recent comments regarding Ronnie James Dio and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the differences between what it means to be a frontman and a singer.
Below, you can find the first part of this interview:
Did that level of showmanship come naturally to you?
It’s something I learned to do early in Twisted Sister’s career. I go back to those crazy bar shows again, where we’d do four sets a night for five or six nights a week. That’s a lot of shows; by the fifth or sixth night, I was just burnt to a crisp. But you know what? I still got out on fucking stage, and I did what I had to do. I remember one night, though, I stopped singing the first song because I had no voice, and I looked at Jay Jay [French], and he shrugged his shoulders and was like, ‘What now. What are we gonna do?’ I just started running all over the stage, all crazy and acting like a lunatic.
That’s when I learned that people in the concert environment are more interested in being completely entertained than seeing perfectly sung vocals. So, I could never sing like Robert Plant or Ronnie James Dio – few can – but what I could do was go nuts on stage and captivate an audience. I can break this down even further: Take Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson, who are excellent entertainers and performers, but they’re not really frontmen. If you look, they’re literally doing choreographed moves.
