TWISTED SISTER TRIVIA
Trivia
The name came from Michael O'Neill, the band's first singer. As Jay Jay French tells it, O'Neill rang him one night from a bar to say he had found the perfect name for them — Twisted Sister. French loved it. The next day O'Neill had no memory of the call at all.
'Under the Blade' is about the fear of the operating table. Dee Snider had the idea when guitarist Eddie Ojeda was facing surgery, and by his own account the song is about lying helpless under the lights with the blade coming down. When the song was accused in 1985 of being about sadomasochism, bondage and rape, this was the point he threw back.
The backbone of 'We're Not Gonna Take It' is the tune of the Christmas carol 'O Come All Ye Faithful'. On 2006's A Twisted Christmas the band closed the circle: they sang the carol's traditional words to the music of 'We're Not Gonna Take It'.
The cover of Stay Hungry was supposed to show the whole band. Dee Snider stayed behind at the shoot, photographer Mark Weiss caught him in the feral pose, and that is the image that became the sleeve.
The Twisted Sister song the PMRC put on its 'Filthy 15' was 'We're Not Gonna Take It', cited for violence. The other song they went after, 'Under the Blade', was not on that list: the charge against it came from an article Tipper Gore wrote in a Long Island newspaper, which is where Dee Snider told the Senate hearing he first read it.
What brought the broken-up Twisted Sister back together was 11 September 2001. The call to Dee Snider that morning came from the bass player, Mark Mendoza; the two had barely spoken since the split in 1988. Mendoza had long since left music and was a civilian working in communications for the state police. That day the state police took him from his house to the command post set up at the Jacob Javits Center, where he spent three months coordinating communications between city, state and federal agencies — one of very few people in New York State able to do it.
Twisted Sister, who had stopped in 2016, entered the Metal Hall of Fame in 2023. At the sixth ceremony, held in California on 26 January, Steve Vai and Mike Portnoy spoke for them and the band came together for the first time in about six years to play three songs: 'You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll', 'Under The Blade' and 'We're Not Gonna Take It'. Eddie Ojeda could not be there — he had covid — and Keith Robert War stood in for him, while Portnoy took the late A.J. Pero's place. It was their first live appearance since November 2016, and no return to activity was planned. Lou Gramm, Raven and Chris Impellitteri were inducted at the same ceremony.
The first Twisted Sister concert with Sebastian Bach out front took place on 28 August 2026 at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey. The show had first been billed under Bent Brother, the band's alter ego, before it was promoted as the debut of the new touring line-up: Bach on vocals, Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda on guitar, Russell Pzütto on bass and Joey Cassata on drums. The arrangement followed Dee Snider stepping down from the band over health challenges, and eleven more shows were set for the autumn.
On 3 March 2026 Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda announced on the band's own site that Sebastian Bach would front Twisted Sister for a handful of select dates that autumn — with the note that none of it would affect Bach's own touring schedule as a solo artist.
Dee Snider's singing started in church. He sang in the choir at All Saints Episcopal Church in Baldwin, New York and at the Church of the Transfiguration in Freeport, New York — that is where his music began.
'Under the Blade' first appeared as a single on the band's own label, Twisted Sister Records, backed with 'I'll Never Grow Up, Now!' — the first single they ever put out. Only in 1982 did the song become the title track of their debut album.
'We're Not Gonna Take It' did not arrive in one night. Dee Snider began it in 1980, two years before the debut Under the Blade; he had the hook from the start but could not find a verse melody. What broke the deadlock was Def Leppard. Studying Mutt Lange's work on 1983's Pyromania, Snider noticed that band using variations on the chorus as a verse, and that, he says, gave him what he needed to finish it — in time for the third album, Stay Hungry.
There are no names in 'We're Not Gonna Take It', and that was deliberate. By Dee Snider's account, naming the parent, the teacher or the boss would have closed the song down. Because he left the target blank, it has been taken up at sporting events, political rallies and protests all over the world by anyone who is not taking something from somebody else.
The guitar solo on 'We're Not Gonna Take It' is Eddie Ojeda's. Twisted Sister split the guitar work between Jay Jay French and Ojeda.
Marty Callner, who directed the 'We're Not Gonna Take It' clip, had made a string of HBO specials but had never directed a music video before. The dialogue laid in before the song starts — the father figure roaring at the boy — is Callner's writing. The boy's answer, 'I wanna rock!', was Dee Snider's line.
The man shouting at the boy is Mark Metcalf, who played Neidermeyer in Animal House. Metcalf was living in Pittsburgh at the time and took the job because it came with a flight to Los Angeles, where his girlfriend was. Dee Snider, a serious Animal House fan, collected him from the airport, and the two hit it off on the spot.
Mark Metcalf comes back as the same Neidermeyer in the follow-up clip for 'I Wanna Rock', which all but restages the famous Animal House scene where he bawls out Flounder — and Stephen Furst, the actor who played Flounder, turns up as his own character too. He is the one who hoses Neidermeyer down with seltzer at the end.
'I Wanna Rock' was built to a plan. Dee Snider has said he could see Iron Maiden doing enormous business with their galloping rhythms, and reckoned that crossing that drive with the anthemic quality he liked — the kind AC/DC deal in, with Slade among his biggest influences there — would give him a huge hit. It did.
One of the points Dee Snider made at the Senate hearing of 19 September 1985 came from the writer's side of the desk. Twisted Sister printed every lyric on the inner sleeve of every album, so being misquoted, as he put it, was a curious thing to have happen.
At the same hearing Dee Snider read out a fact that sat badly with the case against him: the United Way of America had asked for, and been granted, permission to use parts of the 'We're Not Gonna Take It' video in a programme about the changing American family. The reason they gave was the clip's light-hearted way of talking about communicating with teenagers.
There is a running device in the making of 2006's A Twisted Christmas: each of the standard carols on it is introduced by a piece of a rock classic, with Black Sabbath's 'War Pigs' and Judas Priest songs among those doing the job.
The reunion happened at 'New York Steel'. Held less than three months after 11 September 2001, the all-metal concert was put together by Eddie Trunk of the radio station Q104.3 and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza, and alongside Twisted Sister it drew Anthrax, Sebastian Bach, Ace Frehley and Overkill. It raised close to a hundred thousand dollars for the fund supporting the widows and children of New York's police officers and firefighters.
A.J. Pero died on 20 March 2015, aged 55. He was on tour with his other band, Adrenaline Mob, and when morning came he did not wake on the tour bus; the others called an ambulance and he was pronounced dead at a hospital in New York. A heart attack was thought to be the cause. Pero had joined Twisted Sister in 1982 and came and went after that, but from the 2003 reunion onwards the drum stool was his to the end.
There was a second connection between Pero and Mike Portnoy, the drummer who took his place. When Pero joined Adrenaline Mob in December 2013, the seat he inherited was Portnoy's: Portnoy was a founder of that band, Pero filled the gap he left, and two years later Portnoy filled the gap left by Pero.
Less than a month after Pero's death, in April 2015, the band announced memorial shows — one on each coast. The 30 May date at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas was filmed and recorded for television, DVD and CD; the 13 June date at the Starland Ballroom in New Jersey was played for Pero's family. Mike Portnoy, formerly of Dream Theater, took the drum stool, and he played every Twisted Sister date scheduled that year.
The farewell was announced in the same month, April 2015. Twisted Sister said they would stop touring at the end of 2016 and gave the final run a title: 'Forty and F*ck It'. It was to be played by the core line-up of Dee Snider, Jay Jay French, Eddie Ojeda and Mark Mendoza, closing out forty years of the band.
The four surviving members had come together once before that. In November 2019 they met for two days and nights to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of Stay Hungry.
The set that first night ran to seventeen songs and leaned hard on the Under the Blade and You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll years. It opened with 'What You Don't Know (Sure Can Hurt You)' and went on through 'Shoot 'Em Down', 'Tear It Loose', 'Destroyer', 'The Kids Are Back', 'Ride To Live, Live To Ride', 'Under The Blade' and 'The Price'. Two Skid Row songs from Sebastian Bach's own past were played — 'I Remember You' and 'Youth Gone Wild' — and the night closed with 'We're Not Gonna Take It'.
By Sebastian Bach's account, Dee Snider has a name for him. It comes from SMF, the label the band's most devoted followers wear, and Bach is 'SMF Number Two' — number one being Snider himself. After the change of frontman was settled the two spoke on the phone for some forty minutes, and Bach says Snider gave him his full blessing.
Teachers are one of the things 'We're Not Gonna Take It' has always been aimed at. In 2018 the teachers of Oklahoma took it for themselves anyway, striking over pay and school funding: when they marched on the state capitol, the music teachers among them organised a performance, and the song became the anthem of the strike. Many of them had been students when it came out.
'I Wanna Rock' turns up near the end of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, except that the line 'I Wanna Rock!' is swapped for 'I'm a Goofy Goober!' — the name of the club SpongeBob and Patrick belong to. The chants of 'ROCK!' behind it were left alone. The result is called 'Goofy Goober Rock'.
VH1 placed 'I Wanna Rock' at number twenty on its list of the forty greatest metal songs of all time. It was never much of a chart single, but it went on being played on the radio for years afterwards.