Dee Snider suggests Twisted Sister might reunite next year “to champion some important causes”
“I could see us fighting, helping fight the good fight”
Dee Snider. Credit: Gabe Ginsburg/Getty
Dee Snider has said that he “won’t be surprised” if Twisted Sister reunite before the 2024 presidential election “to champion some important causes”.
The band have reunited numerous times since they first split up after 16 years as a band in 1988. They were last active in 2016 for a farewell tour.
Snider speaks to The Metal Voice in a new interview about his new graphic novel He’s Not Gonna Take It, and is asked about the possibility of the We’re Not Gonna Take It hitmakers reuniting again in the future, and it turns out that it’s not out of the question when it comes to the next election year.
“I won’t be surprised if we’re [Twisted Sister] reuniting this election year to champion some important causes. I can see we’re all on the same page [the whole band] pretty much all of us on the same page,” he says. “And I could see us fighting, helping fight the good fight. I mean because this is a big picture election and with things like women’s right to choose, that’s a big picture thing you know, that’s going to hurt the other side.
“I say the other side because I’m not on that side. You can’t roll back the clock, we’re not going back in time, we’re going forward. So there are important important issues so it’ll be more about less about the politicians and more about the parties they represent and what they represent.”
Meanwhile, Snider’s graphic novel explores his battle for freedom of expression at the PMRC hearings in 1985. The PRMC (Parents’ Music Resource Center) were responsible for introducing Parental Advisory stickers onto albums with the aim of increasing parental control over the access of children to music deemed to have violent, drug-related, or sexual themes.
Snider spoke out against the introduction of the labels at a hearing alongside Frank Zappa and John Denver. Reflecting on the hearing, he says: “I felt very abandoned by the rock community for the most part, they did not understand the importance of what was going on. And the industry ,as I said to you before, they folded before we even spoke. They agreed to the sticker; it was a done deal. And a lot of the other musicians stayed out of it, they went quiet, they said just waited for the dust to settle.
“They deliberately made that move,” he continued. “I damaged my band. I became Public Enemy Number One even though you the fans knew we were not the worst of the bunch. But still that face to Mom and Dad was like ‘Oh yeah you can go see Motley Crue but you can’t go see Twisted Sister’. My mail was checked, my phones were tapped, my packages were being checked. It was disheartening.
“I remember Ronnie Dio trashing me in the press and he said ‘Who is Dee Snider to speak for us?’ And my first line (at the hearings) was ‘I cannot speak for anyone but myself’, he didn’t even listen to my first line and then reacted and spoke out against me, years later he apologised but no one remembers the retraction.”
Snider also recently revealed he isn’t fully convinced that Kiss’ End Of The Road tour – which wrapped up last week (2 December) at New York’s Madison Square Garden – is truly the end, with the band set to continue on as holograms,
“But the idea of the farewell tour, I don’t know what to believe,” he says. “And people say, ‘Well, do you think it’s for real?’ I said, ‘This is what I know: when I see the bodies in the Kiss coffins, then I’ll say, ‘They’re done. They’re done.’ When they’re laying there in the coffins, I’ll say, ‘Good work. Good job.’”