Cowabunga!
Scary stories from Twisted Sister's Dee Snider.
By Erik Fong

Much like the Yellow Pages, if Dee Snider hasn't seen it firsthand, then it's probably never happened before. Best known as the frontman for Twisted Sister – easily the sexiest out of the ugliest rock bands ever – Dee has managed to take advantage of both his versatility and extroverted personality with a popular syndicated radio show called "House of Hair" [insert "perfect face for radio" joke here]. And despite having several television shows in development, voiceover work ("Get your break started with a Kit Kat" – yep, that's him) and the relentless itch to begin filming Strangeland 2, he still has time to write music specifically designed to fuck with your head.

Dee's latest musical project, Van Helsing's Curse, is an attempt to create a soundtrack to his favorite holiday of the year, Halloween. Armed with electric guitars, brass and string sections and a six-piece choir, Van Helsing's Curse combines eerie classical movements like "Ave Satani" (theme from The Omen) and "Carmina Burana" with a hard rock edge – all of which is tied together by Dee's haunting narrations. Think of it as Santa Claus reading 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, only Santa wants to kill you.

Luckily, Dee made it out of the gutter after the Twisted Sister empire caved in during the '80s, and he now leads as close to normal of a life as a transvestite headbanger possibly can. When you've ridden – and gotten run over by – the rock n' roll rollercoaster like Dee has, most don't come back up with money, friends or sobriety, but they sure as hell have a few stories to share. And so a-storytellin' Dee went, from the making of Van Helsing's Curse to his fondest Halloween memories. Not to mention the story about that Christmas song he wrote that became a classic thanks to the windpipes of Celine Dion.

Despite the intended spookiness of Van Helsing's Curse, the familiarity of the material on the album gave me a really warm feeling, almost more like Christmas than Halloween.
Wow. That's the first time I've heard that. But the familiarity was important, finding themes – because classical music is a tough sell. We wanted an album that appealed to a broad audience, but finding familiar themes that were haunting and had that creepy vibe was tough. I think we did it successfully, and there are enough familiar pieces to carry you through the unfamiliar stuff.

If I walked into your home right now, what would I see?
It's a contemporary Victorian style house – lots of gingerbread work, waterfalls, and it's heavily landscaped. I call it "décor nuvo guinea" – my wife is a Brooklyn Italian, and she's an amazing interior decorator, but you can clearly see Roman influences. And the basement/play area – it holds all the platinum and gold albums, the arcade games, the town sign from Strangeland and the tombstone from a scene that was cut, and posters of me, and swords and skulls and all that. I call it the dungeon. But otherwise, you would find it to be insanely well-appointed and way too normal. The only thing we don't have are the plastic covers on the seats like in the old days. Actually, Cribs is hounding us. They've been to the house, and they want to do an episode featuring my son [Jesse Blaze, MTV2 VJ and frontman for rock band Blazed] and me.

You had a six-piece choir sing on Van Helsing's Curse. Did the material on the album frighten any of your session players?
We had one person walk out. She understood Latin, and she said, "This part says 'drink the blood of Satan!'" It's a line from "Ave Satani." It's scary, it's Halloween. But she said, "I can't sing 'drink the blood of Satan.' I'm sorry, I just can't do this." And she walked out.

Speaking of Satan, Celine Dion sang a Christmas song that you wrote without even knowing that she was performing a holiday song penned by Twisted Sister's frontman. Has Celine found out that you wrote it yet?
I believe they told her after it was too late to pull it. [laughs] My buddy said she didn't know who I was, but her husband did and started laughing.

The way the story goes is, my wife asked me to write a Christmas song for her many years ago. I said, "Are you insane? I'm a headbanger." Besides, Christmas songs are genre-specific. When's the last time you heard a good new Christmas song? She said, you can do it, you're a classically trained counter tenor, I know you can do it. And I suddenly got a wild hair up my ass and got an idea for a song, and this Christmas song comes out. But I couldn't even sing it. I had to hire session people to record it for her as a Christmas gift. A buddy of mine, who was then a young and aspiring producer, said, "Man, this song is amazing. Would you mind if I held onto a copy of this? Someday somebody's going to record it." I said, "Yeah, yeah, sure they are." Many years later, I get a phone call on a hot summer day from Rick Wake, who went on to get Grammys for Mariah, Celine, Diana Ross and all these people. He says, "Dee, Celine's recording 'God Bless Us Everyone.'" I said, "You're shittin' me. Does she know who wrote it?" He said no, and I said, "Well, don't fuckin' tell her!"

He said, "One thing – she wants to change the name to 'The Magic of Christmas Day (God Bless Us Everyone).'" I said, "I don't care if she calls it 'This Fucking Song Blows,' just send me my publishing check." So then she and Rosie O'Donnell went on to record it for Rosie's Christmas album, and they opened up Rosie's Christmas special with it a few years ago. There's a children's choir, there are candles, my wife's crying, she's in tears, and I'm sitting there with my head in my hands going, "I can't believe this." So now when you walk downstairs into the dungeon, you see all these Twisted albums, and there's this huge Celine Dion "four million records sold" plaque, and a Rosie O'Donnell album plaque.

Ah, the scariest pieces of all. What's the first horror movie you ever watched?
Well, the first one that really disturbed me – I can't remember what it was called, but it was an army movie that my father and I watched. The Germans were torturing a guy and they cut off his toes one by one, and that one kept me awake at night. I must've been seven or eight. They didn't show the toes – but they didn't have to, and I used that trick to great effect in Strangeland. And even then, I still ran into insane problems with the ratings board. Here I've got scenes where I'm doing things to people and you can't see what I'm doing, but I'm describing it and you're seeing the people suffering. And they're making me cut the scenes because "the people are suffering too much." I can't show what I'm doing, and I can't show how they're reacting to it? It's crazy. But going back to the cutting of the toes, I just heard them dropping into a pan, and the guy was just screaming, and that scarred me for life.

That's what Spielberg did with Jaws. He didn't show the shark for the first half of the movie because he wanted to let the audience's imaginations run wild.
That was one reason, and the other reason was that the damn thing looked so fucking fake. [laughs] And those are Spielberg's words, not mine. They used to call it Bruce, and when it showed up on the set it looked like a big piece of rubber. "That's Jaws? That's what's gonna scare the shit out of people? Oh, well, we'll let them use their imagination, just don't show it much." Same with the first Alien – if you've ever seen the suit, it looks like a cheap skin diver suit, but they oiled up and kept it real dark and showed just enough of it, and your imagination took you the rest of the way. And with Van Helsing's, that's what I tried to do with the narrative. But I wanted to give a suggestion of what the next passage was about and then represent it musically. I wrote a passage and then we sat down and said, okay, what music is speaking to this sentiment? But we didn't want to explain everything in detail – let people's imaginations work. Suggestion of story, and then the music takes you the rest of the way.

What does Halloween mean to the Snider family?
My wife is a professional makeup artist and hairdresser and costume maker, and Halloween is our holiday. My daughter Cheyenne was born on Halloween too, so it all ties in. One year she made my son Cody up in Kindergarten. He wanted to be the devil, so she got up early, made everyone up and took him to school. A phone call comes in: "Mrs. Snider, can you please come and get Cody? The rest of the kindergarten class is terrified." She goes to the class, and Cody is on one side of the room and all of the kids are on the other side cowering. He looked like Satan!

What's the best Halloween costume you've ever worn?
I'll give you the coolest and the dumbest. The coolest was Frankenstein. And the sad thing is, it was only a scalp piece – all I had was the top of the head, and my wife painted my face green – but everyone still thought I had a mask on. We went out to a couple of places, everyone was flipping out and I was grunting and getting into it and having a great time.

The stupidest – I wore makeup and costumes all the time, and I liked to have a day off once in a while. So when Halloween would come around, I felt like I was exempt. Actually, when Twisted plays on Halloween, we play without costumes just to fuck with people. So my wife said, "You never get dressed up, every year we do this and you're the only one…" I finally said, "Okay, okay, okay, I'll dress up." We went to my closet, and I've got an affinity for the Old West – I've got all this cowboy paraphernalia, so I put that on. And at the time, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was huge. My kid had a full Michelangelo head, so I put on the head with the cowboy clothes and a cowboy hat and went out. We lived in Florida at the time, and they trick-or-treat at the malls because it's so fucking hot, so the storeowners hand out candy. All of a sudden, kids start mobbing me – they think I'm making a personal appearance as Michelangelo! And I'm like, "Hi kids, yeah! Cowabunga!" I'm dying to get this stupid head off, I'm sweating my ass off, but I can't break the hearts of hundreds of young children. So I went around all day as "Michelangelo the Cowboy" signing autographs. "What happened to your hands, Michelangelo!?"

Your son is in a band as well. If you could only give him one piece of industry advice, what would you tell him?
The advice that I give every young musician I run into – parlay. Whatever success you're getting, think immediately of how you can turn it into something else. For example, Jesse's on MTV – there's no MTV afterlife. You don't see the MTV VJs go on to greatness. The closest thing they've got is, what's-his-name from TRL, Carson Daly, and the verdict's still out on that one. I don't know how his night show is doing.

Well, Martha Quinn got those Neutrogena commercials…
There you go. [laughs] But Jesse knows that – he's seen it with me. Even his views of music are, hey, if it works, it'll be cool for the next couple of years, which is not the average view. Most musicians look at it as a finishing line – touchdown, spike the ball, throw your fists in the air and scream, "YES! I'm done!" Then you open your eyes – 50 more years to live and the couple million you made isn't gonna cut it, especially the way you're spending it.

When you sang at Arnold Schwarzenegger's rally, what did you two bond over when you spoke behind the scenes?
He was very gracious and cool. Backstage, we talked about some USO stuff – Twisted's been doing USO, and so has he, and he suggested going to the Middle East together and raising the morale of the troops. I said, "Dude, I'm there." I'm a true fan, and I tell you, I've liked this guy for a long time, and he's a man who gets things done. In his book, Stay Hungry, he says – and I thought he was just being, I don't know, optimistic – "When I'm done being the biggest bodybuilder in history, I will then go into real estate. I will make millions. Then I'll go into movies and be the biggest movie star in the world, and then I'll go into politics." This was written in 1979. And as the years have gone by, I've watched him and gone, "Holy shit." He's a real estate tycoon, became the biggest movie star, and then he married a Kennedy! I thought, "This bastard's gonna do it!" I saw him at Jesse the Body's inauguration – he was getting ready! I promise the state of California that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He gets things done. If you don't do the job right, we'll find the Perots and the Bloombergs and the Jesse the Bodys and the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and we'll find somebody who can do it right. We'll fucking elect Gopher from The Love Boat if you don't do it right.