Shane Snider, offspring of Dee Snider, the lead singer of Long Island’s most notorious hair metal group, Twisted Sister wrote in to My Dad Was In A Band about his famous father:

I’ve been hearing my dad’s music my entire life. As far back as I can remember, on my family’s VCR sat 3 VHS’s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the movie, ET and Twisted Sister’s music video compilation. I’d watch my father drag Mark Metcalf down the stairs and snarl at the camera without batting an eyelash over and over and over again. It’s weird to think of all the questions I didn’t ask.

I never wondered why he was dressed so funny or why he was beating up this father character. I didn’t even realize the band was wearing anything out of the ordinary. To me, bands were like super-heroes or cartoons, they had outfits they wore all the time, that’s how people knew they were one of the good guys… or bad guys… or group of screaming war-ready up-rising transvestites.

Fun fact: I once was wearing women’s clothing in middle school and when my friend said “Isn’t that a girls shirt?” I said “Maybe… why?” thinking that this was something perfectly normal to be doing. But I was born into my father’s dark years. Twisted Sister was long gone and so was all of his money. My mother did all the make-up, logo and costume design for the band so when it went under, she lost her job too.

My father road his mountain bike to his job working as my uncle’s secretary making just over minimum wage while my mother took care of me and my 2 brothers. Apparently, “rock star” isn’t enough experience to have on a resume to get a decent job. Sometimes my father would would perform with a group called the SMF’s at small bars with maybe 20 people in attendance. Many of which were not there for the show.

I’d watch these shows and wonder what happened. Why wasn’t he dressed like a silly monster anymore? Why isn’t it like the way it used to be? I wonder if my and my brothers’ obsession with the music videos hurt him. A lot of the footage in the videos would be of Twisted Sister performing in packed out houses and coliseums, jamming out on beautiful cars and being rock stars. But under a leaky roof, with a lawn made of dirt and nothing but a station wagon to wash, it was clear there was a large part of my father’s life I just wasn’t around for…. and whatever part that was, it was important.

Part of me wishes I could have seen him in his heyday mostly because I know in that small time span where he was at his peak was always what he had been striving for. Of course he’s better now. He’s making more money, more steadily and he knows how to handle himself in the industry. But I’ll still always wonder what it would have been like to be his son, way back when.