Sketch Fridays #45 – Eddie “Fingers” Ojeda

Aug25
by on 25 August 2017 at 1:34 AM

Sketch Fridays #45 – Eddie “Fingers” Ojeda (lead guitarist, backing vocals)

Most people know Twisted Sister’s biggest hit, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which is probably one of the only heavy metal hits written in a major key, and while that song is fine, the band (as any fan of any band would say) has so much more substance than that song shows. By the time that song hit the airwaves, the band had been around for eight years already and had been regionally successful, selling out arenas in the tri-state area to thousands of people. Their success with Stay Hungry‘s lead single, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” in hindsight, acted more as the icing on the cake that had spent nearly ten years baking.

In fairness, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is a good encapsulation of what the band stood for in a way that appeals to as broad an audience as possible––they didn’t compromise anything about themselves with that song––and part of a look through their catalogue shows that their biggest hit was the result of an evolution rather than a lucky strike while the iron was hot. Jay Jay French once described the band as what you would get if Alice Cooper were blended with British rockers, Slade (the originators of the song, “Cum On Feel The Noize,” which would later be covered by Quiet Riot), and it is in the latter that I think Twisted Sister, and specifically Dee Snider’s songwriting motivation, owes more than even the band wants to let on.

Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” and its predecessor, “Mama, Weer All Crazee Now”, are raucous party songs that culminate in a crowd singing along, a crowd much larger than what can be comprised of just the band itself. In an interview with Slade’s lead singer, Noddy Holder, he said that it was an attempt to capture the feel and sound of a live show on a record. This anthemic, participatory sound and structure is at the heart of Dee Snider’s songwriting, starting in the late seventies where we can not only hear the influence of Slade’s aesthetic and groundbreaking recording choices (and, perhaps, their choices of clothing) but also the seeds for what would become “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

If this connection were solely because Twisted Sister and lead songwriter, Dee Snider, were fans of Slade, it would make sense, but the connection is even stronger when one considers that Twisted is generally considered to be a premier live band. They ran high-energy shows, right up until they called it quits at the end of 2016 (marking Dee’s 40th year with the band) and a highlight of their shows, as can be heard in the plethora of recordings, is how interactive the band and Dee is with the audience. From the call-and-response, Slade-ish type of choruses to Dee’s “raps” with the audience, which could be lengthy monologues in their own right, audience participation was a key element to the band’s image as well as its success, and every time Dee swung for a big hit, it always included that element, especially in the codas when the songs idled on what sounded like a mob chanting the chorus while Dee improvised over them.

With each album, a version (though not literally) of what would become “We’re Not Gonna Take It” exists; from the earliest attempt with “I’ll Never Grow Up Now” in which Dee is barely recognizable to the club hit, “Bad Boys of Rock and Roll”, it’s clear that Dee has a tone he’s going for and that it’s very much a cry for an entire demographic rather than just of a band as both songs proudly devolve into chanting, riffing, but controlled, chaos. With their first major label release, the band finds a focused and largely successful iteration in “I Am (I’m Me)” which proved to be a mild hit overseas. Again, though, the structure is clear, continuing in a straight line all the way from Slade.

 

Once “We’re Not Gonna Take It” landed (along with the second single from the Stay Hungry album, “I Wanna Rock”), Twisted’s follow-up album, Come Out and Play, didn’t really have an analogue, which I feel is to the band’s credit. With their fame and success, they decided to go bigger and more melodramatic with the opener and title track (which I like very much). It wasn’t until their final album, Love Is For Suckers, that Dee returned to the well one last time, but the take was decidedly different––more tired and wizened, but no less ferocious. That track, “Wake Up (The Sleeping Giant)”, stands in stark contrast to the rest of the album and honestly feels like one of the few “genuine” Twisted Sister tracks from it, even quoting from their previous hit when Dee cries out in a pre-chorus build-up: “We took all we’re gonna take.” It’s focused and profound but it falters in that it is a singular song, lacking the party-like atmosphere of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and its antecedents, moving away from being more inclusive to being more militaristic. As an angry teen, “Wake Up” was the song from this lineage that I liked the most and still gives me chills when I listen to it today.

Why it was that “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was the one that broke through, I’m not sure. Its chorus was a finely honed chant that anybody could sing with a sentiment anybody could get behind. The cynical answer would be that with all the attempts at the formula, one would eventually stick with a larger audience. Part of it, if we’re to talk musically, surely has to do with its melody. As mentioned earlier, despite its anarchic lyrics, the major key in which it’s written lends an air of, for lack of a better word, patriotic or, at the very least, empowering attitude. The driving melody, repeated ad nauseam to great effect, is echoed in the lead by guitarist, Eddie “Fingers” Ojeda, who, despite being a clever and capable lead player, sticks to the main melody for the solo break in the middle of the song. For me, as an amateur player, I wouldn’t be surprised if the band didn’t realize the song was written in a major key (it’s easy to miss these things) and they couldn’t figure out what a more traditional, minor key solo didn’t sound right. When in doubt, stick with what works, and it’s hard to ignore the power of that melody and affixing that to the guitar solo only makes the song feel more like a grand anthem than just another rock song. If anything, I feel it is more of a vindication and validation of Slade––who never really broke through in the States––than Quiet Riot’s begrudging cover ever was. For Quiet Riot, “Cum On Feel The Noize” was a single shoved upon them by management. For Twisted Sister, Slade and “Cum On Feel The Noize” was buried treasure that they invested in wisely and personally.

I bring these songs up because these are a big part of Twisted Sister’s oeuvre, but they’re the songs I have the least connection to. They’re fascinating and fun, but they’re more statements of purpose to the outside world, speaking for the people Twisted Sister represents rather than speaking to them. For a band (and genre) that, superficially, can be quite off-putting, these songs stand as evidence that the doors to “our” world was not closed but, in fact, wide open to anybody. While their powerful, simple music and garish clothing and makeup could be misinterpreted as a statement of “If you don’t look weird and scream loud then you don’t belong,” their actual message––and one that I thankfully found as I gathered their catalogue in my teens––was much more humanistic, bold, and important: “Be yourself.”

This week’s drawing of Fingers was actually kind of difficult. In a band full of personalities, from Dee’s gregariousness to Jay Jay’s general cool to Mark “The Animal” Mendoza’s brute force to AJ Pero’s silliness, I fear Eddie gets buried underneath them because, of all the members of the band, he comes across as the musician. To be fair, all the members are capable musicians, but it comes across that Eddie is the guy that just loves to play music. Not only is he humble enough to share lead guitar duties with Jay Jay, but he is the only consistent backing vocalist in the band, and it would be irresponsible of me to say that Dee alone is the voice of the band. If you took away Eddie’s backing vocals on all of Twisted Sister’s songs, the band would sound completely different. Where Dee was the attitude and Jay Jay was the smarts, Eddie was the passion that made this group a band.

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Sketch Fridays #44 – Jay Jay French

Aug18
by on 18 August 2017 at 12:30 AM

Sketch Fridays #44 – Jay Jay French (band founder, lead/rhythm guitars, backing vocals, brains of the operation).

I never saw what Twisted Sister looked like until I was on my third purchase of theirs (and the first CD of theirs I owned) called Big Hits and Nasty Cuts––a collection of live performances and some studio tracks that weren’t simply “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” from their breakthrough third album, Stay Hungry. I was searching for their catalogue at a time before the internet was widely available and CD versions of Twisted Sister’s albums weren’t widely available because, at the time (the mid ’90s), the world was trying to forget any band that wore makeup and had big hair. Before picking up Big Hits, I had found on cassette tape their fourth album and Stay Hungry follow-up, Come Out and Play, but the cassette copy didn’t have any band photos in the liner notes. A while passed before I ever actually saw what Twisted Sister looked like. Once I did, I was shocked and aghast. I found it very difficult to reconcile what I heard with what I saw, it took even longer to reconcile what I saw with my own taste.

On the LPs and CDs, every Twisted Sister album had two band photos: one in makeup, one without. This is the back of the Come Out and Play vinyl; my cassette copy didn’t even have this picture.

As a group and individually, they’re gross. They look like Garbage Pail Kids versions of the “pretty” glam metal bands that were the rage in the ’80s, but I didn’t know––because, again, when I started listening to them was almost a decade after they broke up––that their look was part of the point and what got me to not only to look past their grotesque appearance, but to accept and celebrate it. They were conscious martyrs for the recluses and weirdos.

 

That if the people who just wanted to be left alone were always going to be singled out, they would intentionally look ridiculous as a way to challenge that hierarchy and to take the first hit. The band exhibited this in 1982 when they appeared on the British tv musical performance show, The Tube, and Dee saw that the crowd wasn’t at an excitement level that he wanted them to be (while playing a high octane cover of The Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock and Roll”), when he went so far as to take the makeup off on-stage just to make the more prudish and scoffing audience members feel better:

He turned their power against them which is their message in a nutshell. Subsequently, it was that appearance on The Tube that essentially got Twisted Sister signed to Atlantic Records.

For this week’s drawing of the coolest member of the band, founder Jay Jay French (whose aviator shades appeared to be permanently affixed to his face), I tried to capture his attitude as faithfully as possible and, especially to frame it against the gregariousness of the band’s front man, for their pairing, I would argue, was the bedrock of the band’s attitude. While looking at photos of the band, familiarizing myself with names and faces, it was clear that Dee was an icon and a hero in many ways, there was the calm cool of Jay Jay that Dee could never outshine, and I tried to capture at least part of that in the drawing.

It must be noted that the drawing is not a faithful recreation of any of Jay Jay’s outfits. As with Dee’s drawing last week, these are going to be, in a sense, my design of their classic outfits, combining elements from different outfits they wore throughout the years (though not all of them). The most important aspect of the drawing is actually his guitar, a “pinkburst” Les Paul (a play on the standard guitar finish, a blend from black to natural called “sunburst”). It’s an homage to Jay Jay’s more recent effort with The Pinkburst Project, a foundation started by Jay Jay that references the general color scheme of his band while also calling attention to uveitis, an eye disease that chronically afflicts his daughter.

 

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Sketch Fridays #43 – Dee Snider

Aug11
by on 11 August 2017 at 10:11 PM

Sketch Friday #43 – Dee Snider.

Dee Snider is one of the most important people in my life. Specifically, his time with his ’80s heavy metal band, Twisted Sister, made such an impact on my developing young mind that I tend to not share my love for them and their music because I feel it was music made specifically for me and other people wouldn’t understand. Simply because of my anachronistic appreciation, I’m not totally wrong.

In fairness, my appreciation of the band was anachronistic from the start. I found them––with friend and fellow artist, Josh Tobey––when I was thirteen years-old in the summer of 1994. Josh had found, on the side of a dirt road in the rural areas of Nipomo, CA, a paper shopping bag full of cassette tapes minus any defining cases or liner notes. We spent the afternoon playing games on the Nintendo Entertainment System––on Josh’s trusty, tiny black-and-white tv––listening to tape after tape. Furthermore, we listened to the tapes at faster speed than normal. We found we could lean this heavy teddy bear on the fast-forward button of the cassette player while a tape was playing, which made every tape sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Figure drawing for this week’s Sketch Friday.

In the bag was Twisted Sister’s third album, Stay Hungry, their 1984 breakthrough album with the MTV hits, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock.” By ’94, the band had been broken up for seven years, though most had not heard about that band since 1985 when Dee Snider spoke to the Senate to defend free speech in music from censorship. Despite releasing one album after that, it tanked and the band called it quits, as Dee Snider has said, with a whimper rather than a roar. But, again, they were merely a cassette tape in a bag with dozens of others. So, for a long while, I had no idea what they looked like or even when they were doing their work. All I had was the sound and the words sung by Mr. Snider. From those I shaped an opinion and, ultimately, a devotion.

But how the band ended didn’t matter to me. Their album was just a tape in a bag and was meant to be a means to laugh through the afternoon. And it was until we hit the second to last song on the album, called “The Beast.” It’s a song propelled by a chugging, droning riff that mimics a wolf’s steady stride pursuing prey through a forest. It was confident, predatory, and decidedly metal––a sound and attitude that spoke to my teenage ears.

“The Beast” is a song of horror-infused metaphor and minor-key melodramatics. As soon as it ended, Josh and I broke away from whatever video game we were playing and stared at each other, the power of the song, even at 2x speed, hooked us and, for the first time, we stopped the tape and rewound it to hear the song again.

Dee Snider with Dio. Probably from 1983 or early ’84. Photographer likely Fin Costello.

It marked the beginning of my love for the band. It started completely from a superficial fascination and developed into a nigh-spiritual battle cry that, to this day, informs everything I think, do, and believe. Dee Snider is best described as my “spirit animal.” His tenacity and ferocity underpin my natural reserve and personality. When I break out from my hesitancy, it is under the guidance of “What would Dee Snider do?” Not because he is a religious figure (he’s not), not because he’s the world’s greatest artist (he’s not). It was his voice that first said to me, “It’s okay to be you. No matter what. Forget what anybody else says or decrees. You’re different, and that’s okay. Because you’re one of us.” Such a simple message––spoken through songs like “We’re Not Gonna Take It”, “Don’t Let Me Down”, or “SMF” from Stay Hungry––meant the world to me and got my mind out of a pretty dark place and guided me when I needed guidance most. This is not only the case when I was thirteen, but at various points as I aged and continues to be the baseline I fall back to today.

Despite being a gregarious loudmouth, Dee and Twisted represented individuality in the face of conformity, especially in the mold of those who felt they weren’t able to conform despite their best efforts––a pretty good description of me in my teens. But he backed up his musical claims by taking it as far as testifying in front of the Senate in an articulate and sober argument with which anybody today would not disagree. His art means the world to me, but even more his adherence to principle above all else undoubtedly shaped everything I want to be, despite being almost ten years too late to his music.

I know many people may raise an eyebrow with this revelation, not seeing the pieces connect. While I’m not particularly gregarious or outspoken, this band and most importantly their message is the foundation for who I wanted to be and, I feel, who I became. For the following four weeks, I’ll be interpreting each member of this band in my style, reflecting their individual personality and showing, with hope, my appreciation with each drawing.

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