Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”

It was like I was in high school all over again. I was at the Claresholm Arena today, covering an Under-11 hockey game – that’s kids who are 10 and 11 years old – and during a break in play, what comes on the sound system? “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister.

When I passed by the rink attendant I told him I seriously felt like I was in a time warp. Not only were none of the players alive when the song came out, but some of their parents weren’t born yet either.

In fact, I was just 14 years old myself, embarking on my own musical journey, and Twisted Sister and that particular song played a special part.

School daze
In the Fall of 1984, after nine years at St. Joseph’s School in Coaldale, I started Grade 10 at Kate Andrews High School. It was a chance to meet a lot of new people who had come from the other junior highs in the area – R.I. Baker, Coaldale Christian and Calvin Christian.

One of the classes I took was German 10, and a guy named Gary Brown sat behind me. He was a pretty big guy with a personality to match. I would help him with his German, and he would tell me about the parties he went to and the music he listened to.

He was pretty big into heavy metal music, and a band called Twisted Sister. Back then, one of the cool things to do was write, or carve, your favourite band and a song or two into your desk. Gary used a dark blue pen to scrawl Twisted Sister on his desk.

I had not heard them yet, but soon would. I started watching music videos on various shows including “Video Hits” after school and “Good Rockin’ Tonite” on Friday nights.

Inevitably, I saw my first Twisted Sister song, “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. It was a catchy, albeit repetitive, song. What struck me was lead singer Dee Snider, who looked huge even on screen, with really long frizzy hair, thick pink rouge on his cheeks, eye liner and mascara, and what looked like Klingon armour for a costume. One of the band members had this guitar with a hypnotic pattern of concentric circles. It always makes me think of the word sonic.

Later that year I think, Hostess potato chips, started putting stickers in their chip bags, including some with images of Twisted Sister.

They were kind of a big deal.

Summer fun
That summer of 1985, I realized how big a deal they were. Every summer, I spent a couple weeks with my cousins in Brooks. I kind of idolized my cousin Fred, who was two years older than me but just one grade ahead of me. He was a musician and an artist. He even drew his own album covers and concert posters. It was kind of a precursor to a vision board.

Anyway, that summer when I arrived in Brooks he was really into heavy metal. He had every tape I had come across in my first year of high school, where I had shop class with a lot of heavy metal fans, including the aforementioned Gary Brown.

Fred collected “Circus” and “Hit Parader” magazines, which were largely heavy metal but had stories on other performers and, of special interest to me, the lyrics of songs. They were pretty cool.

I also read up on some of Twisted Sister’s other songs, including one called “Under the Blade”.

My cousin told me all about Twisted Sister. They were more than Dee Snyder but included members such as Mark Mendoza and Jay Jay French as well.

He also told me he had taken some of my other cousins with him to see Twisted Sister and Iron Maiden in concert at the Saddledome in Calgary. Another cousin told me that, while they were walking to the concert, they encountered some guys wrestling and messing around. About a block later one of my cousins told another they had to duck into a washroom at a gas station they were passing. Why? When they passed those guys messing around, somehow my cousin got marijuana thrown in his hair.

It was the ‘80s.

Speaking out
My respect and love of Dee Snider grew a few months later. The tides of censorship were rising with the Moral Majority and people such as Tipper Gore calling for record labeling. There were Senate hearings in the United States that saw the most unlikely of musicians band together to fight censorship – John Denver, Frank Zappa, and Dee Snider.

I saw part of Snider’s testimony one Saturday afternoon on “The New Music Magazine” on channel 7 of the peasant vision dial. Snider was taking the committee to task for misrepresenting his work. They had quoted the lyric, “Stick in the knife and pull out your life” from “Under the Blade”. He said the song was about unnecessary and unwanted surgery and, in the committee’s submission, they not only took his lyrics out of context but put different lyrics together from different parts of the song.

He made mincemeat out of their arguments, as did John Denver and Frank Zappa.

The committee grossly underestimated them. The artists did a great job of trying to battle censorship. This was a time when people were calling for the banning of records, which would have been devastating to freedom of speech.

The song
“We’re Not Gonna Take it” was from the album “Stay Hungry” and first released in May of 1984. It peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, and was Twisted Sister’s only top 40 single.

Parting thoughts
It still amazes me how a song can bring back so many distinct and different memories. “We’re Not Gonna Take it” is a good example. As I listen to it, I am taken back to my first year of high school, as well as summer vacation, and one of my first experiences seeing efforts to curb freedom of speech.

That’s the power of music and memory.