For the first time in the band’s history, Twisted Sister played a full concert on Friday night with someone other than Dee Snider at the microphone. Sebastian Bach, the former Skid Row singer, fronted the band at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey, working through seventeen songs that ended, inevitably, on “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
The show was a slightly strange one on paper. It was originally announced as a one-off by Bent Brother, the alter ego Twisted Sister use for low-key club dates, before promoters quietly began billing it as the live debut of the band’s new touring lineup. Ultimate Classic Rock described it as an “unofficial debut” and an intimate preview — the Starland holds around 2,000 — ahead of the proper run of dates that begins September 4 in Palmer, Alaska. Blabbermouth simply called it the band’s first concert with Bach on lead vocals. Both framings are defensible; the songs were the same either way.
Alongside Bach were founding guitarists Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda, bassist Russell Pzütto — long the band’s bass tech, and a veteran of Snider’s solo projects — and drummer Joey Cassata, who played on Ace Frehley’s final solo album. The setlist leaned unusually hard on the early, faster material Bach has spent years telling interviewers he prefers: “What You Don’t Know (Sure Can Hurt You),” “Shoot ‘Em Down,” “Tear It Loose,” “Destroyer,” “Under The Blade.” He also worked in two Skid Row songs of his own, “I Remember You” and “Youth Gone Wild.”
How Dee Snider ended up off the tour
Twisted Sister announced a 50th anniversary reunion tour last September. Those shows were scrapped, and in February Snider resigned from the band citing what a statement at the time called health challenges. The statement disclosed publicly for the first time that Snider, now 70, had degenerative arthritis and had undergone several surgeries over the years simply to keep performing, and that he could manage only a few songs at a time in pain.
Snider filled in the rest himself in March, on Jamey Jasta’s podcast. Speaking via Louder, he described arthritis spreading through his shoulders, neck, arms and legs — “It hurts all the time” — and said he had begun taking painkillers “by the handful,” which brought its own problems. What finally decided it, he said, was the discovery of hypertension and heart issues that required him to, in his words, calm down. His four children sat him down and asked him to stop, some of them crying, telling him he was going to kill himself. His bandmates offered to bring medical technicians on the road and to wheel him on and off stage; his manager Phil Carson eventually called them and told them to stop offering.
Snider has been firm with fans that the situation is not as dire as the headlines made it sound. He is not, he has said, dying anytime soon.
It is worth noting where the accounts diverge slightly. The version Bach relayed on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation” — drawn from a phone call with Snider — is narrower: arthritis, knees gone bone on bone, a doctor telling him he could not jump around on stage, and Snider replying that not moving was not an option. Snider’s own telling on the Jasta Show is broader and blunter, foregrounding the heart problems and the painkillers. Neither contradicts the other, but the secondhand version is the gentler one.
Bach got the blessing first
Bach has been careful, publicly and repeatedly, to make clear he asked permission. He told “Trunk Nation” that he called Snider and they spoke for about 45 minutes, both of them close to tears, and that Snider told him he had his full blessing. Snider has long nicknamed Bach “SMF Number Two” — Snider being number one — and Bach told UCR he is “honored to continue the legacy of SMF number one as SMF number two.” He also says he asked Snider whether he might come out and jam at some of the shows, and that Snider said yes, though nothing has been confirmed.
French, for his part, has been unsentimental about the whole thing. He pointed out that twenty people have passed through Twisted Sister across 53 years — five singers, three bassists, four guitarists, nine drummers — and reached for the obvious precedents: Steve Perry was replaced in Journey, Freddie Mercury was replaced in Queen, and the music survived both. Bach has used comparisons of his own, citing Paul Rodgers singing with Queen and Axl Rose standing in for Brian Johnson in AC/DC.
What happens next
Eleven more shows are booked this fall, running from the Alaska date on September 4 through a December stop in St. Petersburg, Florida, with fairs, casinos and theaters making up most of the itinerary. Bach, who is 58 to French’s 74, is keeping his solo band going around the Twisted Sister dates and has begun work on the follow-up to his 2024 album Child Within the Man.
Whether an audience that has spent forty years watching Dee Snider snarl through “I Wanna Rock” will accept a substitute is the open question, and it is not one a 2,000-capacity room in New Jersey can settle. The bigger rooms start next week.
