DEE SNIDER Explains Why He Didn't Share Songwriting Credit With His TWISTED SISTER Bandmates

In a new interview with the X5 podcast, Dee Snider explained how he came to write and "own" every song in TWISTED SISTER. He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I joined TWISTED SISTER and I joined the band that existed. They were all older guys. They're a few years older than me. And they were all from New York City, the Bronx. They had that New York attitude. I was a suburban rube. So I was younger than them. I came in the band starry eyed. I had a voice and they treated me like I was the kid. And it really alienated me from the guys. I love them all now — I mean, we're friends — but at that time, starting out, it really made me feel like I wasn't in the band. So I didn't feel like I was a part of the band for a long time."

Dee continued: "I tried to write with them and they didn't write with me. So I wound up writing and became very by myself and alone and working on these songs and I never felt like this was something I shared. I'd go in and say, 'This is the guitar part. This is the drum part.' And I would tell everybody what to do — not solos and stuff, but I very much was coming in as a loner with my songs. So I never felt the compunction, like, 'Oh, I should be sharing these songs with these guys because of all the hard work they're putting in.' Nope. They were out partying and having a good time while I was not getting high and working on song after song after song after song."

During an April 2021 appearance on "Waste Some Time With Jason Green", TWISTED SISTER guitarist Eddie Ojeda was asked how it came about that Snider was credited with writing all the music and lyrics in the band and no one else seemingly contributed to the process. Eddie responded: "[Dee] wrote the melody. He would sing the thing to me, and I would work it out with him. He would kind of have a rough version of the chorus. He could play guitar a little bit — a little bit to show the direction — and then I would kind of refine it. I think I worked well with Dee; he could vocally communicate something to me, and I could bring it out.

"All my guitar solos — I mean, I wrote a lot of theme solos. And those are my solos that I wrote; Dee didn't write those guitar solos. Like on 'Burn In Hell', the whole beginning to 'The Price'. Dee's even admitted it. I mean, he has said, with 'The Price'… At one point, he wanted to give me half of the publishing, but it just never worked out. I didn't put up a stink about it. [My attitude was], 'Okay, we're doing this.' I did my best, came up with parts and never got any writing credit for it.

"Every band is different," he continued. "Like, Eddie Van Halen used to write 90 percent of the songs [in VAN HALEN], but he shared everything 25 percent with everybody in the band. Some bands just do that; some bands don't. And Dee was very diabolical, in his own words, as far as putting 'All words and music by Dee Snider' on every album, which I didn't think was necessary, because it just wasn't true. Yeah, he did write all the lyrics and he did come up with the melody. And at the time, he said, 'Well, the guy who writes the melody is the songwriter.' I did talk to him about, 'Well, what about all the stuff I came up with?' … There's a lot of things I came up with that I never got writing credit for… Just a lot of these little guitar bits that I came up, and a lot of the theme solos, which are melodies; they're not just some guy playing Chuck Berry riffs. They're, like, singable solos with their own melody…

"Dee knew how to kind of roughly put out a chord," Eddie added. "He was good at singing it to me, so I could translate it into whatever it needed to be.

"I think there should have been some writing credit; it should have been spread out a bit. Because, like I said, I wrote my solos. I came up with these theme bits for the songs. I came up with little parts here and there — certain progressions during the solos. There's a lot of little stuff that I added to the songs.

"I think nobody cared. [We didn't make] a big stink about it, because we all said, 'You know what? We're going to do well, so it doesn't matter.' At the time, you don't realize how important it is to fight for that. You don't wanna cause bad vibes. It's one of those things [where] you just go with the flow."

In 2015, Snider sold his Snidest Music music publishing catalog of 69 songs — including the classic TWISTED SISTER rock anthems "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock" — to Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) for what he later said was "a lot of money."

TWISTED SISTER rose to prominence from the New York club scene in the early 1980s. Their biggest album, 1984's "Stay Hungry", contained "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock".

In 2016, TWISTED SISTER embarked on one final trek, titled "Forty And Fuck It", in celebration of its 40th anniversary. These shows featured the band's "core lineup" of Snider, guitarists Jay Jay French and Ojeda, and bassist Mark Mendoza, along with drummer Mike Portnoy. The band's last-ever official concert took place in November of that year — 20 months after the passing of drummer A.J. Pero.

TWISTED SISTER's original run ended in the late '80s. After more than a decade, the band publicly reunited in November 2001 to top the bill of New York Steel, a hard-rock benefit concert to raise money for the New York Police And Fire Widows' And Children's Benefit Fund.