During any given week, the MTV News staff gets a lot of interview opportunities. While most of them are excellent, there are usually only a few that really excite the staff in ways that cannot fully be explained.
Such was the case a few weeks ago when I was offered the opportunity to sit down with former Twisted Sister frontman and free speech activist Dee Snider, who can currently be seen in the hit Broadway musical "Rock of Ages." I jumped at the chance to go visit with Snider in his dressing room at the Brooks Atkinson Theater (where "Rock of Ages" runs eight shows a week) not necessarily because I love the musical (though it's excellent) or because I'm a huge Twisted Sister fan (though I am).
No, the real reason why I wanted to talk to Dee was because I used to listen to him every morning while I drove myself to school at the turn of the century. Snider was the host of "Dee Snider Radio," a morning talk show on Hartford, Connecticut's alternative rock radio station. For three years or so, Snider sat down with newswoman Beth Lockwood, producer Nick Lentino, engineer Darkside Dave, assistant producer Sean and a rotating cast of supporting characters (including Psycho Dan and Mudbone) and talked about the news of the day, Snider's war stories of life on the road and seemingly everybody's most embarrassing moments.
The show had some great moments, including one morning that saw the crew eat a human placenta. "I'm technically a cannibal," Snider admitted. "That was on a dare, and that went horribly wrong. When you walk in in the morning, and the marketing director is cleaning a placenta to be eaten, you know it's going to be a weird day at the office."
Snider also said that some of his favorite moments were some of the most horrible, including the day they discovered Lentino had put a beer bottle into an inappropriate place in his body and the morning of September 11, 2001.
Sadly, "Dee Snider Radio" disappeared off the face of the planet in a mess of downsizing and contractual disputes. But Snider has stuck to the radio (he has a syndicated show called "The House of Hair" that focuses on metal) and has recently opened up a Dee Snider Radio web portal, which is slowly archiving every one of the shows Snider ran in Hartford (which you can stream or download for free). He always looks back fondly on his experience behind the microphone in Hartford. "I had a tremendous time during that show," Snider said. "I run into Peeps — that's what I called my fans, the Peeps — all the time. The minute they say 'Hartford,' I know we have a bond because I know you know me now. When you're on the air for five hours a day every day, pretty much everything comes out."
Do you have any "Dee Snider Radio" memories? Let us know in the comments!
I was stuck in San Antonio International Airport for two hours on Sunday, on my way back to New York from covering the