They had been a been a band since 1973, but Snider didn't come on until 1976. By the time they released the album, Dee had taken control of the songwriting and was, for the most part, calling the shots. Those first two albums gave them their metal bona fides, but to go beyond the headbangers, they needed to sell it with their look, like Quiet Riot did with Metal Health, their 1983 album with a straightjacketed Kevin DuBrow on the cover.
For Stay Hungry, the plan for the cover was was a photo of the band in an abandoned, grimy building in their street clothes, then with images of the group in their snazzy stage duds superimposed behind them. However, at the end of the photo shoot, photographer Mark Weiss had an idea to shoot the group's frontman, Dee Snider, solo.
Weiss explains: "Before we left, I asked Dee, 'Can you stay behind? I have an idea.' The other guys walked out because they'd had enough – it was 22 hours, we had started at 9 a.m. and it was already 5 in the morning the next day. Once the rest of the band left, he became 'Dee Snider the frontman.' He didn't want to upstage the band while they were there, but once they left, he became an animal... literally. By that time, Dee was getting a lot of the attention because he wrote all the songs and was this larger-than-life character on stage – he was the face of the band. But Twisted Sister was a band and they wanted to really keep that identity of a band. So the idea was to have the band on the cover."
The lead singer in any band gets the biggest serving of spotlight, but when that lead singer is Dee Snider, what's left for the other guys is gruel. What's interesting about Snider is he didn't command media attention through debauchery and controversy (à la David Lee Roth and just about every other Spandex-covered frontman of the era), but through a sober campaign to establish himself as a flamboyant but articulate mouthpiece for heavy metal. His look drew you in, but his words kept you listening. There's a reason why he was chosen to testify at Senate hearings on music censorship in 1985.
Which brings us to the bone. The one he's famously weilding on the Stay Hungry cover.
"When everyone left we did the solo photos with the stinking bone," said Weiss. "I said, 'Dee, go nuts! Get into character like you're a caged animal, and you're hungry. Y'know... Stay Hungry.' So he took this bone that I got earlier that week – that smelled like rotting flesh and that no one would touch the whole time – and started banging the wall and punching holes in the wall. The cops even came and wanted to see what the hell was going on. It was a wrap! The very last photo was the photo they used for the cover."
The first two singles from the album, "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock," blew up on MTV, with Snider playing an unhinged, parent-terrifying maniac keen on liberating kids with rock and roll. Stay Hungry ended up selling over three million copies, and the cover proved iconic. Snider spread his wings, writing and starring in the 1998 horror movie Strangeland, and becoming a popular morning show host at a Hartford radio station. In 2018, he released the solo album For The Love Of Metal.
June 10, 2020
The photos from Mark Weiss are part of his collection The Decade That Rocked, available at thedecadethatrocked.com
Here's our 2016 interview with Dee Snider
And Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet cover story
More Song Writing
