TWISTED SISTER’s JAY JAY FRENCH: Dropping The Makeup In 2008 Was ‘The Best Thing That Could Have Happened To Us’

In a new interview with Metal Mayhem ROC, TWISTED SISTER’s founding guitarist and manager Jay Jay French confirmed that he and his bandmates will not go back to wearing the heavy makeup that characterized their early shows when they return to the road as part of their reunion tour later this year. He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “No, we haven’t worn [the makeup] in 15 years. We stopped doing that. And we stopped doing it because of a funny story, actually… It’s actually very funny.”

He continued: “We stopped with the whole makeup thing in 2008 completely by accident. We were playing on a bill in Holland [at the Arrow Rock Festival in Nijmegen, Netherlands] — a mega bill — a one-day festival with REO SPEEDWAGON, KANSAS, MOTÖRHEAD, WHITESNAKE, JOURNEY, TWISTED SISTER, DEF LEPPARD and KISS. In one day. Imagine that — one day. And it was in a gigantic field. And the tickets were 79 euros. Can you imagine that? For all these bands — all these incredible bands. All of ’em have tons of hits. JOURNEY, WHITESNAKE, TWISTED, MOTÖRHEAD, REO SPEEDWAGON, KANSAS. I mean, everyone’s got hits — hits. KISS — hits everywhere. And the promoter goes, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be a perfect day. Everybody’s gonna do an hour starting at noon, and it’s gonna be exactly two stages every hour on the hour.’ So you had 50,000 kids in a field, and they would walk to one end of the field and then walk to the next for the next band, and then walk to the next for the next band and walk to the next for the next band. So our stage time at that show was four in the afternoon. KISS was seven. They were headlining. They were seven. So I think we were four in the afternoon. So we all get there [except for singer Dee Snider] a day before, and Dee decides to take the last plane flight out of New York to arrive in Amsterdam at eight in the morning and be driven to Nijmegen, which is two hours away, to do the show. So Dee goes to Kennedy airport, gets on the plane, he takes an Ambien [a medication primarily used for the short-term treatment of sleeping problems], goes to sleep. He wakes up seven hours later and he says to the guy next to him, ‘Wow, man, what a flight. It didn’t even feel like it moved.’ And the guy goes, ”Cause it didn’t. We’ve been on a weather hold for eight hours.’ So the flight doesn’t take off. And when it does take off, it arrives at 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon at Schiphol airport [in Amsterdam], and there’s no way that Dee is gonna make it to the show. And the promoter is sitting there, and we’re all sitting around with t-shirts and jeans. And the promoter goes, ‘You know, if you don’t play, you lost your money.’ We know that. And so we’re sitting there going, ‘Well, I guess this is the only time it’s ever happened, but it looks like we’re not gonna be able to play.’ And my tour manager/agent Danny said, ‘What if we fly Dee in on a helicopter? We can get him in.’ And it’s a big field. So behind the stage was a huge field, and if we can get the police to agree to let the helicopter land behind the stage, Dee can get out in time and we’ll do the show. So they agreed to do it.”

Jay Jay added: “The problem of getting a helicopter in Holland is that when you get a helicopter in Holland, you get the helicopter in Holland. There’s a helicopter, which cost a freaking fortune. So we get the helicopter. We’re all sitting around the dressing room, like in t-shirts and jeans. It’s 10 to four. We’re thinking we’re not going on. It lands. Dee comes out in t-shirts and jeans. The helicopter’s so small, it won’t take a suitcase. He’s got no stage clothes, he’s got no makeup, no nothing. So he goes, “Well, boys, let’s come on stage and kill it.’ Now KISS is headlining. It was the first time we’d played with KISS. So because I’ve known those guys for a million years and I auditioned for them, to me it was, like, ‘Oh, let’s just go up there and just rattle everybody’s cages and screw ’em all.’ So we went on stage with t-shirts and jeans — first time ever. So we do the show. People are kind of… I mean, I don’t know if they were in shock, ’cause we did it in t-shirts and jeans, but the next day in the Dutch national paper, there was a huge center spread on the concert, and there was only one photo and it was us. The only band’s photo was us. And it said JOURNEY was great, KISS was great, WHITESNAKE was great, everybody was great, but the only band that provided a quasi-religious experience was TWISTED SISTER. So we thought. ‘Wow. Why are we wearing this crap?’ And that was the end of it. And that was the end. And then I thought, ‘Okay, I’m getting ready for the e-mails to come in. I’m ready for that onslaught.’ [Only] one e-mail [came in], and a fan said, ‘I thought you wore makeup.’ That was it.”

French went on to say that dropping the makeup was “the best thing that could have happened to us, and I’ll tell you why. Because there were people that didn’t like us ’cause of how we looked,” he explained. “They wouldn’t get past it, ’cause of the way we looked. Well, now we are not giving ’em a reason not to like us. So our popularity got even bigger. We became more successful. The shows got bigger, the offers got bigger, the festivals got bigger. And by the time we walked away in 2016, the average amount of people we were playing to was 75,000 a night, and it was up to 110,000 at the most.”

TWISTED SISTER’s 2026 reunion will feature the band’s three core members: French, Snider and longtime lead guitarist Eddie Ojeda. Bassist Mark “The Animal” Mendoza won’t be joining the celebration. Russell Pzütto, who has toured with Snider’s solo projects, will replace Mendoza on bass. Joe Franco, who briefly played with the group in the mid-1980s, will sit behind the drum kit, stepping in for A.J. Pero, who passed away in 2015 at the age of 55.

TWISTED SISTER recently announced its first reunion concerts as part of the band’s 50th-anniversary tour. The Snider-fronted act will perform at a number of European festivals this spring and summer, including at Sweden Rock, Copenhell and Graspop Metal Meeting.

French addressed Mendoza’s departure in a statement to Rolling Stone, explaining: “Me, Dee and Eddie have performed as TWISTED SISTER for nearly 50 years with 10 different bass players and drummers. The band has never discussed internal realignment before and has no intention of doing it now. Suffice to say that almost all bands with a 50-year history have gone through realignment as a byproduct of time. We wish Mark well in his future endeavors.”

Franco played on TWISTED SISTER’s 1987 album “Love Is For Suckers”. Mike Portnoy, who took over for Pero after he died near the end of TWISTED SISTER’s 2016 run, is busy touring with DREAM THEATER and is unable to participate in the upcoming TWISTED SISTER live activities.

Three years ago, TWISTED SISTER staged a one-off reunion at the Metal Hall Of Fame in Agoura Hills, California. On hand to be inducted into the Metal Hall Of Fame were Snider, French, Mendoza and Portnoy. Ojeda was absent from the event after contracting COVID-19; filling in for him was Keith Robert War. TWISTED SISTER played a highly charged three-song set consisting of the staples “You Can’t Stop Rock ‘N’ Roll” and “Under The Blade”, as well as the anthem “We’re Not Gonna To Take It”.

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.