In a new interview with Spain’s The Metal Circus, Dee Snider was asked if he misses performing with TWISTED SISTER, nearly five years since the band played its final show. The singer responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I miss TWISTED SISTER, my friends, my brothers — Mark [Mendoza, bass], Jay Jay [French, guitar], Eddie [Ojeda, guitar]— I miss them. But we talk all the time. We’re good friends, and we always talk to each other. It was Mark Mendoza‘s birthday two days ago, and we all were on his podcast and we all joined to wish him a happy birthday. And I miss TWISTED SISTER in its prime. I miss it when we were younger and insane.
“I think that we stayed long enough and it was time for the band to retire in 2016,” he continued. “So I don’t see going back to that because I don’t think it was really true to what TWISTED SISTER was by the end; we’d stopped wearing the makeup, stopped wearing the costumes. It was a crazy show in the ’80s — it was crazy. In the 2000s, people started to get slower, and it wasn’t as crazy. People loved it, but I think it’s good that we stopped.”
This past April, Snider told “Lipps Service With Scott Lipps” that he wouldn’t rule out reuniting with his former bandmates to play “a song or two for a charity” event. “If [American talk show host Jimmy] Fallon called up and said — he’s a big TWISTED fan — ‘Hey, would you guys come on [my] show and do one of your Christmas songs?’ or whatever, I would love to,” he said. “Go out and do a 90[-minute] or two-hour set as TWISTED SISTER again? I don’t see that happening.”
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, French, Ojeda and Mendoza, along with drummer Mike Portnoy. The band’s last-ever concert took place in November of that year — 20 months after the passing of TWISTED‘s longtime 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.
The surviving members of the classic lineup of TWISTED SISTER — Snider, French, Ojeda and Mendoza — reunited virtually on March 20 for a special episode of Mendoza‘s Internet TV show “22 Now”. The hour-and-a-half-long program was a tribute to Pero, who died exactly six years earlier at the age of 55 while on tour with the band ADRENALINE MOB.
Prior to this past March’s virtual reunion, the four surviving members of TWISTED SISTER reunited for two days and nights in November 2019 to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the band’s classic album “Stay Hungry”.