Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider recently talked to Ultimate Guitar, who was asked to clarify some of his recent comments regarding Ronnie James Dio and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the differences between what means to be a frontman and a singer.
He said:
When I said they weren’t great frontman, everybody said, ‘Here’s Dee shooting his mouth off again.’ But I’m not just shooting my mouth off; I’ve actually taken a lot of time to think about and consider it. I didn’t just make an arbitrary statement.
”I’ve thought about it. I got on my computer, and I studied and researched it. I’m actually the journalist’s worst nightmare because if people want to focus on the things I say, they need to know that I’ll back them up.
”But anyway, I said this, and then, on social media, someone said, ‘Okay, so what’s the difference between you and them?’ So, I’ll tell you the difference now: Ronnie James Dio, for example, was a great singer, but he was not a performer, at least, not in the sense of not a frontman. But me? I’m a frontman who is almost like a vaudeville performer.” […]
”It’s something I learned to do early in Twisted Sister’s career. I go back to those crazy bar shows again, where we’d do four sets a night for five or six nights a week. That’s a lot of shows; by the fifth or sixth night, I was just burnt to a crisp. But you know what? I still got out on f**king stage, and I did what I had to do.
”I remember one night, though, I stopped singing the first song because I had no voice, and I looked at Jay Jay [French], and he shrugged his shoulders and was like, ‘What now. What are we gonna do?’ I just started running all over the stage, all crazy and acting like a lunatic.
”That’s when I learned that people in the concert environment are more interested in being completely entertained than seeing perfectly sung vocals. So, I could never sing like Robert Plant or Ronnie James Dio, few can, but what I could do was go nuts on stage and captivate an audience. I can break this down even further:
”Take Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson, who are excellent entertainers and performers, but they’re not really frontmen. If you look, they’re literally doing choreographed moves.” […]