The man who would later on be a Twisted Sister to pay the bills wields a Grabber, man he was cool, that 'fro!!!, kind of Eric Bloom, Ian Hunter, Magic Dick and Rob Grange rolled into one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq1XklQe8dk&feature=relatedWell, to be fair he also wanted to play heavier music as this interesting interview shows, seems like he was the heavy metal U-Boat within The Dictators
:
"DCT: What kind of music did you play?
MAM: Top 40. Even though I didn't like it, I still played. I wanted to play. Period. We did some rock, but mostly whatever was top 40 at the time. It went on like that until the drummer I was with, a guy named Fred Enoch, insisted that I try out for this band called "The Dictators". He said this band was managed by the same people that managed Blue Oyster Cult. He said that they played a whole bunch of big gigs around the world, that they have an album, and that they were going to do another one. So he got me a copy of their first album, it was called Go Girl Crazy. I listened to it and I thought it was the worst crap I ever heard! And I said that there's no way I'm playing in this band. I'm sorry. I'm just not playing this crap. He said that this is your chance to get out and go tour. This is what everybody wants to do! At the time I had just gotten out of high school. I was still 18 years old. It was around February of 1975. I auditioned, and they took me right away! We had a bunch of rehearsals, and then we played some gigs in the city. My first experience at CBGBs was right then and there. I knew nothing of this New York City scene, nothing. Then it was Blondie, the Talking Heads, the New York dolls, all of these city bands I knew nothing of it. Because kids out here (LI) never went to the city to see bands, and the city kids there never came out here to see bands. There was the New York City music scene, and the tri-state scene, and they never intersected. They never intersected at all.
I joined The Dictators, and we played some local gigs, and we immediately did some North East shows with Blue Oyster Cult, I mean big Coliseum's. And here I am 18 years old, playing in front of 20,000 people! So, when I joined The Dictators I kind of changed their style of music. All of a sudden these guys had to play pretty hard to keep up with me. It was like all of a sudden 'super charging' the band.
DCT: So you were influential in changing The Dictators sound?
MAM: I can't take credit for telling them to do it, it just happened because it happened. I didn't understand the scene, and I really didn't understand “me” either at that age. I knew what I could do, and I knew how I played.... The guys I played with before were great musicians and great singers, they were rock guys. There was no problem for us to play stuff that required being 'oomphy', or having balls to play. Not saying that the guys in The Dictators were bad musicians, they weren't, but they just didn't play in the same style that I do, so they really had to do something to keep up with me, and I changed the sound of the band because of that. It wasn’t intentional, but I did. All of a sudden they became more of a hard rock, heavy metal band, than punk. They were the first punk band; they invented the term punk rock.
DCT: Really?
MAM: Absolutely. Adny Shernoff the keyboard player invented the term punk rock. He was the first person to use that term in writing. By joining The Dictators I got turned on to a music scene that I didn't even know existed nor did I care. The few things I heard, I couldn't even stand. The Ramones took their whole deal from The Dictators. They (The Dictators) were the first to have the leather jackets and the bowl haircuts, and the Ramones took that look and went with it. The Dictators just let it go; they didn’t say anything to them about it. They were the original punk rock band. There was no one doing that at the time. Go Girl Crazy was a critically acclaimed album. I mean, everybody loved it. I got to hang out and meet Lester Bangs, and all these writers that were famous from Rolling Stone and other music magazines, but still I just couldn't understand the scene, I thought this was crap. This was just horrible music. Not so much The Dictators, but the other bands I saw. I mean, they wrote horrible songs, they couldn't play their instruments, but yet it was this huge massive scene that I was thrust into as an 18, 19 year old, and I didn't like it. We went on beyond that, though. We toured with Kiss, BOC, REO Speedwagon, Nazareth; we actually were on a bill with Foreigner...
DCT: The Dictators???
MAM: The Dictators. The line up was The Dictators, Foreigner, Nazareth and Uriah Heep. How's that for a line up?!? This was before Feels like the First time was out. They had just released the record; no one knew who they were. Six weeks into the tour, they blew everybody out; I mean they were just the biggest band in the world at that time. I hung out with the guys from Foreigner, it was really fun.
I had a little over two years with The Dictators. It was just chaos and mayhem. I wrecked 42 cars in two years. Completely wrecked rental cars, destroyed I can't tell you how many hotel rooms. Put M80's on door knobs and blew out windows. It was just mayhem and destruction.
It all culminated about two years after I joined the band. They had gotten away from this New York City, tongue in cheek music, and the guys in the band wanted to get back to it. They didn’t want to be as hard or as heavy anymore. I had enough of them, they had enough of me, and I quit. I told them that I wasn’t going to be on the next record. I didn't like any of the production, I didn't like the way management was handling the band. It was not what I wanted, or the direction I wanted to go in with the band, so I quit. I remember I came home, I told my parents I had left the band, and they felt bad because it was like a dream come true for me for those two years."
