Twisted Sister's Dee Snider back on LI for book signing, Long Island Cares commercial

Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Famer Dee Snider, singer-songwriter of the fondly remembered pop-metal band Twisted Sister, returned to his native soil Monday for a book signing at the West Babylon music store Looney Tunes and to shoot a commercial for the charitable organization Long Island Cares.

“I know what they're about, what they stand for, who they are, what they do — I mean, it's just an amazing organization,” the Queens-born Snider, 68, who was raised in Freeport and Baldwin, says of the Hauppauge-based Long Island Cares, which provides food locally to people impacted by hunger and food insecurity — which according to the organization affects 1 in 13 adults and 1 in 9 children in our region.

“You know,” Snider muses, “we're suburban Long Island, you think everybody's got food — not necessarily. So I'm happy to do it,” he says of the upcoming spot. It was written by the nonprofit’s president and CEO, Paule Pachter, who has known Snider since the rocker dedicated his annual “Dee Snider’s Ride” charitable motorcycle event to Long Island Cares in 2013 after Superstorm Sandy. From 2003 to 2019, the Ride in various years also benefited the birth-defect and infant-mortality charity March of Dimes and Melissa’s Wish, which helps the families of loved ones diagnosed with a catastrophic illness, injury or going through an end-of-life event.

Snider — Twisted Sister’s frontman since the mid-1970s, through such 1980s anthems as "We're Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock,” and occasional reunions from its 1987 breakup to its 2016 final show — also was at Looney Tunes to sign his first novel, “Frats,” a semiautobiographical coming-of-age story set in a 1970s Baldwin high school.

“I mean, there’re pieces of me,” Snider allows. “There was a world of high school fraternities in Baldwin, Freeport, Uniondale, Hempstead, South Hempstead, Rockville Centre, Valley Stream a little bit and Oceanside,” he recalls. "And I thought this was just the way of the world until I found out nobody else had high school fraternities. They were more like gangs,” he says. “They had charters with the police and were sanctioned by the schools, and they walked the halls with impunity wearing their colors. People ask, ‘What's the difference between a high school fraternity and a college fraternity?’ College fraternities play beer pong. High school fraternities rumble. They fight.”

And while Snider is physically imposing, “I was this oddball loner walking around wearing a derby” hat, he says. “And finally one of the fraternities said they got tired of watching this freak show and they jumped me and took my derby. But that only made me dress weirder and hence my career,” he jokes of the highly theatrical, glam-rock-influenced Twisted Sister. “You know,” he quips, “they should've left me alone with my derby and I probably would've never put on any makeup!”

Snider, now a popular radio personality and voice-over artist, lived as an adult in Stony Brook before he and his wife, Suzette Gargiulo Snider, the parents of four and grandparents of five, moved about a decade ago to split their time between Los Angeles and Belize. Four of his five siblings still live on Long Island, as does their father, age 92.

“All my kids moved [to California]. And my wife,” he says with a chuckle, “being a true Italian mama, said, ‘I'm going. You can come if you want!’ ”