R.I.P. AJ Pero

Drummer for Twisted Sister.

[www.rollingstone.com]

Not really in TP's target market, but hey, Twisted Sister put a lot of money in Slade's pockets, so that's cool. And compared to most of what makes it onto top 40 radio today, "We're Not Gonna Take It" is a masterpiece.

Twisted Sister.

Possibly the greatest band of all time ... if logos scrawled onto or carved into high-school desktops and spiral notebooks is the sole criterion.

It's either them or Van Halen, I suppose. It's difficult to reach a conclusion, as (once again) I've let yet another year slip away without setting up my Hair-Metal-Logo-Band March Madness Brackets.

My Final Four would probably be (and again, this is based solely on the logo): Twister Sister, Van Halen, Ratt, and Def Leppard.

...

RIP

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Twisted Sister put a lot of money in Slade's pockets, so that's cool.

Perhaps so.

But not as much as Quiet Riot did.

Ouch. I recalled a Dee Snyder interview I once saw where he was praising Slade, and from there I confused Twisted Sister with Quiet Riot.

I've failed the Hair Metal 101 course. I think I'll get over it.

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I've failed the Hair Metal 101 course. I think I'll get over it.

Not so fast there, mister! You know what this means, don't you?

This is for your own good.

That's some schooling I'm happy to receive.

> My Final Four would probably be (and again, this is based solely on the logo): Twister Sister,
> Van Halen, Ratt, and Def Leppard.

Van Halen probably is in front of that pack. That band had a much longer period of popularity than Twisted Sister or Ratt. Def Leppard's logo has too many lines to carve into a desk. The typical high school metalhead probably couldn't finish it without getting busted by the teacher.

I suspect AC/DC and Kiss are high on that roster too.



The typeface used on the first Rush album has become semi-iconic; as far as lettering goes, it's probably the closest that group has come to a logo. But it's got too many curves for efficient desk-carving.



And forget about the "red star" logo. As iconic as that image may be, it's too difficult and time-consuming to carve well ... and no high school boy would want a picture of a naked guy on his notebook, even if it is part of a popular metal band's logo.

Well, maybe they didn't help Slade but they certainly made Mark Metcalf relevant for a few years until he became "The Maestro" on Seinfeld. He even commented on the logo in the "I Wanna Rock" video - "What kind of a man desecrates a defenseless textbook?"

As for logos - the best one (not hairmetal, though) to put on one's notebook is the Dead Kennedys.



Post Edited (03-24-15 13:17)

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As for logos - the best one (not hairmetal, though) to put on one's notebook is the Dead Kennedys.

You are entirely correct. I'm obliged to concede that I was limiting my options to hair metal bands for no other reason than that this was a Twisted Sister-related thread.

That DK logo was everywhere.

A truly dangerous stunt in, say, 1985: Walking through school in an Air Supply T-shirt.

Yep, the DK logo, the Black Flag bars, the sideways-letters D-E-V-O, and the anarchy A. And the Wasted Youth logo, a Y superimposed over a W, was popular, even if the band wasn't really.

I didn't do any desk-carving in school -- no, really, I didn't. But I did decorate/desecrate my spiral notebooks and the paper covers on my textbooks (homemade from brown grocery sacks) with the logos of Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss, Boston and Queen. My drawing of the coat-of-arms logo from A Night at the Opera really impressed my classmates. (Actually, my parents thought I did a pretty nice job on that one too.)

By the time I got into punk and New Wave, high school was pretty much over for me, and few of my new favorite bands had logos, as such. But shortly after I started college, the DK logo became a must-have on any of my spiral notebooks.

Surprised no one mentioned Judas Priest, since "JP" was scrawled upon more than one textbook/school wall/etc. (I was more of a "DK" man myself, but still....)