JAY JAY FRENCH on TWISTED SISTER reunion: 'I'm mot gonna say it's never gonna happen again'
21-09-2021
In a brand new interview with The Rock Experience With Mike Brunn, Jay Jay French was once again asked if thinks TWISTED SISTER will ever play live again, nearly five years after the band completed its farewell tour. The guitarist responded: “I said never before, ’cause I meant never last time, but then we got together again, so now you sound like an idiot. So I’m never gonna say never. We got together ’cause of 9/11 last time, and God forbid, nobody wants a disaster. But my band answered the bell on that selflessly — we went and did it for all the right reasons and came back for all the right reasons. We had the Christmas shows and Christmas album, which was a lot of fun to do.
“No, I’m not gonna say it’s never gonna happen again,” he continued. “I just can tell you this, though: we all had dinner last year with our wives, and nobody talked about playing. Not one person even mentioned playing — nobody. And no one even thought about the we didn’t mention playing. All we did was talk about our kids, how we’re doing these days, ‘how’s your health’ — that kind of stuff. So, when people say to me this, I can tell you we have not had a conversation about it.
“We came back to do a benefit for New York Steel,” Jay Jay added. “Then we did a benefit my daughter’s eye issues. We did a benefit for A.J.‘s (Pero, late TWISTED SISTER drummer) Fallen Blue. Dee (Snider, TWISTED SISTER singer) and Mark (Mendoza, TWISTED SISTER bassist) do motorcycle events. We’ve done shows to raise money… We came back a better band, a more mature band, a more responsible band, which was against all the grains of heavy metal. But we all had kids, so our lives changed. We didn’t have ’em when we all started. So it made us a better band and better people.”
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 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 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”.
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