Dee Snider - Diamonds In The Dust?
By Martin Popoff

Is it just the taste of the biz Dee needs to kick into gear that full-on Twisted Sister reunion folks are talking about? Maybe, maybe not, but there's no question there's a certain satisfaction Dee Snider gets from seeing this sampling from the man's monster cache of songs brought to sizzle, burned to aluminum, and then thrust at his appreciative public.

Never Let The Bastards Wear You Down is Dee Snider's first solo album, but it's a record with a twist, the enclosed ten tracks coming from various incarnations of the man's multi-coloured life at the top, middle and invisible netherzone, some of these songs originating with a band that never even saw release.

"I think that although a few songs may sound decidedly like Twisted, tracks 1 through 3, structurally, they really reflect the writing of Dee Snider and the growth of the writing of Dee Snider, to a point, that point being just the second Widowmaker record," explains Dee on the stylistic make-up of Bastards. "The first album was really just an outgrowth of the demise of Desperado, material from Desperado (ed. Dee's band with Bernie Torme and Clive Burr), and then some things that Al Pitrelli and myself wrote that were inspired by Desperado (laughs) and just continued on. Widowmaker itself - and you as the rock historian know this - the second album is really Widowmaker, because that's when we toured together, created together. But it's really a reflection on my writing and the growth of my writing from 1983 up until about 1989. That's really what it is."

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