TWISTED CHRISTMAS - Get Out Yer Santa Claws! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"Well, you know, we always do Burn In Hell, and that always goes over well. Under The Blade, You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll, of course We're Not Gonna Take It, I Wanna Rock, Destroyer, Fire Still Burns. I'm trying to visualize the set. But those are the classics, the Twisted ones. The way we did it, is that we interwove, so there's really no down-time. And unless you took out the vocals for the Christmas songs, you wouldn't really notice anything different in our playing, because the Christmas songs are just as heavy as Kids Are Back or Shoot 'Em Down, or You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll. It just has a religious Christmas connotation to it."

Indeed, the band attack these songs with the same Priest-meets-AC/DC twin-guitars-in-lockstep resolution that made their own songs so irresistible to Tipper Gore and possibly Al as well. They sound like Twisted, but they also sound like The Ramones, a band that gets a little musical quote early in the set, while Dee is still dressed as Santa Claus.

And with the band half Jewish (Dee himself harbors a half, along with his Hungarian half), the guys couldn't resist a little heavy metal Hava Nagila at the end of Oh Come All Ye Faithful, which is included in the video as well, currently burning up the YouTube charts. "That started out as a joke," laughs AJ, "years ago, on stage, where Eddie would do that, and then Mark would break into La Cucaracha, and it would break into an Italian song, because I'm Italian and everybody would just fight, like in a big guitar war, and we would come offstage crying hysterically with what happened."

One of the flames that started this Yule log of a record came from an epiphany of sorts. "When we were rehearsing, we noticed Oh Come All Ye Faithful was like We're Not Gonna Take It, literally the first six notes, which gave us a laugh. But yes, for us to do this Christmas album was fun, but it wasn't really like when you sit down and write a lot of songs, because you grew up with all the songs all these years. The toughest part was taking a lot of the classics, and not do them like everybody else did... you know, really light. And it really wasn't that different or difficult; it came natural to us, but we still wanted to do it, where it left nothing for anybody to say that we were making fun of Christmas or knocking it. Whatever you want to say - or Tipper Gore and every other one of these do-gooders want to say about us - there's nothing that you can say about this album. Because if you do, you have to criticize Elvis Christmas, and every album that is out there that has been done rock. So that's why nobody has been saying anything."

TWISTED CHRISTMAS - Get Out Yer Santa Claws! Page 3