Dee Snider – Mystic Lake Showroom – Prior Lake MN – October 13th 2017

Dee Snider Mystic Lake Casino  Prior Lake, MN 10/13/17

For those of you that are casual Twisted Sister fans and may not know this, Dee Snider is on a solo tour promoting his new album “We Are The Ones”. He headlined this particular show which is a two day event put on by Mystic Lake Casino.

The opening act was Dokken, wow were they bad! There’s just no harmony left in that band and they are like Great White (Not the Jack Russell version). They are the band that just won’t go away that has settled for mediocrity and will continue to play festivals all around the country. Whether you like it or not, if you go to festival shows, you’re going to have to sit through this. My recommendation would be go have a bite to eat while they’re on.

I’ve never been a huge Twisted Sister fan but I’ve always like them and understood their popularity. They have written many very memorable songs and have their place in rock history. Having said that I think anytime you have a member of a famous band breaks out on his own to try to do something different, it can be a daunting task.

What I really liked about Dee Snider’s performance is he’s not scared to be himself. I found the new music to be very refreshing because it was different. It’s still rock ‘n roll but it’s much more modernized than what you would expect from Twisted Sister. At one point he chose to cover the Nine Inch Nails song “Head Like A Hole”. That takes a lot of courage to try something that different. He even remarked before they played the song that this would’ve never worked with Twisted Sister because it has keyboards.

I commend him for being on the road, writing new music and bring it to the masses. He played several songs off his new CD and opened with the title track “We Are The Ones”. He also did some different things with a few of the Twisted Sister songs. An example would be he did the first half or so of the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It” in a slower acoustic version then went into a full band finish. He also did the songs that you would expect him to do like “You Can’t Stop Rock ‘N Roll”, “I Wanna Rock” and one of my personal favorites “The Price”.

One thing I can say about Dee is he knows how to entertain a crowd. He runs all over the stage and engages his audience.  He also talks to the crowd which I think is important. When I mentioned the set list to a friend who is a big Twisted Sister fan, the first question he asked is how did the crowd react that he didn’t do even more Twisted Sister songs? My response is, they didn’t seem to care. People were into it from the very beginning to the very last note.

If you want to get out and see a great evening of rock ‘n roll music, I highly recommend you go see Dee Snider live. You will know several of the songs that he plays and learn some new ones that can become your favorites as well.

Review and photos by Tommy Sommers.