Twisted Sister (singular, although there were 5 of them they were not the ‘Twisted Sisters’!) found themselves between a rock and a hard place in 1985 upon the multi-platinum success of the ‘Stay Hungry’ album.
What could they possibly come up with to match such a milestone?
As it turned out, they couldn’t quite do that with ‘Come Out And Play’, which was released in November of 1985.
However, it’s still a very powerful statement to this day, and we at Metal Department have already celebrated the albums 35th anniversary by issuing a collective metal coin (find it here), designed to mimmick the stunning sleeve artwork that adorned ‘Come Out And Play’.
This is the story of TWISTED SISTER’s album cover for ‘Come Out And Play’.
Certainly no expense was spared in designing the legendary Twisted Sister album cover artwork, which depicts vocalist Dee Snider crawling out of a manhole in the streets of New York City, and with the classic Twisted Sister logo completely transformed into streetwise graffiti on the back of the cover.
Recently artwork director Mark Weiss released a cool video montage documenting his work on the sleeve, which you can view below (it also includes some great pictures of Twisted Sister from that same period).
Twisted Sister songs off the album of note was of course ‘Fire Still Burns’, ‘Kill or Be Killed’, ‘I Believe in You’ and ‘Out in the Streets’.
MTV was what really broke ‘Twisted Sista’ to the masses in 1984, and this album offered another 2 great Twisted Sister videos: ‘Leader Of The Pack’ and ‘Be Chrool to Your Scuel’ (in which Alice Cooper featured), the latter sadly being banned by MTV as it was basically a mini horror movie, completely with zombies and all.
Beside the video controversy, Twisted Sisters’ lyrics also came under attack during this period via the infamous P.M.R.C. hearings, which found Dee Snider joining Frank Zappa and John Denver as star witnesses against the proposed music censorship.
Full Twisted Sister studio album discography:
Under the Blade (Released: September 1982)
You Can’t Stop Rock ‘n’ Roll (Released: June 1983)
Stay Hungry (Released: May 10, 1984)
Come Out and Play (Released: November 5, 1985)
Websites of note: