DEE SNIDER Offers Heavy Metal Help To Pennsyvania High School Rockers: Video Available

April 22, 2005

NBC10.com is reporting that a Hamburg, Pennsylvania High School rock group wasn't going to take its exclusion from a school talent show, so they fought it and got some heavy metal help from a TWISTED SISTER.

Earlier this year, the school administrators decided that no rock bands with electric instruments could play at the high school talent show because they feared it could lead to safety problems with moshing.

Senior Greg Miller Jr. just wanted to rock his high school talent show one last time, but the new restrictions meant no show for him.

"No electric music, period. Everything had to be played unplugged. If there was an electric performance, we wouldn't be able to perform," Miller said.

Miller decided to do something about it. He petitioned the school board to allow electric guitars and amps at the show.

"At 215 signatures later, we went to the school board and the school board said, 'We're going to have to look at the issue,'" Miller said.

Miller's plight reached the ears of TWISTED SISTER's frontman, Dee Snider.

"To single out a particular type or form of entertainment or certain talent and say, 'We're not going to feature that,' is censorship," Snider said.

In the 1980s Snider fought music censorship. Now, he is a DJ for radio station WMMR and on-air he repeatedly criticized the Hamburg School District administrators for threatening to ban electric instruments from the show.

"I had an opportunity, I had a microphone and I could make noise and I could help raise some hell, and why not?" Snider said.

The school board eventually backed down.

Miller and his band did a cover of TWISTED SISTER's biggest song, "We're Not Going To Take It".

The group chose the song before Snider joined their fight to rock. Snider even decided to join them on stage during the show Thursday night (April 21).

"Wow. This is going to be completely nuts. This is never probably going to happen to me again," Miller said.

The $1,500 that was raised for the talent show will be donated to fourth-grader Codey Smith, a child who is battling leukemia.

Watch an NBC10.com video report on Dee Snider' involvement with the talent show at this location.

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