Rock stars have been putting their own spin on the holidays pretty much since rock music was invented, with Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run” and the Beach Boys’s “Little Saint Nick” becoming Christmas classics and artists from the Jackson 5 to Weezer covering the standards. It’s a lot less common that the holidays put their own spin on a rock band, but that’s more or less what happened with the composition of “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” entirely without the knowledge of Twisted Sister. If you’re not sure what we’re talking about, listen to frontman Dee Snider alternate between verses of his band’s 1984 hit and “O, Come All Ye Faithful.”
It wasn’t until the ‘90s, when Snider was chatting with Al Pitrelli, the guitarist of his new band Widowmaker, that he realized what happened. “We were discussing song plagiarism,” he said, “when Al says, ‘And, of course, ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ is ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful.’” Snider “sat there dumbfounded” as Pitrelli sang the two songs back to back and it sank in that “it turns out I stole the chord progression.”
The rest of the band was in the dark even longer, until they were intentionally recording Christmas songs for their album A Twisted Christmas in 2006, when Snider shared with them what Pitrelli had said. “So we had transposed it, and it worked,” guitarist Jay Jay French said. “It’s not exact, but close. But it was never consciously done.” Snider noted that “I sang in the church choir until I was 19 years old must have sung ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ hundreds of times,” and concluded that “somehow, the first six notes of it infiltrated my psyche.”
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Far from shying away from their newfound Christmas connection, the band has leaned into it. They recorded the Christmas classic properly for their album and performed a mashup of the song live in concert, and Snider included the mashup in his 2014 stage musical Dee Snider’s Rock and Roll Christmas Tale. For the youths out there, this is a little like if Lil Nas X got very into Easter, complete with cotton-tailed catsuit and straight-faced performance of the Passion Play. Father Time and Father Christmas come for us all.
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