Leader Of The Pack

Leader Of The Pack by Twisted Sister: Glam Metal Meets Girl-Group Mythology

Dee Snider's Band at the Peak of Their Moment

By the end of 1985, Twisted Sister had already done something that seemed improbable to anyone who had watched them slog through the New York bar circuit for years: they had made themselves famous. We're Not Gonna Take It and I Wanna Rock had turned the band's cartoonish defiance into genuine commercial currency, and their album Stay Hungry had sold millions. Music videos in which the band's over-the-top drag-inspired look was used to maximum absurd effect had made them a fixture on MTV, a channel that rewarded visual excess generously in 1984 and 1985. So when the band turned to covering the Shangri-Las' classic Leader of the Pack on their 1985 follow-up album Come Out and Play, the move carried a kind of cocky self-assurance. This was a band confident enough in its own identity to try on a girl-group classic and see how it fit over studded leather.

The Original and the Heavy Metal Reinvention

The Shangri-Las' 1964 original was one of the great teen tragedy records, a story told in motorcycle rumble and melodrama, with spoken-word passages that felt like cinematic cutaways. Twisted Sister's version understood that the drama was the whole point. Dee Snider's vocal approach treated the narrative with enough seriousness to function as genuine tribute while the production inflated everything to the proportions of a mid-1980s metal record: bigger drums, heavier guitars, more deliberate bombast. The cover did not attempt to improve on the original; it attempted to transplant it into a different sonic universe and see how much of the original feeling survived the journey. Quite a lot did.

The Chart Performance

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 30, 1985, entering at number 88, and climbed steadily through the holiday season, peaking at number 53 during the week of January 11, 1986. It spent 10 weeks on the chart, a respectable run for a cover single by a band whose momentum was primarily driven by original material and visual spectacle. The chart performance placed it in the middle tier of the band's commercial output, lower than their signature songs but proof that mainstream radio was still willing to follow Twisted Sister into unexpected territory.

The Context of Come Out and Play

The album that housed Leader of the Pack was released during a slightly awkward moment for Twisted Sister. The initial frenzy around Stay Hungry had created commercial expectations that were difficult to sustain, and Come Out and Play was received with somewhat muted enthusiasm compared to its predecessor. The cover of the Shangri-Las song was one of the album's most distinctive moments precisely because it did something unexpected: it revealed a playfulness and a genuine affection for pop history that the band's leather-and-attitude image sometimes obscured. Dee Snider had always been a smarter craftsman than the costumes suggested, and the choice to cover this particular song proved it. Someone who has spent years thinking seriously about songwriting recognizes a classic when he hears one, and the Shangri-Las had made a record that rewarded anyone willing to look past its 1960s pop context and hear the underlying structural intelligence.

Where the Song Lives Now

Twisted Sister's catalogue from this period occupies a comfortable place in nostalgia culture, the soundtrack to a certain flavour of 1980s defiance that has been revisited in films, television, and advertising for decades. Leader of the Pack sits slightly apart from the band's signature songs in that canon, but it rewards the listener who seeks it out. The combination of a genuinely great original song and the specific energy of a band at full commercial confidence produces something more interesting than a straight nostalgia trip. It sounds like a band having fun with its own power, which is a good feeling to be near.

Turn it up and appreciate what the Shangri-Las built, filtered through leather and attitude.

“Leader Of The Pack” — Twisted Sister's singular moment on the 1980s charts.