---
title: "Tough Love from Twisted Sister's Jay Jay French"

description: "Jay Jay French joins for a hard hitting and brutally honest look at what the music industry is really like, and what it takes to make it. Learn how playing over 9,000 live shows helped lead to going multi-platinum, and how the bumpy the road to rock success really is."

status: complete

date: 2024-12-10

kind: guest

guestSlugs:
  - jay-jay-french

listenUrl: "https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lovemusicmore/episodes/Tough-Love-from-Twisted-Sisters-Jay-Jay-French-e2s3av7"

lmwUrl: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4yzsvj7ftE"
appleUrl: "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tough-love-from-twisted-sisters-jay-jay-french/id1567355195?i=1000679862251&uo=4"
spotifyUrl: "https://open.spotify.com/episode/39CLX4cnvRJ0MEowsuN6BI"
youtubeUrl: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_5e1V34GDA"

topicsDiscussed:
  - "Love"
  - "The history of rock"
  - "Touring"
  - "Songwriting"
  - "Twisted Sister's long club grind (9,000+ shows)"
  - "The boredom of excellence & deliberate practice"
  - "Why they skipped CBGB, and sold out the Palladium instead"
  - "Band business models that evolve (and the nuclear option)"
  - "When to move on from a band member"
  - "Tour life, leaving for a gig at 2 p.m., home at 6 a.m."
  - "Entertainment as a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business"
  - "Keynote speaking & universal business lessons from rock"

hostNote: |
  Jay Jay French brings **tough-love business clarity** to a band story most people only know from the hits. Before Twisted Sister broke globally, the band logged thousands of 45-minute club sets: he cites **3,245 shows in the first 30 months alone** as the real answer to "how do you get good?"
  
  We talk through why they famously didn't need CBGB, how an evolving business model (and occasional "nuclear option") kept a volatile lineup functioning, and what it feels like when success immediately becomes "great, where's the next record?" He also walks through the unglamorous math of touring life and why he still finishes a song a week decades later, the same "boredom of excellence" frame from his book *Twisted Business*.

selectedMoments:
  - label: "3,245 shows, how you get good"
    startSec: 45
    note: "Opens with the pre-fame grind count and the 9,000-show arc to global stardom."
  - label: "The boredom of excellence"
    startSec: 971
    note: "Gold-medal skiing as metaphor, daily practice nobody sees until the win."
  - label: "Too big for CBGB"
    startSec: 1120
    note: "Selling out 5,000-seat rooms vs. playing Manhattan clubs for credibility."
  - label: "Business model that evolved"
    startSec: 1560
    note: "Not predetermined, shaped by alcoholism, lineup churn, and survival instincts."
  - label: "The nuclear option"
    startSec: 2400
    note: "Crisis management when popularity outruns sleep and the phone rings at 8 a.m."
  - label: "When to move on from a band member"
    startSec: 2887
    note: "Reform, creative control, and the line between dysfunction and end of band."
  - label: "~52 finished songs a year"
    startSec: 3552
    note: "Post-Twisted Sister output, mixed, mastered, out the door, every week."
  - label: "What have you done for me lately"
    startSec: 3669
    note: "Platinum success and the immediate pressure for the next record."

excerptQuotes:
  - text: "In the first 30 months of the band's career I played 3,245 forty-five-minute shows. If the question is how do you get good at what you do — you got to do it."
    startSec: 231
    reviewed: true
  - text: "I talk about the boredom of excellence — the person who wins the gold medal for skiing downhill has been doing it since they were eight or nine, up at five in the morning almost every day practicing."
    startSec: 975
    reviewed: true
  - text: "When people said, why didn't you play CBGB's — I say we're too big for all those places. We're selling out 5,000-seat bars."
    startSec: 1122
    reviewed: true
  - text: "The entertainment business is a tough-ass business. It is because it's a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business."
    startSec: 3667
    reviewed: true
  - text: "For any business — I don't care what it is — you go to the best restaurants in the world. You don't want to know how the chef is cooking it. You want the best damn dish on your plate."
    startSec: 3774
    reviewed: true

faq:
  - question: "What does Jay Jay French say about Twisted Sister's early career on Love Music More?"
    answer: "He emphasizes thousands of club shows before breakthrough, including 3,245 forty-five-minute sets in the band's first 30 months, and frames sustained repetition as the path to excellence rather than overnight luck."
  - question: "What is the 'boredom of excellence' Jay Jay French discusses?"
    answer: "From his book Twisted Business, the invisible daily practice behind visible wins (like an Olympic skier's years of 5 a.m. training before a gold medal). He applies the same idea to songwriting discipline after Twisted Sister."

transcriptPublished: false

draft: false
---