Twisted Sister’s Jay Jay French Reveals Cancer Scare
Twisted Sister’s guitarist Jay Jay French revealed in a new interview that he had contracted prostate cancer, but he's certain he has beaten the disease.
Speaking with Dean Delray on the comedian’s Let There Be Talk podcast, French proclaimed, “I'm a prostate cancer survivor. I was diagnosed in March and I had an operation in April, and they tell me I'm cured.”
French, who is 65 years old, said that because of his family history, he and his doctors have been on the lookout for the disease for some time.
“They've been watching me for 15 years,” he noted, “because my father died of it ... in '84. And then starting in 2004, they started watching me carefully, and my brother carefully, and we knew this wasn't a matter of 'if'; it was a matter of 'when.’
“So when [I was] finally diagnosed ... I had to deal with it,” French continued. “[I] had to proactively deal with it. ... I went in the hospital and had it removed."
You can listen to the interview below.
Delray’s interview with French is two hours’ worth of stories about Twisted Sister’s early days and a wide range of other topics, including his family, living in New York City, growing up playing music and seeing great concerts at the Fillmore East, such as Jimi Hendrix’s New Years 1970 shows that resulted in the classic Band of Gypsys album.
Twisted Sister, who had struggled for years before making it big in 1984 with the iconic hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” played their final gig on Nov. 12, 2016, having lost drummer AJ Pero to a heart attack the year before. The band’s frontman, Dee Snider, is releasing a new solo album, For the Love of Metal, July 27, and recently revealed a lyric video for the LP’s first single, "Tomorrow's No Concern.”