WATCH: MTV’s Rock the Cradle - "The highest score of the season!"

I was approached about “Rock the Cradle” in 2005. I’d been the subject of an episode of MTV’s Ultrasound about the children of rockstars and it seemed that premise had inspired this singing competition. I was on the fence about doing it from the start. On one hand, I hated nepotism and had worked hard to earn my way in music on my own, doing this show would essentially throw away the credibility I felt I had earned over 6 years of playing clubs with my then band “Baptized By Fire” but I never actually said, “no”. THREE YEARS LATER I was flying high as a six figure voice over actor in New York, and my band “Baptized By Fire” was generally bleeding money and only entertaining shitty Independent record contracts. People had always told me that I spread myself too thin with making music, writing comic books, playing semi-pro football, hosting and working in voice over and that I needed to focus on doing one thing well and since at the time the one thing that was actually paying my bills was voice overs, I began preparing the people closest to me that I was thinking about making music a hobby and going full time into voice over instead. Literally the morning I officially decided to quit, a phone call came in from the producers of the reality competition, now called “Rock the Cradle”. I was spooked. I hadn’t really ever planned to do the show, though I was happy to be asked, but now I was literally out the door, done with music, quitting. Was this some kind of sign? A second chance for my band, Baptized By Fire to be recognized? I decides to do it. But not so fast, now all of a sudden the producers want me to audition. Never mind that I have a whole album for them to listen to and dozens of live performance videos, they want me to come down to the offices at MTV and sing them a song. So, I reach out to my great friend and bass player Dan Carlisle and we head down to MTV with a guitar and play an acoustic rendition of the Baptized By Fire song “One Way Track”. (bit.ly/BXFonewaytrack) The meeting is cold and impersonal and I'm not exactly sure what to make of it. They’d been calling me for three years about this and now I was only a “maybe”...? I was finally cast on the show, but was given the feeling I had been cast as an oddity, another flavor for the mix, a good excuse to feature clips from my father’s colorful MTV defining music videos and NOT because they viewed me as talented or an actual contender to win the show. This really pissed me off and I instantly became determined to prove them all wrong and steal the show out from under everyone. Week 1: I marched out onto the stage, grabbed the microphone and belted out the Led Zepplin classic, “Rock ’n’ Roll” finishing with a backflip in front of the drums, the crowd goes wild. No other contestant had gone over half as well as I did and it was the same thing with the home audience, they loved me. (bit.ly/JBSrocknroll) Most online sources name me the show’s frontrunner after the first episode airs andI'm only getting started. BUT as successful as my first performance is, I quickly notice the narrative the producers are creating about me is extremely unflattering. Week 2: I come out with a foot-tall Mohawk belting out Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell”! My knee slide midway through seals the deal for the judges who award me the highest scores of the show so far, 35.5 out of 40 earning me my first sit in “the untouchable chair” which saves me from potentially being voted off the show next week. Now, it’s official, I am the man to beat on RTC. (bit.ly/JBSrebelyell) But AGAIN the video packages of me do not present me in a very good light, they do not make me seem like a particularly caring or deep person. Suffice to say this did not sit well with me at all. For Week 3, the other contestants and I are informed that we will have to cover one of our parent’s hit songs and I quickly come up with a plan to change the narrative the producers have been going with about me and shift it to something else, something that might even help with my performance of my father’s classic, “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. I call up my father and mother and fill them in, they love it, I am going to PRETEND to do “We’re Not Gonna Take It” like a BALLAD and switch gears halfway through. THIS will show the audience that I don’t NEED to hide behind rock music, but that I choose to because it’s what I love and believe in. We pretend my parents don’t know the plan, so that my video package for the week is all about the strange way I have chosen to perform “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and NOT about me being some kind of cocky asshole, which seemed to be the feeling about me that they were trying to get across. Week 3: I do it again! The bait and switch is a complete success. My parents play along perfectly and when I break the acoustic guitar and rip my button down shirt to reveal a tattered Twisted Sister T-shirt the room explodes even more then my last two performances! (bit.ly/JBSwngti)

Again, I receives the NEW “highest scores yet” 37.5 out of 40! I have now taken control of the show and AGAIN am exiled to “the untouchable chair” but THIS TIME I asks NOT to be untouchable! Unfortunately, I am stuck in my untouchable position, which makes me nervous, because if America doesn’t have to vote for me 2 weeks in a row, will they remember to vote for me next week when I inevitably score lower? Sensing the coming changing of tides, I strips my next performance down to a cool look and some strong vocals with a modified punk rock version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”. Week 3: As predicted the judges go much harder on me this week, Belinda Carlisle calls me a “fake punk” and I later fires back but the audience can not be denied. “Ring of Fire” may put me up for elimination that week, but I ain’t going no where. (bit.ly/JBSringoffire) After Belinda’s “fake punk” comment and my colorful retort the producers are interested in keeping the conflict going, but I know that this will simply play into the false narrative about my character that they have been pushing from the start, but how to handle the producers? They finally tell me that I can perform one of my favorite songs of all time, “Prisoner of Society” by the Living End. Problem is, they are only allowing me to play this song, because the lyrics reenforce the way they have been portraying me from the very beginning, “Because I’m a brat and I know everything and I talk back and I won’t listen to anything you say.” The producers ask me if he can jump onto the judges stand during the performance and sing the part about not listening directly to Belinda, I agree. But I do NOT sing to Belinda like I said I would, in fact earlier in the show I apologizes to her, completely diffusing the tension. Week 4: I front flips off the judges stand into the crowd, backflip in front of the drums and collapse at the end onto the floor with the biggest smile on my face of my life. I know I have just brought the house down and perhaps given the performance of my life. Belinda Carlisle gives me a 10 out of 10, “I didn’t want to give you a 10!” I score the highest of the entire season, 39 out of a possible 40. If I was gonna win this thing, this is the outcome I needs. Now, it’s all left to the people voting at home. For the last episode, the final two contestants and myself were told to prepare an original song for the possible final moments of the show. This is BXF’s big break, I'm gonna sing “Juggernaut” and I know that when the world hears that song they are gonna know that Jesse Blaze Snider is a hell of a lot more than the child of a rockstar who can sing Karaoke, he is a song writer and a true rockstar in his own right. The RTC house band who I have bonded with over the past month do an amazing job translating the BXF classic into a shorter reality show version and I have never been more ready to perform it in my life. (A crappy recording of the rehearsal of “JUGGERNAUT” with the Rock the Cradle house band can be heard here: bit.ly/RTCrehearsals) Unfortunately, I never get the chance to sing “Juggernaut” on the show. Week 5: I open the show singing “The Anthem” by Good Charlotte and launching myself off the stage into the crowd. (bit.ly/JBStheanthem) In the final moments of RTC the winner is announced and it isn’t me. I put on a good face and congratulated the winner, the man the producers have pit me against since episode 1, the man that producers edited very positively while they were editing me negatively. Despite my best efforts to take control of the show's narrative, somehow the producers had convinced the audience that I did not deserve to win. When the show was over, myself, my wife, my parents, my siblings and all our best friends who came down to see the finale went back to my dressing room and…well, it was kinda like someone had died. We were all kind of puzzled, based on everything that had happened up until that point, we were all CONVINCED that I was the hands down winner and yet somehow I wasn’t. Twenty minutes went by without a single word being spoken in the dressing room before my brother Cody finally broke the silence by noting that the room had literally been completely silent for a full 20 minutes. We were all in shock and ever so disappointed. I had given it everything I had, but somehow it wasn’t enough. I left my dressing room for the last time and headed to the world famous Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip for my “moral victory” party with my band Baptized By Fire. Shirtless with my hair decked out in “liberty spikes”, the band and I brought the house down when we played “Juggernaut” and our moral victory was achieved. To this day, “You were robbed!” is a common comment in relation to the Rock the Cradle outcome. I generally look back on my RTC experience fondly. I am proud of my performances. I made a number of great friends. And I am generally very happy with how I handled myself in a very manipulative situation. My performance of “Prisoner of Society” on the penultimate episode stands as one of the proudest moments of my life. Enjoy...