Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

by Chuck Klosterman

  Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love (1982, Elektra): Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m including this album instead of Shout at the Devil, the Crüe record I so aggressively pimped in the opening pages of this book. Well, two reasons: for one thing, I’m sick of talking about Shout, and—quite frankly—this is a better LP.

  I’ve never been too crazy about the popular opener “Live Wire,” a song Mötley still plays in every concert. However, I adore “Come On and Dance” (even though it’s almost impossible to dance to) and “Public Enemy #1” (even though the lyrics never mention what atrocity our antagonist supposedly committed). Too Fast for Love was originally released by the band independently on Lethur Records (they tossed them into club audiences while Nikki Sixx’s boots burned), and the Elektra re-release still seems a little cheap; Vince Neil’s vocals sound shallow, and at least in this instance it’s not his fault. The guitars all sound like they’re made of tin, but that gives everything an aluminum sheen. Light metal (or metal lite), I suppose.

  The strength of Too Fast is the stylized trashiness; it’s the Crüe at their glammiest and (one hopes) most sincere. Still, the crafty marketing of Nikki Sixx is already obvious: The cover art is such a rote Sticky Fingers rip-off that it qualifies as an homage—but almost none of its intended audience had ever seen the original! As a selling tool, Vince Neil’s crotch worked exactly the same way Warhol groupie Jed Johnson’s did. Just like the music, it was old material that seemed completely fresh to thirteen-year-old kids with no sense of history (like me, for example).

  The title cut is probably the album’s best rocker, while the closing ballad “On with the Show” is the finest slow song the band would ever make (it’s twice as gut-wrenching as “Home Sweet Home,” which basically means it’s half as gut-wrenching as Big Star’s “Holocaust” and one-tenth as effective as Snoopy, Come Home). The only misstep was the baffling exclusion of “Toast of the Town,” the very first single Mötley ever released (and in case you’re curious, the B-side was “Stick to Your Guns”). Fortunately, that track was reincluded on the ’99 re-release.

  It will be interesting to see how Mötley Crüe is eventually categorized by rock historians; I sometimes wonder if they’ll end up being the ’80s version of Nazareth or Foghat. They honestly deserve better. When you place heavy metal in a cultural context, Too Fast for Love is the kind of album that kind-of-sort-of matters. Whenever you forget what made glam metal so ridiculously popular, listen to this record. This is what happened when four Hollywood hobos got it right. (Jack Factor: $1,333)

  Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction (1987, Geffen): Well, this is pretty much it.

  Appetite for Destruction is the singular answer to the question, “Why did hair metal need to exist?” After all the coke and the car wrecks and the screaming and the creaming and the musical masturbation and the pentagrams and the dead hookers, this is what we are left with—the best record of the 1980s, regardless of genre. If asked to list the ten best rock albums of all time, this is the only pop metal release that might make the list; it’s certainly the only Reagan-era material that can compete with the White Album and Rumours and Electric Warrior. Appetite for Destruction is an Exile on Main Street for all the kids born in ’72, except Appetite rocks harder and doesn’t get boring in the middle. It bastardizes every early Aerosmith record, but all the lyrics are smarter and Axl is a better dancer.

  Part of the credit for the success of this five-headed juggernaut has to go to Nigel Dick, the faceless fellow who directed all the videos for GNR’s early singles. One needs to remember that Appetite was out for almost a year before it cracked the Billboard Top 10 in 1988. Most people assume that this was because of the single “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” but the real reason was the video for “Welcome to the Jungle.” The first fifteen seconds of that vid explain everything we need to know: Axl gets off a bus in downtown L.A. with a piece of friggin’ hay in his mouth (and evidently, he didn’t do much chewing during the twenty-six-hour bus ride from Indiana, because it still looks pretty fresh). The first time I heard this song, I was riding the Octopus at the North Dakota State Fair in Minot, and I had no idea what the fuck it was supposed to be about—but I still kinda liked it. When I saw this video two months later, I realized that Axl wasn’t welcoming me to the jungle, people were welcoming him. Suddenly, the whole album made a lot more sense: Axl Rose was screaming because he was scared.

  From the brazen misogyny of “It’s So Easy” to the pleading vulnerability of “Rocket Queen,” the album is a relentless exercise in high-concept sleaze. “Nightrain” is my personal favorite; Axl insists he’s “one bad mutha,” and he proves it by waking up his whore and making her buy four-dollar wine with her Visa card. “Mr. Brownstone” is hard funk on hard drugs, and it cleverly tells us how rock stars are supposed to live—you wake up at seven, you get out of bed at nine, and you always take the stage two hours late. “Paradise City” is probably the musical high point; it has GNR’s signature soft-heavy-soft vocal sequence and the best chorus in metal history. “Paradise City” still seems like a disco classic waiting to happen.

  The flip side is a little dirtier, starting with the unsettling “My Michele” and the semisweet “Think About You.” The material is dark and purposefully hidden (kind of like Slash’s eyes, I suppose), and the drums are ferocious; it sounds like Steven Adler is setting off cherry bombs in his drum kit. And through it all, the guitar playing is stellar. On Appetite for Destruction, Slash invented a new style of playing that’s best described as “blues punk.” He simultaneously sounds raw and polished—the master craftsman who came to work loaded. It was a style that sold 15 million records, but almost nobody managed to copy it (including Slash, who never really got it right again—even when he consciously tried on 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?).

  There are those who will argue that the best thing that could have happened to Guns N’ Roses would have been death, probably in about 1991. They were certainly on the right path (in fact, the rumor persists that David Geffen wanted Use Your Illusion to be a double album because he suspected someone in the band would be dead before they could cut anything else). From a romantic (read: selfish) perspective, there’s some truth to this argument; it would be nice if Appetite for Destruction was all we really knew about this band of gypsies; Axl would have never lost his hair and the Gunners would have never become such bloated disasters.

  Since Rose legally obtained the rights to the name Guns N’ Roses in 1991, GNR is Axl Rose for all practical (and impractical) purposes. Put Axl onstage with the starting five of the Quad City Thunder, and that qualifies as “the new Guns N’ Roses.” The group still exists, but it’s almost like comparing Jefferson Airplane to Starship: As I write this, the ever-evolving lineup consists of Axl, Dizzy Reed, former Replacements’ bassist Tommy Stinson, Buckethead (a robot-obsessed guitar freak who wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his dome), Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails, Brian “Brain” Mantia (the drummer from Primus who replaced Josh Freese, the guy from the Vandals who played on the new Guns record but has also quit the band since the album’s completion), and what amounts to Axl’s buddies from high school. The next album’s working title is Chinese Democracy and it’s rumored to be aggressive industrial metal in the spirit of Led Zeppelin, filtered through the sensibilities of Stevie Wonder; I can only imagine what this will be like, although it’s safe to assume it will be twice as good as Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds, three times as good Slash’s Snakepit, and five hundred times better than anything Duff McKagan ever released. But it will never be as good as this, and I suspect AxlA knows it. (Jack Factor: $5,001)

  February 18, 1989

  The staunchly uncompromising, previously untouchable speed metal of Metallica is on the radio with “One” (No. 78 on the singles chart).

  The death of ’80s heavy metal is sometimes compared to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that’s a perfect analogy, even though most of the people who make this argument don’t understand why
.

  Everyone seems to think that dinosaurs lived for 165 million years and then managed to die in the course of one really shitty afternoon. Hacks usually describe the process as if it was a devastating collision of coincidence: The world bumped into a comet, the global thermostat dropped like an Acme anvil, and a bunch of furry little ferrets suddenly decided to eat all the T-Rex eggs in Eurasia. By suppertime, every Thunder Lizard on earth was eating dirt and awaiting petrifaction.

  Obviously, this theory is flawed.

  The historical reality is that the dinosaurs died quickly in terms of the planet, which is a hard concept for modern man to relate to. Hair metal’s demise happened in much the same way: It died quickly, but only in terms of how society consumes pop culture. Retrospectively, the decline of the glam rock empire seems to have happened so rapidly that it already feels like it’s been unpopular for twenty-five years; in truth, metal was still the biggest genre in rock as late as 1991. When Guns N’ Roses released Use Your Illusion 1 & II in September of that year, it momentarily seemed like the defining moment for an entire generation: At midnight, thousands of people lined up at record stores to buy GNR’s much-awaited follow-up to Appetite for Destruction as soon as it went on sale that Tuesday. At the time, this was a legitimately unique deal; although the concept of opening stores at midnight soon became commonplace for marquee records (which would include everything from Pearl Jam’s Vs. to seemingly workmanlike releases from Green Day and the Wu-Tang Clan), no one in their twenties could ever remember this happening before. At the time, I was a college sophomore, and Guns had become my favorite band (MTV deserves some of the credit for that; they had been hyping the GNR record since May, filling my summer evenings with rockumentaries that featured rambling diatribes from a drunken Duff McKagan and bootleg concert clips of Axl Rose starting a riot in St. Louis). My friends and I spent hours hanging out at the one record store in Grand Forks that had an advance copy of the two discs, and we browsed for hours just to hear bits of the new record on the in-store stereo system. On Monday night, we all had about seven beers each and then stood in line on that brisk North Dakota evening, joining the endless masses of people waiting to get in the door of locally owned stores like Disc & Tape and Budget Tapes & Records. And what I remember most is that the majority of these people were clearly not “metal kids.” Judging from their appearance, these conservatively dressed frat boys and sorority girls could have been fans of anything, or—more likely—fans of nothing. It may have been the first time I ever consciously took part in a cultural event.

  But that was just the state of music in 1991. Heavy metal was the predominant music of the era, and Guns N’ Roses was the genre’s best band. Tower Records in Los Angeles sold 23,000 copies of those Illusion albums in twenty-four hours, and that made perfect sense. What most of us did not know (especially those of us in Middle America) was that 46,251 copies of some wacky little record called Nevermind had been sent to stores across the country for a September 24 street date. A new world had already been recorded; we just didn’t know it yet. By Thanksgiving, I had a copy of Nevermind, as did all the people I knew who followed rock with any seriousness. By Christmas, it was filtering down to anyone who bought music in general (although that phenomenon seemed more tied to the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video than it did to any sort of philosophical revolution). Butch Vig was a faceless assassin, and we all unknowingly purchased the death of W. Axl Rose.

  The sad irony is that most metal fans looked at Nirvana as a metal band. It seems crazy now, but—for a few fleeting moments on the cultural calendar of early ’92—the band that many casual rock kids compared (and sometimes even confused) with Nirvana was Ugly Kid Joe. The distinction between grunge and metal was initially unclear: Soundgarden opened for GNR; Alice in Chains originally called themselves “Alice N Chainz.” The first time we heard someone mention the idea of an emerging “Seattle Sound,” I recall my roommate mentioning he was happy because he liked Queensryche.

  The biggest myth about the whole “alternative revolution” was that it happened overnight, and that it swept the commercial insincerity of the 1980s off the map on the strength of a few catchy, grungy guitar riffs from Aberdeen, Washington. That’s not true. We live in an accelerated culture, but its acceleration is increased retrospectively. It would be almost three years before the world heard its second most important Gen X anthem, Beck’s “Loser.” For a college student, three years is a long time.

  What made it seem so sweeping is that for people born in the early 1970s, the transformation was all too clear. I was able to become a major rock fan at a time when cock rock was thriving and growing (the summer of 1984) and exit college on the heels of Kurt Cobain’s death, the ultimate example of how absolutely everything about rock ’n’ roll (and its audience) had changed.

  Of course, every hard-rock guy who’s still touring swears that metal is as popular as it ever was; “It’s just gone underground.” That’s the battle cry of everyone from Warrant to Megadeth, and in some ways it’s true. And not every band was struck by the cultural plague; obviously, Metallica figured out a way to expand their popularity and they have continued to sell more records than they ever did. Of course, some of that success was directly tied to the widespread decline of most of their peers. Even though Metallica mildly alienated some of their most loyal fans by becoming more commercial, there really wasn’t anyone to steal their market share.

  Bands like Marilyn Manson and Korn would seem like obvious extensions of ’80s metal (Manson loves to rave about Judas Priest), but those antiaesthetic sensibilities don’t wash with people who associate their tastes with the prettier, cleaner groups of the former decade. Industrial goth neo-metal suggests a different attitude, and—more importantly—it seems to specifically belong to a defined social sector within a defined demographic. Groups like Van Halen and Def Leppard were kind of made for everybody—guys, girls, stoners, bikers, farm kids, the JV debate team, even people who liked country music (in our football team’s locker room, AC/DC was the original “crossover” band). This is part of the explanation as to why pop metal bands were so damn successful.

  It’s also a big reason why musical pundits were so dismissive of their style: Party-obsessed headbangers lacked the hipness of exclusion. Metallica was one of the few ’80s metal groups who developed that kind of (ahem) “credibility.” They were painfully serious and seemed to be playing music for different reasons than somebody like Jon Bon Jovi, and—at least at first—Metallica offered a sound that was legitimately more intense than the rest of the pack. Idiots always say that Metallica “sold out” between … And Justice For All and their eponymous 1992 Black Album, but that’s nothing compared to their evolution from 1983’s Kill ’Em All to 1984’s Ride the Lightning, an album best remembered for the suicide ballad “Fade to Black.” On their debut record, they had openly expressed a desire to go out and kill people; by their sophomore follow-up, they merely wanted to kill themselves.

  It’s my suspicion that when today’s new generation of rock writers matures into forty-five-year-old bastards and starts running the media industry, Metallica will suddenly become more and more “important,” perhaps even on scale with Led Zeppelin and the Who. They’ve managed to sustain a career that has stretched nearly two decades, and they’ve cleverly excelled at both sides of the cultural equation: Metallica started as an uncompromising underground band who appealed to a fringe hardcore audience, but they’ve seamlessly evolved into a commercial juggernaut that seems to release a new video to MTV every seventy-two hours. They have been the Madonna and they have been the whore, and future historians will ultimately adore them for both.

  But Metallica never meant shit to someone like me. In fact, they kind of pissed me off. When I was a glamour-starved sophomore in high school, James Hetfield was ugly and humorless; when I was an elitist sophomore in college, he made witless sorority bitches like speed metal. Even when his songs were good, I hated their social ramifications.

 
Metallica was influenced by the so-called new wave of British metal (NWOBM), a collection of Europeans who played raw, needlessly complicated songs and lacked mascara, lip liner, and irony. These are groups like the power-hungry Judas Priest, the Samuel Taylor Coleridge-obsessed Iron Maiden, a handful of groups that described “heads” (Diamond Head, Motorhead, et al.), and a band called Tygers of Pang Tang who I’ve never listened to (not even once).

  Musically, these were decent groups that serious (read: unlikeable) metal fans worship, and they will claim that these particular outfits have “stood the test of time” better than the American pretty boys. A better description would be that they still seem about as fun as they did when they were fresh (read: not very). The best NWOBM music came from Priest and Motorhead, especially when they would lean toward a slightly commercial sound (very slightly in the case of Motorhead). The biggest thing they did was to provide the theoretical inspiration for our next generation of unhappy fellows: speed metal (and speed metal’s bastard son, death metal).

  In June of 1998, I covered a Slayer concert at the Odeon Club in downtown Cleveland. The show was a sell-out, which surprised me at the time. It kind of illustrates how much blue-collar midwestern cities continue to love hard rock, regardless of how often the media tells them they should hate it.

  This was the most intense show I ever attended. It was actually kind of terrifying, and I’m the kind of person who generally enjoys watching other people’s self-destructive intensity. About a thousand people packed themselves into this tiny club near Lake Erie and went absolutely ballistic for two hours. Slayer would be Spinal Tap if they possessed even an ounce of irony, but—as it is—they are most serious band who ever lived. The result is absolutely punishing. Slayer is kind of like a guy who walks up to you in a bar and says he’s going to rape your wife, burn down your house, shoot all your friends, cover your kids with acid, and then slowly starve you to death while rats nibble away at your emaciated flesh. Now, if this hypothetical guy is merely a drunken goofball, that kind of complex depravity seems hilarious (almost endearing). But if he’s the one guy on earth willing (and able) to do all those things, you’d suddenly realize you’re talking to the craziest, most sinister motherfucker who ever lived. Slayer is that one guy.