No.
“Obviously, being in an original band is the ultimate dream, but it mostly sucks,” Dischner says. “You don’t get to tour. You don’t get no money. You have to beg your own friends to come to the show. But being a mock star is awesome.”
Paradise City will earn $1,100 for the Harrisonburg show. After their manager takes his 15 percent and they pay for gas and promotions, they will be left with $655, which—split between five people—ends up being $131 each. This is almost nothing. But the operative word is “almost.” If these same five guys in Paradise City performed their own material, they would have to pay to play in most reputable clubs; as a tribute band, they can live as “professional musicians.” Relatively speaking, $1,100 is good money.
“The thing about being in a tribute band is that your fans already exist,” Trask says. “You show up at the bar, and there’s immediately a few hundred people who love Guns N’ Roses and therefore love you.”
This is not always true. A month later, Paradise City will play a show at a club called Dr. Feelgood’s in the desperate lake town of Conneaut, Ohio, and virtually no one will notice; the bar’s billiard tables will have more spectators than the stage, and the owner won’t even give them free beer until they finish the first set. It’s a bit uncomfortable for everyone involved, but not really humbling or tragic: No one in Paradise City seems confused about the social significance of this group.
“I never think of myself as Axl Rose, and we don’t think of ourselves as Guns N’ Roses,” Trask says. “Our fans are Guns N’ Roses fans—they’re not really fans of Paradise City. We’re not deluding ourselves.”
And in a way, somber nights in ghost towns like Conneaut validate their cred; Paradise City almost seems to enjoy adversity. They love talking about how “life on the road” is a hard-yet-satisfying experience. They give “tribute quotes” that sound like outtakes from VH1’s Behind the Music: It’s all about the fans, it’s all about the music, it’s all about the awe-inspiring majesty of rock; it’s all about something, and then it’s all about something else entirely. But they’re never lying—in tribute bands, all those clichés are true. Paradise City cares more about Guns N’ Roses than the original members of Guns N’ Roses care about the song “Paradise City.”
In fact, the guys in Paradise City seem to care about all music with more enthusiasm than any group of musicians I’ve ever encountered. There is no elitism. As we roll toward West Virginia, the truck’s stereo never plays an artist they dislike. They have positive things to say about Aerosmith, Nickelback, Celine Dion (!), Black Sabbath, White Lion, Pink Floyd, and Alabama. When Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me” comes on the radio, Dischner mentions that the song always makes him wish it were raining; ten minutes later, he tells me that Rush is “just about the greatest three-piece band ever,” and then gives a similar compliment to the Rush tribute band 2112.
We fly through the West Virginia border at 4:04 A.M. This is a strange part of the country, but perhaps an ideal place for a group trying to re-create 1988: On the same FM station that played Jewel and Rush, two early morning DJs are unironically joking about Julia Roberts’s relationship with Lyle Lovett.
After getting breakfast from the aforementioned redhead in White Sulphur Springs, we get back on the road (doomed to complete the voyage while driving into the rising sun). After hitting the Virginia state line, Trask begins scanning all the radio stations in the hope of hearing “The Commercial.” This is a radio spot promoting Paradise City’s concert at the Mainstreet Bar & Grill. The band gets excited about hearing “The Commercial” in the same way normal bands get excited about hearing their first single on the radio; for a tribute group, exposure equals success. When we finally hear said advertisement, it refers to Paradise City’s “triumphant return” to Virginia. High-fives are exchanged all around.
I want to talk about the real Guns N’ Roses for a while, and Trask is more than willing to oblige. Though he admits that his first musical love was Mötley Crüe (before Paradise City, he fronted a Mötley tribute called Bastard), one cannot deny his sincere adoration for GNR, a band whose legacy is—to be fair—problematic. Guns N’ Roses debuted as L.A.’s most dangerous band in 1987, blowing the doors off pop metal with Appetite for Destruction, arguably the strongest debut album in rock history. They followed with an EP titled GNR Lies, which is best remembered for the ballad “Patience” and the controversial “One in a Million,”3 a track that managed to be racist, homophobic, and xenophobic in just over six scant minutes. Two years later, the Gunners released two massive albums on the same day, Use Your Illusion I and II, cementing their place as the biggest band in the world. Yet by 1997, all had collapsed; one by one, every member—except the mercurial Axl Rose—either quit or was fired. Rose became a virtual recluse for almost a decade, endlessly working on his alleged masterpiece, Chinese Democracy, and earnestly growing dreadlocks.
I ask my traveling partners if they’re concerned about what will happen when Chinese Democracy eventually hits stores. It’s a paradoxical problem: If the album does well and Rose tours, it could decrease the demand for a GNR tribute; if the album flops, it might make the concept of a GNR “tribute” vaguely ridiculous. But Trask and Dischner aren’t worried. They’re confident there will always be a demand for the original incarnation of Guns N’ Roses, and that can only be experienced through their show. History is not an issue for these people; for them, the past is not different than the present, and the future will be identical. Every year, Axl Rose grows a little older, but Paradise City never ages beyond the summer of ’91.
We arrive at the Hampton Inn parking lot just before 11 A.M. The girl at the front desk is a little overweight, but she has a nice smile. Trask is impressed. “Do you like Guns N’ Roses?” he asks her. “We’re a Guns N’ Roses tribute band. I’m Axl. You should come to the show tonight at the Mainstreet. It’s going to be crazy. They love us here.”
In a few hours, members of the Paradise City entourage will have lunch at a nearby Long John Silver’s. A total stranger will ask Punky if they’re in a band. When Punky replies “Sort of,” the man will ask him, “Are you guys Molly Hatchet?”
There are no “fashion don’ts” inside the Mainstreet Bar & Grill in downtown Harrisonburg. You want to inexplicably wear a headband? Fine. You want to wear a FUBU sweatshirt with a baseball hat that features the Confederate flag? No problem. This is the kind of place where you will see a college girl attempting to buy a $2.25 glass of Natural Light on tap with her credit card—and have her card denied.
Certainly, the Mainstreet is not trendy. But it’s still cool, or at least interesting, and Paradise City has sold it out. Almost five hundred people (mostly kids from nearby James Madison University) have paid $12 to get inside, which is as many as the Mainstreet will draw for next week’s Dokken show. One can only wonder how the real guys in Dokken feel about being as popular as five fake guys in Guns N’ Roses.
The opening act is a local collegiate jam band called Alpine Recess; they look like they’d rather be opening for a Phish tribute, but the crowd is polite. Meanwhile, Paradise City is dressing downstairs in the basement,4 drinking free Budweiser in the storeroom, and leaning against the water heater. They have decided to open with the song “Night Train,” even though the tune includes an extended five-minute guitar solo that Young fears might anesthetize the audience.
Unlike the real GNR, Paradise City hits the stage exactly on time. However, things are not perfect: There are sound problems on “Night Train” that can only be described as cataclysmic, and Trask glares at the soundman. But things get better. Things get tighter. Trask moves his hips in Axl’s signature snake like sway, and the crowd sings along with everything. Paradise City may not always look like Guns N’ Roses, but they certainly sound like them; when I go to the bathroom and hear the music through a wooden door, it’s impossible not to imagine that this is how it would have sounded to urinate on the Sunset Strip in 1986.
“This next song
is dedicated to everybody who ever told you how to live,” Trask tells us as he prowls the twenty-five-foot-stage in his kilt. “This is for everybody who told you not to smoke weed or not to drink beer every day. There are just too many people who make life too hard.”
This soliloquy leads into the bubbling bass intro of “It’s So Easy,” the angriest three minutes off Appetite for Destruction. Girls begin crawling on stage to dance on top of the amplifiers, and the band couldn’t be happier. Ultimately, this is why they do this: They’re literally paying tribute to the music of Guns N’ Roses, but they’re figuratively paying tribute to the Guns N’ Roses Lifestyle. They’re totally willing to become other people, as long as those people party all the time, live like gypsies, and have pretty girls dancing on their amplifiers. This is precisely why guys create rock bands; Paradise City just created somebody else’s.
“I’m not pretending to be a Guns N’ Roses fan,” says Kelly Gony, a stunning twenty-two-year-old history major who danced on stage in her cut-off denim skirt for the last forty-five minutes of the show. “I just think they did an excellent job. Maybe some of the people in the crowd were clapping for Guns N’ Roses, but there also might have been some people clapping about the fact that these guys can act exactly like Guns N’ Roses. I mean, look at me—I’m dressed like it’s 1988. It’s just fun, you know?”
This blue-eyed girl is correct—it is fun, although not so fun that she accepts the band’s offer to go back to their hotel. Gony goes home. However, a few females (most of whom seem very young) agree to go back to the Hampton for a few dozen night caps and more weed. I assume the goal is to have sex with them, although I don’t think this works out for anybody, except possibly Spike. Punky sporadically asks these girls to remove their tank tops, and—although they never actually do—they don’t seem particularly offended by the request.
I hang with Paradise City until around 3:30 A.M.. Part of me thinks that I should really try to party with them all night, because perhaps that’s when things will truly get insane. Maybe there will be a transcendent moment, complete with speedballs and hookers and an albino musk ox. But the larger part of me is tired and drunk and stoned, so I go to bed (luckily, I have my own room). The next morning, I see Dischner in the lobby and ask him how the rest of the night went; he tells me nothing really happened. I ask the same question when I run into Bobby Young, and he spends ten minutes telling me how the girls who came back to the hotel were nothing but “brain-dead cock teases.” He thought the evening sucked.
But not Randy.
Trask is sitting at the wheel of his truck, ready to drive us home on three hours rest. His version of the night is quite different. “It was a madhouse,” he tells me unspecifically, neither lying nor telling the truth. “You should have stayed up with us, Chuck. It was unbelievable. I’m serious. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
I nod. I agree. One way or the other, we all use our illusions. And I’m sure Axl would completely approve.
1. Three days before Pohlman’s haircut, Dischner had told me that “What sets us apart from the other twenty-two Guns N’ Roses tribute bands in America is that we don’t wear wigs.” This new development with Pohlman’s scalp was not to his liking.
2. Premonition’s two singles, “He Is Rising” and “Mr. Heroin,” were both (presumably) about Carlos and allegedly charted in Greece.
3. The last time Paradise City performed in Harrisonburg, they received a death threat from two Middle Eastern patrons after playing “One in a Million.” Over the course of the weekend, this story is breathlessly recounted to me six times.
4. During the Paradise City set, Punky will lay on the dressing room’s concrete floor after falling down a flight of stairs. Though he will continue to post-party with the band for most of the night, Punky will need to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance the following morning when—upon finally sobering up—he will realize he has broken his wrist. Oddly (or perhaps predictably), the band will simply leave him in Harrisonburg and drive back to Ohio.
As America’s best-loved semipro freelance conversationalist, I am often queried about my brazen humorousity. “How is it possible,” I am asked, “that you are able to extemporaneously lecture so effortlessly on such a myriad of complex topics? What is the key to your incisive, witty repertoire?”
It’s a valid question.
Certainly, there is a formula to being relentlessly dynamic. There’s a shockingly simple equation to being über-interesting, and it works with every subject imaginable.
The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible—but remarkably specific—“cultural accusation” (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary). Here are a few examples…
When talking about sports: “I mean, come on—you just know that Rodney Rogers is sitting in the locker room before every game reading Nietzsche, and he’s totally thinking to himself, ‘If Ron Artest tries to step to me one more time, I’m gonna slap jack his brisket, Philly style.’”
When talking about music: “Oh, let’s face it—we all know that if Rivers Cuomo makes one more album about the Cubism didactic, he might as well just give up completely and turn Weezer into a hobo-core three-piece.”
When talking about film: “Everybody in this room has seen Peter Bogdanovich at his worst, and everybody in this room already suspects that he probably sits in his gazebo and beats off to Pet Sounds five nights a week, so I think it’s safe to assume this whole era of the ‘Scarecrow Thriller’ is as dead as the diplodocus.”
When talking about politics: “That crazy Condoleeza Rice—who does she think she’s fooling with all that neo-Ventura, post-Dickensian welfare state pseudo-shit? If that’s supposed to be the future, she may as well stick the Q like the salt queen that she is.”
Do you understand? Do you see the forest through the trees? Do you not see what I am no longer not saying to you? If so—congratulations! Prepare to have sex constantly.
6 Ten Seconds to Love 0:71
“Merry Christmas, Juggalo.”
This is what he scrawled on the card, a little one-flap piece of construction paper featuring a picture of a Clydesdale standing next to a snow-capped conifer. It was attached to a Fuji videotape and handed to me in my favorite bar. I immediately knew what it was. “Thanks, Ninja,” I replied to the dashing twenty-four-year-old doctor who gave it to me. “You are my stone cold elf.” My doctor friend returned to his dart game; I proceeded to have four more drinks while listening to Dean Martin on the jukebox before getting into my car and driving home, traversing the empty, frozen streets of downtown Fargo. Winter nights in urban North Dakota are fascinating, because they resemble overcast summer afternoons: The painfully white snow has such a high albedo that it reflects the glow from streetlights with a remarkable intensity. You can drive without headlights at midnight, which is exactly what I did. It was beautiful. “I love Christmas,” I thought to myself when I arrived home from Duffy’s Tavern, just drunk enough to wrap myself in a terry-cloth robe and watch Pamela Anderson perform oral sex on Tommy Lee.
Every holiday season, I rewatch my illegally dubbed Pamela-Tommy sex tape. It’s sort of my version of It’s a Wonderful Life. There is no thrill in seeing it anymore, and certainly no prurient rush: It is probably the least arousing videotape I own, with the possible exception of Walking with Dinosaurs. However, it’s also the only “important” videotape I own, and it’s important because it shows how unsexy oral sex can represent what we want as a society (or maybe what we’re afraid to want). Everyone is willing to classify Pamela Anderson as a bimbo and a whore and an idealized version of why half the women in America loathe their bodies, and all of that might be true—but what nobody seems willing to admit is that she’s the most crucial woman of her generation, partially
because we hate to think about what Pam Anderson’s heaving bosom means to our culture.
People freak out whenever you attempt to compare Anderson to Marilyn Monroe. In fact, I used to freak out when others have made that comparison, even though I had no idea why. I was unironically watching the E! network a few years back, and some forgettable bozo kept insisting that Pamela was a Marilyn for the nineties (this was either a retrospective on Baywatch or a promotional special for V.I.P., but I can’t remember which). Somehow, this bozo’s assertion made me vaguely angry, which is how I used to react whenever someone claimed Metallica was my generation’s Led Zeppelin.
My desire to protect Marilyn Monroe is inexplicable; I have no idea why I would feel territorial about the legacy of a woman who died ten years before I was born. Marilyn died young and lonely, so (I suppose) it’s impossible not to feel a certain sense of compassion for her—but it’s also hard to imagine anyone who benefited more from an early death. James Dean comes close, but it’s entirely possible he might have made a handful of good films in his forties, and beyond; it’s unlikely Monroe could have had any long-term career. Film revisionists have taken to insisting she was an underrated actress (mostly because of Some Like It Hot, Bus Stop, and Niagara), but it’s actually the other way around: So many people have retrospectively declared her acting to be “underrated” that she’s become overrated, simply because she didn’t make enough important films to vindicate her advocates’ claims.
However, Monroe was the most significant female figure of the middle twentieth century (cinematically or otherwise), and that had almost nothing to do with acting. Both physically and philosophically, Norma Jean was the incarnation of the early fifties sexual archetype. And ironically, that’s why that forgettable bozo on E! was right when he compared Monroe to Pamela Anderson, even though he’d never be able to explain why. Pam is the contemporary Marilyn Monroe, inadvertently illustrating which aspects of human desire can evolve (and which aspects never will).
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Page 8
