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

by Chuck Klosterman

  Living Colour, Vivid (1988, CBS): Mick Jagger produced these rasta rockers, and he even loaned his bulbous lips to the backing vocals on “Glamour Boys,” still one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard, especially when one tries to imagine little nancy boy Mick claiming he’s fierce. But Jagger’s influence doesn’t go much beyond that chorus (although he did score them the opening slot on the ’89 Stones tour).

  Vivid is not swaggering, jukebox metal; it’s a well-lubricated record with lots of sheen and purpose. “Cult of Personality” is pretty much a thrash-o-rama that was whittled into a radio tune, but it always hits like a tsunami (I’ve actually seen it start mosh pits at wedding dances). I think Corey Glover’s comparison of Gandhi with Stalin is supposed to make us think about the media (or something), but it really just reminds us that the guys in Living Colour aren’t a bunch of morons, which should have been the least of their worries. The simple fact is that Vivid is fabulous when it rocks out, but it’s pretty goddamn janky when it tries anything else. It’s the same story with 1993’s anachronistic Stain, a good album that always seems ashamed of itself. Living Colour is one of those hard rock groups who suffer from self-loathing; since all the members seem to think metal bands are stupid, they will ignore what they do best in order to be classified in a different category, even if that means singing a song titled “Open Letter (to a landlord).” When you consider how unintentionally rockin’ Vivid turned out to be, it’s frightening to think how awesome this band could have been had they actually tried. (Jack Factor: $379)

  Skid Row, Skid Row (1989, Atlantic): Like a grizzly that stumbled across a bunch of honey-covered hippies, this is straight-forward carnage: hair-wagging, Bud-guzzling, boot-kicking, no bullshit rock ’n’ roll (or all bullshit rock ’n’ roll, if you follow my meaning). When I went back and found this cassette in my closet, I was surprised to discover this album came out as late as it did; I tend to remember the Skids being a bigger part of the ’80s than they actually were.

  If nothing else, Skid Row deserves credit for being honest; lots of bands claimed their next album was going to be “a lot heavier,” and Skid Row is the only band who wasn’t lying (1991’s Slave to the Grind could swing with Megadeth). Still, this debut is the one that matters. The first four songs never relax; Sebastian Bach screams about mammary glands, somebody’s sweet little sister (I’m guessing not his), and girls who smoke cigarettes when they cry. “18 and Life” was the pulp that made them famous, and it’s one of the rare metal tunes that told a story (Rupert Holmes could probably cover it). “Youth Gone Wild” was their war anthem; it was actually the title of my high school yearbook when I was a senior (and I wasn’t even on yearbook staff!). “I Remember You” might have been a bit too stereotypical as the obligatory power ballad, but Baz’s range was better than most, and he was too damn anorexic (and too pretty) to ignore. To paraphrase the coolest fifth-grader I never interviewed, Skid Row rules ass. (Jack Factor: $400)

  Cinderella, Long Cold Winter (1988, PolyGram): Nobody in the world sounds like Cinderella vocalist Tom Keifer. In the eyes of many, that’s probably good. But in the realm of glam, Keifer might have been the most compelling throat around. If there was ever a dude who really did sound like the proverbial “cat caught in the gears of a combine,” it was Tommy—and that’s a compliment (at least when applied to Long Cold Winter).

  Keifer actually had two voices: a baritone drawl (which he used in the introductions of ballads), and a maddening, nasal-injected screech (which he used for everything else). I realize I’m probably making this music sound horrific, and part of me suspects it probably was, but MAN, was that screech perfect for the first three tracks on this icy rock opera. “Bad Seamstress Blues” is legitimately clever, “Fallin’ Apart at the Seams” is simultaneously poofy and menacing, and “Gypsy Road” is just a good, good, good, good, good song.

  The hidden gems on Winter are on the flip side, namely “Take Me Back,” which is a lot like the KISS hidden gem “Comin’ Home” off Hotter Than Hell. What’s weird is that Cinderella also has a song titled “Coming Home” (note the addition of the g), but it’s a different vibe altogether. On “Coming Home,” Keifer asks his prospective princess if she’s “tough enough” for his love, which is probably a legitimate question: It would be tough to love any guy who was born with Tom’s voice. But like I said, it was killer for bluesy poodle rock.

  1988 was Cindy’s peak; this record went triple platinum, just like their debut (Night Songs). I honestly believe Cinderella was one of the bands who were underrated by almost everyone, except possibly fourteen-year-old girls. Maybe I don’t give mall chicks enough credit; maybe it’s time to admit that fourteen-year-old girls are the only people in America who truly understand what coolness is supposed to look like. (Jack Factor: $455)

  The Cult, Electric (1987, Sire): Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy have made a lot of records in their career (too many, frankly), but this was their best effort and certainly their most metal. The weird thing about the Cult is that they were a hard rock band that people who hated metal always seemed to dig; I’m constantly running into alt rockers who claim their favorite bands in high school were New Order, Erasure, and the Cult. Generally, these types sing the praises of 1985’s Love (and for some reason, most old-school metal kids tend to align themselves with 1989’s Sonic Temple), but Electric is the band’s tastiest cream.

  There is a surprisingly pleasant sameness to all eleven of these tunes, which spikes during “Lil’ Devil” and “King Contrary Man” and dips into painful valleys during the hippy-dippy “Peace Dog” and a godawful cover of “Born to Be Wild.” The most memorable track is “Love Removal Machine,” which is legitimately surreal; I’ve always wondered what a love removal machine would look like—probably something like an electric chair attached to a bottle of bourbon. Either way, Duffy’s guitar licks sound more like Jimmy Page than Page’s himself sounded on Outrider, and Astbury’s coonskin cap is exactly like the one I wore for Halloween in 1979 and 1980, except I was probably a little cooler (but since I didn’t know any fourteen-year-old girls at the time, I guess we’ll never know). (Jack Factor: $512)

  Poison, Open Up and Say … Ahh! (1988, Capitol): Ten seconds into this album, some girl is giving head to Bret Michaels, and “she goes down smooth, like a shot of gin.” How smooth is that? Well, to be honest, not very. But that’s what was great about Poison: Things like the relative smoothness of gin paled in comparison to the “greater concept,” which didn’t make any sense but always resulted in driving and looking for girls who were already drunk.A

  When Open Up … was released, I remember reading a bunch of reviews where writers claimed it lacked the “rollicking fun” of Poison’s first album, Look What the Cat Dragged In. This confused me, because those same writers had all hated that first record, too. Bret and C. C. didn’t get breaks from anyone; I remember hearing fourth-graders bitch about them. And that’s probably why this album still seems so refreshing. If Poison cared what people thought of them, they certainly didn’t act like it. They had debuted with an album that made kids want to steal Citron from their parents and cum in their jeans—and then they made another! C. C. DeVille played lead riffs that even I could figure out (and I can’t play guitar), but he was better at sucking than almost everyone else in the world.

  When the guys in Black Sabbath were growing up in Birmingham, they were all poor kids from an industrial neighborhood. When they got famous in the ’70s, that social despair poured through their black-hearted music. The guys in Poison grew up in industrial Pennsylvania, and their youth was similarly grim. However, Poison got famous during the 1980s, and they fucking loved it. Open Up and Say … Ahh! is an Epicurean affirmation of all that is great about cheesy, plastic rock ’n’ roll. It wasn’t merely that Poison wanted nothing but a good time—they asked the world why they were supposed to want anything else. And in 1988, that was a good question. (Jack Factor: $555)

  Faster Pussycat, Faster Pussycat (1987, Elektra): As a
sophomore in high school, I didn’t know who the fuck Russ Meyer was, so I thought this was a really wussie name for a rock group. Truth is, they were pretty much wussies, but they were some of the most streetwise wussies in L.A. (and if you don’t believe me, go rent The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II). Almost of all of this LP is terrific, particularly the black-and-bluesy sleaze on “Don’t Change That Song” and “Cathouse.” Most of the initial attention surrounding this album was granted to “Babylon,” a rap song that seemed like an attempt to rip off Anthrax’s attempt at ripping off Licensed to Ill, but it sure seemed funny at the time.

  However, it was the second side of Faster Pussycat that paid the rent. “Smash Alley” examined the downside of high heels and switchblades and also reminded me that I should probably listen to my Smashed Gladys cassette more often. “Ship Rolls In” was pretty much an Aerosmith song, but it wonderfully captured the identity of glam metal in three lines from vocalist/fellatio advocate Taime Downe: “You gotta roll with the punches, spin like a top / I ain’t got much, but I got a lot of PER-SO-NAL-I-TEEEE / And that’s all that counts.” Taime, you’re pretty smart for a wussy. (Jack Factor: $580)

  Vinnie Vincent, Invasion (1986, Chrysalis): Like a Tasmanian devil whirling toward vaginas and self-destruction, the guitarmageddon unleashed by ex-KISS wackmobile Vincent on this solo debut is so schlockily stunning that I still have to play this album at least six times every year.

  Never was metal as brilliantly self-indulgent as it was on Invasion (which would soon become part of the group’s actual name, hence the better known moniker “Vinnie Vincent Invasion”). After this first record, the group hired Mark Slaughter’s throat and Vinnie went to hell, both as a rocker and as a human being (for all I know, Vinnie now lives on the moon and wears his Egyptian ankh makeup whenever he surfs the Internet for alt.talk.creaturesofthenight). But for select moments on Invasion, V. V. is the fastest, craziest, and downright best six-string shredder to ever wear pinkish lavender in public.

  Right from track number one, you know what you’re getting: “Boys Are Gonna Rock” has two and a half guitar solos. Singer Robert Fleischman screams about sadomasochism and ejaculations, but—for all practical purposes—this may as well be an instrumental album. At the conclusion of “Animal,” Vincent plays faster and harder and faster and harder and faster and stupider and he’s going nowhere but he’s getting there fast and now your neighbors are banging on the wall and your bookcase speakers are starting to melt and your beagle is in obvious pain and suddenly you suspect that everything in your house is going to IMPLODE. And then Vinnie collapses, and then you hear six seconds of reverb. And then the next song begins (with a guitar solo). It should be also noted that Invasion ultimately ends with 151 seconds of Vincent replicating a car alarm (or perhaps a grain elevator). This is rock ’n’ roll. This is rock ’n’ roll? This is rock ’n’ roll! (Jack Factor: $675)

  Def Leppard, Pyromania (1983, PolyGram): First of all, let me say—purely as a fan—I probably prefer Lep’s 1981 release High ’n’ Dry. The title track on that record smokes everything here, and “Let It Go” is dandy rock candy. But I also realize that Pyromania is the better record. For a bunch of twenty-one-year-old alcoholics in need of personalities, the level of musical sophistication on Pyromania is amazing. I suppose the majority of that credit should go to Robert “Mutt” Lange, who earned the right to sleep with Shania Twain for producing an album this immaculate.

  The knock against Def Leppard has always been that they’re “overproduced,” which is precisely what artists want when they ask Lange to engineer their records. Most producers—like Bob Rock, for example—took metal bands and tried to capture the “liveness” of the sound (when Rock did Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood, he played up the guitar tones and Tommy Lee’s orangutan drumming). Lange does the opposite; he works more like a smart copyeditor. Everything is polished until it’s ultraclean and hyperefficient, so you only notice the main riff and the soaring vocals (this was even more obvious when he produced Back in Black).

  Granted, this kind of recording philosophy doesn’t work with a lot of artists. But it’s a perfect recipe for a legitimately talented metal outfit, and that’s exactly what Def Leppard was. “Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)” is the ideal opening, and “Photograph” is the best Journey song ever made. Pyromania is infected with a bunch of pre-irony studio gimmicks (like the intro to “Rock of Ages” and the supposedly “space age” crap after track ten), but it doesn’t have any bad songs, either.

  Critics of ’80s hard rock sometimes point to Pyromania as an example of what was wrong with the whole industry: The stock argument is that this record is sanitized arena pop that doesn’t deliver anything that could affect a listener—the lyrics are about nothing, the music is perfectly calculated, there’s no emotional investment by the artist, and there’s not even a constructed sense of humanity. However, the only person who would come up with that kind of analysis is somebody who simply hates heavy metal and wants to make up a bunch of reasons to explain why. Fifteen years later, I can experience the same concepts I heard in my bedroom when I first got Pyromania from the RCA Music Service: Controlled aggression that cloaked an Orwellian fear (witness “Stagefright,” “Die Hard the Hunter,” “Foolin’,” and “Billy’s Got a Gun”). It’s stupid to blame Def Leppard for being flawless. Pyromania was metal’s Pretzel Logic—a studio masterpiece that validated the genre. (Jack Factor: $877)

  Guns N’ Roses, GNR Lies (1988, Geffen): When we first heard this eight-song EP, we all thought the live material on side one was tits and the acoustic stuff on side two was girlie crap. Over time, the conventional wisdom revolved into the opinion that the “R” side was brilliant and the “G” side wasn’t worth listening to. Ten years later, I have rediscovered the value of the former without losing respect for the latter (or maybe it’s the other way around).

  Lies opens with “Reckless Life,” an accelerated rocker that would seem to be the résumé for the whole GNR experiment. That blows into a cover of “Nice Boys,” which works because Axl Rose really does seem like a boy. Of course, that makes everything a bit awkward on “Move to the City,” because suddenly Axl becomes a girl who stole her daddy’s credit card—but by the time they’re halfway through a rote version of “Mama Kin,” nobody cares anyway.

  Logic would dictate that the lyrics on the flip side should seem less shocking as time passes, but I find them more spooky today than I did in high school. As I grow older, I’m still intrigued by what Axl was so angry about. His inability to replicate this kind of ferocious emotion on future releases makes me suspect it must have been genuine; if it had all just been a show, you’d think he could do it anytime he stepped into a studio. There seems to be something obviously wrong with Axl Rose’s brain, and it’s the kind of three-act neurosis that ruins a man’s life, makes a man famous, and then ruins his life again (and usually in that order). Side two of GNR Lies is the peak of Act II. (Jack Factor: $920)

  Ozzy Osbourne, Blizzard of Ozz/Diary of a Madman (both 1981, Jet): Obviously, this is kind of cheating, because I’m counting two albums as one. But it’s almost impossible to separate these first two releases from Osbourne’s solo career. If there is truly such a thing as “companion albums,” these two would be the defining example (um … okay—I mean if you don’t count Rubber Soul and Revolver).

  Blizzard and Diary are, of course, the only two albums Ozzy made with Randy Rhoads, and Oz has apparently never recovered; Ozzy insists the twenty-eight months he worked with Randy seem longer than the rest of his life combined. He talks about Rhoads the way most people would discuss a deceased wife (on the liner notes to 1987’s Tribute, he says Rhoads was what he had “dreamed about” in a guitar player and credits him with ending his depression). Part of that loss might be purely practical: Rhoads’s ability as a player is—at times—stunning. The conventional wisdom is that Blizzard of Ozz is a masterpiece and Diary of a Madman sounds rushed and uneven, but I think they’re equally exc
ellent. In fact, I probably prefer the sophomore release.

  Blizzard of Ozz was the perfect vehicle for Osbourne’s solo ascension, because it’s basically Sabbath music played wicked fast. There was a vaguely classical quality to Tony Iommi’s playing, and Rhoads took that one step further (and got there quicker). Over his thirty-year career, “Crazy Train” stands as the best song Ozzy ever yowled. In his book Running with the Devil, Robert Walser points out how the guitar riff on “Suicide Solution” jibes with the lyrics: a cycling, disturbing drone that virtually mirrors clinical depression. Top to bottom, this is simply a good record—it’s remarkably well-conceived and wisely structured.

  Those two statements probably can’t be made about Diary of a Madman, but it doesn’t matter, because Rhoads’s effort is even better. I generally find guitar solos pretty boring (doesn’t everybody?), but I can listen to these; “Over the Mountain” might be more clever than ingenious, but it always blows me away. “Flying High Again” is intended to be this album’s “Crazy Train” (it’s even in the same place—track two), and I think it sort of succeeds in that attempt (it’s also the last song Ozzy made that was indisputably pro-drug). There are a couple of nice slower tracks on Diary—I especially like “Tonight,” which could have been a huge single had it been released five years later—but the real kicker is the intro to the title track. For no particular reason, Rhoads plays twenty-five seconds of the Doors’ “Spanish Caravan.” It’s not central to the album (or even to the song), but it’s neat. It’s the kind of decision that all the guitar hacks who followed him never seemed to make.

  I realize that Rhoads tends to get lionized because he died, and it’s very possible that these records seem so remarkable simply because we are left with nothing else (except for a few early Quiet Riot demos). But this is very good rock music, and that has nothing to do with any plane crashes. (Jack Factor: $1,000)