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

by Chuck Klosterman

  However, my main motivation is to introduce Hoskyns into this equation.

  As the article states, Hoskyns is an editor for MOJO, one of the few British rock magazines that is (a) readable, and (b) remotely accurate. He’s written books on the Doors, Prince, and the Band (and he also coauthored a book titled The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods, so he certainly must understand something about hard rock). The fact that I had the chance to interview him at all was kind of a fluke; our newspaper received a promo copy of his book Glam! on Monday the ninth, and I was supposed to have my story finished by Tuesday afternoon. At about 11:00 A.M. on Monday, I called Simon & Schuster and asked if I could somehow get a hold of Hoskyns as soon as possible. They told me to fax a request, which is publicist slang for “get fucked.”

  At 3:00 P.M. the next day, my story was basically done. But seconds before I sent it to my editor—and to my absolute and utter surprise—Hoskyns suddenly called me from his home in Woodstock, New York. He sounded feminine, but that’s just because he’s very, very British. However, Hoskyns describes himself as an “Americaphile” (which seems like a completely alien term to anyone from the States, but—truth be told—the world probably has a helluva lot more “Americaphiles” than it has “Anglophiles”). And after he fed me some excellent material for my story, we had a friendly, unprofessional conversation about ’80s glam metal. This had kind of become my habit; while in the process of working on this book, I basically asked everyone I ever met about their thoughts on heavy metal. It really didn’t matter who the fuck they were. Even if I was interviewing H. Ross Perot, I was gonna slip in a question about Trixter.

  But I will always remember Barney Hoskyns. Why? Because he basically shredded the entire premise of my project in less than 120 seconds. And this was before I told him what I was doing. I hadn’t even mentioned I was writing a book. Without provocation (and while discussing the “beauty” of Marc Bolan), he touched on the return of hair bands in the early 1980s. Suddenly, I saw my window of opportunity. “That’s an interesting point,” I said. “And now that you’ve brought it up, I’m curious: Was there any value to ’80s glam metal?”

  And this is what he said:

  “Only if you want to seem extremely ironic, or if you just want to be one of those rock critics that doesn’t want to toe the party line. If you’re trying to ask me if I saw any credibility in Poison, I’m certainly not going to say ‘yes.’ They were awful. It was all so overdone; it was so calculating. There was no invention. A band like Mötley Crüe just wanted to be a stupid rock ’n’ roll band with a bunch of tattoos. And ultimately, all those groups looked the same, anyway.”

  At this point, I had a lot of mixed emotions. On one hand, this man had eloquently crystallized every fear I had about trying to create a book about heavy metal, and I suddenly felt like I was the stupidest blockhead in America. Yet—on the other hand—I was pretty damn impressed by how quotable this dude was. And he just kept going!

  “Now, I wouldn’t lump all those bands into one group,” he continued. “Van Halen was funny; I always thought David Lee Roth was a witty, clever guy. But when you got down to the really horrific bands like Quiet Riot and London … oh, my God. You were just seeing this putrid, commercially cynical, idiotic image of what somebody thought a Sunset Strip glam band was supposed to look like.”

  I started to suggest that he was being a little too flippant with his cultural criticism. Certainly, he was exaggerating his argument for effect, right? I mean, even critics agreed that Guns N’ Roses was a good band, right?

  “I thought Guns N’ Roses was really tired,” he continued. “They were exactly like everybody else, except they were a little more obsessed with getting into detox. I have no idea what anyone ever saw in Axl Rose. It seemed like so many people wanted him to be some kind of subversive voice from a small town, kind of like Kurt Cobain. But he was never a Cobain. He never meant anything important.”

  At this point, it seemed as if Hoskyns was literally reading from my text and mocking me. Of course, the simple reality is that his feelings on ’80s metal are a more prototypical reflection of the rock community (and the global community) than mine. And that’s unfortunate. Hoskyns is a smart guy, but he hates heavy metal for all the wrong reasons.

  “Hating metal” actually has a lot to do with liking it. Actually, that’s true for popular music in general. People who take rock music seriously in a literal sense always seem to be missing the point. I enjoy hating musicians far more than I enjoy appreciating them. As far as I’m concerned, when someone becomes a rock star, he quits being a person. I’m not being sarcastic, either. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

  Whenever the subject of Kurt Cobain comes up, I always catch a lot of flak for implying that there was something truly wonderful about his suicide. I can totally understand why that suggestion would make someone want to punch me; as a member of the human race, it doesn’t seem like there is anything positive about a genius who kills himself at the age of twenty-seven and leaves an infant without a father. But from a cultural perspective, Cobain’s suicide was the only “great” thing that happened to music in the 1990s. He is the only artist of my generation who was indisputably sincere.

  Most people have a very fucked-up relationship with musicians: They want to pretend that famous artists think about them as singular individuals. Joe Q. Fan has a personal relationship with Sting, so he likes to believe Sting feels the same way about him. I notice this every single time I’ve been backstage after a concert for a “meet and greet” session with a touring musician. A “meet and greet” is a situation where a band sits at a table after a show, and a few fans and industry types get to shake their hands and have something autographed (usually a black-and-white photo of the group supplied by the road publicist). Most of the time, the entire entourage is composed of the people who promoted the gig, a handful of random superfans who won backstage passes through radio contests, and three potential rock sluts.

  The road manager runs these folks through like an assembly line, and the band is always sweaty and bored. Most groups are almost never rude (in fact, some are amazingly cordial), but it’s really just part of the job. The young, wild-eyed rockers would usually prefer to be out getting drunk and getting laid, and the older established stars would obviously prefer to be having dinner with their spouses. But they sit at these tables (typically set up in the locker rooms of sports arenas) and methodically sign pictures with black felt pens, and they listen to a few dozen people insist they are their “biggest fans,” a lot like the chick from Misery.

  After the “meet and greet” is over (which is almost always exactly thirty minutes), the band stands up and leaves town, and they will do the same thing in another city tomorrow night. But the people who momentarily shook hands with Ozzy or Slash (or whoever) will talk about this for the next five years. They will tell people how they “met” Gene Simmons, and they will inevitably says something like, “He was a really nice guy.” Which basically means the artist in question did not purposely spit on them.

  I hate to classify rock fans as idiots, but they usually are. They don’t understand that they are consuming an art form in a macro format. They are not getting anything special from these performers. If the Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue” touches their life in a wonderful and specific way, that has very little to do with Paul Westerberg. What Westerberg did was write a great song that is (a) catchy, and (b) populist. He’s brilliant, but not because his music can speak to an individual; he’s brilliant because he can speak to millions of individuals and make each one of them feel like he’s specifically talking to them. In an emotive sense, Westerberg helps people affect themselves, and he can do it on a mammoth scale. But diehard Replacements fans refuse to think of his songs in this way. If they did, it would make the whole experience of listening to “Sixteen Blue” on a lonely Friday night a lot less meaningful.

  I suppose that explains why people so desperately want to take pop music seriously; it makes mean
ing out of four simple chords and elementary poetry. But that’s always what was so great about Nirvana—and Cobain’s death. For once, it was all real. People were always obsessed with calling Cobain “ironic,” but nobody (myself included) ever noticed that he was the one guy in the whole scene who was never being ironic. He sang about hating life and wanting to die, and the cacophonic crash and beautiful wail of Nirvana’s music was precisely how sadness sounds. And he validated everything he ever said by carrying through with the ultimate act: a high-profile suicide that was delivered to the world by the media, just as they had delivered “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991. The scale of Kurt’s death was a reflection of his public life, which was really the only part of his life any of us knew. He was—and is—the only pop genius of my generation. He gave people exactly what they really wanted, and he did so with absolute sincerity. I don’t see how anything could ever be more effective than an album as good as Nevermind and a shotgun blast to the face.

  But does that mean that Cobain is beyond reproach? As a person—yes. But as a rock star? No. He was a rock guy who talked a lot of shit most of the time. When he was pogoing and screaming on MTV, he was doing it for our entertainment. When something is put out in the public, it loses its human qualities (for example, if you hate this book, I certainly wouldn’t expect you to pretend you like it in order to spare my feelings, particularly since this book is almost certainly the only reference you have to me as a person). Hating (and sometimes mocking) music is just as important as loving (and embracing) music. They are basically the same emotive function, separated only by the tone of one’s voice.

  That’s why I say Hoskyns hates ’80 pop metal for the wrong reasons. When you get right down to it, the main problem had nothing to do with its social philosophy or the lack of artistic creativity. The biggest problem was that the vast majority of metal songs were simply boring. And the paradox is that the music was especially boring whenever the artists made conscious attempts to be intellectual or creative.

  Metal (and all of rock music, really) has always grappled with the stupid logic of “virtuosity” and the relatively groundless argument that complex construction equates with greatness. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It is easy to illustrate this with extreme examples; I don’t think any normal pop fan would suggest that Joe Satriani is a better guitarist than Keith Richards, even though there’s no doubt that Satch is countless times more proficient. To argue otherwise would be like saying George Will is a better writer than Ernest Hemingway because George uses bigger words, longer sentences, and more complicated arguments.

  Hard rock’s obsession with virtuosity was partially an attempt to legitimize the genre and make it seem valid, which (on rare occasions) it did. If nothing else, it made it seem relatively inaccessible. The beauty (and stupidity) of punk was that anyone could do it; if you had a guitar and a garage and two friends, you were probably two weeks away from playing a gig. That was not the case with heavy metal. The idea of learning the chops for “Surfing with the Alien” or the intro to “Mean Streets” was basically impossible, unless you were pretty damn musical. As a metal kid, there was always the idea that our music was secretly smarter than what was on Top 40 radio. The fans of quick-fingered guitar rock saw their music the same way teen movies usually portrayed burn-out kids: They looked like shit and nobody gave them any credit, but—underneath that tough, lazy exterior—they were really the brightest kids in the class (kind of like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club).

  Sometimes this assumption was right. Obviously, you had Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. Both of those players were raised with classical backgrounds, and one assumes they would have been wonderful talents in whatever sonic medium they pursued. There seems to be a universal belief that someone like Rhoads could have been a world-class oboe player, if that had been the cool thing to do. Of course, Rhoads gets a little extra credit for having died in a plane crash. Nonbreathing people get all the breaks. Clearly, the easiest way to become “great” is to get “good” and then get “dead.” Rhoads is now an axe legend and will be forever (relatively speaking), and his work on those early Osbourne albums is—at the very least—very good. But was he as great as everyone seems to remember? Maybe, but probably not.

  “I’ve never seen anyone become a better fucking guitar player by dying than Randy Rhoads,” Lemmy Kilmister told me in 1998. “Nobody ever talked about him when he was alive, but suddenly everyone started saying he’s some kind of fucking genius. He was a nice guy and a very good guitarist, but he wasn’t a Hendrix or a Clapton or anything like that.”

  Whether or not Rhoads was really that great really isn’t the issue, though. The issue is that his style—and particularly his “goal,” for lack of a better term—has been copied exhaustively. So has Eddie Van Halen’s (to an even larger degree), as well as that of guys like Ritchie Blackmore and Jeff Beck. These ardent followers were the patron saints of the whole “guitar school” chic movement that spawned some of the dullest music of the late twentieth century.

  The music of Yngwie Malmsteen was shit. It was virtually unlistenable. Like an intricately designed maze that went nowhere, it epitomized pretension—which was exactly what so much of the era’s good metal never had. Malmsteen was cursed by three things: a tremendous amount of technical musical prowess, the complete absence of any musical soul, and a horrific unwillingness to pick a stage name. No rock guitarist ever fused classical influences to metal with such unabashed abandon; he even preferred song titles like “Icarus’ Dream Suite.” At the time of his greatest glory (which was never really ever, but for the sake of argument we’ll say 1985), all the guitar mags loved raving about the genius that was Yngwie: a speed demon who could jam a million shrieking notes into half a breath, and did so under the premise of art. He called his debut album (and his backing band) Rising Force, and that was how the hard rock community initially perceived him. There was a moment in time when metal insiders suspected that the future of metal was held in the rapid-fire paws of Malmsteen; even though he hadn’t sold that many records, there was a strong belief that—in time—every metal band would sound like Yngwie Malmsteen.

  But Malmsteen never sold records. He did not reinvent metal. In fact, he never even became famous; today, he’s remembered only by obsessive guitar freaks (and by people who like to make fun of ’80s metal, I suppose).

  Ultimately, Yngwie had four problems. One was the ridiculous name, which wasn’t really his fault since he was Swedish, the Holy Land of ridiculous names. Another was his attitude, and that was his own fault. Malmsteen openly referred to himself as a genius and constantly attacked the metal genre, even though that was his only audience. He was flatly unlikeable. A third was his musical direction. Regardless of its sonic merits, Malmsteen’s style made the mistake of moving metal away from its roots. He never seemed to understand that he was really playing for an updated version of the kids who loved Sab and Zep, two groups who were really just heavy blues bands. When you listened to a record like Odyssey, you never really knew what it was—it sounded like rock, but it didn’t seem like it. There was nothing visceral or angry about it, the songs were sterile, almost robotic. Malmsteen took the blues out of rock ’n’ roll, and the sex and drugs disappeared with it.

  But the real problem (number four) with Malmsteen’s music is what I stated before: It was boring. In fact, it seemed to create a whole new way for music to suck. It was boring in that way that made you feel vaguely ashamed, kind of like reading Moby-Dick or A1 newspaper stories about Kosovo. It made your eyes glaze over; the instrumentals would play on and on, the pyrotechnic scales would climb higher and higher, and it gave you nothing but tinnitus.

  Now, that criticism is not the same as suggesting Malmsteen’s material said nothing, because most metal said nothing (and sometimes even less). Music that doesn’t have a point is totally acceptable. But this kind of rock—this so-called impressive metal—wasn’t even fun. It was laborious. Critics like to accuse ’80s metal of b
eing pompous, and I usually disagree with that assessment; I don’t think the majority of hard rock bands displayed as much pretension as the alternative bands who replaced them. But the handful of metalheads who were the exception to that rule took pomposity to an entirely different level.

  For the most part, these were all guitar guys. I remember reading an article where Steve Vai actually referred to himself as a “guitar god.” It was a really lousy article, so my hope is that Vai was being sardonic and the journalist somehow didn’t pick up on it. But part of me thinks Vai was probably being serious. After all, he did make an instrumental album called The Passion and the Warfare, and the whole thing sounded like one song. I guess that was the point: that passion is warfare. Which I assume most people agreed with anyway, even before they heard fourteen consecutive guitar solos.

  Dokken was a really boring band, mostly because George Lynch is a supposedly “incredible” guitarist. I can barely remember how any Dokken songs go, because the melodies had no hook. Living Colour was sometimes very good, but sometimes extraordinarily dull; once again, the blame falls on the talent of the guitarist, in this case Vernon Reid. Reid can be very cool on occasion. He rips shit up on the Public Enemy song “Sophisticated Bitch” but he works so hard at the “less is more” guitar philosophy that he somehow manages to jam excess simplicity into every song, ultimately turning all that “nothing” into “too much something.” Joe Satriani surfed with an alien, but mostly it was stupid. Every Whitesnake song that wasn’t a smash single is for narcoleptics only, especially when the aforementioned “guitar god” joined the group (Vai was much better when he was with David Lee Roth, mostly because Dave told him to scrap the Guitar Institute bullshit and just get out and push). I also recall a lot of people insisting that Europe and Enuff Z’Nuff were a bunch of long-haired geniuses—Rolling Stone even compared Enuff to the Beatles, and I guess both bands did sing about girls named Michelle—but everyone who liked to rock out thought they were crap. For those of you keeping score at home, Europe is remembered for the single “The Final Countdown.” Enuff Z’Nuff is remembered for nothing, except maybe for that Rolling Stone thing (and that might be an urban legend).