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

by Chuck Klosterman

  More than any other musical style, heavy metal is tied to youth. Living the teenage dream is a gorilla on every glam singer’s shoulders. That ideal can usually be expressed for about two (maybe three) records. After about the fourth album, the concept of expressing the ideals of America’s youth comes off as flatly ridiculous. And after that, it’s just pathetic.

  David Lee Roth is a frequent guest on The Howard Stern Show, and he’s an ideal subject for Stern’s brand of entertainment. Dave tells lots of rambling stories about whores and cocaine, and it’s reminiscent of a retired NFL quarterback who honestly believes he could still go out and throw for three hundred yards against the Packers whenever he gets a few shots of scotch in his gulliver. This is the perfect medium for a man in Roth’s position: He’s a marvelous storyteller, and it’s improving his legacy. Even though Van Halen ended up selling more records with Sammy Hagar than they did with Dave, there’s never an argument over who was the only true frontman of that band.

  Yet Roth would look like a fool if the original Van Halen ever reunited.A The thought of a balding man trying to howl and do backflips is not appealing, and that’s basically all Roth can do. He doesn’t deny it, either. “Of course I’d rather be bouncing around and touring the country,” he said when I asked if he still hoped that Eddie would call and make an offer. “I’m a one-trick pony. That’s the only thing I really do well. Anything else I’ve ever done is merely a way to finance my one trick—arena rock.”

  The problem is that “arena rock” is not like fly fishing for walleye or throwing horseshoes: The window for being able to do it with any social relevance is very small, especially when you play heavy glam. Metal frontmen are supposed to be vocally aggressive and recklessly edgy, and they’re supposed to represent the kind of animalistic sexuality that is only found in seventeen-year-old males. Consequently, the only hard rockers who can survive are the ones who consciously ignore the beautiful stupidity of this archetype. And almost none of them are willing to do that.

  As I look at my own personal CD collection, my eyes gloss over the hair metal bands who still make records today. Almost all of them are insipid, and it kind of makes me sad. For all its ballyhooed hype, Psycho Circus was probably among the worst three or four KISS albums the group ever released (placing it in a class with Crazy Nights and Hot In the Shade). KISS still puts on the best live show in the universe (I’ve seen ’em nine times), but it’s basically parody and they basically admit it. Stephen Pearcy’s post-Ratt project Arcade was as bad as you’d probably expect it to be, and Ratt’s ’99 record tanked. Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat now heads an electronica group called the Newlydeads (“Things just ran their course,” Downe explained. “I just wanted to do different shit.”). Extreme released an album in 1995 titled Waiting for the Punchline; since singer Gary Cherone jumped ship for a brief tenure in Van Halen, I suppose they’re still waiting. Def Leppard still makes new music, and maybe British people care. I know I don’t, even though Euphoria debuted at No. 11 on the charts. The biggest glam metal release from 1999 was a live Guns N’ Roses record, but all of its songs were recorded between 1987 and 1993.

  Almost no one has surrendered, but the war is long over. Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is used in a Comtrex commercial, and Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” hawks Japanese cars. You find a lot of “greatest hits” packages, and you see aging bands playing state fairs and rib festivals, usually hoping to sell 50,000 copies of a new record on CMC, a North Carolina–based label that is now home to a dozen old metal acts. A notable exception to all this is Mötley Crüe; the Crüe are once again trying to become Aerosmith, but this time in a different way.

  Aerosmith was the craziest, wildest American band of the 1970s, and then they hit rock bottom. Joe Perry left the band to start the Joe Perry Project, which flopped like a beached whale. Meanwhile, the Perryless Aerosmith was ever crappier. They all eventually got clean and uncool, leading to a reunion. With the help of Run-DMC, they even became an MTV staple. At the dawn of a new millennium, it can honestly be said that Aerosmith is “more popular than ever.” That’s a cliché that publicists love to tag on dinosaur rock bands, but in this case it’s true. They have made only one good song in ten years (“F.I.N.E.”), but they are still a supergroup.

  “You want to survive and you want to have long-term viability,” Tom Hamilton told me in 1998. “We have recorded some songs that have gone on to be very popular, and that has given us more time to rock. For example, I realize Get a Grip was a commercially successful album, even though I thought it was off-balance and had too many ballads. But we’ll do whatever we have to do to keep making records and to keep touring. Aerosmith doesn’t mind being a pop band sometimes.”

  Aerosmith beat the system by outliving it. And just as Mötley used Aerosmith’s musical template in 1982, they are using their marketing template at the dawn of the millennium. When they kicked Vince Neil out of the group in the early ’90s, they picked up a new singer (John Corabi) and made one of the worst Soundgarden rip-off albums of all time. Neil’s two solo attempts were actually okay, but he still had no future. Nobody was the least bit surprised when the two parties got back together and decided to make one more run for the money. They’ve even purchased (and re-released) their entire Elektra catalog. These guys have bills to pay.

  I keep trying to make myself like the result, 1997’s Generation Swine. It’s not easy. Oh, there are occasional glimpses of the band I discovered in fifth grade—they even do a revamped industrial version of “Shout at the Devil.” But it’s mostly a bunch of shit. The day Generation Swine was released, I remember walking into a record store and talking with the two guys who were working behind the counter. They loved the new Crüe material—but only as a comedy album. Over the next twenty minutes, they played the album’s opening track four times, always laughing like hipster hyenas at the same set of lyrics: “I’m a sick motherfucker / I’m a sweet sucka mutha.” Even goofier was the tune written and sung by Tommy Lee about his child, “Brandon.” Every time Lee sang the chorus, “Brandon, I love you, you are the one,” he tagged on the line “Brandon, my son.” It almost seemed as though Tommy was making a conscious effort to remind everyone he was not gay. You’d think having 15 million people watch you get a blow job from Pamela Anderson would be more than enough to validate your heterosexuality. (Reader’s note: It now seems the always unpredictable Lee has quit the Crüe to become a rapper with the group Methods of Mayhem. It’s horrible, but not nearly as bad as I expected. He’s been replaced—at least temporarily—with ex-Ozzy drummer Randy Castillo and Samantha Maloney from Hole.)

  Still, I legitimately enjoyed the Swine song “Afraid,” a dulcet number that reminded me why I liked Nikki Sixx’s songwriting in the first place. I felt the same way when I heard “Bitter Pill,” one of two new songs on the Crüe’s second greatest-hits compilation that came out in the fall of ’98. “Bitter Pill” replicates the main lick from Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded,” and it lets Vince sound the way I want to remember him.

  Fuck it, I have to be honest: I’m a metal fan, okay? I like listening to Mötley Crüe. I still watch my 1986 VHS copy of Mötley Crüe Uncensored, and I still love the part where Vince walks down the stairs of his fake house and says, “Duuuude.” I know I make it sound like analyzing this music was all some sort of intellectual exercise, but it’s part of my life. And for a few uncomfortable moments of my past, it was pretty much the only thing in my life.

  Every year, Entertainment Weekly has an issue it calls “Guilty Pleasures” where all their writers sing the praises of Patrick Swayze and Charmed. It’s obviously an effective idea, because all my friends and I read the issue and spend the next seventy-two hours coming up with our own lists over e-mail. Part of the annual process is trying to define exactly what a “guilty pleasure” is, and my friend Pat probably came up with the perfect explanation: “A guilty pleasure is something I pretend to like ironically, but in truth is something I really just like.” If I wa
s straight with myself, that would be my take on glam metal. Very often, I inexplicably embrace the same ideas that I just finished railing against: Part of me wants to insist that heavy metal really is stupid. I make fun of people who love the same bands I loved (and still do). Social pressure has made me cannibalize my own adolescent experience.

  We all want to be cool, and it’s hard for some of us to admit we’re not. When I tell people I came from a town that didn’t have a single stoplight, I make myself smile, even though I don’t know why this is funny (or why it should be embarrassing). When I admit that I spent many nights assuming I would die a virgin, I act like I’m being self-deprecating, even though I’m mostly being honest. When I remember how confused I was while I drove up and down the empty streets of my snow-packed hometown, I try to be wistful, even though I fucking hated having no one to talk to. And when I read my high school journal and realize what a homophobic, racist, sexist, and genuinely unlikeable person I was at the age of seventeen, I force myself to laugh. But I’m being a hypocrite, and I know it. In so many ways, that was my life. With the exception of some legitimately good parents and a better-than-average jump shot, I had nothing else … except for the cassettes on my dresser and the pentagram over my bed.

  Hair metal was a wormhole for every midwestern kid who was too naive to understand why he wasn’t happy. I may have been a loser, but Vince and Axl and Ace and Ozzy were cool for me. They allowed me to live a life I never would see, and I never had to leave my bedroom.

  I absolutely could not relate to Mötley Crüe. And that’s why I will always love them.

  Epilogue

  When I started writing Fargo Rock City in 1998, it was never my intention to change anyone’s mind about the value of heavy metal music. There has never been a moment in my life when I wanted to convince the world about the relative awesomeness of White Lion, nor was there ever a day when I aspired to create the definitive, annotated history of Dokken. I just tried to write the book I had always wanted to find in a bookstore. And I think I did that, sort of. Yet as I look back at how my life has changed—and particularly the way I perceive my life—since the release of Fargo Rock City in May of 2001, I suddenly feel like I understand how Nikki Sixx must have felt in 1988, minus the money and the heroin and the marathon sex with Vanity. To quote Guns N’ Roses (or Cool Hand Luke, depending on how you look at it), “Some men you just can’t reach.”

  Superficially, I feel as though the core premise of Fargo Rock City has been totally vindicated; there has certainly been a resurgence of interest in ’80s metal over the past few years. Actually, resurgence isn’t really the right word; what mostly happened is that all the people who secretly loved metal during the 1980s are now too old too worry about being cool. Meanwhile, 17-year-old kids are buying Appetite for Destruction because they’re too young to know it’s unfashionable. When I watched Sum 41 play “Shout at the Devil” and “You Got Another Thing Coming” on MTV’s 20th anniversary special, it was oddly reassuring to see a new generation of kids digging the same music I had loved for all the same reasons. Sum 41’s affinity for pop metal isn’t the least bit surprising, either: There’s just no logic for not liking a Mötley Crüe song if you’re the kind of person who aspires to rock.

  However, what I’ve come to realize is that logic has nothing to do with how people look at anything, including this stupid book. That’s why I suddenly relate to all the bands I wrote about. It’s always been my theory that criticism is really just veiled autobiography; whenever someone writes about a piece of art, they’re really just writing about themselves. Upon watching the reaction to Fargo Rock City, I’m now certain that theory is empirical truth.

  Now, there’s obviously a glaring hypocrisy to what I’m about to write, because (a) many of the reviews of this book have been remarkably complimentary, and (b) I work as a newspaper critic for a living. So it’s not like I have no idea how criticism works; I’m completely aware of how arbitrary it inevitably is. True story: When I was still working in North Dakota, I used to eat lunch with my girlfriend next to a swimming pool (we always enjoyed getting roast beef sandwiches from the Hardees’ drive-thru and eating them on the concrete steps next to the public pool in downtown Fargo; for some reason, it always reminded us of eating at Alcatraz). During one such meal, we had a massive fight about the status of our relationship, a status that seemed to change every 18 minutes we were together. I responded to this argument by going back into my office at the newspaper and writing a review of Balance by Van Halen, which I referred to as the single worst album ever recorded. Now, granted—Balance generally sucks. But it’s probably not the worst album ever recorded, or even the worst album of the ’90s (that would undoubtedly be something by Dave Matthews). The real reason I hated Balance so much is because I thought I was never going to kiss my girlfriend again, which—in truth—didn’t have all that much to do with Sammy Hagar’s larynx. But this is exactly how newspaper criticism works, and anyone who tells you different is either (a) lying, (b) stupid, or (c) actively employed as a newspaper critic. I’m not suggesting that the subject being reviewed is ignored completely, but other intangible factors are involved. And unless the media becomes operated by robots, that will always be the case. I am completely aware of this.

  Which is why I feel like an idiot.

  I feel like an idiot because I was still ridiculously bothered by the criticism of Fargo Rock City, even though I knew it was meaningless. Every time I read someone complaining that the title of the book was “deceptive,” I got depressed; this is because I probably hate the title of this book more than anyone else on the planet, and I felt that way from the very beginning. (I wanted to call it Appetite for Deconstruction, but everyone talked me out of it.) I was always confused when a writer would accuse me of being too ironic, especially since a few other writers claimed that I wasn’t being ironic enough. It was continually frustrating to have people express disappointment over the fact that Fargo Rock City wasn’t the book they assumed it was going to be (i.e. more of a conventional memoir, more of a straightforward rock critique, more of an objective history of hard rock, more of a homage to Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry LP, and so on). And it’s still hard for me to understand why so many people fixated on the drinking chapter, beyond the fact that that it gave writers something obvious to psychologically analyze.

  However, these are all personal issues. These are just examples of me being oversensitive, and it’s probably sort of pathetic for me to write an epilogue just to strike back at my faceless critics. But I have at least one issue of complaint that I think is valid, and it has nothing to do with me: Generally, people reacted to Fargo Rock City not as a book, but as a philosophical extension of the music I wrote about. There is a certain class of people who refuse to accept that heavy metal was important, or even mildly interesting. In fact, the mere suggestion appears to make them mad.

  The same summer Fargo Rock City was released in hardcover, two other books about loud ’80s music arrived in bookstores. The first was The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Neil Strauss, and the second was Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. Both of these books are way, way better than mine. However, they both make for interesting comparisons to Fargo Rock City, and I think these comparisons prove my point. The Dirt was about the escapades of Mötley Crüe, the first and last band mentioned in Fargo Rock City. To the surprise of no one, the group’s stories are relentlessly entertaining: The Dirt is like Hammer of the Gods, amplified by 11, minus the music. And the key is that “minus the music” part. I don’t think the oral history of any band has ever been so exhaustively documented without really talking about the group’s music at all. On the rare occasions when the Crüe’s songs are mentioned, they’re immediately dismissed; even Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil admit that two of the Crüe’s biggest albums (Theater of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls) were more or less shit. It’s sort of sad, really; even the guys in the band have convinced themselves that their mus
ic was appalling.

  So … are Nikki and Vince right? I don’t know. Maybe. I like both of those albums, but I’m certainly not going to try and convince anyone that Theatre of Pain is Carole King’s Tapestry. I’m not a Mötley Crüe apologist.A But how can music that was the soundtrack to the lives of so many teenagers not be culturally important, even if it was overproduced and derivative? The one thing I wanted to show with Fargo Rock City is that pop music doesn’t matter for what it is; it matters for what it does. The greatest thing about rock ’n’ roll is that it’s an art form where the audience is more important than the art itself. Whether or not “Home Sweet Home” was terrific is almost irrelevant; the fact that a million future adults believed it was terrific is what counts.

  That brings me to the subject of Our Band Could Be Your Life, a brilliantly written book that serves as the perfect antithesis for Fargo Rock City. Michael Azerrad wrote about 13 indie bands from the 1980s that comprised the musical underground: The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth, Big Black, et al. Essentially, Azerrad writes about the artists whose art was a direct response to Def Leppard and Tesla and Bon Jovi, and the insights are fascinating. But even as I found myself loving the book, I found myself hating most of the artists he wrote about. In fact, they reminded me of why I loved Poison in the first place. Bret Michaels was important because he never tried to be; he just wanted to be cool, which was once the single biggest goal in my life. Too many of those indie bands were consumed with the misguided belief that their destiny was to recalibrate the American mind; they tried too hard to seem significant. Despite all their espoused organic passion, everything they did was calculated: They knew precisely how unwilling revolutionaries were supposed to act. There will always be this bizarre consensus that sporadically interesting, consciously under-produced music is inherently transcendent, mainly because almost no one appreciates it. And that defines the concept of elitism.