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

  Music fans attack MTV constantly, and usually for two reasons: (a) it doesn’t play enough videos, or (b) it plays the same video over and over and over again. Both criticisms are valid. And as a result, there is a vast library of videos that are played briefly and never seen again. While Nick at Nite will replay the entire run of a situation comedy, very few videos have a life outside their fleeting window of popularity. This even applies to most tracks from major artists. Oh, you’ll see “Hungry Like the Wolf” twice a year for the rest of your life—but when’s the last time you caught the vid for “New Moon on Monday” or “Skin Trade”? There’s an elite percentage of videos that will always surface in countdowns and retrospectives (“Sledgehammer,” “Billie Jean,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” etc.), but most clips do not survive the passing of time. For example, the Black Crowes video for “Remedy” was on ultraheavy MTV rotation in the summer of 1992, and I saw it every single day (often twice or thrice) for three straight months. The image of Chris Robinson dancing barefoot has been forever tattooed into my optic membrane. However, I haven’t seen “Remedy” in the past three years. It’s entirely plausible that I may never see it again.

  This is why I was literally ecstatic after my discovery of Mike’s Videos #1 and Mike’s Videos #2. For a pseudo-scientist studying the video art of ’80s hair metal, this was the equivalent to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls in my parents’ basement.

  Who’s “Mike,” you ask? Mike was a guy I went to college with (although once he turned nineteen, he started calling himself “Rex,” which was a nickname I had given him simply to avoid confusion with another guy named “Mike”). As a junior and senior in high school, he liked to tape rock videos—but not off MTV. In Mike’s hometown, you couldn’t get MTV unless you had a satellite dish. Instead, he watched Night Tracks on TBS, which was actually better, because they played videos that MTV banned (like L.A. Guns’ “One More Reason”). Mike exclusively taped metal videos, along with a handful of nonmetal clips he evidently thought were cool enough to make the cut—Bad English, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, UB40, Rod Stewart, and a few other inexplicable additions.

  As sophomores at the University of North Dakota, we would periodically watch these tapes when we were drinking vodka in our residence halls, mostly because cable services were not yet available in individual dorm rooms. When fall semester ended in December of 1992, we all prepared to go home for a month-long Christmas break. I was going back to my farm in Wyndmere, where I didn’t even have any friends anymore (much less cable services). I had no idea how I was possibly going to entertain myself for the next four weeks. When I mentioned this concern to Rex (a.k.a. The Artist Formerly Known As Mike), he loaned me two videotapes (labeled with Scotch tape). I didn’t remember to take them back to school with me in January, and Rex never missed them. Who would have? By May, I had completely forgotten that these tapes even existed. They ended up getting thrown into a box with about fifty other videotapes, most of which had been used by Mom to tape Falcon Crest.

  Seven years later, I was home visiting my parents in 1999. Once again, I was unspeakably bored (I guess that’s one thing that hadn’t changed). I found a box full of videotapes in the spare bedroom, and I started randomly throwing them into our VCR. Along with the 1988 NCAA Final Four, a PBS special on serial killers and a shitload of Jane Wyman footage, I came across these two gems. I almost started to cry. For a guy writing a book on heavy metal, it was the find of the century.

  The eleven-plus hours of raw footage (taped on SLP) are rough; many videos are partially cut off, and all of Mike’s Videos #2 has static and a vertical shake. Some were taped in stereo, some in mono, and a few were somehow taped in both. But it’s still a miraculous collection of glam rock’s video age. Since Mike was dubbing any big-haired band that happened to stumble across the screen, the tapes captured bands that no modern videographer would have possibly thought to include—Giant, EZO, King Diamond, and other such trashy flashy easy action. This kind of random sampling provides a staunchly realistic representation of what early metal videos were truly like. Mainstream reality is always founded on commercial obscurity.

  Predictably, most of what’s on Mike’s Videos #1 and #2 is primitive. But that’s no reflection on how watchable the material is. Many of the cheapest, cheesiest clips from a 1989 installment of Night Tracks were superior to videos made today, mostly because modern videos have adopted an enforced artistic agenda that’s counterproductive to entertainment. Perhaps the smartest statement ever made about the video medium was written by Rob Sheffield in SPIN’s ten-year anniversary issue: “Van Halen’s 1984 ‘Jump’ was a self-directed, relatively low-budget video. Van Halen’s 1991 ‘Right Now’ was a tasteful, clever, sterile montage of special graphics that looked exactly the same when it became a soft-drink commercial. ‘Jump’ lives in the soul of everybody who has seen it, while ‘Right Now’ represents MTV’s idealized vision of itself as a serious art medium.”

  At first glance, this might seem more like a shot at Sammy Hagar than a thesis statement on the video age, but it makes an important point. As the emphasis of video-making moved away from its original objective—the unconditional goal of pushing albums—the videos became more interesting, but less effective. “Jump” is fundamentally a commercial for 1984, and most hard rock videos from that era were built on the same premise. The goal of the record label was to (a) let people see the band, and (b) convince them to hear a song that listeners might normally ignore. In “Right Now,” the band is hardly ever on the screen—and the accompanying music is supposed to make people read!

  This is not to say that “Right Now” is a bad video. It’s very good. I honestly don’t know if “Jump” necessarily “lives in my soul” any more than “Right Now” does, nor do I understand what’s so horribly bad about selling Pepsi. But Sheffield’s general premise is dead-on accurate. The video for “Right Now” couldn’t possibly make viewers like Van Halen any more than they already did, and it probably made some of them like Van Halen less (if they thought it was boring or pretentious, or if they really hated Pepsi). But “Jump” made me love Van Halen. It was like going to a club and stumbling across the coolest band in town: You saw the group’s personality, you had something to look at while the catchy hook was latently hardwired into your brain, and you got the idea. And what was “the idea”? The easy answer is “nothing”—but the real answer is everything that was ever perfect about Van Halen and rock ’n’ roll. I could never explain why so many people like Van Halen, but anyone who has seen “Jump” can figure it out.

  “Right Now” is an endless string of important ideas that are supposed to remind us about what “really matters.” In that regard, it fails. I don’t think about my life one iota differently because of that video; the aggregate of hundreds of concepts ultimately equates to nothing. Meanwhile, “Jump” was an endless string of … well, of “jumping.” The goal was to make people think Van Halen was a pretty cool rock band. Obviously, it worked. Granted, the motivation for the latter pales in comparison to the goals of the former—but “Jump” is half of something, while “Right Now” is all of nothing.

  Sheffield’s implication is that the “Right Now” video was too much like a television commercial from the day it was created, and his proof is that it was nicely converted into a soda advertisement without much editing. In a strict conventional sense, I suppose that’s true, but the argument really doesn’t stand up when you look at the application. The original video didn’t make me want to buy For Unlawful Carnage Knowledge, and the accompanying commercial didn’t make me want to buy a twelve-pack of pop. Meanwhile, “Jump” sold Van Halen. “Jump” was more mercenary than any other video Van Halen ever made, because all it did was pitch the product. It was nothing but a commercial. Of course, adopting that philosophy always seems to be the best thing that can ever happen to pop music, anyway.

  Videos like “Jump” were the cornerstone of the metal video genre. It’s a specific type of creation I call
the “live without an audience” video. Every band who made at least two videos made at least one of these: It’s the group, performing a prototypical stage show, with no one else in the building (except, I suppose, the camera crew—and in the case of Autograph’s “Loud and Clear,” an exclusive audience of Ozzy Osbourne, Vince Neil, and a bunch of foxy whores). The intention is to present the band as a living entity, but there’s no attempt to fool anyone into thinking this is actually a “live” event; often, band members change clothes several times during the clip, and the wardrobe switches are all edited into one seamless track. Smoke machines were often utilized, and the three obligatory shots were (a) a vocalist running with the microphone stand, (b) a guitar player sliding on his knees during a solo, and (c) the drummer pointing at the camera with his drumstick and smiling (or snarling, if the band happened to be pretending they worship Satan).

  To break up the concert footage, most videos would insert random, unrelated scenes that made the piece “unique.” Common items were girls in tight dresses, shots of the band laughing (or sleeping) on the tour bus, sneaky men wearing trench coats, birds (particularly doves and crows), girls dancing in cages, and/or a horse walking through fog. For the song “All We Are,” the female-fronted German band Warlock blew up cars, much like Wendy O. Williams did.

  Sometimes the director simply had the group perform in a weird place, like a church or an open field. The best location was for Raging Slab’s “Don’t Dog Me,” where the country-fried metalheads rocked out on a flatbed trailer, pulled by a monster truck. You still see this kind of move from modern hard rock videos; a 1998 clip for the Deftones, “My Own Summer (Shove It),” had the band performing on top of shark tanks, interspliced with images of Carcharodon carcharias yapping at the camera.

  From a promotional perspective, the “live without an audience” vid was especially suited for pointing out which member of the group was supposed to be the star. About 90 percent of the time, this meant the vocalist. However, there were some notable exceptions. The potential for “isolation footage” was perfect for egocentric band leaders who wanted to make sure everyone knew who was writing the songs (and thereby paying the bills). In the Badlands video “Dreams in the Dark,” the focus is on guitarist Jake E. Lee; Lee had built a name for himself as Ozzy Osbourne’s third axe player, and he was Badlands’ creator and best-known commodity. Jimmy Page tried to reintroduce himself as a metal god with his Outrider album, and the accompanying performance video for “Wasting My Name” was centered around Page awkwardly re-creating his stage moves from The Song Remains the Same. Meanwhile, the vid for Bonham’s “Wait for You” promotes that outfit’s drummer more than any other video I’ve ever seen; this is obviously because the drummer was Jason Bonham, the group’s namesake and the son of deceased Led Zep percussionist John Bonham.

  Part of the allure of “live without an audience” videos is that they capture the universal teen experience of lip-synching songs in front of the bedroom mirror. A fabricated performance allows the camera crew to get tight shots of the artists, so the viewer is assaulted with a sense of hyper-reality. You could be sitting in the front row of a Warrant concert, and you’d still never be as close to Jani Lane as you are in the video for “Down Boys.” Since everything is shot (and reshot) a hundred times, everything is perfect; every stage move can be choreographed and accentuated. The director can also play with size and scale: In Ratt’s “Round and Round” video, all five members of the band are squeezed into the main shot. It’s like a portrait of the group, and it makes the audience perceive them as a gritty, focused unit. It was just as easy to create the opposite perception. In “You Give Love a Bad Name,” the members of Bon Jovi are spread all over a mammoth concourse (which even included a fake audience!), and it immediately made them seem like a supergroup; it also provided opportunities to isolate the singular star power of its singer.

  Probably the strangest entry in this genre was Stryper, the self-proclaimed “Yellow and Black Attack.” The fact that Stryper had two platinum albums might be the ultimate testament to metal’s popularity: When you consider the stereotype of what kind of people listened to hard rock, it’s amazing that Stryper was even cast in a position to compete as a major act. In their performance video for “Always There for You,” the band is referring to Jesus, and vocalist Michael Sweet constantly points to the heavens; to combat the demonic power of Iron Maiden, their faux stage is decorated with the digits 777. Stryper also made copious references to the biblical passage Isaiah 53:5. When I eventually looked this up in the Old Testament, I expected to see something like, “And the Lord said unto them, you shall all bow before the power and majesty of rock.” However, it actually gives a prophetic description of how the Messiah would be beaten and wounded for all of mankind’s sins. Stryper was not exactly a party band.

  The growth of MTV’s artistic significance is often credited to the competitive and insular nature of Hollywood. During the 1970s (and particularly because of Vietnam), it slowly became standard for absolutely everyone to go to college, particularly if they had no desire to get a real job. One of the results was a massive population of film school students, most of whom became waiters and valets in the 1980s. Since the vast majority of these Kubrick wannabes couldn’t crack the motion picture industry, they saw opportunities to make minimovies in the world of rock ’n’ roll. The idea was that cinematically compelling videos could catapult an artist into feature films, and—occasionally—it worked. The best example is probably David Fincher, who went on to make amazing movies like Se7en and Fight Club after a prolific career as a video director for everyone from Madonna to Loverboy.

  However, it soon became very obvious that you did not need a skilled filmmaker to tweak the appearance of a fairly straightforward rock video. Escalating technology made the addition of video effects incredibly easy, if not necessarily sparkling. In Vixen’s “Edge of a Broken Heart,” a glove-covered hand (presumably lead singer Janet Gardner’s) reaches up and appears to “turn the page” of the TV screen, advancing between color shots of the girls jamming and black-and-white clips of the girls putting on lipstick, shopping in strip malls, and hanging out with their friends in Poison. When watched today, it seems painfully simplistic. But “Edge of a Broken Heart” is a perfect illustration of the “live without an audience” abstraction: You see the musicians performing, you briefly see them frolicking, and it’s more than a moving picture. There is fantasy, as well as a few fleeting grains of reality. Through both production and presentation, we actually feel like we’ve learned something about these people.

  The “live without an audience” video was an especially cagey move for upstart bands (like Vixen) since they didn’t necessarily have an audience, anyway (again, like Vixen). It would not be very cool for any band to shoot a video with fourteen people in the audience, except for maybe Belle and Sebastian.

  However, there was a larger plan: If your “live without an audience” clip was wicked cool, maybe you’d get people to come and see you for real. And if enough kids showed up for at least one show, you could make the “live with an audience” video. These projects are among the most memorable shards of the metal legacy; when you close your eyes and try to imagine the biggest hard rock bands of the 1980s, the most fluent image tends to be the marquee shot of a long-locked vocalist communicating with twenty thousand screaming kids. These are the videos that show which groups hit the big time—they are proof that a given group graduated to the class of rock stars.

  Once again, the early template for this creation comes from Van Halen. The video for “Panama” opened with a massive shot of VH playing before the kind of crowd only they could draw; it clearly outlined who was the biggest band in the land (this kind of distinction was always a serious concern for Van Halen—in the early 1980s, they always wanted to make sure they had larger amps than KISS, and Alex Van Halen always wanted a larger drum kit than Eric Carr). The onstage action in “Panama” focused on the band members hanging from cables
and swinging across the stage, capturing the wild (but still boyishly playful) Van Halen image. The band had actually made a primitive live video for “Unchained” in 1981, but “Panama” was a far better representation of the band’s rambunctious personality.

  The strength of “Panama” is that the concert footage is not overused; in fact, it’s underused. The problem with most performance videos is that they’re usually less than five minutes long, but they still get boring. “Panama” does not, and that’s due to the non-live footage that creates a goofy, non sequitur story line.

  Director Pete Angelus had a good grasp on what made David Lee Roth appealing. He understood that Roth was a clown, but not necessarily a joke; Dave might do something stupid, but he didn’t do stuff that was dorky. The most memorable shot from “Panama” is Roth getting dragged out of a hotel by police, wearing only handcuffs and a towel. The offense is never explained, but it’s obviously illegal and it obviously involved nudity. Seconds later, Roth is back drinking Budweiser with the posse and doing karate kicks in public. That kind of paradox was ’84 Van Halen personified: One minute you’re arrested for snorting coke off a hooker’s ass; the next minute you’re hoisted on a bungee cord in front of twenty-two thousand people.

  When a band makes a video like “Panama,” the members often claim the clip is a “tribute” to their fans. Usually, this is a lie; it’s akin to how groups regurgitate studio tracks onto a live album and swear it captures the true feeling of what a band is “really about,” even though it’s just a way to sell the material to the same audience twice. Still, there may be some sincerity to the suggestion that a live video credits the audience as a group’s unofficial “fifth member” (or as the unofficial “sixth” member, if you have a five-person group—or the unofficial “ninth member,” if you’re in Guns N’ Roses). Take Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home.” It’s a love song that’s about touring, and the video translates that idea with an abundant degree of clarity (much more so than the actual lyrics). The slow-motion footage in “Home Sweet Home” is particularly effective; it makes the image of sweat flying off Vince Neil’s hair seem dramatic. It’s amazing how simple any movement can be glamorized by elementary slow-motion photography; Neil becomes as momentarily captivating as Walter Payton’s icy breath in an NFL Films production.