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

  The video for “Home Sweet Home” was the most important career decision Mötley Crüe ever made. When Theatre of Pain was released, a lot of diehard Crüe fans were less than overjoyed—after the dark, hardcore style of Shout at the Devil, the glitter rock on Theatre of Pain seemed awfully swishy. I remember being especially disappointed the first time I played “Home Sweet Home,” because it came across as the epitome of a sell-out chick ballad geared toward a nonmetal crowd. In a nonvideo age, Mötley Crüe might have lost its core audience. But “Home Sweet Home” briefly became one of the most popular videos in the history of MTV. It was the channel’s most requested video at a time when MTV was rapidly switching from a cultural anomaly to a cultural linchpin. By virtue of a well-shot, well-timed video, Mötley Crüe climbed into the next tier of rock popularity. It suddenly became clear that the Crüe was going to hang around for a while, even if devout metal fans quit playing the records. And since Mötley was clearly the “most metal” of that year’s major pop acts, kids like me supported Theatre of Pain out of virtual obligation. My thirteen-year-old logic knew that any lame Crüe ballad was still better than Starship’s “We Built This City” or Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice Theme,” so “Home Sweet Home” became a classic by default. When the Crüe made this kind of video a second time (for the song “Same Ol’ Situation” off Dr. Feelgood), it was slicker and sexier—but it would never be as defining as “Home Sweet Home.”

  Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” was another concert video that helped cement a band’s image for all time. Whenever I think of Joe Elliott, I picture him wearing shredded jeans. “Pour Some Sugar” also provides a snapshot of a commercial juggernaut flexing its muscles during its period of greatest prosperity (according to writer Mick Wall, beneath the mammoth stage used in this video was a harem of totally naked women waiting to get fucked—a legend that’s probably exaggerated, but certainly possible). Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” might be an even better example: Even though he probably only wore it once, Axl Rose’s white leather suit is a permanent piece of his historical benefaction. In fact, the entire “Paradise City” clip is almost perfect. It was mainly shot at two locations: Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands (where Guns was opening for Aerosmith) and at the 1988 Donnington Rock Festival in England (an event infamously remembered for the deaths of two fans during GNR’s set). Filmed in black and white, the live images show the band in full force—but the offstage footage accentuates each band member’s identity in a surprisingly unforced fashion (serious fans may recall a casual shot of Steven Adler on a boat, and another of Slash signing an autograph while he takes a piss). More than any other video, “Paradise City” re-creates the larger experience of an emotive live event.

  However, the Jedi Masters of this concept will always be Bon Jovi. From a creative standpoint, no other band could rival their sincere appreciation for the audience. Watching a Bon Jovi video made you want to see them for real, even if you didn’t like their songs. And why? Because they seemed legitimately honored to be performing for their fans.

  Bon Jovi took at least one substantial influence from Mercury label mate KISS: They believed that anyone who bought a ticket for the show temporarily became their employer. They worked for the people and gave them whatever they wanted. The video for “Lay Your Hands On Me” was actually a lot like “Pour Some Sugar On Me” (which was a lot like “Livin’ On a Prayer”), and this similarity made sense; both groups particularly appealed to women and not-so-serious metalheads, so one would expect them to be marketed in the same way. But Bon Jovi seemed happier about it. In fact, they seemed so happy that they made “Bad Medicine,” a simple idea that spoke volumes about the entire metal genre.

  For the “Bad Medicine” shoot, Bon Jovi scheduled an intimate club show and gave every member of the audience an eight-millimeter camera. The agreement (or at least the espoused agreement) was that everyone could keep the camera, as long as they gave the band whatever they had filmed during the performance (this technique has since been copied by lots of just-married couples who put disposable cameras on all the supper tables during the wedding reception).

  Video producers spliced together a grainy hodgepodge of Bon Jovi being cute and frisky, along with several bonus shots of really hot girls crouching like the amateur photographers they are. Most of the footage looks like it was directed by B-minus film students from UCLA. From a critical standpoint, it gets a little boring.

  However, this was the kind of well-intended gimmick that showed where Bon Jovi was coming from. This was not a band who was going to look at the people who made them wealthy and say, “We’re only doing this for ourselves.” Jon Bon Jovi recognized that half the value of his art was derived from the people who received it. “Bad Medicine” pushes that idea to its extreme.

  A widely held opinion in the aesthetic community insists an artist is more credible if he doesn’t consider his audience during the creative process; the philosophy suggests that a true artist has to make his art for personal reasons, regardless of whether or not people like it (or even want it). That’s plainly stupid, and Bon Jovi knew it. Art is not intrinsic to the universe; art is a human construction. If you killed off all the world’s people, you would kill off all the art. The only thing important about art is how it affects people. It only needs to affect one person to be interesting, but it has to affect many people to be important.

  Like virtually everything else in life, it all comes down to simple mathematics: The more people who are affected by a piece of art, the more important it is. The video for “Bad Medicine” multiplies that principle by making the audience both sides of the equation. They are the creators of the art, and they are also the receivers. Guys like Richie Sambora merely acted as the conduit.

  For a fan, performance videos were appreciated as surrogates; they were the way to see a band when you could not see them for real. Warrant’s video for “Heaven” was the closest thing to seeing them in concert. However, it still could not compete with a really well-done conceptual video, even though those were few and far between.

  Concept videos change the way a song is consumed by the audience, and some artists have become very good at it. Just about every Radiohead video makes me like that band a little more. R.E.M. has excelled at this art from the beginning. Electronica bands seem particularly suited for this kind of creative medium; world-class hipster Spike Jonze (now better known for directing Being John Malkovich) has created some brilliant concept videos for the Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, and Fatboy Slim.

  On the whole, metal bands are less successful at this venture, and that was especially obvious in the middle 1980s. This entire video genre had improved drastically (for everybody) by the end of the decade, but the early half of the period was not too stellar.

  For a group like Cinderella, the failures were all too obvious. The video for “Nobody’s Fool” has the band performing amid bright pastel lighting (one assumes this is supposed to seem surreal), but the subplot revolves around a girl who runs home and takes a nap. If this is supposed to indicate why she is not a fool, I don’t get it. The clip for “You Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)” has the group playing instruments around a lake (or possibly a loch); the majority of the footage frames Tom Keifer plunking away at a piano while the sun sets behind him, and it ends up looking like a promotional clip for a travel agent.

  Even worse was “Coming Home,” a minifilm about a mysterious man (probably an aspiring soap opera actor) who rides a motorcycle to “come home” to his blond love interest. Judging from the terrain and the copious windmills, the lonely blonde vixen evidently lives in Kansas. The narrative of the video is a rote replication of the lyrics, a technique that almost never works. Poison’s “Fallen Angel” tried the same approach, and it failed just as horribly.

  In “Fallen Angel,” a teenage girl makes an announcement at supper: “I’ve decided to move [dramatic pause] … to California [longer dramatic pause] … and I want to leave on Friday.” A f
ew seconds later, she gets off a bus in L.A. and immediately becomes a whore. Bret Michael explains that she’s just a small-town girl with her whole life packed in a suitcase by her knees, and she’s rolling the dice with her life. At the conclusion of the video, another small-town girl gets off at the same bus stop, and one assumes she is destined for the same slutty future. Actually, this video may have been a form of subliminal marketing for the band. It seemed to be delivering a peculiar rock message: “Stay with your parents! Never go anywhere! Stay in your bedroom and listen to more Poison tapes!” It’s kind of like the ending of The Wizard of Oz.

  However, Poison did make one wonderful concept video, even though its greatness might have happened by accident. When Poison released “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to MTV audiences, the goal was to show their fans what “life on the road” was like. A decade later, the result is kind of spooky, especially when viewed against Poison’s ultimate collapse. Today, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” seems like a sobering examination of Poison’s alcoholism, and it deserves a compliment few rock videos can be granted—it looks real. There is a shot of bassist Bobby Dahl being carried off the stage by a roadie, and there is no question about the validity of his intoxication. Retrospectively (and perhaps unintentionally), “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” has become a conceptual artifact of the glamorous, pathetic existence of a metal band embracing the height of its self-indulgence (in other words, the other side of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” and “Paradise City”). The sunken, drunken eyes of Michaels say a lot about rock ’n’ roll: The dudes in Poison were famous, but they still lived like jobless guys who never made it out of Pennsylvania. Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

  The metal bands who consistently made the best concept videos were the groups that truly understood their audience. As I grow older, it’s getting harder for me to remember who and what I could relate to when I was fifteen, but I bet it was Skid Row. Though they did make at least one clip that was a literal depiction of a song (“18 and Life”), two of their other early vids were brilliant examples of the less-is-more philosophy of filmmaking. The core shot in “Youth Gone Wild” was just a kid running—you can’t see his face and you don’t see where he’s going, but it seems obvious that he’s running away from something. “Piece of Me” has the same aggressive aesthetic, and the images go straight for the adrenal gland: It’s footage of a particularly violent concert, evidently a riot going on outside a Skid Row venue. I suspect the director staged the whole thing, because I’ve never been to a rock show policed by storm troopers and attack dogs, but it looks remarkably plausible. There’s actually a great deal of creative tension in “Piece of Me.”

  All three of these videos were shot in black and white, and they provide an amazingly insightful portrait of Skid Row’s audience: Even though they had a cute lead singer and a bunch of radio songs, Skid Row was a band for the bad kids. These were not the kinds of fans who spent $80 on leather pants, $11 on hair mousse, and still got a CD player for Christmas; these were the kids who wore denim jackets and wrote “Skid Row” on the back with a black Magic Marker. These were the kids who stole cheap beer and actually got in real trouble. These videos show why Skid Row could release a ballad like “I Remember You” and still tour with Pantera (which they did in 1992). They spoke to the people who felt Skid Row was part of their own identity.

  The opposite of the Skid’s pseudo-realism were all the postapocalyptic videos that spoke to absolutely no one, but still succeeded on the strength of absurd entertainment value. For whatever the reason, Mel Gibson’s 1981 film The Road Warrior influenced metal video-making in a major way. Videos from two high-profile releases from ’83 (Shout at the Devil and Lick It Up) constructed fantasy worlds that appeared to be set in postnuclear wastelands where it’s always very windy and all the women wear ripped clothes.

  Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill” stars a Xena-esque female character who emancipates a corral of strippers, much to the chagrin of the Crüe (who were thereby forced to call on the power of Satan by joining fists and creating a fiery pentagram). Mötley’s “Too Young to Fall in Love” was more of an Asian kung-fu thriller (best remembered for Tommy Lee spitting out a mouthful of rice), but its Escape from New York vibe was very much the same. Meanwhile, KISS sold themselves as warriors who walked the earth for no reason in particular. “Lick It Up,” the first video that showed KISS without makeup, suggests that futuristic women will live underground and eat navy rations—but only KISS can help them rock! Its artistic companion, “All Hell’s Breaking Loose,” evidently takes place at the same time and place but also includes a lot of women fencing.

  To be honest, my favorite postapocalyptic video was probably Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly.” The entire clip was basically just Lita, writhing in a cavern after the world had been destroyed. Luckily, the holocaust that prefaced “Kiss Me Deadly” did not seem to affect Lita’s bosom, which always seemed on the brink of escaping from her leather corset.

  The problem with metal concept videos was pretty simple: They didn’t have a concept. Very often, a director tried to be inexplicable in the hope that it would seem innovative. Kix’s “Don’t Close Your Eyes” has lots of shots of trees set against weird, muted lighting, but nothing much happens. White Lion made three videos like this. Winger’s “Headed for a Heartbreak” is shot in black and white, but it’s mostly images of Kip Winger trying to look forlorn; if they hadn’t included a few extraneous shots of some unknown woman’s cleavage, “Headed for a Heartbreak” would resemble the opening sequence for a gay porn flick.

  But not everybody failed. The Cult beat the odds and got it right. They were always a little more artsy than their contemporaries, and their videos showed it. The action is pretty subdued in “Fire Woman,” but it still seemed cool; it opens with a replication of the Sonic Temple album cover (smart marketing, boys), and it features Ian Astbury banging a tambourine like Linda McCartney. “Edie (Ciao Baby)” is far more stylized than the vast majority of hard rock vids, almost akin to an INXS video.

  Van Halen was another who made this work, this time with “Hot for Teacher,” a perfect fantasy with a strangely disturbing sense of humor. However, I must begrudgingly concede that the all-time best concept video was Metallica’s “One.” It was a big deal when Metallica made this clip, because they had never done a video before and usually implied they never would. “As for a video for MTV, there’s no thoughts about it,” drummer Lars Ulrich said in the summer of 1988. “Having one is pretty useless anyway. Headbanger’s Ball is a fucking joke.” But when the band finally sold out (read: got smart) and caved into MTV’s begging, they made a visual composition that was credible, intelligent, and downright spooky. Using footage from the 1971 movie Johnny Got His Gun, Metallica created a seven-minute, twenty-four-second masterpiece that far superseded the original film. The images are now totally familiar to anyone who follows hard rock; a soldier loses his arms, legs, sight, hearing, and voice. What’s interesting is that if you have not seen this video, it’s almost impossible to understand what “One” (the song) is supposed to be about—but once you have seen the video, it doesn’t seem like the song could be about anything else.

  For a lot of purists, that’s exactly what’s bad about music videos: They stop people from creating their own perception of what a piece of music means. By now, even the interpretation of sound has become a socialized process. Without a doubt, the video age is the worst thing that ever happened to teenage creativity. But—at least in the example of “One”—it’s hard to imagine how any kid could come up with anything better.

  October 10, 1987

  Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” is America’s No. 1 single, ousting Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.”

  Intelligent metal fans always felt a grudging sense of respect for Whitesnake.

  Whitesnake was not very cool. This was mostly because they were fronted by the generally unappetizing David
Coverdale, the male slut who replaced Ian Gillan in Deep Purple from 1973 to 1976. Coverdale was from a bygone era, and—no matter how hip and popular his band became—that fact was always a little too clear. Whitesnake was overtly constructed, and unabashedly so (especially when axe mercenary Steve Vai joined the group). They had no grit.

  Coverdale was always accused of ripping off Robert Plant; Plant himself was particularly willing to rail about this similarity. Indirectly, Jimmy Page made the same comparison when he created Coverdale-Page in 1992, one of the worst experiments in rock history and assumedly just a way to goad Plant into recording Unledded. For all practical purposes, Coverdale was always a shameless Plant imitator—but sometimes it worked. “Still of the Night” was the Gen X “Immigrant Song.” It was hard to resist a lot of Whitesnake’s songs.

  Their biggest hit (and their only No. 1 single) was “Here I Go Again.” This song is interesting for a couple of reasons, but mostly for its video. Though the lyrics of the song are about forging one’s own path and being a loner, the director of the video interpreted the song far differently: He seemed to think this song was about watching a woman trying to fuck a car. Luckily, this was 1987, and Coverdale happened to be dating Tawny Kitaen. Ms. Kitaen isn’t a particularly skilled thespian, but she is very, very good at humping the hood of a Jaguar. “Here I Go Again” almost immediately became the most popular video on MTV. Coverdale and Kitaen would later split (surprise!), and Tawny claimed that her car-fucking was the primary reason Whitesnake became commercially popular and that she deserved a huge chunk of the back royalties. She may have a decent argument.