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

  Still, Def Lep was constantly under suspicion of being “poseurs,” the ultimate attack leveled by any metal maniac. Here’s the opening line from a letter to the magazine Hit Parader from March of 1985: “I would like to know why so many people are so obsessed with groups like Duran Duran, Culture Club, the Thompson Twins and Def Leppard,” asks a reader from Denham Springs, Louisiana. What we were too dumb to realize was that the guys in Def Leppard hated the term “heavy metal,” and any member of the band would have given his right arm to avoid the label (except for Rick Allen, I suppose).

  But before we try to explain why Def Leppard wanted to avoid the metal label, let’s try to understand why some of my friends were unwilling to grant them the title (and—as ashamed as I am to admit this—I was part of the anti-Def Leppard contingent!). We didn’t think Def Lep was worthy of respect for lots of reasons, all of which were about as sensible as the reasons for believing in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. But here were two of them:

  • Def Leppard made a great album, and then they made a bad one that was even more popular. Everyone loved Pyromania, including antimetal people. It was the single biggest reason metal sales jumped from 8 percent of the market in 1983 to 20 percent in 1984. At the time, the only bigger album in the universe was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Pyromania was one of the cornerstones of the genre. But then Def Lep released Hysteria. Ultimately, Hysteria would sell even more units, but success wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Pyromania seemed like a metal record that crossed into a lot of other demographics because it was so damn good. However, Hysteria seemed like it had been specifically made for nonmetal fans. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” sounded like a paint-by-number portrait of what producer Mutt Lange assumed would pass for heavy metal. Even worse, the rest of the record was one long power ballad, which points directly to the main reason Def Leppard couldn’t be trusted.

  • Girls liked it way, way too much. With the possible exception of Floridian porn rap, no genre of music was ever more obsessed with getting snatch than ’80s glam metal. The Los Angeles scene (Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P., Faster Pussycat, et al.) was particularly pedantic about this pursuit. And since teenage glam audiences were almost entirely composed of horny teenage males, it made for an effective marriage of ideas. The painfully obvious irony is that fans only liked the image of women in the scope of metal. Feminists would say the young males were “threatened” by the idea of girls digging hard rock, but—in reality—that had almost nothing to do with it. The distaste came from what a female audience reflected. Since no one could agree on what metal was (or which bands qualified), the only gauge was to look around and see who was standing next to you at a concert. That became your peer group; for all practical purposes, you were the people standing next to you. The metal genre is fundamentally about its audience and always has been. So when girls named Danielle who wore Esprit tank tops suddenly embodied the Def Leppard Lifestyle, it clearly indicated that Def Leppard no longer represented the people who had comprised the core audience for On Through the Night. As a shooting guard on our high school basketball team, I recall traveling to an away game and listening to our vapid cheerleaders sing at the front of the bus; they were singing “Armageddon It” and “Love Bites.” That alone was indisputable proof that Hysteria sucked.

  By virtue of this criteria, it would seem that heavy metal was a completely definable entity. And when I was a younger man, those guidelines did indeed seem totally clear. But as an adult, it’s damn near impossible for me to make a comprehensive list of every ’80s glam band that ever existed, because I’ve come to realize that metallurgy isn’t an exact science. Nonetheless, zine editor Matt Worley did a pretty decent job in a 1995 issue of his publication Lies (which may or may not have taken its name from the 1988 Guns N’ Roses EP). Here’s his hit list: Bang Tango, Love/Hate, Smashed Gladys, Bon Jovi, Mother Love Bone, Poison, D’Molls, Cinderella, Dangerous Toys, Guns N’ Roses, Tora Tora, L.A. Guns, White Lion, Whitesnake, Great White, Little Caesar, Roxx Gang, Enuff Z’Nuff, Child’s Play, Danger Danger, Snake Island, Spread Eagle, Kix, Shotgun Messiah, Warrant, Extreme, Vain, Dirty Looks, Dogs D’Amour, Faster Pussycat, D.A.D., Rock City Angels, Dokken, Skid Row, Royal Court of China, liquid jesus, Circus of Power, Katmandu, Kill For Thrills, Bulletboys, Junkyard, Kiss, Lord Tracy, Sleeze Beez, and, oh yeah, Mötley Crüe.

  Well, Mr. Worley obviously forgot Helix. But he still did an admirable job of hitting most of the bands everyone else has forgotten. He only missed a handful of major notables: Ratt, Britny Fox, W.A.S.P., Lita Ford, Twisted Sister, Frehley’s Comet, Vinnie Vincent Invasion, Winger, Hanoi Rocks, King Kobra, Fastway, Slaughter, the Sea Hags, Tuff, Tiger Tailz, Accept, Quiet Riot, Europe, Zebra, Helloween, Loudness, Autograph, Heavens Edge, Vixen, Tesla, Badlands, Stryper, EZO, Pretty Boy Floyd, Y & T, and Hurricane. I will grant that some of these additions are debatable; I’m sure a lot of these bands would vehemently insist that they were “just a rock ’n’ roll band” and shouldn’t be included under the amorphous parameters of metal. I read an interview Nikki Sixx gave after the release of the unremarkable Crüe reunion LP Generation Swine, and he was bemoaning the fact that a magazine listed Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P., and Twisted Sister in the same sentence. He seems to think Mötley Crüe was far better and far different than those other groups, which is absolutely insane. Oh, they were better, but they certainly weren’t different. Mötley, W.A.S.P., and Ratt were often discussed as a leather-clad trinity of L.A. metal excellence (Twisted Sister hailed from New York). In fact, Sixx personally thanked W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless in the liner notes of Shout at the Devil. At one point, I’m pretty sure they were even in the same band (that group was called London, which remains best known for having all its most talented members quit in order to become rock stars with better bands).

  Sixx’s attitude is an unfortunate (and all too common) denial of his roots. Part of the reason ’80s hard rock will never get respect—even kitschy respect—is because so many of the major players have retroactively tried to disassociate themselves from all their peers. Disco didn’t wrestle with this kind of shame: Even after it had been flogged like a dead horse, former discotheque superstars were still proud to be part of the phenomenon they built. Subsequently, it’s become acceptable to play disco albums at parties. Nikki Sixx could learn a lot from Donna Summer.

  The reason so many metal groups hate being lumped into the same category is that writers often turn the phrase “heavy metal” into “glam metal,” which is used interchangeably with “hair metal,” a term that purposefully ignores musical ability and classifies a band by its follicle volume. By the mid 1980s, it had actually become a savvy business move for some bands to pitch themselves as having no visual appeal whatsoever, because those groups fostered their own niche audience. Somehow, there was a working-class credibility in ugliness. The Scorpions were never dismissed as glammy, and neither were the equally unattractive guys in Krokus or the blues-loving idiots in Great White. AC/DC wasn’t either. By lacking visual flair, they were granted street cred.

  Even today, I don’t consider Def Leppard a “glam” metal band, primarily for two reasons (neither of which is homeliness). The first is that they were already somewhat famous when makeup and hairspray became in vogue, so Lep kind of predates this period (when they released On Through the Night in 1980, they were a remarkably young teen quartet; in a lot of ways, they were pop metal’s Silverchair). However, the main reason I don’t call them glam is that I can barely remember how they dressed or how they looked. I once interviewed Theodore Gracyk, the author of an incredibly well researched and painfully dull book titled Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. The only insightful point he made during our entire discussion was when he flippantly referred to Def Leppard as “the most imageless band who ever lived.” Def Lep was actually just a harder-rockin’ version of faceless AOR bands like Journey and Boston. You never saw them, except on MTV—and then you really only saw Joe Elliott. The other four guys blended together
and were essentially interchangeable (except for Phil Collen, who sort of resembled an underfed frat boy). In and of itself, that wasn’t too uncommon; 90 percent of metal nonvocalists all looked like the same guy. The difference was that Def Lep was incredibly popular—way too popular to be anonymous. There’s no explanation as to why they were so nondescript. Prior to working on this book, I don’t even know if I could have matched all five names to all five faces (or all seven faces, if you count the guy they kicked out for boozing and the guy who drank himself to death).

  Clearly, the definition of heavy metal is a purely semantic issue. That being the case, let’s get as semantic as possible.

  Metal is a visceral word. Standing alone, it doesn’t really have a consistent connotation. If you’re trying to protect something, keeping it in a “metal box” is good; if your tap water tastes “metallic,” that’s bad. It’s completely situational, but we can safely assume it’s usually masculine, uncomfortable, and—by its very nature—manufactured.

  In the opening pages of his book Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Robert Walser talks about the dictionary definition of metal, and he prefers to portray metal music as a metaphor for power (in fact, the manuscript’s first line is a quote from Rob Halford stating “metal is power”). That’s a valuable insight, but it doesn’t really get us any closer to understanding what makes a band a “metal band.” Walser’s statement would indicate that either (a) metal bands are always about power, or (b) powerful bands are metal bands.

  Certainly, we know the second statement is false. Patti Smith was pretty goddamn powerful, and no one’s going to say Smith was her generation’s Lita Ford. The same goes for Madonna and Liz Phair. Bruce Springsteen is a powerful character, as was John Lennon. So being a “powerful” artist obviously doesn’t automatically make you a “metal artist.”

  However, the first statement is a little more debatable. It does seem like performing heavy metal often illustrates the possession of power. Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P. literally wore metal on their bodies, almost like the way Hannibal dressed up his war elephants before kicking ass in the Alps. Keel’s signature song was “The Right to Rock,” and its opening lyrics were akin to Mel Gibson’s rah-rah speech from Braveheart: “All our life we’ve been fighting / For the right to take a stand.” And Halford’s thesis that “metal is power” was completely true for his band, Judas Priest: Both lyrically and musically, Priest was only about power. Insipid PMRC spokesmodel Tipper Gore hated Priest, specifically for one song that had a lyric that even disturbed me: “I’m going to force you at gun point to eat me alive.” Even to me, that clearly seemed like a song about violence against women, and—as we all learned from St. Elsewhere—rape is not a “sex crime,” it’s a “power crime.” Of course, Halford recently revealed that he’s homosexual and always has been, so the song takes on a new, mind-blowing dimension. I suppose it actually validates Halford’s longtime argument that the tune was purely a metaphor, but it’s more intriguing to imagine thousands of homophobic teens singing along with a narrative about Halford demanding a blow job from another guy.

  ANYWAY, I suppose it all comes down to what you define as “power” (which means we have to mosh through another wall of semantic bullshit). For example: Was Ratt about “power”? You could argue they were. The first cut off their hugely successful debut LP Out of the Cellar was “Wanted Man,” which implied that vocalist Stephen Pearcy was some kind of dangerous cowboy; according to my friend Greg’s father, most tracks off Invasion of Your Privacy glorified prostitution. Yet Ratt never came across as threatening. They had the usual songs about sex and girls, but—if anything—Ratt seemed to be involved in relationships that didn’t work, and there wasn’t much they could do about it. “What comes around goes around,” crooned Pearcy. Well, yeah—I guess that’s true. But what the fuck does that have to do with power? On “Back for More,” a girl is warned that if she keeps hanging around with her boyfriend, he’ll screw her over … but she’s obviously not dating anyone from Ratt. It’s almost whiny; Pearcy’s like a nerd telling the prom queen she shouldn’t date the quarterback because he likes to beat up freshmen. Philosophically, “Back for More” belongs on a Weezer record. My all-time favorite Ratt song is “You Think You’re Tough,” but that was a sentiment the band members wouldn’t have even applied to one another.

  “[The term] heavy metal has become such a wide label,” Ratt bassist Juan Croucier said as early as 1985. “I remember when Blue Oyster Cult used that term in 1976, and I thought, ‘Okay, BOC is heavy metal and heavy metal is just the really hard stuff.’ I would consider Ratt, more or less, to be fashion rock, FM-oriented, yet it’s not as hard as Iron Maiden or Saxon … we feel that there could be more fashion in rock, outside of spikes and the dark leather look. I don’t want to say that it should be more GQ, but it could be more colorful and up to date.”

  Sometimes the power issue is elastic, even within the same group. KISS has always been driven by two forces, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. Whenever they’re caked in face paint, Paul’s character is the Star Child (sometimes referred to as the Lover), while Gene is the Demon. In real life, Simmons has slept with literally thousands of women and consumed vaginas like they were Pop-Tarts; meanwhile, Stanley spent two decades searching for Miss Right and had his heart broken by Donna Dixon, a costar from the sitcom Bosom Buddies. Granted, Paul physically interviewed every other candidate along the way, but it always seemed like his heart was in the right place.

  Their songwriting style followed suit. Stanley sings songs like “Strutter,” “I Want You,” “Anything for My Baby,” and “Shandi”—all tunes where he longs to be with a woman he can’t necessarily have. Certainly, this is not a hard and fast rule (“I Stole Your Love” is an almost comical example of a sex harvest), but as a general precept, Paul Stanley pursues women through song and loses at least half the time.

  Simmons is the exact opposite. In “Calling Dr. Love,” Gene sings, “Baby, I know what your problem is.” And we all know what her problem is too: She wants Gene to fuck her. In fact, she needs Gene to fuck her (and evidently for medical reasons). In the context KISS uses these terms, it’s all a cartoon, but—if you’re looking for tangible examples of domination imagery in pop culture—it’s a good place to start. Sometimes it’s completely unveiled; on the mega-macho record Creatures of the Night, Simmons sings a song titled “War Machine,” where he claims his intention is to “Strike down the one who leads me / I’m gonna take his place / I’m gonna vindicate the human race.”

  There’s one glaring irony in the Paul-Gene power axis, however. Of all the songs in the KISS catalog, the one that stands out most clearly as a power anthem is “God of Thunder” from 1976’s Destroyer (it even surpasses “War Machine,” because “God of Thunder” is more epic and archetypal). Simmons carried the vocals, and it ultimately defined what his onstage persona was all about; he usually did his infamous blood-spitting routine during the song’s introduction. But what’s compelling is that it was written by Stanley, who fully intended to sing it. Simmons likes to insist that Paul was deliberately writing a “Gene song” and always knew he would eventually handle the lead, but Stanley says otherwise. “You want to hear the real story, or do you want to believe the rumor?” he told me in a 1997 interview. “That was totally [producer] Bob Ezrin’s idea. He thought it came across better with Gene handling the vocals.” In other words, Simmons’s powerful image was a better fit for the song’s powerful imagery; Paul’s androgynous Girl Power would not translate into menace. At least in this case, the tenuous connection between heavy metal and power was completely conscious in the minds of the people who made the record.

  But sometimes what seems obvious is not, particularly when you’re trying to categorize what an artist represents culturally. That certainly seems true with Ozzy Osbourne, who doesn’t seem obsessed with power at all. In fact, he seems more obsessed with weakness, particularly his own.

  As a p
ublic character, Osbourne is the wildest of wild men. During the height of his career, he was constantly chomping off the heads of birds, pissing on historical landmarks, and generally acting like the most berserk, fucked-up lunatic in the universe. It’s not an act, either; what’s unique about Osbourne is that many of the stories about his behavior are at least partially true. But as he’s grown older, another side of Ozzy has become more and more obvious: He is an incredibly vulnerable person who plainly lacks confidence. Rock writer Mick Wall talked about this in a VH1 Behind the Music special about Osbourne, and Ozzy made oblique references to his insecurities in his autobiographical video documentary Don’t Blame Me. I hate to resort to pop psychology, but it seems clear that Ozzy desperately needs people to like him, and—for a long time—the only way he knew how to do that was through drugs, alcohol, performing onstage, and acting like a complete idiot in public situations. And even though it probably wasn’t intentional, that insecurity always came across in his music.

  You can see this way back with his material as vocalist for Black Sabbath. Sonically, the music was very powerful—but those riffs and song structures came from guitarist Tony Iommi, a very authoritarian person (at least within the internal scope of Sabbath). Iommi made all the band’s decisions; Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward were flat-out scared of him. The inevitable result was that Ozzy made up lyrics that were intimidating on the surface but completely vulnerable underneath. “I Am Ironman,” said Ozzy, but his Ironman was not a classic superhero: He was seeking revenge against the people who didn’t appreciate him, and he was a sympathetic (in fact, almost tragic) figure. In the song “Dirty Women,” Osbourne insists he’s depressed and in need of companionship, but the best he can do is make a deal with a pimp who has “take-away women for sale.” On the cryptic acid track “Fairies Wear Boots,” Ozzy goes to his doctor because he’s having bizarre hallucinations. The physician says he can’t be helped “because smoking and tripping is all that you do.” Those lyrics were probably supposed to create a persona of over-the-top madness, but that’s not how it felt to the listener (at least not to this one). The desperation in Oz’s voice made it all seem a little sad. It romanticized the lifestyle, but in a calamitous sense; the song promoted LSD, but it also seemed to indicate that Ozzy knew he was spiraling to destruction. This goes a long way toward explaining why Sabbath’s material stands up over time. There is a human quality to the music that other metal bands can’t replicate.