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

  Osbourne’s solo work generates the same ideas. The title track from Bark at the Moon was about losing control of one’s personality. It was the kind of subject that demanded a scary guitar riff and it provided Osbourne a convenient opportunity to dress like a hairy monster, so I would guess most casual fans merely thought this was “Ozzy being Ozzy” (i.e., “Ozzy being stupid”). But try to look at the clip the way a film critic would critique a Lon Chaney, Jr., werewolf movie. There is almost always an unintentional metaphor to Osbourne’s rock.

  On that same LP, there’s a ballad titled “So Tired,” which is kind of an updated version of the Sab ballad “Changes.” “So Tired” is about the end of a romantic relationship, and this time Ozzy loses twice: Not only does he lose the woman, he also loses the ability to break up with dignity. There’s no indication that Ozzy will overcome this, or that he never really needed her to begin with, or even that she’ll eventually regret her decision. The final reality is that Osbourne is simply too damn tired to talk her out of leaving. He has tried, and he has failed. She has shattered his heart, so he’s just going to fold. He’s completely and utterly powerless, and it won’t matter how many bats he eats.

  This kind of self-loathing is even more obvious on recent Osbourne offerings like “The Road to Nowhere.” In the song’s most telling (and most shamelessly literal) line, Ozzy sings, “The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me / It just won’t leave me alone.” In fact, he was already expressing these confused, powerless thoughts on the first cut of his first solo record, Blizzard of Ozz: “Don’t look to me for answers / Don’t ask me / I don’t know” [italics mine]. These are not the words of a man who thinks he’s going to dominate anything (or anyone).

  Now, this is not to say Rob Halford was 100 percent wrong; quite often, ’80s metal was about power. But sometimes it was about wishing you had some.

  June 6, 1985

  Axl Rose fires guitarist Tracii Guns and joins forces with Slash, finalizing the Guns N’ Roses lineup that would record Appetite for Destruction.

  It might seem odd to list the mere origin of Guns N’ Roses as one of metal’s most significant dates, mostly because I have no memory of this event whatsoever. Virtually no one does. In fact, I would almost guarantee there isn’t one member of GNR who associates this specific anniversary with anything of significance. The date itself might not even be accurate; diehard fans have come to recognize this otherwise unremarkable Thursday as the dawn of Guns N’ Roses in a studio apartment on the Sunset Strip, but I suspect the June 6 designation is more akin to the way early Christians decided December 25 was the day Jesus was born.

  But if the June 6 date is indeed correct, GNR was created the day after my thirteenth birthday. I would have been at basketball camp, sleeping in a dorm room on the campus of North Dakota State, totally oblivious to the fact that I would one day think W. Axl Rose was the coolest motherfucker on the planet.

  One of my best friends is a gay rock writer named Ross Raihala, and Ross once told me he always suspected straight midwestern teens looked at Axl Rose the same way closeted gay teens looked at Morrissey, the British vocalist who fronted the intellectually penetrating and eternally melancholy band the Smiths. When Raihala first mentioned this, I did not really understand what he meant (or if it was supposed to be a compliment or an insult). But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Rose did mean something more than his glam peers, especially for people who lived in the middle of nowhere. For rural kids who were too smart for where they were, but still very much a reflection of rural culture—a “redneck intellectual,” if you will—Axl wasn’t just another cool guy in a cooler-than-average band. He was an iconoclast (in the truest sense of the word). He didn’t speak for us, but he sort of represented us. And in a weird way, Rose slowly evolved into the first artist of my generation who showed glimpses of an (ahem) “alternative” to the larger-than-life fairy tale of poofy-haired metal that was the template for all my favorite bands (including Guns N’ Roses—at least initially). In a few years, flannel-clad grungers would turn that alternative into an art form, and Rose would subsequently become a ridiculous recluse. Nobody got fucked by the Age of Irony as much as Axl.

  The term “redneck intellectual” might seem troublesome to some people, and I can understand why. Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it an oxymoron? I would answer all of these questions by saying “no.” It doesn’t have a connotation. It describes a person who tries to think critically at an age (and in a place) where critical thinking is almost impossible. And I would guess this scenario occurs almost everywhere in America.

  Where I grew up, there were not a lot of people. In fact, there are currently more people in my apartment complex than there were in my hometown. There were no black people, no Hispanic people, no Asian people, no openly gay people, and everyone thought the same way about everything (the major exception being that “Ford vs. Chevy” thing). Now, this does not mean rural North Dakotans are not smart; in fact, the opposite is true. I generally find that midwesterners have far more practical sensibility than people from metropolitan areas; they seem to have a better sense of themselves, and the general education level is higher (this is mostly due to the fact that virtually no one ever drops out of school in a small town and cutting class is almost impossible, so even the least-educated people have spent twelve years at a desk). In a lot of ways, I loved growing up in Wyndmere. But what the culture lacked (and still lacks) is an emphasis on ideas—especially ideas that don’t serve a practical, tangible purpose. In North Dakota, life is about work. Everything is based on working hard, regardless of what it earns you. If you’re spending a lot of time mulling over the state of the universe (or even the state of your own life), you’re obviously not working. You probably need to get back to work. And when that work is over, you will either watch network TV or you will get drunk (or both). Even in moments of freedom, you’re never dealing with ideas.

  Growing up in this kind of atmosphere is incredibly frustrating for anyone who’s interested in anything stretching beyond the conversation at the local Cenex convenience store. If you want to consciously be absurd (which is what I wanted to do all the time), there simply aren’t too many like-minded people to talk to. The big-city stereotype surrounding redneck intellectuals is that they eventually go to college and are amazed by all the different people they meet. I actually had the opposite experience; I was shocked to find people who were like me.

  Still, we are all products of our environment, even if we like to pretend otherwise. So let’s say you are the smartest sixteen-year-old in town; let’s assume you’re creative and introspective and philosophical. You still have a finite number of social tools to work with. You’re only going to apply those espoused intellectual qualities to the redneck paradigm that already exists. You may indeed be having “deep thoughts,” but they’re only deeper versions of the same ideas that are available to everyone else.

  This is where Axl Rose fits into the equation. Musically and visually, Axl stayed within the conventional metal zone. He had a Jagger strut and a Plant howl, long hair and leather pants, and he got quoted in Kerrang! As a musician, Rose appealed to the same contingency that was rooted in Toys in the Attic, British Steel, and Theatre of Pain. Axl existed within the one artistic paradigm that a midwestern white boy was going to consume: For lack of a better term, he “rocked.”

  But Rose was also the most compelling figure within the metal mix. If the thoughts of the redneck intellectual only gravitate along one linear path (and I’m arguing that they did, at least for me), Rose resided on that path’s most cognitive extreme. This wasn’t because he was necessarily smarter; it’s just because he offered a little more to think about.

  In the controversial documentary Kurt and Courtney, there’s footage of a seventeen-ish Kurt Cobain attending a birthday party with an old girlfriend. When I saw that scene, I was shocked by how much he resembled the GNR Lies-era Rose. It’s well-documented that these two icons desperately hated e
ach other, and—as the two biggest groups of the early ’90s—they were often pitted as rivals. The British music weekly New Music Express once called Nirvana “the Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like” (apparently, NME perceives every popular American band exactly the same). The groups even got into a minor shoving match at the 1992 MTV Music Awards, although that altercation can probably be blamed on Courtney Love’s hypocritical idiocy.

  Axl initially loved Nirvana (he wore a Nirvana baseball cap in the “Don’t Cry” video and wanted Nirvana to serve as the opener for the ill-fated ’92 Metallica/Guns tour), but Cobain essentially thought Rose was a doofus, so Axl decided Kurt was a queer (or a poseur, or a pretentious asshole, or some damn thing that he probably would never say now that Cobain is dead). But these two guys share a lot of similarities—certainly more than either was ever willing to recognize. Besides strikingly similar facial features and an overlapping audience, they both offered an image that specifically appealed to lost kids with inexplicable rage. Axl did this first, and his tools were hostility and confusion. Cobain came a few years later, and he used personal angst and sexual tolerance (ultimately, Kurt’s methods proved to be more effective).A Comparing the two men is kind of like comparing a black-and-white photo with its negative: They are totally opposite, yet they’re completely the same.

  What they shared is a human element; they seemed real. There was a certain depth to their character. Granted, this is partially due to their popularity; when the media covers a rock band, they really only cover the vocalist, so singers from the most popular bands always have more opportunities to seem interesting (the third person to follow in this lineage was Eddie Vedder, and for many of the same reasons). But this process works both ways. During their first months in the spotlight, there was something about Rose and Cobain (and, to a lesser extent, Vedder and Trent Reznor) that made me want to know more about them. It was an undefined fascination that I did not feel for people like Tom Keifer or Dave Pirner; though I liked Cinderella and Soul Asylum very much, my interest did not go too far beyond the musical product. Almost instantaneously, Axl Rose came across darker, more dangerous, and more credible than his peers. That’s partially to his credit and partially due to my own naivete. He put himself in a position where I could comfortably lionize him. Rose was hard rock’s equivalent to U2’s Bono.

  If you’re the type who thinks comparing Rose to Cobain is off-putting, the comparison to Bono might seem downright insulting. Serious U2 fans tend to be completely humorless (at least when they talk about early U2 records), and they award Bono an almost religious respect. This is because they feel Bono “stands for something.” Even when U2 decided to become the ’90s version of KISS and evolved into a bloated commercial monster, U2 fans insisted this was “camp.” To rational outsiders, it seemed like U2 was ripping off the blind old fans who refused to judge them as a mortal rock band. And maybe they were. But—if that was truly the case—I give Bono well-deserved kudos for his ability to sell himself as a messianic figure during the 1980s and then reap the capitalistic rewards for that performance ten years later. He’s a cagey charlatan.

  Bono was able to morph himself into whatever his fans needed him to be: He could be angry, brooding, vulnerable, or romantic—and sometimes all at the same moment. Rose is the same kind of shape-shifter, but for a different, less stable audience. His style is even more schizophrenic. He swings from being openly violent and misogynistic (like on the song “It’s So Easy”) to acting utterly helpless (such as the brilliant closing two and a half minutes of “Rocket Queen,” my vote for the finest 171 seconds of ’80s rock). In the video for “Don’t Cry,” emotional juxtaposition is pretty much all Axl does. But unlike Bono, Guns N’ Roses never played “college rock.” It was never specifically directed at smart people. GNR wrote for a younger audience—the kind of people who still slammed bedroom doors and huffed gas in the garage.

  When Ross Raihala first tried to explain what Morrissey meant to him as a teenager, I didn’t get it; whenever I listen to the Smiths, I can sense homosexual overtones, but that’s mostly because I now actively look for them. It doesn’t seem “obvious” at all. But that says more about me than it does about the Smiths. My favorite Smiths songs are “Half a Person” and “Ask,” and—since I apply them to myself—I don’t see any indisputable gay imagery in either of those songs. Raihala thinks that assertion is ridiculous and he’s almost insulted by the suggestion. The reason he takes it as an insult is because it attacks the validity of the connection between Morrissey and the gay community. As a person, Morrissey has never publicly said “I’m gay,” nor has he written any songs that empirically state his sexual preference—yet he (apparently) drops hints constantly. It’s easy to understand why closeted gay teens could relate to that: Like Morrissey, they couldn’t say who they were, but a big part of them wanted people to figure it out.

  Morrissey was “their voice”—a person who spoke from their minority perspective and was able to inject his feelings and ideas into the mainstream culture. If you were recognized as a Morrissey fan, it said something about who you were: To guys like Raihala, it meant either (a) you were gay, or (b) you were certainly comfortable with the gay lifestyle. I would guess there are many members of the gay community who buy Morrissey albums even though they don’t especially care for the music, just because it seems like the proper thing to do. His music and social posture built a persona, and that persona ultimately stretched far beyond his albums. But since he’s still a mere pop singer, his disciples can only connect with him through the appreciation of his records. Raihala now owns thousands of CDs and listens to new music every day, but he says he can still sing along to all seven Smiths studio records in their absolute entirety.

  Interestingly enough, Appetite for Destruction is probably the only record I could karaoke from beginning to end. Part of that is because I’ve listened to it so much—but the larger explanation for why I did is probably similar to Raihala’s adoration of Morrissey. My motivation wasn’t as specific—it did not derive from a singular issue—but it was reflective of my personality in the same way.

  I don’t think it would be accurate to call Axl Rose “my voice” or even “our voice,” because Guns N’ Roses was way too popular. While Morrissey was famous, he was never famous the way Axl was; total sales from all those Smiths LPs would not equal the 15 million-plus copies of Appetite that sold worldwide. It’s unrealistic to think any rock singer can represent an audience of that size. But Rose did represent his core audience, which were people who came from the same place. The fact that he was a rural kid (born in Lafayette, Indiana) was a huge factor, particularly because he always seemed to weave it into the music. All those Appetite songs made L.A. seem (quite literally) like a “jungle” the band had parachuted into. GNR rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin was also from Indiana, and he once said, “Nobody goes to Los Angeles. L.A. is where you end up.” So that was how we came to view Axl: He was the guy who took our small-town paradigm and applied it to the real world—a world that had once seemed glamorous and now seemed like a twisted, sinister paradise city.

  Of all the L.A. metal bands, Guns N’ Roses talked about Hollywood the most (even more than Junkyard, a band whose first single was specifically titled “Hollywood”). Mötley Crüe had a song called “Danger” that described the seedy underside of Los Angeles, but they always seemed like a band who belonged in southern California. Vince Neil looked like a surfer (he was kind of like a belligerent version of David Lee Roth), and Nikki Sixx had bounced around that scene for years.

  L.A. Guns was actually named for its place of origin, but that was yet another accentuation of Axl’s obsession. You see, Rose was the original singer for L.A. Guns, and he briefly stole that group’s guitarist (Tracii Guns) to form an early incarnation of Guns N’ Roses (one can assume the name was an abbreviated version of “Mr. Guns and Mr. Rose”). Izzy Stradlin promptly joined this group after brief stints with Shire and London and another GNR precursor called Hollywood Rose
(who were sometimes known as the Hollywood Roses and briefly included Axl as the frontman). While in Hollywood Rose, Izzy, and Axl quit working with Tracii to hook up with Slash (who—at the time—was auditioning for Poison). Somehow, Axl managed to keep Tracii’s stage name for his band. It’s all very confusing and incestuous, and it barely matters today. But accept this as true: Axl clearly loved the concept of Los Angeles, even if he constantly sang about how disgusting it was. Like a new student in a new school, he was always trying to prove he belonged there. Judging from his performance on Appetite for Destruction, Axl thought about Los Angeles the same way I thought about L.A. when I read those Shout at the Devil liner notes in the fifth grade.