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

  Axl wasn’t a nice person. He beat up camera-wielding fans and treated women like shit. It seems like most of the women he slept with eventually accused him of being a violent lover (ex-wife Erin Everly and ex-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour both filed abuse charges against him). And generally, this sinister weakness made him more alluring to redneck intellectuals. There has never been a time in my life when I supported violence against women, and I can’t think of many things that I find more repelling. But there was a weird legitimacy to this kind of image. Let’s face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film “realistic,” everyone knows what that means—it means the movie has an unhappy ending. We associate happy endings with fairy tales, and Guns N’ Roses was no fairy tale.

  I once did a human interest story on two guys from West Fargo named Mark Rudel and Gregg Lura. (Reader’s note: For those of you wondering where West Fargo is … well, that should be self-explanatory.) These two fellows were essentially male groupies; they loved to meet metal stars and had all sorts of tricks to get backstage. They were damn good at it, too: They met virtually every major hair band from the ’80s. When I asked them about meeting Guns N’ Roses outside of a Fargo hotel at 4:00 A.M. during GNR’s ’93 tour, this was what Rudel told me: “I tried to get an autograph from Slash, but he just hobbled past me. It was exactly like a video—you couldn’t see his eyes, he had his top hat on, and he was stumbling around. One of the roadies said he’d had a long night. Of all the bands we’ve met, Guns N’ Roses appeared to live their life the most like their image.”

  I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but hearing that made me very happy. In some ways, I suppose that proves I’m just another stupid fan. I wanted Guns N’ Roses to be the band I imagined they were. When Rudel talked about meeting the guys from Cinderella, the conversation focused on how normal they seemed (he specifically said Tom Keifer looked sleepy and “really pale”). Guns N’ Roses had always seemed more real than other groups, and I honestly think they might have been. Instead of mirroring the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, Guns N’ Roses adopted it for real—almost like they couldn’t tell it was supposed to be a gimmick to sell records. They were as fucked up as advertised.

  At least I hope they were.

  December 12, 1985

  While listening to Judas Priest’s Stained Class LP, eighteen-year-old Raymond Belknap blows off his head with a shotgun. His twenty-one-year-old friend James Vance tries to do the same and—somehow—manages to fail.

  I don’t know why two guys from Nevada would think that a gay British metal singer was telling them to kill themselves. I honestly have no clue whatsoever, and I can’t even speculate. Sure, they were drinking a few afternoon beers and smoking some low-grade dope, but that’s hardly an excuse for getting that confused about anything. In 1985, I listened to Stained Class at a friend’s house, and that didn’t even convince me to buy the goddamn record.

  Moreover, I’ve never understood why European heavy metal is so appealing to kids who like shooting themselves in the head, but they obviously love it. Oh, I understand the superficial connection and the conventional explanation: Downtrodden people dig downtrodden rock, so it would stand to reason that the darkest kinds of hard rock would fit that criteria perfectly. But these self-destructive obsessions are intertwined in a way that goes far deeper than pop psychology. Teen suicides in 1984, 1986, and 1988 were all blamed on Ozzy Osbourne, and I assume all three accusations are at least partially accurate. I’m also certain that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were rocking out to Rammstein when they decided to fill the Columbine High library with teenage corpses.

  Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting that the music made these people go violently insane. But it’s equally as stupid to argue that there’s no connection at all. Every year, billions of dollars are spent in the advertising industry. This is done on the premise that information can influence the behavior of consumers, and it obviously does. If kids are affected by Sprite commercials and Ronald McDonald, why wouldn’t they be affected by Rob Halford?

  The difference, of course, is that Halford never specifically told anyone to kill themselves. To me, that’s always the weirdest part of all rock suicides: None of these kids were listening to music that actually instructed them to shoot themselves. Parents and lawyers point to the Ozzy song “Suicide Solution,” which (granted) is a pretty misleading title for a supposed antisuicide song; Metallica’s “Fade to Black” is another example that pushes the envelope. But if you actually listen to the words, you will see that these songs don’t say suicide is a good move. And one would assume that any kid so obsessed with a record that he’s going to fucking kill himself over it would take the time to listen to the lyrics (or at least read the liner notes!).

  This paradox is what I find so perplexing about the way young males perceive verbal messages in heavy metal. I’ll never understand why music that only made me want long hair is the same product that made some kids want to die. Normal people don’t care what Ozzy has to say about anything; however, it seems the handful of people who do care inevitably get confused and kill themselves. And since the mood of the music tends to be more persuasive than the actual lyrics—and since the words to most rock songs are almost impossible to understand—kids are forced to interpret heavy metal in any way they can. This is a substantial problem, because the kind of kids who truly love heavy metal evidently suck at artistic interpretation.

  My favorite professor from college was a guy named Scott Lowe, a very thin man who owns a large collection of cardigan sweaters and briefly dabbled in a 1970s California cult that was led by a false prophet named Franklin Jones. He grew up in Florida with his boyhood friend Jimmy Buffett (which may or may not be true) and is one of the only rational environmentalists I have ever met (the other being a guy named Zinda who admired Glenn Danzig). Scott taught religious studies. This academic program had virtually nothing to do with my major (or even my minor), but his upper-level classes always seemed to involve the wackiest lectures on campus. I can recall at least two discussions that briefly touched on the practice of drinking caribou urine in order to get stoned.

  ANYWAY, Scott spent his teenage days as a guitarist in a Kinks-influenced garage band, so we would occasionally chat about pop music. Since these conversations would sometimes occur in the middle of a lecture on, say, the Spanish Inquisition, it was not completely uncommon to connect the topics of Christianity and rock, thereby segueing into a verbal treatise on the value (or lack thereof) of “Christian rock.” And it was during one of these conversations that I decided my favorite Christian rock band was Rush.

  Most people (or—more accurately—all people except me) do not consider Rush a Christian rock band. However, this fact is virtually indisputable. Aren’t pretty much all their songs about Jesus? It certainly seems like it. At the very least, Rush albums promote some sort of bass-heavy Christian value system. “He’s trying to save the day for the Old World man,” proclaim the soaring vocals of Canadian spiritualist Geddy Lee. “He’s trying to pave the way for the Third World man.” Isn’t that the entire New Testament encapsulated in two lines? Didn’t Jesus teach us to bid “A Farewell to Kings” and to watch the humble “Working Man” inherit the earth? And I’m sure God likes “Trees” and hates racism at least as much as Neil Peart does.

  Nobody ever believes me when I start talking about Rush’s hard-line Christian stance, but every time I hear their music it becomes more and more clear. Listen to the song “Freewill”: I have a hard time understanding exactly what Lee is talking about here, but I can tell it has something to do with being a good person (or with being an honest person, or a stoic person, or holding some vague personality trait that God would probably support). “Freewill” also implies something about agnostics going to hell, but that’s just par for the course when it comes to Rush. I even have some suspicions about the metaphorical significance of “The Spirit of Radio,” and that goes double for the cov
er art on Grace Under Pressure, Fly by Night (a fucking owl?), and—most notably—the homoerotic purgatory imagery on the sleeve for Hemispheres. Who is in the Temple of Syrinx? Perhaps it’s Jesus.

  The reason I bring this up is because I think it says a lot about perception, which is the tool we all use to build the context for our lives. Even if my thinking is flawed (and I assume it is), it does indicate that—somehow—Rush has purposefully or accidentally put themselves in a position where virtually anybody can make an oblique argument about what they represent. This is a common problem for hard rock bands, and especially for Rush; everyone wants to categorize them, but no one wants to claim them. As bassist Lee once said, “It’s funny. When you talk to metal people about Rush, eight out of ten will tell you we’re not a metal band. But if you talk to anyone outside of metal, eight out of ten will tell you we are a metal band.” And Geddy’s totally right. In high school, I would never have classified Rush as a metal band. I barely thought they were a hard rock group; now I’m mentioning Rush in this book

  So what does that mean? Well, on one level it simply proves that attempts to categorize anything (rock groups and otherwise) have more to do with personal perception than with reality. Of course—as anyone who has spent too many hours studying communication theory will tell you—perception is reality. And it’s within that construct of perception-driven reality where we start to see the relationship between heavy metal and the people who listened to it (and maybe even the people who use metal as a soundtrack for suicide).

  Here again, I feel forced to use self-destructive drug abuse as the clearest metaphor for life. Regardless of how someone describes their drug use—as a “habit,” as a “problem,” as a “recreation,” whatever—they are really just trying to find a euphemism for their lifestyle. Even if the actual ingestion of narcotics consumes only a fraction of their free time, it’s never a minor personality quirk. For one thing, it’s illegal; for another, it freaks out a good chunk of the population. Drug use is really a lifestyle choice. Though drugs do not necessarily change your life, taking drugs will change the way people look at you (and the way you will look at yourself). Those who have no personal experience with drugs will assume that you’re throwing your life away; certain people will not date you. Employers will be more willing to accept a DUI conviction than the mere rumor that you have a drug problem. Consequently, drug users will absorb these perceptions and recognize that they are now in a different societal class: They have a secret that makes them both vulnerable and dangerous—and it probably makes their lives a lot more interesting (at least for a while).

  Talk to people who do a lot of drugs (or regularly drink to excess), and they will tell you they love it for at least two reasons. One is the physical effect of getting fucked up. The other is the actual process. It’s not just fun to be high; it’s fun to smoke pot. It’s fun to score dope and put ice cubes in the bong and put on boring reggae records and talk with other stoners about idiotic stoner topics. It’s fun to browse through liquor stores and mix drinks on the coffee table and tell memorable puke stories. There is an appeal to the Abuse Lifestyle that exists outside of the product.

  Glam metal had the same kind of appeal: It was all about an unspoken lifestyle. It’s a feeling that can’t be quantified or easily explained, but it absolutely exists.

  One of the interesting things about ’80s metal is that it was the first dominant pop genre to exist in a readily available multimedia context. What that means is that you could copiously consume heavy metal without listening to heavy metal albums. Pop metal was a mainstay of album-oriented FM outlets, so metal could be heard over the populist medium of radio; unlike punk or late ’60s psychedelia, it was not trapped underground. There were also the wide array of tours and concerts, so you might be able to see a few big acts every summer (assuming you lived near a big enough community and your parents felt you were old enough to go to rock concerts).

  But just as importantly, the 1980s saw the dawn of what I call the Golden Age of Periodicals. Suddenly, young metal fans could choose from a glut of easy-to-find metal magazines. There was a time when reading about rock ’n’ roll was limited to reading Rolling Stone or maybe Creem, and its distribution was sketchy (unless you lived in New York, or San Francisco, or some kind of a collegiate culture). By 1985, that problem no longer existed. In fact, you did not even need to purchase rock literature; I can fondly remember loitering at the magazine racks in supermarkets while my mom shopped for groceries, paging through Hit Parader and Circus and Kerrang! and Metal Edge. And by this point, Rolling Stone was so mainstream that it was in my high school library.

  And this new explosion in rock journalism wasn’t teen idol coverage either. Hit Parader and Circus were driven by interviews and considered to be “news” publications (at least to its readership). The interviews were always horrible and the information was often fabricated, but these updates were still the main objects of interest. I always felt magazines that primarily delivered posters or pinups were rip-offs.

  A third component came in 1981 with the introduction of MTV. Its significance was obvious (especially in retrospect), but people tend to forget that it came with an undercurrent. It would take several years before MTV became a cultural universal. A well-known irony about the network is that it was not broadcast in the city limits of New York until 1983—even though that’s where it was produced. Moreover, few rural communities had access to any cable channels. I did not watch two consecutive hours of MTV until August of 1990.

  However, videos still had a massive effect, especially on people born after 1970. For (ahem) “Generation X” kids, videos were not seen as promotional gimmicks or special treats: Videos were expected. Since I was a farm kid, I couldn’t spend six hours a night staring at Martha Quinn and MTV—but I could spend ninety minutes a week watching Friday Night Videos, NBC’s attempt at a knockoff. Meanwhile, my friends who lived in town could watch Night Tracks on one of the seven cable networks that serviced Wyndmere proper (and by 1985, the richer kids could even capture these clips on VHS tape!). Moreover, we knew that people in Fargo were seeing this stuff 24/7. That was the magic of Music Television: You did not have to see MTV to be affected by it: You only had to know it was out there. One way or another, the images would all slip into everyone’s collective consciousness. Case in point: I never saw the full video for Mötley Crüe’s Looks That Kill until college—but I already knew what it looked like in 1986. I saw a clip of it on an episode of ABC’s 20/20 that examined the rising fear of teen satanism (I suppose the argument could be made that this kind of sensationalistic media coverage provided still another tier for metal appreciation: public discourse).

  What this all means is that glam metal was a layered construction. This phenomenon is completely common today—in fact, it’s virtually the only way rock exists in contemporary terms, and now it includes the especially elastic medium of cyberspace. But it was new in the 1980s. In fact, it was so new that its first consumers never even realized it.

  As I mentioned earlier, I never watched MTV until 1990, when I had already graduated from high school and happened to be visiting my eldest sister in Atlanta. However, I hated MTV when I was in junior high; I completely and totally despised everything it represented. I even wrote an essay about it in tenth grade, and I got an A.

  The obvious question here is, “Why?” Or, perhaps more accurately, “How?” I had no exposure to MTV, so how could I hate it? The answer came from those “news” magazines I mentioned several paragraphs ago. In Hit Parader, all the bands expressed one unifying opinion: MTV sucked. MTV didn’t play metal videos. MTV was afraid of heavy rock bands. And most importantly, MTV made metal groups compromise what they truly wanted to do: “Give the kids the fucking rock they fucking deserve!”

  My friends and I hated MTV for these very reasons. In and of itself, that’s crazy. But what’s even crazier is that we would have loved MTV if we had ever actually seen it. During all the years I despised MTV, metal was prett
y much all they played. Watching my sister’s TV that summer made this incredibly clear; I saw Mötley Crüe’s “Girl Don’t Go Away Mad,” Poison’s “Unskinny Bop,” and Faith No More’s “Epic” almost constantly; the only other artists who shared a fraction of the air time were the rap group Bel Biv Devoe and Billy Idol (who almost could have passed for a metal guy himself). The metal world’s contempt for MTV was an utter lie; it was unabashed underdog posturing that further illustrates the hypocrisy of corporate shock rock.

  But it also makes total sense, considering the state of the world.

  I’m hesitant to draw too close a connection between heavy metal and socio-economic policy, and I’m almost as hesitant to say one even reflected the other. It’s too easy to do, and it seems like the kind of clever intellectual connection that’s almost always irrelevant. But consider this: What were the fundamental messages of Reagan-era politics? It was driven by capitalism (i.e., “the greedy ’80s”), saber-rattling (i.e., “the Evil Empire”), and a vaguely hypocritical emphasis on gritty, commonsense values (remember those campaign commercials where Reagan chopped wood?). And what were the fundamental ideals of glam rock? Philosophical capitalism (everyone was a superstar), philosophical saber-rattling (like Nikki Sixx declaring that metal was at war with commercial forces trying to shackle his “identity”), and omnipresent reminders that all these bands came from the lowest tier of society (in song, Axl Rose described himself as “just a small-town white boy” who moved to L.A. and became “just an urchin livin’ under the street”—and the operative watchword in both statements is the inclusion of the modifier “just”).

  There are a few parallels here that belie sarcasm. It’s a weird paradox; while rock in the late 1960s and early ’70s seemed to exist as a political reaction to Richard Nixon’s administration, glam metal latently adopted the Republican persona of the 1980s. And that was a wise move: This was an incredibly popular way of thinking, especially (and surprisingly) among young males. One of the most popular sitcoms of the era was Family Ties, and the character that everyone loved was Alex P. Keaton, the savvy young Republican portrayed by Michael J. Fox. Alex was a “cool” conservative—in other words, he wasn’t some unlikeable guy who whined about social morality. He was all about making money and out-flanking naive idealists; it seemed that Alex didn’t so much hate liberals as he hated hippies. And it has always been fun to hate hippies. By the mid-1980s, flower children had inherited the establishment; that alone would have been enough to make teens bristle, but ex-hippies added an even more repulsive element: They constantly insisted that they were the most important generation that ever existed. They stopped the war; they had things they believed in; they changed the world. There is nothing more repulsive or condescending than a nostalgic Baby Boomer. The fact that Alex P. Keaton ridiculed their impractical, antiquated value system was reason enough to support the GOP. Sometimes I think people want to forget how cool it was to cop a conservative persona in 1988. I mean, that’s pretty much what being “preppie” was all about: It was supposed to show that you were smart—or at least smart enough not to look stupid.