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

  ANYWAY, it’s difficult to overestimate the significance of the KISS makeup. Without the greasepaint, they would have probably made only three albums that would have all sold horribly (although I have the sinking suspicion that if that had been the case all the rock critics who currently hate them would now call them a “raw, seminal influence that predates New York punk”). As it is, KISS made a few million kids want to pick up guitars and pretend to be someone they’re not. And that is rock ’n’ roll, 99 percent of the time.

  That predilection was self-perpetuating. Exactly one decade after KISS made Destroyer, the world was introduced to Poison, a quartet of lovely ladies who were actually three guys from Pennsylvania and a dope fiend from Brooklyn. We in the Midwest first heard them in the spring of 1987 on AOR stations like Fargo’s Q-98; the song was “Talk Dirty to Me,” which—if my memory serves me correctly—was the greatest song anyone had ever recorded up to that point in history. It peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard charts in May of ’87, but its significance was exponentially greater. It was the song of the summer, which is the highest honor any single can achieve (regardless of its genre).

  I am tempted to claim that listening to Poison in the summer of 1987 remains one of the most vivid memories of my adolescence. However, that would only be a half-truth, mostly because I swear the year this song was popular was 1985. This is one of those embarrassing situations where I’m so goddamn positive I’m correct that I refuse to listen to any opposing arguments, even if the main argument is historical record.

  Here’s why I’m so adamant about this: 1985 was the year Wyndmere celebrated its centennial. This was a huge deal; without question, it was the biggest community event that ever happened to my hometown. The weekend of the centennial, the population of Wyndmere went from just under five hundred to just over ten thousand. And on Friday night of that weekend, there was a “teen dance” on the town’s freshly built tennis court, located across the street from the Catholic church. I was about to enter eighth grade, and I had a gut-wrenching crush on a tenth-grade girl named Janet Veit. What was so weird about this particular infatuation was that it actually seemed like Janet kind of liked me (although I have never been able to verify this). Earlier that spring, we would occasionally hang around during track practice, which was about as close to dating as I ever got during the first nineteen years of my life. If nothing else, I am certain that Janet thought I was mildly amusing, and she always seemed touched that I was impressed that she was a 4.0 student. And I suppose Janet, like any young woman, was a little flattered by my desire to talk to her at every possible opportunity and for any reason whatsoever (I once begged her to proofread a science-fiction novel I was supposedly writing, even though I had only completed its title—Bud Moe, the Man in the Lighthouse). I assume all of these factors played a role in our nonexisting relationship, which was punctuated by the event that transpired during “Talk Dirty to Me” on the fateful night of the Centennial Teen Dance.

  At this point, savvy readers are undoubtedly trying to guess what this “event” will be. A first kiss? A first snuggle? A first anything? I’m sure if Janet Veit is reading this, she’s asking these particular questions with exasperated anticipation (or maybe she’s trying to remember if she actually talked to me during track practice that year). However, the answer may ultimately seem anticlimactic: We were merely the first people who walked out on that tennis court and danced. The song (obviously) was “Talk Dirty to Me,” a track I requested from the DJ even though Janet told me to request “Danger Zone” or some other fucking song off the Top Gun soundtrack. But to be honest, I find this “event” far more memorable than either my first kiss or my first sexual encounter. Why? Because those were both things I wanted to do. However, I did not want to dance that night, and I certainly did not want to dance in public. I have always tried to live by a simple principle: If I am sober enough to drive, I am too sober to dance. But this 1985 encounter with Janet Veit and Poison made me realize another principle I would live by, and this one has never been within my control: If I really like a girl, I will do absolutely anything, as long as I think it will make her like me. Oh, I might manipulate the situation to fit my espoused persona (i.e., replacing Kenny Loggins with C. C. DeVille), but it will always be a faint-hearted compromise. As I bounced around the tennis court that night, I thought about how cool it would be to meet Janet at the drive-in or behind the bushes or down the basement (lock the cellar door!). But I knew my life as a man was over, and I was only fourteen.

  Now, it is entirely possible that this happened exactly the way I remember it. Maybe this whole encounter happened at an altogether different teen dance (although I honestly can’t remember going to any others). But I still can’t ignore the contradictions of the timing: How could I request a song that hadn’t even been recorded? And didn’t Top Gun come out in 1986? To this day, I am still hounded by the incongruity. Could all this have happened to an entirely different song? Am I actually thinking of “Photograph”? Have I unintentionally fabricated the most telling moment of my teenage experience? If so, I guess that qualifies me as a jackass (or at least a fiction writer). However, I take solace in the fact that by the time school started in fall of ’86, it was already totally uncool to like Poison. And I know this for a fact.

  Poison had taken glam metal to its ultimate (and I suppose logical) conclusion, and it was kind of disturbing. Poison’s drummer, Rikki Rockett, had been a hairdresser before the band got famous; I don’t think anyone knew that at the time, but it sure seems obvious in retrospect. It wasn’t just that Poison looked like girls—they looked like pretty girls. Structurally, the cover shot for Look What the Cat Dragged In was similar to Shout at the Devil, but it caused a far different reaction. It wasn’t scary or confrontational or satanic; I think the phrase that probably describes it best is “unintentionally subversive.” Here was this cool record with all these cool songs—but by buying it, I would have to admit that this was what I liked.

  In ultra-rural North Dakota in 1987, Poison almost seemed like some sort of gay propaganda. It didn’t matter that every song they wrote was about girls or that singer Bret Michaels had sex with Pamela Anderson—just look at them! They looked like a bunch of baby-stealing gypsies.

  The dumb kids in my school didn’t care about that (which I suppose means they were actually the smart kids). They bought Poison cassettes and didn’t wonder if they “represented” anything, and they certainly didn’t care if they did. The only people who cared were the people who were “into” rock, which in my school meant the metalheads. What made it even tougher was that some of the older kids who were really “into” rock had just discovered Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer. Hardcore fans suddenly insisted that “real” metal bands wore jeans (which I suppose is no more or less ridiculous than any other criteria for liking a group). Even though metal was poised to be popular for five more years, the backlash was already starting. And nobody got hit harder than Poison.

  Consequently, I spent the rest of my high school years telling everyone I hated Poison and that they were the most pathetic band in the world, secretly wrestling with the suspicion that they were better than just about every other band within the metal genre. Open Up and Say … Ahh! was even sexier than their debut, but I refused to possess even a dubbed copy of the cassette in my tape collection. “Nothin’ but a Good Time” became (and probably remains) my generation’s “Rock and Roll All Nite,” but I swore the song sucked. “It’s shallow,” I would say as I popped a Y & T cassette into my car stereo.

  If Black Sabbath can be called the Heaviest of the Heavy (and I already called them that, so it must be all right), then Poison was the Glammiest of the Glammy. And they sounded glammy, although that description obviously makes no sense in real terms. It was a constructed sound, and it didn’t have soul (at least not in the way somebody like Eric Clapton or James Brown has “soul”). Sometimes people compare the best blues-based rock—like Rod Stewart’s Faces and the early ’70s Stones—to a s
onic metaphor for slow, passionate love-making. Following that line of thinking, the first two Poison records were the sonic equivalent to the best masturbation imaginable.

  I guess what I’m saying is that Poison perfected glam metal. They weren’t the era’s best band and they didn’t make the best music, and—quite frankly—they probably have no business being called a “heavy metal” band (there’s nothing heavy or metallic about anything they ever recorded, and as I relisten to their material I’m reminded more of ABBA than I am of Iron Maiden). But they provided an identity for this period of music. As I mentioned earlier, Led Zeppelin was the archetypical construction of a rock band (particularly an arena rock band). Poison embodied the archetypical philosophy of a rock band (particularly a hairspray rock band). If I sit in a quiet room and try to imagine what heavy metal sounds like, I find myself making up a song that replicates Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” or Ozzy’s “Crazy Train.” But whenever anyone asks me to describe heavy metal in unspecific terms, I inevitably find myself unconsciously describing a hypothetical band that looks, acts, and sounds a lot like Poison.

  September 13, 1986

  Bon Jovi’s keyboard-saturated Slippery When Wet quietly enters the Billboard chart at No. 45 and goes on to sell 12 million copies. The following summer, Bon Jovi headlines the Donnington Rock Festival over “serious” metal acts like W.A.S.P., Metallica, and Anthrax.

  In an old interview for Metal Mania magazine, Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante was asked if Anthrax would ever consider using a keyboard in one of their songs. Benante replied, “That is gay. The only band that ever used keyboards that was good was UFO.”

  Benante’s commentary undoubtedly sounded like a throwaway quote when he first said it, but a decade later it speaks volumes. In those fifteen words, three different ideals within the metal lifestyle are portrayed, and all of them were virtually universal.

  First of all, Benante used “gay” as a negative term, but not really in a homophobic sense. He’s not so much attacking gays as he is speaking the lexicon of the time, which—in this case—is actually an opinion on the authenticity of rock music. Late ’80s metal artists were the penultimate generation of musicians to use “gay” as a colloquial term; only rappers were still doing this by the mid ’90s, and almost no one does today. But the result is that ex-metalheads will be the last generation of people who won’t immediately recoil at words like “faggot.” It’s akin to the way the generation that preceded mine is not as affected by the word “nigger” (or at least the Caucasian portion of that generation). Though they completely recognize its degrading connotation and explosive offensiveness, they can still remember a time when saying “nigger” wasn’t a complete and utter faux pas. It was part of urban street language, Blaxploitation was omnipresent, and people just assumed you had to accept a little racism now and then. But if you were born after 1970, there was never a moment in your life when “nigger” wasn’t among the most volatile, most despised words in the lexicon. For people born after 1980, the same social rules will apply to the word “faggot.” But that has only become the case over the past ten years. When we heard that the seminal rap/metal act the Beastie Boys wanted to title their 1986 debut record Don’t Be a Faggot, it seemed edgy—but not necessarily unreasonable and even a little funny. Today, that title seems totally unreasonable and completely humorless, unless it was being used self-reflexively by Pansy Division or some other “ironic” gay band. The only places where homophobic language is still used without a specific meaning are in areas that are rural and seriously impoverished (for example, I have a close friend named Mr. Pancake who teaches eighth-grade life science on an Indian reservation in Arizona, and he says junior high students still use “faggot” as a way to taunt teachers, even though it really has nothing to do with attacks on their sexual orientation—they’re basically just uncreative).

  One could easily argue that the use of antigay language in the metal realm was another clear example of its obsession with power, and the argument could probably be sound. But there’s another way to read this. It’s a little less obvious, but it might shed a bit more light on the music’s popularity.

  Rock ’n’ roll has always tried to appeal to the outcast teenager. It is the voice of alienation (or at least intends to be), and it usually suggests that being weird is okay. When you listen to artists like the Who, Lou Reed, R.E.M., and the Cure, there is usually a vague message of support. Whenever I talk to adults who profess a love for these kinds of bands during their teen years, they inevitably remember dealing with a specific set of feelings: They were different from their classmates, and most often it was because they felt more intelligent and less cool. And these bands always indicated that this was okay. Intellectual introspection was painted as positive, and the social uncomfortability that came with it was the consequence of being wise beyond your years. There was an unspoken cultural compliment to listening to Fables of the Reconstruction. The record seemed to indicate that you recognized the reality of your teenage life. You were going through the same things that Michael Stipe did, and it was helping you become a more advanced human.

  Some social pundits are eager to suggest that heavy metal was the same kind of medium, merely designed for a less intellectual class of people. I disagree with that assertion. I think ’80s hard rock served the same purpose, but it worked in the opposite way. Instead of telling an alienated kid that it was okay to be different, metal seemed to say, “You’re not different at all.” In fact, you’re hyper-normal. In fact, you’re extremely popular and totally cool. Instead of validating the sad reality of your teenage life, it created a different reality altogether.

  You say you don’t have a girlfriend? Well, that’s because you can’t limit yourself to one woman; you’re “too fast for love.” You’re not part of the popular clique in the lunchroom? Well, those kids aren’t really popular. You are. You are part of the KISS Army, a unified force that is larger and more powerful than they could ever imagine. In the 1987 song “Crazy, Crazy Nights,” Paul Stanley explained the war you were fighting against the establishment: “They try to tell us that we don’t belong, but that’s all right, ’cause we’re a million strong … and nobody’s gonna change me, ’cause that’s who I am … ugh.” Those lyrics are an extension of the same inspirational clichés Stanley was saying in almost every interview he gave during the 1980s. “Even if you can’t look like us, you can feel like us,” he told Circus magazine. “There’s a lot of people doing straight jobs where the only thing that gets them by is thinking they’re really hip anyway. We just look the way they feel. We make our own rules, we live our own life, and you can follow us but we won’t follow anybody else. KISS is a way of life.”

  Heavy metal was not sympathetic music, and its audience didn’t want it to be. Executives at record labels may have marketed it toward the unpopular freaks, but the artists never gave that impression. It told the unpopular that they were better than the other kids, and perhaps even at war with them. So when Charlie Benante said a band with keyboards was gay, he wasn’t so much saying the group was feminine or weak; he was saying they were weird. They were a band for the people who weren’t with us. Metal told its audience that they were not different—even if they felt that way most of the time. When the stereo was on, you were among friends … at least in theory.

  Now, I realize I’m ignoring the fact that some of these metal bands were legitimately homophobic, and Anthrax might have been one of them. Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach was photographed in 1989 wearing a T-shirt that said “AIDS Kills Fags Dead,” which isn’t very subtle (although it should probably be noted Bach did apologize for this, cleverly mentioning that his grandmother had just died from cancer and he would have been really offended by anyone wearing a “Cancer Kills Grandmas Dead” shirt). Maybe I’m trying to make these guys seem more symbolic—and less unlikeable—by turning their gay-bashing language into a metaphor for inclusion. So instead of extending that argument, I’m going to break down the second point
of Benante’s aforementioned quote: The merits (or lack thereof) of keyboards.

  I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of ’80s metal. It was—without question—the lamest instrument a band could use. The instrument made a lame sound, and it didn’t seem heavy (even when it was making heavy sounds). Kajagoogoo used keyboards. The Thompson Twins and Human League used keyboards. Hell, our high school stage band used keyboards. And the worst part was that the inclusion of a keyboard player could only mean one thing: This band intended to build its success around a power ballad. Quite simply, a keyboardist could not rock.

  Of course, most bands did use keyboards (although often surreptitiously). Anthrax didn’t, but any group that got on the radio probably did. Tommy Lee played “piano” on Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home,” but it was really just a keyboard. When touring, Warrant hid their keyboard player off-stage, but he played on most of their songs. And the keyboardist was always the third-most important guy in Bon Jovi (after Jon and Richie), although no one ever seems to remember who he was.

  Most importantly, Van Halen proved that cool bands could use synthesizers (at least once in a while). That’s pretty much all “Jump” was: a synthesizer, crashing cymbals, some stupid vocals, and one obligatory guitar solo to keep diehards from killing themselves. But this decision did not come easy. It took Van Halen five years before they threw caution to the wind and admitted they were a borderline keyboard band. Eddie Van Halen insists “Jump” could have been made in the late 1970s, but David Lee Roth refused to cooperate. Why? Because synthetic music was not hard rock. The crazy thing was that Van Halen was already using synthesizers on 1982’s Diver Down. Keyboards explain those weird, warped noises at the beginning of “Little Guitars.” The reason Roth was comfortable with “Little Guitars” was because those effects still sounded like a guitar. I suppose the wildly misleading song title also helped.