Fargo Rock City (2 page)
Authors: Chuck Klosterman
Chapter 16: September 23, 1989
Chapter 17: September 10, 1990
When given the opportunity to make “acknowledgments” for the creation of a book, it's tempting to list every person you've ever met in your entire life. That was my original intention when I started writing this page, but I suppose that's kind of ridiculous and sort of risky, so I'm not even going to try. Instead, I'm only mentioning a select few.
The first person I need to thank is my agent, Todd Keithley, who believed in this project with the intensity of a wolverine on crack. I also must mention Matthew Kalash and his associate Sid Jenkins, who innocently introduced me to Todd and changed the course of my career. I'm just as thankful for the brilliant work of my editor at Scribner, Brant Rumble, who understood this book immediately and actually seemed to like it, even though it never mentions Liam Gallagher or Greg Maddux.
I would also like to thank the multitudes of people who read this manuscript at its various stages, particularly David Giffels and Michael Weinreb (who both provided the necessary competition) and Ross Raihala (who helped shape the way I think about popular music). I am forever indebted to Mark J. Price, who's got to be the only copy editor in the universe who knows AP style
and
the original lineup for Stryper. Bob Ethington provided some bonus editing down the stretch. And though I can't mention them all by name, I want to acknowledge my entire family, the UND Posse, my colleagues from the
Dakota Student
(especially my superfoxy lawyer, Amy Everhart), my past and current coworkers at
The Forum
newspaper and the
Akron Beacon Journal,
and everyone else who ever wasted time with me. If we've had more than two conversations, you're probably in this book. I would also like to apologize to any girl I've ever dated,
partially for using you in this story but mostly for anything else I might have done along the way.
Finally, I would like to personally thank everyone who buys this book, and even those of you who just look at it in a bookstore and decide it isn't worth the money. As a writer, there is nothing more flattering than having someone invest their thoughts into something you wrote. And if you hate this book, feel free to call me at home. My phone number is (330) 867-1883.
A
The only thing I ask is that you promise not to talk about heavy metal (except for maybe KISS).
Fargo Rock City
You know, I've never had long hair.
I don't think there has ever been a day when the back of my neck wasn't visible. In fact, I think I've had pretty much the same Richie Cunningham haircut for the past twenty-seven years (excluding a three-year stretch from 1985 to 1988, when I parted my hair down the middle and feathered it back). It seems like I spent half my life arguing with my parents over this issue, and it was a debate I obviously lost every single time. As a ninth-grader, I once became so enraged about the length of my hair that I actually spit on our kitchen floor. Remarkably, that clever gesture did not seem to influence my mother's aesthetics.
What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hairâI
needed
long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical.
I wanted to rock.
To me, rocking was everything. As a skinny white kid on a family farm in North Dakota, it seemed to be the answer to all the problems I thought I had. I couldn't sing and I played no instruments, but I knew I had the potential to rock. All night long I slapped Mötley Crüe and Ratt cassettes into my boom box (which we called a “ghetto blaster,” which I suppose would now be considered racist) and rocked out in my bedroom while I read
Hit Parader
and played one-on-none Nerf hoop basketball. Clearly, I was always ready to rockâ
but I needed the hair.
I didn't care if it was blond and severe like Vince Neil's or black and explosive like Nikki Sixx'sâI just needed
more
of it. It would have been my singular conduit to greatness, and it was the only part of my life that had a hope of mirroring the world of the
Crüe: They lived in L.A., they banged porn stars, they drank Jack Daniel's for breakfast, and they could spit on their kitchen floor with no repercussions whatsoever. They were like gods on Mount Olympus, and it's all because they understood the awe-inspiring majesty of rock. Compared to Nikki and Vince, Zeus was a total poseur.
Sadly, the Crüe proved to be ephemeral, coke-addled deities. Rock critics spent an entire decade waiting for heavy metal to crash like a lead zeppelin, andâseemingly seconds after Kurt Cobain wore a dress on MTV's
Headbanger's Ball
âthey all got their shovels and began pouring dirt on the graves of Faster Pussycat, Winger, Tesla, Kix, and every other band that experimented with spandex, hairspray, and flash pots. Metal had always been a little stupid; now it wasn't even cool. This was the end. Yngwie Malmsteen, we hardly knew ye.
I became a cultural exile; I wandered the 1990s in search of pyrotechnic riffs and lukewarm Budweiser. It didn't matter how much I pretended to like Sub Pop or hip-hopâI was an indisputable fossil from a musical bronze age, and everybody knew it. My street cred was always in question. Like a mutant species of metal morlocks, my fellow headbangers and I went into hiding, praying that the cute alternachick who worked at the local coffeehouse would not suss out our love for Krokus.
But that era of darkness is going to end.
It is time for all of us to embrace our heavy metal past. It is time to admit that we used to rock like hurricanes. It is time to run for the hills and go round and round. It is time for us to
Shout at the Devil
. We've got the right to choose it, there ain't no way we'll lose it, and we're not gonna take it anymore.
Quite simply, that's why I wrote this book: to recognize that all that poofy, sexist, shallow glam rock
was
important (at least to the kids who loved it). I'm not necessarily claiming that the metal genre was intellectually underrated, but I feel compelled to insist it's been unjustifiably ignored.
In 1998, I was in a Borders bookstore, browsing through the music section. Chain bookstores always amaze me, because it
seems like someone has written a book about absolutely everything. I think that's why bookstores have become the hot place for single adults to hook upâbookstores have a built-in pickup line that always fits the situation. You simply walk up to any desirable person in the place, look at whatever section they're in, and you say (with a certain sense of endearing bewilderment), “Isn't it insane how many books there are about ______?” Fill in the blank with whatever subject at which the individual happens to be looking, and you will always seem perceptive.
Of course
there's going to be a ridiculous number of books on draft horses (or David Berkowitz, or the pipe organ renaissance, or theories about the mating habits of the Sasquatch, or whatever), and you will both enjoy a chuckle over the concept of literary overkill. The best part of this scheme is that it actually seems spontaneous. Bookstores have always been a great place for liars and sexual predators.
ANYWAY, I was shocked to realize this phenomenon does not apply to heavy metal. There are plenty of books about every other pop subcultureâgrunge, disco, techno, rap, punk, alt countryâbut virtually nothing about 1980s hard rock. All you find are a few rock encyclopedias, a handful of “serious” metal examinations, and maybe something by Chuck Eddy.
At first blush, that shouldn't seem altogether surprising. I mean, nobody literate cares about metal, right? But then something else occurred to me: I like metal, and I'm at least semiliterate. In fact, a lot of the most intelligent people I knew at college grew up on metal, just like me. And we were obviously not alone.
Let's say you walked into the average American record store on a typical summer day in 1987 (and for sake of argument, let's say it was June 20). What was selling? Well, U2's
The Joshua Tree
was No. 1 on the chartsâbut Whitesnake was No. 2. Mötley Crüe's
Girls Girls Girls
was No. 3. Bon Jovi's commercial monster
Slippery When Wet
was still No. 4 (in fact, three Bon Jovi records were in the Top 200). Poison was No. 5. Ozzy Osbourne's live
Tribute
to Randy Rhoads was No. 6. Cinderella's
Night Songs
was
a year old, but it was hanging on at No. 27. Ace Frehley was showing his windshield-scarred face at No. 43. Tesla's
Mechanical Resonance
was outperforming R.E.M.'s
Dead Letter Office
by eleven spots (andâperhaps even more tellingâ
Dead Letter Office
featured a cover of Aerosmith's “Toys in the Attic”). Christ, even Stryper's
To Hell with the Devil
was at No. 74.
There were between twenty and twenty-five metals bands on the
Billboard
Top 200 album chart that week (depending on your definition of “heavy metal”), andâin realityâthere almost certainly should have been more. Remember, this was before Soundscan, and metal acts were faced with the same problem that plagued rappers and country artists: They were often ignored by the record store owners who reported the sales, usually by pure estimation. This was clearly illustrated in the summer of 1991, when Soundscan was finally introduced and Skid Row's
Slave to the Grind
immediately debuted at No. 1. The Skid's eponymous first record sold three times as many units as its follow-up, but
Billboard
had never placed
Skid Row
higher than No. 7 and forced it to crawl up the chart, one position per week. It almost certainly flew off shelves far faster (and far more often).
In the 1980s, heavy metal
was
pop (and I say that to mean it was “
pop
ular”). Growing up, it was the soundtrack for my life, and for the life of pretty much everyone I cared about. We didn't necessarily dress in leather chaps and we didn't wear makeup to school, but this stuff touched our minds. Regardless of its artistic merit, Guns N' Roses' 1987
Appetite for Destruction
affected the guys in my shop class the same way teens in 1967 were touched by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Commercial success does not legitimize musical consequence, but it does legitimize cultural consequence. And this shit was everywhere.
I walked out of that Borders bookstore thinking that someone needed to write a book about the cultural impact of heavy metal from a
fan's
perspective (Deena Weinstein's
Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology
is arguably brilliant, but Deena never reminded me of anyone I ever hung out with). As I drove home, the classic rock station on my car radio played Thin Lizzy's “Cowboy Song.”
I was struck by how much it reminded me of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” the best Bon Jovi song there ever was. Obviously, my youth makes this process work in reverse; members of the generation that came before me were more likely reminded of Phil Lynott when they first heard Jon Bon Jovi talk about riding his steel horse. However, I don't think historical sequence matters when you're talking about being personally affected. I'd like to think my memories count for
something.