Fargo Rock City (21 page)

In all likelihood, this is a purely regional anomaly (although I did stumble across a full-page advertisement for
Scarecrow
on
the back cover of a 1985 copy of
Circus,
so maybe there was a connection). It's hard to imagine Mötley Crüe fans in Atlanta thinking little Johnny Cougar was the cool shit. But I don't know if we necessarily did either. He wasn't really
cool.
He was
like us.
He was a good guy. We were never worried about nuclear war or global warming; we were, however, nervous that someone was going to foreclose on my parents' farm, even though we weren't exactly certain how that process worked. All we knew is that there were auction sales whenever times got tough, and (at least according to the talk around my dinner table) times were
always
tough (at least after 1976). All that “rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow” stuff was a little too fucking possible for farm kids; I suppose it was kind of like inner-city kids hearing Notorious B.I.G. songs and wondering if they'd ever get shot.

There were only two kinds of music in rural America during the 1980s: metal and country. Nothing else was culturally relevant. Mellencamp fit into neither category, yet somehow he was both. “Authority Song” was like Judas Priest's “Parental Guidance,” only less obvious. “Jack and Diane” was akin to the better Skid Row power ballads, only more applicable (Wyndmere had a Tastee Freez too!). Oh, Mellencamp certainly pumped out some boring crap that made everybody yawn; I still don't understand the allure of “Pink Houses” (is that about a gay community?). “R-O-C-K in the USA” was a little too much like Bryan Adams, and none of us were going to sit around and listen to any tributes to Jackie Onassis. But Mellencamp was definitely one of us. Actually, Duke and Cliff seemed to understand that better than I did. Whenever I punched
New Jersey
back into the tape deck, we never got past “Bad Medicine.” To them, “Born to Be My Baby” paled in comparison to bloody plows.

Mellencamp wasn't the only fellow who made the cut, however. Tom Petty did too, and for a lot of the same reasons. While he did not specifically apply his lyrics to rural people, there was clearly a provincial feel to his material; he's definitely the most positive role model for small-town stoners. It seemed that metal kids only allowed metal dudes to act like “rock stars,” so we
were drawn to pop singers who consciously downplayed the Hollywood image. Petty knew his place. The Heartbreakers were a completely unglamorous rock band; they almost seemed like the Allman Brothers. Their songs had the simple three-riff structure of pop metal. “Running Down a Dream” was the key track, and I remember thinking that Izzy Stradlin would probably write songs like this if he wasn't in a metal band. It turns out I was basically dead-on.

Tone Loc was another semipredictable favorite, although that had nothing to do with the Allman Brothers. Loc was just this cool, unthreatening black guy who rapped about sex and wine, and it was perfectly constructed to bleed into the white American metal scene. Much has been written about how mainstream Caucasian audiences refused to accept rap music until it was delivered by the wonderfully Jewish Beastie Boys, and that's somewhat true—but their whiteness is only part of the equation. The main reason white kids didn't immediately embrace rap is because they didn't understand the music. It came from a different place, and human ears are always drawn to the familiar. We were not ready for James Brown samples (at least not yet). The Beasties overcame that barrier when they met producer Rick Rubin, who introduced them to Led Zep and AC/DC. Rubin made hip-hop user-friendly to farm kids. We all called
Licensed to Ill
a rap album, but even though we didn't know why, it seemed more like classic rock. In 1989, Tone Loc made things even simpler: He abandoned the idea of a riff and offered a
thump-thump-thump.
Listen to “Funky Cold Medina”—there's
nothing
there, beyond a beat. If you liked bass and had a sense of humor, it was impossible not to dig Loc. The fact that he sampled Van Halen and KISS didn't hurt either.

Less understandable was our universal agreement that the Bangles were cool. And as unbelievable as this might sound, it had nothing to do with how they looked, either. We all thought Susanna Hoffs was hot, but so was Kylie Minogue and Tiffany. This had more to do with their attitude: There just seemed to be some kind of understood belief that the Bangles were our
kind of people. It might have been their cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” on the Rubin-produced
Less Than Zero
soundtrack, but I kind of doubt it; I can't recall anyone except me actually buying that album. Maybe everyone else was mixing them up with Vixen.

Though it seems even stranger, the B-52s were another guilty pleasure for many hard-charging headbangers. This was actually one example of metal kids being ahead of the curve. While the standard dumb teenager liked “Love Shack” because he thought it was a neat song, adolescent Ratt fans immediately assumed it was some kind of a joke. We didn't necessarily understand
irony,
per se, but we had enough exposure to rock posturing to know that this was mostly a gag. It may have been a catchy joke, but it certainly wasn't an earnest attempt at rock 'n' roll. The one thing all those metal magazines taught us was how to spot the stereotypes of rock stardom, and the B-52s were clearly representing the opposite ideal on purpose.

After this point, the list gets pretty barren. If your cassette collection had too many other nonmetal artists, you were bordering on being one of those goddamn eclectics who really didn't
love
anything. One of my primary theories as a junior high kid was that people who claimed to like every genre of music were liars and hypocrites; they lacked backbone. I never trusted open-minded people.

Of course, a few pop songs always managed to weasel into the metal stratosphere. Here's a fairly comprehensive list of all the nonmetal singles that a midwestern headbanger could publicly appreciate. The vast majority were released between 1985 and 1990, but there are a few exceptions. I've tried to figure out the unifying quality that made these specific songs
rock
(or what made them
bitchin'
or
heavy
or
wicked
or whatever it was we were saying at the moment), but that appears to be impossible. I like most—but certainly not all—of them, and I've included a key at the bottom of the list that explains how they were introduced into the glam rock subculture. They are listed in the approximate order of their universal popularity within the metal community.

 

“The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Charlie Daniels Band
[a]

“So Alive,” Love & Rockets
[b]

“Black Cat,” Janet Jackson
[c]

“The Race Is On,” Sawyer Brown (
cover version only
)
[a]

“Holiday in the Sun,” the Sex Pistols
[d]

“Red Red Wine,” UB40
[e]

“Blister in the Sun,” the Violent Femmes
[b]

“Don't Be Cruel,” Cheap Trick
[a]

“The Warrior,” Scandal (featuring Patty Smyth)
[d]

“Strut,” Sheena Easton
[c] [d]

“Darling Nikki,” Prince
[d]

“Flesh for Fantasy,” Billy Idol
[d]

“Just Like Heaven,” the Cure
[b]

“Fishin' in the Dark,” the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
[a] [c]

“Ice Ice Baby,” Vanilla Ice
[f]

“Legs,” ZZ Top
[a] [d] [e]

“You May Be Right,” Billy Joel
[h]

“She Drives Me Crazy,” Fine Young Cannibals
[b]

“Invincible,” Pat Benatar
[g]

“You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” Dead or Alive
[d]

“Who Can It Be Now?,” Men at Work
[h]

“Goin' Back to Cali,” LL Cool J
[e]

“Touch Me (I Want Your Body),” Samantha Fox
[c]

“Rock Me Amadeus,” Falco
[f]

“Hippy Hippy Shake,” the Georgia Satellites
[d]

“She's Got the Look,” Roxette
[c] [e]

“Centerfield,” John Fogerty
[a] [c] [d] [f] [h]

Iron Maiden headlines the Donnington Rock Festival in front of 107,000 people, two of whom die during Guns N' Roses' set.

I have never met Satan, but he actually sounds like a pretty cool guy. A bit geeky, perhaps, but I'm sure we could still hang out and play Scrabble or something.

I've never been to Satan's apartment, so I can only guess how it's decorated. However, certain aspects of his personality have been well-established by the media: He obviously likes to play AD&D. He obviously owns a Ouija board. He obviously likes to smoke angel dust. And he obviously has an awesome stereo with kick-ass speakers, and he obviously plays nothing but heavy metal. In fact, he probably has a framed poster of Ronnie James Dio on his living room wall.

To paraphrase the insightful sock puppet stars of
The Sifl & Olly Show,
all the really cool rock bands are from hell. Ever since Lucifer and chain-smoking bluesman Robert Johnson made a deal “down at the crossroads,” Satan has been the finest A&R rep who ever existed. The Rolling Stones had sympathy for the devil; the Eagles stayed at his hotel; Van Halen went jogging with him. Styx named their band after a river that flowed
next
to hell, which probably explains how they managed to stay cool for about twelve weeks in 1978.

If you believe
Hammer of the Gods,
Satan's favorite band of all time was Led Zeppelin, a group who only occasionally sang about hell but copiously mentioned Valhalla (which would probably be just as frustrating). During the band's heyday, Jimmy Page lived in a castle near Loch Ness, where he supposedly spent all day sitting in the dark, taking drugs, and dabbling in the occultist works of Aleister Crowley (the estate's former owner). It can safely be argued that this is the most awesome thing anyone has ever done in the history of rock. If I ever get to the point where my daily routine revolves around shooting junk in a rural Sussex castle and talking about black majik, I will know I have made it.

According to a popular legend that I don't think even one person ever believed to be true, three of Led Zep's four components made a deal with the devil in exchange for superstardom. The story goes on to suggest that John Paul Jones was the only one who declined this pact, which is why he remains the third-remaining and fourth-best known member of the band. However, he is also the only Zepster who was never penalized by Satan's power; the other three were all struck by evil (John Bonham choked on his own vomit, Robert Plant tragically lost his son Karac, and Page would go on to collaborate with David Coverdale).

Of course, Page and his Loch Ness monstrosities couldn't hold a ceremonial candle to Black Sabbath, a band so intent on pretending to worship Satan that they actually might have done so by accident. The cover of
Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath
has a skull, the number 666, and a reenactment of the money shot from
Rosemary's Baby.
The record itself includes a song called “Killing Yourself to Live.” It may as well be a travel brochure for hell.

Sabbath was always doing weird, spooky shit; from what I can tell, 50 percent of their songs were about the devil, 35 percent were about taking drugs, and (oddly) 15 percent were about traveling through time. Geezer Butler told me the song “N.I.B.” was actually about drummer Bill Ward's poorly grown beard, which Butler thought resembled a little “nub,” which he pronounced as “nib,” which was then inexplicably turned into the acronym
“N.I.B.,” which made every kid with an ounce of creativity assume it was supposed to stand for “Nativity in Black” (particularly since the lyrics do not mention facial hair, but they do refer to Lucifer
in the first person
). Boy, how did anyone misinterpret
that?

Amazingly (or perhaps predictably), this kind of sinister gimmick would ultimately become Sabbath's most recognized influence on rock 'n' roll: fake satanism. “That came from the record company,” Butler now insists. “They manufactured the image. We just called ourselves Black Sabbath to match the lyrics; the record company did the rest. We never worshiped the devil. We never even talked about the devil, except to warn people against him.”