Fargo Rock City (4 page)

Jefferson Morley makes a brilliant point about inflation in his 1988 essay “Twentysomething”: “For us, everything seemed normal. I remember wondering why people were surprised that prices were going up. I thought, That's what prices did.” Consider that those sentiments come from a guy who was already in high
school during Watergate—roughly the same year I was born. To be honest, I don't know if I've ever been legitimately
shocked
by anything, even as a third-grader in 1981. That was the year John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, and I wasn't surprised at all (in fact, it seemed to me that presidential assassinations didn't happen nearly as often as one would expect). From what I could tell, the world had always been a deeply underwhelming place; my generation inherited this paradigm, and it was perfectly fine with me (both then and now).

Mötley Crüe was made to live in this kind of world.
Shout at the Devil
injected itself into a social vortex of jaded pragmatism; subsequently, it was the best album my friends and I had ever heard. We never scoffed at the content as “contrived shock rock.” By 1983, that idea was the norm. Elvis Costello has questioned whether or not '80s glam metal should even be considered rock 'n' roll, because he thinks it's a “facsimile” of what legitimate artists already did in the past. What he fails to realize is that no one born after 1970 can possibly appreciate any creative element in rock 'n' roll: By 1980, there was no creativity left. The freshest ideas in pop music's past twenty years have come out of rap, and that genre is totally based on recycled, bastardized riffs. Clever facsimiles are all we really expect.

The problem with the current generation of rock academics is that they remember when rock music seemed new. It's impossible for them to relate to those of us who have never known a world where rock 'n' roll wasn't
everywhere,
all the time. They remind me of my eleventh-grade history teacher—a guy who simply could not fathom why nobody in my class seemed impressed by the
Apollo
moon landing. As long as I can remember, all good rock bands told lies about themselves and dressed like freaks; that was part of what defined being a “rock star.” Mötley Crüe was a little more overt about following this criteria, but that only made me like them
immediately.

In fact, I loved Mötley Crüe with such reckless abandon that I didn't waste my time learning much about the band. I consistently mispronounced Sixx's name wrong (I usually called him
“Nikki Stixx”), and I got Tommy Lee and Mick Mars mixed up for almost a year.

Until 1992, I didn't even know that the cover art for the vinyl version of
Shout at the Devil
was a singular, bad-ass pentagram that was only visible when the album was held at a forty-five-degree angle. The reason this slipped under my radar was because
Shout at the Devil
was released in 1983, a period when the only people who were still buying vinyl were serious music fans. Obviously, serious music fans weren't buying Mötley Crüe. I've never even
seen
Mötley Crüe on vinyl; I used to buy most of my music at a Pamida in Wahpeton, ND—the only town within a half hour's drive that sold rock 'n' roll—and the last piece of vinyl I recall noticing in the racks was the soundtrack to
Grease.
The rest of us got
Shout at the Devil
on tape. The cassette's jacket featured the four band members in four different photographs, apparently taken on the set for the “Looks That Kill” video (which is probably the most ridiculous video ever made, unless you count videos made in Canada). By the look of the photographs, the band is supposed to be in either (a) hell, or (b) a realm that is remarkably similar to hell, only less expensive to decorate.

Like a conceptual album of the proper variety,
Shout at the Devil
opens with the aforementioned spoken-word piece “In the Beginning.” It describes an evil force (the devil?) who devastated society, thereby forcing the “youth” to join forces and destroy it (apparently by shouting in its general direction). This intro leads directly into “Shout … shout … shout … shout … shout … shout … shout at the Devil,” a textbook metal anthem if there ever was one.

Humorless Jesus freaks always accused Mötley Crüe of satanism, and mostly because of this record. But—if taken literally (a practice that only seems to happen to rock music when it shouldn't)—the lyrics actually suggest an anti-Satan sentiment, which means Mötley Crüe released the most popular Christian rock record of the 1980s. They're not shouting
with
the devil or
for
the devil: They're shouting
at
the devil. Exactly what they're shouting remains open to interpretation; a cynic might speculate
Tommy Lee was shouting, “In exchange for letting me sleep with some of the sexiest women in television history, I will act like a goddamn moron in every social situation for the rest of my life.” However, I suspect Sixx had more high-minded ideas. In fact, as I reconsider the mood and message of these songs, I'm starting to think he really
did
intend this to be a concept album, and I'm merely the first person insane enough to notice.

There are two ways to look at the messages in
Shout at the Devil
. The first is to say “It's elementary anti-authority language, like every other rock record that was geared toward a teen audience. Don't ignore the obvious.” But that kind of dismissive language suggests there's no reason to look for significance in
anything.
It's one thing to realize that something is goofy, but it's quite another to suggest that goofiness disqualifies its significance. If anything, it
expands
the significance, because the product becomes accessible to a wider audience (and to the kind of audience who would never look for symbolism on its own). I think it was Brian Eno who said, “Only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them became a musician.” Well, millions of people bought
Shout at the Devil
, and every single one of them remained a person (excluding the kids who moved on to Judas Priest and decided to shoot themselves in the face).

Fifteen years later, I am not embarrassed by my boyhood idolization of Mötley Crüe. The fact that I once put a Mötley Crüe bumper sticker on the headboard of my bed seems vaguely endearing. And if I hadn't been so obsessed with shouting at the devil, the cultural context of heavy metal might not seem as clear (or as real) as it does for me today.

Through the circumstances of my profession (and without really trying), I've ended up interviewing many of the poofy-haired metal stars I used to mimic against the reflection of my old bedroom windows. But in 1983, the idea of talking with Nikki Sixx or Vince Neil wasn't my dream or even my fantasy—it was something that never crossed my mind. Nikki and Vince did not seem like people you talked to. I was a myopic white kid
who had never drank, never had sex, had never seen drugs, and had never even been in a fight. Judging from the content of
Shout at the Devil
, those were apparently the
only
things the guys in Mötley Crüe did. As far as I could deduce, getting wasted with strippers and beating up cops was their full-time job, so we really had nothing to talk about.

Van Halen's “Jump” holds off “Karma Chameleon” and “99 Luftballoons” for a fifth consecutive week to remain America's No. 1 single.

Now, don't get me wrong—just because I lived in North Dakota doesn't mean I was some rube who had no idea that something called “heavy metal” existed. Quiet Riot's “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” and Van Halen's “Jump” were hugely popular with my elementary school posse, and everyone knew those hooligans were widely considered to be heavy metal bands. However, they didn't seem particularly
heavy
(particularly for those of us who discovered VH via
1984
). “Panama” sounded different than most radio fare (sort of), and we could tell it improved when it was played at a higher volume, but it was essentially just a good party song (in as much as sixth-graders “party”). Girls generally liked it, and the video wasn't threatening at all (actually, it was kind of cute). At this point in their career, Van Halen didn't sound that far removed from pop life, and I was still too naive to realize rock 'n' roll is more about genres and categories than it is about how anything actually
sounds.
In short, I was too stupid to be affected by the greater stupidity of marketing.

Part of this confusion was probably due to my youthful unwillingness to accept that all of “heavy metal” could be classified under a singular umbrella. Van Halen, Judas Priest, and Slayer
were all indisputably metal groups, but I really don't know if they had anything else in common. I can't think of any similarity between Warrant and Pantera, except that they used to appear in the same magazines. Since there was so much loud guitar rock in the 1980s, describing a band as
metal
was about as precise as describing a farm animal as a
mammal.
For attentive audiences, the more critical modifier was whatever word preceded “metal”—these included adjectives like
glam, speed,
and
death.
Those designations became even more important when the original precursor—the word “heavy”—became utterly useless by about 1987.

Taken out of context, “heavy metal” tells us very little. It's almost redundant; I suppose it indicates that Mötley Crüe doesn't have anything to do with aluminum. In other subcultures, “heavy” is a drug term constituting anything that requires a great deal of thought. My ex-girlfriend and I used to smoke pot every day we were together, and—at least for us—
heavy
could mean a lot of different things. Sometimes it referred to the relationship between God and science; sometimes it referred to who would put new batteries in the remote control; all too often, it referred to locating cereal. Regardless of the scenario, whenever we used the word “heavy,” it had something to do with taking a hard look at a perplexing, previously ignored problem. Of course, the only time we ever described something as “heavy” was while we were stoned, which was pretty much all the time, which made for an abundance of perplexing problems (and if I recall correctly, we had a tendency to label every especially unsolvable problem as a “remarkable drag”).

But what makes metal “heavy”? Good question. It becomes a particularly difficult issue when you consider that rock fans see a huge difference between the word “heavy” and the word “hard.” For example, Led Zeppelin was
heavy.
To this day, the song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is as heavy as weapons-grade plutonium. Black Sabbath was the heaviest of the heavy (although I always seem to remember them being heavier than they actually were; early Soundgarden records are actually heavier than Sab ever
was). Meanwhile, a band like Metallica was
hard
(as they've matured, they've become less hard and more heavy). Skid Row and the early Crüe were pretty hard. Nirvana's first record on Sub Pop was heavy, but
Nevermind
was totally hard, which is undoubtedly why they ended up on MTV's
Headbanger's Ball
(that was the fateful episode where Kurt Cobain wore his dress, thereby providing the final death blow to the metal ideology).

Clearly, the “hard vs. heavy” argument is an abstract categorization. To some people it's stupidly obvious, and to other people it's just stupid. Here again, I think drugs are the best way to understand the difference. Bands who play “heavy” music are inevitably referred to as “stoner friendly.” However, “hard” bands are not. Find some pot smokers and play Faster Pussycat for them—I assure you, they will freak out. It will literally hurt their brain. They'll start squinting (more so), and they'll hunch up their shoulders and cower and whine and kind of wave their hands at no one in particular. I nearly killed my aforementioned drug buddy by playing the Beastie Boys' “Sabotage” when she was trapped in a coughing fit. Her recovery required a box of Nutter Butter cookies and almost four full hours of
Frampton Comes Alive.

Sociologist and
Teenage Wasteland
author Donna Gaines described the teen metal audience as a suburban, white, alcoholic subculture, and she's completely correct. The only drugs that go with “hard” metal are bottles of booze (and cocaine, if you can afford it, which you probably can't if you spend all your time listening to
Who Made Who
). Conversely, “heavy” metal meshes perfectly with marijuana, especially if you're alone and prone to staring at things (such as Christmas lights, the Discovery channel, or pornography).

It's tempting to suggest that “heavy” metal came from acid rock (like Iron Butterfly), while “hard” metal came from groups who took their influences from punk (that would explain Guns N' Roses). This seems like a logical connection, but it rarely adds up. A better point of schism is side one of the first Van Halen album, released seven years before we all heard “Jump” on our clock radios.