Fargo Rock City (11 page)

The paradox is that metal bands ended up taking their cues from all the guys who had been able to make a living by
ripping off
Bowie. Even though a third of T. Rex's catalog is folkie unicorn shit and another third is shamelessly gorgeous pop, Marc Bolan was a major influence for countless metal bands. The New York Dolls were also a factor, although not as much as rock critics tend to
imply. Music critics consistently make the mistake of thinking that the “dissonant” (read: “tuneless”) albums they appreciate are somehow influencing culture. No normal listener gives a hoot about any goddamn song the New York Dolls ever made. The only people who have even listened to their material are (a) rock journalists, and (b) the people who read books written by rock journalists (and half of those people are lying).
But those shoes!
The album cover from the Dolls' debut record is more important than any song they ever wrote. It's the purest, sexiest example of constructed glamour in the history of the world.

And—more importantly—the Dolls were outlandish enough to influence KISS. Time is slowly proving that KISS is the second-most influential rock band of all time. The Beatles will always be number one, because they were the first, the greatest, the smartest, and the origin for everything that would come next. The Rolling Stones introduced the attitude rock guys were supposed to have (no one will ever be cooler), and Led Zeppelin acted the way rock bands were supposed to act (there will never be a group as archetypal as Zep). But KISS were
rock stars.
The guys in KISS were walking metaphors for most of what had come before them and everything that would come after.

Gene Simmons has said that KISS selected its look by accident; since they were big macho guys (or at least he was) playing big macho songs, KISS couldn't be glammy the way the Dolls or Bolan or Bowie were glammy. Instead, they went with the colors black and white, and the attire bordered on the sadomasochistic.

This straightforward template did not last long. By 1975, Paul Stanley had the hair, lips, and stage moves of the hairiest supermodel in pop history. Ace Frehley was trying to look “futuristic” (or at least making his best drunken guess as to how the future would appear—I suppose he did predict the advent of moon boots). As for Peter “Cat Man” Criss … well, Peter didn't try too hard. When he left the band, Eric Carr replaced him as “The Fox,” which—for all practical purposes—is just a meaner type of cat.
(Reader's note: The author is not a zoologist.)
Gene Simmons's appearance and behavior also evolved over time; between
Rock and Roll Over
and
Dynasty,
he went through a long phase where he tried to look and act like a robot. This era officially ended with
(Music from) The Elder,
when the band decided it would be cool to wear capes and headbands. Of course, the crowning moment in KISStory was Vinnie Vincent's “Egyptian Warrior” regalia he donned as the replacement for Frehley. This was a stunningly original character. It paid homage to all the famous Egyptian soldiers renowned for their military prowess … of which there are exactly zero. Sometimes Vinnie's persona is referred to as “The Pharaoh,” which would seem to indicate that he was a rock 'n' roll slave owner. Oh well.

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 sonic 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.