Fargo Rock City (18 page)

First of all, the relationship between sex and hard rock is an
idea,
not a tactile reality. Heavy metal is clearly not a conduit for actual intercourse. Though no studies were conducted at the time, it's safe to say that most guys listening to Iron Maiden in the 1980s were not getting laid all that often. It's not like metal was the soundtrack of rampant teenage sex. It was actually the soundtrack from rampant teenage abstinence. If parents
really
wanted to keep their sons from getting the neighbor girl pregnant, the best thing they could have done was buy them several Dio albums and the AD&D
Dungeon Master's Guide.

Still, society inevitably makes a connection between sex and hard rock: As I stated earlier, metal will always have a home in strip clubs, and that's for two reasons. The first is sonic; glam rock is sleazy and trashy, and the tempo suits the action. But the second reason is a metaphor for how this music illustrates sex. Strippers are fantasy women; I don't think any man who goes to a strip club views the dancers as real people—at least not when the girls are onstage. Personally, I've only been to six strip joints in my entire life (and four of them were in Canada), but I completely understand why some men love them. When I explained this to a former girlfriend, she was very hurt when I told her that guys look at strippers as fantastical objects. “
I
should be your fantasy woman,” she insisted. And I was forced to explain that she could never be my fantasy woman, despite the fact that she was doe-eyed and voluptuous and once made me pass out (literally) during a period of physical ecstasy. She could never be my “fantasy woman” because I couldn't avoid the fact that she was real. I had seen this woman vomit. I had seen this woman gorge herself on pancakes. I had been with her when she purchased tampons. Regardless of her unspeakable midwestern sexiness, I would always recognize her as a genuine person. My feelings toward her would be based on fact, not visual fiction. With strippers, the opposite is true.

And that's how it is with the women who were aligned with heavy metal. They were inevitably described in one-dimensional terms. It was once pointed out to me that most of the planets in the
Star Wars
trilogy were described as having only one climate (the “ice world” Hoth, the “desert planet” Tatooine, etc.). I have come to notice a similar trend in hard rock. Women are often described as having a singular characteristic. The aforementioned “Big Guns” from Skid Row is an easy example. “She Goes Down” by Mötley Crüe talks about a girl who (apparently) does nothing but give blow jobs. Winger's “Seventeen” talks about a girl who is seventeen, and that's her whole life story.
Love/Hate's “Rock Queen” worships a highly desirable women, but we know virtually nothing else—except that she has “cookies” (the lyrics keeping pleading, “Let me touch your cookies / Let me eat your cookies”). Maybe Love/Hate's “rock queen” is Betty Crocker.

Still, we somehow managed to use a band's songs and videos—and more importantly, a band's social posture—to get an image of what kind of women they preferred (or appeared to prefer). This goes back to the idea of thinking about pop culture even when it isn't there; with only scraps of information, metal followers were able to construct the sexual appetites of their favorite musicians. Here's a list of what type of girls the premier metal groups liked (or at least
seemed
to like) …

 

GUNS N' ROSES: Bisexual models; submissive women; girls who would buy them booze.

MÖTLEY CRÜE: Strippers; women who have sex in public (particularly elevators); lesbians.

RATT: Hookers with a heart of gold. Or strippers with a heart of gold. Or thirteen-year-olds.

WARRANT: Virgins who exhibited the potential to become nymphomaniacs.

DEF LEPPARD: Drunk girls; female vampires.

THE CULT: Female vampires only.

FASTER PUSSYCAT: GNR rejects.

W.A.S.P.: Magician's assistants; women with rape fantasies; lower primates.

AEROSMITH: Models, but not waifs; high school snobs; more girls who like having sex in elevators.

CINDERELLA: Gypsies.

TESLA: Farm girls; whoever they used to date in junior high.

SKID ROW: Nameless, faceless, top-heavy sex machines (with hearts of gold).

BULLETBOYS: Girls with particularly deep birth canals.

L.A. GUNS: Drug-addled hitchhikers who like rough sex.

BANG TANGO: Faster Pussycat rejects.

VAN HALEN: Party girls; bikini models; the homecoming queen; cast members of
One Day at a Time.

DAVID LEE ROTH (solo): The same as Van Halen, except with bigger boobs.

BON JOVI: The girl next door.

VINNIE VINCENT INVASION: The dominatrix next door.

SLAUGHTER: Girls who couldn't make the cut as Bon Jovi groupies.

WINGER: Whoever Bon Jovi groupies used to baby-sit.

POISON: Girls who liked to tease; girls from small towns; good girls gone bad.

KISS: Any girl who wasn't dead.

IRON MAIDEN: Dead girls.

JUDAS PRIEST: Boys.

METALLICA: None of the above.

Oh yeah … I guess I forgot Whitesnake. As previously stated, they liked girls who fucked cars. But all this analysis only provides us with half of the intercourse equation. We know who all these bands liked to sleep with, but what about the rest of us? If '80s metal was so sexual, what was the best metal song to actually
have sex
to?

This is a complicated question, because most prototypical metal fans never had sex. Thus, we have very little historical precedent to use as a guide. In the film
Less Than Zero,
Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz make love gravy to the song “Bump and Grind” off David Lee Roth's first solo album, but this was not a particularly romantic interlude. I went to high school with a secretly sleazy farm girl who once said it was “totally awesome to fuck to Faster Pussycat,” and since this girl always had a lot of boyfriends, I assume she knew what she was talking about. But these two examples are pretty much all we have to work with.

Part of this problem is that metal is painfully Caucasian, and most good sex music is made by black guys: Prince, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, etc. Logic would therefore indicate that Living Colour should have been the sexiest metal band of all time.
This was not the case. I recently re-listened to both
Vivid
and
Stain,
and neither made me want to sleep with anybody, except maybe a guy. However, the experience did re-instill my belief that (a) I am not a glamour boy, and (b) I am fierce.

So what makes for a good sex song? That depends on whom you ask. I recall having a heated argument with a woman over what made for better sex music: White Zombie or Yanni. In my mind, “More Human Than Human” is
very
sexy; I actually think it sounds like sex. My female opponent strongly disagreed with that assertion, although I don't think she was so much advocating Yanni as she was attacking White Zombie. But this really isn't the point (especially since when we
did
end up having sex, we were listening to Steely Dan). The point is that just about everyone sees a clear difference between “making love” and “fucking”—even headbangers.

If you want to “make love” to a heavy metal song, you're probably going to lean in the direction of a power ballad. Luckily, there were about 4 million of these made between 1983 and 1991. The origin comes from the big '70s arena bands: Aerosmith (“Dream On”), Nazareth (“Love Hurts”), Lynyrd Skynyrd (“Tuesday's Gone”), Black Sabbath (“Changes”), and KISS (“Beth” and “Hard Luck Woman”). None of these songs were particularly sexy (Skynyrd's was probably the best for slow dancing), but they did set a universal template that a thousand bands copied: You put bittersweet lyrics against an acoustic instrument, and then you steamrolled the refrain with a plutonium-heavy guitar riff. The chorus was the “power,” the verse was the “ballad.” If you were a guy in the backseat of a car, you went for the bosom during the chorus.

The popularity of the '80s power ballad was mainly due to a radio mentality that carried over from the previous decade. If a rock band wanted to break into the mainstream in 1976, they needed to release a love song that radio stations felt comfortable playing. Since MTV was originally programmed like a Top 40 radio station, they often used the same criteria for breaking metal acts. Extreme's “More Than Words” is a prime example; in
fact, when MTV first played that song's video in the summer of 1991, VJs would regularly compare Extreme to KISS (i.e., a hard rock group who used a love song to cross into the mainstream).

“More Than Words” was about as good as power balladeering ever got. On the whole, Extreme was only slightly better than okay, but they were
great
at this kind of prom schlock (“When I First Kissed You” off the same album is also quite capital). Unlike most of their spandex-clad peers, they didn't feel the need to inject their heavy metal roots into the middle of every sweet love song. That proved to be very wise. I'm always a little surprised by how well “More Than Words” stands up over time, but I think I know why it does: It's legitimately romantic. It kind of makes you want to cuddle up to someone, especially during the harmonizing. If you lost your virginity to this song, it might be an embarrassing story to tell people, but—at least when no one else was around—it will still seem special to you.

Unfortunately, there really aren't too many other power ballads that qualify. Warrant's “Heaven” would probably make the cut, as would a song by the band Steelheart that I can't remember. Truth be told, Journey, Boston, and Styx were much better at this sort of thing than groups like Quiet Riot and Trixter.

Faster Pussycat's “House of Pain” was a really wonderful ballad, but it had nothing to do with sex (or even girls). The same goes for the Crüe's “Home Sweet Home” and Slaughter's “Fly to the Angels,” which was supposedly not about suicide but certainly seemed like it.

Guns N' Roses' biggest ballad was “Patience,” but that was about
not
having sex. “Sweet Child O' Mine” was a little too upbeat in the beginning (and a little too menacing at the end), and “November Rain” was too much of a wedding song (and I thought that
before
I saw the video). The best GNR sex song was actually “Rocket Queen,” which isn't a ballad at all, except maybe at the end.

But perhaps you don't want romance. Maybe you want the same thing all those metal dudes claimed they needed: Hot, gooey, uninhibited pelvis banging. Well, you're in luck—there's
bushels of material for those purposes too: Def Leppard's “Saturday Night (High N' Dry),” Mötley Crüe's “Sumthin' for Nuthin',” the KISS songs “Lick It Up” and “Fits Like a Glove,” Cinderella's “Push Push,” Faster Pussycat's “Little Dove,” Warrant's “Sure Feels Good to Me,” Poison's “You Can Look but You Can't Touch,” “F.I.N.E.” from Aerosmith, Vinnie Vincent's “Naughty Naughty,” and a song by Danger Danger that was
also
titled “Naughty Naughty.”

Oh yeah … and that Whitesnake song. I forget the title. Something about fucking a car, I think.

The 1988 Class B State Speech & Debate tournament is held in Mandan, North Dakota. Meanwhile, Lita Ford's “Kiss Me Deadly” crawls up to No. 59 on the pop charts.

At this point, I find myself driven to inject Lovely Lita Ford into this discussion.

Lita Ford was one of heavy metal's “exceptions.” This means ninth-graders constantly used her as a pertinent example whenever they wrote an essay for English class that argued metal was more than just satanic cock rock (in case you're curious, the Christian supergroup Stryper was the other overused “exception” for these arguments). Ford began her career in the seminal all-female band the Runaways, a group that has since become a favorite among rock writers. The other star from the Runaways, Joan Jett, became a successful solo artist, but people rarely considered her version of hard rock to be metal. I'm not completely sure why this is. Part of it was timing; “I Love Rock & Roll,” her biggest hit, had come and gone before the modern glam era exploded. More importantly, Jett was always more of a punk rocker than a metalhead. That fact has become even more evident during the past decade; today she's a lesbian icon and the godmother of riot grrls.

However, Lita took a different path. She was metal to the core, even marrying Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P. (that move
heightened her “bad girl” credibility, because Holmes had posed in the “For Ladies” section of
Hustler
magazine and evidently has a huge dick). In a lot of ways, she tried to embody the fantasy image created by all those macho male groups. And—at least in 1988—she succeeded.

I discovered Lita as a sophomore in high school. She had released the single “Kiss Me Deadly,” which went to No. 12 on the pop charts but pervaded bedrooms and school parking lots far more often than its
Billboard
peak would indicate. “Kiss Me Deadly” was similar to “Talk Dirty to Me” and “Panama”—it was simply a great pop song, and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is ignoring the actual tune and attacking the genre. This is not to say Ford had some special gift for making music; “Kiss Me Deadly” is basically the only better-than-average song she ever made (and she wasn't even the credited songwriter). I can barely remember anything else on the album (
Lita
) it came from: I know she had one song called “Back to the Cave” and another called “Blueberry,” plus a semipopular duet with Ozzy Osbourne that seemed to openly promote suicide pacts. This is the extent of Lovely Lita's musical legacy.