Fargo Rock City (3 page)

You know, if someone wrote an essay insisting Thin Lizzy provided the backbone for his teen experience in the mid 1970s, every rock critic in America would nod their head in agreement. A serious discussion on the metaphorical significance of
Jailbreak
would be totally acceptable. I just happen to think the same dialogue can be had about
Slippery When Wet.

Whenever social pundits try to explain why glam metal died, they usually insist that “It wasn't real” or that “It didn't say anything.” Well, it was certainly real to me and all my friends. And more importantly, it
did
say something.

It said something about us.

The worldwide release of Mötley Crüe's
Shout at the Devil
.

It's easy for me to recall the morning I was absorbed into the cult of heavy metal. As is so often the case with this sort of thing, it was all my brother's fault.

As a painfully typical fifth-grader living in the rural Midwest, my life was boring, just like it was supposed to be. I lived five miles south of a tiny town called Wyndmere, where I spent a lot of time drinking Pepsi in the basement and watching syndicated episodes of
Laverne & Shirley
and
Diff'rent Strokes.
I killed the rest of my free time listening to Y-94, the lone Top 40 radio station transmitted out of Fargo, sixty-five miles to the north (in the horizontal wasteland of North Dakota, radio waves travel forever). This was 1983, which—at least in Fargo—was the era of mainstream “new wave” pop (although it seems the phrase “new wave” was only used by people who never actually listened to that kind of music). The artists who appear exclusively on today's “Best of the '80s” compilations were the dominant attractions: Madness, Culture Club, Falco, the Stray Cats, German songstress Nena, and—of course—Duran Duran (the economic backbone of
Friday Night Videos'
cultural economy). The most popular song in my elementary school was Eddy Grant's “Electric Avenue,” but that was destined to be replaced by Prince's “Let's Go Crazy” (which would subsequently be replaced by “Raspberry Beret”).

Obviously, popular music was not in a state of revolution, or turbulence, or even contrived horror. The only exposure anyone in Wyndmere had to punk rock was an episode of
Quincy
that focused on the rising danger of slam dancing (later, we found out that Courtney Love had made a cameo appearance in that particular program, but that kind of trivia wouldn't be worth knowing until college). There were five hundred people in my hometown, and exactly zero of them knew about Motorhead, Judas Priest, or anything loud and British. Rock historians typically describe this as the period where hard rock moved “underground,” and that's the perfect metaphor; the magma of heavy metal was thousands of miles below the snow-packed surface of Wyndmere, North Dakota.

Was this some kind of unadulterated tranquillity? Certainly not. As I look back, nothing seems retroactively utopian about Rick Springfield, even though others might try to tell you differently. Whenever people look back on their grammar school days, they inevitably insist that they remember feeling “safe” or “pure” or “hungry for discovery.” Of course, the people who say those things are lying (or stupid, or both). It's revisionist history; it's someone trying to describe how it felt to be eleven by comparing it to how it feels to be thirty-one, and it has nothing to do with how things really were. When you actually
are
eleven, your life always feels exhaustively normal, because your definition of “normal” is whatever is going on at the moment. You view the entire concept of “life” as
your
life, because you have nothing else to measure it against. Unless your mom dies or you get your foot caught in the family lawn mower, every part of childhood happens exactly as it should. It's the only way things
can
happen.

That changed when my older brother returned from the army. He was on leave from Fort Benning in Georgia, and he had two cassettes in his duffel bag (both of which he would forget to take back with him when he returned to his base). The first,
Sports,
by Huey Lewis and the News, was already a known quantity (“I Want a New Drug” happened to be the song of the moment on
Y-94). However, the second cassette would redirect the path of my life:
Shout at the Devil
by Mötley Crüe.

As cliché as it now seems, I was wholly disturbed by the
Shout at the Devil
cover. I clearly remember thinking, Who the fuck
are
these guys? Who
the fuck
are these guys? And—more importantly—Are these guys even
guys
? The blond one looked like a chick, and one of the members was named “Nikki.” Fortunately, my sister broached this issue seconds after seeing the album cover, and my brother (eleven years my senior) said, “No, they're all guys. They're really twisted, but it's pretty good music.” When my brother was a senior in high school, he used to drive me to school; I remembered that he always listened to 8-tracks featuring Meat Loaf, Molly Hatchet, and what I later recognized to be old Van Halen. Using that memory as my reference point, I assumed I had a vague idea what Mötley Crüe might sound like.

Still, I didn't listen to it. I put Huey Lewis into my brother's trendy Walkman (another first) and fast-forwarded to all the songs I already knew. Meanwhile, I read the liner notes to
Shout at the Devil.
It was like stumbling across a copy of Anton LaVey's
Satanic Bible
(which—of course—was a book I had never heard of or could even imagine existing). The band insisted that “This album was recorded on Foster's Lager, Budweiser, Bombay Gin, lots of Jack Daniel's, Kahlua and Brandy, Quakers and Krell, and Wild Women!” And they even included an advisory:
Caution: This record may contain backwards messages.
What the hell did that mean? Why would anyone do that? I wondered if my brother (or anyone in the world, for that matter) had a tape player that played cassettes backward.

The day before I actually listened to the album, I told my friends about this awesome new band I had discovered. Eleven years later I would become a rock critic and do that sort of thing all the time, so maybe this was like vocational training. Everyone seemed mildly impressed that the Crüe had a song named “Bastard.” “God Bless the Children of the Beast” also seemed promising.

Clearly, this was a cool band. Clearly, I was an idiot and so
were all my friends. It's incredible to look back and realize how effectively the Mötley image machine operated. It didn't occur to anyone that we were going to listen to Mötley Crüe for the same reason we all watched
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
in 1978, when we were first-graders who liked Ace Frehley for the same reasons we liked Spider-Man.

Yet I would be lying if I said the only thing we dug about Mötley Crüe was their persona. Without a doubt, their image was the catalyst for the attraction—but that wasn't the entire equation. I say this because I also remember sitting on my bed on a Sunday afternoon and playing
Shout at the Devil
for the first time. This may make a sad statement about my generation (or perhaps just myself), but
Shout at the Devil
was my
Sgt. Pepper's.

The LP opens with a spoken-word piece called “In the Beginning.” The track doesn't make a whole lot of sense and would seem laughable on any record made after 1992, but I was predictably (and stereotypically) bewitched. The next three songs would forever define my image of what glam metal was supposed to sound like: “Shout at the Devil,” “Looks That Kill,” and the seminal “Bastard.” Although the instrumental “God Bless the Children of the Beast” kind of wasted my precious time, the last song on side one was “Helter Skelter,” which I immediately decided was the catchiest tune on the record (fortunately, I was still a decade away from understanding irony). I was possessed, just as Tipper Gore always feared; I had no choice but to listen to these songs again. And again. And again.

It was three months before I took the time to listen to side two.

It can safely be said that few rock historians consider
Shout at the Devil
a “concept album.” In fact, few rock historians have ever considered
Shout at the Devil
in any way whatsoever (the only exception might be when J. D. Considine reviewed it for
Rolling Stone
and compared it to disco-era KISS). Bassist Nikki Sixx wrote virtually every song on
Shout,
and he probably didn't see it as a concept record either. But for someone (read: me) who had never really listened to albums before—I had only been exposed
to singles on the radio—
Shout at the Devil
took on a conceptual quality that Yes would have castrated themselves to achieve. Like all great '80s music, it was inadvertently post-modern: The significance of
Shout at the Devil
had nothing to do with the concepts it introduced; its significance was the concept of what it literally
was.

I realize this argument could be made by anyone when they discuss their first favorite album. My sister probably saw epic ideas in the Thompson Twins. That's the nature of an adolescent's relationship with rock 'n' roll. Sixx himself has described Aerosmith as “my Beatles.” Using that logic, Mötley Crüe was “my Aerosmith,” who (along these same lines) would still ultimately be “my Beatles.”

Yet this personal relationship is only half the story, and not even the half that matters. There is another reason to look at the Crüe with slightly more seriousness (the operative word here being “slightly”). As we all know, '80s glam metal came from predictable sources: the aforementioned Aerosmith (seemingly every glam artist's favorite band), early and midperiod KISS (duh), Alice Cooper (but not so much musically), Slade (at least according to Quiet Riot), T. Rex (more than logic would dictate), Blue Cheer (supposedly), and—of course—Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin (although those two bands had just as much effect on Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and all the Sasquatch Rockers who would rise from the Pacific Northwest when metal started to flounder). In other words, this wasn't groundbreaking stuff, and no one is trying to argue otherwise. Sonically and visually, heavy metal was (and is) an unabashedly derivative art form.

But those sonic thefts are only half the equation, and maybe even less than that. We have to consider when this happened. The decade of the 1980s is constantly misrepresented by writers who obviously did not have the typical teen experience. If you believe unofficial Gen X spokesman Douglas Coupland (a title I realize he never asked for), every kid in the 1980s laid awake at night and worried about nuclear war. I don't recall the fear of nuclear apocalypse being an issue for me, for anyone I knew, or for any kid who
wasn't trying to win an essay contest. The imprint Ronald Reagan placed on Children of the '80s had nothing to do with the escalation of the Cold War; it had more to do with the fact that he was the only president any of us could really remember (most of my information on Jimmy Carter had been learned through
Real People,
and—in retrospect—I suspect a bias in its news reporting).

In the attempt to paint the 1980s as some glossy, capitalistic wasteland, contemporary writers tend to ignore how unremarkable things actually were. John Hughes movies like
The Breakfast Club
and
Sixteen Candles
were perfect period pieces for their era—all his characters were obsessed with overwrought, self-centered personal problems, exactly like the rest of us. I suppose all the '80s films about the raging arms race are culturally relevant, much in the same way that Godzilla films are interesting reflections on the atomic age. But those films certainly weren't unsettling to anyone who didn't know better.
WarGames
and the TV movie
The Day After
were more plausible than something like
Planet of the Apes,
but—quite frankly—
every
new movie seemed a little more plausible than the stuff made before we were born. Anything could happen and probably would (sooner or later), but nothing would really change. Nobody seemed too shocked over the abundance of nuclear warheads the Soviets pointed at us; as far as I could tell, we were supposed to be on the brink of war 24/7. That was part of being an American. I remember when
Newsweek
ran a cover story introducing a new breed of adults called “Yuppies,” a class of people who wore Nikes to the office and were money-hungry egomaniacs. No fifteen-year-old saw anything unusual about this. I mean, wouldn't that be normal behavior? The single biggest influence on our lives was the inescapable
sameness
of everything, which is probably true for most generations.