Fargo Rock City (32 page)

“At this point, the glam revival is more about theory than it is about music,” says Barney Hoskyns, the U.S. editor of the British magazine
MOJO
and the author of
Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution.
“A movie like
Velvet Goldmine
is a very structured attempt to comment on what glam meant, along with a story line that has heavy homoerotic overtones. But it's not going to get average kids on the street to parade around in silver boots with six-inch heels.”

Hoskyns thinks the hype surrounding glam is primarily coming from the fashion industry. Musically, he's not surprised record buyers have been less enthusiastic.

“The term ‘retro' has become such a buzz word,” Hoskyns
said. “Everything is described as retro these days. I think people are starting to pull away from brazen replications of the past.”

Dennis Dennehy at Geffen Records says the illusion of a glam revival is probably a collision of coincidences: Manson's new look, the release of
Velvet Goldmine
and the return of pop metal just happen to have occurred at the same time.

Still, Dennehy suspects the spirit of glam rock is making a valid resurgence, even if it's being manifested in a different way. At least he hopes it is: In February, Geffen will push a debut album by the band Buck Cherry, a group on the DreamWorks label that Dennehy favorably compares to the New York Dolls.

“Glam was always about sexual freedom and drug experimentation. People are interested in those themes again,” Dennehy says. “AIDS and the heroin epidemic don't cast the cultural shadow they did five years ago. I'm not trying to say those situations are any less important, but people have grown accustomed to living with them. It's just become part of life. Artists feel like they can be rock stars again, and that's what glam is all about.”

I include this article for a couple of reasons. Obviously, it's notable; it seems crazy to talk about glam metal without mentioning the reemergence (or at least the
supposed
reemergence) of the incarnation's original animal a decade after the fact. I also think the potential (albeit unlikely) signing of Cinderella and Ratt to Sony is a little more than a minor anomaly; in fact, I'm kind of afraid that glam metal will completely come back in vogue before I can finish this damn book. At the very least, I'm absolutely certain it will eventually have the kitschy, contrarian appeal of dance pop and new wave. The '98 glam revolt might be a harbinger of another full-on retro explosion that's just around the corner.

However, my main motivation is to introduce Hoskyns into this equation.

As the article states, Hoskyns is an editor for
MOJO,
one of the few British rock magazines that is (a) readable, and (b) remotely accurate. He's written books on the Doors, Prince, and
the Band (and he also coauthored a book titled
The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods,
so he certainly must understand
something
about hard rock). The fact that I had the chance to interview him at all was kind of a fluke; our newspaper received a promo copy of his book
Glam!
on Monday the ninth, and I was supposed to have my story finished by Tuesday afternoon. At about 11:00
A.M.
on Monday, I called Simon & Schuster and asked if I could somehow get a hold of Hoskyns as soon as possible. They told me to fax a request, which is publicist slang for “get fucked.”

At 3:00
P.M.
the next day, my story was basically done. But seconds before I sent it to my editor—and to my absolute and utter surprise—Hoskyns suddenly called me from his home in Woodstock, New York. He sounded feminine, but that's just because he's very, very British. However, Hoskyns describes himself as an “Americaphile” (which seems like a completely alien term to anyone from the States, but—truth be told—the world probably has a helluva lot more “Americaphiles” than it has “Anglophiles”). And after he fed me some excellent material for my story, we had a friendly, unprofessional conversation about '80s glam metal. This had kind of become my habit; while in the process of working on this book, I basically asked everyone I ever met about their thoughts on heavy metal. It really didn't matter who the fuck they were. Even if I was interviewing H. Ross Perot, I was gonna slip in a question about Trixter.

But I will always remember Barney Hoskyns. Why? Because he basically shredded the entire premise of my project in less than 120 seconds. And this was
before
I told him what I was doing. I hadn't even mentioned I was writing a book. Without provocation (and while discussing the “beauty” of Marc Bolan), he touched on the return of hair bands in the early 1980s. Suddenly, I saw my window of opportunity. “That's an interesting point,” I said. “And now that you've brought it up, I'm curious: Was there any value to '80s glam metal?”

And this is what he said:

“Only if you want to seem extremely ironic, or if you just want to be one of those rock critics that doesn't want to toe the
party line. If you're trying to ask me if I saw any credibility in Poison, I'm certainly not going to say ‘yes.' They were awful. It was all so overdone; it was so calculating. There was no invention. A band like Mötley Crüe just wanted to be a stupid rock 'n' roll band with a bunch of tattoos. And ultimately, all those groups looked the same, anyway.”

At this point, I had a lot of mixed emotions. On one hand, this man had eloquently crystallized every fear I had about trying to create a book about heavy metal, and I suddenly felt like I was the stupidest blockhead in America. Yet—on the other hand—I was pretty damn impressed by how quotable this dude was. And he just kept going!

“Now, I wouldn't lump all those bands into one group,” he continued. “Van Halen was funny; I always thought David Lee Roth was a witty, clever guy. But when you got down to the really horrific bands like Quiet Riot and London … oh, my God. You were just seeing this putrid, commercially cynical, idiotic image of what somebody thought a Sunset Strip glam band was supposed to look like.”

I started to suggest that he was being a little too flippant with his cultural criticism. Certainly, he was exaggerating his argument for effect, right? I mean, even critics agreed that Guns N' Roses was a good band, right?

“I thought Guns N' Roses was really tired,” he continued. “They were exactly like everybody else, except they were a little more obsessed with getting into detox. I have no idea what anyone ever saw in Axl Rose. It seemed like so many people wanted him to be some kind of subversive voice from a small town, kind of like Kurt Cobain. But he was never a Cobain. He never meant anything important.”

At this point, it seemed as if Hoskyns was literally reading from my text and mocking me. Of course, the simple reality is that his feelings on '80s metal are a more prototypical reflection of the rock community (and the global community) than mine. And that's unfortunate. Hoskyns is a smart guy, but he hates heavy metal for all the wrong reasons.

“Hating metal” actually has a lot to do with liking it. Actually, that's true for popular music in general. People who take rock music seriously in a literal sense always seem to be missing the point. I enjoy hating musicians far more than I enjoy appreciating them. As far as I'm concerned, when someone becomes a rock star, he quits being a person. I'm not being sarcastic, either. That's how it's
supposed
to be.

Whenever the subject of Kurt Cobain comes up, I always catch a lot of flak for implying that there was something truly wonderful about his suicide. I can totally understand why that suggestion would make someone want to punch me; as a member of the human race, it doesn't seem like there is anything positive about a genius who kills himself at the age of twenty-seven and leaves an infant without a father. But from a cultural perspective, Cobain's suicide was the only “great” thing that happened to music in the 1990s. He is the only artist of my generation who was indisputably sincere.

Most people have a very fucked-up relationship with musicians: They want to pretend that famous artists think about them as singular individuals. Joe Q. Fan has a personal relationship with Sting, so he likes to believe Sting feels the same way about him. I notice this every single time I've been backstage after a concert for a “meet and greet” session with a touring musician. A “meet and greet” is a situation where a band sits at a table after a show, and a few fans and industry types get to shake their hands and have something autographed (usually a black-and-white photo of the group supplied by the road publicist). Most of the time, the entire entourage is composed of the people who promoted the gig, a handful of random superfans who won backstage passes through radio contests, and three potential rock sluts.

The road manager runs these folks through like an assembly line, and the band is always sweaty and bored. Most groups are almost never rude (in fact, some are amazingly cordial), but it's really just part of the job. The young, wild-eyed rockers would usually prefer to be out getting drunk and getting laid, and the
older established stars would obviously prefer to be having dinner with their spouses. But they sit at these tables (typically set up in the locker rooms of sports arenas) and methodically sign pictures with black felt pens, and they listen to a few dozen people insist they are their “biggest fans,” a lot like the chick from
Misery.

After the “meet and greet” is over (which is almost always
exactly
thirty minutes), the band stands up and leaves town, and they will do the same thing in another city tomorrow night. But the people who momentarily shook hands with Ozzy or Slash (or whoever) will talk about this for the next five years. They will tell people how they “met” Gene Simmons, and they will inevitably says something like, “He was a really nice guy.” Which basically means the artist in question did not purposely spit on them.

I hate to classify rock fans as idiots, but they usually are. They don't understand that they are consuming an art form in a macro format. They are not getting anything
special
from these performers. If the Replacements' “Sixteen Blue” touches their life in a wonderful and specific way, that has very little to do with Paul Westerberg. What Westerberg did was write a great song that is (a) catchy, and (b) populist. He's brilliant, but not because his music can speak to an individual; he's brilliant because he can speak to millions of individuals and make each one of them feel like he's specifically talking to them. In an emotive sense, Westerberg helps people affect themselves, and he can do it on a mammoth scale. But diehard Replacements fans refuse to think of his songs in this way. If they did, it would make the whole experience of listening to “Sixteen Blue” on a lonely Friday night a lot less meaningful.

I suppose that explains why people so desperately want to take pop music seriously; it makes meaning out of four simple chords and elementary poetry. But that's always what was so great about Nirvana—and Cobain's death. For once,
it was all real.
People were always obsessed with calling Cobain “ironic,” but nobody (myself included) ever noticed that he was the one guy in the whole scene who was
never
being ironic. He sang about hating
life and wanting to die, and the cacophonic crash and beautiful wail of Nirvana's music was precisely how sadness sounds. And he validated everything he ever said by carrying through with the ultimate act: a high-profile suicide that was delivered to the world by the media, just as they had delivered “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991. The scale of Kurt's death was a reflection of his public life, which was really the only part of his life any of us knew. He was—and is—the only pop genius of my generation. He gave people exactly what they really wanted, and he did so with absolute sincerity. I don't see how anything could ever be more effective than an album as good as
Nevermind
and a shotgun blast to the face.

But does that mean that Cobain is beyond reproach? As a person—yes. But as a rock star? No. He was a rock guy who talked a lot of shit most of the time. When he was pogoing and screaming on MTV, he was doing it for our entertainment. When something is put out in the public, it loses its human qualities (for example, if you hate this book, I certainly wouldn't expect you to pretend you like it in order to spare my feelings, particularly since this book is almost certainly the only reference you have to me as a person). Hating (and sometimes mocking) music is just as important as loving (and embracing) music. They are basically the same emotive function, separated only by the tone of one's voice.

That's why I say Hoskyns hates '80 pop metal for the wrong reasons. When you get right down to it, the main problem had nothing to do with its social philosophy or the lack of artistic creativity. The biggest problem was that the vast majority of metal songs were simply
boring.
And the paradox is that the music was especially boring whenever the artists made conscious attempts to be intellectual or creative.

Metal (and all of rock music, really) has always grappled with the stupid logic of “virtuosity” and the relatively groundless argument that complex construction equates with greatness. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It is easy to illustrate this with extreme examples; I don't think any normal pop fan would
suggest that Joe Satriani is a better guitarist than Keith Richards, even though there's no doubt that Satch is countless times more proficient. To argue otherwise would be like saying George Will is a better writer than Ernest Hemingway because George uses bigger words, longer sentences, and more complicated arguments.

Hard rock's obsession with virtuosity was partially an attempt to legitimize the genre and make it seem valid, which (on rare occasions) it did. If nothing else, it made it seem relatively inaccessible. The beauty (and stupidity) of punk was that anyone could do it; if you had a guitar and a garage and two friends, you were probably two weeks away from playing a gig. That was not the case with heavy metal. The idea of learning the chops for “Surfing with the Alien” or the intro to “Mean Streets” was basically impossible, unless you were pretty damn musical. As a metal kid, there was always the idea that our music was secretly
smarter
than what was on Top 40 radio. The fans of quick-fingered guitar rock saw their music the same way teen movies usually portrayed burn-out kids: They looked like shit and nobody gave them any credit, but—underneath that tough, lazy exterior—they were really the brightest kids in the class (kind of like Judd Nelson in
The Breakfast Club
).