Fargo Rock City (40 page)

That's why Queensryche doesn't sound idiotic a full decade after they mattered. They don't have to convince anyone that they still fuck strippers or sacrifice children onstage, nor do they have to reinvent themselves as intellectuals. Instead,
Hear In the Now Frontier
is the same kind of record they would have made in 1987, and it has the same kind of impact (granted, that impact is marginal, but it's still better than seeming like a bloated caricature). Queensryche is like an Elvis who was never particularly good-looking, but who also never got fat.

Still, crediting Queensryche is probably counterintuitive, since it doesn't really make sense to attack rock bands for lacking longevity. That's not part of the job description. Nobody ever considers the importance of longevity when a band is young; when people buy a CD from a new artist and like what they hear, they might hope that the band's tour goes through their town, and if they really like the album they might even express interest in buying a couple more of the artists' previous releases. However, no teenager ever buys an album and then says, “Gee, I hope these guys make seventeen more albums over the next twenty-five years.” Why should I care what Axl Rose will be doing when
I'm
forty?

Let's be honest: It's more or less taken for granted that rock bands don't have staying power. The moment we're born, we start dying; the moment a musician gets famous, he starts to fade into oblivion. Every pop act that earns major commercial success with one album (or especially with one single) always faces the same criticism from anyone outside of their audience: “In five years, no one will know who these guys are.” And most of the time, that's true. This, of course, is good. If everyone who became famous
stayed
famous, we'd all go bankrupt buying forty new records every Tuesday.

Starting the late '90s, there has even been a cultural movement celebrating musicians who fell off the face of the earth. Predictably, the main culprit behind the retro-kitsch revival is VH1. They occasionally broadcast a show called
Where Are They Now?,
and the premise is to reacquaint us with people like the
Captain and Tennille and Men Without Hats. It's kind of a brilliant coup; even though the producers at VH1 showcase these one-hit wonders with hardcore sarcasm, the artists always love to participate: It puts them back in the spotlight they so dearly miss, and (more importantly) it almost always spikes sales of their back catalog. The wonderfully shameless E! network uses a similar approach with its
True Hollywood Stories,
although E! tends to focus on canceled sitcoms and child stars who go nuts, rob video stores, make porn flicks, and kill themselves. As a whole, our culture has become fascinated with public failure.

Metal acts rarely benefit from that fascination, though. The feeling seems to be that glam rockers took themselves too seriously to warrant playful memories. Here again, we see the emergence of a peculiar contradiction: People describe glam metal music as fun and crazy, yet they also remember glam metal artists as pretentious. The conventional opinion seems to be along the lines of, “Fuck Kip Winger. He's probably working in a gas station, and that's what he deserves.” (Actually, Kip released a solo album called
This Conversation Seems Like a Dream,
a title that's only better than
Hear In the Now Frontier
because it seems like it's mocking the Smiths. But I think you get the general idea.) Nobody really wonders where old metalheads are today, and it's because we can't imagine them as adults. They might as well have melted.

More than any other musical style, heavy metal is tied to youth. Living the teenage dream is a gorilla on every glam singer's shoulders. That ideal can usually be expressed for about two (maybe three) records. After about the fourth album, the concept of expressing the ideals of America's youth comes off as flatly ridiculous. And after that, it's just pathetic.

David Lee Roth is a frequent guest on
The Howard Stern Show,
and he's an ideal subject for Stern's brand of entertainment. Dave tells lots of rambling stories about whores and cocaine, and it's reminiscent of a retired NFL quarterback who honestly believes he could still go out and throw for three hundred yards against the Packers whenever he gets a few shots of scotch in his gulliver. This is the perfect medium for a man in
Roth's position: He's a marvelous storyteller, and it's improving his legacy. Even though Van Halen ended up selling more records with Sammy Hagar than they did with Dave, there's never an argument over who was the only true frontman of that band.

Yet Roth would look like a fool if the original Van Halen ever reunited.
^A
The thought of a balding man trying to howl and do backflips is not appealing, and that's basically all Roth can do. He doesn't deny it, either. “Of course I'd rather be bouncing around and touring the country,” he said when I asked if he still hoped that Eddie would call and make an offer. “I'm a one-trick pony. That's the only thing I really do well. Anything else I've ever done is merely a way to finance my one trick—arena rock.”

The problem is that “arena rock” is not like fly fishing for walleye or throwing horseshoes: The window for being able to do it with any social relevance is very small, especially when you play heavy glam. Metal frontmen are supposed to be vocally aggressive and recklessly edgy, and they're supposed to represent the kind of animalistic sexuality that is only found in seventeen-year-old males. Consequently, the only hard rockers who can survive are the ones who consciously ignore the beautiful stupidity of this archetype. And almost none of them are willing to do that.

As I look at my own personal CD collection, my eyes gloss over the hair metal bands who still make records today. Almost all of them are insipid, and it kind of makes me sad. For all its ballyhooed hype,
Psycho Circus
was probably among the worst three or four KISS albums the group ever released (placing it in a class with
Crazy Nights
and
Hot In the Shade
). KISS still puts on the best live show in the universe (I've seen 'em nine times), but it's basically parody and they basically admit it. Stephen Pearcy's post-Ratt project Arcade was as bad as you'd probably expect it to be, and Ratt's '99 record tanked. Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat now heads an electronica group called the Newlydeads (“Things just ran their course,” Downe explained. “I just wanted to do different
shit.”). Extreme released an album in 1995 titled
Waiting for the Punchline
; since singer Gary Cherone jumped ship for a brief tenure in Van Halen, I suppose they're still waiting. Def Leppard still makes new music, and maybe British people care. I know I don't, even though
Euphoria
debuted at No. 11 on the charts. The biggest glam metal release from 1999 was a live Guns N' Roses record, but all of its songs were recorded between 1987 and 1993.

Almost no one has surrendered, but the war is long over. Twisted Sister's “We're Not Gonna Take It” is used in a Comtrex commercial, and Ozzy's “Crazy Train” hawks Japanese cars. You find a lot of “greatest hits” packages, and you see aging bands playing state fairs and rib festivals, usually hoping to sell 50,000 copies of a new record on CMC, a North Carolina–based label that is now home to a dozen old metal acts. A notable exception to all this is Mötley Crüe; the Crüe are once again trying to become Aerosmith, but this time in a different way.

Aerosmith was the craziest, wildest American band of the 1970s, and then they hit rock bottom. Joe Perry left the band to start the Joe Perry Project, which flopped like a beached whale. Meanwhile, the Perryless Aerosmith was ever crappier. They all eventually got clean and uncool, leading to a reunion. With the help of Run-DMC, they even became an MTV staple. At the dawn of a new millennium, it can honestly be said that Aerosmith is “more popular than ever.” That's a cliché that publicists love to tag on dinosaur rock bands, but in this case it's true. They have made only one good song in ten years (“F.I.N.E.”), but they are still a supergroup.

“You want to survive and you want to have long-term viability,” Tom Hamilton told me in 1998. “We have recorded some songs that have gone on to be very popular, and that has given us more time to rock. For example, I realize
Get a Grip
was a commercially successful album, even though I thought it was off-balance and had too many ballads. But we'll do whatever we have to do to keep making records and to keep touring. Aerosmith doesn't mind being a pop band sometimes.”

Aerosmith beat the system by outliving it. And just as Mötley
used Aerosmith's musical template in 1982, they are using their marketing template at the dawn of the millennium. When they kicked Vince Neil out of the group in the early '90s, they picked up a new singer (John Corabi) and made one of the worst Soundgarden rip-off albums of all time. Neil's two solo attempts were actually okay, but he still had no future. Nobody was the least bit surprised when the two parties got back together and decided to make one more run for the money. They've even purchased (and re-released) their entire Elektra catalog. These guys have bills to pay.

I keep trying to make myself like the result, 1997's
Generation Swine.
It's not easy. Oh, there are occasional glimpses of the band I discovered in fifth grade—they even do a revamped industrial version of “Shout at the Devil.” But it's mostly a bunch of shit. The day
Generation Swine
was released, I remember walking into a record store and talking with the two guys who were working behind the counter. They loved the new Crüe material—but only as a comedy album. Over the next twenty minutes, they played the album's opening track four times, always laughing like hipster hyenas at the same set of lyrics: “I'm a sick motherfucker / I'm a sweet sucka mutha.” Even goofier was the tune written and sung by Tommy Lee about his child, “Brandon.” Every time Lee sang the chorus, “Brandon, I love you, you are the one,” he tagged on the line “Brandon, my son.” It almost seemed as though Tommy was making a conscious effort to remind everyone he was not gay. You'd think having 15 million people watch you get a blow job from Pamela Anderson would be more than enough to validate your heterosexuality.
(Reader's note: It now seems the always unpredictable Lee has quit the Crüe to become a rapper with the group Methods of Mayhem. It's horrible, but not nearly as bad as I expected. He's been replaced—at least temporarily—with ex-Ozzy drummer Randy Castillo and Samantha Maloney from Hole.)

Still, I legitimately enjoyed the
Swine
song “Afraid,” a dulcet number that reminded me why I liked Nikki Sixx's songwriting in the first place. I felt the same way when I heard “Bitter Pill,”
one of two new songs on the Crüe's second greatest-hits compilation that came out in the fall of '98. “Bitter Pill” replicates the main lick from Foreigner's “Hot Blooded,” and it lets Vince sound the way I want to remember him.

Fuck it, I have to be honest: I'm a metal fan, okay? I like listening to Mötley Crüe. I still watch my 1986 VHS copy of
Mötley Crüe Uncensored,
and I still love the part where Vince walks down the stairs of his fake house and says, “Duuuude.” I know I make it sound like analyzing this music was all some sort of intellectual exercise, but it's part of my life. And for a few uncomfortable moments of my past, it was pretty much the only thing in my life.

Every year,
Entertainment Weekly
has an issue it calls “Guilty Pleasures” where all their writers sing the praises of Patrick Swayze and
Charmed.
It's obviously an effective idea, because all my friends and I read the issue and spend the next seventy-two hours coming up with our own lists over e-mail. Part of the annual process is trying to define exactly what a “guilty pleasure” is, and my friend Pat probably came up with the perfect explanation: “A guilty pleasure is something I pretend to like ironically, but in truth is something I really just like.” If I was straight with myself, that would be my take on glam metal. Very often, I inexplicably embrace the same ideas that I just finished railing against: Part of me wants to insist that heavy metal really
is
stupid. I make fun of people who love the same bands I loved (and still do). Social pressure has made me cannibalize my own adolescent experience.

We all want to be cool, and it's hard for some of us to admit we're not. When I tell people I came from a town that didn't have a single stoplight, I make myself smile, even though I don't know why this is funny (or why it should be embarrassing). When I admit that I spent many nights assuming I would die a virgin, I act like I'm being self-deprecating, even though I'm mostly being honest. When I remember how confused I was while I drove up and down the empty streets of my snow-packed hometown, I try to be wistful, even though I fucking hated having no one to talk
to. And when I read my high school journal and realize what a homophobic, racist, sexist, and genuinely
unlikeable
person I was at the age of seventeen, I force myself to laugh. But I'm being a hypocrite, and I know it. In so many ways, that
was
my life. With the exception of some legitimately good parents and a better-than-average jump shot, I had nothing else … except for the cassettes on my dresser and the pentagram over my bed.

Hair metal was a wormhole for every midwestern kid who was too naive to understand why he wasn't happy. I may have been a loser, but Vince and Axl and Ace and Ozzy were cool
for me.
They allowed me to live a life I never would see, and I never had to leave my bedroom.

I absolutely could not relate to Mötley Crüe. And that's why I will always love them.