Fargo Rock City (8 page)

Bono was able to morph himself into whatever his fans needed him to be: He could be angry, brooding, vulnerable, or romantic—and sometimes all at the same moment. Rose is the same kind of shape-shifter, but for a different, less stable audience. His style is even more schizophrenic. He swings from being openly violent and misogynistic (like on the song “It's So Easy”) to acting utterly helpless (such as the brilliant closing two and a half minutes of “Rocket Queen,” my vote for the finest 171 seconds of '80s rock). In the video for “Don't Cry,” emotional juxtaposition is pretty much all Axl does. But unlike Bono, Guns N' Roses never played “college rock.” It was never specifically directed at smart people. GNR wrote for a younger audience—the kind of people who still slammed bedroom doors and huffed gas in the garage.

When Ross Raihala first tried to explain what Morrissey meant to him as a teenager, I didn't get it; whenever I listen to the Smiths, I can sense homosexual overtones, but that's mostly because I now actively look for them. It doesn't seem “obvious” at all. But that says more about me than it does about the Smiths. My favorite Smiths songs are “Half a Person” and “Ask,” and—since I apply them to myself—I don't see any indisputable gay imagery in either of those songs. Raihala thinks that assertion is ridiculous and he's almost insulted by the suggestion. The reason he takes it as an insult is because it attacks the validity of the connection between Morrissey and the gay community. As a person, Morrissey has never publicly said “I'm gay,” nor has he written any songs that empirically state his sexual preference—yet
he (apparently) drops hints constantly. It's easy to understand why closeted gay teens could relate to that: Like Morrissey, they couldn't say who they were, but a big part of them wanted people to figure it out.

Morrissey was “their voice”—a person who spoke from their minority perspective and was able to inject his feelings and ideas into the mainstream culture. If you were recognized as a Morrissey fan, it said something about who you were: To guys like Raihala, it meant either (a) you
were
gay, or (b) you were certainly comfortable with the gay lifestyle. I would guess there are many members of the gay community who buy Morrissey albums even though they don't especially care for the music, just because it seems like the proper thing to do. His music and social posture built a persona, and that persona ultimately stretched far beyond his albums. But since he's still a mere pop singer, his disciples can only connect with him through the appreciation of his records. Raihala now owns thousands of CDs and listens to new music every day, but he says he can still sing along to all seven Smiths studio records in their absolute entirety.

Interestingly enough,
Appetite for Destruction
is probably the only record I could karaoke from beginning to end. Part of that is because I've listened to it so much—but the larger explanation for why I did is probably similar to Raihala's adoration of Morrissey. My motivation wasn't as specific—it did not derive from a singular issue—but it was reflective of my personality in the same way.

I don't think it would be accurate to call Axl Rose “my voice” or even “our voice,” because Guns N' Roses was way too popular. While Morrissey was famous, he was never famous the way Axl was; total sales from all those Smiths LPs would not equal the 15 million-plus copies of
Appetite
that sold worldwide. It's unrealistic to think any rock singer can represent an audience of that size. But Rose did represent his core audience, which were people who came from the same place. The fact that he was a rural kid (born in Lafayette, Indiana) was a huge factor, particularly because he
always seemed to weave it into the music. All those
Appetite
songs made L.A. seem (quite literally) like a “jungle” the band had parachuted into. GNR rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin was also from Indiana, and he once said, “Nobody goes to Los Angeles. L.A. is where you
end up.
” So that was how we came to view Axl: He was the guy who took our small-town paradigm and applied it to the real world—a world that had once seemed glamorous and now seemed like a twisted, sinister paradise city.

Of all the L.A. metal bands, Guns N' Roses talked about Hollywood the most (even more than Junkyard, a band whose first single was specifically titled “Hollywood”). Mötley Crüe had a song called “Danger” that described the seedy underside of Los Angeles, but they always seemed like a band who
belonged
in southern California. Vince Neil looked like a surfer (he was kind of like a belligerent version of David Lee Roth), and Nikki Sixx had bounced around that scene for years.

L.A. Guns was actually named for its place of origin, but that was yet another accentuation of Axl's obsession. You see, Rose was the original singer for L.A. Guns, and he briefly stole that group's guitarist (Tracii Guns) to form an early incarnation of Guns N' Roses (one can assume the name was an abbreviated version of “Mr. Guns and Mr. Rose”). Izzy Stradlin promptly joined this group after brief stints with Shire and London and another GNR precursor called Hollywood Rose (who were sometimes known as the Hollywood Roses and briefly included Axl as the frontman). While in Hollywood Rose, Izzy, and Axl quit working with Tracii to hook up with Slash (who—at the time—was auditioning for Poison). Somehow, Axl managed to keep Tracii's stage name for
his
band. It's all very confusing and incestuous, and it barely matters today. But accept this as true: Axl clearly loved the concept of Los Angeles, even if he constantly sang about how disgusting it was. Like a new student in a new school, he was always trying to prove he belonged there. Judging from his performance on
Appetite for Destruction,
Axl thought about Los Angeles the same way I thought about L.A. when I read those
Shout at the Devil
liner notes in the fifth grade.

Axl wasn't a nice person. He beat up camera-wielding fans and treated women like shit. It seems like most of the women he slept with eventually accused him of being a violent lover (ex-wife Erin Everly and ex-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour both filed abuse charges against him). And generally, this sinister weakness made him
more
alluring to redneck intellectuals. There has never been a time in my life when I supported violence against women, and I can't think of many things that I find more repelling. But there was a weird legitimacy to this kind of image. Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film “realistic,” everyone knows what that means—it means the movie has an unhappy ending. We associate happy endings with fairy tales, and Guns N' Roses was no fairy tale.

I once did a human interest story on two guys from West Fargo named Mark Rudel and Gregg Lura.
(Reader's note: For those of you wondering where West Fargo is … well, that should be self-explanatory.)
These two fellows were essentially male groupies; they loved to meet metal stars and had all sorts of tricks to get backstage. They were damn good at it, too: They met virtually every major hair band from the '80s. When I asked them about meeting Guns N' Roses outside of a Fargo hotel at 4:00
A.M.
during GNR's '93 tour, this was what Rudel told me: “I tried to get an autograph from Slash, but he just hobbled past me. It was exactly like a video—you couldn't see his eyes, he had his top hat on, and he was stumbling around. One of the roadies said he'd had a long night. Of all the bands we've met, Guns N' Roses appeared to live their life the most like their image.”

I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but hearing that made me very happy. In some ways, I suppose that proves I'm just another stupid fan. I wanted Guns N' Roses to be the band I imagined they were. When Rudel talked about meeting the guys from Cinderella, the conversation focused on how normal they seemed (he specifically said Tom Keifer looked sleepy and “really pale”). Guns N' Roses had always seemed more real than other groups, and I honestly think they might have been. Instead of
mirroring the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, Guns N' Roses adopted it for real—almost like they couldn't tell it was supposed to be a gimmick to sell records. They were as fucked up as advertised.

At least I hope they were.

While listening to Judas Priest's
Stained Class
LP, eighteen-year-old Raymond Belknap blows off his head with a shotgun. His twenty-one-year-old friend James Vance tries to do the same and—somehow—manages to fail.

I don't know why two guys from Nevada would think that a gay British metal singer was telling them to kill themselves. I honestly have no clue whatsoever, and I can't even speculate. Sure, they were drinking a few afternoon beers and smoking some low-grade dope, but that's hardly an excuse for getting
that
confused about anything. In 1985, I listened to
Stained Class
at a friend's house, and that didn't even convince me to buy the goddamn record.

Moreover, I've never understood why European heavy metal is so appealing to kids who like shooting themselves in the head, but they obviously love it. Oh, I understand the superficial connection and the conventional explanation: Downtrodden people dig downtrodden rock, so it would stand to reason that the darkest kinds of hard rock would fit that criteria perfectly. But these self-destructive obsessions are intertwined in a way that goes far deeper than pop psychology. Teen suicides in 1984, 1986, and 1988 were all blamed on Ozzy Osbourne, and I assume all three
accusations are at least partially accurate. I'm also certain that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were rocking out to Rammstein when they decided to fill the Columbine High library with teenage corpses.

Now, don't get me wrong: I am not suggesting that the music
made
these people go violently insane. But it's equally as stupid to argue that there's no connection at all. Every year, billions of dollars are spent in the advertising industry. This is done on the premise that information can influence the behavior of consumers, and it obviously does. If kids are affected by Sprite commercials and Ronald McDonald, why
wouldn't
they be affected by Rob Halford?

The difference, of course, is that Halford never specifically told anyone to kill themselves. To me, that's always the weirdest part of all rock suicides: None of these kids were listening to music that actually instructed them to shoot themselves. Parents and lawyers point to the Ozzy song “Suicide Solution,” which (granted) is a pretty misleading title for a supposed antisuicide song; Metallica's “Fade to Black” is another example that pushes the envelope. But if you actually listen to the words, you will see that these songs don't say suicide is a good move. And one would assume that any kid so obsessed with a record
that he's going to fucking kill himself over it
would take the time to listen to the lyrics (or at least read the liner notes!).

This paradox is what I find so perplexing about the way young males perceive verbal messages in heavy metal. I'll never understand why music that only made me want long hair is the same product that made some kids want to die. Normal people don't care what Ozzy has to say about
anything;
however, it seems the handful of people who
do care
inevitably get confused and kill themselves. And since the mood of the music tends to be more persuasive than the actual lyrics—and since the words to most rock songs are almost impossible to understand—kids are forced to interpret heavy metal in any way they can. This is a substantial problem, because the kind of kids who truly love heavy metal evidently suck at artistic interpretation.

My favorite professor from college was a guy named Scott Lowe, a very thin man who owns a large collection of cardigan sweaters and briefly dabbled in a 1970s California cult that was led by a false prophet named Franklin Jones. He grew up in Florida with his boyhood friend Jimmy Buffett (which may or may not be true) and is one of the only rational environmentalists I have ever met (the other being a guy named Zinda who admired Glenn Danzig). Scott taught religious studies. This academic program had virtually nothing to do with my major (or even my minor), but his upper-level classes always seemed to involve the wackiest lectures on campus. I can recall at least two discussions that briefly touched on the practice of drinking caribou urine in order to get stoned.

ANYWAY, Scott spent his teenage days as a guitarist in a Kinks-influenced garage band, so we would occasionally chat about pop music. Since these conversations would sometimes occur in the middle of a lecture on, say, the Spanish Inquisition, it was not completely uncommon to connect the topics of Christianity and rock, thereby segueing into a verbal treatise on the value (or lack thereof) of “Christian rock.” And it was during one of these conversations that I decided my favorite Christian rock band was Rush.