Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

  The three of us were parked in a grove south of town, and we had two cassettes on the dashboard: Bon Jovi’s New Jersey and Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. I sort of thought Mellencamp was singing about a place that was like Wyndmere. When I got older, I would come to realize that John’s version of a “Small Town” wasn’t a fraction as small as our rural village, because we all considered Fargo to be nothing less than a city. It’s still disconcerting to me whenever I hear someone describe Omaha or Green Bay as a small town; where we were sitting, it was impossible to imagine what it would have been like if Wyndmere’s population doubled to one thousand. The idea of that many people living in our community was unthinkable. But it seemed like John Mellencamp felt the same way about his home in Indiana.

  In all likelihood, this is a purely regional anomaly (although I did stumble across a full-page advertisement for Scarecrow on the back cover of a 1985 copy of Circus, so maybe there was a connection). It’s hard to imagine Mötley Crüe fans in Atlanta thinking little Johnny Cougar was the cool shit. But I don’t know if we necessarily did either. He wasn’t really cool. He was like us. He was a good guy. We were never worried about nuclear war or global warming; we were, however, nervous that someone was going to foreclose on my parents’ farm, even though we weren’t exactly certain how that process worked. All we knew is that there were auction sales whenever times got tough, and (at least according to the talk around my dinner table) times were always tough (at least after 1976). All that “rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow” stuff was a little too fucking possible for farm kids; I suppose it was kind of like inner-city kids hearing Notorious B.I.G. songs and wondering if they’d ever get shot.

  There were only two kinds of music in rural America during the 1980s: metal and country. Nothing else was culturally relevant. Mellencamp fit into neither category, yet somehow he was both. “Authority Song” was like Judas Priest’s “Parental Guidance,” only less obvious. “Jack and Diane” was akin to the better Skid Row power ballads, only more applicable (Wyndmere had a Tastee Freez too!). Oh, Mellencamp certainly pumped out some boring crap that made everybody yawn; I still don’t understand the allure of “Pink Houses” (is that about a gay community?). “R-O-C-K in the USA” was a little too much like Bryan Adams, and none of us were going to sit around and listen to any tributes to Jackie Onassis. But Mellencamp was definitely one of us. Actually, Duke and Cliff seemed to understand that better than I did. Whenever I punched New Jersey back into the tape deck, we never got past “Bad Medicine.” To them, “Born to Be My Baby” paled in comparison to bloody plows.

  Mellencamp wasn’t the only fellow who made the cut, however. Tom Petty did too, and for a lot of the same reasons. While he did not specifically apply his lyrics to rural people, there was clearly a provincial feel to his material; he’s definitely the most positive role model for small-town stoners. It seemed that metal kids only allowed metal dudes to act like “rock stars,” so we were drawn to pop singers who consciously downplayed the Hollywood image. Petty knew his place. The Heartbreakers were a completely unglamorous rock band; they almost seemed like the Allman Brothers. Their songs had the simple three-riff structure of pop metal. “Running Down a Dream” was the key track, and I remember thinking that Izzy Stradlin would probably write songs like this if he wasn’t in a metal band. It turns out I was basically dead-on.

  Tone Loc was another semipredictable favorite, although that had nothing to do with the Allman Brothers. Loc was just this cool, unthreatening black guy who rapped about sex and wine, and it was perfectly constructed to bleed into the white American metal scene. Much has been written about how mainstream Caucasian audiences refused to accept rap music until it was delivered by the wonderfully Jewish Beastie Boys, and that’s somewhat true—but their whiteness is only part of the equation. The main reason white kids didn’t immediately embrace rap is because they didn’t understand the music. It came from a different place, and human ears are always drawn to the familiar. We were not ready for James Brown samples (at least not yet). The Beasties overcame that barrier when they met producer Rick Rubin, who introduced them to Led Zep and AC/DC. Rubin made hip-hop user-friendly to farm kids. We all called Licensed to Ill a rap album, but even though we didn’t know why, it seemed more like classic rock. In 1989, Tone Loc made things even simpler: He abandoned the idea of a riff and offered a thump-thump-thump. Listen to “Funky Cold Medina”—there’s nothing there, beyond a beat. If you liked bass and had a sense of humor, it was impossible not to dig Loc. The fact that he sampled Van Halen and KISS didn’t hurt either.

  Less understandable was our universal agreement that the Bangles were cool. And as unbelievable as this might sound, it had nothing to do with how they looked, either. We all thought Susanna Hoffs was hot, but so was Kylie Minogue and Tiffany. This had more to do with their attitude: There just seemed to be some kind of understood belief that the Bangles were our kind of people. It might have been their cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” on the Rubin-produced Less Than Zero soundtrack, but I kind of doubt it; I can’t recall anyone except me actually buying that album. Maybe everyone else was mixing them up with Vixen.

  Though it seems even stranger, the B-52s were another guilty pleasure for many hard-charging headbangers. This was actually one example of metal kids being ahead of the curve. While the standard dumb teenager liked “Love Shack” because he thought it was a neat song, adolescent Ratt fans immediately assumed it was some kind of a joke. We didn’t necessarily understand irony, per se, but we had enough exposure to rock posturing to know that this was mostly a gag. It may have been a catchy joke, but it certainly wasn’t an earnest attempt at rock ’n’ roll. The one thing all those metal magazines taught us was how to spot the stereotypes of rock stardom, and the B-52s were clearly representing the opposite ideal on purpose.

  After this point, the list gets pretty barren. If your cassette collection had too many other nonmetal artists, you were bordering on being one of those goddamn eclectics who really didn’t love anything. One of my primary theories as a junior high kid was that people who claimed to like every genre of music were liars and hypocrites; they lacked backbone. I never trusted open-minded people.

  Of course, a few pop songs always managed to weasel into the metal stratosphere. Here’s a fairly comprehensive list of all the nonmetal singles that a midwestern headbanger could publicly appreciate. The vast majority were released between 1985 and 1990, but there are a few exceptions. I’ve tried to figure out the unifying quality that made these specific songs rock (or what made them bitchin’ or heavy or wicked or whatever it was we were saying at the moment), but that appears to be impossible. I like most—but certainly not all—of them, and I’ve included a key at the bottom of the list that explains how they were introduced into the glam rock subculture. They are listed in the approximate order of their universal popularity within the metal community.

  “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Charlie Daniels Band [a]

  “So Alive,” Love & Rockets [b]

  “Black Cat,” Janet Jackson [c]

  “The Race Is On,” Sawyer Brown (cover version only) [a]

  “Holiday in the Sun,” the Sex Pistols [d]

  “Red Red Wine,” UB40 [e]

  “Blister in the Sun,” the Violent Femmes [b]

  “Don’t Be Cruel,” Cheap Trick [a]

  “The Warrior,” Scandal (featuring Patty Smyth) [d]

  “Strut,” Sheena Easton [c] [d]

  “Darling Nikki,” Prince [d]

  “Flesh for Fantasy,” Billy Idol [d]

  “Just Like Heaven,” the Cure [b]

  “Fishin’ in the Dark,” the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band [a] [c]

  “Ice Ice Baby,” Vanilla Ice [f]

  “Legs,” ZZ Top [a] [d] [e]

  “You May Be Right,” Billy Joel [h]

  “She Drives Me Crazy,” Fine Young Cannibals [b]

  “Invincible,” Pat Benatar [g]

  “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” Dead o
r Alive [d]

  “Who Can It Be Now?,” Men at Work [h]

  “Goin’ Back to Cali,” LL Cool J [e]

  “Touch Me (I Want Your Body),” Samantha Fox [c]

  “Rock Me Amadeus,” Falco [f]

  “Hippy Hippy Shake,” the Georgia Satellites [d]

  “She’s Got the Look,” Roxette [c] [e]

  “Centerfield,” John Fogerty [a] [c] [d] [f] [h]

  KEY

  [a]: The guys who bought us beer loved it.

  [b]: Introduced by nondescript “cool kid” from neighboring town.

  [c]: Local metal chicks liked to dance to it.

  [d]: Thought it maybe was metal.

  [e]: Somebody saw the video and wouldn’t shut up about it.

  [f]: Too stupid to ignore and/or it seemed pretty cool at the time.

  [g]: Prominently featured in the film The Legend of Billie Jean.

  [h]: Origin unknown.

  July 20, 1988

  Iron Maiden headlines the Donnington Rock Festival in front of 107,000 people, two of whom die during Guns N’ Roses’ set.

  I have never met Satan, but he actually sounds like a pretty cool guy. A bit geeky, perhaps, but I’m sure we could still hang out and play Scrabble or something.

  I’ve never been to Satan’s apartment, so I can only guess how it’s decorated. However, certain aspects of his personality have been well-established by the media: He obviously likes to play AD&D. He obviously owns a Ouija board. He obviously likes to smoke angel dust. And he obviously has an awesome stereo with kick-ass speakers, and he obviously plays nothing but heavy metal. In fact, he probably has a framed poster of Ronnie James Dio on his living room wall.

  To paraphrase the insightful sock puppet stars of The Sifl & Olly Show, all the really cool rock bands are from hell. Ever since Lucifer and chain-smoking bluesman Robert Johnson made a deal “down at the crossroads,” Satan has been the finest A&R rep who ever existed. The Rolling Stones had sympathy for the devil; the Eagles stayed at his hotel; Van Halen went jogging with him. Styx named their band after a river that flowed next to hell, which probably explains how they managed to stay cool for about twelve weeks in 1978.

  If you believe Hammer of the Gods, Satan’s favorite band of all time was Led Zeppelin, a group who only occasionally sang about hell but copiously mentioned Valhalla (which would probably be just as frustrating). During the band’s heyday, Jimmy Page lived in a castle near Loch Ness, where he supposedly spent all day sitting in the dark, taking drugs, and dabbling in the occultist works of Aleister Crowley (the estate’s former owner). It can safely be argued that this is the most awesome thing anyone has ever done in the history of rock. If I ever get to the point where my daily routine revolves around shooting junk in a rural Sussex castle and talking about black majik, I will know I have made it.

  According to a popular legend that I don’t think even one person ever believed to be true, three of Led Zep’s four components made a deal with the devil in exchange for superstardom. The story goes on to suggest that John Paul Jones was the only one who declined this pact, which is why he remains the third-remaining and fourth-best known member of the band. However, he is also the only Zepster who was never penalized by Satan’s power; the other three were all struck by evil (John Bonham choked on his own vomit, Robert Plant tragically lost his son Karac, and Page would go on to collaborate with David Coverdale).

  Of course, Page and his Loch Ness monstrosities couldn’t hold a ceremonial candle to Black Sabbath, a band so intent on pretending to worship Satan that they actually might have done so by accident. The cover of Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath has a skull, the number 666, and a reenactment of the money shot from Rosemary’s Baby. The record itself includes a song called “Killing Yourself to Live.” It may as well be a travel brochure for hell.

  Sabbath was always doing weird, spooky shit; from what I can tell, 50 percent of their songs were about the devil, 35 percent were about taking drugs, and (oddly) 15 percent were about traveling through time. Geezer Butler told me the song “N.I.B.” was actually about drummer Bill Ward’s poorly grown beard, which Butler thought resembled a little “nub,” which he pronounced as “nib,” which was then inexplicably turned into the acronym “N.I.B.,” which made every kid with an ounce of creativity assume it was supposed to stand for “Nativity in Black” (particularly since the lyrics do not mention facial hair, but they do refer to Lucifer in the first person). Boy, how did anyone misinterpret that?

  Amazingly (or perhaps predictably), this kind of sinister gimmick would ultimately become Sabbath’s most recognized influence on rock ’n’ roll: fake satanism. “That came from the record company,” Butler now insists. “They manufactured the image. We just called ourselves Black Sabbath to match the lyrics; the record company did the rest. We never worshiped the devil. We never even talked about the devil, except to warn people against him.”

  Part of what Butler says is probably true, but none of it matters. Anyone who saw the album covers were either scared, fascinated, or amused, and all three reactions were connected. In terms of darkness, Sab broke new ground. In his autobiography Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, Abbie Hoffman described a Black Sabbath concert as a microcosm of everything that went wrong at the end of the 1960s. Hoffman was absolutely correct—and for that, I praise Jesus. More than any other rock group, Black Sabbath killed off the hypocritical, self-righteous hippie mentality that was poisoning the planet. Pseudo-political idealism was crushed by pseudo-satanic nihilism, and the world of rock was a far better place.

  For me, the occult illusion was always a big part of what I loved about heavy metal. The devil intrigued me more than sex or drugs combined, mostly because I was under the impression that Satan was everywhere. I honestly believed the odds of me encountering Satan were much higher than my chances of meeting a dealer or a whore.

  Metal stars who appeal to midwestern kids understand this perception. Take Marilyn Manson, a modern superstar who’s not really a metal guy but plays one on TV (more importantly, he was raised with the same sensibilities; the pubescent Manson adored bands like Mötley Crüe and Judas Priest). I’ve interviewed Manson twice: immediately after Portrait of an American Family was released in 1994 (back when he was a nobody), and again in 1995 (when he was opening for Danzig and starting to raise cultural/social—if not necessarily musical—eyebrows). Over time, his ability to manipulate the press has grown at an exponential rate.

  The first time I spoke with Marilyn, he was among the most interesting and insightful musicians I’d ever encountered. When we talked a year later, he was surly and consciously outrageous. In that second conversation, Manson even feigned stupidity—he claimed he didn’t know where North Dakota was, and he said he was unfamiliar with the name “Newt Gingrich.” By the time he released Antichrist Superstar in 1996, Manson was so popular he would only respond to requests from major press outlets; when he did talk to the media, he usually said stuff that was totally insane, sometimes mentioning how he enjoyed cutting into his flesh with razor blades and pouring drugs into the open wounds. Like every shock rocker before him, his weirdness was directly proportional to his fame.

  But what’s fascinating about Manson is how well he understands what society is afraid of.

  Marilyn Manson was born Brian Warner in Canton, Ohio. The community of Canton is a weird little town; before Manson, its only social import was the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the fact that it’s the former home of the only U.S. president ever assassinated by a self-described anarchist (William McKinley, for those keeping score at home). Of course, that kind of sweeping statement is exactly what the people of Canton hate to hear. It’s difficult to find anyone in town who wants to talk about the musician’s local legacy; they’re not necessarily ashamed of Manson, but they are really sick of hearing his name. In 1998, I went to his old high school (GlenOak High) and I asked a student who the school’s most famous alumnus was. After a ridiculously long pause, the seventeen-year-old girl said, “Well,
I guess it would probably be Marilyn Manson.” Who else was it going to be? It appears that Manson’s Ohio connection is a fact that everyone in Canton knows but nobody seems to care about. From what I could tell by chatting with area kids, most of the “urban legends” about the young Brian Warner weren’t even passed down through oral tradition—they all came directly from Manson’s own autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell.

  When he was pushing Antichrist Superstar, Manson’s shtick was built around satanism. According to his book (which—I must note—is remarkably entertaining), he even met with Church of Satan high priest Anton LaVey in San Francisco (they ate steak and talked about the possibility of fucking Traci Lords). This is a good example of Manson’s cleverness; he knows how the media works. Whenever he talked to a reporter, he would mention how true satanism has nothing to do with the devil and how it’s actually a way to worship intellect and egoism. And no mater how accurately the reporter represents his quotes, the story’s headline will include the words “devil worship” or “Satanic Bible” or “Anton LaVey,” and parents will freak out. Technically, Manson did nothing that was particularly outrageous—he simply described a philosophy that would probably be classified as merely amoral if it wasn’t tied to Satan. But the obvious reality is that weird teens will always associate Manson and his music with the colloquial definition of Satanism—animal sacrifice, perverted sex, and ritualistic occultism that gives supernatural abilities to mortal beings. Intellectuals are forced to give him a few grains of credibility, and the black-hearted masses will always see him as the hard-partying Prince of Darkness.

  What’s even more fascinating was Manson’s personal reinvention for his 1998 album Mechanical Animals. The look and sound were both conscious rip-offs of glam-era Bowie, but his new scare tactic was a little more original: The main set piece on his tour was a huge electric sign that screamed DRUGS, and the record’s best song was titled “I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me).” During his live performance of the tune “The Speed of Pain,” his set was dusted with a blizzard of fake snow that clearly represented cocaine.