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

  Since we didn’t have MTV and nobody listened to the radio, the North Dakota metal community found out about Vince’s car wreck through the local newspaper. Mötley Crüe was just big enough to warrant an AP story whenever one of its members killed somebody, and I remember being mildly excited when I saw a nine-inch article about an accident involving Vince Neil Wharton, the lead singer from the “rock ’n’roll band Mötley Crüe.” To me, that line was the most offensive part of the entire article—Mötley Crüe was not a “rock ’n’ roll band.” Bruce fucking Springsteen was in a “rock ’n’ roll band.” Mötley was a heavy metal band. I immediately questioned the reporter’s credibility.

  At the time, this event did not seem like a tragedy. Before the death of Razzle, I had never even heard of Hanoi Rocks. Hardly anyone had; I’m sure the untimely death of their drummer was the greatest thing that ever happened to their commercial viability. My main concern was that Vince was okay—that is to say, okay enough to finish the new record.

  Not only had Neil killed his co-pilot, he had also rammed into another car, badly injuring its two passengers (one of them was a woman who suffered permanent brain damage). As an adult, I now realize that normal people go to prison for this sort of thing. But that never crossed my mind as a twelve-year-old. I was somehow naive and jaded at the same time: Part of me didn’t think anyone could go to jail for an accident (that was the naive part), and part of me already knew that famous people never go to jail for anything (that was the jaded part).

  There was another kid in my high school named Eric; he was three years older than me and the vortex of the burgeoning Wyndmere metal scene. Eric had long hair and took guitar lessons (he could play “Smoke on the Water”!), and even though he was an honor student and a fundamentally good person, all the local parents hated him (especially mine). Today, Eric is a doctor, but in 1984 he aspired to be as sinister as most adults assumed he was: On a fateful autumn night in 1985, he and two other ruffians vandalized an abandoned schoolhouse with an axe (a crime that remains “unsolved”). This was about the same time Eric took to calling himself “Nikki.”

  ANYWAY, I stayed over at Eric’s (Nikki’s?) house one night, and I remember that he had the Neil newspaper article taped to his wall. It would be easy to look back and suggest that he did this to “glorify” the act, but that was not the case. It was because this story validated the existence of Mötley Crüe. One of “our” people was making news in “their” world. This is a very common paradigm held in small towns. If somebody who grew up in your community wins a Nobel Prize, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board; if someone from your town grows up and becomes America’s most depraved serial rapist, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board. It’s just nice to see someone doing anything.

  I can completely remember discussing Vince’s accident that night; we were listening to Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry and had finished playing with Eric’s Intellivision. The reason I remember it so vividly is because Eric was drinking a beer. This was a new experience for me. I wasn’t even drinking—I was just hanging out with somebody who was. We were in the basement (Eric essentially lived in the basement), and he nonchalantly took an Old Milwaukee from the fridge and replaced it with a warm can from the storage closet. He asked me if I wanted one, and I said “no.” I’m not sure if Eric was showing off or trying to coerce me into drinking, but I really doubt it was either. He was not prone to such behavior (especially since we were the only people in the room).

  In retrospect, this does not seem dangerous (or even very rebellious). But I’m stunned by the unknowing hypocrisy of my adolescent mind. I was unwilling to drink a beer, and I was mildly disturbed by the fact that my friend was, but I saw nothing wrong whatsoever about Vince Neil getting wasted and destroying a total stranger’s brain. Here again, the separation between my reality and the world of my idols is staggering. I obviously felt no human kinship to Vince Neil at all. His lifestyle and his music were equally unreal. I did not see his drinking as good or bad; I simply saw his drinking as his.

  But that would not always be the case.

  As I look back at my career as an alcoholic, I can usually break it down in one of two ways: by booze, or by the band that came with it. For the purposes of this discussion, I will do both. I began drinking earnestly during the second semester of my freshman year at college (roughly one year before the aforementioned hockey fiasco). This is what I normally classify as my “early whiskey period,” but it can also be referred to as the “Crüe months.” At the time, Mötley Crüe was still my favorite band, and since this was an introductory period to alcoholism, I used Nikki Sixx as a reference point. Nikki (along with Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony) was an adamant supporter of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, so that’s what I liked to drink. And when I say “drinking,” I basically mean sitting in my dorm room with three other guys, watching movies, and getting loaded. Like most new drinkers, I was still struggling with beer consumption. Beer is like coffee; you have to force yourself to drink it for months before you actually think it tastes good, and then you want to drink it all the time. At this juncture, whiskey made more sense, because we’d mix it with Coke, and then it would taste like really bad Coke. One bottle of Southern Comfort could get four of us drunk (the reason we replaced Jack with SoCo was because we were always broke, and—when you get right down to it—what the fuck did we know about whiskey? In fact, I still don’t understand people who know a lot about alcohol. I’m sure I’ll never remember the difference between “whiskey” and “bourbon,” even though I’m more than willing to pour both down my gullet).

  The summer after my freshman year (this is 1991), I lived with my goofball sidekick Mike Schauer. At the time, Mike was obsessed with Warrant, so I pretended to hate them. My main argument was that they had too many guys in the band; I was a big supporter of four-member groups, while Mike favored five-man ensembles (our other major argument was over whose Nintendo baseball team was more “popular” with the simulated Nintendo fans). Nonetheless, we still listened to a lot of Cherry Pie over those three months (as well as ample doses of Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind), and that seemed to foster the consumption of Coors and Budweiser. Warrant was more of a populist party band, and their music was not founded on being wasted every moment of the day. In fact, Warrant even appealed to the three girls who lived next door to us, so we actually dabbled in “social drinking,” a concept Mike and I had never before understood. We still weren’t very good at it—one of us usually puked (usually Mike, who was always prone to puking)—but it was still a different kind of booze-soaked insanity. Beer was much more user-friendly. I’m sure if Warrant had kept putting out decent records, I’d own one of those home-brewing kits.

  Fall of 1991 was when we all “discovered” Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and that prompted the Vodka Age. Beer suddenly seemed antiquated; frat boys and football players drank Budweiser. Of course, we drank Budweiser too—but only when we listened to Guns N’ Roses. All those L.A. metal bands loved Bud, even after they got rich. It was another example of six-string patriotism: Heavy metal was the most American of musical genres. After a hard night of bloated commercialism and meaningless sex, Budweiser helped you unwind like a man, even though it’s made from rice.

  That spring, my friends and I started aggressively going to keg parties; this became the driving force in all our lives. All week long, campus conversations focused on where the parties were going to be that weekend. Friday night, you drank in your dorm room until it got dark (7:20 in the winter, 9:05 in the summer), and then you hit as many parties as you could. If keg cups cost $3 at the door, you viewed it as a wonderful bargain; if they were $4, you had to drink as much as possible to break even; if they were $5, you went somewhere else. Of course, if you were a girl, cups were always free, but you were halfway expected to eventually put out.

  Here’s how the process works at a normal keg party: As you drink yourself into a zombie, you walk around and ask everyone
where they are going to party tomorrow night. Saturday night, you see these same people and ask them if they had a good time the night before. These are your “keg party friends.” You know nothing about them and you have never spoken to them sober, and that is perfectly fine. If you see these people during daylight hours, you will exchange a knowing glance that recognizes your relationship but does nothing to deepen the bond (and if you do talk, it will only be to figure out who is having a party). There are dozens of people I shared every weekend with for over a year, and I couldn’t guess where 95 percent of them live today. However, I will never forget the street location of every good party house in Grand Forks (the top five were as follows: Sixteenth and Fifth, 123 Walnut, 2100 University Avenue, the kickass studio apartment across from the Ski & Bike Shop, and the loft above Popolino’s Pizza on Gateway Avenue). I can honestly say it was the happiest period of my entire life.

  Unfortunately, this is also the hardest period to categorize musically. People who throw keg parties tend to play really shitty music. Sometimes they would just turn on MTV and jack the volume up, so I remember hearing Ace of Base constantly. I was also tight with a balding high school track legend named Shane who lived in a house commonly known as the Mule Barn, and his parties were dominated by solo Ozzy (No More Tears, No Rest for the Wicked, all that Zakk Wylde shit). Osbourne was a good role model for these gatherings, because the primary objective was to appear pathetically and psychotically drunk in front of as many people as possible. If you were going to throw back twenty-two glasses of warm beer and totally freak out and instigate a fight and start crying and punch through a TV screen, it was absolutely essential to do so with at least forty strangers in the house. Granted, this kind of behavior wasn’t very “glam” (it’s hard to look glamorous when three of your friends are trying to incapacitate you before the cops come), but it was very “metal.” It was wildly popular to play the “Jekyll and Hyde” card: You acted affable and happy and quiet whenever you were straight, and then you became a depressed, suicidal wild man after a dozen drinks. Lots of folks in my social circle were obsessed with behaving this way on a weekly basis; I guess we all thought this course of action would make people think we were “dark” and “misunderstood,” and somehow this would get us laid. Ozzy claims he did this every day for about fifteen years. Maybe it worked for him.

  By the time I was a junior, I was more “media savvy,” which basically meant I now consciously made lifestyle choices that were dictated by famous people. I really got into the whole Guns N’ Roses mystique, particularly Slash, and particularly trying to act like Slash at parties. This sparked my “late whiskey period,” only this time I really was drinking Jack Daniel’s, because now I was getting Pell grants. I swore that Jack Daniel’s was all I would drink for a year, and for a while that’s exactly what I did. I usually drank two 750 milliliter bottles every week (when I cleaned out my dorm room at the end of that academic year, I found empty JD bottles hidden absolutely everywhere—including four in my sock drawer). By now, I was pretty well established as a local writer (I was my university’s contrived version of the “wacky controversial columnist”), and I tried to foster the same reputation that Slash seemed to display: “He’s talented and popular—but will he live to be thirty?” That’s exactly what I wanted people to say about me. And I’m pretty sure some of them did (although not as many as I’d like to pretend). I would drink Jack Daniel’s until I was dazed and incoherent, and then I’d sit in the corner and watch people at the party whisper about who I was. Even when I was too drunk to walk, I could always tell which people recognized me from the picture that ran with my newspaper column. I loved that pathetic admiration; I loved being wasted in public; I loved the strange credibility that comes with being the most self-cancerous superstar in any given social situation. I could not dance with Mr. Brownstone, but I would swallow anything you poured in front of me.

  After a while, I got bored with this shtick (or maybe I ran out of money—I honestly can’t remember). Me and my little posse spent the next few months hanging out in a dorm room occupied by Mr. Pancake (who was a biology major with no relationship to Mr. Brownstone), and we’d watch the Canadian teen drama Fifteen while drinking Busch Light pounders (which truth be told was always the most universal staple in all our drinking diets). Our musical leanings were becoming more “collegiate” (at least temporarily), so it didn’t seem like it mattered what we were drinking. I’m sure the guys in Pavement drank beer, but they didn’t exactly make a point of talking about it. We saw lots of pictures where Eddie Vedder looked drunk (there’s one especially memorable MTV interview where he’s holding his head and surrounded by empty bottles), but it wasn’t part of his message. It did not seem like Pearl Jam drank to have fun; they drank because they were sexually abused (or they were worried about people who were, or something like that). Of course, this didn’t stop us from drinking, but it did erode our supposed motivations for doing so. Now we drank because that’s what we did.

  Now I’m twenty-eight, so I drink in actual bars. The only bars I like are neighborhood dives where no one else goes, and these types of places don’t play hair metal. They usually play Dean Martin or the Carpenters, which is usually what I want to hear anyway. Today, I mostly drink brandy and ginger ale, a concoction that has come to be known as the Witty Chuck. The Witty Chuck (and you can actually order this by name at Duffy’s Tavern in Fargo and the Double Olive in Akron) is a wonderful drink for three reasons, which is ironic, because it only has two ingredients. The reasons are as follows: (1) it tastes good, (2) it has some kick, and most importantly, (3) it makes you witty. I’m serious—it makes you witty. Most people become stupid and belligerent when they get drunk, but not people who drink the Witty Chuck. After three elixirs, they turn into Dorothy Parker. You’ll find yourself winging zingers at everyone in the bar, and they will all have to admit that you are the wittiest person alive. People will love you, and some of them will insist on buying you waffles at Denny’s. Trust me on this one.

  Of course, as I already mentioned, I do occasionally get wasted in my living room to get “back to my roots,” which is ’80s metal and whatever alcohol I can find in my kitchen. “Drinking is my profession. Drums are just a hobby,” Dokken percussionist Mick Brown said in 1985, and some nights I can see where he’s coming from. “I have to admit that I’m a pretty bad influence on a lot of people. The girls who hang around me will take a couple of days off from their jobs, and then find out they’ve been fired when they return to work. And they get really torn up. I just go, ‘Listen, if you can’t handle it, then don’t hang around me. I don’t want to ruin your life just for having a good time.’ I’m a party professional. I stay in on New Year’s Eve because all the amateurs are out.”

  This kind of behavior was clearly not too responsible of Mick (and it probably cost him a few girlfriends), just as it’s probably not too sensible for me to get loaded while I listen to Tooth and Nail all by myself. But I can’t deny my heart: I like to drink, and I like to rock. You think I’m an idiot? Fine. You don’t have to come over.

  January 27, 1997

  A reunited (and substantially grizzled) Mötley Crüe perform “Shout at the Devil ’97” at the American Music Awards.

  The release (and subsequent success) of Bush’s Sixteen Stone in 1994 represented the first crack in Seattle’s grunge empire, unquestionably the most important musical force since punk. Though the album itself was generally quite good—“Machinehead” was one of the most metal-esque tunes of that year—Sixteen Stone set a dangerous precedent: If a bunch of handsome art students from Britain could go hyper-platinum as a post-Cobain clone, the state of Sasquatch rock was at maximum saturation. The formula had been set in concrete; parody was soon on the horizon. Bush was a good band who just happened to signal the beginning of the end; ultimately, they would became the grunge Warrant.

  Seemingly seconds after grunge began to falter, the possibility of a “metal revival” started to surface on the lips of
all those rock pundits who exist solely to start musical revivals they’ll eventually bemoan. At first, it was total kitsch; the only bands who talked about ’80s hard rock in interviews were joke bands who realized that mentioning Winger made reporters giggle. It evolved into rediscovery; fifth-graders found their parents’ Def Leppard and Metallica cassettes the same way I found my brother’s CCR 8-tracks. Suddenly, Appetite for Destruction and 5150 were classic rock. By 1996, ironic pop stars were still mentioning glam rockers in interviews, but now it was harder to tell if they were joking. Dave Grohl would claim that Dio-era Sabbath was awesome (he has a particular appreciation for “The Mob Rules”), and everyone would smirk—but then the Foo Fighters would release a song that sounded like Ozzy solo material (if you don’t believe me, listen to their contribution on that ridiculous X-Files soundtrack).

  Pretty soon, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who was blathering on about the “new metal” movement. The most obvious example came with the advent of Ozzfest, an economic juggernaut that proved to be the most successful tour of 1997 (pound for pound and dollar for dollar, it squashed the media-exulted Lilith Fair festival). The first Ozzfest tour had a couple of major draws: It featured Marilyn Manson at the peak of his Q rating, and it delivered a reunion of the original Black Sabbath lineup (sort of … actually, drummer Bill Ward was too “exhausted” to perform, so they recruited that ponytail guy from Faith No More and they only played about four songs per night, but then again, how much can you really expect from three fifty-year-old Brits who spent half their life eating acid and pretending to worship the devil?).