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

  I don’t think I ever listened to the Veruca Salt EP that Albini worked on, mostly because it had a really stupid title. But I’m guessing it was probably pretty decent. Veruca was fronted by two righteous rock bitches: the sniveling prima donna Nina Gordon, and the sniveling bad-ass Louise Post. Gordon did most of the singing, but Post did all the work; she always claimed her main influence was Angus Young, but her fast machine had a cleaner motor than AC/DC ever did. Both American Thighs and Eight Arms to Hold You have way too much filler to be classified as genius, but the good stuff is stellar: “Seether,” “Straight,” and “Don’t Make Me Prove It” have that sense of hardness that categorized early Skid Row and Judas Priest. This is the best modern example of a group that’s hard, but not heavy. Veruca Salt reminds me of a Mexican middleweight in the mold of Julio Cesar Chavez—they’ll jab the piss out of you, cleverly setting up an overhand right that is a little louder than you’d expect. These women have great taste in power pop, and they also had some real visual flair (the video for “Volcano Girls” was the best use of bungee cords since “Panama”). I’m still not exactly sure why former best buddies Nina and Louise now hate each other; rumor has it that one of them (I think it was Louise) was sleeping with David Grohl, who eventually dumped her for Winona Ryder, thereby casting Veruca Salt into unexplained turmoil. I don’t know; I guess I never read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  Even though their first album is kind of crappy, it’s nice to see that a band like Buckcherry is trying to jump on (or possibly jump-start) the glam wagon. A full six months before their debut, Geffen (acting as an arm of DreamWorks) was hyping Buckcherry as a “Sunset Strip band,” which is industry lingo for “hair metal slut rock.” The first song I heard from Buckcherry was the cocaine-praising single “Lit Up,” which nicely replicates the core riff from Ace Frehley’s “Shock Me.” This got me excited, because I suspected the Bucks might be as cool and shameless as the Donnas (a hope I had also held for the Prissteens). Unfortunately, the rest of the LP is an attempt to write their own “original” material, much of which sucks. Buckcherry makes a concerted effort to sound like an Uzi Suicide-era GNR, but they deliver a muddled jalopy that seems more like Jackyl jamming with Tracii Guns. Still, it is glam metal, and it probably deserves to be mentioned here.

  I suppose I also need to give a shout out to Lenny Kravitz. Mr. Kravitz is many things. He’s a musician, but he looks like a model. He’s half-black, but he’s also half-Jewish. He’s the son of one TV star (the late Roxie Roker) and the ex-husband of another (Lisa Bonet). He’s a Jesus freak, but he also likes to bang Australian songstress Natalie Imbruglia. He’s kind of a metal guy, but he’s also kind of a funk guy—and that somehow makes him an alternative balladeer. And he’s the best dresser in rock ’n’ roll (at least if you’re a fan of hemp pants). “Are You Gonna Go My Way” sounds like Sly and the Family Stone jamming with Rush, which equates to a totally rocking version of Living Colour (except good).

  At this point, I am tempted to go all Chuck Eddy on you and include a bunch of other bands I like that have no relationship to metal whatsoever. When Eddy updated his “pretentious and funny” Stairway to Hell in 1998, he included his list of the 100 Best Metal Records of the 1990s; the ranks included high-intensity acid rockers like Weezer and Cornershop. Eddy swears his criteria for inclusion on his list is that at least half the music on any given record sounds like metal to him, which makes me wonder just how loud he plays his stereo. I suspect Chuck’s whole reason for doing the updated list was to reiterate how much he loves Rancid, who he evidently sees as the Gen X equivalent of Kix.

  As I scan over the rest of my CDs from the ’90s, the only band that seems legitimately misplaced and—by virtue of all cultural barometers—should have been an ’80s group is Stone Temple Pilots, a group constantly attacked by the press as the worst band of its generation. Much of that has to do with one song, the Pearl Jam rip-off “Plush.” Though the song itself does seem strikingly similar to some of the material on Ten, the real problem was its presentation: In the accompanying video, vocalist Scott Weiland tried to look like Eddie Vedder, even mimicking his physical affectations. This singular decision put STP in a hole they never emerged from, which eventually prompted Weiland to become a heroin addict and even become friends with Courtney Love.A

  The sad irony is that almost everything Stone Temple Pilots released after their 1992 debut (Core) was damn good. Purple (1994) was critically ripped to shreds (particularly by SPIN magazine), but it stands up as one of that year’s best efforts. Though “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is unquestionably the decade’s most important rock song, “Interstate Love Song” is probably the best one to listen to. I have heard it hundreds of times, but when it comes on my car radio I never touch the dial. At least for cruising purposes, it’s an almost flawless tune. Tiny Music … Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop was another vastly underrated album that suffered more from the band’s janky reputation than from any ill-advised songwriting.

  Every little nuance of STP makes them seem like they should be an ’80s metal band, from their charismatic, drug-addled frontman to their Zeplified riffing and earnest respect for melody. They possess the beautiful combination of virtuosity and imbecility that makes metal my favorite kind of music. But on a guttural level, I never feel like STP can be called a metal band (even though they would have made a great one). They seem to fit in a new class of pop music that is almost undefinable. Along with everyone from the Black Crowes to Helmet, Stone Temple Pilots are just a “modern hard-rock group.” I’m sure all of those outfits would prefer that designation to being called “metal bands,” but the amorphous category of modern hard rock is actually a mild criticism. Musicians are always insisting that they want their own identity and they don’t want to be pigeonholed into a “type,” but once they achieve that aspiration, it somehow makes them seem less consequential. Unless you leave a massive body of world-class work (like Prince or R.E.M.), being autonomous is usually more admirable than effective. The quest for musical immortality is not a simple one, and being able to do many things well is usually not as effective as doing just one thing perfectly.

  In 1997, Queensryche released an album called Hear In the Now Frontier. I did not buy it, but I ended up winning it at a bar while I was watching a Monday Night Football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Jacksonville Jaguars. Some radio station was broadcasting from the establishment, and they were asking trivia questions (actually, the questions weren’t really “trivia,” per se—I won by knowing what Tulane University’s nickname is, which seemed more like a current events question, but who am I to bicker with authority?). My prize was the soundtrack to the movie Elizabeth, which I traded for the Queensryche disc. Ironically, the guy who had won the Queensryche CD got it for not knowing the answer to the question, “What was the name of the most recent Queensryche album?”

  ANYWAY, I did not make this trade because I had a particular affinity for Queensryche. I never even owned any of their albums, but my old college roommate loved them. Mike (that was his name) was an especially big fan of Operation: Mindcrime, a conspiracy-driven rock opera about a nun who gets pregnant and tries to brainwash society (or something like that). Most people remember Queensryche for the song “Silent Lucidity,” which came off the 1990 Empire album. That single caused casual fans to believe that Queensryche was a lot like Pink Floyd, which (at the time) seemed like an insult to us metalheads. Looking back, the comparison was certainly understandable.

  Upon my acquisition of Hear In the Now Frontier (which had to be the worst album title since PE’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age), I decided to mail it to Mike, certainly the nicest Queensyche fan I ever lived with. But before I did, I thought I’d give Hear In the Now Frontier a spin in my CD player (and come to think of it, Alanis Morissette’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie was a pretty awful album title too).

  As I listened to Geoff Tate’s earnest voice, I was dumbstruck by something I would have never expected in a
thousand years: This record sounded good—certainly as good as those old Queensryche records that hard rock critics always described as “vastly underrated.”

  The inexplicable sonic success of Hear In the Now Frontier got me thinking about why most of the ’80s metal bands fail when they try to make contemporary albums. What did Queensryche do that everyone else seems to miss? My gut reaction was that maybe Queensryche had always been different, and that their technical virtuosity superseded the limitations of the genre. It wouldn’t be a bad argument, because Queensryche did take cues from less predictable sources. While the connection to Floyd was a little overstated, there was a lot of Queen in Queensryche (or at least a lot of Brian May). There was also a lot of Rush and Yes, two bands that never sounded contemporary (even when they were).

  But this thinking does not hold up to scrutiny. Lots of bands could argue that they were different from the rest, and that didn’t stop them from flopping over time. Iron Maiden took more ideas from classical music than they stole from Aerosmith. A band like Dream Theater never sustained any musical relevance, and they were (and are) exactly like Queensryche. I actually saw Dream Theater when they opened for ELP and Yes in the autumn of 1998, and it reminded me of Spinal Tap’s “jazz odyssey” period.

  I was nearly ready to give up thinking about Queensryche altogether, mostly because I thought the value of Hear In the Now Frontier was a musical anomaly that was probably due to my admittedly low expectations. But then David Giffels explained everything. David Giffels is one of those guys who seems to have lived a charmed life: He was a Cleveland Cavaliers ball boy, and then he fronted a cool rock band, and then he married a beautiful woman who’s half-Italian and half-Cherokee, and then he became a script writer for Beavis & Butt-head, and then he cowrote a book documenting the 125-year history of the Akron rubber industry, and he renovated a nineteenth-century home, and then he explained to me why Queensryche doesn’t suck.

  David seems to think a band’s longevity isn’t necessarily dependent on what they produce; it’s more dependent on “what they’re about.” At first, that almost sounds like ridiculous hippie talk, but it’s actually pretty astute. His example was the Rolling Stones: As a bunch of sixty-year-old men strutting onstage in front of 35,000 baby boomers, the Stones look pretty stupid. However, no one cares how pathetic they look, and that’s due to two reasons.

  The first reason can be explained with my own theory: I think the Stones are now loved by people who don’t actually like them and never really did. I know bushels of people in their thirties and forties who paid $125 to see the Rolling Stones in concert, and very few of them know anything about the band. I wrote a feature story about the ’99 Stones concert in Cleveland, and the majority of the ticketholders I interviewed outside Gund Arena knew nearly nothing about the group’s history. Many of them never even owned any of the Stones records; they were all listening to the Carpenters and KISS and the Cars and The Blues Brothers soundtrack and all the other omnipresent 8-tracks of the era. Sticky Fingers is a wonderful and important record, but I rarely find it when I look through most folks’ old record collections. However, I stumble across copies of Head East’s Flat as a Pancake constantly. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Flat as a Pancake only went gold, which proves just how useless record figures were before the advent of Soundscan. There is no way that album only sold 500,000 copies. There are four people in my family who own that fucking record.

  The Rolling Stones no longer represent Rolling Stones fans. They now represent “baby boomer rock ’n’ roll,” and every aging boomer wants to believe he or she still rocks. That being the case, they really have no choice but to love Mick Jagger—no one else is left. You can’t really go around acting excited about Uriah Heep. If you want to participate in the music of “Your Generation,” the Stones are just about the only option. That’s why people who never listened to Beggar’s Banquet are suddenly buying Hot Rocks on CD and insisting that Ron Wood has always been their personal Christ. The same thing happened when the Eagles reunited in the early ’90s: My brother paid over $100 bucks to see the Eagles, and I know he never listened to them in the 1970s. Back in 1977, he would probably have preferred to see Ted Nugent pick up a crossbow and shoot Don Henley in the face.

  But there is also a second reason for the Stones’ eternal youth, and that brings us to Mr. Giffels’s theory. Any pop musicologist will tell you that the Rolling Stones earned their spot in rock history by tapping into the blues—even if every Stone had all died in 1973, they’d still be important in a sonic sense. They are the epitome of the white British blues band; Cream, Zeppelin, and early Fleetwood Mac took the concept further, but the Stones were the true source. They connected Howlin’ Wolf to Bill Haley, and Jagger rubbed that combination against the crotch of the Western world. It may have been a great show, but it was always about the blues. If you strip away everything else, the Rolling Stones are simply a blues band (it’s similar to how Nirvana was simply a great punk band—once you carved away the nonsense and the hype).

  In other words, the Stones are “about” playing the blues. Consequently, they are able to get old and still matter. No one would ever call B. B. King an “old fart.” No one would ever accuse R. L. Burnside of being a dinosaur. These terms only seem to apply to white rock musicians who rely on modern gimmicks. If the Stones suddenly faded into social mediocrity and could no longer sell out the Pontiac Silverdome in twenty-eight minutes, Keith Richards could still get critics’ attention by picking up an acoustic guitar and meandering down to the crossroads. As a bluesman, he’s probably just now entering his prime.

  A similar comparison can be made with a band like Queensryche. Queensryche was never “about” heavy metal, even though they were a metal band. Mostly, Queensryche was about trying to be ambitious and interesting; you never threw on Operation: Mindcrime when you were drinking Busch Light and hoping to get laid (in fact, my buddy Mike usually played Operation Mindcrime when he was reading his accounting textbooks). They were obsessed with integrity and—at least among metalists—highly political. Much of their political content leaned in the direction of naive libertarian gobbledygook (as is so often the case with civics rockers), but at least they thought about something. If Poison can be seen as metal’s hippies, Queenryche would have been metal’s yippies (and I suppose that would make Slayer the Weathermen). It wasn’t fun music, and it wasn’t supposed to be. It was supposed to be a labor of love.

  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 ye
ars, 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.