Fargo Rock City (28 page)

The strength of
Too Fast
is the stylized trashiness; it's the Crüe at their glammiest and (one hopes) most sincere. Still, the crafty marketing of Nikki Sixx is already obvious: The cover art is such a rote
Sticky Fingers
rip-off that it qualifies as an homage—but almost none of its intended audience had ever seen the original! As a selling tool, Vince Neil's crotch worked
exactly
the same way Warhol groupie Jed Johnson's did. Just like the music, it was old material that seemed completely fresh to thirteen-year-old kids with no sense of history (like me, for example).

The title cut is probably the album's best rocker, while the closing ballad “On with the Show” is the finest slow song the band would ever make (it's twice as gut-wrenching as “Home Sweet Home,” which basically means it's half as gut-wrenching as Big Star's “Holocaust” and one-tenth as effective as
Snoopy, Come Home
). The only misstep was the baffling exclusion of “Toast of the Town,” the very first single Mötley ever released (and in case you're curious, the B-side was “Stick to Your Guns”). Fortunately, that track was reincluded on the '99 re-release.

It will be interesting to see how Mötley Crüe is eventually categorized by rock historians; I sometimes wonder if they'll end up being the '80s version of Nazareth or Foghat. They honestly deserve better. When you place heavy metal in a cultural context,
Too Fast for Love
is the kind of album that kind-of-sort-of matters. Whenever you forget what made glam metal so ridiculously popular, listen to this record. This is what happened when four Hollywood hobos got it right.
(Jack Factor: $1,333)

Guns N' Roses,
Appetite for Destruction
(1987, Geffen): Well, this is pretty much it.

Appetite for Destruction
is the singular answer to the question, “Why did hair metal need to exist?” After all the coke and the car wrecks and the screaming and the creaming and the musical masturbation and the pentagrams and the dead hookers, this is
what we are left with—the best record of the 1980s, regardless of genre. If asked to list the ten best rock albums of all time, this is the only pop metal release that might make the list; it's certainly the only Reagan-era material that can compete with the White Album and
Rumours
and
Electric Warrior. Appetite for Destruction
is an
Exile on Main Street
for all the kids born in '72, except
Appetite
rocks harder and doesn't get boring in the middle. It bastardizes every early Aerosmith record, but all the lyrics are smarter and Axl is a better dancer.

Part of the credit for the success of this five-headed juggernaut has to go to Nigel Dick, the faceless fellow who directed all the videos for GNR's early singles. One needs to remember that
Appetite
was out for almost a year before it cracked the
Billboard
Top 10 in 1988. Most people assume that this was because of the single “Sweet Child O' Mine,” but the real reason was the video for “Welcome to the Jungle.” The first fifteen seconds of that vid explain everything we need to know: Axl gets off a bus in downtown L.A. with a piece of friggin'
hay
in his mouth (and evidently, he didn't do much chewing during the twenty-six-hour bus ride from Indiana, because it still looks pretty fresh). The first time I heard this song, I was riding the Octopus at the North Dakota State Fair in Minot, and I had no idea what the fuck it was supposed to be about—but I still kinda liked it. When I saw this video two months later, I realized that Axl wasn't welcoming
me
to the jungle, people were welcoming
him
. Suddenly, the whole album made a lot more sense: Axl Rose was screaming because he was scared.

From the brazen misogyny of “It's So Easy” to the pleading vulnerability of “Rocket Queen,” the album is a relentless exercise in high-concept sleaze. “Nightrain” is my personal favorite; Axl insists he's “one bad mutha,” and he proves it by waking up his whore and making her buy four-dollar wine with her Visa card. “Mr. Brownstone” is hard funk on hard drugs, and it cleverly tells us how rock stars are supposed to live—you wake up at seven, you get out of bed at nine, and you always take the stage two hours late. “Paradise City” is probably the musical high
point; it has GNR's signature soft-heavy-soft vocal sequence and the best chorus in metal history. “Paradise City” still seems like a disco classic waiting to happen.

The flip side is a little dirtier, starting with the unsettling “My Michele” and the semisweet “Think About You.” The material is dark and purposefully hidden (kind of like Slash's eyes, I suppose), and the drums are ferocious; it sounds like Steven Adler is setting off cherry bombs in his drum kit. And through it all, the guitar playing is stellar. On
Appetite for Destruction
, Slash invented a new style of playing that's best described as “blues punk.” He simultaneously sounds raw and polished—the master craftsman who came to work loaded. It was a style that sold 15 million records, but almost nobody managed to copy it (including Slash, who never really got it right again—even when he consciously tried on 1993's
The Spaghetti Incident?
).

There are those who will argue that the best thing that could have happened to Guns N' Roses would have been death, probably in about 1991. They were certainly on the right path (in fact, the rumor persists that David Geffen wanted
Use Your Illusion
to be a double album because he suspected someone in the band would be dead before they could cut anything else). From a romantic (read: selfish) perspective, there's some truth to this argument; it would be nice if
Appetite for Destruction
was all we really knew about this band of gypsies; Axl would have never lost his hair and the Gunners would have never become such bloated disasters.

Since Rose legally obtained the rights to the name Guns N' Roses in 1991, GNR is Axl Rose for all practical (and impractical) purposes. Put Axl onstage with the starting five of the Quad City Thunder, and that qualifies as “the new Guns N' Roses.” The group still exists, but it's almost like comparing Jefferson Airplane to Starship: As I write this, the ever-evolving lineup consists of Axl, Dizzy Reed, former Replacements' bassist Tommy Stinson, Buckethead (a robot-obsessed guitar freak who wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his dome), Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails, Brian “Brain” Mantia (the drummer from
Primus who replaced Josh Freese, the guy from the Vandals who played on the new Guns record but has also quit the band since the album's completion), and what amounts to Axl's buddies from high school. The next album's working title is
Chinese Democracy
and it's rumored to be aggressive industrial metal in the spirit of Led Zeppelin, filtered through the sensibilities of Stevie Wonder; I can only imagine what this will be like, although it's safe to assume it will be twice as good as Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds, three times as good Slash's Snakepit, and five hundred times better than anything Duff McKagan ever released. But it will never be as good as this, and I suspect Axl
^A
knows it.
(Jack Factor: $5,001)

The staunchly uncompromising, previously untouchable speed metal of Metallica is on the radio with “One” (No. 78 on the singles chart).

The death of '80s heavy metal is sometimes compared to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that's a perfect analogy, even though most of the people who make this argument don't understand why.

Everyone seems to think that dinosaurs lived for 165 million years and then managed to die in the course of one really shitty afternoon. Hacks usually describe the process as if it was a devastating collision of coincidence: The world bumped into a comet, the global thermostat dropped like an Acme anvil, and a bunch of furry little ferrets suddenly decided to eat all the T-Rex eggs in Eurasia. By suppertime, every Thunder Lizard on earth was eating dirt and awaiting petrifaction.

Obviously, this theory is flawed.

The historical reality is that the dinosaurs died quickly
in terms of the planet,
which is a hard concept for modern man to relate to. Hair metal's demise happened in much the same way: It died quickly, but only in terms of how society consumes pop culture. Retrospectively, the decline of the glam rock empire seems to have happened so rapidly that it already feels like it's been unpopular for twenty-five years; in truth, metal was still the
biggest genre in rock as late as 1991. When Guns N' Roses released
Use Your Illusion 1 & II
in September of that year, it momentarily seemed like the defining moment for an entire generation: At midnight, thousands of people lined up at record stores to buy GNR's much-awaited follow-up to
Appetite for Destruction
as soon as it went on sale that Tuesday. At the time, this was a legitimately unique deal; although the concept of opening stores at midnight soon became commonplace for marquee records (which would include everything from Pearl Jam's
Vs.
to seemingly workmanlike releases from Green Day and the Wu-Tang Clan), no one in their twenties could ever remember this happening before. At the time, I was a college sophomore, and Guns had become my favorite band (MTV deserves some of the credit for that; they had been hyping the GNR record since May, filling my summer evenings with rockumentaries that featured rambling diatribes from a drunken Duff McKagan and bootleg concert clips of Axl Rose starting a riot in St. Louis). My friends and I spent hours hanging out at the one record store in Grand Forks that had an advance copy of the two discs, and we browsed for hours just to hear bits of the new record on the in-store stereo system. On Monday night, we all had about seven beers each and then stood in line on that brisk North Dakota evening, joining the endless masses of people waiting to get in the door of locally owned stores like Disc & Tape and Budget Tapes & Records. And what I remember most is that the majority of these people were clearly not “metal kids.” Judging from their appearance, these conservatively dressed frat boys and sorority girls could have been fans of anything, or—more likely—fans of nothing. It may have been the first time I ever consciously took part in a cultural
event.

But that was just the state of music in 1991. Heavy metal was the predominant music of the era, and Guns N' Roses was the genre's best band. Tower Records in Los Angeles sold 23,000 copies of those
Illusion
albums in twenty-four hours, and that made perfect sense. What most of us did not know (especially those of us in Middle America) was that 46,251 copies of some
wacky little record called
Nevermind
had been sent to stores across the country for a September 24 street date. A new world had already been recorded; we just didn't know it yet. By Thanksgiving, I had a copy of
Nevermind,
as did all the people I knew who followed rock with any seriousness. By Christmas, it was filtering down to anyone who bought music in general (although that phenomenon seemed more tied to the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video than it did to any sort of philosophical revolution). Butch Vig was a faceless assassin, and we all unknowingly purchased the death of W. Axl Rose.

The sad irony is that most metal fans looked at Nirvana
as
a metal band. It seems crazy now, but—for a few fleeting moments on the cultural calendar of early '92—the band that many casual rock kids compared (and sometimes even confused) with Nirvana was Ugly Kid Joe. The distinction between grunge and metal was initially unclear: Soundgarden opened for GNR; Alice in Chains originally called themselves “Alice N Chainz.” The first time we heard someone mention the idea of an emerging “Seattle Sound,” I recall my roommate mentioning he was happy because he liked Queensryche.

The biggest myth about the whole “alternative revolution” was that it happened overnight, and that it swept the commercial insincerity of the 1980s off the map on the strength of a few catchy, grungy guitar riffs from Aberdeen, Washington. That's not true. We live in an accelerated culture, but its acceleration is increased retrospectively. It would be almost three years before the world heard its second most important Gen X anthem, Beck's “Loser.” For a college student, three years is a long time.

What made it seem so sweeping is that for people born in the early 1970s, the transformation was all too clear. I was able to become a major rock fan at a time when cock rock was thriving and growing (the summer of 1984) and exit college on the heels of Kurt Cobain's death, the ultimate example of how absolutely everything about rock 'n' roll (and its audience) had changed.

Of course, every hard-rock guy who's still touring swears that metal is as popular as it ever was; “It's just gone underground.”
That's the battle cry of everyone from Warrant to Megadeth, and in some ways it's true. And not every band was struck by the cultural plague; obviously, Metallica figured out a way to expand their popularity and they have continued to sell more records than they ever did. Of course, some of that success was directly tied to the widespread decline of most of their peers. Even though Metallica mildly alienated some of their most loyal fans by becoming more commercial, there really wasn't anyone to steal their market share.