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Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota Paperback – May 1, 2002
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With a voice like Ace Frehley's guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock—his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet—but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 1, 2002
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.72 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-109780743406567
- ISBN-13978-0743406567
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Marc Weingarten author of "Station to Station: The History of Rock and Roll on Television" Klosterman's hilarious heavy metal odyssey will flick the Bic of every headbanger who's ever found salvation in a great Motley Crue riff. His sly, swaggering prose struts across the page like Axl Rose in his prime.
Ronin Ro author of "Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records" With a style as hilarious as it is thought-provoking, Chuck Klosterman delivers an authoritative, impressive debut.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The worldwide release of Mötley Crüe's
Shout at the Devil.
It's easy for me to recall the morning I was absorbed into the cult of heavy metal. As is so often the case with this sort of thing, it was all my brother's fault.
As a painfully typical fifth-grader living in the rural Midwest, my life was boring, just like it was supposed to be. I lived five miles south of a tiny town called Wyndmere, where I spent a lot of time drinking Pepsi in the basement and watching syndicated episodes of Laverne & Shirley and Diff'rent Strokes. I killed the rest of my free time listening to Y-94, the lone Top 40 radio station transmitted out of Fargo, sixty-five miles to the north (in the horizontal wasteland of North Dakota, radio waves travel forever). This was 1983, which -- at least in Fargo -- was the era of mainstream "new wave" pop (although it seems the phrase "new wave" was only used by people who never actually listened to that kind of music). The artists who appear exclusively on today's "Best of the '80s" compilations were the dominant attractions: Madness, Culture Club, Falco, the Stray Cats, German songstress Nena, and -- of course -- Duran Duran (the economic backbone of Friday Night Videos' cultural economy). The most popular song in my elementary school was Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue," but that was destined to be replaced by Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" (which would subsequently be replaced by "Raspberry Beret").
Obviously, popular music was not in a state of revolution, or turbulence, or even contrived horror. The only exposure anyone in Wyndmere had to punk rock was an episode of Quincy that focused on the rising danger of slam dancing (later, we found out that Courtney Love had made a cameo appearance in that particular program, but that kind of trivia wouldn't be worth knowing until college). There were five hundred people in my hometown, and exactly zero of them knew about Motorhead, Judas Priest, or anything loud and British. Rock historians typically describe this as the period where hard rock moved "underground," and that's the perfect metaphor; the magma of heavy metal was thousands of miles below the snow-packed surface of Wyndmere, North Dakota.
Was this some kind of unadulterated tranquillity? Certainly not. As I look back, nothing seems retroactively utopian about Rick Springfield, even though others might try to tell you differently. Whenever people look back on their grammar school days, they inevitably insist that they remember feeling "safe" or "pure" or "hungry for discovery." Of course, the people who say those things are lying (or stupid, or both). It's revisionist history; it's someone trying to describe how it felt to be eleven by comparing it to how it feels to be thirty-one, and it has nothing to do with how things really were. When you actually are eleven, your life always feels exhaustively normal, because your definition of "normal" is whatever is going on at the moment. You view the entire concept of "life" as your life, because you have nothing else to measure it against. Unless your mom dies or you get your foot caught in the family lawn mower, every part of childhood happens exactly as it should. It's the only way things can happen.
That changed when my older brother returned from the army. He was on leave from Fort Benning in Georgia, and he had two cassettes in his duffel bag (both of which he would forget to take back with him when he returned to his base). The first, Sports, by Huey Lewis and the News, was already a known quantity ("I Want a New Drug" happened to be the song of the moment on Y-94). However, the second cassette would redirect the path of my life: Shout at the Devil by Mötley Crüe.
As cliché as it now seems, I was wholly disturbed by the Shout at the Devil cover. I clearly remember thinking, Who the fuck are these guys? Who the fuck are these guys? And -- more importantly -- Are these guys even guys? The blond one looked like a chick, and one of the members was named "Nikki." Fortunately, my sister broached this issue seconds after seeing the album cover, and my brother (eleven years my senior) said, "No, they're all guys. They're really twisted, but it's pretty good music." When my brother was a senior in high school, he used to drive me to school; I remembered that he always listened to 8-tracks featuring Meat Loaf, Molly Hatchet, and what I later recognized to be old Van Halen. Using that memory as my reference point, I assumed I had a vague idea what Mötley Crüe might sound like.
Still, I didn't listen to it. I put Huey Lewis into my brother's trendy Walkman (another first) and fast-forwarded to all the songs I already knew. Meanwhile, I read the liner notes to Shout at the Devil. It was like stumbling across a copy of Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible (which -- of course -- was a book I had never heard of or could even imagine existing). The band insisted that "This album was recorded on Foster's Lager, Budweiser, Bombay Gin, lots of Jack Daniel's, Kahlua and Brandy, Quakers and Krell, and Wild Women!" And they even included an advisory: Caution: This record may contain backwards messages. What the hell did that mean? Why would anyone do that? I wondered if my brother (or anyone in the world, for that matter) had a tape player that played cassettes backward.
The day before I actually listened to the album, I told my friends about this awesome new band I had discovered. Eleven years later I would become a rock critic and do that sort of thing all the time, so maybe this was like vocational training. Everyone seemed mildly impressed that the Crüe had a song named "Bastard." "God Bless the Children of the Beast" also seemed promising.
Clearly, this was a cool band. Clearly, I was an idiot and so were all my friends. It's incredible to look back and realize how effectively the Mötley image machine operated. It didn't occur to anyone that we were going to listen to Mötley Crüe for the same reason we all watched KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park in 1978, when we were first-graders who liked Ace Frehley for the same reasons we liked Spider-Man.
Yet I would be lying if I said the only thing we dug about Mötley Crüe was their persona. Without a doubt, their image was the catalyst for the attraction -- but that wasn't the entire equation. I say this because I also remember sitting on my bed on a Sunday afternoon and playing Shout at the Devil for the first time. This may make a sad statement about my generation (or perhaps just myself), but Shout at the Devil was my Sgt. Pepper's.
The LP opens with a spoken-word piece called "In the Beginning." The track doesn't make a whole lot of sense and would seem laughable on any record made after 1992, but I was predictably (and stereotypically) bewitched. The next three songs would forever define my image of what glam metal was supposed to sound like: "Shout at the Devil," "Looks That Kill," and the seminal "Bastard." Although the instrumental "God Bless the Children of the Beast" kind of wasted my precious time, the last song on side one was "Helter Skelter," which I immediately decided was the catchiest tune on the record (fortunately, I was still a decade away from understanding irony). I was possessed, just as Tipper Gore always feared; I had no choice but to listen to these songs again. And again. And again.
It was three months before I took the time to listen to side two.
It can safely be said that few rock historians consider Shout at the Devil a "concept album." In fact, few rock historians have ever considered Shout at the Devil in any way whatsoever (the only exception might be when J. D. Considine reviewed it for Rolling Stone and compared it to disco-era KISS). Bassist Nikki Sixx wrote virtually every song on Shout, and he probably didn't see it as a concept record either. But for someone (read: me) who had never really listened to albums before -- I had only been exposed to singles on the radio -- Shout at the Devil took on a conceptual quality that Yes would have castrated themselves to achieve. Like all great '80s music, it was inadvertently post-modern: The significance of Shout at the Devil had nothing to do with the concepts it introduced; its significance was the concept of what it literally was.
I realize this argument could be made by anyone when they discuss their first favorite album. My sister probably saw epic ideas in the Thompson Twins. That's the nature of an adolescent's relationship with rock 'n' roll. Sixx himself has described Aerosmith as "my Beatles." Using that logic, Mötley Crüe was "my Aerosmith," who (along these same lines) would still ultimately be "my Beatles."
Yet this personal relationship is only half the story, and not even the half that matters. There is another reason to look at the Crüe with slightly more seriousness (the operative word here being "slightly"). As we all know, '80s glam metal came from predictable sources: the aforementioned Aerosmith (seemingly every glam artist's favorite band), early and midperiod KISS (duh), Alice Cooper (but not so much musically), Slade (at least according to Quiet Riot), T. Rex (more than logic would dictate), Blue Cheer (supposedly), and -- of course -- Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin (although those two bands had just as much effect on Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and all the Sasquatch Rockers who would rise from the Pacific Northwest when metal started to flounder). In other words, this wasn't groundbreaking stuff, and no one is trying to argue otherwise. Sonically and visually, heavy metal was (and is) an unabashedly derivative art form.
But those sonic thefts are only half the equation, and maybe even less than that. We have to consider when this happened. The decade of the 1980s is constantly misrepresented by writers who obviously did not have the typical teen experience. If you believe unofficial Gen X spokesman Douglas Coupland (a title I realize he never asked for), every kid in the 1980s laid awake at night and worried about nuclear war. I don't recall the fear of nuclear apocalypse being an issue for me, for anyone I knew, or for any kid who wasn't trying to win an essay contest. The imprint Ronald Reagan placed on Children of the '80s had nothing to do with the escalation of the Cold War; it had more to do with the fact that he was the only president any of us could really remember (most of my information on Jimmy Carter had been learned through Real People, and -- in retrospect -- I suspect a bias in its news reporting).
In the attempt to paint the 1980s as some glossy, capitalistic wasteland, contemporary writers tend to ignore how unremarkable things actually were. John Hughes movies like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles were perfect period pieces for their era -- all his characters were obsessed with overwrought, self-centered personal problems, exactly like the rest of us. I suppose all the '80s films about the raging arms race are culturally relevant, much in the same way that Godzilla films are interesting reflections on the atomic age. But those films certainly weren't unsettling to anyone who didn't know better. WarGames and the TV movie The Day After were more plausible than something like Planet of the Apes, but -- quite frankly -- every new movie seemed a little more plausible than the stuff made before we were born. Anything could happen and probably would (sooner or later), but nothing would really change. Nobody seemed too shocked over the abundance of nuclear warheads the Soviets pointed at us; as far as I could tell, we were supposed to be on the brink of war 24/7. That was part of being an American. I remember when Newsweek ran a cover story introducing a new breed of adults called "Yuppies," a class of people who wore Nikes to the office and were money-hungry egomaniacs. No fifteen-year-old saw anything unusual about this. I mean, wouldn't that be normal behavior? The single biggest influence on our lives was the inescapable sameness of everything, which is probably true for most generations.
Jefferson Morley makes a brilliant point about inflation in his 1988 essay "Twentysomething": "For us, everything seemed normal. I remember wondering why people were surprised that prices were going up. I thought, That's what prices did." Consider that those sentiments come from a guy who was already in high school during Watergate -- roughly the same year I was born. To be honest, I don't know if I've ever been legitimately shocked by anything, even as a third-grader in 1981. That was the year John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, and I wasn't surprised at all (in fact, it seemed to me that presidential assassinations didn't happen nearly as often as one would expect). From what I could tell, the world had always been a deeply underwhelming place; my generation inherited this paradigm, and it was perfectly fine with me (both then and now).
Mötley Crüe was made to live in this kind of world. Shout at the Devil injected itself into a social vortex of jaded pragmatism; subsequently, it was the best album my friends and I had ever heard. We never scoffed at the content as "contrived shock rock." By 1983, that idea was the norm. Elvis Costello has questioned whether or not '80s glam metal should even be considered rock 'n' roll, because he thinks it's a "facsimile" of what legitimate artists already did in the past. What he fails to realize is that no one born after 1970 can possibly appreciate any creative element in rock 'n' roll: By 1980, there was no creativity left. The freshest ideas in pop music's past twenty years have come out of rap, and that genre is totally based on recycled, bastardized riffs. Clever facsimiles are all we really expect.
The problem with the current generation of rock academics is that they remember when rock music seemed new. It's impossible for them to relate to those of us who have never known a world where rock 'n' roll wasn't everywhere, all the time. They remind me of my eleventh-grade history teacher -- a guy who simply could not fathom why nobody in my class seemed impressed by the Apollo moon landing. As long as I can remember, all good rock bands told lies about themselves and dressed like freaks; that was part of what defined being a "rock star." Mötley Crüe was a little more overt about following this criteria, but that only made me like them immediately.
In fact, I loved Mötley Crüe with such reckless abandon that I didn't waste my time learning much about the band. I consistently mispronounced Sixx's name wrong (I usually called him "Nikki Stixx"), and I got Tommy Lee and Mick Mars mixed up for almost a year.
Until 1992, I didn't even know that the cover art for the vinyl version of Shout at the Devil was a singular, bad-ass pentagram that was only visible when the album was held at a forty-five-degree angle. The reason this slipped under my radar was because Shout at the Devil was released in 1983, a period when the only people who were still buying vinyl were serious music fans. Obviously, serious music fans weren't buying Mötley Crüe. I've never even seen Mötley Crüe on vinyl; I used to buy most of my music at a Pamida in Wahpeton, ND -- the only town within a half hour's drive that sold rock 'n' roll -- and the last piece of vinyl I recall noticing in the racks was the soundtrack to Grease. The rest of us got Shout at the Devil on tape. The cassette's jacket featured the four band members in four different photographs, apparently taken on the set for the "Looks That Kill" video (which is probably the most ridiculous video ever made, unless you count videos made in Canada). By the look of the photographs, the band is supposed to be in either (a) hell, or (b) a realm that is remarkably similar to hell, only less expensive to decorate.
Like a conceptual album of the proper variety, Shout at the Devil opens with the aforementioned spoken-word piece "In the Beginning." It describes an evil force (the devil?) who devastated society, thereby forcing the "youth" to join forces and destroy it (apparently by shouting in its general direction). This intro leads directly into "Shout...shout...shout...shout...shout...shout...shout at the Devil," a textbook metal anthem if there ever was one.
Humorless Jesus freaks always accused Mötley Crüe of satanism, and mostly because of this record. But -- if taken literally (a practice that only seems to happen to rock music when it shouldn't) -- the lyrics actually suggest an anti-Satan sentiment, which means Mötley Crüe released the most popular Christian rock record of the 1980s. They're not shouting with the devil or for the devil: They're shouting at the devil. Exactly what they're shouting remains open to interpretation; a cynic might speculate Tommy Lee was shouting, "In exchange for letting me sleep with some of the sexiest women in television history, I will act like a goddamn moron in every social situation for the rest of my life." However, I suspect Sixx had more high-minded ideas. In fact, as I reconsider the mood and message of these songs, I'm starting to think he really did intend this to be a concept album, and I'm merely the first person insane enough to notice.
There are two ways to look at the messages in Shout at the Devil. The first is to say "It's elementary antiauthority language, like every other rock record that was geared toward a teen audience. Don't ignore the obvious." But that kind of dismissive language suggests there's no reason to look for significance in anything. It's one thing to realize that something is goofy, but it's quite another to suggest that goofiness disqualifies its significance. If anything, it expands the significance, because the product becomes accessible to a wider audience (and to the kind of audience who would never look for symbolism on its own). I think it was Brian Eno who said, "Only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them became a musician." Well, millions of people bought Shout at the Devil, and every single one of them remained a person (excluding the kids who moved on to Judas Priest and decided to shoot themselves in the face).
Fifteen years later, I am not embarrassed by my boyhood idolization of Mötley Crüe. The fact that I once put a Mötley Crüe bumper sticker on the headboard of my bed seems vaguely endearing. And if I hadn't been so obsessed with shouting at the devil, the cultural context of heavy metal might not seem as clear (or as real) as it does for me today.
Through the circumstances of my profession (and without really trying), I've ended up interviewing many of the poofy-haired metal stars I used to mimic against the reflection of my old bedroom windows. But in 1983, the idea of talking with Nikki Sixx or Vince Neil wasn't my dream or even my fantasy -- it was something that never crossed my mind. Nikki and Vince did not seem like people you talked to. I was a myopic white kid who had never drank, never had sex, had never seen drugs, and had never even been in a fight. Judging from the content of Shout at the Devil, those were apparently the only things the guys in Mötley Crüe did. As far as I could deduce, getting wasted with strippers and beating up cops was their full-time job, so we really had nothing to talk about.
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Klosterman
Product details
- ASIN : 0743406567
- Publisher : Scribner; Reprint edition (May 1, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780743406567
- ISBN-13 : 978-0743406567
- Item Weight : 9.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.72 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #240,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #674 in Rock Band Biographies
- #682 in Rock Music (Books)
- #7,156 in Memoirs (Books)
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About the author
Chuck Klosterman is a New York Times bestselling author and a featured columnist for Esquire, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and has also written for Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Believer, and ESPN.
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But Chuck Klosterman was a different breed. From the moment he first heard Motley Crue on cassette in 1982, he had found HIS music. He spent the 1980s as a devout metal-head, and largely remains one today. As an articulate writer and critic, and a fan of music largely ignored or decried, he turned his word processor to an analysis of why his favorite music was good after all, and more importantly, why it worked for him and his friends in their backwater town in North Dakota.
I loved this book. Metal was never my music but I felt a kinship with Klosterman for the absolute passion and devotion he showed for what he loved. I had my own obsessions and could completely identify with his. I enjoyed his thumbnail history of heavy metal, his analysis of the different bands, and the memoir aspects of how events in the history of the music intersected with his own life and consciousness--for example, a story in the newspaper about Vince Neil's DUI killing a member of another band (and badly wounding several other people) didn't mean that Vince Neil was a criminal or possibly going to prison to middle school Chuck--rather, the appearance of the story in the local newspaper was an odd confirmation that the music and people he loved existed in a larger world that otherwise seemed to take no notice.
I read the book straight through in one sitting--it's a fast, easy, often laugh-out-loud-funny read--and it was the kind of book where I kept reading bits and pieces to my partner. Definitely recommended to anyone who is feeling nostalgic about the metal bands of their youth, or even for those who aren't particularly fans of the music but can identify with spending one's pre-teen and teenage years obsessed with something others find stupid or dorky.
And that's frankly what you're getting in this wonderful memoir - a passionate and funny accounting of growing up in small rural town without a whole lot to do, while this huge music scene provided some outlet into a wider and more glamorous world. He's not trying to please anyone here, it's just an honest opinions of what he thought about certain groups when and how tastes shifted over time. A great read for people passionate about 1980s/early 1990s rock music, but also should hit a lot of poignant notes for people who grew up in similar circumstances during this period. If you like this book then his Killing Yourself to Live should be the next book you buy.
We were both born in the same year, we both grew up in somewhat culturally isolated communities, we both love 80s hair metal, Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil was the record that had the biggest impact on our early teenage lives and finally, we can both karaoke Guns 'n Roses' Apetite for Destruction from start to finish. There are still some differences in our journeys from childhood to maturity, but those are mere details. I spent my teen years baking on a tropical Latin American shithole instead of freezing on a Midwestern wasteland and I had access to MTV as early as in 1982. Instead of becoming an indie rock loving hipster during College like the author I kept my metal faith in the early 90s, Nevermind notwithstanding, and moved on to extreme metal as the decade progressed, but in the end, it doesn't matter, since we both still rock to the same aquanet friendly songs when drunk.
You might say that because my teenage music related experiences are pretty similar to Chuck's I'm bound, even obligated to love this book and that is a very valid point, but that doesn't mean anyone can enjoy it, since it's very entertaining and written with an unassuming, funny and down to earth style. Since the story of a nerdy teenager using rock music as a means to escape his boring, drab day to day life and overcome his own lameness can be the story of countless people everywhere, this book transcends its limited musical scope and ultimately becomes a paean to music lovers of every genre and origin, while still managing to make poignant observations about the radical changes media and music consumption went through the 80s. Highly recommended for pop culture enthusiasts, music lovers and anyone who was a teenager during the 80s.
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Klosterman offers an analytical point of view on this music. He makes some strong points and some of them are very valid. Particularly when he says "I have both so and so in my collection, it doesn't matter which one is better they're both part of the soundtrack to my life" and proves most opinions are just that, opinions and can be irrelevant. His view is that if a song means something to you then it automatically becomes important somehow because that song is now part of your life. He makes further interesting assertions such as when he says Rush is a Christian band (and attempts to explain why that is) or that Ozzy is bothered by people calling him a Satanist. Chuck is somewhat of a music critic and has worked for magazines and published reviews which may explain why he feels the need to explain and analyze everything. His arguments on Guns N'Roses and Axl Rose more specifically are very well thought out and he does make some valid points when interpreting what Axl felt and why Chinese Democracy took such a long time to release. He suggests that Axl's pain was real but as time went on he couldn't replicate or fake it, keep in mind at the time of writing the album wasn't yet released.
Reading about Chuck's hometown and what it was like for him actually reminded me of my teenage years. I found Rock/Heavy Metal music in a place that no one would have expected me to. His story about the ATM machine that made him rich and allowed him to buy practically anything he wanted and the way he tells it is captivating. The personal bits on his life did not downgrade the book by any means, it added a biographical factor and those parts of Chuck's life were well integrated. I particularly enjoyed the author's list of albums you'd have to pay him not to listen to anymore. I found his picks interesting and liked how he defended his picks and the matter in which he chose to validate and explain his decisions. I liked the artists he picked but wondered about some of the selections he made (seriously of the studio albums KISS released Animalize is their best?).
It seems that Klosterman mostly like the 1980's Glam bands, as he pays little attention to what people who liked metal called "metal" like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer and so on. He doesn't go deep into genres and stays within the stereotyped idea of "Heavy Metal" and besides KISS, Bowie and a few others gives little importance to bands that preceded the bands largely discussed in Fargo Rock City. If you're looking for a read that talks about the popular Glam bands of the day this will be in your alley but if your definition of Metal and Rock music is broader then you honestly cannot expect a book that is in any way reflective of the entire genre and that Klosterman covers all. Not that there is anything wrong with what he does here, I'm just giving you a heads up.
I think the original title of Appetite for Deconstruction would have been more proper and suitable for this book and it seems the author thinks so as well according to the. Fargo is a fun ride and definitely made me want to read the author's other books. One of the most remarkable things about Fargo Rock City is that Mr. Klosterman wrote this book before it become cool again like Heavy Metal in the advent of the 2000's with biographies such as Motley Crue's The Dirt, he really was a fan all along. If anything it probably won't make you rush to buy those albums he talks about whenever he mentions his favorite bands but. I'm not sure that Klosterman answers his initial thesis or that he really proves anything here and doesn't entirely succeeds at validating why the "Hair" bands were important and why they are important to him. Chances are even if you're not a fan of Glam Metal, don't have the slightest idea where Fargo is located you will find Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City to be a least entertaining because through his writing he manages to be interesting and knows how to tell a story but it really helps if you're familiar with or like the music. Overall excellent and highly entertaining read.