Fargo Rock City (10 page)

In fact, as I type this very sentence, I am looking at the cover of Cinderella's
Night Songs
LP. Vocalist Tom Keifer is pointing at me with both his index fingers, and his outfit features somewhere between three and five scarves. It's all pretty groovy, but I am nonetheless drawn to his head. It appears perfectly spherical; his hair is a uniform length, and it is standing at attention. It's like a lion's mane. Grrr.

In an old MTV interview, Keifer once bemoaned the fact that he kept seeing reviews of
Night Songs
where writers talked exclusively about the group's hair (guitarist Jeff LaBar had an even more obnoxious coif than Keifer). Truth be told, it was a semivalid complaint; Cinderella consistently wrote better pop metal than their peers (now that I've had a decade to think it over, I would still place
Night Songs
among the ten best albums of 1986, metal or otherwise). But I can totally understand why journalists had a hard time getting over the band's appearance. Though Cindy's music did stretch beyond the glam metal formula (albeit only slightly), their look defined it. I'm sure the group regrets the
Night Songs
album cover. From a cultural perspective, it's a wonderfully telling period piece, but it makes the band seem idiotic. It's like watching episodes of
American Bandstand
from the early 1960s and realizing these people are not actors. You've got to force yourself to remember that
Night Songs
is not satire. In fact, you could not do satire this effectively on purpose.

But—at the same time—I'm also taking an all-too-easy cheap shot. This sardonic commentary comes long after the point of impact, and it didn't seem so stupid at the time. Cinderella's hair may have been a bit outlandish (or at least outlandish enough to be noticed by record reviewers), but that was the style of the day. Conventional pop artists accentuated that even more; a band
like A Flock of Seagulls is
only
remembered for its hair (and one catchy single). And there
was
a reason for all this.

Whenever you hear Gene Simmons or Alice Cooper refer to the early '70s New York glam scene, they always talk about “getting noticed.” They use that phrase in the context of live performance; if someone like the New York Dolls had played a club on Friday, Saturday's audience would have a certain expectation, and it often had nothing to do with the music.

A new paradigm for musical success had been created. For someone like Brian Wilson, success had meant writing songs that were competitive with the Beatles. For someone like Jimmy Page, success would always be associated by record sales that dwarfed the commercial performance of other artists, including the Rolling Stones. But this generation of glam groups had a different set of priorities. Their two descriptions of success were (a) creating a buzz, and (b) getting paid. The musical product was secondary to being able to get gigs where you would be seen (and hopefully seen again). Style was beating substance, and this time it was on purpose.

“The New York Dolls were media darlings,” Cooper told me in 1998, “but—at the time—they were purely a joke to everybody who saw them. They were like Sha Na Na. They certainly didn't sell records. It was only after they broke up that they somehow became important.”

Max's Kansas City in 1972 was a microcosm of the whole world in 1985. With the proliferation of pop bands and—more importantly—the proliferation of media, the need for attention became paramount. All of America was now a singular club scene. You could see a band perform through videos, and you could effectively “hang out” with the guys in the group by reading magazine articles. The only key for the artist was entering the public consciousness. You needed to be able to
stop
people—to stop them from flipping channels, and to stop them from turning the page. The means for earning this attention couldn't be too high concept either; accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious. Consequently, bands took the
most blatant avenue: Make everything larger. Including your head.

So here we have the first metaphorical example of metal's influence on the teen mind-set of the 1980s—the hunger for what can probably be called “obvious success.” Around this same period, African-Americans began proliferating the phrase “living large,” the modern incarnation of an old jazz term. This is probably just coincidental—but it still seems strange how fervently the idea of size (both literal and figurative) reemerged as a key indicator of how good something was. As always, it goes back to the idea of a cultural pendulum. The late 1970s had felt the crunch of the oil shortage; our too-nice-to-be-effective president Jimmy Carter even urged Americans to wear sweaters instead of burning dinosaur bones. By 1985, those days were over. America was back, and so was the sweet pleasure of gluttony. The explosion in hair (and fashion, and volume) was the other side of consumerism.

Tom Keifer didn't wake up one morning with that hairdo (although at times it may have looked like he did). That doesn't prove he was necessarily making a conscious
statement,
either. But within all that Aqua Net, there was a message—maybe not his, but someone's. I'm certain no one ever killed themselves listening to
Long Cold Winter,
but Tom was still talking about life and death. Judas Priest supposedly made kids point guns at their heads; Cinderella made me do the same thing with a hair dryer.

It's all too easy to get attention by making yourself dead. I was trying to get attention by being alive in a really obvious way.

Poison.

The concept of rock music being tied to glamour is incredibly predictable and—in some respects—essential. Except for those Sarah McLachlan-esque idiots who insist they “need” to make music, it's really the only reason anyone gets into rock 'n' roll.

However, there's an important difference between “altruistic glamour” and “constructed glamour.” Some people are going to be perceived as glamorous even if they don't try. Look at some of those old shots of Jane Fonda when she's in the jungles of Vietnam: It was impossible for her not to be sexy, even when she was covered in swamp shit. The same goes for gun-toting Patty Hearst and tennis superfox Monica Seles—it's not just that they manage to look good in unflattering circumstances, they look
famous
in unflattering circumstances. They sweat like they're in Nike commercials. Young Jim Morrison had this quality, as does his modern-day doppelgänger Eddie Vedder. So does Michael Jordan. Altruistic glamour is something that goes beyond the temporary schemata of society and rests squarely on the truth that some people have an undeniable visual charisma.

Like just about everyone else, I am attracted to altruistic glamour. But I'm not interested in it at all.

Constructed glamour is far more intriguing. It's almost as attractive, but not in a visceral sense. Constructed glamour requires an intellectual element. Take heroin chic, the “look” that dominated modeling runways in the mid 1990s. Heroin chic was a weird middle ground between altruistic and constructed
glamour; it was
constructed
to make females seem
altruistically
glamorous under the
construction
of a situation that should have been
altruistically
damaging (i.e., seventeen-year-old girls with hollow eyes who shoot smack all day and stay alive by eating unsalted popcorn). To find these models sexy, you have to know they were
trying
to look like they were dying. As always, that's the singular key to appearing ridiculous; as long as everyone knows you're doing it, it's completely cool.

That brings us to the early days of glam rock, which cultural revisionists have started to call glitter rock, mainly to downplay its evolution into glam metal (I've never heard anyone use the term “glitter metal”). Glam rock is the ultimate personification of constructed glamour. It takes an idea and turns it into fashion, and the fashion evolves into a philosophy. The idea is that in order to be a rock star
you have to be a rock star.
You are not a normal person. Even if you don't possess altruistic glamour, you can be glamorous. Quite honestly, it's the same kind of thinking that drives drag queen culture (this will come as no surprise to people who remember Dee Snider).

I no longer think there's any question about whether or not pop culture swings on a pendulum between style and substance—it does. The late '60s had freedom rock, so the reaction was '70s art rock. Since no one could relate to ELP and Jethro Tull, the world was subjected to punk by '77, which burned itself out before anyone got rich. Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it—you didn't even need to know how to play your instrument, assuming you knew how to plug it in. There was really no difference between Sid Vicious and anyone in London who owned a bass. But people still wanted to act famous (don't they always?), so that opened the door to glam metal in '83. And as we all know, glam was shattered by '92 grunge, a musical genre that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of making metal commercially unpopular.

Anyone who's taken an entry-level sociology class (in fact, pretty much anyone who has ever used the word “sociology” in its proper context) can explain why Seattle power pop was so effective.
The unspoken statement made by '90s alternative music was “We're all the same, man. I play this guitar and you know who I am, and I will never know who you are, but I am still a normal person. I am
not
a rock star. In fact, I am going to make records for a label called Kill Rock Stars. If you recognize me in public, I will hate you. That will prove that I love you, because we are all the same.” But there was never anything real about those sentiments. It's an illusion that lasts as long as its audience is willing to believe it. The ultimate goal for Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Foghat, Uriah Heep, the Clash, Bon Jovi, and Sonic Youth was all ultimately the same:
They wanted to make music that other people wanted to hear.
That's really the only reason for going into a recording studio. What music “means” is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.

What happened to music in the 1990s was not bad; it was extremely important for at least three reasons. One was that it better reflected the era; another was that we got a handful of truly great personalities and a few dozen wonderful songs. But the third (and perhaps more disturbing) quality was that the “imageless” Seattle music scene finally achieved what constructed glamour had always intended: It made
everybody
into a rock star, because it no longer mattered what you looked like or how you acted. And eventually, all these superstars were completely interchangeable (which proved to be a painful downside for everybody). This wasn't so much the work of the artists as the spin of the modern media—had the original class of '77 punks existed in the accelerated culture of 1992, I'm sure they would have become just as homogenized. I have no doubt whatsoever that we would have heard Muzak versions of “God Save the Queen.”

I was twenty when the grunginess of Nirvana exploded, and—looking back—it
was
a pretty amazing period to be a rock fan in a collegiate setting. Everything about popular music was being analyzed as it happened; everything was so clear. There was
never a “vague undercurrent” that the pop world was changing, because all those social changes were being publicly dissected the moment they occurred. I was told why
Exile in Guyville
was “groundbreaking” the very same day I discovered the record existed. In fact, the first time it hit me that all the Seattle bands wore flannel shirts was when I read a news story about how this fashion trend was “changing the self-image of Generation X.” Prior to seeing that article, I had barely noticed what the fuck those guys were wearing.

Obviously, the goal (and the effect) of glam rock had been precisely the opposite—you couldn't
not
notice the visual side to the music, even if it supposedly meant nothing and the media didn't give a damn. The metal bands I liked were an extension of an altogether different aesthetic: They created characters, and they did so consciously. If dressing like a lumberjack speaks to an entire demographic of young people, dressing like a transvestite speaks only to the dude who's wearing the heels. Glam is a struggle
against
normalcy.

Ground zero for the glam movement can be traced back to one singular guy—David Bowie. Yet Bowie does not play a role in this discussion, and here's why: He did not directly influence metal (at least not '80s metal). At best, he's at least one full cultural generation removed. Over the past five years, it's become very chic for hard rockers to credit Bowie as a major influence, and it would be cool if he had been—but most of these bands are lying. All that adoration is coming retrospectively. When hairspray bands were developing in 1983, Bowie was putting out records like “Let's Dance” and dressing like a waiter from the Olive Garden. At the time, it was certainly not cool for any self-respecting metal dude to emulate David Bowie (even the old Bowie).