Fargo Rock City (27 page)

Poison,
Open Up and Say … Ahh!
(1988, Capitol): Ten seconds into this album, some girl is giving head to Bret Michaels, and “she goes down smooth, like a shot of gin.” How smooth is that? Well, to be honest, not very. But that's what was great about Poison: Things like the relative smoothness of gin paled in comparison to the “greater concept,” which didn't make any sense but always resulted in driving and looking for girls who were already drunk.
^A

When
Open Up …
was released, I remember reading a bunch of reviews where writers claimed it lacked the “rollicking fun” of Poison's first album,
Look What the Cat Dragged In.
This confused
me, because those same writers had all hated that first record, too. Bret and C. C. didn't get breaks from anyone; I remember hearing
fourth-graders
bitch about them. And that's probably why this album still seems so refreshing. If Poison cared what people thought of them, they certainly didn't act like it. They had debuted with an album that made kids want to steal Citron from their parents and cum in their jeans—
and then they made another!
C. C. DeVille played lead riffs that even I could figure out (and I can't play guitar), but he was better at sucking than almost everyone else in the world.

When the guys in Black Sabbath were growing up in Birmingham, they were all poor kids from an industrial neighborhood. When they got famous in the '70s, that social despair poured through their black-hearted music. The guys in Poison grew up in industrial Pennsylvania, and their youth was similarly grim. However, Poison got famous during the 1980s, and they fucking loved it.
Open Up and Say … Ahh!
is an Epicurean affirmation of all that is great about cheesy, plastic rock 'n' roll. It wasn't merely that Poison wanted nothing but a good time—they asked the world why they were supposed to want anything else. And in 1988, that was a good question.
(Jack Factor: $555)

Faster Pussycat,
Faster Pussycat
(1987, Elektra): As a sophomore in high school, I didn't know who the fuck Russ Meyer was, so I thought this was a really wussie name for a rock group. Truth is, they
were
pretty much wussies, but they were some of the most streetwise wussies in L.A. (and if you don't believe me, go rent
The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II).
Almost of all of this LP is terrific, particularly the black-and-bluesy sleaze on “Don't Change That Song” and “Cathouse.” Most of the initial attention surrounding this album was granted to “Babylon,” a rap song that seemed like an attempt to rip off Anthrax's attempt at ripping off
Licensed to Ill,
but it sure seemed funny at the time.

However, it was the second side of
Faster Pussycat
that paid the rent. “Smash Alley” examined the downside of high heels and
switchblades and also reminded me that I should probably listen to my Smashed Gladys cassette more often. “Ship Rolls In” was pretty much an Aerosmith song, but it wonderfully captured the identity of glam metal in three lines from vocalist/fellatio advocate Taime Downe: “You gotta roll with the punches, spin like a top / I ain't got much, but I got a lot of PER-SO-NAL-I-TEEEE / And that's all that counts.” Taime, you're pretty smart for a wussy.
(Jack Factor: $580)

Vinnie Vincent,
Invasion
(1986, Chrysalis): Like a Tasmanian devil whirling toward vaginas and self-destruction, the guitarmageddon unleashed by ex-KISS wackmobile Vincent on this solo debut is so schlockily stunning that I still have to play this album at least six times every year.

Never was metal as brilliantly self-indulgent as it was on
Invasion
(which would soon become part of the group's actual name, hence the better known moniker “Vinnie Vincent Invasion”). After this first record, the group hired Mark Slaughter's throat and Vinnie went to hell, both as a rocker and as a human being (for all I know, Vinnie now lives on the moon and wears his Egyptian ankh makeup whenever he surfs the Internet for
alt.talk.creaturesofthenight
). But for select moments on
Invasion,
V. V. is the fastest, craziest, and downright
best
six-string shredder to ever wear pinkish lavender in public.

Right from track number one, you know what you're getting: “Boys Are Gonna Rock” has
two and a half
guitar solos. Singer Robert Fleischman screams about sadomasochism and ejaculations, but—for all practical purposes—this may as well be an instrumental album. At the conclusion of “Animal,” Vincent plays faster and harder and faster and harder and faster and stupider and he's going nowhere but he's getting there fast and now your neighbors are banging on the wall and your bookcase speakers are starting to melt and your beagle is in obvious pain and suddenly you suspect that everything in your house is going to IMPLODE. And then Vinnie collapses, and then you hear six seconds of reverb. And then the next song begins (with a guitar
solo). It should be also noted that
Invasion
ultimately ends with 151 seconds of Vincent replicating a car alarm (or perhaps a grain elevator). This is rock 'n' roll. This is rock 'n' roll? This is rock 'n' roll!
(Jack Factor: $675)

Def Leppard,
Pyromania
(1983, PolyGram): First of all, let me say—purely as a fan—I probably prefer Lep's 1981 release
High 'n' Dry.
The title track on that record smokes everything here, and “Let It Go” is dandy rock candy. But I also realize that
Pyromania
is the better record. For a bunch of twenty-one-year-old alcoholics in need of personalities, the level of musical sophistication on
Pyromania
is amazing. I suppose the majority of that credit should go to Robert “Mutt” Lange, who earned the right to sleep with Shania Twain for producing an album this immaculate.

The knock against Def Leppard has always been that they're “overproduced,” which is precisely what artists want when they ask Lange to engineer their records. Most producers—like Bob Rock, for example—took metal bands and tried to capture the “liveness” of the sound (when Rock did Mötley Crüe's
Dr. Feelgood,
he played up the guitar tones and Tommy Lee's orangutan drumming). Lange does the opposite; he works more like a smart copyeditor. Everything is polished until it's ultraclean and hyperefficient, so you only notice the main riff and the soaring vocals (this was even more obvious when he produced
Back in Black
).

Granted, this kind of recording philosophy doesn't work with a lot of artists. But it's a perfect recipe for a legitimately talented metal outfit, and that's exactly what Def Leppard was. “Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)” is the ideal opening, and “Photograph” is the best Journey song ever made. Pyromania is infected with a bunch of pre-irony studio gimmicks (like the intro to “Rock of Ages” and the supposedly “space age” crap after track ten), but it doesn't have any bad songs, either.

Critics of '80s hard rock sometimes point to
Pyromania
as an example of what was wrong with the whole industry: The stock argument is that this record is sanitized arena pop that doesn't deliver
anything
that could affect a listener—the lyrics are about
nothing, the music is perfectly calculated, there's no emotional investment by the artist, and there's not even a
constructed
sense of humanity. However, the only person who would come up with that kind of analysis is somebody who simply hates heavy metal and wants to make up a bunch of reasons to explain why. Fifteen years later, I can experience the same concepts I heard in my bedroom when I first got
Pyromania
from the RCA Music Service: Controlled aggression that cloaked an Orwellian fear (witness “Stagefright,” “Die Hard the Hunter,” “Foolin',” and “Billy's Got a Gun”). It's stupid to blame Def Leppard for being flawless.
Pyromania
was metal's
Pretzel Logic
—a studio masterpiece that validated the genre.
(Jack Factor: $877)

Guns N' Roses,
GNR Lies
(1988, Geffen): When we first heard this eight-song EP, we all thought the live material on side one was tits and the acoustic stuff on side two was girlie crap. Over time, the conventional wisdom revolved into the opinion that the “R” side was brilliant and the “G” side wasn't worth listening to. Ten years later, I have rediscovered the value of the former without losing respect for the latter (or maybe it's the other way around).

Lies
opens with “Reckless Life,” an accelerated rocker that would seem to be the résumé for the whole GNR experiment. That blows into a cover of “Nice Boys,” which works because Axl Rose really does seem like a
boy
. Of course, that makes everything a bit awkward on “Move to the City,” because suddenly Axl becomes a girl who stole her daddy's credit card—but by the time they're halfway through a rote version of “Mama Kin,” nobody cares anyway.

Logic would dictate that the lyrics on the flip side should seem less shocking as time passes, but I find them more spooky today than I did in high school. As I grow older, I'm still intrigued by what Axl was so angry about. His inability to replicate this kind of ferocious emotion on future releases makes me suspect it must have been genuine; if it had all just been a show, you'd think he could do it anytime he stepped into a studio.
There seems to be something obviously wrong with Axl Rose's brain, and it's the kind of three-act neurosis that ruins a man's life, makes a man famous, and then ruins his life again (and usually in that order). Side two of
GNR Lies
is the peak of Act II.
(Jack Factor: $920)

Ozzy Osbourne,
Blizzard of Ozz/Diary of a Madman
(both 1981, Jet): Obviously, this is kind of cheating, because I'm counting two albums as one. But it's almost impossible to separate these first two releases from Osbourne's solo career. If there is truly such a thing as “companion albums,” these two would be the defining example (um … okay—I mean if you
don't
count
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver
).

Blizzard
and
Diary
are, of course, the only two albums Ozzy made with Randy Rhoads, and Oz has apparently never recovered; Ozzy insists the twenty-eight months he worked with Randy seem longer than the rest of his life combined. He talks about Rhoads the way most people would discuss a deceased wife (on the liner notes to 1987's
Tribute,
he says Rhoads was what he had “dreamed about” in a guitar player and credits him with ending his depression). Part of that loss might be purely practical: Rhoads's ability as a player is—at times—stunning. The conventional wisdom is that
Blizzard of Ozz
is a masterpiece and
Diary of a Madman
sounds rushed and uneven, but I think they're equally excellent. In fact, I probably prefer the sophomore release.

Blizzard of Ozz
was the perfect vehicle for Osbourne's solo ascension, because it's basically Sabbath music played wicked fast. There was a vaguely classical quality to Tony Iommi's playing, and Rhoads took that one step further (and got there quicker). Over his thirty-year career, “Crazy Train” stands as the best song Ozzy ever yowled. In his book
Running with the Devil,
Robert Walser points out how the guitar riff on “Suicide Solution” jibes with the lyrics: a cycling, disturbing drone that virtually mirrors clinical depression. Top to bottom, this is simply a good record—it's remarkably well-conceived and wisely structured.

Those two statements probably can't be made about
Diary of a Madman,
but it doesn't matter, because Rhoads's effort is even better. I generally find guitar solos pretty boring (doesn't everybody?), but I can listen to these; “Over the Mountain” might be more clever than ingenious, but it always blows me away. “Flying High Again” is intended to be this album's “Crazy Train” (it's even in the same place—track two), and I think it sort of succeeds in that attempt (it's also the last song Ozzy made that was indisputably pro-drug). There are a couple of nice slower tracks on
Diary
—I especially like “Tonight,” which could have been a huge single had it been released five years later—but the real kicker is the intro to the title track. For no particular reason, Rhoads plays twenty-five seconds of the Doors' “Spanish Caravan.” It's not central to the album (or even to the song), but it's
neat.
It's the kind of decision that all the guitar hacks who followed him never seemed to make.

I realize that Rhoads tends to get lionized because he died, and it's very possible that these records seem so remarkable simply because we are left with nothing else (except for a few early Quiet Riot demos). But this is very good rock music, and that has nothing to do with any plane crashes.
(Jack Factor: $1,000)

Mötley Crüe,
Too Fast for Love
(1982, Elektra): Perhaps you're wondering why I'm including this album instead of
Shout at the Devil,
the Crüe record I so aggressively pimped in the opening pages of this book. Well, two reasons: for one thing, I'm sick of talking about
Shout
, and—quite frankly—this is a better LP.

I've never been too crazy about the popular opener “Live Wire,” a song Mötley still plays in every concert. However, I adore “Come On and Dance” (even though it's almost impossible to dance to) and “Public Enemy #1” (even though the lyrics never mention what atrocity our antagonist supposedly committed).
Too Fast for Love
was originally released by the band independently on Lethur Records (they tossed them into club audiences while Nikki Sixx's boots burned), and the Elektra re-release still seems a little cheap; Vince Neil's vocals sound
shallow, and at least in this instance it's not his fault. The guitars all sound like they're made of tin, but that gives everything an aluminum sheen. Light metal (or metal lite), I suppose.