Fargo Rock City (25 page)

KISS,
Lick It Up
(1983, PolyGram): This was the first KISS record to feature the band unmasked (which somehow didn't happen on
Unmasked
), and it's the only one where psychopathic axe genius Vinnie Vincent was on board for all the playing and composition. Vincent clearly dominated the songwriting sessions (he gets credit on eight of the ten tracks), and
Lick It Up
sounds vastly unlike all previous KISS records. The other guys in KISS swear he's a jackass, but Vinnie's artistic template ultimately set the direction for the band's next four or five efforts.

When left to his own devices, Vincent plays incredibly fast. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley forced him to slow down and play behind the beat, which was an attempt to mimic Ace Frehley's style (Simmons refers to this as the “monster plod”). The only song where Vinnie is able to shred maniacally is “Fits Like a Glove,” which is (ironically) one of the only two songs he didn't help write.

By and large,
Lick It Up
is a pretty good hard rock record and the catalyst for KISS' recovery as a platinum-selling artist. It's got quite a bit of filler (which was an all-too-common problem on every KISS record from the '80s), but the better stuff—“Fits Like a Glove,” “All Hell's Breaking Loose,” and the title cut—proved that Paul and Gene could make competitive, contemporary metal music for a second (third?) generation of KISS fans. If
Lick It Up
had tanked, one might speculate that KISS would have folded—or maybe they just would have reunited with Ace and Peter ten years earlier.
(Jack Factor: $125)

W.A.S.P.,
Live … in the Raw
(1987, Capitol): After three studio albums, W.A.S.P. had quickly established themselves as the most sexually depraved rock band in America. As far as Tipper Gore and the Parent's Music Resource Center were concerned,
W.A.S.P. was Public Enemy No. 1, mostly because they liked to pretend they were butchering women onstage. Tipper Gore was actually the best thing that ever happened to W.A.S.P.; thanks to the PMRC, the band got famous for a song virtually no one in America had ever heard—“Animal (Fuck Like a Beast),” a track that Capitol refused to release (and was subsequently distributed as an “underground single” on the Music for Nations label).

That song isn't on this record, but most of W.A.S.P.'s better material is. None of their studio albums were spectacular; the best was probably 1985's
The Last Command,
which was recently re-released with a bonus cover of Mountain's “Mississippi Queen.” (For reasons that shall forever remain unknown, the entire W.A.S.P. catalog was re-released by Snapper Music in 1998, as if these works were somehow lost musical treasures that demanded further examination.)

W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless was briefly the tour drummer with the New York Dolls, which basically meant he understood showmanship (if not necessarily musicianship). Almost all of these songs improve when played live, particularly “9.5 Nasty” and “Harder Faster.” There's also a nice segue between Humble Pie's “I Don't Need No Doctor” and “L.O.V.E. Machine,” two songs about needing medical attention but having sex instead. Lawless described himself as a “Manimal” who slept in a fire and had to ride an intoxicated horse from Long Beach to Los Angeles, much of which I suspect is untrue. Though I can no longer understand what seemed so appealing about buckets of blood and raw meat, these guys definitely had their gooey paws on the metal community's pulse in 1987. If only they had been willing to perform oral sex on each other, I'm sure they could have been Marilyn Manson.
(Jack Factor: $129.99)

Judas Priest,
British Steel
(1980, CBS Records): I'm a bit disappointed this album didn't make me want to kill myself, but I still enjoy it immensely. It has a sense of credibility that most metal albums lack, although you'd never guess that if your only exposure was the ultra-stupid track “Metal Gods.”

Yet for all practical purposes,
British Steel
defines all the stereotypes of the metal genre: screaming, soaring vocals; screaming, soaring guitars; booming bass; machine gun drums. It's impossible to deconstruct a song like “Breaking the Law,” nor can you deny the tight, clean perfection of “Living After Midnight.” By all accounts,
British Steel
is a cornerstone of late-twentieth-century hard rock, even if a few of the songs manage to be really heavy and really lame at the same time. And I'm still waiting for “United” to become a gay anthem.
(Jack Factor: $160)

Junkyard,
Junkyard
(1989, Geffen): This L.A.-based band got an incredible amount of mileage from the fact that Axl Rose wore a Junkyard T-shirt to a GNR photo shoot and was subsequently shown promoting the band in about two dozen different photographs in five different metal magazines. Rose might have done that because he liked Junkyard, or he might have done that because Junkyard was on Geffen and somebody in a blue suit told him it would be a fine idea to pretend he was a fan. Either way, it worked—it seemed like everybody had heard of this group before they ever released any records.

My gut tells me Axl probably
did
like Junkyard, mostly because they had the same sort of trashy, hooker-hungry, just-an-urchin-livin'-under-the-street appeal. Vocalist David Roach sounded a lot like Vince Neil (in fact, when I heard “Hollywood” I thought it was Mötley Crüe), and he was especially Axl-esque at combining depression with semidangerous anger. “Hands Off” is maybe the best metal song ever written about having a woman break your heart; when Roach says “God
da-amn,
” he may as well be Hank Williams.
(Jack Factor: $172)

Heavy Metal,
Music from the Motion Picture (1981, Elektra): This movie is pretty lousy if you're sober and/or an adult, and the soundtrack should be either glammier or skankier, or maybe both. But it does have the best Sammy Hagar ever recorded (“Heavy Metal”), the only decent post-Oz Sabbath tune (“The Mob Rules”), some foxy witch rock (Stevie Nicks's “Blue
Lamp”), and some nifty math rock (Devo's “Working in a Coal Mine”). Nine of the sixteen tracks have magnificent intros, so the album makes for wonderful car music in the summer. It's also fun to get drunk and cry during “Open Arms,” and maybe even call your ex-girlfriend and apologize for things that actually happened in an altogether different relationship with an altogether different person. Just trust me on this one. Steve Perry is a fucking genius.
(Jack Factor: $180)

Ace Frehley,
Frehley's Comet
(1987, Megaforce): I'm not exactly sure what Ace Frehley did between his 1982 departure from KISS and this '87 debut. I do know he smashed a Porsche in Connecticut and was arrested for driving 110 m.p.h. in a DeLorean on the Bronx River Parkway, and I have to believe he was pretty wasted during both of those incidents because he always seems to combine both events into one singular story. That patchwork narrative became the premise for the song “Rock Soldiers,” the first cut on
Frehley's Comet.

Ace's problem as a frontman was always abundantly obvious: His voice is terrible. But that's also his strength; like Jimi Hendrix and Courtney Love, his stunning inability to sing on key makes his music charming. KISS fans adored his contributions to
Love Gun
and
Dynasty,
as well as his exceptional 1978 effort, easily the best of the ill-fated KISS solo albums. And through most of the 1980s,
Frehley's Comet
sounded more like KISS than KISS did.

The value of
Frehley's Comet
is its quirkiness. I think it's cool that Anton Fig is the drummer. I like the tune that sounds like Journey (“Calling to You”) and I love the song that sounds like a combination of Ted Nugent and the Jeff Twilley Band (“Love Me Right”). I find it intriguing that a male rock star would write a song that pays tribute to his doll collection (“Dolls”). And I am forever amused by Frehley's obsession with making sure all of his lyrics rhyme
exactly.
Dave Barry once pointed out that Steve Miller found a way to rhyme the word “Texas” with the phrase “What the facts is” (in that same song, Miller also managed to pair the word “justice” with the phrase “other people's taxes”).
Poets refer to this literary device as “slant rhyme.” Ace would never be so bold. His lines are always stiff, parallel rhymes—except for one awkward attempt to pair his own surname with the line “Don't be silly.” Oh well.
(Jack Factor: $199)

KISS,
Animalize
(1984, PolyGram): This was the best KISS effort from the sans makeup years, and it was pretty much Paul Stanley's baby (by this point, Gene Simmons was becoming infatuated with his film career and putting no effort whatsoever into songwriting). In fact, if you listed the twenty best KISS songs of all time,
Animalize
is the only post-Kabuki album that would have a tune to offer, the yowl-driven single “Heaven's On Fire.” This was an extremely popular song in my junior high, and it prompted my neighbor to create a naughty little parody of the chorus: “Feel my meat / Watch my cock rise / Burn with me / My ass is on fire.” Granted, this was only slightly more polished than “Weird” Al Yankovic, but I still think it was pretty clever for a sixth-grader who was burdened with the nickname “Ippy.”

Animalize
is the only KISS record that features Mark St. John on guitar; soon after making the record, he contracted an incredibly rare arthritic disorder that caused his left hand to swell to the side of a midsize rhinoceros. St. John would eventually recover and form White Tiger, a band most people mistakenly called “White Lion” or “Glass Tiger,” which wouldn't have been a big deal if those hadn't been the names of other bands who were already more popular. But to be fair, St. John actually does a damn nice job on this LP, especially when you consider he was fundamentally a studio hack and was clearly instructed to play like one.

Beyond “Heaven's On Fire,” the tune everyone seems to remember off
Animalize
is “Burn Bitch Burn,” the closest Simmons ever came to writing a straightforward joke song (except of course for “Domino,” which hopefully
is
a joke). The most memorable lyric was “When love rears its head, I want to get on your case / Ooh baby, I wanna put my log in your fireplace.” We all thought this was hilarious … except for Ippy, who probably considered it to be a little lowbrow.
(Jack Factor: $200)

Tesla,
The Great Radio Controversy
(1989, Geffen): This was glam metal to play inside the cab of a tractor—bluesy, denim, and downright
wholesome
: On “Be a Man,” former cement truck driver Jeff Keith tells us to “do right by the ones you love, and always lend a helping hand.” According to Tesla, this is what it takes to be a man. I guess nobody informed them that life ain't nothin' but bitches and money, and that's beautiful.

Traditionalists usually prefer their harder-rocking debut (1986's
Mechanical Resonance
) and kids who played hackey sack enjoyed 1990's deadheaded
Five Man Acoustical Jam,
but
The Great Radio Controversy
is still the best record Tesla ever made. It melds nonelectric instruments with unglossy riffing, and even a little Neil Young-ish pregrunge on “Heaven's Trail (No Way Out).” Unlike their peers, Tesla ignored the temptation to make formulaic power ballads and wrote normal AM radio relationship tunes, the best example being the bittersweet “Love Song.” Of course, I still can't understand why the fuck this band cared who “really” invented the radio, and I still occasionally catch myself mispronouncing their name “Telsa,” just like every other kid at my school. Come to think of it, we always seemed to erroneously call their first album
Mechanical Renaissance
too. Maybe Tesla turns kids into mindless deadheads (which I suppose is a pretty blatant oxymoron).
(Jack Factor: $217)

Mötley Crüe,
Girls Girls Girls
(1987, Elektra): This is the Crüe's “dark” album, mostly because it's about drugs instead of the devil. Written by Nikki Sixx during the depths of his smack addiction, it's supposed to be about fucking strippers, but it's really about being fucked in the head. On “Wild Side,” Vince Neil tells us that “A baby cries / A cop dies / A day's pay on the wild side.” It seems that Sixx forgot to mention if this is supposed to be good or bad; judging from the context, he could really go either way.
Girls Girls Girls
ends up being a very nihilistic project, probably by accident; when Nikki tried to write a nihilistic album
on purpose
in 1994, it was slightly less successful than the introduction of New Coke.

The music on
Girls
… is more consciously bluesy than the other Crüe albums, hence the horrific live cover of “Jailhouse Rock.” I tend to like the first three songs on side two (especially “Five Years Dead,” mostly because it sounds like they're saying “
Bach
is dead,” which actually makes more sense), and I've always enjoyed the sentimental throwaway “Nona,” a tribute to Sixx's dead grandma (which is especially touching when followed by “Sumthin' for Nuthin',” a song about having sex with grandmas who are still alive). Of course, I'm not exactly sure how any of this was supposed to fit the image they were fostering at the time: Mötley had evolved from '81's “glam metal” to '83's “shock rock” to '85's “glitter pop,” finally settling on this incarnation—some kind of leather-clad biker persona that mostly seemed like an homage to Al Pacino's
Cruisin'.
But you know, whatever.
(Jack Factor: $229)

Warrant,
Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich
(1989, Columbia): The first release by the very first band I ever saw play live (May '89, West Fargo Fairgrounds, opening for Great White and Ratt), this magnum opus was dedicated to a girl who “lost her cherry but that's no sin / she's still got the box the cherry came in.” That's pretty vapid and so are most of these lyrics, but it's the yummy kind of vapid. The album opens with a song about living on thirty-two pennies in a Ragú jar, but by the start of side two they want to light cigarettes with hundred-dollar bills and wear ocelot pelts to the farmer's market in rural Ohio, which is evidently what you do when you're a Down Boy.