Fargo Rock City (7 page)

You can see this way back with his material as vocalist for Black Sabbath. Sonically, the music was very powerful—but those riffs and song structures came from guitarist Tony Iommi, a very authoritarian person (at least within the internal scope of Sabbath). Iommi made all the band's decisions; Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward were flat-out scared of him. The inevitable result was that Ozzy made up lyrics that were intimidating on the surface but completely vulnerable underneath. “I Am Ironman,” said Ozzy, but his Ironman was not a classic superhero: He was seeking revenge against the people who didn't appreciate him, and he was a sympathetic (in fact, almost tragic) figure. In the song “Dirty Women,” Osbourne insists he's depressed and in need of companionship, but the best he can do is make a deal with a pimp who has “take-away women for sale.” On the cryptic acid track “Fairies Wear Boots,” Ozzy goes to his doctor because he's having bizarre hallucinations. The physician says he can't be helped “because smoking and tripping is all that you do.” Those lyrics were probably supposed to create a persona of over-the-top madness, but that's not how it felt to the listener (at least not to this one). The desperation in Oz's voice made it all seem a little sad. It romanticized the lifestyle, but in a calamitous sense; the song promoted LSD, but it also seemed
to indicate that Ozzy knew he was spiraling to destruction. This goes a long way toward explaining why Sabbath's material stands up over time. There is a human quality to the music that other metal bands can't replicate.

Osbourne's solo work generates the same ideas. The title track from
Bark at the Moon
was about losing control of one's personality. It was the kind of subject that demanded a scary guitar riff and it provided Osbourne a convenient opportunity to dress like a hairy monster, so I would guess most casual fans merely thought this was “Ozzy being Ozzy” (i.e., “Ozzy being stupid”). But try to look at the clip the way a film critic would critique a Lon Chaney, Jr., werewolf movie. There is almost always an unintentional metaphor to Osbourne's rock.

On that same LP, there's a ballad titled “So Tired,” which is kind of an updated version of the Sab ballad “Changes.” “So Tired” is about the end of a romantic relationship, and this time Ozzy loses twice: Not only does he lose the woman, he also loses the ability to break up with dignity. There's no indication that Ozzy will overcome this, or that he never really needed her to begin with, or even that she'll eventually regret her decision. The final reality is that Osbourne is simply too damn tired to talk her out of leaving. He has tried, and he has failed. She has shattered his heart, so he's just going to fold. He's completely and utterly powerless, and it won't matter how many bats he eats.

This kind of self-loathing is even more obvious on recent Osbourne offerings like “The Road to Nowhere.” In the song's most telling (and most shamelessly literal) line, Ozzy sings, “The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me / It just won't leave me alone.” In fact, he was already expressing these confused, powerless thoughts on the first cut of his first solo record,
Blizzard of Ozz
: “Don't look to me for answers / Don't ask me /
I don't know
” [italics mine]. These are not the words of a man who thinks he's going to dominate anything (or anyone).

Now, this is not to say Rob Halford was 100 percent wrong; quite often, '80s metal
was
about power. But sometimes it was about wishing you had some.

Axl Rose fires guitarist Tracii Guns and joins forces with Slash, finalizing the Guns N' Roses lineup that would record
Appetite for Destruction
.

It might seem odd to list the mere origin of Guns N' Roses as one of metal's most significant dates, mostly because I have no memory of this event whatsoever. Virtually no one does. In fact, I would almost guarantee there isn't one member of GNR who associates this specific anniversary with anything of significance. The date itself might not even be accurate; diehard fans have come to recognize this otherwise unremarkable Thursday as the dawn of Guns N' Roses in a studio apartment on the Sunset Strip, but I suspect the June 6 designation is more akin to the way early Christians decided December 25 was the day Jesus was born.

But if the June 6 date is indeed correct, GNR was created the day after my thirteenth birthday. I would have been at basketball camp, sleeping in a dorm room on the campus of North Dakota State, totally oblivious to the fact that I would one day think W. Axl Rose was the coolest motherfucker on the planet.

One of my best friends is a gay rock writer named Ross Raihala, and Ross once told me he always suspected straight midwestern teens looked at Axl Rose the same way closeted gay teens looked at Morrissey, the British vocalist who fronted the intellectually penetrating and eternally melancholy band the Smiths. When
Raihala first mentioned this, I did not really understand what he meant (or if it was supposed to be a compliment or an insult). But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Rose
did
mean something more than his glam peers, especially for people who lived in the middle of nowhere. For rural kids who were too smart for where they were, but still very much a reflection of rural culture—a “redneck intellectual,” if you will—Axl wasn't just another cool guy in a cooler-than-average band. He was an iconoclast (in the truest sense of the word). He didn't speak for us, but he sort of represented us. And in a weird way, Rose slowly evolved into the first artist of my generation who showed glimpses of an (ahem) “alternative” to the larger-than-life fairy tale of poofy-haired metal that was the template for all my favorite bands (including Guns N' Roses—at least initially). In a few years, flannel-clad grungers would turn that alternative into an art form, and Rose would subsequently become a ridiculous recluse. Nobody got fucked by the Age of Irony as much as Axl.

The term “redneck intellectual” might seem troublesome to some people, and I can understand why. Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it an oxymoron? I would answer all of these questions by saying “no.” It doesn't have a connotation. It describes a person who tries to think critically at an age (and in a place) where critical thinking is almost impossible. And I would guess this scenario occurs almost everywhere in America.

Where I grew up, there were not a lot of people. In fact, there are currently more people in my apartment complex than there were in my hometown. There were no black people, no Hispanic people, no Asian people, no openly gay people, and everyone thought the same way about everything (the major exception being that “Ford vs. Chevy” thing). Now, this does not mean rural North Dakotans are not smart; in fact, the opposite is true. I generally find that midwesterners have far more practical sensibility than people from metropolitan areas; they seem to have a better sense of themselves, and the general education level is higher (this is mostly due to the fact that virtually no one ever drops out of school in a small town and cutting class is almost impossible, so
even the least-educated people have spent twelve years at a desk). In a lot of ways, I loved growing up in Wyndmere. But what the culture lacked (and still lacks) is an emphasis on
ideas
—especially ideas that don't serve a practical, tangible purpose. In North Dakota, life is about work. Everything is based on working hard, regardless of what it earns you. If you're spending a lot of time mulling over the state of the universe (or even the state of your own life), you're obviously not working. You probably need to get back to work. And when that work is over, you will either watch network TV or you will get drunk (or both). Even in moments of freedom, you're never dealing with ideas.

Growing up in this kind of atmosphere is incredibly frustrating for anyone who's interested in anything stretching beyond the conversation at the local Cenex convenience store. If you want to consciously be absurd (which is what I wanted to do
all the time
), there simply aren't too many like-minded people to talk to. The big-city stereotype surrounding redneck intellectuals is that they eventually go to college and are amazed by all the different people they meet. I actually had the opposite experience; I was shocked to find people who
were
like me.

Still, we are all products of our environment, even if we like to pretend otherwise. So let's say you
are
the smartest sixteen-year-old in town; let's assume you're creative and introspective and philosophical. You still have a finite number of social tools to work with. You're only going to apply those espoused intellectual qualities to the redneck paradigm that already exists. You may indeed be having “deep thoughts,” but they're only deeper versions of the same ideas that are available to everyone else.

This is where Axl Rose fits into the equation. Musically and visually, Axl stayed within the conventional metal zone. He had a Jagger strut and a Plant howl, long hair and leather pants, and he got quoted in
Kerrang!
As a musician, Rose appealed to the same contingency that was rooted in
Toys in the Attic, British Steel,
and
Theatre of Pain.
Axl existed within the one artistic paradigm that a midwestern white boy was going to consume: For lack of a better term, he “rocked.”

But Rose was also the most compelling figure within the metal mix. If the thoughts of the redneck intellectual only gravitate along one linear path (and I'm arguing that they did, at least for me), Rose resided on that path's most cognitive extreme. This wasn't because he was necessarily smarter; it's just because he offered a little more to think about.

In the controversial documentary
Kurt and Courtney,
there's footage of a seventeen-ish Kurt Cobain attending a birthday party with an old girlfriend. When I saw that scene, I was shocked by how much he resembled the
GNR Lies
-era Rose. It's well-documented that these two icons desperately hated each other, and—as the two biggest groups of the early '90s—they were often pitted as rivals. The British music weekly
New Music Express
once called Nirvana “the Guns N' Roses it's okay to like” (apparently,
NME
perceives every popular American band exactly the same). The groups even got into a minor shoving match at the 1992 MTV Music Awards, although that altercation can probably be blamed on Courtney Love's hypocritical idiocy.

Axl initially loved Nirvana (he wore a Nirvana baseball cap in the “Don't Cry” video and wanted Nirvana to serve as the opener for the ill-fated '92 Metallica/Guns tour), but Cobain essentially thought Rose was a doofus, so Axl decided Kurt was a queer (or a poseur, or a pretentious asshole, or some damn thing that he probably would never say now that Cobain is dead). But these two guys share a lot of similarities—certainly more than either was ever willing to recognize. Besides strikingly similar facial features and an overlapping audience, they both offered an image that specifically appealed to lost kids with inexplicable rage. Axl did this first, and his tools were hostility and confusion. Cobain came a few years later, and he used personal angst and sexual tolerance (ultimately, Kurt's methods proved to be more effective).
^A
Comparing the two men is kind of like comparing a
black-and-white photo with its negative: They are totally opposite, yet they're completely the same.

What they shared is a human element; they seemed real. There was a certain depth to their character. Granted, this is partially due to their popularity; when the media covers a rock band, they really only cover the vocalist, so singers from the most popular bands always have more opportunities to seem interesting (the third person to follow in this lineage was Eddie Vedder, and for many of the same reasons). But this process works both ways. During their first months in the spotlight, there was something about Rose and Cobain (and, to a lesser extent, Vedder and Trent Reznor) that made me want to know more about them. It was an undefined fascination that I did not feel for people like Tom Keifer or Dave Pirner; though I liked Cinderella and Soul Asylum very much, my interest did not go too far beyond the musical product. Almost instantaneously, Axl Rose came across darker, more dangerous, and more credible than his peers. That's partially to his credit and partially due to my own naivete. He put himself in a position where I could comfortably lionize him. Rose was hard rock's equivalent to U2's Bono.

If you're the type who thinks comparing Rose to Cobain is off-putting, the comparison to Bono might seem downright insulting. Serious U2 fans tend to be completely humorless (at least when they talk about early U2 records), and they award Bono an almost religious respect. This is because they feel Bono “stands
for something.” Even when U2 decided to become the '90s version of KISS and evolved into a bloated commercial monster, U2 fans insisted this was “camp.” To rational outsiders, it seemed like U2 was ripping off the blind old fans who refused to judge them as a mortal rock band. And maybe they were. But—if that was truly the case—I give Bono well-deserved kudos for his ability to sell himself as a messianic figure during the 1980s and then reap the capitalistic rewards for that performance ten years later. He's a cagey charlatan.