Fargo Rock City

A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

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Empirically proving that -- no matter where you are -- kids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman's hilrious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakotoa (population: 498). 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.

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Scribner |
288 pages |
ISBN 9780743406567 |
May 2002

$15.00 List Price

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Praise

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“Kirkus Reviews This is what Lester Bangs would have written had he been a farmboy raised on a diet of Skid Row and KISS. Unfailingly smart and demonically opinionated... ”

“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 Mötley Crüe... ”

“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. ”

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Read an Excerpt

Chapter One: October 26, 1983

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...