Happy now?
by Matt Worley

I think it was during a church ski trip when I first studied the cover art of Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil." It was very disturbing. I wasn't sure if just holding the pre-folded piece of paper from the cassette would send me to hell directly or take a little bit of time.

Riding in the back of some parent's Bronco, I could envision the fiery car crash that killed us all. The police would find a half-burnt piece of semi-cardboard still clutched in my fist bearing the ugly but strangely fascinating upside down pentagram symbol of "the devil."

"Looks like the devil caught up with this bunch," one officer would say, pulling the paper from my dead hands.

"Damn Satan. He's got his hands in everyone's heart these days," the other would comment as they stood in the eerie firelight waiting for fire trucks.

But the car crash never came, and I found out soon enough that this music wasn't taking me anywhere close to hell.

But it sure did piss off the parents.

Rock music and church were hopelessly intertwined when I was a teenager, but it wasn't always so. Before moving to New Mexico when I was ten, the only radio I knew existed was talk radio. We listened to NPR, Royals' baseball games and sometimes Chiefs' football. There were local talk radio guys in K.C. I heard on occasion, but I don't remember their names. Names didn't matter, and their subjects were only mildly interesting to pre-teens. For music, my brothers and I listened to movie soundtracks (the Muppet Movie and Star Wars), in addition to the huge selection of Broadway musical records my parents bought through mail order. My dad's favorite was Brigadoon. I liked Oliver, but listened to many. I knew all the words to Annie, My Fair Lady and Camelot.

All of this changed when the fam moved to the southwest. There was no talk radio in the small town I grew up in, just Top 40 and country. And since we knew country was bad--if not inherently evil--we listened to Top 40.

But with the advent of Shout At The Devil, music changed. No longer was it confined to the offerings of the radio. There was a huge undercurrent of exciting music that the radio wouldn't play. Within the span of about a year, my favorite band went from Duran Duran to Van Halen to Bon Jovi. Mostly harmless, but the perception was changed. It wasn't guys in suits singing, it was guys in torn up t-shirts--and that was a look I could get into.

Motley Crue was always on the periphery of all of this. Those pentagrams always scared me a little bit, as if that mark was really the mark of the beast. And if I held something bearing the mark, I was part of the beast as well. Forget that most of the songs were all about getting wasted or getting laid or playing rock and roll. The Crue scared and excited me at the same time.

They posed for photos sniffing cocaine through huge carnival straws. They had wild orgies and told everyone about them. And they wore make-up, just like Kiss.

I didn't know all of this had been done before. I knew nothing about Ziggy Stardust, Iggy Pop, the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols. Of rock history, I knew two things: the Beatles (pre-Sergeant Pepper's) and Elvis Presley (pre-fatness). So the fact that we were going through another cycle didn't occur to me. I thought we were covering new ground, and some of it was scary.

But then something changed again. Motley Crue released "Girls, Girls, Girls" to great fanfare in my circle of high school-dom. My older brother taped the song off the radio (they played it on the radio--finally!) and played it every morning right as we were driving into the school parking lot.

And suddenly I realized that all the nights praying to God that I didn't get sucked down into hell because I held an album or listened to a song or danced to Motley Crue didn't matter, because God didn't care about this crap.

Not that I thought less of Motley Crue, just the devil. I didn't fear his influence anymore, because I realized there wasn't an influence, just youthful fantasy.

And now there's Marilyn Manson. The guy--and the band--has taken over the top of the "evil" rock and roll mountain. Even for all of Rob Zombie's theatrics and Addams Family allusions, Manson has got him and the rest of the rock and roll baddies beat. The people at church are scared of him.

Marilyn Manson debuted at number one with their new release, "Mechanical Animals." Like the new Hole album, Manson has eschewed much of his past musical endeavors (the dirty industrial metal sound) for poppier futures. And it will serve him well. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Thank god. I thought we were gonna be drowning in Matchbox 20 blandness, but the future is looking glammy. Get out the cake makeup everyone, the kids want the fantasy rebellion of rock and roll again.

Matt Worley thinks the kids are alright.

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