Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

The singular upside to the photo shoot was the cookies; someone was responsible for providing Britney with warm chocolate chip cookies at all times, and they were fucking awesome.

The Edge was open about his support for John Kerry, but Bono—supremely aware that he will have to work with whomever wins—remained staunchly nonpartisan. “I have forsaken my ability to talk about this issue,” he said, and I find it hilarious that he actually used the word forsaken. For the past twenty-five years, countless people have referred to Bono as “messianic.” Now he actually talks like Jesus.

The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is mildly Zen: there are public road signs that say “Gusty Winds May Exist.” This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.

Stone says Kilmer has substantially matured over the years, noting that the death of Kilmer’s father in 1993 had an immediate impact on his emotional flexibility. “We didn’t have the greatest relationship when we made The Doors,” he says. “I always thought he was a technically brilliant actor, but he was difficult. He can be moody. But when we did Alexander, Val was an absolute pleasure to work with. I think part of his problems with The Doors was that he just got sick of wearing leather pants every day.”

We begin discussing what constitutes the definition of religion; Kilmer thinks an institution cannot be classified as a religion unless God is involved. When I argue that this is not necessarily the case, Val walks into the house and brings out the Oxford English Dictionary; I’m not sure how many working actors own their own copy of the OED, but this one does. The print in the OED is minuscule, so he begins scouring the pages like Sherlock Holmes. He pores over the tiny words with a magnifying glass that has an African boar’s tusk as a handle. He finds the definition of religion, but the OED’s answer is unsatisfactory. He decides to check what Webster’s Second Unabridged Dictionary has to say, since he insists that Webster’s Second was the last dictionary created without an agenda. We spend the next fifteen minutes looking up various words, including monastic. So this, I suppose, is an illustration of how Val Kilmer is weird in unexpected ways: he’s a Christian Scientist, and he owns an inordinate number of reference books.

This is the kind of insight that makes talking to an established movie star so unorthodox: Kilmer remembers that his girlfriend wearing a certain hat was a big deal, but he doesn’t think it was a big deal that the girlfriend was Cindy Crawford. Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. He mentions that he is almost embarrassed by how cliché his life has become, despite the fact that the manifestation of this cliché includes buffalo ownership.

But what was so intriguing about this guy was that he intended to turn his pastime into a full-time job; he hoped to make a living by looking like Morrissey’s clone. However, he didn’t have much of a strategy for making this a reality. I remember asking him, “How will you earn money by looking like Morrissey, considering that you don’t do anything else?” He said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure I could do in-store appearances around Los Angeles and San Francisco whenever a new Morrissey album is released.” This seemed like a dangerous career move, particularly since Morrissey once went eight years without releasing an album. “That’s a good point,” he said when I mentioned that fact. “Maybe I’ll have to do in-store appearances for Johnny Marr solo albums, too.”

To argue that Morrissey’s contemporary audience skews Hispanic would be inaccurate; Morrissey’s contemporary audience is Hispanic, at least in L.A. Of the 1,400 people at this year’s convention, at least 75 percent of the ticket buyers—virtually all under twenty—were Latino. For reasons that may never be completely understood, teenage Hispanics tend to be the only people who still care about Manchester’s saddest sack. But they care a lot.

However, when Torres talks about the time he met Morrissey at an in-store record signing, he illustrates the most confusing aspect of neo-Moz culture: just about everybody who’s ever seen or heard Morrissey assumes he is gay—except for these Latino kids. “I kissed Morrissey once,” Torres says. “I kissed his hand. I wish I would have kissed him, but his hand was good enough. But I’m not gay or anything. It’s just that he’s Morrissey, you know? There is sort of a homophobic vibe among some Latinos, and they seem to think, Well, we like him, so he can’t be gay. But that’s stupid.” Torres’s take is pretty liberal; a few Latinos at the convention concede that Morrissey might be bisexual, but none would classify him as gay. “People are always asking me if I’m gay because I have a photo of Morrissey hugging Johnny Marr,” says Alex Diaz, a sixteen-year-old Smiths fanatic who plans on joining the Marines when he’s old enough. “My friends always ask me, ‘Why do you like these queers?’ But, you know, he’s probably just bisexual. His songs aren’t all about guys. Look at ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’—that’s about a girl.2 I think there probably would be some people who’d hate it if Morrissey ever came out and said he was gay, but, personally, I don’t really care. And like I said, he’s probably bisexual.” Though it’s understandable how a culture that invented the term machismo might be uncomfortable lionizing a gay icon, it’s ironic that Morrissey has now been adopted by two diametrically oppo...

The performances by These Charming Men were clearly the linchpin of the 2002 convention, and Cullen’s attention to detail is remarkable; he’s a good singer and a great actor. The band played for two hours each night, expending more energy than Morrissey himself has offered in years. Fans were expected to rush onstage and hug Cullen while he pretended to ignore them, a simulation of every Morrissey concert since the dawn of time. It’s very postmodern: the audience becomes a “tribute audience,” earnestly simulating hyperkinetic adoration while the band earnestly simulates Meat Is Murder.

“I don’t think a true Morrissey fan would want to see a Morrissey cover band,” Barbu says without a hint of inflection. “Morrissey would be depressed if he showed up here. He’d cry for a week. Have you seen those people around here wearing T-shirts that say ‘Got Morrissey?’ instead of ‘Got Milk?’ It’s ridiculous. Morrissey would hate this.” It’s obvious that Barbu and Hensley are smart, and they’re endlessly, hopelessly sarcastic. There was a time when they would have embodied everything Morrissey seemed to represent. But Moz didn’t hang on to his friends. He found new ones who liked him more. It’s not that Barbu and Hensley feel their subculture has wound up in the wrong hands; it’s just that these neo-Mozzers are too enthusiastic to be properly dour. “People have actually said to me, ‘You like Morrissey? That’s weird for a white guy.’ And I find that completely bizarre,” Hensley tells me, momentarily dropping his veil of irony for a grain of semi-sincere annoyance. “Most of the other people here wouldn’t even know who Jarvis Cocker is. They only like Morrissey. We just came here to make fun of people.” But perhaps that joke isn’t funny anymore.

What’s curious, though, is how eating at McDonald’s somehow became “political” over the eight years that followed. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation came out in 2001, and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me was released in 2004. I interviewed Spurlock for an Esquire column about his movie, and I made it clear that (a) I had once done something vaguely similar to his documentary, and (b) I didn’t think eating at McDonald’s was especially dangerous. I still don’t. But I do think it’s an interesting coincidence that we both thought of trying to prove some larger idea about life through eating fried foodstuffs.

In order to document the effects of the McNugget Diet, I had a physical examination before and after the weeklong experience. I also kept a daily diary of my McNugget pilgrimage. The following text is excerpts from my chronicles. Although I was eventually overcome with madness, my journal provides a fascinating (and sometimes deeply inspirational) account of the McNugget Lifestyle … • • • Day 1: Today I began my journey with a visit to the PRACS, a pharmaceutical research institute in North Fargo. All my vital signs were tested. Despite some initial confusion about my project (I cryptically claimed I was doing “performance testing” on my body), the PRACS staff agreed to assess my condition through a battery of medical procedures. The testing proved I am ridiculously healthy. I am the ideal weight for my height and frame. My resting pulse rate is low and steady. An EKG showed that my heart is absolutely perfect, and my vertical leap measured a whopping thirty-six inches (the vertical leap part is kind of my own personal estimate, but still). It’s been two hours since my exam and, as I write this, I’m eating my first serving: twenty McNuggets and a small orange drink. As expected, the virgin meal is going splendidly. As crazy as this sounds, I can’t fathom not enjoying sweet ’n’ sour sauce. It takes me about twelve minutes to eat twenty nuggets, which (I assume) are roughly equal to a free-range fryer submerged in fat. To be honest, my primary fear is that this undertaking w...

I have learned that covering a nugget in honey and adding a subtle dab of hot mustard is an electrifying combination. Honey also improves the content of the barbecue sauce. On the whole, sweet ’n’ sour is the only flavor that holds up well as an independent condiment. This may all seem boring (and it most certainly is), but it has become a critical part of my existence. I have developed a romantic relationship with the process of dipping. However, the first downside has arisen: I suddenly feel an urge to wash my face every twenty minutes.

You know what’s great about McDonald’s? It’s the last universal place in America. Nobody over the age of six actively aspires to go to McDonald’s but—eventually—everyone does. As I sit in my vinyl booth and scribble these notes into a legal pad, I am surrounded by every aspect of society: angst-ridden teenagers, three boring businessmen, a table of grandparents, one depressed drunk guy, and the most beautiful woman I’ve seen since May of 1993. I wonder if this woman would be impressed if I told her I ate forty McNuggets today? Sadly, the blond bombshell dumps her tray and walks out of the door … and out of my life. My heart is broken. It hurts almost as much as my tummy.

I can no longer live inside this charade: I’m a little sick. I feel like I’ve spent an afternoon drinking Jägermeister with Liam Gallagher. I don’t blame McDonald’s for this (obviously, they did not intend anyone to live on their food), but I’m struggling. Whenever I start to chew, my esophagus contracts and I have to force myself to swallow. It’s not that the nuggets taste horrible; they still taste good. But my body craves anything else. “Where are the Cocoa Puffs?” asks my stomach. “Where is the Franco-American ravioli?” inquires my small intestine. My internal organs must assume I’m in a death camp governed by Mayor McCheese’s secret police.

Day 7: i do not feel very good i think i am dying and although i have not vomited i think it might be fun to do so. my world is crisp and rubbery and dripping with sauce and irony but people are still eating fries. words and their meanings have been swallowed by the deep-fat fryer of social depravity. fast-food culture? ha! there is no such thing. darkness … imprisoning me … all that i see … absolute horror. ronald mcdonald is the harvester of sorrow. actually these nuggets are still pretty decent they taste a lot like chicken.

Man cannot live on bread alone, but he apparently can live on McNuggets. My return to the PRACS Institute for a follow-up exam offered unexpected results: amazingly, both my blood pressure and cholesterol went down. Somehow, I only gained one pound. My vertical leap also improved to forty-one inches. I’m not completely positive how many chunks of poultry I ate over those seven days; the number would fall somewhere between 230 and 280. People have asked me if I will ever eat McNuggets again. Well, of course I will. McNuggets have been good to me. Even before the final chicken came home to roost, my journey had been more sweet than sour.

Everything is bad for you. Food is bad for you. Food—something you need in order to stay alive—is killing you right now. Food hates you. But food cannot be held accountable for its diabolical actions, even if Morgan Spurlock thinks otherwise. Spurlock is the director of the new documentary Super Size Me. The film chronicles Spurlock’s performance-testing on his own thirty-two-year-old body: For thirty days, he ate nothing but food from McDonald’s. If it wasn’t on the menu, he did not consume it. (For example, he wouldn’t even take aspirin, as McDonald’s does not offer pharmaceuticals.) Within the reality of the movie, the results are staggering; Spurlock gains twenty-five pounds, watches his cholesterol spike sixty-two points, shows signs of liver failure, becomes profoundly depressed, and sporadically vomits. The goal of Super Size Me is to illustrate how fast-food restaurants contribute to the overall obesity of America.

Perhaps you thought that lawsuit was frivolous. Well, that’s because it was. It was completely idiotic, as is the entire philosophical premise for this movie. Now, before I get into this, I want to be clear about something. Super Size Me is not an unwatchable movie. It’s generally interesting and always entertaining. Moreover, Spurlock seems like a great guy; he came over to my apartment to screen his documentary on my living-room TV, and he drank four Sierra Nevada beers, and he has a cool-looking Jack McDowell mustache and a vegan girlfriend who vaguely resembles Brady Bunch star Eve Plumb. I hope Spurlock makes money from this movie. In fact, I actively want people to see Super Size Me, if for no other reason than to consider its two problems. The first problem is tangible: Is this movie true? I’m not sure. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. The second problem is ideological: Does this movie make a valid point? No.

I wrote this story on a laptop computer in Austin, Texas. I was staying in the downtown Omni Hotel, and—after finishing the last paragraph—I went up to the hot tub on the roof and drank a beverage. There were two women with me in the water; they were very athletic, very married dancers from some kind of traveling theatrical troupe passing through east Texas. They ignored me completely, but I wordlessly listened to them have an intense (and completely serious) forty-five-minute conversation about (a) which gay male dancers in their theatrical troupe were most physically and intellectually attractive, and (b) whether it would count as cheating if they somehow convinced any of these gay guys to have casual heterosexual sex. Weirdly, their conclusion was that it would only qualify as infidelity if the encounter involved oral sex, since the gay men might then fantasize that they were actually getting blowjobs from other males (which would thereby make the physical exchange “reciprocal”). Obviously, this has nothing to do with Steve Nash. But it just seems like the kind of information people need to know.

We casually shook hands, made some superfluous banter about how the conversation had been friendly, and then—because it was raining—I reached down to get my umbrella off a chair. By the time I returned to an upright position, Steve Nash was already on the other side of the street. It was like someone had taken a laser beam, obliterated every atom in his body, and instantaneously reconstructed his entire anatomy forty feet to the west. This was some Philip K. Dick–Star Trek–vampire shit. And it was also somewhat ironic, because we had spent a large portion of our conversation discussing the very concept of human quickness.

I’ve never watched A.I. shop for baby food, and it’s possible that Nash merely hates getting wet. But the bottom line is that Steve Nash can accelerate in a way that you cannot possibly comprehend. Have you ever seen a college pitcher get struck by a line drive that was hit off an aluminum bat? He’s like that line drive, except faster. So Steve Nash is fast. But here’s the second thing I learned, and this matters more: STEVE NASH IS NOT TECHNICALLY A COMMUNIST. Or at least he’s not a good one, since (as previously stated) he gets paid $63 million for throwing bounce passes to guys who barely graduated high school. In practice, he is a more successful capitalist than Don Lapre. But in theory, Nash is the most successful socialist in contemporary athletics. And socialism works in sports. It doesn’t work in a free society, and it certainly didn’t work in Russia. But the principles of socialism make the Phoenix Suns almost impossible to defend, and that’s due in totality to Nash, a long-haired liberal thriving inside the conservative idiom of sports.

The reason we were talking about political theory is mostly due to a story that ran in The New York Times last January. During a midseason interview, Nash casually mentioned that he had been reading The Communist Manifesto (as well as the autobiography of Che Guevara) on a road trip. One gets the sense that this is the kind of statement he regrets, simply because (a) it ended up becoming the only thing anyone remembers from that story, and (b) it was immediately (and incorrectly) connected to pacifist statements he had made at the 2003 All-Star Game. “I honestly don’t want to say anything controversial to you, because I don’t want to deal with the three weeks that always come with that,” he says when I remind him of this.

“You know, I never came out and trashed George W. Bush or his administration. I just came out and said that I was personally antiwar, and that it was necessary for everybody to go deeper than the mainstream media to understand the situation in Iraq.” In other words, Steve Nash is just as American as you or I, except that he is Canadian. “I still feel like a Canadian living in America, but that doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “Everyone in the world is kind of an American, because America rules the free world.” This is true: despite its current (and seemingly unprecedented) unpopularity, American thought still dominates the planet. But American thought does not dominate team sports. In fact, it tends to work against it. This country’s most successful sports league is the NFL, which (not coincidentally) is also the most socialist; Pete Rozelle’s enforced revenue-sharing was the best move any sports commissioner has ever made.

Unfortunately, every man has flaws. Every man has a sickness, and Nash’s personal cancer was made public during last year’s slam dunk contest, when he bounced a lob pass to Stoudemire off his skull. “I watch much more soccer than basketball,” he tells me, and I think he might even be wearing indoor soccer shoes when he says this. He apparently plays pickup soccer every night, all summer long. “It’s my favorite sport,” he insists. And I’m almost certain he was telling the truth, because both his brother and father played soccer professionally. Somehow, this man really, truly likes soccer more than he loves basketball. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Steve Nash is a communist.

All five band members are being pelted with panties while they jam, but almost all of the lingerie is being thrown by the same woman; she has evidently hauled a duffel bag of women’s underwear into the concert venue. I don’t think most of these panties belong to her (or—if they do—she hasn’t worn them since 1986). The crowd is losing its collective mind. They love it. We love it. And even if we didn’t, there’s not much we could do: we’re a hundred miles from dry land, floating through international waters, listening to an eighteen-song Styx medley that briefly includes “Mr. Roboto.” We are watching a rock concert on a boat. Tomorrow, we will watch another, and that group will be REO Speedwagon; on Friday, we will watch Journey. Seven long days, three arcane bands, one deep ocean. This kind of thing has never been done before. However, it will probably be done again, because everyone involved seems to be absolutely ecstatic.

With the possible exception of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, I have never seen an audience like anything as much as these middle-aged cruise patrons like Styx. And what’s even crazier is that I think they like Journey more. Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me … Two days after Thanksgiving, the Carnival ocean liner Triumph leaves Miami for seven days, scheduled to loop around Cuba and make one-day stops in Cozumel, the Cayman Islands, and Jamaica. This is a standard cruise itinerary. However, this particular voyage is different; this particular trip includes the presence of three bands who have not been famous since the introduction of New Coke. On Monday afternoon, Styx will conduct a casual “question-and-answer” session in the ship’s thousand-seat lounge and then perform that evening in the same intimate location. On Tuesday, REO Speedwagon will follow suit with their own conversation and concert. A friendly Q&A session with Journey is set for Thursday afternoon, but they’re not playing until Friday night, hours before we redock in Florida.

There are three main hurdles involved with the writing and reporting of this story. The first is that the definitive cruise story has already been written by David Foster Wallace, who published the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in 1995; this is evidently the most popular essay ever produced, as roughly six thousand people have mentioned it to me during the forty-eight hours prior to this trip. The second hurdle is my inability to swim, which means this trip could possibly kill me. The third (and strangest) hurdle is that Clear Channel decreed that I cannot interview any of the three musical outfits, nor can I actively participate in any of the Q&A sessions; apparently, the cruise is supposed to be a vacation for the bands, too. In truth, talking to members of Journey doesn’t interest me that much; I much prefer chatting with my Croatian waiter, as he seems to know a great deal about international politics and international heavy metal. He bristles when I tell him I like KISS. “Oof,” guffaws Zeljko. “That is only show! ‘I was made for loving you’? Oof. That is no rock. AC/DC is rock, but only from Bon Scott era, and maybe on Back in Black. Saxon, Judas Priest—these are the rock bands.” Zeljko works on this Carnival cruise line because Serbians bombed his house during the ’90s. Now he supports his wife and kids by refilling my glass with ice water and sending his paycheck across the Atlantic. This makes me so depressed that I briefly consider buying some...

These Carnival cruise patrons stand on one side of a philosophical chasm; demographically, the chasm can be quantified as the aesthetic abyss between (a) people born just before 1960, and (b) people born just after 1980. And what’s fascinating about this gap is that both sides love the same thing: they both love rock music. This is not a case of the youth embracing a completely new idiom their parents can’t fathom, because the idiom is essentially the same; this is a generation gap over virtuosity. Quite simply, the people on this cruise don’t believe modern bands know how to play, and they’re willing to spend $2,500 to see groups who can. “You hit the nail on the head,” Shipman says when I suggest this hypothesis. “I talk to my students about music all the time, and they’re all used to Britney Spears and Madonna and Janet Jackson and all those rap guys. That’s what they consider normal music. But those people are just talking over a beat and dancing—it has more to do with what they wear. It’s not like someone singing and playing guitar and writing all the material and running around the stage while they play it.1 It seems like kids today are more interested in the culture around music than in the music itself.” There might be some grains of truth in what Shipman says. However, it’s possible that kids are more interested in the culture around music simply because that culture is always more interesting, and it always has been. Or at least it was on this boat.

Journey: Christened in 1973 (via a radio contest on KSAN-FM in San Francisco), Journey began as a primarily instrumental jazz collective. Steve Perry joined in 1977; by 1980, they were rich. In that ephemeral era between Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and Van Halen’s 1984, it could be argued that Journey was the world’s most popular arena rock band. However, Journey is not very good at remaining Journey. Perry left the group twice (once in 1986 and again in 1996) and released solo tracks like “Oh, Sherry.” While on hiatus in the mid-’80s, guitarist Neal Schon and keyboardist Gregg Rolie formed a band with John Waite called Bad English. Eight years ago, a re-formed version of Journey added vocalist Steve Augeri, a man who sings like Steve Perry, looks like Steve Perry, talks like Steve Perry, and is (weirdly) even named “Steve.” Journey is, far and away, the most popular band on this cruise ship. I spot two shirtless guys drinking low-carb Michelob Ultra and listening to Journey through a boom box on the ninth-floor sundeck. One of them, forty-five-year-old mechanical contractor Larry Zuccari, has seen Journey thirty-one times; his wedding song was the Journey ballad “Faithfully.” However, his bride is not on this boat. “Both our wives allow us to have this time to ourselves,” Zuccari explains, gesturing to boyhood friend Bill Hagan. “We don’t own bass boats. We don’t bowl. We don’t hang out in bars. We follow Journey. I saw Journey perform at a Wet ’n’ Wild amusement park next to a ...

If you discount the crime and the poverty and the overabundance of goats, Jamaica is a wonderful place. According to our tour guide, this is what life there is like: “You wake up, you ride a donkey to work, you go home to smoke, and you dance with your wife. Easy livin’!” Such logic is hard to argue with. Consequently, the Zen perfectitude of my Jamaican morning makes the afternoon’s question-and-answer session with Journey seem stilted and contrived. The session’s second-best question is directed at drummer Dean Castronovo: “You look so much thinner than I remember—what happened?” (Answer: “I lost fifty-two pounds on the Atkins diet!”) The best question is directed toward Schon: “I have a friend named Ken Miller in Concord, and he says he jams with you guys once in a while, and I’m wondering if he’s telling the truth?” (Answer: “Kevin who?”)

These are two stories from that SPIN metal issue (September 2002). The first is a misguided attempt to prove how all forms of heavy metal actually derive from Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, a theory I never completely believed. The second piece, however, was legitimately entertaining (at least to me). I did this brief (maybe twenty minute) Q&A with Robert Plant over the telephone, and he was tremendous. If given the choice between talking with a hip, relevant artist or talking with an older, salty rock monster from a bygone era, I’ll take the latter every single time. Young musicians are always obsessed with creating a persona and saying the things they think they’re supposed to say; older guys truly don’t care. When I think back at the rock stars I’ve interviewed, the most unpredictable conversations were almost always with people over forty: Plant, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan (who acted like a college professor trying to get fired), Barry Manilow (who criticized Nine Inch Nails for lacking soul), Bono (who seemed to actively want me to analyze his livelihood), and Ozzy Osbourne (who talked about Nazis and riding elephants).

What’s so great about this Plant conversation is that the only thing we really talked about was how much he hates heavy metal, which was the antithesis of why we wanted him in the magazine. He also completely disproves my “Zoso hypothesis,” but that hardly seems surprising. I just wish he would have explained what the fuck a hedgerow is.

Led Zeppelin’s fourth studio album—1971’s unnamed Zoso (so called for the enigmatic symbols on its cover)—is the most famous hard-rock album ever recorded, not to mention a watershed moment for every grizzled old man who’s ever carried a bundle of sticks on his back. Zoso is not Zeppelin’s best album (that would be Houses of the Holy) or their heaviest (Physical Graffiti) or even their “most metal” (Led Zeppelin II). However, it’s the defining endeavor for the band, and for the genre it accidentally created. Epic, ethereal, and eerily sexual, Zoso is the origin of everything that sounds, feels, or even tastes vaguely metallic, except maybe Metallica and that sludge from Scandinavia (both of which come from Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath).

When I started the reporting for this article, their previous album (White Blood Cells) still hadn’t gone gold. As a consequence, I think I unconsciously felt a pressure to “sell” the band to readers, which is why I included a sentence where I refer to the music of the Stripes as “so fucking good.” I regret doing this. I mean, the White Stripes are fucking good, but that sentence sounds completely idiotic.

“People in Detroit know their records.” This is certainly true for the Stripes, who pepper shows with Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” Meg’s rendition of Loretta Lynn’s “Rated X,” and the menacing, tommy-gun riff of Link Wray’s “Jack the Ripper.” Jack explains it this way: “We’ve never covered a song simply because it would be cool or because we’d seem really obscure for doing so. Certain circles of musicians will all get involved with the same record at the same time, and suddenly it will be cool to like the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society for a month. But why didn’t people feel that way three years ago? I’ve always hated the whole idea of record collectors who are obsessed with how obscure something is. Usually when somebody brings up something obscure, I assume it’s not very good, because—if it was—I would have heard it already. Record collectors are collecting. They’re not really listening to music.”

However, there is more to Phantom Coaches than just cars: the group also enjoys celebrating Halloween, hanging out in cemeteries, and listening to “gothabilly” music, which is sort of a synthesis of the Stray Cats with Siouxsie and the Banshees. The highlight of our mass photograph in front of the castle is the appearance of Snow White’s nemesis, the Evil Queen, an über-wicked woman roundly cheered by hundreds of goth minions who evidently see her as some kind of role model. These guys certainly dig the black-hearted bitches. Moments later, an actress portraying the virginal Snow White tries to get into the picture, and everyone boos her into submission.

1:43 P.M.: What do you feed a hungry goth? Apparently, Monte Cristo sandwiches from a restaurant called the Blue Bayou in New Orleans Square. A party of five goths waits for a table in the Blue Bayou’s lobby, and I mention that Disney’s mainstream parkgoers appear oddly unalarmed by the number of people bumping around in capes and hooded death robes. However, these goths feel differently about the level of tolerance. “I was just in one of the stores,” says twenty-eight-year-old chemist Jennifer Nogle, “and all the normals were asking the staff questions like ‘What’s with these people? Are they part of some weird religion?’ Get real.” Nogle’s reference to “normals”—goth slang for nongoths—raises an interesting point: people are constantly asking goth kids what makes someone goth. However, an equally valid question is: What makes someone a normal? “They are not us,” Nogle says with focused conviction. “They wear polo shirts.”

Radiohead was the smartest collection of musicians I’ve ever interviewed, and I have no idea what band would rank second. I do know it wouldn’t be that close. All they wanted to talk about were books. The dumbest guy in Radiohead is still smarter (by himself) than all three members of the Beastie Boys and two-fifths of the Strokes.

There have been countless occasions when I’ve listened to a song and imagined what its words and sounds were supposed to represent, and I inevitably perceive each element to be complex and subtle and conscious. However, when the songwriter eventually explains his thought process during the music’s creation, I often realize that (a) the musician barely cares what the song is supposed to mean, and that (b) I’ve actually invested more intellectual energy into the song than the goddamn artist. Which is fine, I suppose; I mean, my favorite band is KISS, so there are certainly some self-created holes within my argument. But it was still satisfying to discover that Radiohead’s music seems smart on purpose.

O’Brien is the fifth member of the band I have spoken with over the past eight hours, each in a different room of the Old Parsonage. I’ve been rushing from room to room for answers, not unlike the final ten minutes in a game of Clue. O’Brien is the last person I’m speaking with today, and he’s different from the other four guys in the band: he’s significantly taller (six feet five), he’s the only one who doesn’t reside in Radiohead’s native city of Oxford (he lives an hour away in London), and he talks like an intelligent hippie (if such a creature exists). He’s also rumored to be the most “rock-oriented” member of Radiohead, preferring the conventional structures of older songs, like “Ripcord” and “Just.” Here, again, my assumption is wrong. “Do people really think I like straight-ahead rock?” he asks when I bring this up. “There is an irony in that, because I’ve always been more interested in making sounds, which is why I tend to gravitate toward Kid A material. If I ever made a solo record—and I have no plans to do that, but if I did—it would be all ethereal music. I like to smoke. I like a toke or two. So I like music in that vein.”

Colin is both the band’s friendliest and goofiest member and just about the most enthusiastic person I have ever met. Sometimes he closes his eyes for twenty seconds at a time, almost as if the world is too brilliant to look at; there appears to be no subject he is not obsessed with. He tells me I must visit the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to see the stuffed dodo birds (which I do) and insists I check out a cartography exhibit at the Bodleian Library (which I do not). He gleefully mentions having seen a baby deer while driving to the SPIN photo shoot, as if it had been some rare sighting of the Loch Ness monster. He mentions about fifteen different books during our interview and even gives me one as a present (Brian Thompson’s Imperial Vanities). Everyone in this band probably reads more than you do; hanging out with Radiohead is kind of like getting high with a bunch of librarians.

We are inside the Supper Club in Times Square; there is a blizzard on the streets of Manhattan, but the amplifiers are melting inside. The Supper Club is hosting a semi-private party for Showtime’s lesbian soap opera The L Word, and we are experiencing the headline entertainment: Lez Zeppelin, an all-girl tribute to the greatest rock band ever to sing about The Hobbit. Tonight, Lez Zeppelin will play just four songs—“Good Times, Bad Times,” “Black Dog,” “Whole Lotta Love” (including the theremin solo), and “Rock and Roll.” Their replication of these songs is 80 percent flawless and 99 percent awesome. They sound like what would have happened if Heart had somehow written four songs that were all better than “Barracuda.” And there are a few jarring moments when it will feel like the most powerful all-female band in rock history is not the Runaways or L7 or Sleater-Kinney; it will feel like the most powerful all-female band in rock history is four women playing cock rock to a room full of hard-drinking, cable-subscribing lesbians. That might sound sexist (and perhaps it is), but it also might be true.

“I have this theory,” she tells me a few weeks after the L Word gig. “A contractor was going to do some work in my apartment, and I told him about our band. Well, he flipped out; he told me that he saw Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden in 1973. And this big contractor dude—this heavy-duty, heterosexual bricklayer—told me that Robert Plant was the only man he ever wanted to sleep with. My theory is that there were a lot of guys like this contractor: guys who were sexually turned on by Led Zeppelin, because Page and Plant were fucking beautiful. They were thin, they had long, flowing hair—they looked like girls. My theory is that a lot of male Zeppelin fans really did want to sleep with Led Zeppelin. So those kinds of guys love the fact that we’re girls, because they can watch us play those songs and still feel normal. They can actually go there in their mind without freaking themselves out.” So perhaps this phenomenon is a little less political than it seems.

“Some other tribute acts do take this all-girl thing to a totally different level,” Ward says. “We were never trying to be political. We would never say, ‘We’re chicks and we can rock, too!’ I mean, of course chicks can rock. But there are other all-girl bands where that is absolutely their agenda, and they’re feminists and they make feminist statements. We’ve been asked to play at political events and to do fund-raisers, but we always say no. Our agenda is to have no agenda. Rock ’n’ roll has nothing to do with politics. Even if we agree with the politics, we still refuse to do those events, because AC/DC would never do anything like that.”

The first night I watch Lez Zeppelin perform, I presume they are all lesbians. This seems like a valid assumption, inasmuch as (a) they were performing at a party for The L Word, and (b) they are in a band called Lez Zeppelin. After I interview the band in a Manhattan rehearsal space, I decide that my initial math was wrong; I decide that two of them are lesbians and two of them are not. When I see them a third time, I realize that three of them are totally straight (and at least two are totally married). In fact, they might all be straight, for all I know. This is their “mystery,” much like the way the real Led Zeppelin refused to admit whether or not they had sold their souls to the devil in order to receive supernatural rocking power and/or a higher royalty rate from Atlantic Records. “Definitely maybe not,” says drummer Wendy Kershen when I first ask if Lez Zeppelin are predominantly (or partially) homosexual. “But maybe. Maybe, or maybe not. Actually, I had to have a sex change to join this band.” As it turns out, the name Lez Zeppelin is a marketing tool.

Roberta Plant looks a little like Parker Posey; her other band is called Easy, but this band is easier. All she has to do is sing the songs that changed her life. And if men (or women) want to watch her do that simply because she’s a woman, that’s fine; being a woman doesn’t have any impact on why she loves Physical Graffiti and In Through the Out Door. “Actually, the hardest thing is just memorizing the lyrics,” she says. “When I was learning ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ I had to close my eyes and create this entire movie in my head—I had to come up with this entire visual fucking thing, just so I could fucking remember all six verses of this weird-ass shit. I had to look up hedgerow in the dictionary.” Well, so did the rest of us.

Those who keep insisting that The Streets isn’t actually a rap act could use Skinner’s interview posture as proof—he does not talk about the things one has come to expect from hip-hop practitioners. He hasn’t been shot nine times (like 50 Cent), nor does he casually mention murdering people (like Jay-Z). He never praises God or criticizes his biological parents; when he discusses the complexities of “The Game,” he’s usually referring to PlayStation

In a macro sense, they were symmetrical, self-destructive clones; for anyone who isn’t obsessed with rock ’n’ roll, they were basically the same guy. Yet anyone who is obsessed with rock ’n’ roll would define these two humans as diametrically different. To rock aficionados, Dee Dee and the Ramones were “important” and Crosby and Ratt were not. We are all supposed to concede this. We are supposed to know that the Ramones saved rock ’n’ roll by fabricating their surnames, sniffing glue, and playing consciously unpolished three-chord songs in the Bowery district of New York. We are likewise supposed to acknowledge that Ratt sullied rock ’n’ roll by abusing hairspray, snorting cocaine, and playing highly produced six-chord songs on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.