Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

the opposite is true. I think the fact that Joel divorced the woman he wrote this song about makes it his single greatest achievement.

When I hear “Just the Way You Are,” it never makes me think about Joel’s broken marriage. It makes me think about all the perfectly scribed love letters and drunken e-mails I have written over the past twelve years, and about all the various women who received them. I think about how I told them they changed the way I thought about the universe, and that they made every other woman on earth unattractive, and that I would love them unconditionally even if we were never together. I hate that those letters still exist. But I don’t hate them because what I said was false; I hate them because what I said was completely true. My convictions could not have been stronger when I wrote those words, and—for whatever reason—they still faded into nothingness. Three times I have been certain that I could never love anyone else, and I was wrong every time. Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies, just as “Just the Way You Are” undoubtedly reminds Joel of his.

Perhaps this is why I can’t see Billy Joel as cool. Perhaps it’s because all he makes me see is me.

(Monkees = Monkees interlude)

Last year I had to go to one of those “adult” parties. I think you know the kind of party I mean: People brought their screaming children and someone inexplicably served fresh cornbread, and half the house stood around and watched the local news affiliate when it came on at 11:00 P.M. I spent the whole evening in the kitchen with the two guys I came with; we tried to have an exclusionary conversation despite the fact that we consciously drove to this party in order to be social. Most of the guests began to exit at around midnight, which is the same time some odd fellow I’d never seen before suddenly appeared next to the refrigerator and pulled out a Zippo lighter and a little wooden box.

The gathering took a decidedly different turn.

Ten minutes later, I found it necessary to mention that Journey was rock’s version of the TV show Dynasty. This prompted a spirited debate we dubbed “Monkees = Monkees.” The goal is to figure out which television show is the closest philosophical analogy to a specific rock ’n’ roll band, and the criteria is mind-blowingly complex: It’s a combination of longevity, era, critical acclaim, commercial success, and—most important—the aesthetic soul of each artistic entity. For example, the Rolling Stones are Gunsmoke. The Strokes are Kiefer Sutherland’s 24. Jimi Hendrix was The Twilight Zone. Devo was Fern-wood 2-Night. Lynyrd Skynyrd was The Beverly Hillbillies, which makes Molly Hatchet Petticoat Junction. The Black Crowes are That ’70s Show. Hall & Oates were Bosom Buddies. U2 is M*A*S*H (both got preachy at the end). Dokken was Jason Bateman’s short-lived sitcom It’s Your Move. Eurythmics were Mork & Mindy. We even deduced comparisons for solo projects, which can only be made to series that were spawned as spin-offs. The four Beatles are as follows: John = Maude, Paul = Frasier, George = The Jeffersons, and Ringo = Flo. David Lee Roth’s solo period was Knots Landing.

So there’s proof: Marijuana makes you smarter.

5 Appetite for Replication 0:56

She is not a beautiful woman.

She is not necessarily repulsive, I suppose, but no one is going to suspect this woman is an upstart actress or an aspiring model. One assumes there aren’t a lot of actresses or models in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and one assumes even fewer would be working in a roadside cafe at 5:55 A.M. on Saturday morning. But for the next ten minutes, this aging red-haired woman is being treated like the foxiest rock chick in Appalachia. For a few post-dawn moments on this particular Saturday, she might as well be Tawny Kitaen.

“Do you like Guns N’ Roses?” asks Randy Trask, the be spectacled twenty-eight-year-old who talks more than the other five people at the table combined. “We’re a Guns N’ Roses tribute band. I’m Axl. We’re doing a show tonight in Harrisonburg. You gotta come. It’s only like four hours away. Bring all your girlfriends. It’s going to be insane. They love us in Harrisonburg. But I need to see you there. I’m the singer. I play Axl.”

The waitress blushes like a middle-school crossing guard and calls Trask a sweetheart. She tells us that she can’t come to the show because her grandfather is dying, and you can tell she’s not lying. In a weird way, this might be flirting. When she leaves to fetch our pancakes, Trask glows like the MTV logo, circa 1988. Before we leave the restaurant, he will give this not-so-anorexic waitress a hug and aggressively declare that we will stop back to see her on our way home tomorrow afternoon.

“Exit 175. Remember that. This restaurant is off Exit 175,” he says when we crawl back into the pickup. “What did I tell you? There’s just something about me and redheads.”

• • •

In truth, Mr. Trask should be a redhead. His overt blondness—along with the fact that he’s six-foot-four—makes him look more like David Lee Roth than W. Axl Rose, and he knows it. “I am going to dye my hair red. That is definitely in the works,” he says. “It’s just that the last time I tried, it turned sort of pink. And for some reason, people get scared of you when you have red hair. I don’t know why that it is, but it’s true. They just don’t warm up to you the way they do if you’re blond.”

Trask tells me this at ten minutes to midnight while we sit in his 1997 extended-cab Ford Ranger pickup, which we will drive from Cincinnati to northern Virginia for tomorrow night’s rock show. It’s roughly a ten-hour drive, so leaving in the middle of the night should get us to town just in time to check into the Hampton Inn for an afternoon nap. There is some concern about this, because the last time Trask and his band mates in Paradise City were in Harrisonburg they were banned for life from the Econo Lodge. This weekend, they need to make sure things go smoothly at the Hampton; there just aren’t that many hotels in Harrisonburg.

Our pickup is sitting outside the home of Paul Dischner, and the engine is idling. Like Trask, Dischner is striving to be someone else; he’s supposed to be Izzy Stradlin, Guns N’ Roses original rhythm guitar player. In the band Paradise City, everybody is supposed to be someone else. That’s the idea.

“I initially had a problem with the idea of doing a Guns N’ Roses tribute, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was discrediting Axl. That was always my main concern. If Axl was somehow against this, I’d straight up quit. I would never do this if he disapproved,” Trask says. “But I really think we can do his songs justice. People constantly tell me, ‘You sound better than Axl,’ but I always say, ‘Whoa now, slow down.’ Because I like the way I sing Axl’s songs, but I love the way Axl sings them. That’s the main thing I’m concerned about with this article: I do not want this to say anything negative about Guns N’ Roses. That’s all I ask.”

I am the first reporter who has ever done a story on Paradise City. This is less a commentary on Paradise City and more a commentary on the tribute band phenomenon, arguably the most universally maligned sector of rock ’n’ roll. These are bands mired in obscurity and engaged in a bizarrely postmodern zero-sum game: If a tribute band were to completely succeed, its members would no longer have personalities. They would have no character whatsoever, beyond the qualities of whomever they tried to emulate. The goal is not to be somebody; the goal is be somebody else.

Though the Beatles and Elvis Presley were the first artists to spawn impersonators, the modern tribute template was mostly set by groups like Strutter, Hotter than Hell, and Cold Gin, all of whom toured in the early nineties by looking, acting, and singing like the 1978 version of KISS. It worked a little better than anyone could have expected: People would sooner pay $10 to see four guys pretending to be KISS than $5 to see four guys playing original songs nobody had ever heard before. And club owners understand money. There are now hundreds—probably thousands—of rock bands who make a living by method acting. There’s the Atomic Punks, a