An ode to Iron Maiden.
The first time I went to an Iron Maiden concert, I was 14 and almost cried when, during “The Trooper,” Steve Harris’ blue bass reflected light like a laser beam into my eyes and momentarily blinded me. I was leaning far too far over the railing and lost my balance. A strong hand pulled me back from falling into the Hollywood Sportatorium’s crowded abyss below. Dude had a fat joint hanging from his open lips. “Hey, man,” he said, “hit this.”
I didn’t then. That came later. But I was high enough that night. I’d been listening to rock and metal since I was 8 years old and heard Kiss Alive II. Seeing Iron Maiden on their Powerslave tour cemented not only my love of metal—it was my first concert, and the ridiculously entertaining Twisted Sister was the opening band—but hanging off that balcony in a cloud of smoke, with leather, neon spandex, and tattered denim all around me, with the music enormous and real in my rib cage, that show tattooed my devotion to Maiden into the very core of my DNA.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of metal bands, and I love all kinds of music, from Marley to Muse to Manu Chao to Mastodon, but nothing I’ve ever listened to has had more pull than Iron Maiden.
The galloping martial groove, the walls of sound, Bruce Dickinson’s siren voice: I was smitten at age 13 when by chance I heard “Flight of Icarus” at a mall in Miami.
A few years later, my buddy Jay picked me up to go to school near the end of his senior year (my junior year). Everybody got out of the back seat as we pulled into the parking lot of Beach High. Jay looked at me over the roof of his brother’s red Scirocco.
“The option is on the table,” he said.
“Orlando or Key West?”
“Whatever. Let’s do this.”
Listen, you’ve been there. An album, a record, a tape, a CD, a file, whatever, that music you can’t let go of ever. We hit the Turnpike, slipped in Powerslave, and rocked our brains to mush, our throats raw, and our necks sore.
In 1988 I went on the first March of the Living, a two week, emotionally wrecking rollercoaster of a teenage tour through concentration camps in Poland that ended in Israel.
After a few celebratory days in Israel, we had a couple of days to spend with friends or family. About a dozen of my very best friends had been spending that whole year—after they’d graduated the year before—learning and working in Israel.
Stuart, who had moved to Israel sometime before and was on leave from military service for the weekend, picked me up at the bus depot. We hugged, got in his parents’ SUV, and he asked what I wanted to listen to.
I pulled out a tape I’d saved for just that occasion: Iron Maiden’s Live After Death. It may have been the first time in my life that I was purposefully and meaningfully ironic. We banged heads and screamed lyrics as he drove through hills of sunlit stone and dusty faces from Tel Aviv to Tiberias.
“Two Minutes to Midnight” was especially cathartic, but when “The Trooper” came on, I looked at Stuart, stopped the tape, and asked him what kind of shit he’d been through in the army so far. He smiled. “What shit?” he said. “Some shit here, some shit there. Tremendous shit. Fuck shit. Put the music back on.”
Somewhere there are pictures that survived that night. We all drank way, way too much beer and Arak. When the festivities began, I was wearing a black and pink Kiss concert tee from the recent Crazy Nights tour. The sun woke us up on a roof. Pebbles in my hair. A different shirt. A rooster greeting, the call of a muezzin, a car alarm: the sounds of dawn. Someone put up coffee.
A couple of years ago, my son asked me about Iron Maiden. He was 12.
I said, “I’m going to properly introduce you to the best metal band ever.”
I printed out Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” and the lyrics to “The Trooper,” one of Maiden’s more famous songs off of Piece of Mind.
“Go to your room and read this poem and the lyrics to this song. Prepare to discuss the similarities and differences in about 15 minutes. Then I’ll play you one of my favorite songs of all time.” It’s got to sometimes suck having an English and Social Studies teacher for a dad.
He came down 10 minutes later, ready to rock.
“These lyrics are like the voice of one of these 500.”
I have taught my padawan well.
We blasted “The Trooper.” My daughter, who was 9, came down the stairs wearing her school skirt and shirt and knee socks.
“Daddy!”
“—“
“Is this Iron Maiden?”
“Mmm hmmm.”
“I like this!”
And it doesn’t end. I’ve skipped the time I sang on stage with the band during “Heaven Can Wait” on the Fear of the Dark tour. I skipped the time my wife and I hung out with the band back stage and had a couple of beers with Dave Murray and Steve Harris. I didn’t tell you how my son and I have jammed “Blood Brothers” in the car and sang every lyric together like it was a Chassidic niggun.
Maybe the martial artist and the reader in me are attracted to the martial rhythm and the lyrics that read like a fantastical comic book university course on Western Civilization. Maybe it’s the power of their guitars and imagery, the drums and bass changing the beat of my heart. I could go on, but I wouldn’t know where to stop. I’m a slave to the power of Iron Maiden forever.
Up the Irons, mates.
photo Adels / Flickr
Brilliant article David, My first Maiden show was in 1984 in Glasgow and that was the day i fell in love with this behemoth of a metal band…..they are much more that now. Having been lucky to see them all over the world (61 times and still going) and meet some amazing members of the Iron Maiden family young and old, i feel privileged and glad they are still with us. In fact a very good friend of mine who has seen Maiden a few times over the years turned to me during the Legacy of the beast concert last… Read more »
My introduction to Iron Maiden, and metal in general, came in the 8th Grade. I grew up on country and gospel music (my parents’ preferences) but by the time I was 13, I was more a fan of New Wave bands like Duran Duran and Adam And The Ants, thanks to MTV. Then one day a boy named Art — he had long hair, wore a battered denim jacket every day and sat next to me in Study Hall — gave me a mixtape that had a number of songs on it by hard rock and heavy metal bands, including… Read more »
KatyD, Thank you for sharing your story. Your experience is very familiar for a lot of us metal heads, I think. My first intro to them after hearing “Flight of Icarus” at the mall was buying a tape of Piece of Mind from a friend who had recorded his older brother’s album. Bunch of 7th graders had a little business going on selling recordings of their older siblings’ and parents’ albums. I was hooked and well prepped by the time Powerslave came out and I went to that show. Saw them time and again at the Somewhere in Time tour,… Read more »
Right on; David, it sounds like you are a powerslave probably for many of the same reasons I am. I listen to British rock and heavy metal for all the reasons you listed, but mainly for the depth of meaning and finely crafted songs. From Greek mythology to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it’s all there, man; exquisitely literate lyrics blended with the sonic velvet thunder of the Maiden metal sound. Many people think it’s just noise, but to those of us that came of age when metal ruled the world and Iron Maiden was the most powerful of rare earths, that… Read more »
So awesome to read your comment. Thank you so much for sharing. I most definitely share your sentiments and I’m amazed at how you cut to the core of our different experiences sharing that common element of doing something outside of ourselves, our comfort zones.
Thank you, as well, for your service.