PC

Sun 2 Mar 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

In the early 80s metal bands were pretty politically aware. Well, not sure if that’s what Iron Maiden qualify as. Metal, that is. They always seemed like a hard rock band more than heavy metal monsters—despite their predilection for a certain monster, Eddie. Yes, they were part of the New Wave of NWBHM Heavy Metal (could have picked a better acronym than NWBHM), but listen to this lovely pop song (the sound quality on this video is pretty poor) and see what you think.

Hmm. Iron Maiden are playing in LA during BookExpo. Tempting. Haven’t seen them since 1987.

This posted due to someone with a sense of humor giving me a CD of Number of the Beast at some point and me digging it up today while at work. I don’t know how often the CD will be played but it is clean, crisp old-fashioned somewhat-familiar rock’n’roll and is refreshingly noisy. Tomorrow will be time enough for calmer climes.

One funny thing is that I remember most of these songs pretty well (they were used to wake me up when I was 12 so they’re pretty deeply worn into the failing brainpan) except “Total Eclipse.” Without doing further digging to see if I still have a tape of the original album I suspect the reason is that that song may not have made it on to my tape.* Funny. It’s an ok song and there’s some fun Maiden-y time signature change-ups in the second half. Who knows why it didn’t make the cut. Funny to have it now as basically a new 26 y.o. song.

It’s ok Jed, I won’t play it while you’re here.

* Yes, as in taped album (or cassette), rather than something I owned. Naughty? Perhaps. Penurious way to acquire music in pre-internet age? Yes. Sued by record companies at the time? No. Later purchases of music owing a debt to those tapes: quite a lot. RIAA: go sue yourselves out of existence for being so anti-fan.