Dan's Metal Memory of the Month: 5/07

Bruce Dickinson with hair. Big Eddie with a leather jacket. Old clips from classic horror films. In the world of '80s metal, it doesn't get much better than this. While I enjoyed the two Paul Di'Anno albums, I'd become a hardcore Iron Maiden fan when Dickinson became their vocalist. I first saw them on their popular Powerslave tour when I was 14 (my wife, a true cow-punk from Nashville, also admits to attending this metal tour... on crutches, no less). Unlike the majority of rival metal bands, Maiden refused to take themselves and their constructed mythology too seriously. One of the few heavies to not exclusively embrace the whole devil-worshipping thang, their album art evolution reads like the pages of a hell-bent history textbook. The band's homicidal mascot, Eddie, has been a juvenile delinquent, a lunatic in an asylum, a WWII Spitfire pilot, a time-travelling assassin, a mummified Pharaoh, and even a floating clairvoyant torso. He's been killed off and born again several times. In this video, however, he's still just an axe-wielding punk rocker in the wee years of his long career. One thing I always liked about this early video is how Maiden already strayed away from the tired "666" imagery, inter-cutting a brief survey of nerdy monster movie clips from the 1950s, 60s and 70s into their masterpiece (including one of my favorites, "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" starring a pre-Little House on the Prairie Michael Landon). While I checked out when Dickinson left the band, as many fans did, Maiden forged ahead and maintained a healthy backlash of sticks and stones from well-intended but misguided Christian activism... As it should be.