PUSSY-FOOTING IN THE HEART OF THE BEST

IRON MAIDEN

PUSSY-FOOTING IN THE HEART OF THE BEST

by

John Neilson

"GNATNOOP TEEWS GAND GNAW!"

"GNATNOOP TEEWS GNAD GNAW!"

It was enough to drive me crazy. My job, that is...

"GNATNOOP TEEWS GNAD GNAW!"

Yanking the Ted Nugent LP off the specially-designed backwards-playing turntable, I hurled it on the corner with the others. No satanic messages on that one either. Not that I really expected to find any, of course—two years of this and all I've ever gotten were headaches and bad dreams of Neanderthals coming up to me saying "NEVAEH 07 YAWRIATS EHT GNIYUB SEHS DNA!" and "NAM NORI MA I!" Still, the Committee of Responsible Elders Enforcing Morality (C.R.E.E.M:) was paying me big bucks to help root out evil in rock music, so I couldn't complain (someone's gotta pay my Mr. Pibb tab).

A soft knock at my door drew me back to the present, and a gloved messenger thrust a package into my hand from the shadow of my doorway. Ripping open the wrapping, I found a neatly typed note:

"Good day, Mr. Neilson:," it read.

"Your mission, as an agent of C.R.E.E.M., is to determine the threat to America's youth posed by the music of the Heavy Metal cult band Iron Maiden. You will infiltrate one of their rallies, observe their rituals, and if possible, attempt contract with members of the band itself, perhaps in the guise of a music journalist.

"What little information we have on Iron Maiden leads us to believe that this is a very dangerous assignment, so take all necessary precautions. However, as always, your mission comes first—you are expendable."

Wow—a real mission! This could be my big break!

I ■ People are still listening to tracks done ten years ago. We just carry on the same tradition, really.

My enthusiasm quickly became hesitation however, when I pulled the remaining articles from the package: three albums and a mini-LP, all bearing the singularly repulsive face of some poor anorexia victim with the frizzies. Yucko! The record sleeves were literally bursting with images of violence, gore, and evil, but the most recent one, The Number Of The Beast, really caught my eye. This one (whose name was taken from a passage in Revelations, I noticed) featured the ghoul playing puppeteer over a pitchfork-bearing demon, who in turn was roasting some poor sucker in the fires of Hell.

I could hardly believe it—after all this time searching for satanic messages in the grooves of old Rush albums, here was a group so brazen, so callous, they were announcing their hellish affiliation right on the cover! The magnitude of my task suddenly became all too apparent, causing my breakfast to do a double backflip. Fate was hurling me straight into the heart of the beast!

Two days of intensive briefing later, I found myself inside a basketball arena with several thousand—and I'm assuming this from their t-shirts—employees of the local radio station. Taking my seat, I did one last check of my rock-journalist outfit—sunglasses, tape recorder, backstage pass, attitude—and reviewed some of what I had learned:

Iron Maiden formed in 1977, released three-track indie single in 1979. 1st LP Iron Maiden, 2nd LP Killers, followed by live mini-LP Maiden Japan. Third LP The Number Of The Beast first to feature current line-up of Bruce Dickinson/vocals, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith/guitars, Steve Harris/bass, Clive Burr/drums — Dickinson being the new addition. Big in England, poised for same here. Second iC* night of U.S. tour.

Although they were of headlining stature in England, Iron Maiden's popularity hadn't yet matched that here, so in this instance the band was opening for Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow (I remembered them —their records had pinned the Hell-OMeter a few times, too). Suddenly the lights dimmed, the crowd rose to its feet and roared; and...and...no, it was too horrible...

Yeah, 1 survived—soul intact and lunch unblown—with only a ringing in my ears and a renewed embarrassment at the flaccid rituals of the new heavy metal to report. Devil worship? Don't make me laugh. If Iron Maiden worship anything it's the music of their role models, and their own music is merely an attempt at one-upmanship in the heavier-than-thou HM sweepstakes.

Excuse, please to explain zis 'evee metal?

There was a time when HM seemed to make sense. At its roots it was an evolutionary amplification of a few select aspects of rock music into a knowing cariacature. Both the violence of its sound and the malignance of its vision were perfectly suited to its time. Its endless riffs were the rhythms of dance slowed down and stripped to a series of violent thrusts. Vocally, Robert Plant established screechy falsetto as the norm, Ted Nugent exemplified the shaggy, chest-thumping macho guitar primitive, Black Sabbath flirted with the occult, Alice Cooper tossed in a freak show, and technology took care of the volume, flashing lights, and explosions. Give or take a few names and tricks, these are the basic elements that HM bands have contented themselves with ever since.

With little interest in anything but its own little myths, HM was only too happy to chase its own tail—newer bands aped the old note for note, pose for pose, until what was once awesome was now as predictable as baby food (I mean, take 'em or leave 'em, the originals were at least original).

Sexuality was reduced to the level of a Frank Frazetta poster, rhythms were leg-ironed, shrimpy guys had beefcake self-portraits on their album covers, and they played the same relentless doodlyoodly-oodly-oodly guitar solos—to the delight of air guitarists everywhere.. .ensuring that HM was now a neutered self-parody of its former self. (Speaking of selfparody, why hasn't somebody blown up Ozzy Osbourne on stage yet?)

We're not into the occult the way some other hands might be. We don't go around casting spells...

So is this rock 'n' roll or what? Well, not in my book, but somewhere along the line radio programmers decided that this was just what they needed—timid, reactionary music masquerading as gutsy Rawwk'n Ro-ell, BABY!! So, heavy metal gets tenure on every AOR station in the country, formats clamp down tight, and this encourages musical inbreeding and turns rock 'n' roll into a bloated, unrecognized sludge that oozes from radio everywhere and smells funny.

Despite my opinions of Iron Maiden's music, it wasn't too surprising to find that Bruce Dickinson and Steve Harris were genuinely nice guys who just happened to see things a lot differently than I did. For starters, then, I asked them about the apparent resurgence of HM after years of being neglected and taken for granted by the press. Was it coming back, or had it never left?

"I think that's it," Dickenson offered, "I think you hit it there, you said nobody paid any attention to it. I think it's having a bit of a comeback as far as the press is concerned, 'cause they kinda ignored it. It's not the kind of music—with all due respect—the newspaper likes, 'cause it's not like here today and gone tomorrow. It's not like (wave arms) 'New Thing!', and five minutes later there's another new thing, which is how newspapers sell newspapers. But its not how I listen to music, if you know wot I mean."

"People are still listening to tracks done 10 years ago—Skynyrd and Zepplin and Purple and things like that. You can still listen to that today and get the sense of what the guys were saying then. We just carry on the same tradition, really, in our own way."

But isn't this sameness part of the problem? I mean, the world is constantly changing—why shouldn't music?

"But we change all the time," he replied. "You gotta think, like, we are playing within an...an idiom. If we came out and did like Glenn Miller tunes or something, then justifiably people'd be a bit freaked out Like'f Glenn Miller came out and did 'Smoke On The Water,' his audience would probably go HUH? They'd throw a wobbler!

"It's the same in any sort of music. You get people who like a certain sort of music, but within that music you can say an awful lots of things. And we said different things on each album."

So that brings up the question of exactly what Iron Maiden—with all the gore and evil imagery (remember, the band got its name from a torture box with big, pointy spikes on the inside)—is trying to get across to its audience?

"You can't go around trying to change the world all the time," the singer said somewhat defensively, " 'cause people aren't like that—apart from politicians, who are like universally regarded as idiots anyway. You can forget about people like that, but normal, everyday people, they think a little bit about what's going on and things like that, but a lot of time they just wanna go out and have fun. So some of our stuff is about that. A lot of our stuff is derived from a sort of Gothic Horror sort of imagery—it just comes out of a sort of fascination we've got with horror movies, books, all that kind of stuff. I don't know why we like it—a lot of other people like it..."

So is this fascination with horror and the occult a big drawing card for the band?

"I dunno about the occult," bassist Steve Harris interjects, "because lemme make this clear, we're not 'into' the occult in the way that some other bands might be. I mearw^e don't go around casting spells or indulge in it. The thing about 666 and the Beast and all the rest of it came from... well it was just that one verse, really."

"Basically it's a fascination with it," Dickinson agrees, "but I really wouldn't wanna get into it too deep because in a way I think there's too much there we don't understand about it just yet, anyway. Maybe sooner or later it'll be regarded as like science or whatever. I think it can be very dangerous. It is a thing that is unknown, and I think that is why people get off on it—takes some fairly pedestrian rock, dress it up with some exaggerated gore and satanic mumbo-jumbo, and peddle it to kids hungry for a cheap scare. Is that it?

"It depends what you'd call cheap," Harris replies. "I don't think the way we portray it is done in a cheap way. Bits of it might be tongue-in-cheek—I mean, like Eddie is definitely tongue-in-cheek. I mean there's no way that he's like REALLY FRIGHTENING. He's not supposed to be.

In case you haven't guessed, "Eddie" is the band's mascot—the emaciated ghoul that adorns every piece of product that the band churns out. And Steve Harris is right—he isn't frightening. In fact, when a roadie in an Eddie costume totters out during the band's stage show, lurches a bit, and then is led away offstage, he's almost pathetic. So where does Eddie come from?

"It's like a Kabuki mask," Harris offers. "We used to have this backdrop when we used to play clubs in London, and it used to have blood cornin' out the mouth, and then we made a bigger one—light up the eyes and smoke cornin' out the mouth. It was just called "Eddie the 'ead,' you know. When we came to do the first album the artist expanded on that, and came up with the sort of ghoulish figure we used now.

''I s'pose you could think that Eddie as a figurehead is more famous than we are, but it's great, because as soon as people see that, they associate it with Iron Maiden. It's a great symbol—it just sort of sticks out."

It'll be interesting to see how subsequent Iron Maiden album covers manage to make use of Eddie ("Eddie's First Date"? "Eddie Goes West"? "Eddie Joins The Navy"?). Will each manage to be more garish than the last? Given the plethora of gore cranked out by their competitors, will anyone notice?

And what about their music? I ask them if it bothers them to be doing essentially the CONTINUED FROM PAGE 44

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same song-and-dance that Black Sabbath and Deep Purple were doing over a decade ago.

"I'd say that Wagner was doing the same thing that Beethoven was doing," Harris answers, "and Bach was doing the same thing that somebody else was doing. Where do you stop?"

"It's not the same," Dickinson agreed, "I mean, people obviously enjoy their influences. I really liked Sabbath when I was like 15, 16,17, or whatever—I still like 'em now to a certain extent. With Zeppelin, a lot of their influences are really bluesy, they draw their influences from a lot of old blues musicians. I don't think there's anything wrong with having influences, but I honestly don't think we sound like Black Sabbath."

"These days in pop music things are happening faster and faster and faster," Harris said, warming up to the subject. "It's not every year you have a change of style, it's every six months you have a new thing, and people are getting so programmed to that, when somebody comes along and says 'I just play music,—I play songs, I wrote songs, and I like to play 'em this way—just loud and heavy with plenty of intensity onstage and lots of leaping around'—they go 'Aw, people used to do that 10 years ago.. .' So what? I like doing it this way, and my songs are different than theirs. And they go 'No, it's the same, you got the same sort of ideas, that's bad.' And I just say why?"

So do I, guys. _

So do I.