BETTER EDDIE THAN DEAD: IRON MAIDEN TATTOO AMERICA

BETTER EDDIE THAN DEAD: IRON MAIDEN

FEATURES

TATTOO AMERICA

Sylvie Simmons

A dream. I’m lounging on the balcony of a Beverly Hills hotel staring out over the pool when there’s a knock on the door. In glides a Vision, drenched in leather. James Dean’s body, Al Pacino’s face, and an upturned palm full of the finest narcotics.Holly wood has to offer. “Hi,” says the Vision in a voice not unlike Clint Eastwood’s. “I’m a present from Iron Maiden. They just love this band in England, and the boys were, well, hoping they’ll love them in America too. Have a nice day.” And the Vision starts to slowly peel of the top layer of leather and...

I’m awake. No hotel, no Vision in Leather, just a fluorescent-lit room in the giant Ajax can aka Capitol Records where I’m waiting, for one of the few new heavy metal bands (alas cruel fate!) that doesn’t have the need for such delightful bribery. Iron Maiden will be BIG in America. Make that ENORMOUS. How do I know? Hey, I can read the signs! Who do you know with a picture of Steve Perry tattooed on their chest, eh? Eh? Or what about Tommy Shaw custom-jobs on their cars? Anyone of your acquaintance with a giant effigy of David Lee Roth on the roof of their house [in case of affirmative answer to this one, send photo, age and phone number to me c/o CREEM] or Van Halen II etched on their biceps? Okay, there’s a couple of people out there with Loverboy perms, but not to worry, the hairdressers will have their asses sued off. But Iron Maiden—notably their cadaverous mascot Eddie—have already been thusly immortalized across the States.

The guy wjth the Sanctuary coyer tattooed on his arm with “Up The Amazon” inscribed beneath (the London equivalent to inking “Go Dodgers Go” on your manly flesh). The kid with the group’s name, on his front and a tattoo of Eddie’s skull on his back. The house with the 30-foot Eddie balancing on the antenna and the car with the 10-foot Eddie gleaming from the bodywork. Not to mention the Dedicated Dad from Chicago who follows them from gig to gig with his teenage daughter and a dozen schoolfriends in tow. And of course “the Steve Harris trouser brigade at the shows—all the kids who walk around looking like zebra crossings,” inspired by the bass player’s striped pants, and the Bruce Dickinson “ironmongery mob” who lumber around with 2-foot metal arm-braces on after the singer once doffed one. If those aren’t the signs of impending greatness I don’t know what is. Another sign, of course, for the less imaginative amongst you, is Billboard magazine. Piece Of Mind, the new album it says, is 21 with a bullet.

“We’re waiting for the guy who goes and gets himself decapitated from the new album cover,” chortles Bruce, referring to Eddie’s shaved head and lobotomy, apparently not modeled on Ozzy. Hey, I’m waiting too. Wouldn’t be surprised if you are. So while we’re waiting, we might as well find out more about this commendable bunch of boys.

It started back in late 77. While all around him punks were shaving their hair, Steve Harris was growing his. After failing to make his fortune in Smile and Gypsy’s Kiss, he got together with former skinhead guitarist Dave Murray, at one time in London punk band, Secret, recruited some locals who weren’t ashamed to admit owning Deep Purple albums, and formed Iron Maiden, nicely named after the medieval torturing implement.

It was “a heavy metal band with punk attitudes,” he sajd back then. One of several that seemed to pop up at the same time with similar ages and Outlooks, and which collectively got dubbed the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. More energy and less self-indulgence than the over-30 HM establishment, the NWOBHM bands had the added bonus of bodies that looked better squeezed into leather and spandex than those of their forefathers. And the only time they used accountants was to check that the number of beer bottles backstage for aftershow partying was sufficient for extreme brain damage. An idea that caught on.

The record companies were snapping up the narrow-tie set then, so the band stuck out their first EP on their own Rock Hard Records. Dubbed the Soundhouse Tapes, named after their local drinking hole, it started selling like band-aids at a psoriasis convention. The major labels came out in force, and when a first album was released it shot straight into the British charts at number four.

Europe, Japan started falling. Then the States, where they toured with every band you care to mention and built a small but rabid following. The tattoo and effigy set. Then a big but rabid following; 300,000 of the new album, tattoo that on your chest. And talking of tattoos, a couple of band members got needled and left, leaving the current Maiden line-up Bruce Dickinson on vocals, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith on guitars, Steve Harris on bass and Nicko McBrain on drums.

We’re back in the Ajax can. Bruce, looking manly in his sweatpants, is telling grisly tales of riots down in Mexico City where the others (except for Nicko, listening in) got sent for an in-store appearance. Five thousand loonies, broken windows, fanatics hanging on to the back of the band’s car and getting dragged a mile down the road. “I teenk,” says gringo Bruce, “I see dee Revolution.” I teenk I see a whole lot of potential Eddie tatoos and lobotomies. “All the South American countries are really happening, considering we’ve never actually been there.”

The North, as we’ve already established, is REALLY happening. I wonder if they’ve lost any of that fanatical cult following they used to have though.

“I don’t think we have and I don’t think we ever will lose it,” reckons Bruce, “as long as we keep on with the same attitude which we’ve had, which is: go out and go for it. That’s what got us the cult following, in the same way that I think AC/DC went out and got that cult following with Bon. Because when you went to see an AC/DC show, whatever else you got, you always got 100 percent from the band. And you always got

"we don’t give a monkey’s about what anybody else thinks — Bruce Dickinson

lots of blood and lots of sweat and everything, and that’s what you still get if you go to see an Iron Maiden show.

“If you go in with the attitude that the thing is just a job, then of course it will become a job, and you go onstage with all the inspiration of a plumber’s mate, or something like that.”

The show is one of those nice over-thetop events that bring tears to a HM fan’s ears, and it couldn’t have hurt their status over here that they took it all over the States for months and months. “There really wasn’t any alternative, because there was no way we were going to pick up radio airplay,” says Bruce. “We do now—but that’s because of the touring. We haven’t changed our style to fit American radio; American radio has come to us and said, we feel we’ve got to play because when we open the phone lines for requests, all we get is abuse because we’re not playing Iron Maiden. They don’t really want to play the band but they’ve got to, because there’s so many people they can’t ignore it. I think that’s a very healthy situation.”

I wonder—I get to wondering occasionally—if there’s any connection with the fact that American radio has started playing the British new wave bands who were doing well in England a couple of years back, and now, a couple of years behind the time, is picking up at last on the NWOBHM.

“I don’t know if there is. I think it’s probably just their perverse business brains thinking, ’great, we’ve given that two years, now it’s time to kill that one off and give new heavy rock bands a bit of time, and we’ll build up that fad and get rid of them.’

“Unfortunately they won’t be able to get rid of us.” Bruce gives me the confident leer only a man with Eddie to back him up could giye.

“See, press and people like that in general misunderstood the whole thing that is heavy rock. They don’t comprehend the extent of the dedication of not only the band themselves, but usually the fans that go with the band. To them, pop music means disposable music which sells disposable articles. As far as we’re concerned, our music isn’t disposable music which sells disposable articles. As far as we’re concerned, our music isn’t disposable, it isn’t designed to sell anything, and all we ask is that people listen to it and enjoy it.”

So when the press was happily calling Iron Maiden and the others the next fad, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, you weren’t going ’round thinking, here we are, the new movement, the NWOBHM?

“Not in the slightest. This is something I’ve been doing since I was 13 years old, since I first listened to Deep Purple In Rock—that was the record that got me involved in rock music, full stop. And ever since that age, I’ve been involved in some way—for the first three or four years listening to it, and then getting around to trying to play something.

“It’s not like I suddenly discovered something new in my life—‘aha! A cause! A movement!’ It’s always been part of my life, and I think heavy rock is part of a lot of people’s lives. Because everything is getting more disposable and more plastic and more throwaway every second. In that way we’re a bit of an anachronism really.”

So much for New Wave. Bruce goes on to equate HM with country and western and cabaret pop, things that have always been around despite lack of fashionable credibility and constant slag-offs from such organs as this.

“Although the people who listen to C&W aren’t the kind of people who listen to heavy rock, as a movement the two people are very, very similar. Because C&W has its own stations, it’s own sort of subculture, and despite every effort to kill it off and get rid of it, it still survives. Because it’s a live music entity, and that’s the same with heavy rock. And therefore the press and radio people can’t dominate it.”

So the NWOHM has never really existed; a bit like finding out the Tooth Fairy isn’t going to come anymore? Not according to Bruce, who reckons it was an ungainly, not to mention stupid, tag in the first place.

“It’s not a movement. It was almost as if in 1977, suddenly from nowhere like spontaneous generation, all these bands suddenly appeared like locusts. And it isn’t like that at all. There have always been heavy metal bands. There are still as many up and coming HM bands in England as there ever were when Iron Maiden and Samson and Saxon and all those bands came up. The difference is there just aren’t as many record companies interested or prepared to take the new wave tag because record comapnies had a pretty easy time with New Wave. All they had to do was make records cheaply— because the bands in most cases couldn’t play too good, and really didn’t care about playing much anyway—stick them in the back of a transit and send them off to Sweden, and that was New Wave. All very anarchistic and revolutionary.

“But unfortunately a lot of record companies went round signing heavy rock acts in exactly the same way, just throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Because it actually does cost a certain amount of money to support a heavy rock band on the road, because they tend to do things slightly different to a new wave band. A lot of bands—not us—just wanted to get an album out because they were convinced, no matter what the record company was like, they could set the world bn fire.”

No ulterior motives of getting to the top of the charts and blowing raspberries at the old-timer HM bands down below?

“That’s a complete fantasy,” states Bruce, who counts the old-timers among his favorite bands.

“I’m still a Ritchie Blackmore fan. I love watching the guy. I think he’s miles away from what he was doing in Deep Purple, but then that’s understandable because that was 12 years ago and the guy gets older and wants to move on and do different things. I remember when I was 14 or 15, that one particular album, Made In Japan, made a really profound impression on me. Really profound. I used to just sit and listen to it over and over again. I used to know the whole thing note perfect—every drum beat, everything. Like the first couple of Sabbath albums, and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, and Arthur Brown, would you believe—great.”

Are you—gulp—saying that all these NMOHM bands really like and emulate the OWOHM-ers?

“My favorite bands all come from the ’69-75 period really; not a lot after that. But really, it’s not so much whether it’s new or old, it’s the quality. In the old days bands were less prepared to compromise—that’s not true actually, plenty of bands compromised, but bands that didn’t always ended up being our firm favorites. Bands like Purple. It’s that attitude, I think, that inspired me to get into rock music. And unless I see that sort of magic coming from a band when you see it live, then I’m not really interested, no matter how pro or note-perfect. If somebody has got inside your head and motivated you, you go away thinking ‘now let’s go and rip off whatever they did!’ ” Bruce sniggers.

Any American bands they like at the moment? Silence.

“Eddie Van Halen plays good guitar,” recites Bruce.

“Journey,” says Nicko. “I find they’re a phenomenal band. I really like their music. I know you don’t but I do.”

“I still prefer English bands really,” says Bruce. “I think they’ve got a few more rough edges. I like rough edges in music.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 34

“But Escape is a brilliant record,” Nicko persists. Probably thought Styx could save rock ’n’ roll too, eh?

“I didn’t know it was dying actually,” Nicko tries to wriggle out of the question. “Steve saw the show. He liked it.”

“Don’t expect us to do walk-on parts in the next Iron Maiden show though,” adds Bruce.

Talking of Styx makes me think of elderly men in tasteless suits which makes me think of the Moral Majority! Iron Maiden came in for some stick because of the pic of Eddie holding the Devil on strings on the cover of the album before last.

“I think it’s pathetic,” says Bruce. “Water off a duck’s back really. It was fun to play along with it a little bit last year, because the album was called Number Of The Beast, and they seemed perfectly willing to give us oodles and oodles of cheap publicity. But I’m just fed up with it now. It’s boring, it’s tired, and I think even the Moral Majority’s getting fed up with it. You don’t need to play up to that sort of publicity. We’re quite capable of going out and entertaining people live without having to go out and seek cheap publicity.”

But there is a backwards message on the new album. “We put it there especially for them. Still, we put it the right way round and Americans still haven’t understood it! It’s a great wind up. There’s nothing Satanic about it. We haven’t masked it—it’s out there in the great open air for all to see in the naked groove.”

[For those who missed it it goes as follows. (Idi Amin accent): “Hmm Hmm. What-ho! Sed dee ting wid dee tree bonce. Dwon’t meddill wid tings y’chont undatand (burp).”]

Don’t meddle with things you don’t understand. The motto the group had pinned on the studio door in the Bahamas where they made the last record. A thing several critics have been saying in one word or another about their lyrics—lots of stuff about faraway planets and forbidden worlds and dinosaurs and things.

“The thing is,” says Bruce, “Journalists are journalists because they write words better than they write music, so consequently they don’t understand that the reading of rock lyrics is not reading poetry. Rock lyrics are designed to be sung. I mean, ‘wopbopa loobop a lop bam boom, got a girl named Daisy who’s driving me crazy’—it sounds great when Little Richard is singing it, doesn’t it, know what I mean? So I don’t think you can really knock lyrics. If the cap fits, wear it. The bottom line is if they sound OK when they’re sung.

“I will admit that there are a couple of lines on this album that we thought were real funny at the time, but we kept them in,” he laughs, “because we didn’t want to go through the grief of arguing about it. So we kept them in and we all go ‘ooooofffl’

“ ‘In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, when the land was swamp and the caves were home, in an age when prize possession was fire...’, everybody had a crack up about that! But, bless his pointed little head, nobody told Steve! Alright Steve, here we go woaaaaakkk!”

“They’re still stories, nevertheless,” Nicko comes to his defense.

“Yeah, everybody’s entitled to a little folly now and again. They all love ‘Conan The Barbarian’—that’s hip, with stuff like ‘thuddd-douaaaaghhhh!!!’ Like the song ‘Where Eagles Dare’ [this band has a habit of stealing movie titles for its songs] is a white hats and black hats adventure Boys Own Paper romp—killing the jolly old Nazis and all the rest of it.

“And I freely admit it. I still read Biggies books—it’s great, picturing yourself in the cockpit, big scarf sticking out and everything. It’s fun. On this album there is a slightly more serious side, but everything is treated with a certain amount of humor. Within the band we do have a strong sense of humor about what we do, although we do take it seriously. I think there’s a lot of humor in life, and 1 think that’s fairly accurately represented. We have a very black sense of humor, hence the album covers. We watch Halloween Parts One Two and Three and Poltergeist and things like that.”

Black? That stuff’s fairly grey. Let’s talk about Gates Of Hell and Dr. Butcher.

“1 love all that sort of stuff!”

While you’re in a loving mood, what about that bloke in the Scorpions who said no one can expect to play decent heavy metal until they’re at least 30 years old?

Bruce chuckles. “I have every respect for the Scorpions and their opinions, but I think it’s nonsense. I feel sorry for Eddie Van Halen, poor chap. He’s obviously got six years to go before he can learn how to play guitar. Not to mention Michael Schenker who’s only 25. And Ritchie’s only been playing guitar since he joined Rainbow, according to that one! Age has got nothing to do with anything. It’s attitude and how you play.”

And Iron Maiden’s attitude?

“We don’t give a monkey’s about what anybody else thinks. We play our music the best we can, we go absolutely loopy onstage, we take the band seriously but we have fun.”

“That’s the best thing about being in Iron Maiden,” agrees Nicko. “Fun.”

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more Death. Neither sorrow nor crying. Neither shall there be anymore Brain. For the former things are passed away.”