February 28, 2022 by A.S. Van Dorston

On their third album with a hotshot new singer, Maiden expands their audience through MTV and challenges Judas Priest as the quintessential heavy metal band.

While I had plenty of exposure to MTV, our junior high home room teacher turning it on during our 7th period “study hour,” I didn’t have cable. My best friend Mike, however, did, plus a TV in his basement bedroom. He suffered through the repeat plays of Eddie Money, Rod Stewart, Patty Smyth, 38 Special, Rick Springfield and America (remember “You Can Do Maaaaagic”?) so that he could report back on late night discoveries like Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills.” I call that a win-win situation. It’s weird to think of them as an MTV band, but to me, that’s what they were at first. While I had a weird experience with hearing the first three Black Sabbath albums involving a neighbor girl Jolene forcing me to play House if I wanted to hear them five years previously, our heaviest reference points were Mike’s KISS albums, the harder Queen tunes, Led Zeppelin, Scorpions, Rush, AC/DC, a couple Judas Priest songs, and that’s about it. I wouldn’t hear a full Priest album until several months later, and it was years before I heard Motörhead. The album was a revelation. There may have been more influential metal albums, heavier albums and better metal albums, but nothing before or since had hit that perfect balance of intensity and accessibility, cartoonish allure, and an irreverent flirtation with evil that is harmless in hindsight, but at the time you could see how it could freak people out.

For us, Maiden was not immediately a gateway to more underground bands in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal scene like it was for a Dutch immigrant tennis player who would trade tapes of Diamond Head, Angel Witch, Saxon, Tygers of Pan Tang, Venom, Tank and Raven before forming Metallica. I was regularly reading CREEM and Circus magazines by then, but if those bands got any mention, I missed it. We didn’t even get the first two albums and Black Sabbath’s essential collaboration with Dio, Heaven and Hell (1980) an oversight which I’d correct in a Back to the Future scenario, and give myself a stern lecture. What can I say, we had a limited budget! From our perspective, Iron Maiden were already their own brand, completely separate from any scene. For a while, the division was Iron Maiden, and all other music that wasn’t as good. For me this lasted through Piece of Mind (1983) and Powerslave (1984), despite bands like U2 and R.EM. beginning to challenge my loyalty. I was severely disappointed by Somewhere in Time (1986) and decided I’d outgrown Maiden. But less than a decade later, I realized it was too late, they were under my skin and fused with my DNA, and I would never stop enjoying those albums. Once the band came back in 2000, hundreds of thousands of fans throughout the world realized the same thing, elevating Iron Maiden to one of the biggest world touring juggernauts ever.

The way we listened to the album, we started with side B. How can that title track with the intro by Vincent Price soundalike Barry Clayton, reading from Revelations, not be the ideal way to kick off the album? And Bruce Dickinson’s build-up from a whisper to a holler, to that extended blood-curdling scream! So epic. With all the hubub about 666 and sacrifices to Satan, it’s no wonder we kept the door closed and the album carefully filed away from prying parental eyes. By the time I got my own copy, it only elicited a raised eyebrow from my mom. She was still young and had records of “Sympathy With the Devil” and “Helter Skelter,” so not a big whoop. Plus, she was a fan of Barbara Streisand, who in a way was far more terrifying, and probably had more fans at the time than Satan, who reportedly was seen in her dressing room preparing her cocktails and saying “yes, Mistress.”

After the galloping gateway single of “Run to the Hills” that expressed empathy for Native Americans, told from their perspective, “Gangland” was perhaps the weakest track, pretty tuneless but fast. “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is of course one of Maiden’s greatest songs, possibly their best, so clearly there were some sequencing issues. “The sands of time are running looooooooooooooooooooooooooo-ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. Running loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!” Not to mention a really excellent song, “Total Eclipse,” coulda shoulda been included in the original album, but wasn’t added until decades later on reissues.

On the other side, Bruce takes the point of view of conquering Vikings on “Invaders.” He and bandleader/songwriter Steve Harris seemed to have quite an unhealthy obsession with war and genocide, but at least they could tell good, succinct stories (not so succinct in later years). I’ve been careful to not pay attention to their politics, so as to not ruin my enjoyment of the music. “Children of the Damned” is a classic example of their mastering of starting with almost a ballad and gradually building to full gallop. Always a satisfying payoff. “The Prisoner” starts with the cool “I’m not a number, I’m a free man!” clip from the old TV show, and features one of the band’s tightest melodies in the chorus. I don’t think I realized at the time that “22 Acacia Avenue” was about a prostitute, and unfortunately it reminds us that these geezers were a band since 1975, and reflected the outdated attitudes of the time. Still a great tune, with Bruce’s rapid-fire delivery verses in the middle of the song on point.

It seems kind of pointless to describe these songs, as they are etched like stone religious tablets in the brains of most fans as canonical classic heavy metal. No matter which particular Maiden album is a favorite, the significance and greatness of this album is pretty undisputed. But it’s interesting to remember what it was like to first hear it as a kid, a jolt of lightning out of the gray AOR skies.