"SCREAM FOR ME, LOS ANGELES"

BY KEVIN STACK

It was 10:16 am some Saturday in November when I bought my tickets for the Iron Maiden “Somewhere Back in Time” tour. The show was to be on February 19 at a 14,000-seater and just sixteen minutes after tickets went on sale, I purchased mine for the colonnade, a French word actually, for nosebleed. After the Ticketmaster rape-charge, the tickets turned out to be 63 dollars—a sum that I personally had no biff with. I have been listening to Maiden since 1985. (My bro and I had a babysitter who delivered us to Maiden, Zappa, Suicidal Tendencies and DK in fifth grade!) And even though I started going to rock shows in ’86, I never thought to see either Frank or Eddie and Co. So I had to be at the Maiden show that brought back the spirit of the famous World Slavery Tour, complete with Egyptian stage design. The band promised songs from Iron Maiden, Killers, Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind, Powerslave, Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. The latter two being a tack-on that gave the set list a little more reach and allowed Cyborg-Eddie to grace the stage.
I found online a Steve Harris interview and he said he thought of the “Somewhere Back in Time” tour as he was boring the fuck out of die-hard Maiden fans during the 2006 tour. They were showing off the new album, playing it cover to cover, and then capping with a three classic encore.
Harris and the boys decided to give back and are now hitting the hotspots of the globe in their own jet plane, piloted by Bruce “the golden goose is on the loose” Dickinson. And by hotspots I mean places like Mumbai, India. If you think back, Maiden has always had world famous status, and I guess the 100,000 metalheads that turned out in India back that claim. Speaking of claims, here’s a bare-logic fallacy: the discussion of the existence of God proves God’s existence.
But can’t you just picture Bruce Dickinson flying a commercial jet liner?  “This is your Captain speaking, we are currently number 58 in line for takeoff, CAN YOU SCREAM FOR ME, ALSATIAN AIR PASSENGERS?”
I called my friends that Saturday in November to tell them my good news: I’m going to fucking Maiden and, well, shit, they’re only doing this in LA and NYC, so I guess I’ll text you when they play “Flash of the Blade.”
One real earthdog, bat-crazed friend of mine, upon receiving the call, said, “buy me a ticket and get me a flight while you’re at it.” So I did, and after that the wait began. Four months and change.
So, I started having Maiden training in my house. It’s a rigorous ordeal, involving smoking one hitters and sloshing Jack and waters around the living room, one hand on the volume knob, head slouched in head bang ready position, swelling the volume during the fan-picked gallops and really killer breakdowns, like the part in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” after the “dice have been played for the crew”—dun na na, dun na na, dun na na, dun dun duh dun na na, duhhhhhhhh, that last one no doubt being a nice open “E”. I was going for full memorization of every song on the albums. Most of them were in the dome already. So I decided to learn them on guitar to keep my fingers nimble.
Mrs. Chong, the Korean octogenarian next door neighbor: I hope she can’t hear so well. Because for tonight and the next few months Maiden’s got a third rhythm guitar player who’s learning the songs on the spot, drunk and stoned, and he’s also trying to bake an acorn squash and steam wild rice and cranberries.
I’ve been playing long enough to make sense of most basic rock tunes. One of the first songs I learned, in fact, was “Revelations.” Song two offa Piece of Mind; a nice G-A, G-A slammer. Nora, my fiancé, who will be home soon--she thinks I’m insane and rude and like a teenager for playing my little Fender at half volume while my Cerwin-Vegas sting out the picked chord rapture of “Prodigal Son.” And so it is no surprise I don’t hear her come in the front door and then she gets within inches of me as I round the corner on the difficult solo that I handle by riding and bending one note that is outta the box anyway. And it is a big surprise when I see her out of my peripheral vision and freak the fuck out, leaping like a stroke victim at the long jump, springing toward the ceiling in an uncontrollable back spasm and a feeling of an ice cube going up the ass. “Holy shit, you scared me!” I yell over the music and she drops her purse, rushes to the stereo, cranks the volume all the way off as my guitar half feeds, half hums in the guilty space left behind by Di’Anno and his muted back-up band.
And so another day in Maiden training camp comes to a close.

Many of my high school students are going to Maiden. As the day draws closer, I start the tally. Beto, the kid I loaned Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Volume One (he lost it), is an excellent drummer. He always says we should jam. I say “no.” It’s just not “cool” and I often reflect on how I “jammed” as a high-schooler and then realize that Beto and I would probably create our own version of Maiden camp, which would probably involve something a guy can get a prescription for out here in Los Angeles, which then would probably result in myself explaining to the cops and his parents the intricacies of burning AK-47. Anyway, Beto didn’t get a Maiden ticket and now he wants to go. I tell him I got mine in November. Back then he was telling me Maiden wasn’t worth it, blah blah blah. Beto likes Power Metal, which Maiden, in his opinion, clearly is not. (Ha!)

The LA Forum rises out of Inglewood like a blue and white cupcake on a plate of cigarette butts, bottle caps and wilting nachos. I don’t know when the last coliseum show you saw was, but if you like the metal you probably can remember that vibe that takes a ostensibly civil location like a place where the Lakers used to play and turns it into a wacky shack with drunkenness, public urination, multiple car stereos vying for dominance, bottles and cans in found art arrangements, violent cops directing traffic, shit-caked and flooded bathrooms with toilet paper streamers and everyone under one banner: Up with Irons.
I was experimenting with a nice cocktail of drugs: Dayquil, Jack Daniels, Advil, Halls Mentholyptus, Robitussin DM and Marlboro. You wouldn’t believe me anyway if I told you what happened to the vitamin C. That earthdog friend of mine who flew in from Austin and I blew out Los Angeles for the days leading up to the Maiden show, leaving us staring at PBS opera selections at 5:54am and chugging straight whiskey, forget the mixer, forget the chaser. The flu was also in town, complete with a dry, hacking, unproductive cough, fever, severe nasal congestion and a general sense of malaria. The whole enchilada elevated my mental state on Maiden night to that of white suburban shaman drunk on post-Christian polarity issues; which was a good place to be for the quasi-philosophical, definitely literate Iron Maiden oeuvre.
We jockeyed to our seats and surprisingly the Forum was a much smaller venue than imagined. I had expected a binocular requisite. However, we were very close to the stage, at the front of our section. And then Churchill spoke, “fighting in the air, on the land, on the seas” which is the cue that show will open with “Aces High.” The band toured us through the Maiden years. The guys played everything picture perfect. I hadn’t expected that they would do anything less. I had two songs from Piece of Mind that I was dieing to hear, “To Tame A Land” and “Revelations”. And they did play “Revelations” early in the set; a complete “worth the price of admission” moment for me. “The lights of the blind, you’ll see, the venom chills mine spine, the eyes of the Nile are opening to me.” It could be any song for anyone, but when you get that song at a show, everything else slides by like vanilla ice cream and Bailey’s on a hot day at the beach.
The rest of the set were classic, not-so-deep cuts that satisfied the fans. You could guess the songs. “Trooper,” “Number of the Beast,” “Run to the Hills,” etc, etc. There were 17 of them all told and they rocked it for two hours. I noticed that the younger Maiden fans really rocked to the later stuff like “Wasted Years” and “Heaven Can Wait.” Pure Maiden heads love it all unconditionally. They could release a bag pipe-euphonium record and motherfuckers would slam fists into dashboards to it. The later stuff (Seventh Son… and Somewhere in Time) in this cross section is already classic by the time younger kids get to it, so they really got an amazing show; every song being an anthem-like appeal to all that is holy in the pantheon of metal gods. The apex deity in that Mt. Olympus of leather and spikes is, of course, Eddie. He graced the stage, all 11-feet of him, complete with a LA Lakers jersey on, a cyborg, light-up eye and a laser pistol.
The show was phenomenal; a time machine-like affect coming over me and my years of good Maiden memories. Dickinson told us that in late spring they’re doing more North American shows complete with the eighteen semis that house “all Eddie’s friends.”
I would like to thank Nikko McBrain for being a real ugly, real pro drummer and Bruce Dickinson for the bravery it takes to wear a feather mask in front of 14,000 machismo-laden heads. And even though the words, “SCREAM FOR ME WEST COVINA” don’t really roll off the tongue like mercury beads, “SCREAM FOR ME LOS ANGELES” certainly does, Mr. Dickinson, and it’s good to see you “back in the village again.”