Reflecting upon points somewhere in time with a friend named Ed.
Dan Rowe 10/6/03
(Page 1 of 2)
A few weeks ago, I was blessed with an opportunity I never thought I'd receive--I got to see Iron Maiden live in concert. This was a pretty important personal benchmark as their music has always meant a great deal to me. That said, it wasn't until the build up of weeks before this show that I truly grasped what a huge part Iron Maiden has played in my life--through bad and good.
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I first encontered the music of Iron Maiden in my pre-teen years. At that point in my life, our family had moved away from small town Arkansas to the unfriendly confines of Englewood, Colorado. Our first week there saw me looking on in horror from the car as people stepped over a hemorrhaging man one night in downtown Denver. This was not home and I knew it never would be, right from the start. I felt trapped, terrified, and very alone. As time passed, things only grew worse--I was living virtually every moment of my young life in constant despair. The one thing keeping my head above water was listening to the music I loved so much. However, there came a point where even this was barely holding me up. That is, until one day when I walked into the record store and came across an album with one of the coolest looking covers I had ever seen--a living corpse, bathed in spotlights, brandishing a gleaming samurai sword. Fortunately, I had just enough money that day to buy it. This record was the Maiden Japan 12" EP.
I will never forget putting the needle to that slab the first time. It was kind of like when the power first comes back on after a long outage--the surge of energy I felt coming through the speakers and flowing through me was startling. Songs like "Running Free" made an instant connection--lyrical turns such as "out of money, out of luck" and "got no place to call my own" rung very true for me.
It wasn't just the lyrics, though. The galloping rhythms of the music stirred my soul in a way it hadn't been before. This stuff literally sounded like the pounding hooves of a cavalry coming to the rescue.
Suddenly, I wasn't so alone.
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As time went on, I delved more and more into Maiden's back catalog. The more I heard, the more they became my heroes. My room was lined with posters of that rotting ole Eddie, from ceiling to floor. He bacame like a gargoyle sitting on its perch, there to protect "the castle" and all those who inhabited it.
So, when it came time to put together my jeans jacket leading into seventh grade year (a hugely big deal to us metal loving kids, at the time) there was no question every patch would be an Iron Maiden one. It was such a beautiful sight--complete with a limited edition "Somewhere On Tour" backpatch I scored from the local shop. I wore that jacket like a badge of honor.
Of course, this was Englewood, so that joy was bound to be tarnished, somehow. As such, on the very fist day of class, my English teacher started talking about stereotypes and how she believed in them. She then started pacing around my desk, me in my Iron Maiden jacket, saying she believed all people who listen to metal do drugs and on and on. Over the course of that school year, this woman went out of her way to bully and "make an example" out of me.
Finally, on the last day of class, she had the gall to ask me what my problem had been with her all year at which point I reminded her of what she said during that "sterotype" diatribe. She denied she had said this to which the entire class replied, almost in unison, "YES, YOU DID (one of the only times anyone ever stood up for me during our years in Colorado)!" With this, she gave a very insincere, sarcastic appology.
As my friends held me back while I cussed a blue streak through her, telling her off for all to see, my future course had in a way been set--that was the moment I officially became determined to be a musician without also turing into a substance abuse cliche/casualty, but also, and most importantly, the moment I decided I would never again be pushed around or abused by a person in position of authority, no matter what the cost. There was no hesitation in taking that stand--it was a moment to stand up for the music that had stood for me when I couldn't so many times before.
I slung that jacket on like the piece of armor it had become to me, walked out the classroom door with head held high, and never looked back.
Iron Maiden had my back, as always--both figuratively and literally.
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