#4 Iron Maiden - Live After Death
Of My Top Out of Order Records
Yesterday somehow I started wise cracking on a video call with some members of my team about my rhyming skills. I ultimately sent few pictures of my small (around 250 discs) vinyl collection including a few Digable Planets records (Reachin and Blow Out Comb) to one of them.
My guy asked what was my favorite. In a short and quick debate in my cabeza I had #1 almost instantly and most of the top 5 shortly thereafter his question.
This morning I thought I’d share them. But not in numerical order and not all at once.
Why start at 4? Why not?
Here it goes.
I bought this very copy of Live After Death at a mall record store in New London, CT. I was likely 12.
My mom was a manager at Caldor (basically a northeast regional version of Target that went out of business in the 90s - I posit probably largely because of Targets growth beyond the Midwest). I would go into work with her on Sundays and help her with her stocking and organizing the health and beauty department she ran. She’d give me $10 and I’d go shop that record store (man if I had the cash I do now at 1985/86 prices I’d cleaned that place out and make a ton on Discogs).
I hid this record from my parents. And surprisingly on a raid of my records when I was around 13 it was not confiscated by my mother (she only grabbed Ozzy after a Barbara Walter’s special on satanic music).
In the early 90s when I traded off most of my metal tapes and vinyl for “indie” cds and records this one survived.
When I went into the Army this record along with all my others, and most of everything of value I decided to keep, went into a closet at my mom’s in North and then South Carolina (she moved my crap around with her over a decade). I didn’t liberate it to Arizona until 2020 when I drove out to see her during Covid and even then it wasn’t until the end of 2023 that I bought a rack and pulled my records out of crates in a closet. To my surprise the insert booklet still there!
That’s its history and journey. Unlike some of my stuff, it missed out on being drug all over the western US in my 20s and 30s while I was hoping job to job building my brain to do what I do now and building my small family.
It’s in fantastic shape I think (could use a groove wash though). Somehow my pre-teen hands didn’t destroy it.
I don’t play it. I have it on Apple Music and listen to it on long runs. If you know Maiden there’s a lot of tunes that run the length of the Iliad. Great shit. It’s the perfect record for a half marathon or a segment of a Bataan Memorial Death (true stories and the 2024 Mesa Half and 2022 BMDM).
This would have been the 2nd or 3rd Maiden I bought. I don’t perfectly recall if I got Somewhere in Time, then Maiden Japan and then Live After Death? Or SIT, LAD and then MJ.
Anyway. From the first track, which is Churchhill’s Speech with airplane engines revving up in the back all the way through the last (Phantom of the Opera) this is like 3 periods in a row of an ass kicking history, philosophy and drama class taught by one supercool teacher who listened to Sabbath when they were in college and graduated to the New Wave of British Metal in middle adult hood as they were teaching young minds.
The thing I missed was the actual educational value. I’m sure my parents would have as well. This is really subversive record when you really think about it. And as with many albums we had the lyrics in our hands as they were printed in the inside jackets that held the platters.
Most of the songs on this (nothing like a truly live greatest hits album) are influenced by Bruce Dickinson readings during recordings of 3 albums in the early 80s. I have the benefit now of hearing and reading Bruce talk about the books and poems that inspired him like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (part of my reading list on two planned flights to the UK this summer) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834
So now that I know, I bang my head and it gives me a taste of something I should go read and learn. If I’d only made that pitch to mom and dad I’d caught less shit from them about my choice of music, hair, clothes, etc.
As I mentioned earlier. I bought this in Connecticut. My dad was an instructor at the Submarine Medical School at the time. He spent my life through around 10th grade in the Navy as a Corpsman on subs and some shore duty like his time in Groton across the river from the store I should have bought more from as a kid.
Much of this record was recorded live at the Long Beach Arena near another Navy town of its era, San Pedro. We never lived on the west coast so I always imagined Long Beach (cool town as it is) was this amazing place because there was a ton live metal recordings done at that Arena. Seemed all the major bands played there versus the Forum in LA for some reason. I’ve still yet to see a gig at the Long Beach Arena (stayed at a hotel near there), but I did Slayer at the Forum. Still a little irked at my parents for not taking orders on the west coast when I was a kid, but I made up for it on my own as an adult.
The Long Beach Arena seemed like our Hammer Smith Oden to me because of this record.
Until I wrote this I had no idea how much of my life connects through this record (although I may be over interpreting that).
With that said. Why is this only #4? Good question. It could easily be #1. And there’s a connection between 1 and 4 that I’ll reveal once I write that. Possibly it may be that I undervalue this record. Could be that it took too long for me to understand it beyond just being a beautiful package with a ton of great songs.
No matter. It’s being 4th is no real measure of my love for it. And my feelings of its value to me and its representation of awesome.
Maiden Maiden Maiden!!!!
