Powerslave

A heavy-metal band named after a medieval torture device sounds like a ready-made joke. But I've always had a soft spot for Iron Maiden. And it was 20 years ago today (to borrow a phrase) that Iron Maiden released its best album. I am referring, of course, to Powerslave.

When I was in the 9th grade, I listened to Powerslave so much I wore out the cassette. There was a lot to love: The crunching rhythms, the wailing guitars, the smart lyrics.

(Smart lyrics? Bet you weren't expecting that. A quick scan of Iron Maiden's album covers doesn't reveal many signs of intelligent life. Just about all of them feature a frizzy-haired zombie named Eddie, who looks like the artistic creation of a 16-year-old burnout with some inborn talent but little training and no sense of direction. The term "juvenilia" leaps to mind. And the titles don't help, either: Two of the band's first three albums are called Killers and The Number of the Beast. The crude appeals to dread and deviltry are a couple of the biggest heavy-metal clichйs going. Everything about Iron Maiden appears patently ridiculous, at least on the surface.

It would be wrong to say that Iron Maiden was ill served by this packaging. After all, the band has experienced real commercial success in its native Britain, here in the United States, and around the world. A recent item on the group's website notes that Iron Maiden just sold its 500,000th album in Finland. That's not bad for a country of only five million people. (Can one in ten Finns possibly be wrong?)

In the loud and fast genre of heavy metal, Iron Maiden's music is tough to beat. Listening to the band for the first time after many years -- I more or less had stopped by 1987 -- I hear lots of strong riffs and melodies as well as impressive levels of musicianship. I don't play the guitar, but I've strummed one before and taking in a Maiden solo now makes me tip my hat to the guy who spent a lot of lonely hours perfecting his craft.

For me, however, what always separated Iron Maiden from other heavy-metal bands were the topics of the songs. Despite those silly album covers and names, the group's lyrical interests were downright mature -- and several notches above everything else in the genre. If Iron Maiden ever wrote a song about sex, drugs, or rock and roll, I never heard it. The guys were too busy singing about literature and history. Here's a sampling of song titles: "The Flight of Icarus," "Alexander the Great," "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner." Not all of their subjects are so transparent. "The Trooper" is Maiden's version of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the poem by Tennyson. "To Tame a Land" is based on Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune. "Stranger in a Strange Land" isn't based on the Robert Heinlein book, but something else entirely. (Arctic exploration, if you must know.)

When Iron Maiden fans pick their favorite album, most settle on one of three from the band's heyday in the early 1980s: The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind, or Powerslave. Each has its strong points, though I've always preferred Powerslave, probably because it was the first Maiden album I ever bought -- the one that turned me into a fan. The songs are magnificent. The first track, "Aces High," is about as perfect a heavy-metal tune as there is. It's about the Battle of Britain, told from the perspective of a British pilot. On tour in support of Powerslave two decades ago, Iron Maiden would begin its concerts by playing snippet from Winston Churchill's "Never Surrender" speech -- and then launch into this rocker.

The second song is one of Iron Maiden's most familiar: "Two Minutes to Midnight." It's an anti-nuke tune whose politics aren't exactly to my liking. Although the lyrics admit that "blood is freedom's stain," they also suggest that during the Cold War, both sides were deluded. The title is a reference to the Doomsday Clock, whose main purpose is to serve as a propaganda tool of the Left. None of this means that the boys in Iron Maiden are Commie symps -- they aren't -- but a piece of me always has wished this