Run to the Pits

My unusual introduction to Iron Maiden

Clips from the current Iron Maiden tour (which I’m sadly missing) and a friend’s Facebook posts from his recent trip to Greece have flashed me back four decades to a couple of key summers from my teenage years. (Aren’t all teenage summers incredibly important? Well yes — but these were even more so than my others…)

I spent most of the summer of 1981 exploring Greece with my good friend Aristotle. (Seriously, that was/is his name. His younger brother is named Achilles.) We were 15 years old at the time, and I still can’t believe that our parents thought it was a good idea for us to travel abroad on our own, but I’m forever grateful that they did. It was a fantastic and profoundly educational experience, one which I’ll probably write more about at a later date. But at the moment, the memory that stands out most vividly from that trip is of a particular record store window in Thessaloniki.

There were many times during our trip where we’d have nothing to do but wander the streets of whatever town or city we were visiting. Maybe we were killing time while waiting for a bus or boat to take us to our next destination, or maybe we were waiting for the shops and tavernas to re-open after “siesta” was over, or maybe our budgeted meal/drink money for the day had run out and we were taking “the long way home” back to our hotel.

On this particular evening in Thessaloniki, we stumbled upon a record store located on a side street near where we were staying. The shop was closed for the night, but its display windows were brightly lit. And what a display it was…

Back in Chicago, I was still mostly shopping at record chains like Rose or Downtown, where the display windows were usually crammed with promotions for the latest major label blockbusters, and the edgiest things I ever saw were posters or album flats of new records by The Clash or Elvis Costello. But this window was filled with all kinds of albums by artists like Kraftwerk, Motörhead, Echo and the Bunnymen, The League of Gentlemen, XTC, Riot, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — none of whom I’d heard before, or in some cases even heard of — and I felt a strong pull in that moment to explore beyond the mainstream hard rock/new wave/Springsteen/Dire Straits kinda stuff that formed the core of my current listening. But what really grabbed my eye was this album:

I had no idea who or what Iron Maiden even was, but the cover of Killers had to be the freakiest thing I’d seen all summer. An axe-murdering zombie with metalhead hair, doing his bloody work on a darkened street that looked, uh, not dissimilar from the one we were standing on at the moment? Man, that was some intense shit. Too intense for me at the time, in fact; though I could respect the utter badassedness of it all, I figured that Iron Maiden’s music — whatever it sounded like — was probably way too over-the-top for my radio-calibrated ears.

I didn’t think much about the band or album again until the following summer, when I found myself working alongside the biggest Iron Maiden fan I had ever met — well, the only Iron Maiden fan I’d ever met up to this point.

I spent the summer of ‘82 working as a runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange; it was my first-ever real job, landed via some of my then-stepfather’s connections. Though I realized pretty quickly that I had zero interest in “the markets,” I still loved going to that job thanks to the incredibly diverse array of personalities that I worked with. Some were straight-laced business types, but most of my co-workers were pretty funny and interesting people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Many of the runners were high school kids like me, earning some money for college with a sweet summer gig that let out at 2 pm. But the full-time runners were slightly older and from considerably less cushy backgrounds; they were there to get their foot firmly in the door at “The Merc,” to learn and network and maybe eventually land a steady position with one of the firms or hang out their own shingle as a trader.

I learned a lot that summer. It was the first time I’d ever seen cocaine being used at work; it was the first time I’d ever witnessed women being sexually harassed on the job (unfortunately a pretty regular occurrence at that particular time and place); and it was the first — and, so far, last — time I ever had my pocket picked. (The thief was my co-worker Ronnie, a seriously streetwise kid from the West Side projects; he gave my fully intact wallet back to me before I was even aware that it was missing, along with a stern lecture to always keep my it in my front pocket.) But what I really learned about that summer was Iron Maiden.

One of the runners at my company was a kid named Jim. He was about 18, with long white-blond feathered hair and a freckled complexion, and though he was only about 5’6” he carried himself with some serious bantam swagger. He always wore a spiked leather wristband on the trading floor, and kept his runner jacket festooned with badges of his favorite heavy metal bands — and his absolute favorite, I soon learned, was Iron Maiden.

Jim and I talked a lot while waiting for our next orders to come in — or rather, he talked while I listened. He told me that he played lead guitar in a suburban speed-metal band called Witchslayer, and there was all kinds of drama between him and one of the other guys in the band because Jim had stolen his girlfriend. Said girl was still in high school, so Jim would come in every day with new tales of how he’d had to sneak in through her bedroom window so he could “give it to her doggy-style”. When he and his love intere went out on a “date,” it was always to some heavy metal show, and the highlight of Jim’s summer was the Scorpions/Iron Maiden/Girlschool show at Alpine Valley, which he described to me in even greater detail than his alleged sexcapades.

Jim liked Girlschool (who I’d never heard of), and really dug the Scorps (as did I), but seeing Iron Maiden had practically been a religious experience for him; he even demonstrated some of “Eddie’s” onstage movements for me. (This was the very moment when I learned that Maiden’s undead mascot had a name.)

I told Jim that I knew the album Killers — a lie, since I’d still only ever seen the cover — but he told me that their new album The Number of the Beast was even better, and that their new lead singer was a vast improvement over the previous guy. “He sings like this,” he said, gamely trying to replicate Bruce Dickinson’s air-raid siren wail. “Uh AH uh AH uh AHHHHH!!!”

That Bruce Dickinson imitation soon became Jim’s favored way of greeting me. If we were passing each other on our ways to or from various trading pits, he’d invariably flash me the “metal” horns and yell, “MAIDEN, man! Uh AH uh AH uh AHHHHH!!!” Sometimes he’d mix it up — “PRIEST, man! Uh AH uh AH uh AHHHHH!!!” or “SCORPS, man! Uh AH uh AH uh AHHHHH!!!” or, when he was really digging deep, “RAVEN, man! Uh AH uh AH uh AHHHHH!!!” — but Maiden was usually the first thing on his mind.

Despite the rampant cocaine use, the Merc had strict rules against using drugs on the premises — and if you got caught by Merc security, you were immediately fired from your present job, no questions asked or warnings given. One morning before the opening bell, Jim and another runner had stepped out of the building and gone to smoke a joint by the river; like idiots, they’d kept their yellow runner jackets on while doing this, and thus were easily spotted by a security guard.

The last time I saw Jim, he was hustling around the Merc floor with a stack of resumés, trying to find a new gig. “MAIDEN, man!,” I called out to him. “Uh AH uh AH uh AHHHHH!!!” He silently shot me a look that said, “Dude, I’m so hating my life right now,” and then vanished from mine forever.

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