Screaming For Vengeance

Looking Back with Rob Halford at Judas Priest's classic 1982 LP.

A couple of quick bits before we get to the main event:

1) A huge n’ hearty thank you to all the new Jagged Time Lapse subscribers, paid and otherwise, who have joined the party this last week. Your support is profoundly appreciated, and I hope you hang around and maybe even recommend this Substack to your pals.

2) For those of you who enjoyed the last JTL post about how Ferrante & Teicher’s cover of “Theme from Exodus” introduced me to the concept of heavy music, by all means check out the latest edition of my friend Cal Zone’s “Magic Records” radio show, which my post apparently inspired. It’s an hour of incredible soundtrack selections, ranging from the original King Kong to various Blaxploitation gems, and it kept me very fine company yesterday as I wended my way through the fog-shrouded Shawangunk Mountains…

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And speaking of heavy music, how’s about a little Judas Priest? 2022 marked the 40th anniversary of Screaming for Vengeance, the first platinum-selling album by the legendary British metal band. While I generally prefer Priest’s harder (and weirder) ’70s stuff, Screaming is my favorite of their post-British Steel albums, a diamond-hard juggernaut of rampaging riffs, dueling guitar solos and ridiculously catchy choruses. And if you think I’d put this album down just because it happened to be massively successful, you’ve got another thing coming.

My own Priest fandom predates the album’s original release by a few years. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I became a fan. It was in the fall of 1979, and I was hanging out in my L.A. bedroom after school, playing Strat-o-Matic Baseball and listening to KROQ when a “Dirty Dragstrip”-style announcer stopped me mid-dice roll. “When Rob Halford of Judas Priest rides out onstage on his black Harley-Davidson,” he growled, “YOOOU KNOOOW it’s hell bent for leather!” “Hell bent! Hell bent for leather!” the band chanted behind him.

The ad was for Priest’s upcoming appearance at the Santa Monica Civic Center, supporting their new Hell Bent For Leather album (known as Killing Machine everywhere else in the world), and the effect it had on me was as if I had just been tased. My eyes bugged out, my body trembled, and my brain could only go, “WHOA — WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!?” over and over again. I had never even heard of Judas Priest before, but that ad made them truly sound like the baddest band in the world, and I suddenly, desperately needed to learn more…

And learn more I did, especially after moving to Chicago a few months later, where WLUP played several of their tracks on a regular basis (and even more so after British Steel was released in April 1980), and several of my new friends turned out to be Priest fans. One thing I didn’t learn at the time — though I definitely had my suspicions — was that lead singer Rob Halford was gay. Lots of metal and hard rock bands wore leather and studs in those days, but nobody wore them with Halford’s over-the-top panache, nor with the sort of “I know what I am, but do you?” wink and nudge that he seemed to impart in his band’s videos. Still, a lot of metal fans were pretty damn certain that Halford was completely heterosexual (see the infamous “I’d jump his bones” scene from Heavy Metal Parking Lot), and steadfastly refused to believe otherwise until he officially came out in 1998.

Not that it mattered at all to me. Frankly, I admired the hell out of the man, both because of his phenomenal pipes and because he seemed to have so much fun subverting the standard “chick-hungry metal frontman” conventions. I loved Priest’s hot-rodded Unleashed in the East rendition of Joan Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust” from the very first time I heard it; but when I later learned that Baez had written the song about her love affair with Bob Dylan (from whose song “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” the band took their name), it added so many new layers to Priest’s version for me. That verse where Halford, playing a lover spurned by the greatest songwriter of the past 60 years, angrily spits “Now you’re TELLING me/You’re not NOSTALGIC/Then give me another WORD for it/You were so GOOD with words/And at keeping things VAGUE” — man, it gives me goosebumps every time. I really wish Dylan had written about Priest’s version of Baez’s song in his new book, though doing so would have probably required him to drop more masks than he’s capable of at this point.

All of which is to say that, when I finally got the chance to interview Rob Halford for the first time in 2002, for a Guitar World feature on the 20th anniversary of Screaming for Vengeance, I was extremely stoked, and not a little intimidated. This was metal royalty, after all. But as I’ve experienced so many times over the years, it’s the metal legends who are often the nicest, funniest, most down-to-earth interview subjects.

While chunks of this interview found its way into Guitar World, this is the first time it has ever run anywhere in its entirety, because that’s the kind of treat I love to lay on my paid subscribers…