Ye Olde Hit Parade: Run to the Hills

1982: Iron Maiden - Run to the Hills

After the major changes of the previous year, 1982 was pretty stable for our family. We had moved into a decent-sized house across town in Richland, Washington and I began the second half of my freshman year at a new high school. It took a little while to make friends, but I did eventually.

World events were interesting: The 10-week Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom kicked off, seven people died in Chicago of Tylenol poisoning and a guy named Lawn Chair Larry flew 16,000 feet above Long Beach, California, in a lawn chair with weather balloons attached. In addition, the first CDs were manufactured in Germany.

But I didn't know about CDs. I was all about cassettes, since I got a Sony Walkman that year. I was still buying vinyl, but I would tape albums onto cassettes so I could listen to them at school. The recordings were of extremely shitty quality because I didn't know squat about proper recording techniques, but the portability was awesome.

Musically, I was getting more and more into hard rock and metal, and there was plenty of it to listen to: There were new releases from Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin (an outtakes collection), Rush, Robert Plant, Scorpions and Judas Priest. I had to seek out this stuff on my own, because we didn't have MTV yet and the one "rock" station in town stuck to top 40. I quickly got sick of stuff like Steve Miller's "Abracadabra," Olivia Newton John's "Physical," "Ebony and Ivory" by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson because it got played to death. I also remember being very disappointed by the debut album from Asia, a so-called supergroup comprised of people from bands I liked such as Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. On paper, it should have been good and proggy, but man, did it suck.

Another place I found out about music was Night Flight on USA Network, which would play concerts by the likes of Neil Young and Cheap Trick, but also would play videos like Judas Priest's "You've Got Another Thing Comin'. I discovered rock magazines like Circus and Hit Parader, as well as Rolling Stone, so that's where I got a lot of my information. And there were a couple of record stores in town, so I spent my allowance on music and comic books. I was aware of Iron Maiden and had picked up their live EP Maiden Japan while I was still in Toronto, but now they had a new singer named Bruce Dickinson and a new studio album called The Number of the Beast. Now I had been raised fairly religiously by my Christian mom, so I knew all about Revelations and the Anti-Christ and all that jazz. So I was a little freaked out by the new Maiden record at first. But as I read about the band and realized the cover showed their mascot Eddie controlling the devil, I came to the conclusion that they weren't devil worshippers; it was more like a horror movie. Nevertheless, when I bought the album, I made sure my mom didn't catch sight of it. She probably would have called an exorcist or something.


The lead single was "Run to the Hills," a galloping beast of a thrasher about the first European settlers arriving in North America and attacking Native Americans. I didn't see the video until years later and I never heard it on the radio, but between my vinyl and the tape copy, I listened to it constantly in '82. That summer, we drove up to Seattle and took a ferry over to Vancouver and while we were in the car, I heard a radio interview on Seattle's KISW-FM with members of the band, who were in town to play the Kingdome that night.

The single only charted in the UK and Ireland, but the album was a huge success for the band. It got to #33 on the U.S. album charts, but it hit #1 in the UK and has sold more than 14 million copies worldwide since its release.

I kept my metal fandom to myself mostly, although it's not like I had a ton of friends, anyway. The guys I did hang out with were more into stuff like REO Speedwagon and Survivor, which didn't really interest me. But thanks to my trusty Walkman, I could blast Maiden or Ozzy whenever I wanted.

Honorable mentions: Judas Priest - "You've Got Another Thing Comin'"; Rush - "New World Man"; Van Halen - "Pretty Woman"; Scorpions - "No One Like You"; April Wine - "Enough Is Enough"; Robert Plant - "Burning Down One Side"; Led Zeppelin - "Wearing and Tearing"; Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - "I Love Rock N' Roll"; Tom Petty - "You Got Lucky"; Aldo Nova - "Fantasy"; Coney Hatch - "Devil's Deck"; A Flock of Seagulls - "I Ran (So Far Away)"; The Clash - "Rock the Casbah"; Iron Maiden - "The Number of the Beast"; Peter Gabriel - "Shock the Monkey"