Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
The Trooper (1983)
When you're a kid getting into music, sometimes it takes a while to figure out what you really like. When I was really young, I liked whatever was on the radio, but then I started to home in on certain things.
There were a couple of years when disco was the big thing and I was digging it, but by the end of the '70s, I was gravitating towards heavier music. A key moment was when I sold my copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and used the store credit to buy Led Zeppelin's new at-the-time album In Through the Out Door. I liked Zep and Rush, but also the Who, the Kinks, the Stones, the Beatles. But then I heard Black Sabbath (the Dio version) and Ozzy and I was hooked. I saw a Motorhead show on TV and was all in. Yeah, I was becoming a teenage metalhead.
I started reading hard rock magazines like Circus and Hit Parader. Not exactly the zenith of music journalism, but hey, I was 14. In addition to Ozzy and Sabbath and Van Halen, I began seeing a lot of stories about a British band called Iron Maiden. As a comics fanatic, I liked their mascot Eddie and bought a Maiden Japan jersey around the same time I got the live album of the same name. But not long after that, Maiden switched vocalists, swapping out the gruff Paul Di'Anno for the operatic Bruce Dickinson.
The band was formed in London in 1975 by bassist/songwriter Steve Harris. There were several lineup changes before the band recorded its 1980 self-titled debut; at that time, the band was comprised of Harris, Di'Anno, guitarists Dave Murray and Dennis Stratton and drummer Clive Burr. The album brought a fresh approach to metal, which had been languishing a bit in recent years. It was fast, loud and brash, and Maiden was quickly branded part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal along with other upstarts like Def Leppard, Motorhead, Venom, Saxon and Diamond Head. Stratton left the band after the debut and was replaced by Adrian Smith, and the band released Killers in 1981; the band began to get more attention, opening for Judas Priest in the U.S. and going on their first world tour.
Di'Anno was indulging in a lot of cocaine and was fired from the band after the Killers tour, with Dickinson brought in as his replacement. Dickinson had previously been lead singer for the British band Samson. He was hired in September 1981 and the band released its third album, The Number of the Beast, in 1982. The title track and cover art, which featured band mascot Eddie manipulating the devil as a puppet, got the band in the sights of fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. It was the early days of the '80s Satanic Panic, but Maiden just laughed it off all the way to the bank. The album went to #1 in the U.K. and #33 in the U.S., with a rock radio hit in "Run to the Hills." I bought the album not long after it came out but made sure my extremely religious mother didn't see the cover.
Burr was let go after that tour; he was an excellent drummer but the band had concerns that his offstage partying was affecting his performance. Maiden hired Nicko McBrain, most recently of the French hard rock act Trust, to replace him. The band went right into the studio and recorded Piece of Mind, which came out in May 1983. The first single, "Flight of Icarus," was a radio and MTV hit, going to #8 on the Billboard Top Album Tracks chart.
The second single was "The Trooper," a steamroller of a song that Harris wrote about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. For a bunch of metal hooligans, Iron Maiden was pretty well-read and nerdy (other songs on the album referenced the Dune books, Japanese samurai and movies like "Quest for Fire" and "Where Eagles Dare."
"The Trooper" begins with an unforgettable harmony guitar riff and then launches into a galloping bass line while Dickinson absolutely tears into the lyrics.
"You'll take my life, but I'll take yours, too/You'll fire your musket, but I'll run you through/So when you're waiting for the next attack/You'd better stand, there's no turning back/The bugle sounds, the charge begins/But on this battlefield, no one wins/The smell of acrid smoke and horse's breath/As I plunge on into certain death."
The song is one of the fastest 4-minute songs you'll ever hear because it just thunders along at breakneck speed. There's no chorus, per se, other than the anthemic "Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh" that follows every other verse.
"The horse, he sweats with fear, we break to run/The mighty roar of the Russian guns/And as we race toward the human wall/The screams of pain as my comrades fall/We hurdle bodies that lay on the ground/And the Russians fire another round/We get so near, yet so far away/We won't live to fight another day."
The song's narrator details the futility of war, and it doesn't end well for him.
"We get so close, near enough to fight/When a Russian gets me in his sights/He pulls the trigger and I feel the blow/A burst of rounds take my horse below/And as I lay there gazing at the sky/My body's numb and my throat is dry/And as I lay forgotten and alone/Without a tear, I draw my parting groan."
The song quickly became a concert staple for Maiden, with Dickinson often waving a Union Jack flag and wearing a redcoat as he performs it. It went to #28 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and #12 on the U.K. Singles chart, and Piece of Mind got to #14 on the Billboard Top 200 and #3 in the U.K. It cemented the band's reputation as one of the top metal acts in the world, which only increased throughout the '80s with albums like Powerslave, Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.
I was living in Washington State when the album came out, but we moved to New Hampshire the day after school got out in June 1983. I had just bought Piece of Mind after the movers left for the cross-country trip with all our stuff, so I actually carried it with me for the plane ride to NH. I didn't see Maiden in concert until 1988 and 1990, but the shows were everything I thought they'd be.
In the early '90s, things started to crumble a bit for the band, with both Dickinson and Smith working on solo projects and Smith eventually leaving the band. He was replaced by Janick Gers, who played in Dickinson's solo band. Dickinson and Harris began butting heads and Dickinson went solo in 1993. Maiden hired Blaze Bayley as their new singer and released two albums that didn't fare well. Dickinson and Smith returned to Maiden in 1999, giving the band a three-guitar attack. The band did a successful reunion tour and then released two studio albums in the early 2000s that fared well.
I tuned out on the band, and heavy metal in general, after 1991. As the '80s wore on, I was increasingly more interested in alternative rock and by '92, I just didn't pay attention to metal and hard rock anymore. It wasn't until 2006 that I started getting back into Iron Maiden. I was talking to a co-worker about Maiden and he gave me a mix CD of their best songs. There was a new album coming out and I started checking that out, and then went to see them at Agganis Arena with a buddy. In the years since, I've seen them three or four more times when they've come around. Hey man, they're a great live act.
I'm still primarily interested in indie rock, but I'll never get sick of "The Trooper."
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