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angidescent · 5 years

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Tonight I'm seeing Iron Maiden live for the 5th time. It's always an emotional time for me and I started thinking about a blog post I wrote about it in 2016. Figured I'd copy it here just in case anything ever happens to my Wordpress blog.

A Musical Memorial

April 21, 2016

“And in a moment the memories are all that remain, / And all the wounds are reopening again” – “Blood Brothers” by Iron Maiden

I firmly believe that a life without music is not worth living. It reaches into the deepest parts of our souls and allows us to process or feel every emotion imaginable. It makes us relive moments. Music has the ability to break all cultural, societal, economic, and language barriers to make us feel something powerful. And no person experiences or hears a piece of music the same way. It is also a well-known fact that in the metal community, there is a deep connection among the members. Some say there are no strangers in metal, just friends we haven’t met yet. While music has always had this magical hold over me, Iron Maiden in particular has the power to make me feel every emotion and relive almost every moment of my life. Especially the most painful ones. It has taken me a while to write this, but earlier this month, I attended my fourth Iron Maiden concert. To understand the significance of this, you need to understand why this band in particular is closely tied to my relationships with three important men in my life. After I get those details out, I promise to rip your heart out with a very emotional story.

I am very fortunate to be a second generation metalhead, hence my common use of the phrase “from the womb to the tomb” to describe my metalhead status. It can be argued that metal music always brought me comfort because Dad would sing metal songs to me as lullabies. Yes, Enter the Sandman and Screaming in the Night were excellent lullabies! And when I became a properly sentient larvae, I would pick CDs to fall asleep to. I essentially stole Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time and Twisted Sister’s Big Hits and Nasty Cuts from him. Some of my favourite childhood memories are sitting in the living room while Dad acted like a DJ. He would play all sorts of records, cassettes, or CDs and tell us trivia or memories associated with them. He’d also quiz us on what band or album it was, a game Sister never excelled at and hated! I am happy to report that she is much better at it now. Perhaps it was partly due to me always being a daddy’s girl, but metal has remained my primary genre of music throughout my life. He was so damn proud of me when I started my metal and punk radio show in university!

Growing up as a metalhead was frustrating at times. I’m not usually one to pull this card, but being a girl didn’t help. Other than liking the odd song or band, most of the other girls didn’t listen to metal. And the boys? Well I stopped even mentioning my music preferences because most of them would claim I was lying or quiz me to prove my authenticity. Hell, even Spike didn’t quite believe me when we first met, but I soon made him see the truth. What didn’t help my case was the fact that I was a shy kid and tried to blend in to avoid being bullied. I wore casual, bright clothes while at school and got straight-As; I didn’t fit the stereotype. I will never forget the look on my Literature 12 teacher’s face the day he played Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in class. He hated metal and lectured the whole time he was setting up the CD player about how much he hated metal and expected the students not to enjoy it, but he was going to play this anyway because it was an example of how old poetry can still be relevant in modern culture. He was obviously shocked and disappointed in me when he noticed I was quietly drumming on my desk and lip syncing while pretending to serenade my ballerina friend.

That moment in Literature 12 was also a significant one for Ragehorn and I. You see, although Ragehorn and I had known each other since elementary school, we weren’t close. In high school we ended up in two of the same social circles, but remained friendly acquaintances at best. During grade 12, after the majority of one of those circles had graduated, we finally became proper friends. Maybe it was just out of loneliness. For the first time since elementary school, we had classes together and were both on the Scholarship Team, so we got better acquainted. But when he looked over during that moment in Lit class and I noticed his foot tapping along, we had a sudden realization that we had more in common than we thought. After that, our bond continued to grow and developed into full-fledged best friend status when we started university. And Maiden continued to be the soundtrack of our friendship: driving around town, sitting in the campus hallways, or passionately arguing when we had different opinions about individual songs or albums. Through me, Spike and Ragehorn also became close friends and it wasn’t long before people started cracking jokes about me having two boyfriends or calling Ragehorn Spike and I’s boyfriend. We were quite happy with our platonic threesome whatever way you sliced it.

The first time Iron Maiden announced a concert near me in my lifetime, I told Dad we were going. He didn’t even have a choice; he was bringing his daughter to the slaughter! I was 19 at the time and also asked my boyfriends if they wanted to come. Of course they did, it was Iron fucking Maiden! By Eddie that was a magical night! It was Spike, Ragehorn, and I’s first big concert and we were excited! Ragehorn was a really shy, quiet guy during this stage of his life and didn’t know Dad well yet, so he almost pissed himself the first time Dad let out a scream. While the three of us were head banging and yelling, Ragehorn quietly rocked out with foot tapping, head bobbing, and the odd horned salute. And he definitely pissed himself when we were driving home and “scary” Dad told my uncle over the phone that he had to switch spots because Ragehorn wouldn’t stop grabbing his ass. It took a while for him to get used to Dad’s humour. Two years later, Iron Maiden returned and Dad, Spike, and I bought tickets! Ragehorn originally declined our invitation, but decided to come last minute and bought a spare ticket my uncle had right next to us. In those two years, he had become much more outgoing and knew Dad quite well so he threatened to grab Dad’s ass outright. Thankfully his head banging had also improved. At the time Cupcake and I had this shtick where we would send “snexy selfies” to one another. The point of them was to be unflattering or downright goofy. The night of the second Maiden concert, we took this snexy shot:

I will always be so thankful that Ragehorn decided to join us that night because less than a month later, he was dead. Yep, the night of his birthday a whole group of us were celebrating. We had a designated driver (me) and left his ride at a totally different location blocks away from where we were. No one thought anything of him and Orange going for a walk around the block to sober up because that is what they had done for years without incident. For whatever reason though, they decided to walk to the bar we left the car at and drive that night. If there is anything positive to this heartbreaking and traumatic experience, it was that it was a single car crash and they both died painlessly on impact. The only people that suffered were those left behind to grieve. When Ragehorn’s mother wanted his guitar played at their funeral, we knew it had to be an Iron Maiden song. It was decided that his bandmates, Spike and Saiyan, would perform. Dad, Spike, and I spent hours deciding on what song to choose before “Blood Brothers” hit us like lightning. Leading up to the funeral, even more hours were spent in my parents’ living room arranging and rehearsing a shortened, acoustic version. And crying…lots of crying. Saiyan couldn’t touch Ragehorn’s guitar at first, so he used my guitar; which he had to retune because Ragehorn had decided to tune it drunk a couple weeks before. I’ll never forget the moment he unconsciously grabbed Ragehorn’s guitar and Mom quietly saying “Saiyan…don’t panic, but do you realize what’s in your hand?” He almost dropped it, but from that point on he used it. Every minute from the moment we realized Ragehorn and Orange were missing to the day after the funeral is burned in my memories, but the performance at the funeral is a particularly vibrant one. Watching Saiyan hesitate picking up the guitar, Spike singing every painful emotion, me gripping Cupcake and Toxic’s hands when I saw my ever strong father crying. It was the only performance Thanatos Instinct ever did; the band couldn’t go on after losing Ragehorn. Further on the Maiden theme, the shirt Ragehorn bought at one of the concerts was turned into a stunning memorial teddy bear.

Not a day goes by where I don’t think about Ragehorn and Orange at least once, but as the Maiden concerts approach it becomes almost unbearable. The first Maiden concert without Ragehorn was two years after he died. I cried for days leading up to it; it was the first one without him and the universe didn’t seem fair. Assholes will argue that he somehow deserved to die for driving drunk, but Spike and I didn’t deserve to lose our best friend when we were all so young. We didn’t deserve to lose our best man before we even got engaged. The first song that got to me that night was “Afraid to Shoot Strangers,” a favourite of ours to blast in the truck while driving around in the middle of the night. Then came “Wasted Years,” the ringtone I had assigned for his calls. Along with “The Evil That Men Do,” which they played later, these were the tracks I played on repeat when I couldn’t control my grief. With lyrics like “And I will pray for her, I will call her name out loud/And I will bleed for her, if I could only see her now” and “Too much time on my hands, I got you on my mind/Can’t ease this pain, so easily/When you can’t find the words to say it’s hard to/make it through another day/And it makes me wanna cry and throw my hands up to the sky,” they struck all the right emotional chords. As Hans Christian Andersen said, “Where words fail, music speaks.” But even with the tears, it was cathartic. Yes, it was painful, but it was also a perfect time to remember him and all the crazy adventures we had. It made us feel like a piece of him was still with us if only for a few moments.

It has been over 5 years since we lost Ragehorn, so as the lights were going down and Maiden was taking the stage this time, I thought to myself “let’s see if I can do this without crying! Tears are not metal!” I’d have thoughts like “Ragehorn would be so mad because these seats are amazing,” but I was keeping positive. I was doing fine…until the encore. The front man, Bruce Dickinson, was doing his little speech between songs to introduce the next one, and then he caught me off guard with a song I didn’t expect: “Blood Brothers.” Sure, they had played it at the second concert we attended, but I didn’t expect them to perform it again. As soon as Bruce said the word “blood,” I started tearing up. As the music started, Dad looked back at me and said “Ragehorn’s with us.” At that point, I fully broke down crying. Spike hasn’t been able to listen to the song since the funeral, so I wrapped my arms around him, buried my face in his chest, and just cried as I sang along. I started to compose myself as the song ended, but they followed it up with “Wasted Years.” I texted Cupcake “Fuck they’re doing Blood Brothers” followed by “And they fucking followed it with Wasted Years.” Then I sent her a snexy selfie of me all teary-eyed giving the horns, haha! I belted the song out as loud as I could, tears still streaming down my face. And what went through my mind when this happened? I just pictured Ragehorn standing with us, laughing at me and too proud of himself for making me lose emotional control; for making me cry in a METAL concert! As much as he hated seeing me cry, I know a piece of him would love that we still miss him so much. That we still think of and celebrate him at every Maiden concert, throw a little birthday party for him, and tattoo our bodies because we loved him so much.

#iron maiden #grief #grieving #metal music #metal #heavy metal #metal head #from the womb to the tomb #concert #angidescent

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