Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I
journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album
from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the
project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.
Since the very early goings of this series, I've been foreshadowing that metal would one day play an important role in the progress of progressive rock, and now, my dear dedicated few readers who have stuck with this series, we're here! The moment when heavy metal and progressive rock truly converge! Can you feel the tingling on the back of neck? The sudden impulse to thrash your head back and forth? The undeniable urge to make edgy allusions to Satan to discomfort your parents? Yeah baby! Here we go!
I should say first that I am not anything close to a metal expert; metal music communities thrive on hyper-specific knowledge that I simply do not have. I enjoy this music, and I hope I've represented it to the best of my abilities. But there are probably going to be some factual errors and oversimplifications here. If so, please let me know!
But wait; per tradition, here's some history. As you may have guessed, neither 1984 nor Iron Maiden's Powerslave are the first time that progressive rock and heavy metal have overlapped. I talked about their interplay way back on my 1970 post about Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and I still basically stand by the observation that back in the post-'67 explosion of divergent rock music styles and structures, a lot of the people pushing the boundaries of rock music were basically all hobnobbing under the same big tent of rock's vanguard, from the wacked-out avant-gardists like Captain Beefheart to those who would eventually become associated with more commercially viable genres like art rock, hard rock, heavy metal, and progressive rock. I mean, Deep Purple, definitely one of the heavy metal grandaddies, sings about Frank Zappa in "Smoke on the Water"; my impression is that this was all something of a scene, which is kind of wild to think about when you consider how siloed the branches of rock music would become from one another moving forward.
And they did get siloed pretty quickly. As early as 1972 or '73, these definitely felt like completely different wings that may occasionally overlap but generally felt as if they were moving in distinct directions. The avant-garde/experimental folks like Zappa and Henry Cow were off in one corner, doing their thing. Then there was art rock and progressive rock going in their own increasingly florid directions, especially prog, which, as we've discussed, focused on forming complicated, busy compositions that stretched over whole sides of LPs; meanwhile, hard rock and heavy metal traded on one another for the rest of the '70s with bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Blue Öyster Cult (all of whom tended to trade in both genres), with hard rock forging a faster, bluesier path and heavy metal leaning on slower, crushing riffs and doomy atmospheres—and despite emerging from the same post-'67 primordial pool, neither sounded especially proggy except on obvious genre experiments like Zeppelin's "Achilles Last Stand." This is all waaay simplifying the evolution here, but hopefully it's not too unfamiliar territory for someone who stuck it out this far in the series. Tons of this is still part of the mainstream rock canon; if you still have a radio, '70s heavy metal and hard rock in particular are all over classic rock radio[1].
Predictably, this all gets shaken up with the emergence of punk, which begins mid-'70s in the United States as kind of a convergent evolution between America's experimental rock and hard rock wings but soon hops across the pond to the UK, where it makes an arguably bigger cultural splash as specifically a movement in defiance of the reigning powers that be in the rock world, which in the UK at the time mean prog and heavy metal. I've talked before about how the narrative that "punk killed prog" is a gross oversimplification, and I would say the same thing of this first wave of heavy metal/hard rock in relation to punk. As with prog, heavy metal/hard rock happened to be undergoing some internal shakeups not directly connected to punk, e.g. Ozzy Osbourne's departure from Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin's increasing trouble with its members' health/behavior, culminating in the death of drummer John Bonham and the group's subsequent dissolution. So as with prog, heavy metal has something of an identity crisis at the end of the '70s[2].
Now unlike prog, which, as we've seen previously in this series, adapted to punk by ultimately just abandoning prog for prog-inflected pop, metal sees punk and its aggression and fleet songwriting and adopts a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach, and what's known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM... catchy) forms around a bunch of artists who fuse the speed and scuzziness of punk with the riffs and doom of heavy metal: Motörhead, Saxon, Def Leppard[3], etc. It makes sense; the sneering thrash of punk is a much more obvious cross-pollination with the aggro-postures of metal than it is with the operatic and symphonic sensibilities of '70s prog, so it seems only natural that metal and punk rub off on one another more so than punk and prog do[4].
The funny thing about all of this is that because of prog and metal's at-this-point distant shared ancestors, prog did end up cross-pollinating with punk by proxy of the NWOBHM, whose bands fused the immediate instrumental ferocity of punk with the more grandiose structures of the legacy of that stew of post-'67 rock experimentation. The groups who especially leaned into the latter half of this equation even became known as "progressive metal."
This is more or less where we get to Iron Maiden, not only one of the headlining bands of the NWOBHM but also a key player in the formation of progressive metal. Iron Maiden were formed by bassist/songwriter Steve Harris in London in 1975, and like a lot of bands, the group kind of bounced around various clubs and underwent a number of lineup changes before finally being able to scrounge up enough funds to get themselves into the studio. In 1978, they recorded their very scrappy, self-produced debut, The Soundhouse Tapes: a lean three-song EP written entirely by Steven Harris. It's a fairly modest listen for being the studio debut of one of the most important metal groups of all time, but it's also an early example of the hallmarks of the NWOBHM: DIY production, punk-flavored guitar and vocals, Judas-Priest-inspired edge. At the time, punk, not metal, was the press darling as far as emergent underground rock music in the UK goes, so Iron Maiden, as with most of the New Wave Metal, mostly gained an audience by word-of-mouth and by circulating tapes of this EP (honestly a very punk move) until they found radio and club DJs who were interested. This eventually snowballed into enough popularity that their public release of The Soundhouse Tapes in 1979 sold out all 5000 copies in a matter of weeks. This was enough to get some major label attention, and the group signed to EMI soon after.
I know that this is technically a post about the band's fifth album, Powerslave, but I say all this about their debut EP just to point out that Iron Maiden is truly a fusion of the legacies of all three major strands of left-of-center British rock music: punk and prog and metal. As I pointed out in the previous post in this series, a lot of post-'70s posture towards prog was anything but progressive, attempting to preserve certain characteristics of the genre as if the sea change of the punk/new wave moment at the end of the '80s had never happened[5]. But with Iron Maiden, there is a genuine spirit of synthesizing the old with the new that feels way more in the spirit of their early-'70s forebears than the people who were out there trying to create '70s revivalist music, which I find delightful. Even more delightful is the fact that Iron Maiden don't seem to have envisioned themselves as progressive rockers at all, based on their early, formational work; The Soundhouse Tapes make it clear that punk and metal are the key building blocks, and the music reflects that, with fast-paced, macabre tunes about urban decay ("Prowler"), Vikings ("Invaders"), and the band's spooky persona itself ("Iron Maiden"). None of these songs are over the four-and-a-half minute mark; none of them are particularly indebted to any of the tropes of prog.
That all starts to change with the group's first full-length LP (self-titled, naturally). In some ways, the album is a continuation of what the band started with The Soundhouse Tapes; "Prowler" and "Iron Maiden"[6] are both present in re-recorded versions, and a lot of the rest of the album has the same sort of punk-metal sound. But nestled at the end of Side One is a track called "Phantom of the Opera," a seven-minute, multi-part epic inspired by the titular gothic mystery novel by Gaston Leroux—pretty much a prog hat trick. And with this single track, Iron Maiden's progressive metal is born. Nearly every album from Iron Maiden's classic era (approximately their self-titled through 1988's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son) has some sort of openly operatic composition in this vein, a long, multi-movement song usually drawing on history or classic literature/mythology or sometimes just fantasy or sci-fi more broadly: "Prodigal Son" on Killers, "Hallowed Be Thy Name" on The Number of the Beast, "To Tame a Land"[7] on Piece of Mind, etc. Even the songs that aren't overt epics begin to take on some of the grandeur of their more ambitious siblings—for example, "Flight of Icarus" on Piece of Mind, a song that's not even four minutes long but that still makes time to re-tell the Greek myth alluded to in the title.
One of the things that sometimes goes unremarked-upon about prog is that it is a genre that relies heavily
on storytelling. Country and hip-hop get a lot of attention as the
"storytelling" genres, and they certainly have earned those accolades. But prog's penchant for conceptual ideas, unself-consciously grand gestures, and the genre's roots in British prep schools make it a little different from the embellished autobiography and folk realism that imbues the country and hip-hop storytellers. Because outside of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here or The Wall, proggers tend to shy away from overt autobiography; instead, befitting the genre's grandiose ambitions, when prog tells a story, it tells an epic one: apocalypses, sci-fi sagas, pseudo-Biblical fantasy parables, Tarkuses, to say nothing of the numerous examples of social/political satire that have peppered the genre with big ideas. As much as progressive music has aspired to the mathematical bombast of classical music, so too has its lyrical content often been bent toward the literary classics in either explicit adaptations or pieces that reach for the same philosophical/cultural high-mindedness as the European storytelling canon[8]. I've been a little snarky about some of these storytelling attempts in the past because they are a little cornball at times, and there's something of a "teenaged boy thinks that the most serious stories have battles and brooding men doing important things" vibe to some of this, and critics of prog have certainly used this to lampoon the genre as a bastion of faux-intellectual dorks. But I also have a great deal of affection for the unabashed nerdiness of this kind of thing, and besides, some of this stuff is really cool and interesting and weird, or at least charmingly bookish in a way that most rock music does not allow itself to be. And Iron Maiden definitely slots right into this category.
The funny thing about Iron Maiden is that, despite being named after an instrument of torture and having either Satan, a zombie, or both on every one of their album covers and being one of the key players in a genre notorious for its edge-lord darkness and alleged ability to corrupt the morals of children, Iron Maiden are kind of dorks. To be fair, this is true of many metal bands once you peel back the macabre facade, but it is especially true of Iron Maiden, a band whose lyrics seem intentionally calibrated to be played by high school English and history teachers desperate to prove to their students that they are one of the Cool Ones[9]. The one most responsible for this impulse seems to be Steve Harris, who was initially the primary songwriting for the band. Though the songwriting duties eventually diversified, Harris is far and away the most prolific of the Iron Maiden crew, and his penchant is definitely for these high-school-class-type epics, being the man responsible for all of the songs I named above except for "Flight of Icarus." Under Harris's pen, the band honed what would be Iron Maiden's signature lyrical posture: a macabre gloss over a classical education. I am throwing no shade here; I unabashedly love this about Iron Maiden, and this impulse in the band that I love arguably comes to a head with their fifth album, Powerslave.
Powerslave finds Iron Maiden at their proggiest point yet, in terms of both their music and their lyrics. Just looking at the track listing, you've got the most obvious harbingers of progginess: long songs. Only two of the eight tracks dip below five minutes, and at the album's long-windiest, you've even got a 7-minute song and a nearly 14-minute song. But this is just surface-level; more important is what's actually in those songs, which are loud, brash, and fast in the NWOBHM style but also intricately composed, with winding instrumental passages and multi-movement structures in a way that distinctly recalls the tendencies of prog.
Most importantly for the theme that I've been building in this post, this album is positively brimming with narrative. The record opens with "Aces High," a Harris-penned recounting of a WWII dogfight, followed just a few tracks later by vocalist Bruce Dickinson's "Flash of the Blade," which tells the story of a young boy who grows into a vengeful swordsman, before ending Side One with another Harris lyric, "The Duellists," about a sword duel to the death and named for the Ridley Scott film of the same title (itself adapted from the Joseph Conrad novella The Duel). The other two Side One songs I didn't already mention are "Losfer Words (Big 'Orra)," an instrumental track, and "Two Minutes to Midnight," an apocalyptic anti-nuclear-war banger that, in the grand Sabbath tradition, associates nihilistic war hawks with the demonic—neither free from prog inflections themselves.
Side Two of the record goes even fuller-bore into this grand narrative posture. The first song on Side Two is "Back in the Village," part two of a pair of Iron Maiden songs (the first being "The Prisoner" on their third album, The Number of the Beast) based on the cult-favorite British TV series The Prisoner. Next is "Powerslave" itself, which opens on a Pink-Floyd-sounding bit of spooky sound collage until it bursts forth into a riff-heavy jam whose lyrics form a dramatic monologue of sorts involving a pharaoh on his deathbed raging against the coming darkness. "Powerslave" in particular whips itself up to a rather impressive progressive frenzy, shifting through three very distinct movements, each with their own tempos and technical flair: the first and third comprising the lyrical sections, a grim memento mori growled over hard-hitting riffage, sandwiching the second movement, a lengthy and escalatingly quick passage of guitar pyrotechnics that at times abandons any metal flourishes entirely and becomes definitively neo-prog its its melodic, winding guitar work. At seven minutes, this kind of structure wouldn't feel out-of-place on, say, Yes's Close to the Edge or Marillion's Script for a Jester's Tear.
But all of this pales in comparison to the album's 13-minute-and-45-seconds grand finale, the monstrous, sprawling "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The song is more or less structured like "Powerslave" in that there are two conventional metal sections sandwiching a moodier middle, but the runtime allows for the band to stretch each movement out to heretofore unprecedented levels of detail. By the end, the song has this all-encompassing feel, as if Iron Maiden is trying (and succeeding!) to put everything they know how to do in one song: you've got the heavy riff of the beginning, the NWOBHM "chugga-chugga-chugga" faster section after that, a lengthy atmospheric interlude with minimal instrumentation and melody, a crescendo lifting the song out of atmospherics back into full-throttle metal mode, culminating in a shredding guitar solo, and then an ending that returns to the riff from the beginning of the song. It's incredible, almost certainly the greatest Iron Maiden song of all time as well as one of the greatest heavy metal songs ever. And with that structure, it's of course incredibly proggy.
More than just that, this song feels like an essential link in chronicling the connections between metal and prog. Literary nerds (or just students who have suffered through my 12th-grade English class) will recognize that this song is based on based on the 18th-century Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem of the same name. The poem itself is plenty epic and macabre, more than 600 lines of dark Romanticism wherein Nature is presented as this incomprehensibly large and frighteningly capricious force that tortures those human beings with the arrogance to assume they can tame it, a grisly piece of verse that feels like it was practically tailor-made to be turned into a metal song. People talk all the time about how the posture of prog is basically a space-age lens on Classical and Romantic ideas, but it's not nearly as widely noted that the aesthetics and attitudes of a lot of heavy metal themselves date back to that same period, building on the Gothic and dark-Romantic ideas that proliferated in the more troubled fringes of that same literary/musical movement of the 18th/19th centuries, which means that metal and prog don't just share common ancestry in the post-psych-rock boom of the late 1960s but they also share DNA originating over a century previous to that. The cool thing about a lot of the literary foundations of Iron Maiden's output but especially "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is that they really highlight that shared DNA.
The effect of that shared DNA is that you can get something like Powerslave: definitively metal but in a way that also scratches that prog itch, too. As I've already pointed out, it's not as if there hadn't already been overlap with these two genres before, but the ways that a lot of '80s metal leans into that overlap feels simultaneously in the prog tradition but also genuinely new. In the most literal sense of the genre's title, what '80s metal does is actually "progressing" rock music, and the intertwining of metal and progressive rock would continue to yield fruit for years to come. Powerslave, while hardly the only album to do that, feels like an epitome of that kind of progress. Besides, it's just a great album regardless.
See you in 1985!
1] Though that said, "classic rock radio" is increasingly oriented around the '80s and '90s, which... well, I would say it gives me consternation, except that it doesn't really, because radio stations are just for waiting rooms now, right? (I love radio, but really).
2] Again, I'm simplifying heavily, and as with prog, there are still plenty of examples of commercially and artistically successful heavy metal artists during the late '70s—for example, Judas Priest, who would go on to have great success in the UK on either side of the punk watershed, as well as Rush on the other side of the Atlantic, who continued to thrive at the intersection of heavy metal, hard rock, prog, and (eventually) pop well into the '80s.
3] In their pre-Pyromania days, at least.
4] Though apparently the punks didn't take too kindly to metalheads showing up at their venues and vice-versa, so this mutual influence happened at the somewhat tense distance between their respective clubs and pubs.
5] I should probably also mention disco: not precisely "rock music" (as obnoxious rock fans have reminded us ever since) but certainly a part of that shifting music landscape by the end of the '70s. As far as I can tell, disco has no influence on Iron Maiden or most of the NWOBHM, though.
6] Making this one of the rare (and always satisfying) examples of an artist with a self-titled album with a self-titled song—as luck would have it, the only other metal band I've covered so far in this series, Black Sabbath, is also part of this club.
7] Which is a retelling of the book Dune, incidentally—not the first time a band in this series has found inspiration in Frank Herbert's work.
8] Noticeably missing (at least, I can't find any) from the list of influences of prog storytellers are the parts of the literary canon that have a reputation for being bawdy: Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. I personally would love to get a 20-minute rock epic about "The Miller's Tale," with guitar solos and Mellotron and the works.
9] No I've never done this, why do you ask
