Chapter 5: Iron Maiden: True Stories of Men at War

At the beginning of this book I briefly discussed Led Zeppelin. This band are now generally categorised as rock, or hard rock, or even classic rock. It is quite common to see the band on the cover of Classic Rock magazine, for example, but they have not appeared on Metal Hammer, in the United Kingdom at last. At the time of their success, however, they were linked with heavy metal alongside Black Sabbath by their many critics in the music press (Spracklen, 2018a). Their fans were disparaged as heavy metal fans (Gross, 1990; Walser, 1993). Led Zeppelin provided the template for all the heavy metal bands that followed them. Their music was driven by the distorted guitars of Jimmy Page and the aggressive drumming of John Bonham. Although they had moments of introspection and alternated the riffs with acoustic guitars and other gentle instruments, Led Zeppelin were big because the quiet moments always gave way to the excess of the loud and the heavy. They were adored by millions of fans around the world, men and women, because of the power of their live act (Fast, 1999, 2001). The young white male fans who attended their gigs were often rowdy and violent, and critics mocked them for being alienated young men with no girlfriends (Gross, 1990). Lyrically, the band celebrated their own status as young, heterosexual men on prowl for sex with willing young women (Fast, 1999). On stage, and on record, the band exemplified hegemonic masculinity. In the studio, Page laid down guitar riffs and licks that sounded tough and manly. Page used his guitar as a phallic symbol, caressing it on stage like he was masturbating, standing with it between his legs. Robert Plant was an incantation of some pagan god of fertility, and most of the band’s albums had songs that had Plant moaning and groaning, or asking for a good time from his woman (Fast, 1999). Plant also sang stories of heroic manliness, from “Immigrant Song” to “Battle of Evermore”, and although “Achilles’ Last Stand” was about his own comeback from a serious injury, its title and some of the imagery used suggest the “boy’s own adventure” version of the Iliad. Led Zeppelin were the band that made hegemonic masculinity part of the ideology of heavy metal, which was mocked so readily in the spoof documentary Spinal Tap. They treated women unethically, cheating on their wives and humiliating the groupies who wanted to sleep with them (Fast, 2001). They legitimised the idea of the band being a conquering army, destroying everything and everyone in their way. They popularised the idea that rock and heavy metal celebrated a heroic, heterosexual and hegemonc masculinity (Connell, 1987). This was the model for all the big heavy metal bands of the 1980s.