Gen X Reflex: When “The Trooper” Starts Galloping
The songs our bodies recognize before our brains do.
The first time somebody asked me about Iron Maiden, I ran away.
Literally.
In my defense, I had absolutely no idea Iron Maiden was a band.
I was at school, selling some kind of nonsense for the German Club. I don't remember what we were selling. Cookies? Candy? Wrapping paper? Whatever fundraising scheme had been inflicted upon students that particular year.
What I do remember was the guy.
He was one of the cool kids.
More specifically, he was one of the rockers.
And I had begun spending an increasing amount of time somewhere near their territory.
Not in their territory.
Let's be clear about that.
Near it.
There was a difference.
One day this very cool student came over while I was doing my German Club duty and asked me a question.
“Are you an Iron Maiden?”
Excuse me?
A what?
I didn't know what an Iron Maiden was.
I didn't know there was a band called Iron Maiden.
I didn't know any Iron Maiden songs.
I didn't know anything.
What I did know was that some cool rocker guy had just asked me something that sounded vaguely threatening and possibly inappropriate.
So I did what any brave future Rock 'n' Roll Angel would do.
I got scared and scurried away.
😂
Thus began my relationship with Iron Maiden.
Consulting the Experts
Naturally, I needed information.
This was before Google.
There was no phone in my pocket where I could type:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF A BOY ASKS IF YOU ARE AN IRON MAIDEN?
Which, in retrospect, might have produced some interesting search results anyway.
So I consulted one of the authorities available to me.
My oldest sister.
Unfortunately, her knowledge of rock and roll outside of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones wasn't exactly extensive.
I explained what had happened.
Some boy had asked if I was an Iron Maiden.
She didn't know what it meant either.
Therefore, through the combined investigative powers of two people who knew absolutely nothing about the subject, we reached a conclusion:
This was probably some kind of weird stalker inappropriate thing.
😂
My sister forbade me from talking to him again.
Too bad.
From what I remember, he was kind of cute.
The Map of High School
There's something I remember about school in those days.
Looking back, it reminds me of the board from some enormous fantasy game.
There were lands.
Territories.
Kingdoms.
Every community had its borders, and everybody seemed to understand where those borders were.
There were the athletes.
The smart kids.
The popular kids.
The various cultural groups.
The theater kids.
The band kids.
And then there were...
the rockers.
There was some overlap with another territory occupied by people we called the stoners, but that's a story for another day.
Rockerland fascinated me.
Long hair.
Torn T-shirts.
Denim.
Band logos.
The smoking lot.
And the fellas?
Well.
The fellas were VERY cool.
Just saying.
😂
But I was intimidated.
I wasn't one of them.
I would walk along the border sometimes. I might even step across the line for a moment.
But I never ventured terribly far into the kingdom.
I was too scared.
Still, I kept looking.
And the more I looked, the more little pieces of Rockerland began calling to parts of me that I already understood.
Especially one.
Who the Hell Is Eddie?
I loved horror.
Not just horror.
Old horror.
Classic monsters. Creepy movies. Hammer films. Strange creatures. Science fiction. Fantasy.
That world had been mine long before I started wandering around the edges of rock and roll.
And somewhere in Rockerland, I began seeing this...thing.
A skeletal, zombie-looking creature.
Sometimes horrifying.
Sometimes almost funny.
Always disturbing.
And he kept showing up.
On shirts.
Album artwork.
Posters.
Different poses.
Different worlds.
But always that face.
Finally, I asked somebody:
“What is that?”
“That's Eddie.”
Who?
😂
Apparently everyone in Rockerland had received some kind of orientation packet that I had missed.
So I needed a source.
Fortunately, I had one.
The Rock-and-Roll Librarian
There was a guy I would see around the bus stop after school.
He knew music.
More importantly, he would answer my questions without making me feel completely ridiculous for asking them.
So somewhere along the way I decided he was my research department.
My rock-and-roll librarian.
And he usually had a tape player with him.
One afternoon I asked him about the creature.
“So...this Eddie guy. Who is he?”
He looked at me.
He smiled.
Then he shook his head.
He didn't explain.
And I swear I could almost hear what he was thinking.
This girl has so much to learn.
He reached for his tape player.
Pressed the button.
And hit play.
Then came those guitars.
Oh.
If you're a certain kind of Gen Xer, I barely have to say anything else.
You know.
That opening.
The guitars begin and the entire song immediately feels like it's running toward something.
Then the rhythm locks in underneath them.
And we're off.
“The Trooper.”
There are songs you recognize from their chorus.
There are songs you recognize from a lyric.
And then there are songs whose first few seconds cause some ancient mechanism buried in the Gen X nervous system to activate.
The Trooper is one of those.
Your brain may still be processing.
Your body already knows.
Ohhhhhhh. Those guys.
And suddenly my mysterious creature had a home.
Eddie belonged to Iron Maiden.
Iron Maiden wasn't something inappropriate that cute boys were asking girls to become.
My sister and I had perhaps conducted inadequate research. 😂
Iron Maiden was a band.
And apparently I needed to know more.
So Who the Heck Are Iron Maiden?
Iron Maiden formed in East London on Christmas Day in 1975, founded by bassist Steve Harris.
They emerged as one of the defining bands of what became known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the movement that exploded around the late 1970s and early 1980s and helped reshape heavy metal for a new generation.
Their self-titled debut arrived in 1980 with Paul Di'Anno on vocals.
Then came Killers.
And then the lineup changed.
In 1981, Bruce Dickinson joined the band.
In 1982, Iron Maiden released The Number of the Beast.
And everything got considerably bigger.
Piece of Mind followed in 1983.
That's the album containing the song my rock-and-roll librarian played for me:
“The Trooper.”
Then came Powerslave.
Somewhere in Time.
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.
And an increasingly enormous international following.
This wasn't just another band from across the border.
Iron Maiden was becoming one of the defining bands of heavy metal.
And part of what made them different was something I wouldn't fully appreciate until later.
These guys were storytellers.
Heavy Metal for the Nerds
I say that with enormous affection.
Because listen to what Iron Maiden was writing about.
History.
War.
Literature.
Mythology.
Religion.
Fantasy.
Science fiction.
“The Trooper” was inspired by the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War.
“Run to the Hills” tackled the violent collision between European settlers and Native peoples in North America, shifting perspective within the song as it told the story.
“Aces High” took us into aerial combat during the Battle of Britain.
“Alexander the Great” gave us history through heavy metal.
“Flight of Icarus” reached into Greek mythology.
And then these absolute maniacs looked at Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and apparently thought:
You know what this eighteenth-century poem needs?
Thirteen minutes of heavy metal.
😂
YES.
This was the part I hadn't understood while standing nervously along the border of Rockerland.
I'd been looking at the long hair.
The ripped shirts.
The smoking lot.
The intimidating boys.
But underneath all of that were people listening to music filled with exactly the kinds of things that already fascinated me.
History.
Horror.
Fantasy.
Stories.
Mythology.
Monsters.
Warriors.
Other worlds.
These people weren't nearly as foreign to me as I thought.
And Then There Was Eddie
Eddie wasn't simply some scary picture somebody slapped onto an album cover.
He became part of the identity of Iron Maiden.
Created visually by artist Derek Riggs from an earlier image of his, Eddie appeared on the band's early releases and evolved alongside them.
And Eddie could become practically anything.
A soldier.
A pharaoh.
A cyborg.
A mental patient.
A killer.
A creature from the future.
Whatever world Iron Maiden entered, Eddie could enter it with them.
For The Trooper, there he was in British military dress, charging forward with the Union Jack.
It was branding before teenage Angel knew what branding was.
Iron Maiden had created something recognizable from across the room.
You didn't necessarily need to read the band's name.
You saw Eddie.
You knew.
And for the horror-loving science-fiction girl peeking into Rockerland?
Oh, they had me.
I just hadn't admitted it yet.
That Gallop
There's another reason The Trooper became one of those songs.
Steve Harris.
If you've spent any meaningful amount of time with Iron Maiden, you know that bass.
That famous galloping rhythm became one of the signatures of the band's sound.
Add the twin-guitar attack, the drums, Bruce Dickinson's soaring vocals and the sheer momentum of the arrangement, and The Trooper doesn't feel like it's describing a cavalry charge.
It feels like one.
The song moves.
It attacks.
It races.
And decades later, all it takes is that opening for something inside me to respond.
That's why this belongs in Gen X Reflex.
There is no thought required.
Play it.
The spine straightens.
The head starts moving.
Somewhere, somebody reaches instinctively for an air guitar.
We have been summoned.
🤘
About That Singer...
And then there's Bruce Dickinson.
What can I possibly say about Bruce Dickinson?
First:
That voice.
There's a reason he earned the nickname “The Air Raid Siren.”
Huge range. Huge power. Huge stage presence.
He's the kind of frontman built for an Iron Maiden show.
But apparently being the singer of one of the world's biggest heavy metal bands wasn't providing enough stimulation.
So Bruce Dickinson became a pilot.
Not:
Celebrity buys little airplane and takes flying lessons.
No.
Dickinson became a commercially qualified airline pilot and flew professionally.
Which created perhaps the most Iron Maiden touring solution imaginable.
The band needed to travel around the world.
The crew needed to travel around the world.
Equipment needed to travel around the world.
They needed an airplane.
And...
their singer could fly the airplane.
Ladies and gentlemen...
Enter: Ed Force One. ✈️🤘
You cannot make this stuff up.
Iron Maiden began using specially liveried aircraft for major tours, with the planes carrying the band, crew and equipment between destinations.
Naturally, they were called Ed Force One.
Naturally, Eddie appeared on them.
And yes.
Bruce flew the plane.
During the Somewhere Back in Time tour, the famous aircraft was a Boeing 757.
Then, for The Book of Souls World Tour in 2016, Iron Maiden apparently decided that wasn't ridiculous enough.
So they upgraded.
To a freaking Boeing 747-400.
And Bruce Dickinson trained to fly that too.
Somewhere in the past, teenage Angel is still standing nervously along the border of Rockerland trying to determine whether these people are safe.
Honey.
Their lead singer is flying the 747.
Cross the border.
😂🤘✈️
The Thing About Iron Maiden
What I appreciate now is how completely Iron Maiden built their own world.
They weren't dependent upon having whatever happened to be the biggest pop hit of the moment.
They built generations of fans.
They toured relentlessly.
They created enormous theatrical shows.
They developed a visual language that belonged to them.
They made Eddie one of the most recognizable mascots in music.
And they kept going.
There were lineup changes.
Bruce left and eventually returned.
Adrian Smith left and returned.
The musical world changed around them.
Heavy metal changed.
Popular culture changed.
Iron Maiden remained Iron Maiden.
That's no small accomplishment.
The band has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, played thousands of concerts, and built a following that now stretches across generations.
Which brings us somewhere I never expected this story to go.
All the way to Hawkins, Indiana.
Eddie Meets Eddie
More than forty years after The Trooper first appeared on Piece of Mind, I heard that familiar gallop turn up somewhere fascinating.
Stranger Things.
In the show's final episode, The Trooper accompanies Dustin Henderson's graduation sequence and the continuing remembrance of another beloved figure from metal culture:
Eddie Munson.
Eddie.
Of course.
😂🤘
The kid who represented the misunderstood metalhead.
The leader of the Hellfire Club.
The character who helped introduce another generation to heavy metal.
And now one of Iron Maiden's defining songs was part of his final chapter.
There was something beautifully circular about that for me.
Because decades earlier, another Eddie had helped pull me toward this music.
The Gallop Continues
That's the thing about songs like The Trooper.
They don't belong exclusively to us anymore.
Maybe they never did.
Somewhere today, a teenager who never owned a cassette tape and never stood at a bus stop beside somebody carrying a portable tape player hears The Trooper through Stranger Things.
Maybe that opening hits.
Maybe they ask:
“What is this?”
Then:
“Who is Iron Maiden?”
And maybe eventually:
“Okay...who the hell is Eddie?”
And somewhere inside my memory, I can still see that guy at the bus stop.
He looks at me.
Smiles.
Shakes his head.
This girl has so much to learn.
Then he reaches for the tape player.
Click.
The guitars begin.
The gallop starts.
And another kid crosses the border into Rockerland.
🤘
Thank you for taking another trip with me through Rock ’n’ Roll Angel, where we're remembering the songs, the people, the weird little moments and the soundtrack of growing up Gen X.
Were you already living in Rockerland when Iron Maiden arrived, or did somebody have to bring you across the border?
And come on...
Who remembers the first time they saw Eddie?
🌐 DrAYHeath.com 📸 Instagram: @ayheath ▶️ YouTube: @TheMysticScribe 📱 TikTok & X: @drayheath
Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel) 🤘