Iron Maiden’s Gonna Git Ya
It was me, my three brothers, Pete, Steve and Alex, and my son who’d recently gladdened my liberal heart by adopting the urban moniker, Laz-E-Jay, all the male Koweskis left alive gathered on the grassy slope of Credit One amphitheater, what will always be known as Tinley Park to me, to see Iron Maiden for the Run for Your Lives tour. If somebody wanted to take out the Polish Hammer bloodline, this would be the place to do it, while the five of us were uncharacteristically unarmed, and characteristically nearly catatonic from drinking twenty-dollar concert Michelobs.
“Remember all the Iron Maiden posters covering the walls of my bedroom?” I asked my brothers.
“I useta be scared to death to walk into your room when I was four,” Steve said. “You had a giant Live After Death poster, Eddie busting out of the grave, lightning bolt striking the hinge on his skullcap. Scared the shit outta me. By the time I was five, I knew all the words to Number of the Beast.”
“I miss the days when I could just decorate the walls with any poster that struck my fancy. Every Sunday, I’d take my paper route money and hit the flea market in the old Goldblatt’s department store in downtown Hammond. There was this old metal head selling posters and pins and patches in a booth set up in the basement. Man, it’s been forty years, but I swear to you when I close my eyes, I could wend my way straight to his tables. I miss that. I miss those posters. I guess being young and single allowed for it. I can’t imagine my wife allowing me to interior design our living space with an Iron Maiden motif.”
“Maybe if it was tastefully done…”
“Even then, Alex, I believe I would get some heated pushback if I taped my Seventh Son of a Seventh Son concert poster to the living room wall.”
“There’s the problem. You put that shit in a frame.”
Steve said “I don’t recall Ma liking it very much, either.”
“Nah, the posters, hell, even the music, didn’t bother her half as much as the black candles or the dead, strangled cat she found in my room.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, fortunately, Ma only held a tenuous grasp on the dogma of Catholicism, and I was able to explain it away as one of those Saint’s Day rituals we learned at St. Casimir School.”
“She could be incredibly naïve when she wanted to be.”
“That explains why I got to go to public school.”
“Dad didn’t care much for Iron Maiden much, either, but he did seem oddly relieved when I hung up that Samantha Fox poster.”
“You know, I’m not a nostalgic cat,” Pete conceded. “The past is best left in the past, and I never thought it was all that great to begin with. I’m all about living, and the only place you can do that is the here and now. But I am nostalgic for the days when I could successfully masturbate to a woman in a swimsuit.”
“Here. Here.”
“Now, it’s gotta be clown porn while I tighten a noose around my neck.”
“I will say, bringing you guys up in an atmosphere saturated with Iron Maiden iconography prepared y’all for your own iconoclastic obsessions once you got introduced to Insane Clown Posse and the strange, accompanying culture that compels you to challenge your diabetes with copious amounts of Red Pop Faygo before searching out large women to display your buttholes for.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “We’ve kinda gotten away from all that. The music, anyway. I still enjoy a lukewarm Moon Mist, now and again, and I do flash my butthole to the ladies when the spirit grabs me, but the music has lost its edge. I always come back to Iron Maiden, though. Iron Maiden lives on and on.”
This was my third Iron Maiden concert. All three within the last decade. I was too young and too poor to see Maiden live during their eighties prime. When I came of concert going age and started working shit jobs to pay for my entertainment, Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith had left the band. Though Steve enjoyed the Blaze Bayley era of Maiden and the two godawful albums that resulted from the union, I hated that shit and wouldn’t have run down to the corner tavern, Milskie’s, to see them play on a postage stamp sized stage which is what they were relegated to without Bruce’s operatic pipes and unrivaled stage presence.
“Did you ever even listen to the Blaze Bayley albums? Could you name them?”
“Shut up, Steve, I’m trying to write some exposition, here. Also, I’m pretty sure one of those albums was named X-Factor or some generic shit like that. The Klansman wasn’t a bad song from that time… when Bruce sings it.”
Anyway, by the time Bruce and Adrian rejoined the band for Brave New World in 2000, I was firmly ensconced in factory work and fatherhood, leaving me zero time and money to do shit.
Steve saw Maiden live before the rest of us. He caught them on their tour for A Matter of Life and Death, a tour notorious for the band’s decision to play the mediocre album in its entirety. It was a choice that seemed to please the boys in the band, but not too many other folks. It wasn’t that it was a bad album, it just wasn’t as good as all their preceding albums obviously exempting the two Blaze Bayley albums.
“It was an underwhelming experience,” Steve allowed.
Undeterred, he saw Maiden again, this time with Alex, at Tinley Park, for their tour supporting Book of Souls. It was on this tour, that I was able to see Iron Maiden for the first time, an experience I feared I would miss out on in this life. My wife and I saw them at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, and it was a mind-blowing experience for all of us. Steve was especially touched to hear Blood Brothers live for the first time, his favorite song off Brave New World, perhaps his favorite Iron Maiden song, period.
“I hope they play Blood Brothers, tonight,” Steve said.
Alex, Pete, and Laz-E-Jay considered this. It was a good song, and there was never a bad time to hear it. The hops must have gotten on top of Steve. He knew that song wasn’t in the cards. So, it was up to me to disappoint them.
“They’re only playing songs off their first nine albums. You guys know this; we talked about it. The set list doesn’t change, and, sadly, Blood Brothers ain’t on it.”
“You never know. They might play it.”
“I do know. They won’t.”
“You don’t know everything.”
“I know this.”
“We’ll see.”
My favorite Iron Maiden songs are as follows: 1) Two Minutes to Midnight 2) Hallowed Be Thy Name 3) Infinite Dreams 4) Murders in the Rue Morgue 5) Phantom of the Opera. Revelations is somewhere in that list as well. And while they’re not playing that song tonight, I was able to hear it on their Legacy of the Beast tour which I attended with my son. But all five of those songs were played tonight along with many other favorites, rarely played live, including Rhime of the Ancient Mariner, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and Powerslave.
More important than all that, this was Pete’s first Iron Maiden concert. Responsibilities at work always scuttled his chances to see them over the years. He’d been a fan from birth like his brothers, like my son. The end of 2025 and most of 2026 saw Pete fall deathly ill. I believe it was touch and go for a while, more than he let’s on. Recovery has been a grueling process. Being able to share this experience with him, after everything, was more than worth the ten hour drive there and the ten hour drive back that awaited me. Pete sat in his chair, the only one of us smart enough to rent one, and basked in the glory that is Maiden.
Maiden came out for their encore.
“Here it comes,” Steve said. “Blood Brothers.”
“It’s not… Nevermind.”
Maiden played Aces High, Fear of the Dark, and Wasted Years. Just like every other stop on their Run for Your Lives tour.
As we filed out of Tinley Park with twenty-eight thousand other fans we talked about what an amazing experience we had, together.
“Only missed opportunity,” Steve said. “Blood Brothers.”
“It was their first nine albums, Steve…”
“They could have played it, anyway.”
One thing for sure, driving out of Tinley Park, we played the song repeatedly the entire way home, me bouncing in around in the cargo hold trying to sing along with my brothers and son, the only three words of the song I knew regardless how many times I listened to the fucking song.
“We’re blood brothers…. We’re blood brothers… We’re blood brothers…”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
