would actually pick up Ken
and Glenn. And on a couple of
locations, things would
happen and they would be
left hanging up in the air.
set previous to Turbo, for Defenders. “But it was very evil and eerie. This new guy is a friendly monster; he’s cool. The Metallian was not really friendly. He just stood there and sneered at us all night.”
The only live date Priest played in 1985 was Bob Geldof ’s Live Aid behemoth. Rob looked extra cool in high-class black shades, very blond hair and full leather on a hot sunny day.
This is where Rob got to meet Joan Baez, the writer of “Diamonds and Rust,” Baez fully aware of Priest’s version and thanking Rob for coming up with it.
The Turbo tour, dubbed Fuel for Life, got underway in May of ’86 in the American Southwest, with Dokken as support. As men-tioned, the staging was a bit of a chore, but so
was other technology the band had put to use, including drum triggers and the accursed guitar synths, which kept malfunctioning.
Early in the tour, in Landover, Maryland, the legendary Heavy Metal Parking Lot documen-tary was shot, the film consisting of all egregious manner of Priest fans liquoring up for the big show that night, proclaiming their undying allegiance to the metal gods.
An amusing moment was the Kerrang!-fueled rumor that Dave Holland wasn’t playing the drums. Given the tricky drum-triggering equipment, the band had brought along Legs Diamond’s Jonathan Valen to help sort it out.
Tipton had quipped that Valen fancied himself a bit of a star and had even gone as far as wearing stage clothes and giving an interview.
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The tour continued through the States in June and into Canada in July of ’86. Krokus was now supporting, as the band crossed back into America in August.
“I was always so happy to tour with Priest, because we were so respected by the lads,”
recalls Krokus lead singer Marc Storace. “And I even played tennis with them — K.K. and Glenn — and our tour manager did too. It was fun being with the Priest, because they were always saying, ‘Are you happy with everything?
Anything you need?’ Really nice. Compared to . . . well, I won’t mention anybody. We had an
audience that appreciated both bands, and that’s very important when you have a package together. We also toured with them on Screaming for Vengeance, but with this second tour, my dad had died. I was quite melancholic before the Change of Address release, and they were really nice. I remember them being very soothing to my soul. Rob was somehow not as much around as the other guys. But when we were recording the album Headhunter, we were in Orlando, Florida, and we had their pro-ducer, Tom Allom, in the control room, and Rob turned up and did some backing vocals with me — I believe it was ‘Screaming in the Night’ and ‘Ready to Burn.’”
As regards working with Allom, Storace talks about much of what aided the Priest in achieving success, beginning with the Allom-fueled rethink of the band on British Steel. “He tried not to bring them in too much, to kind of separate Krokus from Priest. He wouldn’t play the Priest thing on us, like, ‘Hey, when I work with Priest, I do it this way, so let’s do it this way too.’ He was very neutral with us. But I
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noticed always, in the back of his mind, he was thinking of the fans. That was his first priority.
He understood very well the metal and the rock ’n’ roll mentality. He would say, ‘Let’s keep it simple, let’s keep it straight, let’s keep it rock
’n’ roll — hey, think of the fans.’ He would even resort to some jokes and so on, about some of those fans that get extreme with their alcohol and drugs. But there again, he liked raising his glass [laughs].”
“Rob is an absolute screamer, whereas I had to work on it, build it up,” muses Storace, when asked about Halford’s place in metal history.
“Great attitude, great image, ‘Breaking the Law,’
‘Screaming for Vengeance,’ the whole thing, the Harley Davidson onstage, the leather and studs . . . it’s like the consummate heavy metal image.
And I think no one beats that. Rob is Rob, and that’s it. He carries out the performance really well, and he’s a really nice guy at the bottom of it, too, as a human being. As far as I’m con-cerned, he’s 100 percent genuine.”
Eighty-odd shows completed, Judas Priest crossed the pond to Europe, Warlock (Doro
Pesch’s Priest- and Accept-like act) in support from September through October, before hit-ting Japan and Hawaii in December. And as discussed, a slice of this life can be heard on Priest . . . Live!, which was recorded over two dates, Atlanta and Dallas, in June of ’86. Like Turbo, this one was also recorded on Sony Digital. Unfortunately, contrary to the band’s plan, no previously unreleased Judas Priest songs were to be found on the final product.
And also unfortunately, the album doesn’t live up to the fire-breathing standard of Unleashed in the East, one of the greatest live albums of all
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