JUDAS PAIEST 50 Years of Metal Music
If Dave Grohl is the current ambassador of rock and roll, then Judas Priest’s Rob Halford is certainly the ambassador of heavy metal music. And despite a hiatus from Judas Priest that began in 1996 (with replacement singer Tim “Ripper” Owens filling the void for six years), Halford is the true face of the band since taking over for founding frontman Al Atkins in 1973.
The tale goes like this: In search of a new singer, bassist Ian Hill recommended his future brother-in-law Rob Halford to guitarist K.K. Downing. Halford had been singing with a group named Hiroshima with friend/drummer John Hinch. Needing both a singer and a drummer, Downing and Hill visited the Halford flat. Halford, still living with his parents, auditioned on the spot to a pop song by Doris Day. Downing knew the wonderful voice he heard would play up well with the Cream/Hendrix sound they were developing. Halford was in and, as a bonus, so was drummer Hinch.
Who knows if the meeting went exactly like that? Memories have a way of blurring out the actual details. But it wouldn’t matter if Halford sang to Doris Day or Dean Martin in his parents’ flat back in early 1973. Halford had a legitimate singing voice. His vocals were slightly different than the ear-splitting screams he would become known for in later, more metallic, years. All a listener needs to do to verify Halford’s talent is to go back to Judas Priest’s debut album, Rocka Rolla. Now, Rocka Rolla didn’t have the slickest of production skills (even though Black Sabbath producer Rodger Bain was at the helm), but it does showcase a nearly pristine vocal display from Rob Halford. Listen to Halford plead “ I can’t go on” in an operatic-like vocal at the end of the song “Run of the Mill.” It will send chills up and down your spine, but not in the heavy metal way you’d expect. This was blues rock music — raw, emotional, working-man blues rock from industrial Birmingham, England, and Halford owned it. At this point in time, you could put Halford in a class worthy of the greatest professional singers out there. And his world-class vocals would come into play again and again for the rest of the ’70s; the operatic highs and the snarling lows on tunes like “The Ripper,” “Beyond the Realms of Death,” “The Island of Domination,” the duality of “Here Come the Tears” and “Dissident Aggressor” and, of course, the classic “Victim of Changes.” The list can go on.
falls somewhere between the years of 1969-1973. The band were truly a victim of changes. Vocalist Al Atkins managed a semblance of a working band in 1969, and the name of the band was fortified in 1970, pinched from the Bob Dylan song “The Ballad of. Musicians shuffled in and out and finally the band split up, until guitarist K.K. Downing helped regroup Judas Priest as a serious unit in 1971. Then, as mentioned, Halford came in after Atkins left in 1973. Regardless of an exact date, Judas Priest is celebrating 50 years of the band’s career. Besides performing concerts with only Halford and Hill as the only members remaining from their debut album, the release of a recent box set commemorates the entire Priest legacy (including the two albums, in 1997 and in 2001, with singer Ripper Owens as the frontman).
