Btw, little story...: Reading the first lines you might wonder "what does this have to do with Maiden?", but it does have.
Last month I was given a box full of old stuff by my parents, full of personal things from my childhood - along with the question if I needed it or not, I might would wanna take a look. My parents are in their mif 70s nowadays and they're cleaning up their house a bit. Inside this box there was, along with various other things, an original X-ray picture taken by my dentist that I went to when I was a ten year old boy, displaying my complete jaw as it got considered to fit my teeth with braces. That picture looks like new, just as if it was being made only yesterday. It obviously went straight to this box right after it had been made and wasn't being touched again for almost 40 years. My first reflex was to throw this X-ray photography away, why would I ever need it nowadays... but... all the time I felt like there was something with the date it was taken. First I had no clue...: March 14 1985...
Family matters like someone's birthday maybe?
No, not really.
And suddently...
Yes, the first night of the legendary Long Beach Arena shows that later turned into the Live After Death release.
So this X-ray pic has a very special place in my Maiden collection now.
It even has a time written to it - 3:30 p.m. (German time), so it was 6:30 a.m. in California that moment, band and crew were just about to start their day and very soon would begin to set things up inside of Long Beach Arena.
The interesting thing is that I wasn't a Maiden fan at that time but became short after. In March 1985 I never heard of Maiden but got introduced to their music only a few months later, around the end of 1985.