Today’s song is a good one – it’s one of the singles from Iron Maiden’s 1988 masterpiece Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. It’s one of the more recognizable tunes from the record and a fantastic track. And the video is notable too – it features Monty Python standout Graham Chapman and is one of his final acting appearances before his 1989 death.

The story goes as such – I first saw Iron Maiden in 2000. I recounted that concert and other Maiden-related things roughly a month into this blog. Of course I got a shirt from the tour and it was a unique design only available on that tour. It was a pretty nice keepsave from what is a legendary concert in my show-attending lexicon.

Let’s jump in time a few years to 2004. I wind up dating this gal. Long story short – she was kind of awful and not worth the time. While I won’t get into the particulars of it, I will say that the inevitable happened – I lost my Iron Maiden shirt at her house.

It’s worth mentioning that it was a legitimate case of loss. It does seem like people lose articles of clothing when they’re involved with someone for awhile. Sometimes people “lose” possessions in these sort of split-ups when others intentionally misappropriate items to fund their shitty drug habits and that did happen in this break-up, but the shirt itself was truly just lost in her house and never to be found by me again. I also lost a Megadeth Rust In Peace shirt in the same break-up, just some really lame shit.

But the Megadeth shirt is fairly easily replaceable, it’s just the cover of Rust In Peace, it wasn’t original anyway and the shirt gets re-issued all the time. The Iron Maiden shirt, though? That was a tour original and was not going to be easy at all to replace.

Being that this was a super urgent issue to me, I waited until roughly late 2005 or early ’06 to bother with the matter of finding the same shirt again. It sort of struck me one day that if I were going to get another one, time would be of the essence. Iron Maiden tour shirts were already fetching princely sums in the mid-00’s, and now they can be flat out obscene.

Luck was (mostly) on my side – sure as shit, someone on eBay had the same Brave New World shirt up. It was $60. That was a seemingly ludicrous price to pay for a damn band shirt, but again, consider the mitigating factors. It was a unique Maiden tour-release shirt. How bad of a mistake would it have been to NOT buy it in 2006 for $60 compared to what I’d have to pay now for the same thing? I haven’t even seen a listing for one in a long time and I doubt the price would be $60 if there was one for sale. (Edit – a few do seem to be around for sale, in the $200 price range)

The shirt was in great shape and still is all these years later. The seller also threw in a bootleg CD of the concert he attended on the tour. It was a cool touch from back when eBay wasn’t so hard up about people selling bootlegs. I haven’t seen that around for a long time but I’m kind of sure I know where it is. And it was a very good sounding bootleg, almost like it came off the soundboard.

Anyway, I was able to recover my position and get the shirt. There was one small hitch – the backs weren’t exactly the same. There is a rear art piece of Eddie in a crowd on the back, that much was the same. But my original shirt had a listing of all the US tour dates. This replacement shirt only listed one city, Irvine. It kind of sucks but it’s a relatively minor issue I can live with. I even wondered if the shirt was a bootleg but it looks fine and they spelled “Iron Maiden” correctly so I can live with it. I’d guess it’s official, it looks identical to my first one besides the dates on the back.

That’s about all there is to this silly story. All stories have morals and there are a few here – don’t date lousy people and for damn sure don’t leave prized possessions behind at their homes when you split.

And if you do, don’t wait until the secondary market is some kind of cash-gobbling monster before replacing your stuff. I dodged a bullet on that one.