It was a slightly chilly afternoon —- Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 to be exact —- under fading sunlight when I got to shake the hand of the one and only Hansi Kursch. An hour or so earlier, my two goofball buddies and I had barreled in my car down the Houston freeways to a venue called Warehouse Live that skirted the eastern edge of downtown Houston, a nominally sketchy area at the best of times. I was gunning the accelerator, despite knowing full well that the show wouldn’t start until many, many hours later in the evening. My subconscious reason for this might have been the fact that none of us had tickets yet. Yeah I know, and if you’ve slapped your forehead and muttered “Idiots!” under your breath already, well, under normal circumstances I’d agree with you —- but there was a perfectly valid reason for this. See this particular date on Blind Guardian’s “Sacred Worlds And Songs Divine Tour” was supposed to be held in San Antonio, but the actual location of the show was being shuffled around last minute and I was sending frantic emails to both the promoters and band management in trying to find out what the real deal was. Turns out no one would know until two days before the scheduled date, when the band confirmed that the show was officially moved to Houston.
We rejoiced! Not only because we wouldn’t have to make a furious post-work drive to San Antonio, but mostly because Houston finally won one. All the years of H-town being passed over, cancelled, or postponed by various metal tours in flux —- we finally had something swing OUR WAY! Not only that, but it was the biggest swing we could’ve possibly imagined, Blind Guardian was returning to Houston, they were in our city! This has greater impact if you know that Blind Guardian had tremendously bad luck with Houston in the past. The band had to cancel the Houston date on their 2002 North American trek in support of A Night At the Opera (and their first Stateside tour to boot), a show that was scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving (the irony!), all because the venue’s promoter goofed and couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain. I was gutted. My friends were gutted. That night of the cancelled show, we got provocatively drunk and briefly debated the merits of throwing lit trash cans through the venue’s front windows. Four years later we would finally get another opportunity to see them here in Houston on their tour for A Twist In the Myth, and the band actually came and played a pretty good show at a different crappy venue. However the entire band was dealing with a really nasty case of the flu and were understandably too exhausted to do anything in the way of encores or shaking a few hands after the show. It was bittersweet in that sense. We finally got to see them live, but it would be in Houston of all places when the band would feel like ancient death… of course…
Naturally in my mind I was expecting something to go wrong, and chief on that list of possible disasters was the notion, however remote, that we’d get to the venue late only to find a lengthy line and a sold out sign on the front of the box office window. I recklessly exited the freeway and drove over numerous potholes, ignoring the fact that I was also super hungry (and the grumblings from said goofball friends echoing similar statements) —- because the only thing I wanted to do at that moment was give some disinterested box office girl my twenty odd bucks in return for a little stub of paper with Blind Guardian printed on it. Venue in sight, with black night-liner tour bus parked at its side (phew!). Haphazardly park, exit, hustle-walk to the front of venue and its hopefully open box office window. The girl was as disinterested as possible, but did confirm that we were the first idiots buying tickets that day when I asked. I looked at the time on my phone —- 4:45 pm. Tickets in hand, I finally agreed to increasingly loud declarations that we head to the nearest Freebirds, one of those made-to-order big burrito places. We began to walk back towards my car, and it was just after that when one of the most surreal moments of my life occurred.
I remember walking behind my friends, they got in the car first, but I was slowed down by rubbernecking at the tour bus itself, looking for signs of life within those heavily tinted front windows. There was one major sign of life, a short haired guy just outside the bus on the sidewalk taking what looked like a pair of shoes out of a bag. I didn’t think much of it initially, the guy looked like a roadie or a tour manager perhaps, and I got in my car and started to slowly pull backwards out of my parking spot and lurch forward towards the tour bus. An increasingly closer view prompted me to register what I was seeing by muttering the following aloud: “I think that’s Hansi…”. I was scoffed at on the notion that the man had short hair, but my fellow compatriots were not as plugged into the detailed minutiae of the band’s current profile as I was, I knew that Hansi had recently cut his hair. I made one of the best decisions of my life and awkwardly jutted the car into an awful, diagonally parked position —- half on the sidewalk mind you —- and clumsily got out of the car, hearing one of my two friends exclaim “Holy shit it is Hansi!”
The funniest thing about this burned in memory is just how particularly alarmed Hansi looked at that precise moment: He had stopped his particularly mundane activity, in this case, slapping his black boots in hand together to get what appeared to be a whole lot of mud off. He was partially bent over, looking directly at us with a look that was startled and wondering if he should jump back in the tour bus, arms frozen in mid-boot slap. It was the kind of look that immediately made me register the sudden, near-violent nature of our approach with a dawning realization that Hansi probably had a pretty good idea of just what part of town he was currently in. We could’ve been Houston thugs at that moment for all he knew. But it must’ve been our random mix of metal t-shirts, uncontrollable grins, and peacemaking hand waves that eased his disposition —- just a bunch of goofy fans (likely what he was thinking himself). I’ll confess that I can’t recall the particular words that first left my mouth, but that thankfully they weren’t “You’re Hansi!”. With handshakes all around, we welcomed him to Houston, and expressed just how insanely happy we were that the show wasn’t cancelled and that the band was actually here. He was gracious beyond belief. I remember him half-joking that “You guys might be the only people in the audience tonight.” The date’s city switch was sure to leave a lot of people scrambling, and I expressed to him my faith that Houston would rally.
The whole exchange lasted a few minutes, and towards its end I had considered asking him for a picture, but realized that I’d left my phone in the car. We told him he’d see us in the crowd for sure and said goodbye, and I remember walking back to the car as if in slow motion. A wellspring of thoughts were bubbling in my mind: I had just met the man responsible for so much music that impacted me not only as a metal fan, but as a music lover in general. I had just shook hands with Hansi Kursch. I had a conversation with Hansi frickin’ Kursch. I wanted so badly to turn around and start babbling something, anything, about what his music had done for me —- but of course, that’s not how you play those situations. The man had just stepped out of his tour bus to clean his boots off, he was cool enough to unexpectedly talk with us for a couple minutes, and he was as genuinely nice and friendly as he always had come across in the audio interviews I had heard of him. He didn’t deserve to have to deal with some random, awkward moment of fan-gushing. Still, fragments of glorious Blind Guardian songs were flying through my mind, along with all those memories of particular moments I associated with them. Speaking of memories…
It was on an internet radio website called Hardradio where I first discovered Blind Guardian, through a random airing of the orchestral version of their classic ballad “Lord of the Rings” from the Forgotten Tales album. This was late 1998, in the dawn of the turn of the millennium pop-metal nostalgia revival that would resurrect many forgotten bands’ careers as surprisingly successful live performers, so the station was mostly playing music of that ilk. It had seemed that nine times out of ten I would randomly tune in to their internet feed and hear stuff like Jackyl, Warrant, or Kix. I was generally okay with it, because at that time I was an equal parts hard rock aficionado as I was a mainstream metal fan; all to happy to explore Tesla’s back catalog as I was Metal Church’s. European metal hadn’t really sunk in as something that I should’ve known about, in fact, I was (however ignorantly) certain of the notion that American and British bands were mostly the only ones worth knowing.
Its likely that upon hearing “Lord of the Rings” initial acoustic pluckings I thought it was a dopey love ballad by one of those bands, but that was immediately cast aside when Hansi sang in his clarion voice, “There are signs on the ring / which make me feel so down…”. His voice was so unique, richly melodic yet still gruff, and with a slight timbre that I’d never heard before —- a completely original voice that was singing about something Tolkien related of all things! By the time the song was at its emotional high point with background vocal swells of “Slow down and I sail on the river / Slow down and I walk to the hill”, I was astonished, just completely overwhelmed by one of the most breathtaking songs I’d ever heard. I launched into an internet search to find out everything possible about the band, and need I remind you this was late nineties internet —- information was scarce, and MP3s were even scarcer. In my search however I eventually found my way to a few more of the band’s songs, and also discovered a hugely important radio show in my metal development called The Metal Meltdown with Dr. Metal —- a guy based in Cleveland who was one of the few American media people with his ear to the ground for European metal bands (and whose show I still listen to and rely on to this day).
Perhaps most pressingly I found out that the band had just inked an agreement with Century Media to issue their back catalog in the States. Physically obtaining their albums happened relatively slowly, I’d feast on one for months on end and eventually manage to get my hands on another. Once I started working as a music department staffer at a Borders Books and Music, obtaining albums became all too easy by tapping into the company’s distribution network and their unusually deep access to import companies. At one point I shelled out sixty bucks for an import mail order of Forgotten Tales, still the most expensive single disc album I’ve ever bought. The end result of this was the expansion and deepening of my metal fandom from merely on-the-radar bands fed to me through various rock and metal magazines to far more underground artists, most of whom had fanbases overseas but were complete unknowns in the States. Blind Guardian threw open the doors of European metal for me, and not just for power metal; it was through them that I discovered In Flames and the Gothenburg melo-death sound, the amazing power metal talent coming out of Finland at that time, as well as Norwegian black metal (and its history) —- just to name a few things.
More fundamentally in regards to power metal, Blind Guardian’s music was infused with an emphasis on melodicism that I had only heard before in Iron Maiden, and in small doses elsewhere. My immersion into their albums made me realize something fundamental about myself as a metal and music fan —- that I valued melody as much as heaviness, abrasiveness, and shock value. When I was younger, rock and metal was attractive noise because of its inherently rebellious nature, its counter-culture spirit, and the feeling of inclusion it seemed to project. As I grew out of those teenaged years and shed most of its self-conscious trappings, I was left with a simple love for the music itself, and a craving for more of the elements within it that I particularly enjoyed. Andre Olbrich’s guitarwork was one of these elements, and the way he played was truly a style of his own making —- borrowing equally from Brian May, Yngwie, and Chris DeGarmo (of classic era Queensryche), he channeled his influences to create vivid, intense musical backdrops that reflected everything from speed metal, Queen-esque theatricality, and romantic medieval themes (which I didn’t even know I loved until I heard Blind Guardian).
In Hansi, I found a vocalist that I enjoyed as much as Bruce Dickinson on a purely technical level, but perhaps loved even more for the sheer bloody passion he could deliver through his voice. When I’d hear his verse line-extending screams in “Another Holy War”, I’d shake with adrenaline (to this day still). He transfixed me with his abilities as a truly original lyricist as well, presenting his songs through the voice of an well-traveled narrator in a way that did justice to his fan appointed title as a “bard”. I saw it in obvious gems like “A Past and Future Secret” and of course”The Bard’s Song”, but in more creative narrative framing such as the entirety of the Nightfall in Middle-Earth album. So transfixed was I by his dramatization of events and perspectives from Tolkien’s source material, that I actually bought a copy of The Silmarillion and forced myself to keep at its dense, biblical text until I finally began to enjoy it. I’ve now read it more times than the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit combined, I sometimes even fall asleep with the unabridged audiobook playing on my headphones like a maniac. I’d like to think that Hansi would be proud, or worried.
I don’t need to go on about why Blind Guardian is great. If you’ve read this far, you know damn well why. But I don’t think that I’ve associated more personal memories with one band than I have with the bards. I’d ride around with their discs as a near permanent in-car rotation in those lo-tech days before iPods, and amidst hour long plus commutes to and from school, work, home, and various excursions all over Houston I’d repeatedly soak in every second of their discography. I have fond memories of laughing deliriously while driving when my buddy Matt pointed out how angry Hansi sounded during the second verse of their cover of “Surfin’ USA” (he’s REALLY angry that everybody’s gone surfin’), and how every time that song would come on we’d mime his imaginary rage. On their cover of “Spread Your Wings”, we got a kick out of the way Hansi pronounced “honey”, imagining he was standing with the characters of Winnie the Pooh and motioning us over a cartoon hill (“Come on haaaanie!”). Every time I was down and needed a pick me up, I could listen to that song and it’d help a bit.
I remember my excitement on the release day of A Night At the Opera, at an actual record store where a copy was specifically held just for me… I couldn’t tear the plastic off fast enough. Speaking of which, I vividly recall just how stunned I felt upon first hearing the “And Then There Was Silence” single, sitting in my room with headphones on with the lyric sheet in front of me. I remember the time I was huddled around a fire during a teeth-chatteringly cold night while camping at the Texas Renaissance Festival as Imaginations played out of a portable mini-disc player, downing awful whiskey and loving it. I remember with fondness the New Years Eve spent on a friend’s apartment balcony, a bunch of us drunkenly swaying and singing along to “The Bard’s Song” at the top of our lungs (written warnings were issued the next day). I remember how cheerful it felt to first hear those gorgeous final vocal melodies in “War of the Thrones”, and how I listened to that song on repeat over and over while singing along to them every time.
Mostly I just remember the band always being there, particularly during darker times when all I wanted was an escape. Here on the eve of a new Blind Guardian album release, I find it comforting to know that hasn’t changed at least. Its not lost on me that the last time Blind Guardian released an album way back in 2010, there were people, places, and situations that were in my life that simply aren’t there anymore. It happens less frequently to me these days, but when people question why you’re still an obsessed metal fan as an adult, all you really can to point to is your own personal relationship to the music you love. There are no cliques, no scenes, no one you’re trying to impress or piss-off —- the only thing that matters is whats going on internally when its just you by yourself in your car, listening to whatever you’re listening to.
Blind Guardian are one of the few metal bands that belong to a specific subgenre yet manage to transcend it and crossover to other metal fans. As Brad Sanders of Invisible Oranges so eloquently pointed out, “Their discography is like a completely crossed-out to-do list of things to put in your music if you don’t want the metal intelligentsia to take you seriously, and yet they’re the only power metal band I can put on with a carload of trve-kvlt warriors without having control of the stereo wrested from my hands.” Sanders attributes this to the band’s complete lack of cynicism —- and I’ll add a lack of irony and self-awareness to the list. Blind Guardian run on a love of pure imaginative storytelling, fantastical or otherwise, and pass this on to their listeners in the form of expressively earnest music. Its why they are loved in the manner they are, with devotion that most bands could never appreciate, let alone muster.
So I reached my car door and briefly looked back —- Hansi had begun to climb back into the bus, boots relatively less muddied. I wanted to sit there and let it soak in a for a minute, but after the initial round of expletive laden exclamations of triumph and joy, I was firmly ordered to hit the gas. Burritos waited somewhere in the distance, and we had to get back relatively soon to ensure a good spot in line. The stereo came on, playing Blind Guardian of course. We agreed that we had handled ourselves well, and no one did or said anything embarrassing —- it was about as much as we ever analyzed anything we’d ever said. Well then, let this serve as my ex post facto potentially embarrassing fan gushing treatise —- the stuff I wanted to say to Hansi at that moment but kept wisely bottled up instead. Delusional I’m not, I know he’s not going to read this, but its actually more for me than it is for anyone else. Traveler in time for life.