You invite Scott Lucas to the music section’s birthday bash for Steve Newton, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two recently released major-label CDs, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whine.

Dear Payback Time: I know our youth cannot be captured, but it probably would have been a more enjoyable concert if you had left your cynical, grumpy old self at home and let your Valley headbanger out instead. I have always been a metal fan (though not particularly of Iron Maiden) and thought these boys blew the doors off anything pretending to be music/entertainment. Look past the trinkets and enjoy the spectacle of metal. So sad that one must dedicate so much of a music review to marketing techniques. Get your hand off your wallet, raise the devil horns, and enjoy yourself for a change, or give your ticket to someone who couldn’t get one to a sold-out metal opera supreme!

> Clayton Bachynsky

Steve Newton responds—Dearest Clayton: Dude, I let my “Valley headbanger” out when Maiden played here back in ’84, on the World Slavery Tour, and he OD’d on the sheer awesomeness of it all. That show was unbelievable! To reminisce about it, I just went downstairs to my hallowed album stacks and slid out my revered copy of Live After Death, the 1985 double album that captured that tour (and was also the template for Maiden’s current one). Open up the gatefold and you’ll see a whack of pictures that—apart from the volume of spandex and Bruce Dickinson’s hair—you’d swear were taken at the Coliseum last week. Twenty-four years later and Maiden has barely changed; it can still kick your ass six ways from Sunday. Cynical? Grumpy? Whatcha talkin’ ’bout, fool? Just because I rambled on about Maiden’s marketing doesn’t mean I didn’t love the show. My “valley headbanger” came blasting up from the grave like Eddie on Live After Death’s wicked cover! I was so impressed that, on the way out, I laid down 10 big ones for an Iron Maiden beer cozy, then came home and put it to work while writing my rave review into the wee hours of the morning. You can’t get more metal than that! Freaky thing is, the write-up clocked in at precisely 667 words, which, as everyone knows, is the Number of the Neighbour of the Beast!

You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by sending an e-mail to payback@straight.com.