Parents have this weird way of existing in this one-dimensional space in your mind when you’re growing up. My dad was just… Dad. The guy who worked at the insurance office, who wore ties with tiny sailboats on them, who got unreasonably excited about lawn care products, and who rolled his eyes dramatically every time I cranked up Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” in my bedroom. The walking embodiment of everything decidedly un-metal in the universe.
At least that’s what I thought until that random Tuesday night in 2008 when everything I knew about my father completely imploded.
I was visiting my parents’ house, helping Dad clean out the garage—a chore I’d been successfully avoiding for approximately seven years but had finally been guilt-tripped into by Mom’s tactical deployment of homemade lasagna as bait. We were digging through these ancient cardboard boxes that had apparently survived three moves without ever being opened, the archaeological layers of my family’s history stacked in precarious towers between the Toyota and an ancient lawn mower.
“What’s in this one?” I asked, pulling down a particularly beat-up box labeled “Jim – College Stuff” in faded marker.
Dad glanced over, wiping dust from his glasses. “Oh, just junk from my university days. Probably nothing worth keeping.”
But something in his tone caught my attention—a slight hesitation, maybe even a touch of… was that nervousness? From the man who once gave a forty-minute lecture to a door-to-door salesman about the importance of proper rain gutter maintenance? Naturally, I had to investigate.
I pried open the box, expecting to find accounting textbooks or maybe some embarrassing 70s fashion choices preserved for posterity. Instead, I found myself staring at a collection of vinyl records in worn sleeves. Not Frank Sinatra or Simon & Garfunkel or whatever I’d vaguely imagined my father might have listened to in his youth. No—I was looking at Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” Deep Purple’s “Machine Head,” and holy shit, right there on top, Iron Maiden’s “Killers.”
“Dad?” I held up the Maiden album, Eddie’s axe-wielding face staring maniacally back at me. “What the hell is this?”
He actually blushed. James Callahan—insurance adjuster, youth soccer coach, enthusiastic clipper of grocery coupons—turned red as a teenager caught with a Playboy. “Oh, that old thing,” he said with forced casualness. “Just something I picked up back in the day.”
“Back in the day?” I repeated, now digging deeper into the box like I’d discovered pirate treasure. “Dad, there’s like thirty metal albums in here! Judas Priest? Motörhead? You’ve been giving me grief about my music for YEARS!”
What followed was possibly the most surreal conversation of my adult life. My father, apparently realizing the jig was up, sat down on an overturned paint bucket and proceeded to tell me about his secret headbanging past.
“It started with Deep Purple,” he said, taking the “Machine Head” album from me with an unexpected reverence. “I heard ‘Highway Star’ at a party my freshman year of college, and it was like… a revelation.” The word sounded so strange coming from him, almost religious.
“Your mother and I had our first real date at a Black Sabbath concert in ’76,” he continued, and I nearly choked on air. Mom—the woman who asked me to “please turn down that angry music” when I played Metallica at what I considered an already unreasonably low volume—had willingly attended a Sabbath show?
“She loved Sabbath,” Dad said, now grinning at my obvious shock. “Said Ozzy had ‘honest eyes.’ Whatever that means.”
The garage cleaning forgotten, we spent the next three hours sitting on concrete surrounded by dust-covered boxes while my father—the same man who had once described my beloved Megadeth as “noise that sounds like a washing machine falling down stairs”—gave me a detailed education on the early New Wave of British Heavy Metal scene. He explained how he’d discovered Iron Maiden through a college roommate, how he’d waited in line for six hours to buy tickets to their first American tour, how he’d briefly grown his hair long enough to earn a stern talking-to from his own father.
“But what happened?” I asked, genuinely baffled. “Why the transformation from metalhead to… whatever you became?” I gestured vaguely at his polo shirt and khakis, the universal uniform of middle-aged suburban dads.
He laughed, but there was something wistful in it. “Life, I guess. Got my accounting degree, started the career track, had you kids. Somewhere along the way, it just seemed like the right time to put away childish things.” He picked up the Iron Maiden album again, running a thumb along its worn edge. “But man, I miss it sometimes. That feeling when Bruce Dickinson would hit those high notes and it would just send electricity straight through you.”
“You know,” I said slowly, “they’re touring next month. Playing the whole ‘Seventh Son’ album.”
The look that crossed his face—a mixture of longing, excitement, and something like fear—was so nakedly emotional that it almost made me uncomfortable. This wasn’t an expression I associated with James Callahan, dispenser of insurance policies and practical advice.
“I haven’t been to a concert in… God, twenty-five years?” he said. “Your mother would think I’ve lost my mind.”
“Actually,” came a voice from the garage doorway, causing us both to jump, “I think it sounds like fun.”
Mom stood there with two glasses of iced tea, apparently having overheard at least part of our conversation. She smiled at Dad with a look I couldn’t quite interpret—something private between them that spoke of shared history I’d known nothing about.
Three weeks later, I found myself in the surreal position of standing in line outside the arena with both my parents, my dad wearing a vintage Iron Maiden shirt he’d dug out of that same box. Mom had opted against band merch but had put on a leather jacket that I’d never seen before, which she informed me had been her “concert jacket” back in the day.
“Your father proposed to me in this jacket,” she said casually, as if this wasn’t completely rewriting my understanding of my parents’ origin story. “After a UFO show. He’d had a few beers and got all emotional during ‘Love to Love.'”
Dad looked simultaneously embarrassed and proud. “It seemed romantic at the time.”
The show itself was transcendent—Maiden at their theatrical best, with pyrotechnics and Eddie appearances and Bruce commanding the stage like the metal god he is. But the real show, for me, was watching my father. He knew every word to every song, his voice joining thousands of others on classics like “Moonchild” and “The Evil That Men Do.” When they played “Infinite Dreams,” I actually saw tears in his eyes, glistening in the stage lights.
During “The Clairvoyant,” Dad leaned over and shouted above the music, “This was playing in the hospital room when you were born!”
“What?” I yelled back, certain I’d misheard.
“Your mother brought a boom box! The nurses thought we were crazy!”
I looked at Mom for confirmation, and she just shrugged, grinning. “We wanted your first sounds to be something special!”
After the show, walking back to the car, Dad kept shaking his head in wonder. “They’ve still got it. After all these years, they’ve still got it.”
“Kind of like you,” I said, surprising myself with the sudden sentimentality. “Still secretly a metalhead after all these years.”
He laughed, throwing an arm around my shoulders. “Maybe not so secret anymore.”
Something fundamental shifted between us that night. The next time I visited home, Dad had the stereo playing “Powerslave” while he made dinner. He’d dug out his old vinyl collection and bought a new turntable to play them on. Mom had apparently embraced this resurrection of her husband’s metal phase with amused tolerance, only occasionally asking him to “please not blast Judas Priest before 10 AM on weekends.”
Our conversations changed too. Music had always been my territory—the thing I was passionate about that Dad merely tolerated with bemused confusion. Now we had this shared language, this unexpected common ground. He’d send me texts asking if I’d heard the new album from whatever band he’d rediscovered. I’d send him deep cuts from metal bands I thought might appeal to his now-admitted love of technical guitarwork.
The real shock came last Christmas when he gave me a first-pressing vinyl of Iron Maiden’s “Piece of Mind” that he’d tracked down through some collector he’d found online. “I had one just like it,” he told me, “but I played it so much in college that it warped. Take better care of this one.”
The strangest part of all of this isn’t that my straight-laced insurance agent father turned out to have a secret headbanging past. It’s how easily I’d accepted the one-dimensional version of him I’d constructed in my mind. How readily I’d believed that who he was as a parent encompassed all he’d ever been.
When I called him last weekend to discuss the latest Maiden rumors about a possible new album, it occurred to me that what we’ve really been talking about all these years isn’t just music. It’s the recognition that we contain multitudes, that growing up doesn’t mean abandoning the parts of yourself that brought you joy, and that it’s never too late to reclaim the pieces you’ve set aside.
And now he’s talking about getting tickets to see Judas Priest next year. Mom’s already pulled the leather jacket out of storage. Apparently, there’s a whole metal revival happening in my parents’ quiet suburban home, and it’s kind of awesome.
I still haven’t fully processed seeing my dad throw the horns during “Fear of the Dark” while wearing khakis and sensible shoes. But maybe that’s the most metal thing of all—defying expectations and refusing to be categorized. Somewhere beneath the responsible adult exterior, the insurance policies and lawn care regimens, there’s still a headbanger with honest eyes, just like Ozzy.