Since I’m kind of going through an “80’s thing” lately, might as well share one of my other favorite bands from that era. According to Wikipedia, Accept was a German heavy metal band from the town of Solingen, originally assembled by vocalist Udo Dirkschneider, guitarist Wolf Hoffmann and bassist Peter Baltes. Their beginnings can be traced back to the late 1960s. The band played an important role in the development of speed and thrash metal which emerged in the early to mid-1980s. Accept achieved commercial success with their fifth studio album “Balls to the Wall,” which is the band's only album to be certified gold in the United States and Canada.
The album starts off with the hit “Balls to the Wall” and never lets up. My favorite songs are “Losing More Than You Ever Had” and “Guardian of the Night” although there’s not a single moment of weakness on the entire record. Of course it wouldn’t be until the mid-nineties that I would become aware of Accept or this heavy metal masterpiece.
I named my first Corvette (which was black of course) “Guardian of the Night” and had a friend airbrush it on the back. The ZR-1 would, I guess, be “Guardian of the Night IV.” What I always liked most about this song was the sheer awesomeness and emotional impact of the lyrics. The singer has fallen for a girl who had obviously been in an abusive relationship “when I found her she was dying, trying to kill herself, maybe you don’t know what you've done, but all you want to do is wrong” and they were now together. Her “ex” isn’t able to let her go and has it out for the singer (and maybe the girl too). The lyrics “burn your hate in my soul,” “stainless steel of a sword,” and “you came to kill for someone who’s gone” make this pretty clear.
I always took “Losing more than you ever had” to mean the singer is going to kill the guy if he didn’t drop it and decided to come after him or the girl. Violent certainly, but great stuff if you’re into it. And if you’re NOT…
then you should listen to something else.
(Interestingly, my mom and dad were mostly concerned about the “gay” album cover not the violent content. I have written several times that I’m sure at least my mom suspected I was gay. It wasn’t until my relationship with Stephen/Stephanie that they began to finally understand their son. By the way, I looked it up recently and it is on The Advocate’s list of 60 “homoerotic” album covers.)