Almost on a whim, I grabbed Bruce Dickinson's autobiography from a heavy metal book website a year or two ago. I finished it a couple of days ago. Bruce Dickinson is best known as the lead singer for Iron Maiden. The book was called "What Does This Button Do? Bruce Dickinson: An Autobiography."
The book I got had an assortment of color pictures in the middle from over the years. As I read, I was curious about the impetus behind the various Iron Maiden albums - both their inspiration and the nuts and bolts of their compilation and production. This wasn't a book about that, though, as it was an autobiography...not a retrospective of Iron Maiden's catalogue. It's an intriguing autobiography, though, and Bruce Dickinson starts it in his early youth and carries it through his career with Iron Maiden, his leaving the band and doing some solo projects, his rejoining with Iron Maiden, and his battle with cancer.
Bruce stayed very busy. That's a good thing and I think he would agree with that. He was an avid fencer...something I tried in college but was miserable at. I think I lost all but one matches that I was in. I didn't get it. And I'm clumsy on top of that so sports don't go well for me. Fencing was no exception. Bruce also became an airplane pilot - even flying commercially over a period of time. I had seen images of Iron Maiden's jet - the so-called Ed Force One - but didn't realize that Bruce was a pilot as well.
Bruce maintained a really good attitude about life throughout the book...at least that part of life that the book was open to exploring. He explicitly passed on discussing marriages, divorces, and children. Which is perplexing to me because those are all monumental occurrences in one's life. He did remark later in the book, though, that "You are never so alive as when learning something new and overcoming adversity." I tend to agree with that sentiment.
The autobiography was personal - don't get me wrong. I just wish it had painted a fuller portrait of his family and his religion. Two critical components in anyone's life even when they don't have much of one or the other. One of his commercial pilot jobs was flying migrants on their Haj to Mecca. I wondered why...not that it isn't a worthy thing to do, but was there something about it that drew him to step up to that? Or was it truly just another job. I suspect not because he mentioned it more than once in the book, but it isn't explained.
Bruce does mention a couple of traumatizing incidents in his life. One was when, during his solo career, he did a gig in Sarajevo in 1994, when the area was a full-blown war zone. I wondered why he chose to go there as well, but his motivation wasn't explained in detail. It made me curious...war is hell and voluntarily going near one is going to shake anyone up. Bruce was also in New York City on 9/11. I hadn't realized that either. It took him five days, understandably so, to get out of the area. He had been there on the roof of a hotel when he learned what was happening. The visit was for an interview related to their first reunion album: "Brave New World." That was my first Iron Maiden album and is still one of my favorites.
I don't read a lot of autobiographies, but I do enjoy them when I do. It's intriguing to learn about others and their perspectives and reflections on life. I recommend this book for anyone interested in Bruce Dickinson, his career, or Iron Maiden. As I noted earlier, it doesn't scrub the Iron Maiden background as much as I'd hoped, but there's still a lot to read about related to the band in this book.
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