Welcome to another edition of From My Collection. Well folks, another week, another in memoriam essay. This week, we pay tribute to the unsung hero of Judas Priest, Les Binks, whose death was just announced this week, despite passing last month. While all of these FMC essays are personal for me (the keyword being “My”), this one especially hits close to home, as Stained Class, Binks’ debut with Priest, was my introduction to the Metal Gods. Furthermore, technically speaking, Binks was the first member of Priest I ever heard, but more on that later. Today, we go back in time to 1978 and revisit the album that many consider to be the finest in heavy metal history. This is the story of Judas Priest’s Stained Class. Rest in power Les.
Come 1978, Judas Priest’s profile was quickly rising, and for good reason. With back to back masterpieces to their name in the form of Sad Wings of Destiny (1976) and Sin After Sin (1977), the band stands on their own and, with all due respect to the equally innovative UFO, Scorpions, and Rainbow, are playing a brand of metal that lies closest to what would follow in the ’80s. These creative triumphs don’t mean much in the way of commercial success. However, they do generate enough of a buzz that the band are in the midst of a multi-album deal with Columbia, and they even manage to embark upon their first American tour come the summer of ’77.
There is, however, one problem, and I can’t help but think it served as the foundation for one of This is Spinal Tap‘s most infamous punchlines. Judas Priest have a bit of a drummer issue. A chap named John Hinch held down the beat on their debut psych-metal freakout, Rocka Rolla (1974), only to depart a year later in ’75. This led to the return of Alan “Skip” Moore, who had previously played with the band from ’71 to ’72, for Sad Wings. Come Moore’s second and final departure, Priest relied on the talents of a baby Simon Phillips (pre-go-to drummer for everybody under the sun) to help finish Sin After Sin. And following the making of THAT album, Priest find themselves drummer-less altogether…but not for long. Enter Les Binks!
Having done time with forgotten glam rockers Fancy, Binks was an industry veteran by the time he answered the Priest’s call in 1977. He’d hit the road with Priest in ’77, gel into the lineup, and come the tail end of the year, find himself knee deep in the development, recording, and production of the band’s most ambitious album to date, Stained Class. Whereas Priest’s sound up until this point could be described as an evil genius synthesis of Sabbath’s darkness with Queen’s grandiosity, Stained Class would see the band fusing these tropes beyond the point of recognition, crafting a sound that is, to this day, solely their own.
As we drop the needle on Stained Class, the first thing we hear (after the initial hiss of the vinyl, of course) is a raucous opening drum riff from Binks, one easily three to five years ahead of its time. If the intro to “Exciter” isn’t the ultimate musical “Look at me! I’m here!”, I don’t know what is. This frenetic beat sets the stage for a heroic proto-thrasher, that would serve crucially influential for every speed, thrash, and power metal act to follow in its wake. Every time I hear “Exciter”, it takes me back to being 9 years old, sitting in the back of my dad’s minivan, hearing it for the first time. Up until this point, I was already enamored by Rush and Black Sabbath, taking baby steps on my metal journey. This? This was the equivalent of an atomic bomb going off in my head, and I can only imagine how young headbangers reacted upon hearing it in ’78.
Following “Exciter” is the more straightforward traditional metal rage of “White Heat, Red Hot”. While this one might be more subdued than the album opener in terms of tempo, that’s about it. Everything from the riffs and solos, to Halford’s vocals and lyrics, are unleashed with a venomous bite, and again, sounds ridiculously ahead of its time. If you played this for someone blindly, they’d be hard pressed to point out anything ’70s-esque about this banger, save for MAYBE the production. Sonically, it lies much closer to say Diamond Head at their most furious than the usual metallic stylings of ’78.
Falling smack-dab in the middle of side A is a song that, ironically, despite being the most accessible of the bunch and handpicked by Columbia for inclusion on the album, would go onto become the most infamous. I could write an entire essay regarding the fallout surrounding Priest’s cover of Spooky Tooth’s proto-metal monster, “Better by You, Better than Me”, but I’ll save that for another day. For now, let’s focus on the music itself, shall we? One thing I’ve always found ironic about Priest’s covers is the way they’d manage to be more cheery and upbeat than the originals, this coming from the de facto traditional metal band! “Better by You, Better than Me” is no exception. Priest takes Spooky Tooth’s equally brilliant tripped out, proto-doom arrangement and revs up the tempo, making for a true melodic metal gem.
Now that we got “the single” out of the way, it’s back to the epics, and what an epic this next song is. One listen to “Stained Class” is all it takes to figure out why it became the album’s title track as opposed to “Exciter” or “Saints in Hell” (although both of those would’ve been fitting as well). A friend of mine noted a few years ago the similarity in riffing and arrangement between this song and Queen’s “Keep Yourself Alive”, and while there might be some truth there, let’s not kid ourselves: “Stained Class” sends that Queen ditty home on a stretcher. The galloping riffs, those triumphant solos, Halford’s soaring vocal melodies and perfect pitch: This is epic metal before epic metal was a thing.
Closing out side A is yet another uptempo banger in “Invader”. Although not as pedal to the metal as “Exciter”, it’s definitely fast enough to stake claim as a progenitor of speed metal. Furthermore, the song tackles yet another lyrical theme that is undoubtedly metal: aliens! Granted, Priest weren’t alone in the ’70s metal department when it came to otherworldly lyrical fare. Blue Öyster Cult had no shortage of extraterrestrial themed suites, and space rockers Hawkwind were pretty damn heavy for their time as well, both musically and thematically. In the case of Priest, however, “Invader” comes off as a beacon that would be followed by Agent Steel, for better or worse (Don’t sue us, John!).
Side B opens with a song as over the top and unforgettable as “Exciter”, albeit in its own manner, “Saints in Hell”. One of the wickedest songs in the Priest canon, “Saints in Hell” sees Halford delving into the depths of his beloved thesaurus, weaving a tale of dark fantasy and religious history to craft an epic that’s nothing short of metallic genius. And again, talk about ahead of its time. The arrangement, riffing, and lyrics sound like a template for the type of metal Mercyful Fate would conjure come ’82. Like most of the songs on here, “Saints in Hell” warrants an essay in and of itself, one that somebody else took upon themselves to write 13 years ago and can be found here. Thank you random Blogspot poster! Your effort was not in vein!
Without warning, “Savage” comes screaming through our speakers, figuratively and literally speaking! There’s no shortage of ’70s Priest songs that can be used as support for the argument that, in his prime, Rob Halford was the greatest singer on the planet. “Savage” is amongst these songs. As if the opening screams, that see Halford reach the tippy top of his range, aren’t enough, listen to the way he attacks the lyrics, delivering the verses with power and force, before unleashing a chorus of operatic proportions. Admittedly, Halford was expanding upon the conventions established by Ian Gillan and David Byron before him, but in ways that, again, set the stage for the ’80s.
Circling back to the “Better by You, Better than Me” controversy, you’d think if any song on Stained Class were used as a scapegoat for teen suicide, it’d be “Beyond the Realms of Death”. You know, the song ACTUALLY about suicide (or at the very least alluded to)? But no. The Spooky Tooth cover told us to “do it”. Anyways, back to the music, “Beyond” happens to be Binks’ sole songwriting credit in the Priest canon, the drummer contributing the lead acoustic riff that guides the verses. The rest was written by Halford and is, again, pure genius. To all of those dorks who cried “sellout” when Metallica dropped “Fade to Black”, did you do the same when Priest dropped this one 7 years earlier? Oh wait, no, because literally the only metal band you knew was KISS, who themselves had a mega-ballad in “Beth”, so tape that mouth shut!
Rounding it all out is another bombastic slab of “Queen metal”, “Heroes End”. The arrangement, melodies, and tone that make up this closer have this here online metal journalist believe it’s a distant cousin of the title track, and you can’t tell me I’m that far off. The only difference is the riffs are unorthodox, and I mean that in the best way possible. They shouldn’t work, and for any other band, they wouldn’t, but in the case of Priest, they do. It’s almost as if Glenn Tipton was going for a “Robert Fripp gone trad metal” type riff, if that makes any sense.
In the end, Stained Class proved to be yet another jewel in Judas Priest’s heavy metal crown: One that continues to grow more studded almost half a century later. While like Sad Wings and Sin After Sin beforehand, it didn’t produce much in the way of “hits”, it further solidified the band’s status as the undisputed stained class kings of metal in a world where Deep Purple was no more, Black Sabbath were on life support, and Led Zeppelin faced internal struggles that nearly derailed them from a final offering of soft rock. “Fall to your knees and repent if you please!”
A true “classic” metal album.