Metal mania still rocks

It was May 31, 1986, in Largo, Md., a day that would live in infamy if only anyone could remember it.

Thankfully, there was a film crew there to compensate for all the brain cells waterboarded in Budweiser.

The scene: the parking lot for the Capital Centre arena, where Judas Priest and Dokken were playing a show later that night.

The real action took place outside the venue, where a bunch of shirtless dudes in jean shorts and chicks in one-piece leopard-print jumpsuits had themselves one righteous par-tay. It was all captured on the riotous "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" short documentary, where a coke-, alcohol- and acid-addled crowd mugs for the camera, shouts endless profanities and philosophizes about life, liberty and the pursuit of weed.

"They should make a joint so big, it fits across America," one skinny, bare-chested dude helpfully suggests, gripping a bottle of beer.

"I'd get in line for that one," his buddy solemnly notes.

Clearly, a bitchin' time was had by all, and so with Judas Priest hitting town last Saturday at the Thomas & Mack, I set out to see if the feathered-hair festivities still continue to this day

I was not disappointed.

Slamming brews in the back of pickups with Priest tunes blaring out of open car doors, the crowd was in feisty form from the get go.

There were lots of beer guts, plenty of dudes looked like they had gotten knocked up by a keg, and most everyone was dressed in black, as if we were all attending some sort of mass funeral for sobriety.

An endless array of beer bottle caps led up to the arena like a trail of bread crumbs.

See, you don't get to participate in this kind of action outside of a Mariah Carey gig, pounding cans of Coors Light until you could practically sweat barley.

As for the show itself, it was pretty great in its own right.

"Are you ready to r-o-o-o-o-o-ck?" Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale queried with the force of a thousand exclamation points, warming the stage for the headliners by humping his mic stand, wagging his tongue and reminiscing about playing the Thomas & Mack three decades earlier.

"Maybe some of you were conceived that very evening," he noted.

Then Priest came out and roared through their classic "British Steel" album in its entirety as green lasers shot through thick clouds of dry ice. "Pounding the world like a battering ram," Priest frontman Rob Halford growled during a show-opening "Rapid Fire," flanked by guitarist Glenn Tipton, perhaps the only 61-year-old in the world who can get away with wearing red leather pants so tight that the guy must have to do deep-breathing exercises before getting dressed.

Priest is a lot like the beer that fueled this evening, a familiar taste, to be sure, but one that never seems to get old despite the repetition.

And so, in short, the night was awesome.

Kind of like the headache the next day.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.