Several legendary actors have provided narration for rock and metal bands. Sir Christopher Lee had a particularly close collaboration with Italian symphonic metal band Rhapsody of Fire. Brian Blessed has provided booming narration for the likes of Hawkwind and Manowar. Tom Baker, Rutger Hauer and John de Lancie have all narrated rock operas for Ayreon, and Patrick Stewart helped Rick Wakeman tell the story about a return to the centre of the earth. Looking further back, Vincent Price famously did Thriller with Michael Jackson. Actors with recognisable and good sounding voices have long been attractive to use in story-driven and/or cinematic music productions, and the results are often great.
One of the most unlikely and fascinating collaborations still has to be that of Manowar and Orson Welles, which happened back in 1982. Pairings between legendary actors and bands – let alone lowly heavy metal bands – were far from commonplace back then. Add to that the fact that Manowar were total unknowns, recording their debut album Battle Hymns at the time. Orson Welles, however, was just about as legendary as you could get. The most amazing thing about this is that the band actually had the balls to ask him.
But, they did, and Welles agreed to do it. He ended up recording narration for two early Manowar songs: Dark Avenger and Defender.
The band considered having vocalist Eric Adams do the narration sections in these songs, but it was felt not to be enough. While Adams has a very strong voice, it felt confusing to have their singer suddenly break into spoken word and then go back to singing. It did not make it clear enough that the narration came from a different perspective than that of the ordinary lead voice, and they realised the only way to highlight that change in a satisfying way was to have someone different narrate it.
Eric Adams recalled the experience in an interview with metal-rules.com: “We were in Florida making our first record, and we had already written Dark Avenger. As we rehearsed it, I did the narration, but my voice was really too high to be that deep, resonating voice that we needed for that. So we concluded that we needed the voice of a father image. We needed that deep, resonating voice.”
Guitarist Ross ‘The Boss’ Friedman looked back at those sessions in a recent Vintage Vinyl News podcast. “I had written Dark Avenger. It was an epic song,” he recalled. “We needed a narration. We needed a voice – but we needed a REAL voice. Who could we have?” He recalled that names like James Earl Jones and Vincent Price were mentioned before Orson Welles was brought up.
Joey DeMaio added a lot of detail about his Orson Welles experiences on the first episode of his Words of Power podcast: “We talked about it with Bob Curry from our record company, who was the visionary who signed Manowar. We explained the meaning of our song, and what’s going down, and I said, ‘we really need someone who can narrate this song and do justice to it. Someone with a bigger than life voice. Someone like Orson Welles.’ Curry just looked at me and said, ‘well, why don’t we just get Orson Welles?’ And I said, ‘you’re kidding!’ He said, ‘no, why would I be kidding?’ I couldn’t believe it. It was just like a joke. But here we were with EMI Records at the time [the Liberty label]. And he said he would try to get a hold of him, that it couldn’t hurt to try. I was like, that would be amazing!”
DeMaio was not the only one who reacted with disbelief. “I went home and told my parents,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Why would he do that? He’s Orson Welles.’ I’m like, ‘yeah, I know, but we’re gonna try.’”
Executive producer Bob Currie reached out to Welles’ management, who was quite receptive to the idea after looking at the lyrics. The band could not believe it. “Bob Curry just said ‘We’ll just ask him’” says Eric Adams, still in disbelief after all these years, “and I’m like ‘Sure – we’ll just call him up. Right.’ And he says, ‘No, we’ll just ask him – we’ll shake the tree and see what falls out.’ So he gave the lyrics to his management, Orson read the lyrics and he understood the band and dug it and said he’d do it.”
“Bob sent him the lyrics, and I have the letter somewhere,” says DeMaio. “Basically we got a response, and it was positive! And we were just completely blown away that this great man who had achieved so much in so many areas would do it. We’d got a letter that he would consider recording the song with us. We were just blown away, I mean, what can I say? Lo and behold, on just the strength of the lyrics, he was in!”
“We sent him the text,” says guitarist Ross The Boss. “He loved it and the next thing you know we are at Media Sounds on 57th Street recording Dark Avenger and Defender… We did two at once,” Friedman said. “It was amazing.”
The band had initially hoped that Welles would be coming down to Florida, where they were recording the album, but as Ross Friedman mentions, the sessions would take place in New York. Welles was flying into town to receive an award, and the scheduling worked. A session was booked at Media Sound Studios which was one of the big studios at the time.
DeMaio: “We walked into the studio, and Bob Curry from the record company said ‘Come on you guys! He is here!’ I go, ‘he’s here?!!’ He goes, ‘yes! He’s amazing! He’s really bigger than life!’”
‘Bigger than life’ was not overstating anything. A huge personality, a powerful man in every sense, and rather big physically as well! He was brought up in the freight elevator, with his entire entourage, including his dog, and all the things that always was on hand whenever he went somewhere.
DeMaio: “We’re hurrying up to get up into the hallway, and I hear this mighty voice through the hallway. And remember, he was in the recording room. I heard his big, deep voice through the microphone, saying ‘Has the author arrived yet?’ I thought, who’s the author? I didn’t think! I was thinking, author means novel. But in professional terms, it meant the person who had actually written the written text. By that time I got into the control room, I pushed the button and I said, ‘yes sir, I’m here!’ And so he said ‘All right then. Let’s begin.’”
One thing DeMaio had not thought much about until then, was that as the album’s producer, he would actually be directing Orson Welles. The thought was, frankly, alien to him. How could anyone be directing the greatest director ever?
DeMaio: “I’m standing there and the engineer looked at me and he said, ‘Well, there’s the producer’s chair.’ And I looked at him, and the guy from the record company goes ‘That’s you! Get over there!’ And I just remember thinking to myself, now wait a minute. I’m gonna be telling this guy what to say, how to say it, how fast to say it…? It was one of those moments. I froze in time. I couldn’t believe I was going to do what I … I just, I thought I’d offend him, I thought I’d make a fool our of myself or say the wrong things. You know, all of these things go through your head, particularly at such an early age. But he was just amazing to work with.”
He was met at the gate of Hades
By the Guardian of the Lost Souls
The Keeper of the Unavenged
And He did say to him
“Let you not pass
Abandon
Return to the world
From whence you came…”
DeMaio: “When I had to push the talk button in the recording studio, you are completely isolated from the performers. You can see each other, but unless you have microphones to speak to each other, you can’t communicate. I could see him, he could see me, and I would push the microphone to talk… the talk button. And I will never forget the first time I said ‘Oh, Mr Welles, do you think you could say that line there, ‘When he rode up from hell’ with a little more power?’ And he said ‘Yes, okay. Let’s do it again then.’ And I hear him go, ‘THEY RODE UP FROM HELL!” And I say, ‘Oh yes! That’s exactly what we want, we want more of that!’”
And on that night
They rode up from Hell
The pounding of his hooves
Did clap like thunder!
DeMaio: “I’ll never forget, we were just looking at each other in the control room, and just making the face like, oh my god can you believe this?! When we heard his voice come through the monitors, it was like thunder! It was unbelievable. It was just an experience like you can’t imagine because he had this huge, resonant voice. I remember saying to the recording engineer, what kind of EQ do you have on his voice? You know, being able to make something brighter, or more bassy. He said, nothing really, just a little bit of compression on his voice. I just could not believe it. He was basically recording him flat, and it was thunderous. It was amazing. He delivered, and he did everything I asked. He was actually speaking too fast, and of course the song was longer, and the pieces that he was talking in was longer, so I had to ask him to slow down a few times and speak it slower. He was just happy to do it.”
Ross The Boss recalled: “Let me tell you something, this man was a big man, Orson Welles, a huge guy in latter days. When he got out of the limousine … on 57th Street in Manhattan by the Carnegie – you know, that neighbourhood has some hot shit over there. When he stepped out into that neighbourhood, women in mink coats were throwing themselves on him. It was just like ‘Oh, Orson, oh.’ It was like Frank Sinatra in the 40s. Seriously, I saw it with my own eyes. People were in awe of this man because he was so incredible. He was a legendary guy, legendary maverick.”
DeMaio: “It was explained to him how much we idolized him, and how we were doing everything ourselves. We had managed to get our own record deal, recording our own record, producing it, had written all the music, much in the same way that he was responsible for all areas of his films and plays and radio shows and everything that he did. He was a very hands-on guy.”
Dark Avenger was considered the most important song to get done at the time, as that was completely finished otherwise and would be going on the album. Titled Battle Hymns, Manowar’s first opus was released on 14 June 1982, making the world more metal than it had been before.
There was one other song, though. Defender was not totally finished and had to wait. They got Welles to complete the narration for it, and ended up releasing it as a standalone single by early 1983, before the release of their second album.
Defender is a great metal anthem and a solid song – better than Dark Avenger in many ways. The 1983 version somehow didn’t come out right, feeling a little rushed and somewhat unsettled. They would revisit it on their fifth album Fighting the World, technology having advanced sufficiently that they could tweak Welles’ narration to match a much more settled and epic instrumentation of the song. On that version, they nailed it. The new version of Defender remains one of Manowar’s true classics.
Orson Welles takes the part of a father in this song, narrating the words in a letter he has left for his son to read when he has come of age. It explains his life calling, why he had to leave his young son, and the legacy passed on to him. It’s emotional, but also truly the stuff of legend and high adventure.
When you are old enough to read these words
Their meaning will unfold
These words are all that’s left
And though we’ve never met, my only son
I hope you know
That I would have been there to watch you grow
But my call was heard and I did go
Now your mission lies ahead of you
As it did my so long ago
To help the helpless ones who all look up to you
And to defend them to the end
Defender
It is a mighty song, and the end section in particular when Eric Adams sings against Welles’ narration is particularly powerful. Adams loves singing that part as well: “Defender, to his day, puts chills up my back. When our voices blend together, it’s really incredible. When we originally wanted to do it live, we wanted to have a hologram in the back of us, like this big Wizard of Oz thing, then I’d come out (singing): ‘Father!’ Damn! But, the production costs were ridiculous. So we just said, forget this. When we did it live, we rolled the tape and the band would play to it. Orson would be getting louder and louder. They’d put blue lights on the stage, and it would get really eerie looking. I would sneak out to the drum riser while they’d get the fog rolling out, and when it came up to the time, I’d spring out and sing, ‘Father!’ And it was so f*cking cool!”
To hear Joey DeMaio talk about his Orson Welles experience and how Welles has inspired himself and Manowar, check out his Words of Power podcast. The podcast is created to provide support and encouragement during these dark times, seeking to inspire and empower people to achieve their dreams.
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