There was a similar story about Bruce Dickinson recording Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast."
The story has been confirmed by the producer Martin Birch, and Bruce Dickinson himself.
The story went that Bruce joined the band as the vocalist, and due to his better voice and range, the bassist and bandleader Steve Harris wanted to tap into new and exciting things they couldn't do with their previous singer Paul Di'Anno.
Well Martin Birch was the producer, and Maiden went into the studio to record the album.
On the title track "Number of the Beast," Martin Birch said, in his own words:
I remember we spent ages getting the vocal intro to the title track right. We did it over and over and over until Bruce said: “My head is splitting. Can’t we move on and do something else and come back to this?”. But I wouldn’t let him do anything else until he’d got it perfect. It drove him crazy.
This went on for hours, I think Bruce and the band (Maiden records live in the studio, mind you) did that intro some 50 times or something of the sort.
This drove Bruce so crazy that he was throwing chairs across the room wanting to continue on.
But Birch wanted to get everything perfect.
And, totally paraphrasing here, Birch said something to the effect of:
Alright Bruce, that was pretty good. I think we got it. Can you do the scream leading into the second verse?
And then Bruce said, "Oh, willingly!" and delivered a rage fueled scream of frustration that's an iconic part of the song to this very day.
To this day, Bruce, as good a singer as he is, can't quite replicate that performance. It was one of those once in a lifetime takes.
The moral of this story is that to create something like this is to have great songwriters and musicians, as well as a great recording engineer that knows how to push the musicians' buttons to get the best performances out of them.
I have many more interesting things about some of our favorite metal songs, like type of equipment, and so on.
