Judas Priest bringing 50th anniversary tour to Moline

With groups like Black Sabbath, Kiss and Aerosmith either having staged or in the process of doing farewell tours, it’s easy to see how hard rock might trend toward being more of a young person’s game.

Leave it to Judas Priest to punch a hole in that trope.

The band is on the road for their 50 Heavy Metal Years tour — rescheduled after this tour’s planned 2020 outing was canceled because of the pandemic. On Saturday night, the tour will rock the former TaxSlayer Center, now known as the Vibrant Arena at The Mark, in Moline, Ill.

While the tour celebrates the 50th anniversary of the band, Judas Priest shows no signs of being the retiring types — all the more with the 50 Heavy Metal Years tour back for a second round, after last year’s initial run. Virginia native and Priest drummer Scott Travis promises the wait will have been worth it for fans eager to check out Priest in a live setting.

“There are a lot of things for people to see, hear and feel when they come to the show,” Travis said in a recent phone interview. “It’s definitely a treat for the eyes and the ears. In addition, we’re breaking out some new old songs that may have been recorded 40-plus years ago. Some of these songs may never have been done live by Judas Priest. Or if they were played live, it was a long time ago. So we’re reintroducing some of those into our set list as well as switching things around as we try to do every tour.

“You have to do these sorts of things to make it new and make it fresh.”

In the beginning

Founded in 1969 — a year after Birmingham neighbors Sabbath got their start — Judas Priest was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame this year, having long since established themselves as a major heavy metal cornerstone, while proudly and humbly accepting their role as significant standard-bearers for a genre that’s often misunderstood and mischaracterized. It’s a role vocalist Rob Halford gladly embraces and it’s this pride in their craft that he points to as the key to the band’s longevity.

“It’s all about the music. I know the performance runs side by side, but we work really hard in making the best music we could ever make. I think anything of quality sustains itself,” he said in a separate phone interview. “Right from those early kind of groundshakers — how far can I think back? — ‘United,’ ‘Take On the World,’ ‘Evening Star’ — anything from that point on where you make that connection and it starts to stick and that is also your motivation to keep making music at a very high standard.

“We’ve never approached our albums as being about one song serving as a radio track and the rest is filler,” Halford said. “We’ve never done that. Every single song is handcrafted. That’s it really, in a nutshell — good stuff lasts forever.”

Adding additional perspective to the seismic impact Priest has had over the years is Travis, who joined the band as the first non-Briton after passing a 1989 audition to replace departing timekeeper Dave Holland. Travis’ road to devoted Priest fandom went back a decade prior.

“A friend of mine had the cassette version of ‘Unleashed In the East’ and he and I were riding around in my car and I think he left it in the tape deck,” Travis said. “I dropped him off and wound up having the cassette in my possession for a few days. Of course, when it’s in your car, you just keep playing it over and over. So that was really the first time that I remember thinking, ‘This is different. It’s not Led Zeppelin. It’s not Aerosmith. It’s not Van Halen. It’s a different sort of heavy metal and I really like it.’

“As most fans do,” he said, “you work backwards and start listening to the stuff prior to that — albums like ‘Hellbent For Leather,’ ‘Stained Class’ and ‘Sin After Sin.’ That’s what I did and obviously, I’ve been hanging around ever since.”

Rocking a roll

COVID-19 notwithstanding, Priest has been on a creative roll the past few years. Released in 2018, “Firepower,” the band’s last studio album, saw the band straddling the line between the past and present with production duties shared by longtime collaborator Tom Allom and Grammy-winning producer Andy Sneap.

And while it was positively received via it becoming the band’s highest-charting album in the U.S. after it debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard magazine 200 chart during its first week of release, the announcement that followed that founding member Glenn Tipton was retiring from touring due to his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease sent understandable seismic shocks through the Priest camp. It was decided that Sneap would step into the founding member’s string-bending shoes.

And while the web percolated with commentary from longtime guitarist K.K. Downing, who left the band in 2011, Halford was both diplomatic and sanguine about the group’s decision along with Tipton’s future in the band going forward.

“Ken (Downing) had very publicly and informally said he was done. That was enough for us to know and I think for all the fans to know. There are lots of things flying around the internet right now in regards to Ken and I think both parties have said what we’ve needed to say,” Halford said.

“As for Glenn, we watched him work really, really hard on ‘Firepower.’ It was tremendously challenging for Glenn to get all his parts down, but he did, because that’s Glenn. It took a long, long time, but he did.”

Looking ahead

“And for the future, that’s something we’re always thinking about,” Halford said. “Glenn said that it’s time for him to go back to his studio and start loading up the riffs for the next Priest songs. He’s so brave. It’s all so positive and wonderful.”

Going forward, Priest last fall released a massive box set, “50 Heavy Metal Years of Music,” which featured every official studio and live album released by the group plus 13 discs of unreleased (mostly) live recordings. This year’s second installment of the tour supporting the box set and the band’s 50th anniversary should serve as a career-spanning soundtrack to hard rock and metal fans everywhere.

The longevity of Judas Priest is a badge of honor Halford and his compatriots not only proudly wear, but take very seriously.

“Priest is part of the fabric of music in American culture now. We have been for a long time. The longer you’re around, the more that has substance attached to it. We’re this heavy metal time machine and can take you back to the 1970s and literally walk through the decades together through the performances that we make now,” he said.

“We want to give our fans the best experience we can, from the visual side of what you love about Priest, which is this larger-than-life experience and a big stage with a light show, the stage set, the bike and the costumes. But the music is first and foremost and is at the heart of any Priest event.

“And it is an event now, since some of our friends have retired recently,” Halford added. “As I understand it, Priest is the go-to band for live performance and the roots and origins of heavy metal. We’re still delivering the goods and want to give you something that when you wake up the next morning, you’re not only thinking about what you heard, but what you saw. It’s a strong metal memory.”