Heavy Metal (Takin' A Ride)

Album: Heavy Metal Soundtrack (1981)
Charted: 43
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Songfacts®:

  • Heavy Metal is a 1981 animated film telling several disjointed stories revolving around an evil orb called the Loc-Nar. Rated R, the movie was so warped and carnal that South Park based a sequence of their 2008 "Major Boobage" episode on the film.

    Eagles guitarist Don Felder was asked to write and record the theme song to the film, which also featured music by Nazareth, Cheap Trick, and Black Sabbath. Felder based the song on a track he worked on for the Eagles 1979 album The Long Run, which turned out to be their last studio album until 2007. That song, with the working title "You're Really High, Aren't You?," didn't make the cut, but Don remembered it when he was asked to work on the movie. He told us: "It was really written specifically for that movie, but I used a lot of the track that I had written for an Eagles song that had never been finished. I'd said, 'Hey, those are great parts. I'm going to use these parts and I'll use this title for introduction, and I'll write the lyrics based around this graphic, and there we go.'"
  • Felder wrote this song to go along with the opening sequence of the film, which shows a Corvette flying through space. The song ended up being used in a different scene, with "Radar Rider" by Riggs used in the open.

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