Heavy Metal (Takin' A Ride)

Album: Heavy Metal Soundtrack (1981)
Charted: 43
Play Video

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.

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Little Richard

Little RichardFact or Fiction

Was Long Tall Sally a cross-dresser? Did he really set his piano on fire? See if you know the real stories about one of rock's greatest innovators.

Tom Keifer of Cinderella

Tom Keifer of CinderellaSongwriter Interviews

Tom talks about the evolution of Cinderella's songs through their first three albums, and how he writes as a solo artist.

Who Did It First?

Who Did It First?Music Quiz

Do you know who recorded the original versions of these ten hit songs?

Movie Stars In Music Videos

Movie Stars In Music VideosSong Writing

Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Mila Kunis and John Malkovich are just a few of the film stars who have moonlighted in music videos.

Devo

DevoSongwriter Interviews

Devo founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale take us into their world of subversive performance art. They may be right about the De-Evoloution thing.

P.F. Sloan

P.F. SloanSongwriter Interviews

P.F. was a teenager writing hits and playing on tracks for Jan & Dean when he wrote a #1 hit that got him blackballed.