Brian Mansfield

USA TODAY

They've got another tour comin': Rob Halford believes Judas Priest tours are more valuable than ever these days. "When you come and see a Priest show, you're looking at and listening to a band that was there from the roots, the origins, the sparks of where it all began," says the band's frontman. In addition to its best-known songs Breakin' the Law, Living After Midnight and You've Got Another Thing Comin', the band will play material from its new Redeemer of Souls album tonight as it launches its tour in Rochester, N.Y. "It's an ongoing celebration of a band that's been making this wonderful, glorious British classic heavy-metal music for four decades now."

First U.S. tour: Judas Priest formed in 1970, with Halford signing on three years later. The band first played the USA in 1977 in support of its Sin After Sin album. "We wanted to conquer America, and that wasn't just New York and L.A.," Halford says. "We wanted to go to every place we could plug in the gear." As a result of those initial jaunts across the nation, "we still find ourselves in a position that we can play everywhere from the upper East Coast, straight across to Seattle, everything down to San Diego, across to Miami and everything in between. There are very few British acts, regardless of what kind of music they play, that can claim to have that connection after doing it for so long." An opening slot for Led Zeppelin at Oakland's Alameda County Coliseum on that tour helped establish the group's reputation as a live act.

Near miss: Bassist Ian Hill, the group's sole remaining founding member, remembers a show where he felt a gust of wind while he was looking down at his bass as he played. He looked up to find the central truss of the lighting rig swinging past him. "There were three winches, and the front one had broken," he says. "It missed me by about six inches, and it missed the drum riser by probably the same amount. If I had been just two feet back, it would have taken my head off."

Breaking the nose, breaking the nose: At the start of a 1991 show in Toronto, Halford rode onto the stage on a motorcycle and hit the drum riser. The fall from the bike knocked him out and broke his nose. "I remember coming to in a swirl of dry ice and feeling a boot prodding me," he says. First song Hell Bent for Leather was an instrumental that night, but Halford completed the show. Afterward, "they put one of those neck braces on, put me on a board, put me in an ambulance and took me to the hospital."

Not the last for long: In 2011, the group announced that its Epitaph world tour would be its last, and longtime guitarist K.K. Downing did retire that year. Adding guitarist Richie Faulkner re-energized the band. "If you're making a change, it should be significant," Halford says. "Where at one time the sun was setting, now the sun is rising again. It's a new metal dawn." In addition to Halford, Hill and Faulkner, the band's lineup currently includes guitarist Glenn Tipton and drummer Scott Travis.

Blessed are the cheesemakers: During one tour, every bus had a copy of Monty Python's 1979 film Life of Brian playing almost constantly. The band and crew members acted out entire scenes from the movie during soundchecks. "You'd walk in and take a part; then there'd be another scene going on somewhere else, so you'd walk over and take a different part," says Hill, promptly falling into character as Pontius Pilate: "Really, Centurion! I'm surprised to hear a man like you wattled by a wabble of wowdy rebels."