Meat Loaf “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell”
When I was older than a teenager but younger than a man, I was living in the wilds of Connecticut, adrift. I had lost my girl. I went home to my shack down by the docks. I drilled two small holes into the corner of my cassettes “Bat out of Hell” and “Born to Run”. I tied a ribbon to unite them and walked around with one tape in the back pocket and the other dangling. I called them “the sisters” for their spiritual connection to the drama of youth. But like all siblings they were different -- one was within the realm of good taste, and the other didn’t care. In my car, one tape would play, the other would dangle. Switch. Repeat. This should be a lie, but it’s not. The sisters and nothing else were in that cassette player until the snow melted in the Spring. That’s what this music can do to you.
“Bat out of Hell” was written by Jim Steinman and performed by Meat Loaf. Their music idolized the motorcycle, the car, the crash of either, and the desperation of first love. Where Springsteen was cool, a street poet, and a total catch, these guys were true outcasts. One of Steinman’s gigs before “Bat Out of Hell” was music for a puppet show. Meat Loaf was 200 lbs in seventh grade. These guys were never going to get the girl, and so they went BIG. If they couldn’t win, they’d spin out in a ball of flames. Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf are yin and yang, a perfect pair. Like the Frank Frazzetta Conan the Barbarian painting they’re trying to bring to life, they contain within them: damsel, monster, hero.
By 1992, their glory far faded, Jim Steinman came over to a party at Meat Loaf’s house. The two had gone separate ways a long time ago. The pressure to record the follow up to their 1977 smash “Bat out of Hell” had given Meat Loaf a psychological block and he couldn’t sing. I imagine the scene like something out of a 50’s melodrama, Meat grabbing his throat, and mouthing “My voice. It’s…..gone”! That night at the party in 1992, Jim took to the piano and for old times sake they belted out the entire album together, the passionate creation that took them to the stars and back. Sweaty, disheveled, Meat heaved for breath at the musical finish, then looked up at his old friend. It was time.
Jim Steinman had actually already recorded a sequel to “Bat out of Hell” in 1981 called “Bad for Good”. After Meat’s voice disappeared, Steinman had made the unfortunate decision to record it with his own limited pipes — which, if you’ve heard them, is a move you would only make sky high on success. The album tanked. Steinman fell to Earth. Years later, with Meat and Jim back together, that historical mistake could be repaired. “Bat out of Hell II” contains four songs resuscitated from that commercially buried solo Steinman album. The strangest of these is “Wasted Youth” which was renamed from its original title “Love and Death and the American Guitar”. This is not a song, but a story, like the one Springsteen tells about his Dad who referred to his guitar as “that god damn guitar” all his young life. Bruce would tell this on stage and then he’d take that god damn guitar and plow into his coming of age classic “Growing Up” as the crowd roared. Steinman’s story is like that, but bat-shit. Bat out of hell-shit. If you can reckon with this dead f’ing serious goofball tale, you open the gateway into the fires of Steinman and the Loaf.
I remember everything
I remember every little thing as if it only happened yesterday
I was barely seventeen, and I once killed a boy with a Fender guitar
I don't remember if it was Telecaster or Stratocaster
But I do remember that it had a heart of chrome, and a voice like a horny angel
The words are spoken by Steinman himself, a cut and paste from his 1981 solo album and the moment I realized just how truly singular a writer he was. He was winking and throbbingly sincere at the same time. His words fearlessly dove into the ludicrous, screaming about his mystical guitar bleeding “Chuck Berry red” after the murder and allowing him to play notes he could never play before. And yet he is totally committed, as if these words meant EVERYTHING. When Steinman himself speaks them, you realize what an uncut dose of weird this is — it can be off-putting. When Meat Loaf joins Steinman, he brings 350lbs of heart, and lets the words do the winking. That was their magic together, and though Steinman had hits with Bonnie Tyler and Celine Dion, there just ain't nothin’ like the Loaf.
The album version of “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t do That)” is twelve minutes. Too long for radio. Steinman fought tooth and nail for every 5 minutes and 16 seconds that ended up on the abridged single. He didn’t see his work as theater — to him it was cinema. These were teen operas and like the Shangri-Las songs that inspired him, they had heroes, villains, explosions, and full story arcs to them. Twelve minutes was nothing. The chopped up single “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t do That), with a video by equally bombastic director Michael Bay, was a huge hit, though people were admittedly confused what “that” was. It’s actually in the lyric, but you’re too swept up to notice. In twelve minutes, Meat won’t: forget the way you feel right now; forgive himself if we don't go all the way; do it better than he does it with you; stop dreaming of you every night of his life; move on from you; screw around on you. It’s positively Homeric. He just won’t do any of that.
But what happens to the teen opera writer in middle-age? Despite the inclusion of four songs from 1981, the sequel does not dodge adulthood. “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer than They Are” is the centerpiece of the album and it’s a song about longingly looking back to the past. Where 1977’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” was sung winkingly about shirking commitment to nab sex, “Objects” deals with the haunting consequences of making the wrong moves, much like (yes, I’m serious) Springsteen in “Nebraska” and “The River”, but with more canon fire. Hear Meat Loaf belting out regret for losing a magnificent Florence Nightingale of a girl the singer once loved:
She used her body just like a bandage;
She used my body just like a wound
I'll probably never know where she disappeared
But I can see her rising up out of the back seat now
Guitar crashes in and Meat’s voice hits the ceiling
Just like an angel rising up from a tomb!
The reference to the backseat romp of “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” from such a melancholic, weird and wistful point of view sends shivers up your arms against all your better judgement. The E Street Band’s Roy Bittan pounds away on the piano, and like the original “Bat out of Hell” they do it again: Springsteen: the theme park ride in 4-D! You can smell the carburetor.
The renewed tragedy of looking back at what’s lost justifies the sequel. The new songs are full of regret and these middle-aged men make you believe it. “It Just Won’t Quit” achingly remembers the confidence of youth from the perspective of it being gone, gone, gone. The “It” of “It Just Won’t Quit” is also known as a mid-life crisis. In the cheekily titled “Life is a Lemon (And I Want my Money Back),” the adult Steinman works to excise the regret and bitterness that can come with getting old. In a full band chant:
What about love?
It's defective! It's always breaking in half
What about sex?
It's defective! It's never built to really last
What about family?
It’s Defective!
All the batteries are shot
I never can find those AA’s for the kids’ toys. He goes on to list the litany of institutions that let you down in life. In my darker moments I agree with a lot of them. It’s probably the hardest rocker of the album, a pinky toe into real metal with the anger to back it up. It would all be pretty bleak if it were not for the humor of the chorus and a spirited suggestion to shove it all up your ass.
There is no bad song on this album. If you don’t like it, you don’t like any of it (and that may be the case). These are two outsider musicians who know they have one more shot to get back into the limelight and they’re going to leave it all out on the field. Together Meat Loaf and Steinman made their own genre. It’s like a musical, it’s like a movie, it’s like a secret journal found in an old high school locker. “Everything Louder than Everything Else” is an ecstatic tribute to giving everything you’ve got. Meat Loaf has collapsed multiple times on the stage doing just that. He has all of Springsteen’s passion without the personal trainer. “Everything Louder” could be a mission statement for the past-prime artist:
And I ain't in it for the power
And I ain't in it for my health
I ain't in it for the glory of anything at all
And I sure ain't in it for the wealth
But I'm in it til' it's over
And I just can't stop
If you want to get it done, you have to do it yourself
And I like my music like I like my life
Everything louder than everything else!!!
It’s good enough for me. When Steinman wrote the song “Tonight is What it Means to be Young” for the 1984 film “Streets of Fire”, the movie had already filmed an ending with the same Bruce Springsteen song that had inspired the title of the movie. The production had already torn down the large Wilton Theater set they had built for the movie. Upon receiving the new song, the films’ producer Joel Silver left a message on Steinman’s answering machine: “I hate you Jim. I love it. We’re going to have to do it, we’re going to have to rebuild the Wilton.” Steinman had finally bested Springsteen.
The rebuild cost a million dollars. The movie lost six and half million dollars.
That’s what this music can do to you.