As if it happened only yesterday
By: Phil Adams
Tags: Meatloaf, Music, Lyrics

Jim Steinman’s shanty town website is neither modest nor modern.

It is a dog’s dinner even by the standards of the internet dark ages, from which it is surely a relic. I’ve seen better designed Bebo fan pages. A bunch of self-aggrandising facts, figures and celebrity chum-shots have been puked onto a homepage which offers no hint of navigation. Instead each careless click is a one-way ticket into rabbit holes which are crammed full of superlatives and from which there is no way back. It is very trippy. And for brazen brashness it is off the scale.

But, if your name is Jim Steinman, it is a mirror-mirror-on-the-wall website that never gives the wrong answer to the question, “Who is the baddassest rock lyricist of all time?”

Jim is. Unquestionably so.

As Kerrang! magazine said back in 1983:

Jim Steinman is a man who accepted excess into his heart in the way a Christian must accept God into his soul…Probably the ultimate definition of the genius-as-madman producer since Phil Spector…creator of the most gloriously pounding, emotionally derailed, headily deranged, chrome hard, wildly demented, madly powerful, too real, wholly unreal, sexually monumental, totally melodramatic all-time masterpiece album ever made.

The album in question is Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf for which Jim Steinman wrote all the words and all the music. It has sold over forty three million copies since it was released in 1977.

Bat Out Of Hell entered the world just as I was entering my teens. I was an impressionable young lad at high school on the outskirts of Wigan. And for several years I became an attentive student of hard rock and heavy metal music. My school timetable included five periods, also known as lunch hours, that were devoted to the subject. A group of us would eat our sandwiches at Stuart Beveridge’s house whilst listening to his elder brother’s record collection and reading his elder brother’s latest copy of Sounds magazine.

The playlist in those days — back when records were records (including limited edition coloured vinyl and picture discs) — was a who’s who of long-haired, leather-clad, guitar-smashing egotists. We stepped out of school into a world of Marshall amp stacks, Fender Stratocasters and patchouli oil.

Writing a list of bands from those days gives me chills of nostalgia: Deep Purple, Rainbow, AC/DC, Motörhead, Saxon, Led Zeppelin, Scorpions, UFO, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Magnum, Rush, Hawkwind, Jethro Tull, Gillan, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, along with lesser known bands such as Michael Schenker Group, Tygers Of Pan Tang and even Budgie.

And Meatloaf of course.

Bat Out Of Hell was an instant icon. The album transcended both genre and playground factions. Mods, rockers, new wavers and punks alike were swept along by its originality, its swagger and its grand ambition.

The songs are epic, and I do not use that word lightly. The album is a mixture of the divine and the comedic. It is meaty, beaty and big throughout, bouncy in places. The title track, which opens the album, is 9 minutes 48 seconds long. And the closing track, For Crying Out Loud, comes in at 8:45. Its first verse alone is longer than many pop songs.

These majestic anthems cradle and bracket five songs which may be shorter in length but which lack nothing in stature: You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth, Heaven Can Wait, All Revved Up With No Place To Go, Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad, and Paradise By The Dashboard Light. There is no padding on this record, no making up of numbers. Bat Out Of Hell is an album without album tracks.

It is a clever album. Steinman worked with the standard primary themes of heavy rock — sex, drink, fast moving vehicles, and Gothic fantasy — but his stories are layered and complex, and his writing is poetic.

Like a bat out of Hell

I’ll be gone when the morning comes

But when the day is done

And the sun goes down

And the moonlight’s shining through

Then like a sinner

Before the gates of Heaven

I’ll come crawling on back to you

It is no surprise to learn that Steinman cut his teeth writing for musicals. And it is almost no surprise that he is pictured with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the homepage of his aforementioned website. Jim Steinman is the Tim Rice of heavy rock. Bat Out Of Hell could easily be the soundtrack album for a Broadway show*. Mama Mia with power chords.

Back in school I was an equally attentive student of the poems of Robert Browning. Along with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and some classic novels whose names escape me, the poems were part of my English Literature O-Level syllabus. I had to study them.

But the attentiveness was down to my teacher. Mr Jones was very tall, but the thrall in which he held his classes came not from his physical stature but from his infectious enthusiasm for the English language. His unashamed passion made him a charismatic teacher and we gladly set aside our teenage self-consciousness and cynicism and opened our hearts and minds to the import and enchantment of literary works. Mr Jones made it cool to be keen.

After years of dark grey he turned up proudly one day in a new slate green suit which drew favourable comments from colleagues and pupils alike. Encouraged by our affirmative responses he wore the new suit every day for a week or so before a cheap ballpoint pen leaked into the breast pocket of the jacket. No amount of dry cleaning could remove the stain but he continued to wear the suit nonetheless. On reflection it was entirely fitting that a man who inspired so many children to appreciate the written word should have ink so conspicuously close to his heart.

It is down to him that now, more than thirty years later, a list of poems gives me the same nostalgic chills as a list of rock bands: Porphyria’s Lover, My Last Duchess, The Laboratory et al.

Robert Browning is acknowledged as a master of the dramatic monologue; poems written in the first person, expressing the thoughts and feelings of someone other than the poet, to an assumed audience that is obviously present but not overtly referred to.

And it strikes me, in a crossing of nostalgic streams, that Bat Out Of Hell is a pretty mean dramatic monologue as well as a very mean rock anthem.

It shares some important characteristics of the form.

For one it opens in medias res, in the middle of things:

The sirens are screamin’

And the fires are howlin’

Way down in the valley tonight

Compare that with the opening of Porphyria’s Lover:

The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its worst to vex the lake:

In both instances the language is extreme, urgent and portentous.

In a dramatic monologue the speaker reveals his or her personality and attitudes through their words. And Messrs Steinman and Browning are both adept at portraying subjects with nihilistic streaks.

From Bat Out Of Hell:

Nothing ever grows

In this rotting old hole

And everything is stunted and lost

And nothing really rocks

And nothing really rolls

And nothing’s ever worth the cost

And from The Laboratory:

Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly,

May gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely,

As thou pliest thy trade in this devil’s-smithy —

Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?

He is with her, and they know that I know

Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow

While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear

Empty church, to pray God in, for them! — I am here.

Both writers are fascinated by love-crazed protagonists and the lengths to which they will go in the name of jealousy or possessiveness or insecurity in various other forms. Their heroes will do anything for love. And more often than not they will do “that”.

Porphyria’s lover, concerned that Porphyria will not remain captivated by him forever, decides to preserve the moment at which he is most sure of her devotion by killing her.

Happy and proud; at last l knew

Porphyria worshiped me: surprise

Made my heart swell, and still it grew

While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string l wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her.

And the dick-led teenage boy in Paradise By The Dashboard Light, driven to hormonal distraction by his desire to score a home run, expediently decides to say whatever he has to in the heat of the moment, leaving him with the rest of his life to repent at leisure.

Lord, I was crazed

And when the feeling came upon me like a tidal wave

I started swearing to my God and on my mother’s grave

That I would love you to the end of time

I swore that I would love you to the end of time

So now I’m praying for the end of time

To hurry up and arrive

‘Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you

I don’t think that I can really survive

I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow

But God only knows what I can do right now

I’m praying for the end of time, It’s all that I can do

Praying for the end of time so I can end my time with you

Paradise By The Dashboard Light is the most clever, most knowing and most complex song on Bat Out Of Hell. It is formed of three distinct parts: Paradise, Let Me Sleep On It and Praying For The End Of Time, which navigate from naive optimism, through sexual morality and frustration, to desperate, acrimonious regret.

It is a duet rather than a monologue. And it is five and half minutes of brilliant storytelling. The lyrics are super-saturated with meaning and metaphor, such as the wickedly knowing baseball commentary, set to a funky guitar backing, that punctuates parts 1 and 2.

Commentator:

There, almost daring him to try and pick him off, the pitcher

Glances over, winds up, and it’s bunted, bunted down the third

Base line, the suicide squeeze is on, here he comes, squeeze

Play, it’s gonna be close, holy cow, I think he’s gonna make it

Girl:

Stop right there! I gotta know right now

Before we go any further do you love me?

Will you love me forever? Do you need me?

Will you never leave me?

It takes me back.

It takes me back because we’ve all been those teenagers.

And it takes me back on a vivid reminiscence trip. I am reminded of people, places and seemingly trivial incidents that I haven’t thought about for over thirty years — ink-stained pockets, Stuart Beveridge’s neurotic dog, that Whitesnake album cover…

As the first line of Paradise By Dashboard Light says:

Well, I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday

Bat Out Of Hell is a timeless time capsule.

And Jim Steinman is a genius.

But, if his website is anything to go by, he’d probably think I was damning him with faint praise by saying so.

*Bat Out Of Hell did become a musical, written by Steinman and incorporating songs from the three eponymous albums