Meat Loaf — Welcome to the Neighbourhood Collectors Edition 2011

Collectors Edition Liner Notes

Nobody ever asks Meat Loaf: What do you eat? Why do you eat so much? Shouldn’t you lose some weight? No, he shouldn’t, He’s fuckin’ Meat Loaf, He writes songs, and he has a great time, and none of your fuckin’ business. — Layne Stanley

The late Alice in Chains front man hit it bang on the button in 1996 when he sang the praises of the man Born Marvin Lee Aday, in Dallas, Texas, 1947.

That’s because, just a year earlier, the subject of Stanley’s eulogy had defied his critics by emerging from the belfry-like shadows of his mightily successful Bat Out Of Hell opuses with a hot-selling comeback, Welcome To The Neighbourhood…

It was a comeback that was recorded very much on Meat Loaf’s own terms, and not those of his mentor/svengali/nemesis/sideman/partner (delete as applicable), Jim Steinman (the eccentric song writing genius).

Like it’s pointy-eared predecessors, Welcome To The Neighbourhood may have been dedicated to nocturnal activities — but they were of the type carried out in cheap detective novels, not in the bowels of stately Wayne Manor, Imagine Raymond Chandler wit a hint of Will Eisner’s spirit, Or Elmore Leonard penning the further adventures of Mary, the hero-noir of Frank Miller’s Sin City, That’s Welcome To The Neighbourhood for you!

For further evidence, check out the wide-eyed femme fatale depicted on Welcome To The Neighbourhood’s delightfully garish cover: her tousled, brittle-blonde hairdo, her ripped red dress, the way she’s recoiling from that menacing, hook-nosed silhouette, No doubt about it, The order Chiroptera ain’t remotely on the agenda.

In actual fact, those aforementioned belfries-like shadows had been doubly dark threatening for Meat Loaf around the time of Welcome To The Neighbourhood’s release, That’s because, a couple of years earlier, 1993, he had put out Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell… It had gone on to become a No, 1 record on both sides of the Atlantic.

Despite the span of 16 long years between the original Bat Out Of Hell and its sequel, plus albums such as Dead Ringer, Midnight At The Lost And Found, Bad Attitude and Blind Before I Stop along the way people were starting to question whether Meat Loaf was a single-trick pony, A man who ‘batted’ for one side, if you’ll pardon the expression.

But Welcome To The Neighbourhood proved once and for all that he could large it on his own, It was triumph for the man-mountain frontman, because he had been to hell and back — personally, as well as professionally.

The success of his magnum opus, the glorious gothic rock opera that is the original 1977 Bat Out Of Hell, took its toll on our hulking hero — and then some, Meat Loaf had a nervous breakdown, He lost his voice, He went through therapy, Hell, according to his biography a doctor in Malibu even injected him with his own urine, wrapped him in a carpet and beat him until he screamed in a bid to get his career back on track, Sheesh, it would’ve been a lot easier to just pay a visit to the Job Centre…

Meat Loaf recalls in his biography that, as Bat Out Of Hell got bigger, I got crazier, It was like some terrible curse where everything I’d wished for turned into a nightmare, at it was rapidly turning me into a maniac. But still, that didn’t stop him from eventually recording the 1993 follow-up, (And, indeed, 2006’s Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose), Go figure!

Still, after the release of Bat II, Meat Loaf had conquered his demons and was in a good place, Haven proven himself musically once more, he felt he needed to get back into his second love: acting.

I love acting, and the movie critics love me, he once said, But the rock critics just brutalise me, And when they write about your acting, they don’t want to know about my dog that just died, or whatever when I was a kid, It’s grown-up stuff.

So Meat Loaf moved from New York to Hollywood and started to network — not by hogging the party circuit, but by playing golf, While honing his technique on the green he bumped into the likes of Joe Pesci, Sean Connery, Bill Murray and a director called Peter Chelsen, who gave him a part in the movie The Mighty, Several other roles followed, but before long the prospect of another Bat Out Of Hell recording reared its furry little head.

There were optimistic meetings with Jim [Steinman], Meat Loaf recalled, Two-thousand dollar dinners where Jim orders everything on the menu, Jim was throwing out tempting song titles like ‘God Has Left The Building’, We said: ‘Wow!’

But Jim’s method is seduction, he explained, He has ideas for new stuff; he doesn’t always have the songs, He was romancing us, talking himself into all these visions, We all started to believe he might have a whole new album in embryo, tucked away in one of his ratty old shopping bags.

Well, he hadn’t, Plus Steinman was rumoured to have copyrighted the phrase Bat Out Of Hell as his trademark, hindering Meat Loaf’s further use of it.

There’s just too much baggage, the singer said later, what with Steinman and his manager and lawyer and everything, Nobody will let it go, Everybody has to have a piece, It’s a shame…

Bat III ended up becoming Welcome To The Neighbourhood… Produced by Ron Nevinson (with a little help from Sammy Hagar and Steven Van Zandt), there are just two Steinman songs on the album: ‘Original Sin’, from the Pandora’s Box Original Sin album, and ‘Left In The Dark’, which first appeared on Steinman’s Bad For Good album.

The Grammy-winning songwriter Diane Warren takes up reins on ‘I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)’ and ‘If This Is The Last Kiss (Let’s Make It Last All Night)’ — Meat Loaf duets with Patti Russo on both — while Hagar himself gets credit on ‘Amnesty Is Granted’, Van Zandt, in case you were wondering, plays guitar on that track, Hell, even Tom Waits gets a composer’s credit on ‘Martha’.

If the variety of songwiters makes Welcome To The Neighbourhood sounds like a mixed bag, don’t worry: it isn’t, Meat Loaf made clear: It’s a story album, Basically a guy’s life story from the time he went on his first date to the present, I used pulp-fiction artwork for the cover and the booklet, with lurid paintings and titles from the 1940s detective magazines.

Turns out Meat Loaf’s manager, Allen Kovac, wanted to call the record Welcome To The Neighbourhood: Escape From Hell, in order to capitalise on his artist’s heritage, But Meat Loaf responded: I want to do my own record, not more of Steinman’s characters, And I was screaming at Allen, saying I’m sick and tired of being a cartoon, I don’t want to be that Meat Loaf comic book character any more.

Still, one familiar and recurring theme on Welcome To The Neighbourhood is the use of parentheses (in song titles), as pioneered by Bat Out Of Hell’s ‘You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)’ and Bat II’s ‘I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)’.

‘I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)’ was never meant to have brackets, Meat Loaf growled in an interview shortly after Welcome To The Neighbourhood’s release, I didn’t notice them until two weeks ago and I said: Who put this in brackets?! I’m looking for whoever did it but no one will confess, I’m going to put him in a bracket when I find him!

Welcome To The Neighbourhood went platinum in both the United States and United Kingdom, spawning three hit singles along the way: ‘I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)’, ‘Not A Dry Eye In The House’ and (watch out, it’s those goddamn brackets again) ‘Runnin’ For The Red Light (I Gotta Life)’.

Reflecting on Welcome To The Neighbourhood’s success in his autobiography, Meat Loaf found himself wondering about his self-imposed cartoon character persona, Eventually, the singer decided that instead of rejecting the cartoon image, I would embrace him, I was going to bring that cartoon to life, put him in living colour and take him on the road, So that’s what I did, I came to the realisation that, like Popeye, I yam what I yam, and that’s all I yam.

Meat and two veg, you could say — assuming the veg is Popeye-friendly spinach, And if you don’t agree… well, that’s none of your fuckin’ business.

Geoff Barton
Classic Rock magazine, 2011