Phenomenology of Excess

“Heavy Metal Drugs so habit-forming that a single shot results in lifelong addiction” —William S. Burroughs, Cities Of The Red Night.

“Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it.” —Jim Morrison, The Doors.

“The gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness.” —Leslie Fiedler, Love & Death In The American Novel.

“Too much is never enough.” —Jim Steinman, composer/artist.

You can point to antecedents in culture generally, but in rock ‘n’ roll terms there was no warning of the Meat Loaf phenomenon. The 1977 album Bat Out Of Hell has sold over 8,000,000 copies worldwide and its tenure in the UK charts can be measured in years rather than months. Director/composer Jim Steinman’s solo sequel/personal debut, Bad For Good, is thundering along nicely as I write, and by the time you read this the new Meat Loaf platter Dead Ringer should be bringing a smile to executive faces in vinyl skyscrapers everywhere.

I remember vividly the first time I saw Bat Out Of Hell advertised in an American rockzine that I was struck by three things: 1) The heroic, mythic artwork by Heavy Metal adult comix painter Richard Corben. Gothic motorcycles, yet! 2) The Todd Rundgren production credit. Old Todd had abandoned pop for pomp too long, but this smelled fresh. 3) The prominent credit, “Songs By Jim Steinman”. People just don’t plaster the composer’s name upfront unless he’s special. I immediately Xeroxed the ad and gave it to SOUNDS (then) reviews Ed Geoff Barton, who pestered Epic UK for an advance copy. Crawling back to my leaky dungeon and cranking up the borrowed stereo, I was greeted with something unusual: ORIGINALITY without the abandoning of ACCESSIBILITY. Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel, Kim Fowley producing Helen Reddy … I was hooked, yet again, by the dazzle of sharp juxtaposition. Metal, Spector, Sinatra, Opera, Fantasy, all in one big reality sandwich. I wrote then:

“Garage bands. Despite all their virtues, and even though groups like Yes and Uriah Heep are pretty convincing arguments against technology and heavy metal respectively, occasionally the accumulated knowledge of hardware and musical heritage can still combine to produce some pretty interesting plastic. I mean, Hollywood does make the best movies (sometimes), if you get my drift. And so it is with this album.”

In the USA the disc was not an immidiate success. This no doubt prompted a lot of corporate anal-retentatives to holler “toldyaso!”, since most record companies had baulked at the concept of a 250-pund man screaming extended existentialist ballads in a style that owed less to pop convention than it did to Wagner. Touring helped, as did Meat’s radio promotion dash through 33 cities in 19 days to push a 45 release of the track ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’ (in fact, all 7 of the ‘Bat’ cuts have been singles!), he covered San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Eugene and Denver in one day. Did I say ‘excess’? But we get ahead of ourselves …

Let us regress to the beginning … when the world was new …

The Workshop of Creation, Rites of Spring (Michigan-style), and the Origins of a Super-Hero …

Marvin Lee Aday is (about) 33 years old. Nicknamed Meat Loaf in school as a consequence of his not inconsiderable girth, he lit out of the soft parade of his parental Dallas home in 1966 to California (which Leonard Wolf has dubbed the modern Transylvania), where he formed a banned called Popcorn Blizzard, later known as Meat Loaf Soul. “Ted Nugent had the Amboy Dukes and I was the opening act on a 60 day tour with him,” recalls the Loaf.

After beating his brain out as support from everybody from Edgar Winter to Iggy & The Stooges, using Detroit as a base: by 1969 the group had sunk and Meat was in a commune in Echo Park, Los Angeles. While working as a parking-lot attendant he met the lead in Hair, who suggested he auditioned for a recently vacated part in the show. Shining thru the ‘cattle call’, he got the gig and it carried him to Washington, Broadway and Detroit (again). A girl singer in this last version, Stoney, teamed up with him to cut a failry abysmal R&B album for Tamla-Motown’s honky subsidiary label. A tour with Alice Cooper failed to shift the units, so Meat wisely returned to theatre-land. The turning point in the whole saga came when he auditioned for a play by ayoung protogé of respected producer Joseph Papp. The play was More Than You deserve. The author Jim Steinman …

The modern day composer refuses to die (again) …

The Altered States of the Boy Who Remembers Everything, The Doors, Perception and Bleeding Fingers

Jim Steinman attended the same Amherst College fraternity as David Eisenhower. The secret service agents guarding the place meant it was totally safe, drug-wise, since the cops could never get it. This may account for Jim’s brilliant, uniquely warped consciousness. The New York kid spent his high school days in California, where his steel magnate (heavy metal) dad had moved shop to. Piano training ensued.

“One of the first things I ever remember listening to on a record player was Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde, and I sat through the whole thing. I didn’t know what I was hearing, but I just thought it was incredible-sounding. And then it was all over, I put on a Little Richard album. I think I got the two confused in my mind and I’ve never been able to untangle them.” — Jim Steinman.

Thespian wuz the boy: “I only got into rock ‘n’ roll because I was doing plays in college and I thought that I wouldn’t want to see a play if it didn’t have any music … My two trademarks with all the bands I was in were my little notebook with all the chords written out and my hands bleeding over the keys. I had a little electric organ that I’d bash the shit out of, then hold my bleeding hand up at the end of the set. It seemed to me to be a very musical thing to do.”