Wagner/Wagner/Wagner
“Both painting and theater could contain a moment in which reality was suspended and one could approach as nearly as possible the tension of the dreaming state while in the waking one. This could extend through masques and pageants to the operatic productions of Wagner.” —Rowland Elzen, Delaware Art Museum, in The English Dreamers, a collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
“It’s like German operas, the knight in the armour and the dragon and the girl in the tower, that’s the whole idea behind it.” —Meat Loaf
Jimmy loves Wagner … Nibulungen rock. So of course:
Richard (Wilhelm) Wagner (1813-83), German opera freak composer, often accused of being a raving proto-Nazi. Stuff like Tristan & Isolde, Parsifal and the Ring cycle of 4 operas reached new realms excess as het utilised themes rather than set numbers (and concepts based on Norse and Arthurian myths) to attempt the Gesamtkunstwerk, the work of art uniting all forms of art, in the revolutionary Festival Theater in Bayreuth which he designed. Mad, bad, and fun to listen to if you’ve gotta lotta time to spare and a penchant for global domination, baby.
Meanwhile, back at the bank: Meat Loaf releases his album, now called Dead Ringer. It contains 7 new offerings, all songs being penned by Steinman. The original concept was to have narration all the way thru, on a Joe Friday, Dragnet level, all the songs leading up to one crime of passion. In th end, this gets in the way of things, and is modified. “Meat’s album is a little more personal and intimate … it’s more like a normal album than mine,” says Steinman. The album is notable for the song Everything Is Permitted. The phrase derives from Hassan I Sabbah, the old man of the mountain, crazed fanatic of the dim past whose murderous followers caused the leader’s name to spawn the term ‘assassination’. The phrase itself is popular, loved by many to this day: Dostoyevsky, William Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle, Jim Carroll all give the nod. Do what thou wilt rock.
23, 23, 23, mystic No.::: PRELUDE TO NEVERLAND. Or Who The Hell Is JM BARRIE?
Sir James Matthew Barrie was a Scotsman, born 1860, who moved to London age 25 and began to get kudos for his tsories of life back home. Peter Pan was a play first, the character however growing out of an appearance in his novel The Little White Bird. Barrie befriended the little boys of a family of his aquaintance, and spun them yarns about Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, and his domain in Kensington Gardens. One literary critic called the original book “as irresistible amd horrific as a nasty daydream”. In Jim Steinman’s hands it won’t be no Walt Disney trip, that’s for sure …
A dream goes on forever: NEVERLAND, a work in progress
“I consider myself very lucky that I don’t have to grow up. I mean, my real belief is that we have to be Peter Pan in this lifetime, those of us who write, paint or sing, and for me, to go to Never-Neverland is to be in Hollywood, and never to grow up is always to make pictures.” —Steven Spielberg, Director of Close Encounters.
“Cinematic. We’re both into films, like Bat Out Of Hell to Jimmy was like the beginning of Psycho. His songs are visions in his head. It’s like rolling films in our heads when he writes and I perform.” —Meat Loaf, 78.
Almost since the inception of the Meat Loaf smash, both he and Steinman have been talking about the relationship of their work to film and more particularly to Neverland, a rock ‘n’ roll version of Peter Pan by Steinman, once performed theatrically at New York’s Kennedy Centre. Many of the songs on Bat Out Of Hell and Bad For Good are part and parcel of the soundtrack while the cover art in Bad For Good is a picture showing the updated Peter and Wendy. As far back as 1979 Meat was talking about Mr Hook being portrayed by George C. Scott or Laurence Olivier. “It goes into this whole German prisoner Nazi camp thing with Baal, who is basically Peter … anytime he says this number Hook goes crazy. And they have killer nuns, and Mr and Mrs Hook they both wear hooks. Imagine Boys From Brazil with Bat Out Of Hell in it, would that be a rock ‘n’ roll movie?”
Steinman: “I think of it as sort of a mixture of West Side Story, A Clockwork Orange and Star Wars, in that it’s science fiction but it’s pretty violent.” Now it’s 1981 and CBS Films has at last decided to furnish money for Jim to actually complete a script. “It would be a real expensive movie, but you can never guarantee a movie is gonna get made,” says Jim philosophically. However, we can fantasize:
DIRECTORS?
“There are only four or five I think who could do it. My first choice is Francis Ford Coppola. Him or George Lucas, or Steven Spielberg …” Jim’s other choice would be Brian De Palma, director of the rock/terror classic beloved of Sandy Pearlman, Phantom Of The Paradise. “He’s real funny but real sour,” says Steinman, “He always reminds me of a slightly cynical koala bear!”
One problem with the film might be the fact that the rights to Peter Pan belong to the Great Ormond Street Hospital For Sick Children in London. Jim has already had a barrage of nasty legal letters because he’s mentioned doing an update of the story, even though the connection is quite loose, Neverland being ser in a futuristic California. “In my version chemical genetic damage is the reason they never grow old. California has been almost totally destroyed by a series of earthquakes and chemical wars, there’s a lot of mutations and radioactivity. In that sense it’s like all those 50’s movies, huge lizards, Sinbad movies …”
“The city is destroyed but rebuilt as a mediaeval fortress with chrome on the outside to protect it from gases. The only people left are the military and the church who join forces. Hook marries the Mother Superior … The reason they both have hooks is this enormous duck-billed platypus that they were experimenting with was mutated and one night they fell asleep and it ate both their hands! Since that day it’s wanted the rest of them, but instead of the clock in the crocodile ticking as a warning, it’s a geiger counter!"
Naturally, instead of the kindly dog Nana to protect Wendy from the scavenging lost boys outside, the creature is a slavering mastiff with a surprise: “It’s the ultimate guard dog. It has a smaller version of itself inside.” And in this tale, Tinkerbell is a warrior deaf-mute trained to kill. And Peter? “Peter’s a great character. He’s been 16 for 75 years and he’s totally out of his mind. He’s running out of new things to do. The lost boys are always on edge. It’s got a real chilling ending too, just like the original. They were trying to create a race of soldiers who never age and it ended in the lost boys’ genes being frozen. They don’t know how the mutation happened, so they’re always trying to catch them and dissect them, Hook and his men.”
As in Barrie, Peter eventually comes to rescue Wendy, 40 years on. And she’s too old. That’s rock ‘n’ roll …