Karine Hannah was at one time working on an album with Steinman. The record was never completed, but there are demos and live recordings. She sang the Catwoman parts on the Batman demos.
Its sad how sick we can become of awesome songs we loved. I have been changing the station whenever "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" has come on for years. Last night i chose to listen with headphones to the entire song. In some ways its Jim's "Bohemian Rhapsody" So many musical changes in 8 minutes. And its the first time since Ellen Foley's wonderful tweet after Jim's death that i actually heard the words "STOP RIGHT THERE".
I've been playing it a lot, too, but I've never been sick of that one. It's genius. I've been watching she first time reaction videos to that song lately and it blows everyone away.
@Jerseyfornia i don't like to be a boomer elitist ....but my god ....the music we had.....coming at us ....constantly .There is no question Paradise is genius ....it is so much more than a song .... its a creation ..... But for the two big pieces ....this one , with our hero miserable and tortured for the rest of his life somehow seemed more uncomfortable and less relatable for me than " and i cant stop thinking of you and i never seeing the sudden curve until its way too late" ....Anyway it was bittersweet to listen to it for the first time since his death....and incredible to realize what he created ....
Just listening to Bruce's 'House Of A Thousand Guitars' and it strikes me as somewhat Steinmanesque. It's almost like one of the eternal teenagers of Steinman's world actually making it to older age, but still living spiritually in that world.
The original recordings of the songs that made up Meat and Jim's final collaboration. I wrote about that severely flawed record on the old forums and managed to find the post online.
The only way this record works is if it's the last. Not just the last Meat Loaf/Steinman collaboration, but the last Meat Loaf album. If this is the eulogy, then it serves as well as any.
I listened once all the way through and I was so disappointed. If I wasn't hoping for another Bat Out Of Hell, I was at least hoping for another Dead Ringer. What I heard was an attempt to replicate Steinman's production values, which is something many of Meat Loaf's producers have tried and failed at. I always thought it was interesting that a lot of the records Steinman was behind the board for are labeled "produced and directed by Jim Steinman." I've never seen another record producer use the word "directed" the way a film would. Only Jim Steinman does that. There are a lot of things only Jim Steinman does so it's not really fair to blame the producers who've worked with Meat Loaf, tried to direct like Steinman and failed. Some have come very, very close, but none of them hit the mark.
The more I listened to the album, the more I began to accept it for what I thought it was and then to hear it for what it actually is. This is the swan song, this is the viewing of the corpse, and it's a very public one. By any other standard, this album is probably a complete failure. The first and best record these two ever made together featured a headstone on the cover and their subsequent collaborations were illustrated with variations on the theme of the forever youthful hero, who escaped from hell in the name of love, battling the specter of death itself. The cover of this album doesn't feature that hero. Instead, it gives us the backsides of the two men who brought that hero to life as they face the obviously unstoppable, relentless riders of the apocalypse. The harbingers of the end. This album is the tombstone itself.
Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pumped the pomp of Broadway into their rock and roll records, but on this final one, they turn that approach around and spit just a little bit of rock and roll into the theater seats. A lot of Steinman fans will recognize most of these songs from previous projects or demos and it's fitting, to me, that these two old road warriors, both of them ravaged to the point of being mere shadows of their former public images, give us, with their final breath, songs that were written when both of them were very young.
This album has a sort of truth to it and, as everyone knows, the truth is rarely pretty. Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman aren't going down swinging. Most of us won't. But at least they're going down singing. Bat Out Of Hell had its origins in Peter Pan and Steinman's imaginary universe is home to lost boys and golden girls who swore they'd never grow up. Well, the truth being told to me with this record is that they never did grow up, they never will grow up, but they will certainly die.
The album opens with an admission that, if the lost boys didn't grow up, they have somehow still grown old. Right from the start, the hopelessly romantic biker from Bat Out Of Hell (yes it's him, it's still him) reminding us boldly that his voice, his body, his sex and even his mind just aren't what they used to be. Given that admission, it's hard to judge him too harshly for then proving it to us.
Seems something is coming out every day. I remember catching this bad movie on television in the early 80s and only watching through to the end to hear Steinman's music. Some easily recognizable melodies and motifs.
Jim Steinman vocal instead of the Ellen Foley version on the record.
I'm definitely downloading this to add to my multilingual Dance of the Vampires collection.
@Jerseyfornia I have to confess that I've been avoiding this thread because reading it makes me so uncomfortable... I start thinking about the day Bruce will pass away and what an impact it'll have on us all. What you're going to write, the non existent, is causing a lump in my throat already. Had to share this..
@Early North Jersey I like it. I've heard some demos from The Dream Engine before, but never in this quality. I'm starting to think a Steinman uber collector is mourning by sharing.
On Bonnie Tyler's Getting So Excited, from Faster Than The Speed Of Night, there's a brief spoken line. It's actually Jim Steinman's voice, tweaked to sound like a woman, speaking the line "I'd do anything for love, but I won't do that."
That seed took some time to bear fruit, didn't it?
You can't have a Steinman thread without posting Air Supply, since their recording of Making Love Out Of Nothing At All contributed to Steinman's 1983 total eclipse of the charts when it sat at number 2 and Bonnie Tyler held the number one spot. I believe it's the only time the number 1 and 2 songs on the Hot 100 were written and produced by the same person.
Total Eclipse and Making Love were both meant for Meat Loaf's Midnight At The Lost And Found album, but the record company refused Jim's participation. I bet those guys felt like idiots after seeing both songs go to the top of the charts.
Yes. It's from Whistle Down The Wind. The original cast recording is a great album, but there's a compilation of the songs recorded by pop and rock artists, from which the Boyzone version is taken.
Meat Loaf also recorded Home By Now/No Matter What for one of his greatest hits retrospectives. It's beautiful.
I hope this isn't taken the wrong way, because my intention isn't to sound disrespectful, but it's a damned shame there isn't a Springsteen and the E Street Band tour going on right now. I think they'd have given Steinman a tribute cover performance for the ages.
Jim wrote a 1975 play that ran for, if I recall, two days. Kid Champion featured Christopher Walken and early versions of a countrified For Crying Out Loud and the constantly recurring The Storm.
Oh, and I don't think we've posted this one on here either. It has what is probably my favourite Jim Steinman moment and a shout for one of the best song openings ever.
"I bet you say that to all the boys." 😎
"Billboard reviewed the single, finding the guitar introduction to be energetic, the beat to be "catchy" and the vocal performance to be somewhat similar to Bruce Springsteen." - No wonder why I love this damn song - and maybe why I love the music of Bruce Springsteen!
Jim even made it into one of the Final Fantasy video games. This is the song I was expecting when Jim and Meat put out their final album, but by then it had morphed into the eleven and a half minute Going All The Way Is Just The Start (A Song In 6 Movements).
Haha what an amazing title. I think most artists would go with "You've Got to Love Me" as the proper name with the rest in parenthesis - you know, in a "Higher and Higher" kind of way, but nah, just full on "this is what it's called, deal with it".
@Jerseyfornia“Jim was a funny guy, very eccentric,” Joe Elliott says. “But you could sit down with Charles Manson for 20 minutes and probably come away saying: ‘Hey, he’s not that bad.’ And in that first meeting, we realised that Jim was in a completely different orbit to us. I got this uncomfortable feeling."
I don't think many people saw MTV's 2004 Steinman-produced Wuthering Heights. I know I never saw it, but I did grab the music when it was briefly going around the torrent sites. Three of the tracks would later be recorded by Meat Loaf for Bat 3 and Braver Than We Are. Roy does play piano on these tracks.
I’ve never told this story, but Jim is gone now and it’s time: We had finished the demos in 1975 when he called me one night. He said, “There’s this guy down here at the Bottom Line.” He didn’t even say “Bruce Springsteen.” It was just “a guy.” This is 11 p.m. at night. He said, “There’s a guy doing what we do down here at the Bottom Line. You have to come down and see the second show.” I said, “Jim, I’m not going to come down there in the middle of the night.”
I didn’t go. Jim stayed for both shows. And Jim thought that [E Street Band keyboardist] Roy Bittan was legitimate. I guess Jim liked Springsteen. He felt Roy Bittan was one of the best piano players in the world and he wanted him on this record. He said, “This guy is better than me.”
"I don’t want to die, but I may die this year because of Jim. I’m always with him and he’s right here with me now. I’ve always been with Jim and Jim has always been with me."
I read this interview earlier tonight, and while I felt Meat Loaf seemed a bit 'blunt' at times, it really was a heartwarming read. I believe he didn't want to sound that way, but he's very clearly in a bad way right now, and it's entirely understandable and forgivable. I'm very glad he told us the truth about their relationship. For a long time I've thought he and Steinman were strained, in a Lennon and McCartney way but x100. To know that they'd not only 'reconnected', but that they'd never actually drifted apart was nice to learn.
I hadn't listened to any Meat Loaf songs, or any music written by Jim Steinman in a long while before the last few days. This is something I tend to do a lot after someone of note passes, sadly, but unlike the music of Prince or Tom Petty this music, this music I've actually grown up listening to, and while it hasn't been instrumental in my life in the same way it has yours, Rick, it's given me memories that I'll look back on fondly. Simple car rides out to places across country, across the world. Whether you're all revved up with no place to go or completely the opposite, music serves us greatly as a soundtrack to our lives, and Jim Steinman played his part to perfection. I have no doubt he'll continue to do so.
Reading Meat's words I listened to a couple of tracks from Bat Out of Hell: "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth", "Paradise By the Dashboard Light", "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" and the title track itself. We talk a lot about how Bruce writes and throws away songs that would make other people's careers, and for an album to feature not only those four, but "Heaven Can Wait" and "For Crying Out Loud" as well is an achievement that would and should make everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Paul McCartney jealous.
@Mario Brega Meat was always the blunt one of the pair. I remember interviews around the release of Bat Out Of Hell II when Steinman went on about it being a sequel, a continuation, an evolution of the original Bat and Meat said, "We called it Bat Out Of Hell II because we knew it would sell shitloads."
What I've taken from all the interviews I've read or watched over the years is that they loved each other and knew that each was at his best with the other. The ups and downs we could all relate to, if we've ever had friends.
You've likely noticed I've been posting on this thread a bit obsessively. I'm really mourning Jim's death. Most of the world knows Jim Steinman because of Meat Loaf, but I went backward from Bad For Good to Bat Out Of Hell. In 1981, I was already becoming a music fanatic, but I was a fan of pop and rock music overall, an avid radio listener, a frequent recorded store visitor and a fan of only one artist; Bruce Springsteen. Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through hit radio and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Not regular bricks, either, but epic Steinmanesque bricks. I bought the Bad For Good album and...well, it took a while for me to love it. It shocked me at first. I didn't know what to make of a song like Love And Death And An American Guitar or Left In The Dark. The title track was monstrous. The whole thing sounded so over-the-top, melodramatic, campy and excessive. I kept on listening, though, based on the power of the single and two familiar names in the liner notes until I realized that the excessiveness and drama was the whole point. The histrionics, the bombast, the pomp! Bad For Good wasn't a rock and roll album; it was theater and you had to approach it as such.
Jim Steinman was the first artist, after Springsteen, that I listened to as a songwriter. Before I knew Dylan, Young, Kristofferson, I was a fan of Steinman's writing and the alternate universe his characters inhabited. It was Springsteen's America turned upside down. The cars, the girls, the motorcycles and small towns were all there, but they were carnival mirror versions, distorted by some dark and sinister underlying tone. Bat Out Of Hell, I'm convinced, is the gothic sequel to Born To Run, in which the main character doesn't escape that suicide rap, but dies in a fiery crash, instead. No one pulled out of Steinman's world to win. They lived their entire lives there as eternal teenagers or they died young and in love.
Jim's Bad For Good is the only true sequel to Bat Out Of Hell and, sometimes, I think it's the better record.
Now, Meat Loaf is unquestionably the superior singer. It was Meat's inability to record a follow-up to Bat Out Of Hell, pressure from the record company and, surely, Jim's own ego that led Steinman to record the album without Meat Loaf, under his own name. Jim recognized his own vocal limitations, bringing in stalwart accomplice Rory Dodd to sing lead on three of the tracks. It's not that Jim was an awful singer, though some might argue that he was. His voice was adequate, though a bit trembly and sometimes almost screechy on the high notes, but I love it and it suits the songs. His voice lends a sense of angst and uncertainty where Meat Loaf's precision delivery might have smoothed over some of Steinman's gothic shards. I think the biggest testament to Jim's performance on Bad For Good is that Meat Loaf has by now recorded all but one of the songs from that album and none of his versions, in my opinion, match the frenetic emotion of Jim's originals.
Bat Out Of Hell, whether you like it or not, can't be ignored. It's one of the best-selling albums of all time, having sold over 50 million copies worldwide. It's been certified 14x Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. As of June 2019, it has spent 522 weeks in the UK Albums Chart. It spawned two sequel albums and a handful of imitations on which Meat Loaf tried to conjure the magic he shared with Steinman. Bad For Good, on the other hand, is largely unknown, a novelty record to some, but an imperfect masterpiece in its own right.
I miss Jim Steinman. I'm going to miss him for a long time. These are the times when I'm glad to have been an obsessive collector, because there's so much more to Steinman than the guy with the perfect Meat Loaf recipe.
That is a fantastic write up. And I agree with your assertion that Bad For Good may be better than Bat... I was listening to the whole album for the first time in quite a while the other day and I had exactly the same thought.
@Bosstralian If the original plan had played out and Bad For Good had been the follow-up to Bat Out Of Hell, with Meat Loaf's voice on the songs and his name on the cover, the album would have been a massive hit. That being said, I'm glad we have it just as it is.
I don't know if any of you remember, but in the past I've talked about how I hear another song when the melody of Bruce's "Sugarland" kicks in. Even though it's obviously not this, this has always been the song I think of when I start racking my brain.
Possibly the most epic music video of all time; at least for me, it's a personal favorite. From the opening motorcycle chase to the Beauty & The Beast/Phantom of the Opera theme and the beautiful Dana Patrick, there isn't anything about the video I don't love.
Michael Bay directed all three videos from Bat 2 and they're all great, but don't equal the first single.
Back when I used to watch MTV and VH1 all the time to hear songs I like (before the Bruce fandom took over) I remember "I'd Do Anything For Love" being on ALL. THE. TIME. If there was a countdown of rock songs, power ballads or anything there were three guarantees: That song, Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Jennifer Rush's "The Power of Love". And they'd all likely be the top 3.
Two Steinman produced songs there as well, I guess two out of three ain't bad after all!
Jim's death puts the final nail in the coffin for my longtime wish that he and Rory Dodd would release a record. Most of you will know that Rory sang on nearly every single Steinman produced (directed. Jim always was credited as a director, rather than producer, on the early records) song. He is probably one of the most over-qualified back-up vocalists in history, best known for singing the "turn around bright eyes" lines on Total Eclipse of the Heart. He sang lead on three songs from Bad For Good (Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through, Surf's Up and Lost Boys and Golden Girls) and performed the vocals on most of Steinman's demos. I wonder what they've got in the vaults that we may see eventually.
@Early North Jersey Quite a few Steinman demos on youtube. Most of them are either Rory or Jim singing, but here's Bette Midler demoing Heaven Can Wait in 72.
One thing writers hear constantly is to avoid cliché , but Steinman had a knack for taking a common or over-used phrase and turning it into an epic song.
Another thing I truly love about Steinman is that he was a world-builder. His body of work revolves around and returns to a universe of eternal teenagers and endless night, where no one ever grows up and the most valuable currencies are motorcycles and lust.
I'm going to miss him, even though I wasn't expecting any new music from him. He isn't as widely regarded as a Prince or a Tom Petty, but I'm feeling this one just as much as I did those.
@Bosstralian I remember buying the album and The Storm and Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through were included on a 45 (They didn't fit on the vinyl). When I played the 45 the first time and the song ended, then that vocal reprise that they never played on the radio version...wow.
@Jerseyfornia This song may well be the first song that really made the kind of impact on me that turns a music listener to a music fan. I was eleven years old and I can remember with incredible clarity exactly where and how I heard it. My mum had parked the car to go to the bank. She left the radio on for us three kids. And this sucker came on.
I can still clearly see the radio in that long gone car, because I was staring at it absolutely mesmerised while the song played. I know exactly where and on what street we were parked when this all happened, too. It really is the most bizarrely clear memory from such a relatively young age.
Oh, and I think they did include the vocal reprise as that I was familiar with once I tracked the song down several years later on vinyl. It was the extended sax solo that was new to me.
It was many more years after all that when I realised my 11 year old self had been fairy dusted in part by members of the E Street band in that moment...
@Bosstralian It is an absolutely incredible song. I am bad at picking out similarities in songs but Long Walk Home somehow reminded me of Rock And Roll Dreams .....and while LWH is very high on my list of post reunion Bruce ..... I always thought it needed more of those piano fills that the Steinman song had. And apropos of nothing ..... I have referred to the song Bat Out Of Hell as Jungleland on crack. I loved Bruce at his most Steinman-Esque ...And Steinman at his most Bruce-esque. It was an embarrassment of riches.
Karine Hannah was at one time working on an album with Steinman. The record was never completed, but there are demos and live recordings. She sang the Catwoman parts on the Batman demos.
Its sad how sick we can become of awesome songs we loved. I have been changing the station whenever "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" has come on for years. Last night i chose to listen with headphones to the entire song. In some ways its Jim's "Bohemian Rhapsody" So many musical changes in 8 minutes. And its the first time since Ellen Foley's wonderful tweet after Jim's death that i actually heard the words "STOP RIGHT THERE".
Just listening to Bruce's 'House Of A Thousand Guitars' and it strikes me as somewhat Steinmanesque. It's almost like one of the eternal teenagers of Steinman's world actually making it to older age, but still living spiritually in that world.
The original recordings of the songs that made up Meat and Jim's final collaboration. I wrote about that severely flawed record on the old forums and managed to find the post online.
The only way this record works is if it's the last. Not just the last Meat Loaf/Steinman collaboration, but the last Meat Loaf album. If this is the eulogy, then it serves as well as any.
I listened once all the way through and I was so disappointed. If I wasn't hoping for another Bat Out Of Hell, I was at least hoping for another Dead Ringer. What I heard was an attempt to replicate Steinman's production values, which is something many of Meat Loaf's producers have tried and failed at. I always thought it was interesting that a lot of the records Steinman was behind the board for are labeled "produced and directed by Jim Steinman." I've never seen another record producer use the word "directed" the way a film would. Only Jim Steinman does that. There are a lot of things only Jim Steinman does so it's not really fair to blame the producers who've worked with Meat Loaf, tried to direct like Steinman and failed. Some have come very, very close, but none of them hit the mark.
The more I listened to the album, the more I began to accept it for what I thought it was and then to hear it for what it actually is. This is the swan song, this is the viewing of the corpse, and it's a very public one. By any other standard, this album is probably a complete failure. The first and best record these two ever made together featured a headstone on the cover and their subsequent collaborations were illustrated with variations on the theme of the forever youthful hero, who escaped from hell in the name of love, battling the specter of death itself. The cover of this album doesn't feature that hero. Instead, it gives us the backsides of the two men who brought that hero to life as they face the obviously unstoppable, relentless riders of the apocalypse. The harbingers of the end. This album is the tombstone itself.
Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pumped the pomp of Broadway into their rock and roll records, but on this final one, they turn that approach around and spit just a little bit of rock and roll into the theater seats. A lot of Steinman fans will recognize most of these songs from previous projects or demos and it's fitting, to me, that these two old road warriors, both of them ravaged to the point of being mere shadows of their former public images, give us, with their final breath, songs that were written when both of them were very young.
This album has a sort of truth to it and, as everyone knows, the truth is rarely pretty. Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman aren't going down swinging. Most of us won't. But at least they're going down singing. Bat Out Of Hell had its origins in Peter Pan and Steinman's imaginary universe is home to lost boys and golden girls who swore they'd never grow up. Well, the truth being told to me with this record is that they never did grow up, they never will grow up, but they will certainly die.
The album opens with an admission that, if the lost boys didn't grow up, they have somehow still grown old. Right from the start, the hopelessly romantic biker from Bat Out Of Hell (yes it's him, it's still him) reminding us boldly that his voice, his body, his sex and even his mind just aren't what they used to be. Given that admission, it's hard to judge him too harshly for then proving it to us.
And the last thing I see is my heart
Still beating...still beating...
Breakin' out of my body and flyin' away
Like a bat out of hell
Rest in peace, lost boys. Give 'em hell.
Seems something is coming out every day. I remember catching this bad movie on television in the early 80s and only watching through to the end to hear Steinman's music. Some easily recognizable melodies and motifs.
Jim Steinman vocal instead of the Ellen Foley version on the record.
I'm definitely downloading this to add to my multilingual Dance of the Vampires collection.
Another new one out. I'm enjoying this.
GOOD WOMAN OF SZECHUAN:
00:00:00 The Song Of The Water Seller In The Rain
00:05:51 The Song Of The Smoke
00:14:02 The Song Of Defencelessness (The Song Of The Gods)
MORE THAN YOU DESERVE:
00:19:14 Souvenirs
00:25:21 More Than You Deserve
00:28:54 The Song Of The Golden Egg
00:33:19 The Spooky Song (Give Me The Simple Life)
00:38:43 Oh, What A War!
00:41:29 The Igoo Boogie Nookie Nookie Song (Go Go Guerillas)
Piano, Vocals - Jim Steinman
Keyboards, Piano - Steve Margoshes
Vocals - Barry Keating
Vocals - Andre deShields
Vocals - Ursuline Kairson
Vocals - Johanna Albrecht
Vocals - Meat Loaf
@Jerseyfornia I have to confess that I've been avoiding this thread because reading it makes me so uncomfortable... I start thinking about the day Bruce will pass away and what an impact it'll have on us all. What you're going to write, the non existent, is causing a lump in my throat already. Had to share this..
And another.
I thought I had collected everything in circulation, but only heard this Dream Engine demo of Nowhere Fast for the first time tonight.
On Bonnie Tyler's Getting So Excited, from Faster Than The Speed Of Night, there's a brief spoken line. It's actually Jim Steinman's voice, tweaked to sound like a woman, speaking the line "I'd do anything for love, but I won't do that."
That seed took some time to bear fruit, didn't it?
Nothing we haven't already discussed here, but it's nice to see Bad For Good being written about in the press...decades too late.
Even Barbra got on the Neverland Express in the 80s.
And if I'm bringing in Air Supply, I've got to mention that Steinman gave the same soft edge to Barry Manilow.
You can't have a Steinman thread without posting Air Supply, since their recording of Making Love Out Of Nothing At All contributed to Steinman's 1983 total eclipse of the charts when it sat at number 2 and Bonnie Tyler held the number one spot. I believe it's the only time the number 1 and 2 songs on the Hot 100 were written and produced by the same person.
Somebody pointed it out in the YouTube comments, but "No matter what the ending, my life began with you..." might say it all.
I don't think I knew Steinman wrote and produced Boyzone's "No Matter What". That's a pairing I'd have never envisioned.
He wrote it alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber too, talk about three different genres of music!
I hope this isn't taken the wrong way, because my intention isn't to sound disrespectful, but it's a damned shame there isn't a Springsteen and the E Street Band tour going on right now. I think they'd have given Steinman a tribute cover performance for the ages.
Jim wrote a 1975 play that ran for, if I recall, two days. Kid Champion featured Christopher Walken and early versions of a countrified For Crying Out Loud and the constantly recurring The Storm.
Oh, and I don't think we've posted this one on here either. It has what is probably my favourite Jim Steinman moment and a shout for one of the best song openings ever.
"I bet you say that to all the boys." 😎
"Billboard reviewed the single, finding the guitar introduction to be energetic, the beat to be "catchy" and the vocal performance to be somewhat similar to Bruce Springsteen." - No wonder why I love this damn song - and maybe why I love the music of Bruce Springsteen!
Jim even made it into one of the Final Fantasy video games. This is the song I was expecting when Jim and Meat put out their final album, but by then it had morphed into the eleven and a half minute Going All The Way Is Just The Start (A Song In 6 Movements).
You've Got to Love Me With the Sun In Your Eyes Until The Day That You Go Blind has got to be the most Steinmanesque of all Steinman song titles.
He did so much, and achieved so much. That's the legacy you'd want to leave, imo.
I don't think many people saw MTV's 2004 Steinman-produced Wuthering Heights. I know I never saw it, but I did grab the music when it was briefly going around the torrent sites. Three of the tracks would later be recorded by Meat Loaf for Bat 3 and Braver Than We Are. Roy does play piano on these tracks.
I left out the two songs Jim didn't write.
"I don’t want to die, but I may die this year because of Jim. I’m always with him and he’s right here with me now. I’ve always been with Jim and Jim has always been with me."
You've likely noticed I've been posting on this thread a bit obsessively. I'm really mourning Jim's death. Most of the world knows Jim Steinman because of Meat Loaf, but I went backward from Bad For Good to Bat Out Of Hell. In 1981, I was already becoming a music fanatic, but I was a fan of pop and rock music overall, an avid radio listener, a frequent recorded store visitor and a fan of only one artist; Bruce Springsteen. Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through hit radio and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Not regular bricks, either, but epic Steinmanesque bricks. I bought the Bad For Good album and...well, it took a while for me to love it. It shocked me at first. I didn't know what to make of a song like Love And Death And An American Guitar or Left In The Dark. The title track was monstrous. The whole thing sounded so over-the-top, melodramatic, campy and excessive. I kept on listening, though, based on the power of the single and two familiar names in the liner notes until I realized that the excessiveness and drama was the whole point. The histrionics, the bombast, the pomp! Bad For Good wasn't a rock and roll album; it was theater and you had to approach it as such.
Jim Steinman was the first artist, after Springsteen, that I listened to as a songwriter. Before I knew Dylan, Young, Kristofferson, I was a fan of Steinman's writing and the alternate universe his characters inhabited. It was Springsteen's America turned upside down. The cars, the girls, the motorcycles and small towns were all there, but they were carnival mirror versions, distorted by some dark and sinister underlying tone. Bat Out Of Hell, I'm convinced, is the gothic sequel to Born To Run, in which the main character doesn't escape that suicide rap, but dies in a fiery crash, instead. No one pulled out of Steinman's world to win. They lived their entire lives there as eternal teenagers or they died young and in love.
Jim's Bad For Good is the only true sequel to Bat Out Of Hell and, sometimes, I think it's the better record.
Now, Meat Loaf is unquestionably the superior singer. It was Meat's inability to record a follow-up to Bat Out Of Hell, pressure from the record company and, surely, Jim's own ego that led Steinman to record the album without Meat Loaf, under his own name. Jim recognized his own vocal limitations, bringing in stalwart accomplice Rory Dodd to sing lead on three of the tracks. It's not that Jim was an awful singer, though some might argue that he was. His voice was adequate, though a bit trembly and sometimes almost screechy on the high notes, but I love it and it suits the songs. His voice lends a sense of angst and uncertainty where Meat Loaf's precision delivery might have smoothed over some of Steinman's gothic shards. I think the biggest testament to Jim's performance on Bad For Good is that Meat Loaf has by now recorded all but one of the songs from that album and none of his versions, in my opinion, match the frenetic emotion of Jim's originals.
Bat Out Of Hell, whether you like it or not, can't be ignored. It's one of the best-selling albums of all time, having sold over 50 million copies worldwide. It's been certified 14x Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. As of June 2019, it has spent 522 weeks in the UK Albums Chart. It spawned two sequel albums and a handful of imitations on which Meat Loaf tried to conjure the magic he shared with Steinman. Bad For Good, on the other hand, is largely unknown, a novelty record to some, but an imperfect masterpiece in its own right.
I miss Jim Steinman. I'm going to miss him for a long time. These are the times when I'm glad to have been an obsessive collector, because there's so much more to Steinman than the guy with the perfect Meat Loaf recipe.
At 7:12, check out Rory Dodd and the band taking the spotlight on the Dead Ringer tour for a mind-blowing version of Skull Of Your Country.
I don't know if any of you remember, but in the past I've talked about how I hear another song when the melody of Bruce's "Sugarland" kicks in. Even though it's obviously not this, this has always been the song I think of when I start racking my brain.
Possibly the most epic music video of all time; at least for me, it's a personal favorite. From the opening motorcycle chase to the Beauty & The Beast/Phantom of the Opera theme and the beautiful Dana Patrick, there isn't anything about the video I don't love.
Michael Bay directed all three videos from Bat 2 and they're all great, but don't equal the first single.
The great teenage sex song trilogy.
We should mention Jim's barely-noticed 1989 Wagnerian Girl Group project. If you like Steinman's music, you'll love this record.
And the outtake.
Most of these songs were resurrected by Meat Loaf on Bat 2, Welcome To The Neighborhood and Bat 3.
If you're into musicals...or Steinman...or both...
I wish his Batman musical had come to fruition.
And of course
Jim's death puts the final nail in the coffin for my longtime wish that he and Rory Dodd would release a record. Most of you will know that Rory sang on nearly every single Steinman produced (directed. Jim always was credited as a director, rather than producer, on the early records) song. He is probably one of the most over-qualified back-up vocalists in history, best known for singing the "turn around bright eyes" lines on Total Eclipse of the Heart. He sang lead on three songs from Bad For Good (Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through, Surf's Up and Lost Boys and Golden Girls) and performed the vocals on most of Steinman's demos. I wonder what they've got in the vaults that we may see eventually.
Because I was, and remain, a lost boy.
This song was a big influence for a long-ago poem I wrote called Boys On The Road, which you can read here, if you care to. https://www.acrosstheborderforum.com/forum/main/comment/60749785ed795c02500c6de3
One thing writers hear constantly is to avoid cliché , but Steinman had a knack for taking a common or over-used phrase and turning it into an epic song.
Another thing I truly love about Steinman is that he was a world-builder. His body of work revolves around and returns to a universe of eternal teenagers and endless night, where no one ever grows up and the most valuable currencies are motorcycles and lust.
I'm going to miss him, even though I wasn't expecting any new music from him. He isn't as widely regarded as a Prince or a Tom Petty, but I'm feeling this one just as much as I did those.
And, of course...
Diane Lane is gorgeous, but it's Holly Sherwood singing, along with Rory Dodd and other Steinman accomplices.
Another favorite that Roy and Max just slay.
Two of his all-time great ballads.
Roy and Max own this one, along with Meat.
Left In The Dark is brilliantly bitter and sad.
Sad news. RIP.
No. Shit. That lunatic was supposed to live forever.
Jim Steinman was partly responsible for several of the greatest rock epics ever recorded. An absolute genius.
Sad news R.I.P.
Songs were often way over the top but heck I loved them.
Someone must have blessed us when you gave us those songs.
No it's not very old these days, only two years younger than the person responsible for why we are all here.
Sad news, 73 isn't old these days.
As Kay says, my youth seems to be leaving fast.
Another youth reminder gone. Sad.
Listening to Bonnie Tyler on the radio now.