Meat Loaf — Bat Out of Hell

In 1977, when “Bat Out of Hell” was released, I was 16, and this album was a goddamn cultural phenomenon. It’s surprising now to find that neither the album nor its singles went to the top of the US charts (“Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” did best at #11), because this album and its songs were absolutely inescapable in my senior year of high school.

It is, of course, a gigantic hunk of cheese, completely over the top hard rock/metalish opera, our introduction to the work of Jim Steinman in the form of songs reworked from a planned rock musical. The lyrics are as self-important as can be – they really think they’re clever. The music is bombastic, and in a style that I ordinarily had no interest in. But hiding inside of all that was something genuine that touched the teenage heart. Nonsense like “You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth” perfectly conveyed the teen yearning for just that kiss . . . the one that would shake my world. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” talked about sex in the only way that records could in 1977 – by burying it in a sports metaphor. But . . . it talked about sex and (weirdly) commitment, and lies and what we’ll say to get what we want – and again, I was 17. This is a teenage record. I loved it. All my friends loved it, even those with normally more folky tendencies.

There was one who did not love it – my girlfriend at the time, a year older, already in college, with musical tastes that leaned more toward trad jazz. She hated the sound (which I get), she hated the lyrics even more (which I also get). She thought it was incredibly stupid. I recall she was particularly angry over the moral/emotional math of “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” She was right about all of it, of course, and yet it was obvious that, though friends we remain unto this day, we could never have been a long-term match. (She didn’t like “Grease,” either, as I recall, and on that one I’m going to have to concede.)

Because sometimes you just have to embrace the stupid.

So I’ve had this album since my senior year. “You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth” was the first single, released in October 1977. It starts with pretentious theater that was both pretentious theater and an important statement of longing for 17-year-old me: “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”

But let’s be honest – it hasn’t had a lot of plays since 1978. I never even bothered to give it a record bag. Unlike a lot of things from my high school music collection, I was never embarrassed by this, never felt the need to get rid of it, never said “I’ll not listen to this again.” But it was also exactly enough – I wasn’t chasing the sequel albums, and truly paid Meat Loaf no more attention until an odd moment in the early ’90s caught me picking up his VH1: Storytellers CD, which I liked for a while but now haven’t played in years.

I have to thank Jim Steinman for two other hunks of cheese that I will defend to the end of time: to the best motion picture ever made, “Streets of Fire,” he contributed “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young” and “Nowhere Fast” and I defy anyone to find better bad songs anywhere. “There’s nothing wrong with going nowhere, baby / But we should be going nowhere fast.” The man could write a corny lyric that resonated anyway.