Meat Loaf sadly died this week. This won’t be an attempt at an obituary, I wouldn’t be equipped for that. But it’s worth a couple of words. That’s for sure. So here they are.
I realise
it sounds more like a Jackson Browne song, but in ’77 I was fourteen and the music
was everywhere. Punk and New Wave hadn’t yet crashed over our heads and, in
that year after its release, the charts were full with songs from the likes of Grease
and Saturday Night Fever. Barry Manilow had his place in the chart, as did Engelbert
Humperdinck and ABBA. Things were getting ready to change but they hadn’t
changed yet.
Then the ‘it’
I referred to in the paragraph before landed in our consciousness and took firm
root there. ‘Bat out of Hell’ did not seem to grab us off the back of radio
airplay or stuff on television, not to my memory anyway, it just leaked into
our awareness. A sort of a, ‘Have you heard this?’ thing.
In more
recent years, the way the production of the record was approached was quite the
revelation to me. Apparently, the main creative forces of Steinman and Meat Loaf
had come out of a musical theatre background and the album was born out of
these influences as well as many others. A documentary I saw about the birth of
the album gave it a sort of ‘Glee’ or ‘High School Musical’ type of preppy
vibe.
We, the
fourteen or fifteen-year-olds, didn’t get that vibe at all. For us, Bat out of
Hell, seemed excessive and rude and out-there in a way that we must have craved
but didn’t really know it. The young people in the songs were crashing
motorbikes and getting off with each other down on the hot sands of a midnight
beach. Our bikes were push-powered, and our beaches were the very antithesis of
hot at any time of the day but still the songs connected in the way they openly
talked of lust and need and general youthful over-the-top-ness.
Bat out of
Hell wasn’t the only thing that year but it was certainly a big thing. The music
of our day seemed washed out and for another generation. The music of yesterday
drew us more, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, all connected to us and spoke to us but
they belonged to other, slightly older people. When it landed, Bat of Hell
might have been a bit tacky and a bit OTT but, dammit, it was ours and nobody
else’s and we grabbed it.
We knew all
the words, and there were lots of words. I’d say I still know every one and,
with the lightest of kick starts, I could bale through them faster than any boy
has ever gone. The words spoke of things we knew nothing about - varsity
tackles, cracker jack boxes and such - but it spoke of things we knew and felt
too and that peculiar juxtaposition of the strange and the familiar made for a momentarily heady
brew that has never since fallen out of our affections.
My best
memory of Bat Out of Hell comes from Valentino’s, the night club I tried and
tried to get into way back then. The nightclub I failed and failed to get into
until, one night, I didn’t and, from then on, I got in every week. I’ve covered
that story in another post here.
The point
is, there was a girl, and she was a friend of a friend, and I didn’t really
know her very well and she didn’t know me. It is a sad truth that I can’t even
recall her name at this point. She was nice but she had no interest in me and
the feeling was fully reciprocated on my part. We both had our eyes elsewhere,
on places where we probably wasting our time. Such was the nature of those
evenings.
But we
developed a thing, a very little thing, in Valentino’s. Every week, Tommy
Higgins would play ‘Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad’ as part of one of his slow
sets. This girl and me must have had a slow dance to it one night and, though I’m
filling-in here, I imagine we both knew all the words and sang them aloud as we
swayed around and laughed. It must have been fun because, every week, she would
say to me, “Come find me for ‘Two out of Three’,” and I would, and we would sway
around and sing and laugh together and maybe stick around for the rest of the set
and then simply be gone.
You’ll probably
read this and think, “Silly Ken, this was some unrequited attraction that his
dumb fifteen-year-old self couldn’t even recognise.” But, no, I don’t think
that’s right. For my part, I never really did terribly well at dances and such: I was scruffy, and my hair was too long in all the wrong places and my
complexion wasn’t all that great. Thinking about it now, I was like one of
those two guys on the periphery of ‘Gregory’s Girl’ who watch romance unfold all
around them and who make plans and scheme schemes but who never really get
anywhere much.
When ‘Two
Out of Three’ played, somebody wanted me, if only for the briefest of interludes.
Somebody sought me out or required me to seek them out. That’s what the album
was like too. Somebody had made something just for us. It might not have been perfect,
and it might have been a little bit off-kilter in places, but it was just ours.
Perhaps, in
meeting up on the beer-soaked floor, and whirling around it one more time, we
were both subconsciously reflecting that. I don’t think so though. Not really.
Like the
album itself, it was just our little moment.