My Secret Shame: Meat Loaf

Honestly, I had sort of blocked off this part of my life until Ol’ Loaf appeared on a Dancing with the Stars results show, and I realized that I still know every single word to “Bat Out of Hell”. This came as somewhat of a surprise, but once I got there, the memories came flooding back. Musical memories of a misspent youth, or as Meat Loaf would call it a “Wasted Youth”. (By the way, this track is not on “Hits from Hell”, but it’s worth noting because it’s one of Loaf’s spoken word pieces about a teenager who murders people with a guitar. Because of this track, I still believe that “God damn it, Daddy! You know I love you, but you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock and roll!” is a viable punchline. I am consistently wrong on that score.)

I think the best way to illustrate my love of this album is to look at a couple of tracks. Sadly, the duet with Ted Nugent (“I Love You so I Told You a Lie”) is average at best, reflecting more of the Nuge’s lyrical sensibility, which is to say “Repeat the same phrase one million times until you want to kill yourself.” Still, the liner notes are in German, so you do learn that, in German, Nugent’s nickname is “Der Wackmaster”.

Meat Loaf loves the ladies. Weirdly, in many of his songs, the women in question fall short of his expectations, but he’s still so damn happy that they’re going to give him a chance. He may have issues with women, but he’s got bigger issues with himself. (Yes, I know that Loaf’s lyrics are all written by Jim Steinman, and it’s probably not wise to ascribe consistent intellectual thought to them. Bear with me.) Personally, I really like “Dead Ringer for Love”, where he keeps insulting a woman while begging her to sleep with him. Even better is how he keeps referring to beer as “brew”, which to my knowledge is a term only used by BD in Vietnam-era Doonesbury strips. Actually, Meat Loaf has a pretty clear singing voice, but I always assume I’m hearing the lyrics wrong, because there’s no way they could be that stupid. And yet…

And then there’s “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”, in which he explains to a woman that he will never love her, but she should still have sex with him. As Loaf makes clear “There ain’t no Coupe de Ville / hiding at the bottom / of a Crackerjack box.” When you think of all the three-syllable items of value he could plug in there, many of which make thematic sense (“Diamond ring”, perhaps?), and still he ends up with “Coupe de Ville”, well, that’s got to boggle your mind.

“Peel Out” and “Surf’s Up” are essentially the same song, which is to say, Meat Loaf takes a cliché, uses it as a chorus, and then has a bunch of lyrics about being a rebel. “There ought to be a law and there better be a crime” indeed.

Naturally, the crown jewel is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, a song so awesome it has its own Wikipedia page, as well as a guest vocal by Phil Rizzuto. I continue to believe, by the way, that nobody ever told Phil what the song is about. He does not seem like the kind of guy who’d appreciate a “baseball as orgasm” metaphor. Regardless, like any good piece of operatic rock, “Paradise” has three movements, the first one is Loaf gently coercing his girlfriend. The second is Meat Loaf actively begging, and the third consists of future Meat Loaf regretting the promise he made. One could almost call it a morality play, except for the fact that it’s completely ridiculous. “Now I’m praying for the end of time / so I can end my time with you”.

Actually, Meat Loaf views women and sex in exactly the way a teenage boy does. He desperately wants somebody to put out, but he’s also vaguely contemptuous of the women who do. This would be a dangerous worldview, except that both teenage boys and Meat Loaf are ineffectual dumbasses. And suddenly I realize where this love of Meat Loaf comes from. I bought that CD in high school, when the odds that I would ever speak to a woman were slim to none. (I now hold out hope that it’ll happen one day. I keep chasing that dream.) Meat Loaf’s songs are all about finding somebody whose standards are low enough that they’ll settle for you, which is pretty much all that nerds think about when they’re in high school. That and superheroes.

Sure, now it’s a vaguely disturbing worldview, but again, Meat Loaf is so nonthreatening that it doesn’t matter. And he’s not bursting with the kind of charisma that would make anybody say “You know, he’s right!” Meat Loaf songs are about the kind of things that teenage boys are already thinking.

But listening to it now, it’s a mess of weird imagery (What exactly is a “a bottomless ocean in a sea”? The sea contains an ocean?), overwrought lyrics (“Then I’m dying on the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun”), and instruments played so loud an unsubtly that you can’t tell whether you’re hearing a bass or a piano. And I know that none of this is good, but yet I also know that it’s fantastic. If I heard Meat Loaf for the first time now, I’d walk away without a second thought. But because he’s carved out a place in my youth, as soon as I hear “Read ‘em and Weep”, I am officially rocking out.

I’m ashamed of myself, but I’m still rocking. Which I imagine is exactly how Meat Loaf feels.