Tyre Tracks And Broken Hearts

Hello there

A very happy Monday morning to you, and today – as appears to have become tradition – I want to get a few words down on yet another recent death.

That sounded blunt, eh? I nearly wrote “passing” but I just don’t get along with that description.  To be honest, death is the best word too, as I’m talking about death a lot in this post.  That’s it Ian, sell it well…

It’s not really a morbid post though.  That’s not my intent at all.  Ah we shall see how it goes.  Let’s just crack on with it.

So, confession time. It perhaps shows a little of how my sometimes fatalistic mind works as well. When I was drawing that last Rocky Horror piece, and scheduled the second part of it a few days ahead of time, the thought crossed my mind how it would seem if one of the folk on it died in the meantime.  Genuinely.  Further confession, I was picturing Tim Curry when I thought it.  Oh, that really sounds awful, but that’s the truth. It was very late at night, I’d been working on it solidly for several hours, I was a bit tired and maudlin, and it led to me thinking about death loads.  It started as a horrible thing, and went on to be philosophical.  Well, as philosophical as I get.

I pretty much gave up on sleep, and stood at the bedroom window with my vape, with a fan heater blowing on my back.  I do that a lot.  I started off thinking about how ill I was last year, and then I started thinking about all my stuff, and all my art etc, and what a pain that’s gonna be for somebody to sort.  I thought about how it would be a logistical nightmare as well as an emotional nightmare, because you wouldn’t really want to bin or sell anything that I’d made.  For the record, I’m personally all for it getting sold and capitalised on, but I would understand the quandary.  Then I started thinking about unfinished work, and what would happen with Rocky Robot.  I wouldn’t want the others to have a dead project as well as a dead pal, but I also don’t know how anybody could just pick up the work from where it’s at.  How they’d find where all the puppets or files were.  That sort of thing.  I started thinking about how the bits I’ve voiced would just be a curio, as it would obviously need to be re-cast (hopefully by someone who can actually do it properly, rather than my muddled-yet-plucky attempts).  It’s gonna be Phil Fletcher innit?  I bet he hopes I do die so he can get his grubby little mitts on it.

Anyway, it all moved on from the self-indulgent, and I started thinking about it on a wider level.  Which I’ll tell you about in a bit, as this is firstly about Meat Loaf.

I got this text from my brother early on Friday morning:

Now, it was pretty much a done deal as to what that meant, but I checked online and saw the breaking news that his death had been announced.

My brother is a big fan of Meat Loaf.  Again, the lineage coming from my Dad, to me, to him.  As a child, I had no choice but to like Bat Out Of Hell, because it was all my Dad played in every car journey.  A cassette of Bat Out Of Hell playing on repeat, his Embassy No.1 smoke wafting into the back seat because he had his window open to let the smoke out.  Parenting circa 1978-ish. It didn’t feel like indoctrination though.  I ultimately went with Silk Cut and I  don’t recall ever disliking that album.  I vividly remember my Dad always hitting the steering wheel immediately after “I bet you say that to all the boys”.

I’m not gonna overly bang on about it, because I said all I wanted to say about the music stuff on a post when Jim Steinman died last year. I certainly clarified that I was first and foremost a fan of Steinman.  That’s true, but there’s still plenty to say about Meat Loaf.  It’s just not hugely about the music as such.

Back to the new philosopher vaping at the window…

I started to think of every death I’ve experienced in my own life.  I’m old enough now that there’s been plenty.  Family, pals, acquaintances, folk I was a fan of.  Some biggies as well.  Some stupidly young, some unexpected, some drawn out, some self-inflicted, some peaceful, some violent, some particularly unjust. Every one of them altered my horizon forever. That’s what I focussed on really.  That no death passes without changing the lives of those left behind in some way, irreversibly. You are one minute living in a world where they exist, and you think of them as existing, and the next moment you’re living in a world where you think of them as gone.  I think that’s why it’s so disorientating when you momentarily forget somebody died.  That fleeting moment of them being very present again, before the tragic crash of the realisation they are forever absent.

That’s the overriding feeling I have about Meat Loaf being away.

Never met the man, was never in his company, but he has been very present in my life.  I didn’t go and see him live (flatly refused), and other than a brief period where I was working with the Bat Out Of Hell musical team, and entertained the thought of getting over myself to speak with him, that was pretty much my (bad) attitude.  I certainly spoke on the radio about how I sometimes felt a little uneasy when he was showing off in interviews and being boisterous.  So, despite every one of his albums being on my vinyl shelf (including the ones that had no Steinman involvement), I never really considered myself a “fan”.  I was mainly turning a blind eye to my perception of him in reality, and enjoying (most of) the music.

I’m not eulogising a bloke here by criticising him by the way.  The story continues in this post.  I got well cross at a BBC article that said Braver Than We Are, the last album both Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman ever made, maybe shouldn’t have been made and the fans were disappointed.  Even though we’ve just established I’m not going with being a “fan”, I thought this was a vile and snide claim.  Who on earth has the right to judge on what a creative should or shouldn’t have created.  Nowt to do with anyone else. There is so much about that album that is special.  So much about it that is unique and a full stop to a crazy, unlikely adventure.  The front cover, of Meat and Jim staring down the four horsemen of the Apocalypse has been the image I’ve kept thinking of this weekend.   It’s just not a listen-once-to-judge album. With a bit of perspective, and certainly with a knowledge of the story leading up to it, it’s very thorough. It’s also got all the usual delicious preposterousness of a Loaf/Steinman collaboration, and I’m not having that casually dismissed. By all means make a song and dance about it, but not casual thank you.

So, here’s the thing, beyond the sneering, and beyond the swaggering no-holds-barred approach of Meat Loaf in the seventies even, where – for me – it worked the absolute best, on stage, when he got it right, he was untouchable.  The key words, of course, are “when he got it right”, but if we can park the condescension for a moment, getting it right ever is impressive. Really, his only crime was trying to get it right in the face of his own relentless giddiness. When that giddiness had been channelled so successfully at the start of his career (pointing you firmly towards the 1978 Rockpalast gig - which has both Steinman and Meat Loaf running riot in the whirlwind - it’s on YouTube), it must have been impossible for him to not keep the faith with it.

There was unarguably a constant commitment to his performing.  There was no shirking, no short-changing.  When Bat Out Of Hell got knocked back in demo versions, they went to the record companies and played it live in offices.  When he was bankrupt and hoisted by the record company, he went out on tour because they couldn’t stop him doing that.  Literally to little bars and clubs. I don’t envisage any of these occasions as having him singing shyly in the corner.

He was clearly knackered from the graft in his final years, but I can tell you first-hand that when he showed up at the musical in London, and went on stage, and did everything he could to sing, just anything he could muster with his shot voice and health, there wasn’t a performer on that stage not blown away by it.  Every last one of them could sing technically better than him by now, but every last one was in awe. I’ve seen “force of nature” written a lot about him this last few days, and that’s fair enough.  Maybe a slight understatement.

There’s something else though.  When I was in the sixth form, doing art A Level (badly), I was in a small class with a girl called Georgina.  She’d been in my year for all of senior school, but there were no uniforms for sixth formers, and she suddenly arrived very different.  She pretty much looked like a rock-Magenta from Rocky Horror.  Massive hair, dark, dark eyes, big boots, everything suddenly skin-tight.  For reasons beyond me, she never turned my head, and – retrospectively – I think she might have been coming on strong too.  That didn’t even cross my mind at the time, even as someone who had already done kissing and the rest, and been a hopeless romantic and early bloomer, I was without confidence that somebody looking like me could be desirable.  Heart-breaking this innit? That Georgina lass was besotted with Meat Loaf.  Not just the music stuff, she proper fancied him. I was so entrenched with the belief that this simply wasn’t possible, that I debated this with her and laughed – perhaps just in case she was winding me up.  She never wavered on it though. She maintained that Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the sexiest thing in the world. I simply couldn’t get my head round it.

Not till I was loads older.  That’s when I think the perspective of how Meat Loaf had rode into town in the seventies really made sense to me.  It was about as unconventional a rock star as there could have been.  It wasn’t a restrained opera singer, it was a gut-out, swaggering, sweaty tip, that had the sexual confidence of a boyband singer with his top off. I would put forward that the image of Meat Loaf screaming into the microphone with not an ounce of self-consciousness, of him brazenly making out during Paradise By The Dashboard Light, with no apology, no hiding, no traditional vanity, was an absolute game breaker in the perceived laws of attractiveness. Or, another way of putting it, was it was a reality check.  It hammered home that nobody is a write-off based on appearance.  That confidence in yourself will always win some hearts.  I know he always spoke about his stage performances as a character and playing a role, and I’ve no idea if there was any thought to it beyond just committing to the role, but the result remained.

In a world of constantly shifting attitudes towards identity and appearance, where folk generally have gotten their heads around the absence of a conventional attractiveness in reality, the stance taken in the arrival of the Meat Loaf/Bat Out Of Hell machine, way back when, whether considered or not, really shouldn’t be underestimated.

It’s a real shame he’s not around to see how many people are now suddenly announcing themselves as fans or admirers.  I feel like he was never really convinced.  That might be wrong, but he was certainly always quick to display humility and dismiss his own importance.  Course, that might have been part of the performance, but I’m not sure. I think it was horrible that he was an occasional shorthand for naff.  I think it was stupid that I didn’t go and see him live because I arrogantly thought it would ruin some pompous perceived artistic investment to the raw and ruthless performances at the start of the story.  My brother took my Dad to see him in Manchester during his penultimate tour (I think it was, he did a last tour a fair few times) and they loved it.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that the seat of whoever was sat in front of my dad took a hell of a knock straight after “I bet you say that to all the boys”.

All gone now. Some adventure though. Read ‘em and weep.

Sending much love to you, and do have a lovely day please.

xxxxxxxxxxx