There is always something out there that should, logically speaking, engage you but remains hidden. And then a casual remark leads you to a sudden understanding of it. With Meat Loaf, I have experienced such hiddenness, followed by an almost epiphanous sense of discovery.
Sometime ago, Edison Prithviraj, who is director of Unwind Center, brought up Meat Loaf during a powwow about power ballads. Eddie, as he is known in music circles, is a diehard fan of Meat Loaf’s music for how it communicates emotions, mostly those of a tender kind, through powerful sounds and images that make up hard rock.
Following that discussion, I have heard more of Meat Loaf and, I believe, have a better understanding of his music. And though Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ and The Who’s ‘Tommy’ will remain in my mind as the finest expositions of rock opera, Meat Loaf has offered me glimpses of the genre. In fact, Meat Loaf is associated with what can be called a sub-category of rock opera, and which is elegantly referred to as Wagnerian rock.
Meat Loaf fuses operatic elements with rock convincingly, a process aided by his voice register. Produced in collaboration with Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf’s ‘I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that’ (1993) is a mini rock-opera.
The song, which figures in the album ‘Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell’, part of a trilogy, celebrates the silver jubilee of its chart-busting performance in the United States, this month.
The song bears Steinman’s genius as a songwriter. I can draw parallels between this song and ‘Making Love Out Of Nothing At All’, a power ballad by Air Supply with songwriting credits for Steinman. Both are about spirited declarations of love.
For many of those who were drawn to this song by Meat Loaf in the 1990s, the video was as much of a pulling factor, as was the audio.
“Bat-outta-hell and a Gothic look with long hair and a leather jacket, heavy guitar riffs alongside notes from the piano and a song mixed with emotions... In those days, MTV influenced me significantly and this video was engaging for the drama it presented. As a young mind and a metal head, its love theme appealed to me and the images it presented were in alignment with the rebellious attitude I was carrying around then,” says Eddie.
The song is built for theatrical performance and there have been shows where it has sometimes run for nearly 15 minutes, largely because Meat Loaf would talk to the audience at the end of the song to add a layer of humour to it. In the section where the man and his lady-love interact, improvisations would be introduced on the stage, mostly with a comic slant to get the concert hall to reverberate with laughter. At stage shows, Patti Russo used to be the female vocalist.
In the year this song was released, the air the Western music world breathed was stirring with some of the finest love songs of all time, including Whitney Houston's version of ‘I Will Always Love You’ and reggae and pop band UB40’s version of ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’ with some nice saxophone sounds. Whitney Houston’s rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’ spurred many cover versions of it. A few months ago, this year, Indian singer Dhvani Bhanushali presented a version that went viral on the Internet. Despite the competition, the Meat Loaf love song captured hearts. It still does — and I can vouch for that.
