META-REVIEWS: Meat Loaf, Saturday Night Fever, and a secret album!

If you missed the first installment, META-REVIEWS are where I review huge, successful albums, from which there are well-known singles, and yet I have either never heard the entire album, or have no recollection thereof.

This week, I picked another of the biggest selling albums of all time, wound up with another, and then wound up with a mystery album. The whole thing is a mess. I hope you enjoy the mess.

Meat Loaf

Bat Out of Hell (Cleveland International / Epic, 1977)

Bat Out of Hell has sold over 43,000,000 copies worldwide. Apparently it’s never left the UK Top 200 albums chart. Clearly it not only has an audience but a durable one. But who exactly? People who like musicals? People who like rock and roll? Some junction in the Venn diagram between the two? But I can’t imagine such a junction explaining both how huge and how enduring the album has been. Something else is going on. Right?

Over time, I’ve heard “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” on the radio countless times, usually on a decidedly rock-oriented station. Nothing else like it ever gets played. Maybe the next closest thing you might hear is “Bohemian Rhapsody”? And that’s not all that close.

So this was a perfect album to consider as part of this silly META-REVIEWS exercise: one of the all-time biggest sellers, with a song that I’m extremely familiar with, but which I really lack a lot of context about.

Up front I read up a little bit on the background of Bat Out of Hell, listened to it once, and had one set of opinions. Then I listened to it again and had a different set of opinions. So my thoughts here are disjointed.

Let’s start here: Musicals are not my thing. I’ve never been a big fan of showtunes. Over time, it’s been my sense that people into musicals and people into rock music just don’t overlap that much. For example, I knew people who performed in a rendition of Tommy, but I don’t think they’d ever listened to any albums from The Who.

At the outset the album sounds like the opening sequence to a coming of age movie. Coming of age movies can sometimes be comedies, can sometimes be serious films, can sometimes have wacky hijinks and action sequences but ultimately have some kind of supposedly important message. Maybe the best way to understand Bat Out of Hell is as a purely musical representation of one of those hybrid coming of age movies? At times there’s action. At times there’s drama. At all times it’s over the top.

The people involved here, I suppose, are ideal for all of this. Meat Loaf can wail. Todd Rundgren is the producer, and that’s a man who knows how to make things sound big. Jim Steinman, the songwriter, is clearly all about thematic epicness.

At some point while listening to this, I thought, this feels almost designed to be presented on Saturday Night Live. Turns out, that’s exactly what happened. Meat Loaf did “Two Out of Three Ain't Bad” on SNL in 1978, and it was apparently a very big deal. I found the clip, and it helped center some of my thoughts on all this.

I think it’s all about 1977.

I’d always though of Meat Loaf as some sort of outro or cult figure. Prior to Bat Out of Hell he was widely known only for his role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So he’s a crossover artist, right? And with this provocative album title, here’s a cult figure who’s pushing the envelope or something? But I’ve come around to think this is the wrong way to understand what’s going on here.

Bat Out of Hell isn’t some statement about how to live your life. It’s a story, not a lifestyle choice; but as a story, it’s been spun into an epic. It successfully transcends genres - not musical genres, exactly, but more so it transcends forms of art. It’s not a movie, but it’s cinematic. It’s not a novel, but at its core it’s a piece of storytelling. It’s really not a rock album, but it literally is a rock album. It’s not so much the intersection of a Venn diagram as it is something which spiders out from the center into the other bubbles.

Is it good? Is it great? I don’t know. I think maybe this is something truly exceptional and yet not necessarily great. I mean, I don’t really want to go back and listen to it again. A third of it sounds like Elton John on amphetamines, a third of it sounds like a template for lite rock radio, and I don’t know that we’re talking about an enduring musical triumph here. But I can’t deny that they were very successful at what they did.

But, again, where my mind went is to 1977. Bat Out of Hell is an excessive exercise for a philosophically disjoint time. Thematically it’s somewhat mundane, but it’s presented in a huge, outrageous way. It’s a musical distillation of theatrical spectacle, released in the aftermath of the nation’s bicentennial.

I repeat, because the number is so overwhelming: Bat Out of Hell has sold over 43,000,000 copies worldwide. And yet two other albums released the very same year have sold more. One of them is Rumours, the album which sort of started this whole META-REVIEWS things. The other one…

Various Artists (but most notably the Bee Gees)

Saturday Night Fever (The Original Movie Soundtrack) (RSO, 1977)

I wasn’t really going to go down the path of dealing with soundtracks. I’m largely interested in that chestnut we call Album Oriented Rock, and this as much as anything may be how I’d never actually sat and listened to Saturday Night Fever in its entirety. But if anything deserves to be the exception to the rule, isn’t it this?

If Bat Out of Hell is cinema as music, then Saturday Night Fever is music as cinema. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

As something for intellectual consideration, this soundtrack doesn’t seem to provide a lot of fodder. It’s not intended to. I could try really, really hard to say something profound about “Disco Inferno”, but that would be silly. You’ve all heard “Stayin’ Alive”. You’ve all heard “Night Fever”. If this stuff doesn’t elicit finger snaps, if your mood isn’t altered when the Bee Gees are blasting out of your stereo, then what possible intellectual analysis of all this could you possibly be interested in?

Consider this: “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, “Night Fever”, and “The Chain” are all ultimately about the same thing. In Meat Loaf’s telling, he’s left praying for the end of time. In Fleetwood Mac’s telling, the end of time is nigh, and now what? Oh, but see, in the hands of the Bee Gees, we’ve already moved past all that. All of the crazy prologue and nonsense in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” actually repeats every Saturday night, minus the angst, minus the chain. Isn’t it great?

The Sixties represented a fundamental conflict between the past and the future. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement… they are present-directed but even more so they are future-directed. Where are we as of 1977? For Fleetwood Mac, everything has fallen apart and needs to be put back together again. For Meat Loaf, everything has fallen apart and there’s no corrective mechanism. But Saturday Night Fever solves the whole problem: by eliminating both the past and the future.

Look. “Night Fever” is magical. Your ass is stuck in a chair and your brain is still dancing. It’s not trying to be about anything else. There’s nothing else for it to need to be about. It’s not there to take out the garbage, it's not there to pay the bills. Is it escapism? For some, surely. But is it not also an accurate reflection of a subset of the culture?

Was disco a manifestation of a hedonist zeitgeist? Was it a primary contributor? Is it not even a fair framing? Many people have written a great deal on this. I don’t have a lot to add about disco as a cultural phenomenon.

I’ll say this though: Dance music, at least popular dance music in America, has never been better than it was at the peak of disco. But you know what’s interesting? Disco today is just lumped in with “pop” music. It doesn't exist as “rock” music according to any kind of prescribed canon. And yet when I hear something like “You Should Be Dancing”, this is more obviously rock music than most of what was happening on Bat Out of Hell. Frankly, it’s more obviously rock music than most of what was happening on Rumours. Maybe you don’t want your classic rock radio station to play Led Zeppelin and Tavares in the same set. But why, exactly? And why was Meat Loaf somehow okay in this context for so long? Is this just a tempo thing? Is this just a race thing? And wait, wasn’t punk specifically a response to disco? Anarchy is a reaction against hedonism? Ahh, but I feel like so much of the way all of this was embedded in how people talked about music for so long was just such bullshit.

Now I’ve raised too many questions and provided too few answers. Clearly I need to look back just a wee bit further. Just a few months. Back to late 1976. The Ford years. I need to figure out where everything actually comes together, before 1977 comes around and we go off the rails. I need to understand what rock music is really about. There’s only one thing to do. I must, we all must, move onto…

… wait for it …

… wait for it …

… wait for it …

Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band

Night Moves (Capitol, 1976)

I’ll address the album as a whole further down. Let’s focus on the title track for a hot minute.

As it so happens, “Night Moves” is about pretty much the exact same thing as “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Night Fever”. But whereas Meat Loaf is over-the-top and the Bee Gees may as well be inhabiting a different planet, “Night Moves” tells the coming of age story in a very different way. If Bat Out of Hell is about the past, and Saturday Night Fever lives only in the present, well, Night Moves is all about the long view. Look to the past for cues for an understanding of who the protagonist is today, and in turn who the protagonist will be tomorrow.

Now, this is Bob Seger, not Bob Dylan, so we shouldn’t get too outrageous in lyrical analysis. But think about that one part of “Night Moves”:

I used her, she used me, but neither one caredWe were gettin' our share

How to handle the ambiguity of the human condition? You can deny (Bat Out of Hell), ignore / escape (Saturday Night Fever), escape / fight / escape / fight (Rumours), or, if you’re Bob Seger, you accept it. You acknowledge it. You even celebrate it.

Bat Out of Hell is absurd, overblown, and, yes, it’s very well done. (I’m still a little lost as to how it got to be as huge as it did, but hey, that’s how it went.) Saturday Night Fever, meanwhile, is overblown in a different sense, but at its best, it’s pop platinum, it’s as good as dance music ever got.

I’m a rock guy, though. I just am. I’m drawn to the idea of the bar band, incredibly tight after playing together for so long, constantly cranking away, and then, just maybe, transcending that whole scene into something bigger. Who epitomizes this more than Bob Seger? He wasn’t the biggest. He wasn’t the best. But who else from the 1970s is more purely classic rock than Bob Seger? And when he was at his best, didn’t the man damn well deliver?

Night Moves as a whole is not some sort of world-beating creation. What it is is an eminently solid rock album. It’s a little more varied than other albums of its vintage, there’s more space to the arrangements, but still, at its core, it’s simply a solid rock album. It is what it is. And it’s sold over 6,000,000 copies in the US alone. Not 43,000,000. But still. That’s a lot of black circles for some old time rock and roll.

“Rock and Roll Never Forgets”? Okay, sure. It would have been great to have seen them play this in some dive outside Grand Rapids in 1976. “The Fire Down Below”? Same thing. Both of these still get classic rock radio airplay. Neither of them are especially brilliant or important. They’re not designed to be.

Side two, ol’ Bob went down south and recorded with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. They produced “Mainstreet”, yet another classic rock radio regular. And from the same sessions came “Come to Poppa”, a rarer radio treat. As a general rule, you don’t roll into Muscle Shoals and lay down turds, and he didn’t.

Really, though, this album is all about the title track. And the title track is, as much as any other song I can think of, the song that stakes a claim as centering rock and roll at the time. It’s not just four guys pounding away on their instruments - there’s some organ, there’s the background singers - but it’s still unmistakeable rock and roll, remarkably far away from what Fleetwood Mac or Meat Loaf or the Bee Gees were doing. Quite literally, this album is about what happens just off of Main Street.

I think that Bob Seger has become so closely associated with things like that damn Chevy commercial, and indirectly with what we now sort of associate as a celebration of when America was, ahem, “great”, that he sort of gets dismissed for it. Night Moves came out the month before I was born; by the time I was 10, I think Bob Seger was already something of an anachronism. But so too was Main Street. America likes to talk a lot about Main Street, but what we mean by that is often some sort of ridiculous send up of American Graffiti. For many of us growing up, the literal Main Street, or whatever its equivalent was - the “main drag” of a town or a neighborhood of a mid-sized city - was already a long row of tired buildings. The critical difference, maybe, is that the inner cities didn’t really have Main Streets in the same way, they had something different, something already run down, perhaps something in a more constant state of renewal; something more consistently alive that the malls at the edge of town weren't disrupting; places that were always replenished unlike the towns where the kids went off to college and never came back. Or, streets which were already in a more thorough state of collapse, places from which white people had fled, leaving behind communities to be ignored or exploited. The newer bedroom communities the white families had flocked to also had no Main Streets in the same way. They were places devoid of history and charm; but nevertheless full of people who might latch on to romantic notions of what Main Street might be like.

Night Moves as a whole has a nostalgic quality coupled with a certain ambiguous feeling that I’d argue that you’re supposed to feel about your home town. But because it’s all part and parcel with the American paradigm of whiteness in a way that disco never could be, the meaning has gotten distorted, in a way that you just can’t distort the meaning of “Night Fever” or “Stayin’ Alive”. (Even Bat Out of Hell, while certainly anachronistic in its own way, just seems in retrospect kind of like the 1977 version of Glee. Some of the tropes are out of the past but as an artistic form, its position relative to the dominant culture seems kind of the same, and perhaps this is how it has managed to endure.)

I’m a Rust Belt kid. I grew up in a mid-sized American city where the urban, suburban, and rural all coexist. I went to a rural high school. My childhood experiences are remarkably normalized in American culture writ large, and things like musicals and discos are... well, deviant. But rock and roll is not. Nevermind that rock and roll at its inception was castigated as the devil’s music. It was Bob Seger himself, on his very next album, who most clearly laid it out:

Don't try to take me to a discoYou'll never even get me out on the floorIn ten minutes I'll be late for the doorI like that old time rock and roll

So, how is disco deviant? Well, for one, it “ain’t got the same soul”.

You know where else you could find “soul”? As in, the soul of a community? Down on Main Street.

And yet even with all that, I think Bob Seger is too easily reduced to an artist peddling in nostalgia. “Night Moves” and “Mainstreet” are deeply ambivalent songs. He’s singing about what he knows. What else is he supposed to sing about? That the ambivalence - the art - has faded over time and left behind primarily the nostalgia is unfortunate.

It’s hard for me to imagine whose record collection in mid-1977 might have contained all of these albums, unless I just accept that a whole lot of people just bought whatever was big at the time. Personally, Bat Out of Hell is interesting but not something I need to listen to again; Saturday Night Fever is enthralling but not something I’d likely ever listen to again start to finish; and Night Moves is perhaps the least notable but still the most in line with what I like to sit down and listen to. As a sum, and with Rumours factored in, my sense of how strange American culture was at the time is heightened. To think of all this going on at the same time that so many other people just sat at home and watched Hee Haw on Saturday nights… I can see how in 1976 we could have elected a man like Carter, and how by 1980 everything fell apart. It seems all the more clear the parallels which can be drawn between Carter and Obama, and in turn between Reagan and Trump. But that is a tangent for another time.

Exploring this time frame has been elucidating. I think it's time to move past it, though. Next time up, something newer. Or, maybe, something much older. Or, maybe, there’s not much difference between the two in the end…