In 1981, a recording engineer drove home after working on this album. It was late at night. His wife had just left him. He sat in a depressed fog, listened to “Left In The Dark” on repeat for about forty times, then slit open his wrists.
Jim Steinman told this dramatic tale every chance he got, as evidence of his song’s heart-juicing power…except he couldn’t keep the details straight. Sometimes the unnamed engineer’s wife had cheated on him, sometimes she’d just left him. Sometimes he’d attempted suicide by wrist-slitting. Other times he’d tried to drive his car off a cliff. The wires of fact and fiction often get crossed in our minds, and Steinman’s was a 1000 thread count. I don’t think he knew any other way to be.
Nobody played to the cheap seats so shamelessly or so well as Jim Steinman. He was a Cecil B DeMillionaire: an artist who used size the way others use paint. His music hoards the wind and marshalls the sea, unites the infernal with the divine, takes the frigid dark and effaces in with the brightest hottest fire. He electrified Wagner, mocked Odin for his puny one horsepower engine, drew inspiration both from mythic hugeness and everyday mundanity. A lot of his work finds a kind of interesting fractality, where large and small exist together. He found a way to unite the great, mythic Nordic sky and the humble, crude people who stare up at it, puncturing a throat-rending operatic ballad with what’s either a jab at Meat Loaf’s physique or a dick joke (“And can’t you see my faded Levis bursting apart”).
In 1981, Bat out of Hell was picking up steam (it had sold between six and eight million copies), and Steinman decided to make lightning strike twice, and this album is a skyscraper-sized lightning rod rigged atop the bat tombstone, with a middle finger pointing straight at God. *Bad For Good* tries to scream and bludgeon its way into greatness in a way that is both impressive and terrifying. I am not joking when I say that I fear this album. It would scalp me and chew my buttocks off if I stood between it and an RIAA platinum certificate, I just know it.
Steinman spared no expense. He reunited most the *Bat Out of Hell* personnel (Ellen Foley, Karla deVito, Todd Rundgren, Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan), tapped Richard Corben for another cover, wrote another set of agitated rockers, ballads (with a lyrical ear for fairytales and myths of all types.)
More, it ups the ante. The title track is “Bat Out of Hell” on crack cocaine and outright sounds like parody. “Love and Death and an American Guitar” is a spoken word piece that begins “I remember everything little thing as if it happened yesterday. I was barely seventeen”), but instead of being “barely dressed” the hero “once killed a boy with a Fender guitar.” And remember how Bat had Ellen Foley singing on the record and Karla deVito singing live? Bad for Good has them both together! *Bat* had several members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band on it. *Bad For Good* has Bruce Springsteen’s orchestral arranger (Charles Calello, of the New York Philharmonic!)
At a certain point, you have to ask “so is this just Bat Out of Hell, but a bit louder? Is there anything new here?” To which the answer is “yes” with a pause of about one to two seconds before answering.
There’s the ferocious production. That’s new. Bad for Good is mixed so hot and sharp and bright that it cuts the ear like plasma. This is a benchmark “eighties” record and arguably where Jim Steinman came into his own as a producer and engineer. You see where he’d soon end up with Bonnie Tyler and Sisters of Mercy: gigantic gated drums, vocal tracks layered like a sediment of crushed ghosts, and samples of motorbikes and gunshots filling out dead spots in the mix.
And where *Bat* was an attempt at translating Wagnerian orchestra into a modern rock context. Bad for Good translates Wagnerian orchestra into…Wagnerian orchestra! The 62-instrument composition “The Storm” is fabulous to listen to, and unlike anything on its predecessor.
Otherwise, it colors within the lines you’d expect on a Meat Loaf album. Except it doesn’t have Meat Loaf. That’s kind of its big defining fact: he is Godot on his own album: perceptible only as a very large hole. (Which Meat Loaf spent decades trying to fill—many of its songs were later covered by him.)
*Bad for Good* was written for Meat Loaf, but wasn’t sung by Meat Loaf. It’s sung by Jim Steinman himself. I’ve heard a lot of people talking *mess* about his voice, as teens say, so I’ll just say this: his voice is *fine*. He’s a clear, fine tenor that suits the music pretty well. He only really sounds out of place on “Left in the Dark” (an oddly weak performance where he seems to have a cold). He’s no Meat Loaf, but only a small percentage of the population is (under 10%, per last data.)
What happened? To summarize an unsummarizable situation: the touring cycle for Bat out of Hell broke Meat Loaf’s voice, and left him unable to perform music. Except he recorded a new studio album of Steinman compositions (the rather slight but entertaining *Dead Ringer*) And despite their claims of eternal friendship later in life, the Steinman/Loaf partnership appears to have entered sharky waters through this period (evidenced, if nothing else, by the fact that they didn’t do a full record together for over a decade). It’s hard to find an interview from either man that doesn’t contain some shit-talking and passive aggression.
The songs are very, very good. “Bad for Good” is a devastatingly effective opening track, probably edging out the title track of *Bat Out of Hell* for me. It is one of the great Steinman pieces: utterly riveting from side to side. The pace flies, Todd Rundgren’s backing vocals howl it along like a demonic wind. it’s full of complex and memorable motifs and ideas, Max Weinberg’s machinegun snare-fills seem to splatter blood across the landscape. Steinman plays into his vampire role with relish, biting off lines like a man sinking teeth into flesh. *”Your love is so close that I can almost taste it!”*
“Lost Boys and Golden Girls” “Stark Raving Love” are two different ways of telling the same Peter Pan tale that was never far from Steinman’s thoughts. One is an ersatz Broadway showtune, the other an agitated high-speed rocker.
The album, while incredible, is slightly worse than *Bat Out of Hell* for me.
Part of the problem is its sheer similarity: it demands comparison to its predecessor at every turn: you can’t avoid noticing how it usually loses these head-to-head battles.
For example, “Dance in My Pants” is another humorous battle-of-the-sexes duet, but it’s about 80% as good as “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”. “Left In The Dark” is strong, yet it’s clearly “For Crying Out Loud” on cruise control mode. “All Revved Up With No Place To Go” is a more succinct “Stark Raving Love”. “Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire)” has some clear issues with diminishing returns.
Steinman did little wrong in the eighties. But you can kind of hear an even better version of this album by buying “Bat Out of Hell”. The first time you hear a fairytale is always the strongest. So that’s my only misgiving on what’s otherwise a very strong record.
Some find his music gaudy and tacky. I think I get his project: tell a story right, and it gets more real as it becomes more ridiculous. The bigger the fireworks, the harder the flash pulses against the inside of your eyes. A vivid aurora-splash of color, flashing out the veins throbbing beneath your lids, and in that moment, you believe the aurora exists only for you. It’s music that can be experienced collectively, or alone. Barely dressed, or with a Fender guitar. With a car, or with a razorblade.
“You can’t run away forever, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start”
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