BBC ROCK HOUR SPECIAL: JIM STEINMAN

Transcription of BBC Radio Broadcast, l981

Be Like This Forever Be Like This Forever

R.S.: This is Richard Skinner in London presenting a BBC Rock Hour Special. This time we feature a profile of the man who wrote the words and music that made Meat Loaf an international star - a profile of the remarkable Jim Steinman.

Album track - Bat Out Of Hell ..........

R.S.: Bat Out Of Hell - Meat Loaf on the title track of the album that made him a household name. An album of songs written and arranged by Jim Steinman. Since its release in 1977 that record's been constantly in the charts around the world. A success story that Jim Steinman recently followed up with the album that he calls Bat Out Of Hell part 2 - the album Bad For Good. But back to the beginning. How did Jim Steinman come to create the original success of Bat Out Of Hell?

JIM: I was doing theater. My main background was doing theater - at least after I got out of college. I went down to the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City, and I did an awful lot of theater. I wrote plays, directed, acted, wrote a lot of music for some Shakespearean scores and some musicals but, I was more involved in musical theater than I was in straight dramatic theater. I mean, at that time my greatest goal was to become a film director or a stage director and I was doing a lot of that and the way I met Meat Loaf was that he auditioned for me for a musical I had written and he auditioned pretty much as an actor. At that time he was a real innocent kid from Texas. This big kind of blubbering guy comes in and I'm just in awe of his presence because he came in and it was really like the entrance of a diesel truck! And then he sang and he had never really sung rock'n'roll. He'd sung a lot of gospel and blues when I first met him, but he'd never sung much rock'n'roll and certainly nothing like the kind I was writing. It was, at that time, tremendously fortunate that he arrived for a couple of reasons. One, I had pretty much decided I wanted to concentrate totally on rock'n'roll even though I'd been doing theater. I think the reason for that was I'd been trying to get rock'n'roll into the theater and had a lot of frustrations doing it and decided it was a lot easier to put theater into rock'n'roll than rock'n'roll into theater. Partly because of the economics of it. The audiences in New York, especially on Broadway - the Broadway theater, which is the only place you'd have the budget...I wanted to do big spectacles and it required a big budget - and the audiences are fairly old, I mean they're very old, in fact they're the kind of people who go home at night take off their jewels and sleep in formaldehyde until the morning! It wasn't exactly the audience I was going for and they were very mummified and it's a boring elitist audience and the few shows I got to do with rock'n'roll - I wrote a couple that did and I wrote a lot of different kinds of music. I wrote an opera and I wrote some shows that had like Broadway style of music. Mostly I wanted to do rock'n'roll - at least mix it with other styles. And the guy who was running the New York Shakespeare Festival Joe Papp, was brilliant and he was wonderful - he was like a patron to me. He really understood it a lot and he kept pushing me to do it, but he also realized there were some obstacles that were impossible to overcome and we were doing this show at the time when Meat Loaf auditioned and it was just at that time I was sort of reaching a turning point where I decided I wanted to do rock'n'roll more than I wanted to do theater.

R.S.: What made you think that Meat Loaf was the man to help you make that change?

JIM: Well, partly he came and put a hammerlock around my neck and said "I want to sing these songs!"...The main reason is ..a couple of reasons that are actually interesting. The funniest one that is true - I was planning to sing my own songs. I always hated the idea of writing for other people - it never interested me. I was managed by Robert Stigwood at the time and he was trying to get me to write for people like Yvonne Elliman - a lot of his performers - and I was really bored by doing that because I liked singing. That's what I thought of myself primarily as in terms of music, as a singer, songwriter together. A couple of weeks before I met Meat Loaf I got into a huge bar-room brawl. And so, I'm sort of a pip-squeak, compared to Meat certainly, and I was doing all right, I thought, until I turned around to my left thinking it was almost over and I was jumped on by this enormous lady biker which was a little bit...Now, how would I describe this? It was like when she jumped on top of me, it was like being French kissed by a Buick! ! I mean it was horrifying! And she bashed me up and broke my nose in about eight spots. I don't know how she found eight spots but she managed to bash it away...

R.S.: I bet you weren't singing too good after that...

JIM: I was not singing at all! I went right to this doctor - who I'm convinced was probably living with this lady biker because he did her a great favor by finding the few spots that weren't broken and proceeded to destroy them!

R.S.: So when Meat arrived it wasn't so much a "bat out of hell" as sort of an answer from God ..........

JIM: Yes, exactly. It was a big person from God who could sing and it was like a substitute voice. It was amazing really, it was like fate. I couldn't sing so he became my voice. And he was the first person that I ever met who I really thought could sing my songs - who I felt I could trust to sing them. One, because he had a huge voice and I was writing really operatic, incredibly physically demanding songs and two, because he was very...how would I put it? He was very - I could shape him. He's very flexible and, not to demean him, but he really had no idea what he wanted to do so he totally put himself in my hands because that was sort of my director's instinct. I really thought of him like a sculptor would think of clay or how a director would think of an actor. I really wanted to shape him into this character "Meat Loaf"...

R.S.: You're really a modern day Phil Spector or somebody in that sense...

JIM: Me? Yeah, well Phil Spector's my idol. Yeah, and he was like Ronnie Spector. He was like The Ronettes! Meat Loaf was all The Ronettes and The Crystals and The Angels put together! - and I just felt that he was someone who, you know, could take direction because he had no preconceptions. He had no idea he could even sing like that. So I would teach him the songs over a period of a year and a half, it took. And I would teach him line by line which is why he picked up a lot - like if you listen to my album Bad For Good and Bat Out Of Hell next to each other, a lot of people think the vocals are very similar in terms of style and I know a lot of people come to me and they say "You know you sing like Meat Loaf", when in actual fact it's equally true that he sings like me, because he picked up my phrasing by me teaching it to him - because I really taught it to him very precisely, and so it was just a great bit of luck that he came along.

R.S.: The world-wide success of the Meat Loaf album Bat Out Of Hell would never have occurred without the help of one man - producer Todd Rundgren - as Jim Steinman explains ..........

JIM: Todd he's magnificent. The record could never even have been begun without him. For one thing, he put up his own money to start it - we had no record company. He's totally astonishing to work with, in fact Meat Loaf finds him very intimidating, which I guess is one reason he didn't do the new Meat Loaf record, but to me he's just a thrill from beginning to end. He's astounding to watch in the studio.  He's a lot like a magician when he works and he works very fast. He has a very short attention span and, er, but he doesn't like to produce records particularly. He says this constantly. He hates producing when it's only production. The one thing he liked about the records he did with me is they involved playing a lot of guitar and a lot of background vocals, so that was a lot more demanded of him than just production - but a lot of the records that he just produces, he hates to do 'em. He kept complaining. I finally said "Todd, why do you keep doing it?"' And he said very simply "Well, if people would stop offering me so much damn money, I'd stop!" But he does it to support his huge video studio. He's got an enormous video studio and he basically gets all his money from producing other acts because his records have never sold in great quantities. And this record, I think, just challenged him though - Bat Out Of Hell - when he first heard it. He just thought - because every other producer turned it down. They were all terrified of it. Their attitude was all "It's too theatrical, it would never translate to record - it's too much like a huge film - it's a spectacle - there's no way to get this on record and it's a little too raunchy and it's too dark and violent, and the songs are long and this...and it's going to sound too big - we can't get that much sound onto a groove..." and they were just scared of it and Todd was the only one who heard it and his first comment was "I see no problem here, let's get to work!" And he was brilliant from beginning to end and to me just a joy to work with.

R.S.: I'd like to talk about your involvement with film later because I know that that's something, one of your prime joys still. But more up to date - Bad For Good - your solo album. Why is it that it's your solo album this time and not Meat Loaf's record?

JIM: Well, that's like the story coming full circle. Meat Loaf in a sense sang Bat Out Of Hell because I lost my voice because of having my nose broken and couldn't sing for two years and thought it was a good idea to work with him. He lost his voice when it came time to do the second album, the follow up to Bat Out Of Hell. I sat down, started writing this album Bad For Good thinking it was going to be a Meat Loaf album which it started out...it doesn't matter to me what I think about it because I write for Meat Loaf the same way I write for myself. It's just I write the way I want to hear them, just like I would sing it, so I don't have to change my style. But I started writing what I felt was Bat Out Of Hell part 2, definitely like The Godfather part I and part 2, that's how I saw it. I wanted to do a continuation and I wanted to do an album that went even further and that was more extreme, if possible, which a lot of people felt wasn't possible but I just wanted to see if I could make a record that was even more heroic because that's what I thought of it...Bat Out Of Hell to me was ultimately very heroic though it was funny. I thought it was a heroic album and I wanted to do one that to me would be even more heroic and more epic and a little more operatic and passionate. So I was working on this record and we'd just finished a grueling year and a half tour, and I'd gotten about 10 percent of it done and I'd just started really - scratched the surface - and I asked Meat Loaf to come up and start just rehearsing, just so I could hear what shape his voice was in - and he opened his mouth and we both like just looked at each other in shock - because the sound that came out of his mouth didn't even resemble a human voice. And it wasn't like most singers who just become hoarse or their voice is tired. He sounded literally like the little girl in The Exorcist - that's the only description I can ever use. It was like this low, guttural like blghblgh - made him  sound like a dragon trying to sing - it was a horrifying sound, and there was no way we'd be able to do a record like that and he didn't know what to do. He just stared at me, sort of helplessly, and said "What do I do now?" I said "I think you better go get help." And so, he started out on a procession of doctors, vocal coaches, vocal teachers, throat specialists, hypnotists and it was really at the point he would see a witch doctor - he would see anybody! And all this time I just kept writing because I had nothing else to do. I kept writing the music to Bat Out Of Hell part 2- to Bad For Good is how I conceived it - my sequel. And after about, oh, seven months he came to me and said, "No progress there's nothing happening. I'm gonna go do a movie," he said. So he went to do this film called Roadie. He only did it to get his mind off the music business. I actually I think he knew that it wasn't much of a movie, but he wanted to forget about the record. He thought maybe...because this whole problem with his voice, everyone realized, was about 50 per cent physical and 50 per cent psychological. He really was in terror of trying to follow up Bat Out Of Hell because you have to remember that he had thought at most it would sell 700,000. I was the insane one who thought it would sell 5 millions, but when it ended up...

R.S.: You could cope with it?

JIM: Yeah, I could deal with it, but when it ended up selling 8 million I think he just paralyzed with fear about how to top it. So he suggested at this point that since I was writing songs why didn't I do, in a way, Bat Out Of Hell with Meat Loaf and Bad For Good with Jim Steinman and they would go together. And I think another reason he suggested it was kind of shrewd on his part, which is that it took some of the pressure off. In other words in asking me to do the follow up to Bat Out Of Hell, it kind of took a lot of the burden off himself.

R.S.: Got the head together a bit more?

JIM: Yeah, and helped him a lot and I think he realized that. And since I kind of thrive on pressure a lot more than I think he does and I kind of enjoy it, I said fine and I was dying to get these songs recorded. So I went in a sort of a blaze wrote the other 75 percent of the album really fast and started recording it in the Summer of 1980 and really worked straight through up until about 3 months ago when I finished it. And right before I did that though he did ask me to have another record ready for him - totally different. And so just on the assumption that he would get his voice back, I...before I did it...I've never worked this fast before - I wrote an entire album for him - did all the tracks, co-produced it, arranged it, and had it all sitting there - sort of sitting waiting in the cans ready for him for when he did get his voice back - and then I went and did my record.

R.S.: But don't say another word about Meat Loaf because we're going to hear the title track from your album at the moment. It's Bad For Good...

R.S.: This is a BBC Rock Hour Special focusing on the words and music of Jim Steinman. A man who creates music on an epic scale that Cecil B. de Mille would have been proud of.

JIM: Really every song I write, my idea is that the whole album should sound like a soundtrack to a movie that hasn't been made yet. So that you could listen to the movie and basically create the film yourself. But I try to write them so visually and cinematically, as much as possible because to me they are films. Every song is one and the entire album fits together. It's just a very powerful film to me, and this one in particular. Bad For Good and a lot of the songs on this album, and especially this first song, I wrote with a very specific movie in mind, which has sort of been my dream project for almost two years now, and that's a film called Neverland which is a rock'n'roll, science fiction version of Peter Pan. Peter Pan's always been about my favorite story and I've always looked at it from the perspective that it's a great rock'n'roll myth because it's about - when you get right down to it - it's about a gang of lost boys who never grow up, who are going to be young forever and that's about as perfect an image for rock'n'roll as I can think of. I mean, the way I see this movie - it's like a mixture of Westside Story, A Clockwork Orange and Star Wars...I mean it's a real dance, real musical - singing and dancing like a Westside Story, and the dancing is like Westside Story 25 years later. I means it's very athletic, virtuostic, real tough dancing - much tougher than Westside Story, but it's that style - real showy, and it's got a lot of special effects - science fiction Star Wars kind of tradition...

R.S.: Will it get made?

JIM: It'll get made if CBS films can get 25 million dollars which they say they can. I'm writing it now...

R.S.: Great!

JIM: And I think it's coming along great - the script. But I used that as the base for this album Bad For Good. I had that movie in mind. In a way, to me, this album is more than anything else a journey through this world of Neverland which is this world of Peter Pan - rock'n'roll Peter Pan - the lost boys who never grow up. And that opening song, for instance, Bad For Good to me is the song that Peter sings to Wendy when he breaks in her room - right at the beginning of the movie he breaks through the window and comes in with the lost boys and tries to seduce her and abduct her, to kidnap her and get her to leave the city where she lives with her father Captain Hook, who's an evil sort of Dr. Strangelove military commander.

R.S.: I love the way you're bringing sex into Peter Pan like this!

JIM: Sex was always there, they just didn't realize it! Peter and Wendy weren't aware of it, but it was always ready to rear its ugly head at the slightest mention! This one definitely brings sex into Peter Pan, but it's long overdue. I mean, Mary Martin - it's getting ridiculous watching these 45 year old women playing Peter Pan after all these years.

R.S.: And here we are sitting in London town talking about it - it's wonderful!

JIM: Well, James M. Barry - he wouldn't approve but he'd probably get a kick out of it of some sort!

Album track - Lost Boys And Golden Girls ..........

R.S.: Lost Boys And Golden Girls - Jim Steinman's interpretation of the story of Peter Pan from the album Bad For Good. It's a track that could well develop into a full blown movies and it's not the only film project that Jim's working on at the moment...

JIM: Well, I'm working on two of them at once. I'm working on Neverland, my rock'n'roll Peter Pan which a lot of these songs are written for and then there's another movie called Guitar. There's a piece on the album called Love And Death And An American Guitar. In fact, the first song Bad For Good, like I said, is from this Neverland. The second song, Lost Boys And Golden Girls obviously, from the title, is also from Neverland - it's one of the songs that Peter sings to Wendy. It's like a love song he sings to her. But then there's a song - the third song on the album which is really not so much a song as a speech - a sort of spoken fantasy called Love And Death And An American Guitar. And I was really influenced by The Doors. I know I loved The Doors growing up and they did stuff like this and no-one's been doing it since and I wanted to do a spoken piece when the rhythm wasn't coming from the drums so much as the voice - the rhythm of the spoken voice and the heartbeat behind it. So this piece is part of a movie I'm writing called Guitar which is really the life story of one Fender electric guitar - the first Telecaster guitar from 1953 to 1986. I don't know if you saw the movie? There's a movie made a couple of years ago called The Yellow Rolls Royce. And there' s been a few of the style. That one followed one yellow Rolls Royce down through like 30 years and all the people who owned it and four different stories. Well, this one follows this one electric guitar from 1953 to 1986, and it's narrated by the guitar. The guitar tells the story itself. I've been writing the narration of the guitar. That's the most fun of it because it's great to hear the voice of the guitar speaking and it basically tells you its life from 1953 to 1986 and by doing that you not only get an adventure story about what happens to the guitar - I mean, who owns it, who loses it, who finds it, who steals it, how they use it, how they abuse it, the people who exploit it, the ones who exalt it and worship it, the ones who hate it, try to destroy it. It's used to smuggle drugs. It's used as a murder weapon and it just has an amazing life and you hear an entire history of the music over that 30 year period. Through the guitar sounds you can hear everything that happened in rock'n'roll and pop music and beyond that. If it's done well it becomes a saga of a history of America because it's set in America - of how America changed over those 30 years, because when you think about it, the sounds of the guitar represent the sounds of the country in which it exists. I means the minute you hear Jimi Hendrix you know that has something to do with the late '60's. That music sounded that way because the world was a certain way. When you hear the kind of music Clapton's playing now, you know it is a much kind of more passive, mellower age and when you hear Townshend - the kind of music that The Who did in the early '60's - it's a lot more violent than the music they're doing now, and you really get a sense of the kinds of - you know, the way the times change. So you get a sort of adventure about the guitar, a history of the music and a saga about the country and the world and all this narrated by the guitar. And plus, I see a lot of it filmed from the guitar's point of view, like in Jaws when you see things from the shark's point of view through the water. l see a lot of it like if you were inside the guitar like someone reaches out - Like a great sequence where the Hendrix character tries to play it by, you know biting the strings, by setting fire to it, and you're inside the guitar and you can imagine the disgust of the guitar that has lighter fluid - the guitar has a great attitude to all of this. It's very sarcastic. It's like the computer Hal in 2001. It's attitude to the whole thing is sort of like "none of you are really good enough to play me"...

Album track - Love And Death And An American Guitar ....

R.S.: Jim Steinman has created the music for two remarkable albums - Bat Out Of Hell and Bad For Good. But does he worry today about the problems creating hit album number 3?

JIM: I know that when Bat Out Of Hell was finished, I thought to myself there's no way I could possibly do an album that would sound bigger, be more epic or more heroic and yet Bad For Good is. I'm actually, as a writer, prouder of Bad For Good. I think the songs are richer, more powerful and deeper - Just darker and more exciting. And I guess now I have the idea there is no way I can still do a third, even bigger. But I have a feeling there is one third one, maybe because I think in terms of threes and trilogies - but I think there's a third record that I can do as a solo record that would probably be like the conclusion of the saga.

R.S.: Where does the Meat Loaf LP that's upcoming - where does that fit into your saga?

JIM: That's interesting because that's a whole different style in a way because I had to figure out - how can I keep doing records for myself and for Meat Loaf ? And I think what I figured is that in Bat Out Of Hell those qualities that I've been mentioning - the operatic, the real heroic, the epic style - was really a lot more my own personality than it was Meat Loaf's really, and so that's why I did Bad For Good in that style. But I think when I sat down to do this new Meat Loaf album, that's coming out this Fall, I tried to think of a different style even though it's still got a lot of my qualities in the writing. I mean, it's a very passionate record. It's much more intimate in that it's more personal. It's not so much mythic and epic as it is about people. You know, it's the difference between a movie that's about four people and a movie that's like Star Wars. You know it's not so much a big spectacular as it is every song is really a love song of some sort so, it's scaled down a bit in a sense and that's what his album is and the songs in a way are more traditional in terms of rock'n'roll musical styles.

R.S.: And no Todd Rundgren?

JIM: No, we didn't work with Todd on that because I think Meat felt uncomfortable. Partly because Todd's very intimidating and Meat was having troubles. And also because Todd's very impatient and Meat felt, I think, that pressure. And so this one was co-produced with Jimmy Iovine, who's a wonderful producer anyway. He did Tom Petty and Patti Smith - Because The Night - and Dire Straits last album. And so I co-produced it with Jimmy Iovine and even though Todd didn't play on it, some of the musicians who played on Bad For Good and Bat Out Of Hell did. I mean Bad For Good, the record I did, my solo record has pretty much the same core of musicians as Bat Out Of Hell - Todd Rundgren on guitars, background vocals, two of the best players from the E Street Band - Bruce Springsteen's band - Roy Bittan on piano, Max Weinberg on drums - Some of the members of Todd Rundgren's band Utopia. Some of the most amazing stuff on the album is just an overdub done by Davey Johnstone, who used to play with Elton John. A song Stark Raving Love that we did has a...Davey came in because Todd was on tour and I thought the song was done. It was another one of my real thundering teenage anthems this song, Stark Raving Love. In fact I thought in many ways it was the theme of the whole album because one of the key lines in it is "too much is never enough" and that was really the theme of the album. It was about excess. I mean, the album was about going too far. It was about that one step beyond where you should always go and so "too much is never enough" seems a good theme. And this song, Stark Raving Love - I was really trying to capture the sort of...as feverishly as I could, the delirious kind of horny excitement of a Saturday night in a city. And we were doing it and I thought the...I thought it was basically finished and then at the end I had all this fade-out and I thought there must be something I can do here. So I brought in Davey Johnstone and we put together...I think of it as the charge of the guitar brigade - but it's 25 different guitars going from speaker to speaker, back and forth and we used 25 guitars and about nine amplifiers and about 5 or 6 pre-amplifiers - and it sounds like just an army of guitars charging! Or else the other image I sometimes have is if you leave guitars alone in the dark at night and they start to mate when you're not there - it's sort of the sexual play of guitars. It seems to me like a sex dance between guitars and you can really hear the guitars screaming and moaning and teasing each other - and Davey did that all himself and to me it is one of the most amazing instrumental sections of the whole record.

Album track - Stark Raving Love...

R.S.: Stark Raving Love from Jim Steinman's solo album Bad For Good wrapping up this BBC Rock Hour Special.