| "The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records Of All Time" | |
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Scarecrow's_Brain 09:03 am UTC 03/12/07 |
| Does anyone else have this book? It's from 91, written by Jim Guterman and Owen O'Donnell. Jim came in at # 30 in the worst singles category for "Faster Than The Speed of Night". I've typed out the text below. **** BONNIE TYLER "Faster Than the Speed of Night" Columbia, 1983 highest chart position: did not chart Some one-hit wonders will do anything for another shot. When singer Bonnie Tyler scored her number-three smash "It's a Heartache" in 1978, she immediately seemed primed for one-hit oblivion. Her singing style (caused partially by a 1976 throat operation) went out of its way to ape Rod Stewart's primal rasp; she seemed nothing more than a slightly talented clone jumping on a true original's bandwagon. None of her follow-up singles charted, and it seemed that was that. But five years later Tyler hooked up with another second-tier one-hit rocker trying to pump some life into a dying career. Songwriter and producer Jim Steinman had also enjoyed tremendous success in 1978 as the musically flatulent Geppetto behind Meat Loaf's inexplicably multiplatinum Bat Out of Hell LP. His barrage of lengthy declamations, stolen Springsteen riffs (whose existence was not excused by the presence of several E Streeters on the record), and adolescent double entendres made Meat Loaf a massive star and Steinman an instant millionaire. Then the roof fell in. Mr. Loaf (as the New York Times called him) blew out his voice on tour and couldn't record a follow-up for years. Frustrated by Meat's debilitation and envious that he wasn't yet a star in his own right, Steinman took the songs planned for the next Meat Loaf record, yelled them himself, and talked the folks at Epic into releasing it. The resulting album, Bad for Good, was such an over-the-top disaster that neither Steinman's nor, by association, Meat Loaf's career ever recovered. By 1983, both Tyler and Steinman were at the end of their respective ropes. Tyler was desperate and willing to try anything new, even if it meant succumbing to Steinman's least grounded ideas ever. Their album together, Faster Than the Speed of Night, coupled Tyler's gruff tenor with Steinman songs that were so far out of her range she would have needed another operation to capture them. The album delivered a hit in "Total Eclipse of the Heart", a typically random Steinman image (what, we ask, is a partial eclipse of the heart?) that has no relation to any of the other lyrics in the song. The deadliest cut on the disc was its title-track single. On it, Tyler is swamped by an enormous arrangement that sounds like every musician in the New York local took a turn adding clutter to the mix. Steinman's arrangements always squeeze too many instruments into too little space, but here there's so much nonsense that there's no place left to put the song. Tyler gives up when confronted with lines like, "You're such a pretty boy/Let me show you what to do and you'll do it/But you gotta move faster than the speed of night." Faster than the speed of night, Jim? What if we only move as fast as the speed of night? Will that be fast enough to escape this song? | |
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