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Welcome to the Passion Playhouse - Erections of the Heart

Posted by:	rockfenris2005 04:02 pm UTC 06/25/16
In reply to:	I Still Got It & So do THEY!!!!! - Jsteinfan 01:58 pm UTC 06/25/16

OK……. my thoughts… based on what I’ve heard… PREAMBLE: I’ve told this story before, many times, but I’m going to tell it again because it seems as appropriate as ever. It all begins with me hearing “Bat out of Hell” on car trips out to my Nan’s place, there and back, and then hearing what would have been my first single, the radio edit for “I’d do anything for love (But I won’t do that)”. It was only about five minutes long, not the version from the music video either which I would have heard if I’d seen it, and I had no idea, no idea that my favourite song in the whole wide world was going to be seven minutes longer. To this day (and I was 7 then and I’m 31 this year) this is one of the coolest arts music related experience I’ve ever had. It completely blew my mind. I was taken into a corner when we were out one time and CDs were new to us, and it was around the time I started seeing them all in the shops (places like BRASHS & Kmart, places GARY here would be familiar with too), and got played this album. And just… wow. Just wow!!! I want everyone who reads this review to picture your favourite song, your first favourite song maybe, and then imagine it being about seven minutes longer and you had no clue. How insane is that??? How awesome!!! “Anything for love” just kept going on forever & ever & ever. It just wouldn’t quit! And then there were ten other tracks as well that kept following. When we got the tape, well I’ve probably heard “Bat out of Hell 2”… how many times in 23 years? How many listens would I have had? In the last few years I think I’ve managed 30-50 listens per year? (What can I say? I love this album…). Then after that, the “process of discovery” continues… with the help of this site (the front page screaming out words like “DREAM POLLUTION” and “WELCOME TO THE PASSION PLAYHOUSE” and “DO YOU DARE TO DREAM HIS DREAM”). Many more memories, including waking up to the full “It’s all coming back to me now” on a weekend, going pale as a ghost hearing “Tonight is what it means to be young” for the first time, being in disbelief that a song could sound that amazing. WTF just happened??? And how come “Nowhere fast” was a thousand times cooler??? And Jim used “God speed” again!!! Because why the hell not??? TANZ! I’ve probably managed about 150 listens? THERE ARE NO WORDS. No, somebody on Neverland Hotel put it best: “LIKE BEING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE MASTER AFTER SO MANY YEARS.” Yes. That’s it. And that musical also was the culmination of so many, MANY brilliant talents. PREAMBLE 2!!!!!!!!!! THREE YEARS AGO I had a dream, an amazing dream, where I was walking around in the countryside, this great open field, with mountains behind me, listening to “BRAVER THAN WE ARE” on an iPod. Meat was singing over the orchestra from “DRAUSSEN IST FREIHEIT” and Patti was singing too, and it was so clear to me. And THE HAMBURG ENTR’ACTE of “TANZ” – the rock one based on “BRAVER” – was the intro, played like the score to “Conan the Barbarian” composed by Basil Poledouris. I woke up, surprised at how REAL and VIVID this dream was. It was SO fully realized. And then I got “sad” because I thought, how disappointed would I be if this couldn’t possibly live up to THAT??? That dream haunted me at various points over the past three years… UNTIL RECENTLY!!! Words that come to MY mind re: “GOING ALL THE WAY”: “OPERATIC ANNIHILATION!!! ERECTIONS OF THE HEART!!! READ MY APOCALYPSE!!! GOING ALL THE WAY IS JUST THE START!!!” I don’t want to rave like an idiot here, but I do want to get across just how INSANE this was for me as a listener. So I’m just sitting there listening to this song, and by the end of it all, the window’s opened up, the air’s being sucked out of my room, the chair’s still there somehow, and I’m like Aunt Marge in “Harry Potter” floating out of the window, out into the back garden, up over the fence, up over the neighbourhood, then over the suburbs, and now I can see the beach and I’m headed out to sea, and I just keep on going, up above the clouds, and now it’s “Hans Pfaall” by Edgar Allan Poe or something, or Baron Munchausen dancing with Venus played by Uma Thurman, and I’m just getting further and further out into the atmosphere, until I’m finally just looking down over the earth in awe, and I’m seeing Greek temples, and Egyptian pyramids, and Incan ruins, and icebergs, and skyscrapers, and Eiffel Towers and Mount Everest, and you name it… all of it just kind of swirling in my view. “How far is too far” indeed?? Even if I hated this track, it still would have been… A PASSION PLAYHOUSE!!! That’s the problem with BAT 3. I’ve come to terms with it – I want that album, in some ways I need that album, but I don’t think I’m ever going to love it? – But where’s… THE PASSION PLAYHOUSE??? THANK YOU in abundance Jim, Paul, Meat, Ellen, Karla, Justin, EVERYBODY who worked on this piece that was like being thrown into the middle of “THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG” directed by Peter Jackson with no Smaug in sight and just piles and piles of treasure (but with the kind of awe that dragon left me in when I watched that movie for the first time.) “12 MINUTES OF OLYMPIAN SPLENDOUR” I once wrote, perhaps even PROPHESIZED, haha, or more just wishful thinking, VERY wishful thinking perhaps… “I’ve been around and I know the ropes and I won’t get fooled again…” THAT’S EXACTLY how I felt. SO THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!! This album IS a demented circus for me!!! THE PHANTOM OF CONEY ISLAND!!! But with a better storyline, hehe, or just “LOVE NEVER DIES” without the Phantom connection!!! I was even wondering what Andrew Lloyd Webber would make out of “WHO NEEDS THE YOUNG”??? Could someone find out for us??? I would really love to KNOW haha!!!! I said though, if “GOING ALL THE WAY” worked for me, I didn’t give a FLYING FUCK if the rest of it didn’t work, Because I would have that one song, which would make up for over TEN YEARS of imagining what another Meat Loaf/Jim Steinman album would be like, without all the politics & compromises. And I cannot feel grateful enough. I almost feel like something’s been PURGED from my system, and now I can move on to pratting about James Cameron coming back and directing one more “TERMINATOR” movie where John Connor and the resistance win over Skynet? And I even read a rumour the other day!!! I GET the whole thing with Meat’s voice. Believe me I do. But I just saw past all of that INTO THIS CHARACTER. **************THE OLD AGE OF STRAT************************* OK. How I began to view the BAT trilogy (although this is not terribly specific and more of a guide) really is: BATYOUTH, BAT 2MIDDLE AGE, BAT 3OLD AGE. I had this IMAGE of an old broken down Meat Loaf in the middle of a rotting decaying mansion somewhere in a Gothic American setting, in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, sitting there on an ornate armchair in a darkened living room, wearing a big long flowing dressing gown, almost like something out of “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”, and he sings those lines… There are endless nights, they just go on forever He’s sort of arching back in his chair, convulses of pain and agony… There are scars on scars that I know will never heal There’s relentless pain, it tortures me forever I’ve got to pretend it ain’t real!!! Then when it got back to the “BREAK IT” part, HUNDREDS & THOUSANDS of these little GREMLIN urchins, would burst out of the walls, and flood the place, and old man Meat or STRAT, is flailing around singing this song. SO IT’S PROBABLY NO WONDER I LIKE THIS ALBUM SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!! “WHO NEEDS THE YOUNG?” INSANE, “GOING ALL THE WAY” 2012 if it was directed by James Cameron instead of Emmerich with a pure 40 minutes of LA being apocalyptically decimated, “SPEAKING IN TONGUES” which contains for me some of the greatest lyrics Jim ever “committed” to paper, “DIRTY JOB” “SOUVENIRS” I started to lose it, but loved the Billy Joel vibes in the latter, (more than I can ever explain!!!), “ONLY WHEN I FEEL” OMGGGG, “MORE”, CHILLS, “GODZ”, FIRE!! FIRE!!! FIRE!!!!, and “TRAIN OF LOVE”, finishing with the chilling line: “DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE I AM”. I can’t think of anything else to say. I guess that’s all for now. BUT I MUST THANK EVERYONE INVOLVED AGAIN!!!!!!! YOU HAVE MADE A FAN OF NEARLY 25 YEARS EXTRAORDINARILY HAPPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOD BLESS YOU ALLL!!!!!!!! MUAH MUAH MUAH!!!! I shall ENJOY holding the CD in my hands. AND THE VINYL TOO!!! RYAN XXXX


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