“Every Saturday night I felt the fever grow
Do ya know what it’s like
All revved up with no place to go.”—“All Revved Up With No Place to Go,” written by Jim Steinman, performed by Meat Loaf from his Bat Out of Hell LP (1977)
Some time ago, I was discussing with a colleague of roughly my age the unique show-biz moniker of the former Marvin Lee Aday. What did reporters call him, I asked? Mr. Meat Loaf? Mr. Loaf? Or, more informally, Mr. Meat?
“When you’re that big, you’re called anything you like,” my colleague answered.
The photo accompanying this post shows the rock ‘n’ roller in his older—but, oddly enough, healthier—self. He undoubtedly prefers to be seen and thought of this way, and, at least partly in this spirit, I’m showing the comparatively slimmed-down version of the man.
(Note, however, that my sympathies only extend so far. I refused, upholding one of the few principles I still possess, to watch Meat Loaf's appearances on Celebrity Appearance. Somebody, somewhere needs to drive Donald Trump and his works down into the deep blue sea, where neither can be heard from again, and it might as well start with me.)
But in my late teens, the singer was, as my colleague said, “that big,” and then some—not only in girth (you never knew if one of his hell-for-leather appearances of the time would end in an onstage heart attack), but in his overwhelming presence on the rock ‘n’ roll scene, and all because of a single album: Bat Out of Hell. God knows, my copy of his platinum seller got a workout, and especially the tune that ended Side 1 with a bang: “All Revved Up With No Place to Go.”
This wasn’t an anthem for doomed youth, but for stymied youth—enough energy in a single teenage boy to power the Grand Coulee Dam, yet all going nowhere.
Lately, now that I’m over the half-century mark, with the ol' energy levels decidedly lower, I’m half-tempted to retitle this “All Slowed Up With No Place to Go.”
Except, perhaps, when I hear the great growling sax that starts this monster of a song (producer Todd Rundgren succeeded in doing here with rock 'n' roll what Phil Spector did with pop--push the boundaries of sound and energy to their earthly limit).
Then my brain thinks it’s senior year of high school all over again, and I inexplicably (very inexplicably, for those who know me) feel like “a varsity tackle and a helluva block/And when I played my guitar, I made the canyons rock.”
You might want to consider the phenomen of Leonard cohen---76 years old, performing all over the world in a black suit, black hat, wearing out a blue raincoat and with a bass voice. As a younger man, he sang in a tenor-baritone and had the frizzy hair, disheveled appearance and following that is similar to Bob Dylan's (lyrics have the same quality, except his are more personal love songs rather than social songs.) He may or may not be healthier, but I heard "Suzanne" the first time around in the tenor version and have now heard it many years later in a bass. Performers never fade away, they just catch up with their taxes.
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