The album cover was scary, exciting, and somehow loud. A motorcycle, adorned with a cow skull in the front and white exhaust or possibly flame behind it, soared through the air. A demon bat screeched in the distance. The rider, a muscled-man with distinct Valkyrie undertones, hangs on for dear life in a pose I wouldn’t understand the undertones behind until much, much later.
It’s Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, and it’s sitting on the dining room table. My dad is carefully studying the back, just like he has roughly twice a week for as long as I can remember. He is wearing headphones that cover 60 percent of his head. They are connected to a knockoff Japanese stereo through a cord thicker than the one that kept our telephone attached to its receiver.
I am 8 years old and ready to depart to the TV room for Friday night’s TGIF lineup — Family Matters, Full House, Step-by-Step, the works. But first I’ve got to finish chores, which means clearing the dishes from the table. Dad didn’t really drink back then. Didn’t smoke, either. His deliverance came 46 minutes, 25 seconds at a time, beginning with the title track and slipping through operatic anthems, power ballads and the song he’d play all eight-plus minutes of at my sister’s wedding; Paradise by the Dashboard Light.
That’s where he’s landed tonight, having already hummed and bobbed his head through You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth. His voice rose a level to sing the chorus of Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad, betraying the subtle sadness behind a man who was Henny Youngman levels of prolific when it came to dad jokes. But when Paradise came on — those first 11 notes screeching out of Jim Steinman’s glorious, drama-kid brain and through a perfectly scratchy electric guitar — it sent lightning through his body.
His eyes closed. His shoulders shook. Every word of those lyrics, every syllable, tumbled from his lips in perfect sync with the record spinning in the background we couldn’t hear. He sang with the conviction of a born-again sinner on a Sunday morning.
Well I remember every little thing, as if it happened only yesterday,
Parking by the lake and there was not another car in sight…
The whole family knew the song well. Our summer vacations were two-week trips to visit family in Pittsburgh. Each way was a 10-hour drive with a handful of cassettes and a portable tape player rested on the front console armrest. The only one that really got played was a homemade mix barely labeled on a blank Maxell. It had some Bob Seger and Paul Evans and, for some reason, Memory from the musical Cats. It also had Paradise by the Dashboard Light on both the front and back sides.
Now Dad rose up from his seat as the chorus hit, a heavenly tilt upward before assuring the family he was both barely 17 as well as barely dressed. He gained steam as the song did, omitting nothing for me or my sister — who at 10 years older, understood at least slightly better than I did — as he sunk deeper into the world carefully created by Steinman and Loaf.
And now our bodies are oh so close and tight,
It never felt so good, it never felt so right
And we’re glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife
I didn’t get any of that, but somehow, the piece that bothered me the most was the knife. Knives didn’t glow, and if they did it certainly just wouldn’t be one sliver that did it. But a clumsy metaphor was, in fact, the perfect parallel to the clumsy everything going on behind it.
Besides, my dad was already onto the next beat, loudly proclaiming we were about to go all the way tonight. Then he doubled down toward the table, knowing he’d have to buy all the way in and save his breath to perfectly nail the next 52 seconds of breathless Phil Rizzuto play-by-play.
I narrowed my focus as well. Growing up a Red Sox fan in Rhode Island had conditioned me to baseball failure. It was the one part of the song I understood. I just wanted to know if this kid, the one that really makes things happen out there, was going to make it home or not. Every time I’d listen intently as though Ellen Foley wasn’t about to bring in Act III just in the nick of time.
Stop right there! I gotta know right now.
Yep, Dad did the lady parts too.
Do you love me? Will you love me forever?
Do you neeeeeed me? Will you nev-uh leave me?
Will you make me so happy for the rest of my life?
Will you take me away, will you make me your wife?
I gotta know right now, before we go any further:
Do you love me? Will you love me forever?
I didn’t realize this at the time, but this would be my sex education. Roughly five years later Dad, vastly underestimating my budding awkwardness and just how attractive the opposite sex would find my JV cross country body, sat me down for the talk. The center of a galaxy of bon mots USA TODAY would ultimately prefer not to have attached to its website was Paradise by the Dashboard Light. “Sex is a commitment, son. No one knows it better than me. No one said it better than Meat Loaf.”
At the table, however, I was watching a one-man ballet. His voice shifted back and forth like a veteran truck driver spinning around a wreck. His hands moved from accusing to pleading with the grace of a surgeon’s scalpel.
Foley’s parts were the actual knife in the song, slicing through five minutes of wallpapered happiness that preceded it. Meat Loaf begged in response. It was teenage trash Shakespeare, fed directly into one man’s brain and processed across 15 years and multiple worn-out copies of Bat out of Hell.
Then, the dam burst.
I couldn’t take it any longer, Lord I was crazed!
And when the feeling came upon me like a tidal wave
I started swearing to my god and on my mother’s grave
That I would love you to the end of time!
Dad hit every note with flooding relief and regret, coasting through the final minute-plus and to the end of the song. Then he’d get sucked back in to the album’s finale, For Crying Out Loud, and sing the full eight minutes, 45 seconds like a dirge. Eyes closed, slumped in a hard-back chair, a light sweat glowing as if he’d just done a quick workout.
Then he’d snap back to us, and inevitably I’d ask:
“Who’s that guy the baseball announcer was talking about?”
“That was Meat Loaf, too,” he’d respond.
“Was he safe at home?”
Then Dad paused, tilted his head, and scrunched his face a bit.
“He was. But he still lost.”
“But it was the bottom of the ninth, tie game!”
“Trust me, son. He lost.”
