Jim Steinman Song Showdown

 Who Covered It Best? 

For a guy so dedicated to maintaining a badass public image (still wearing leather jackets and spiked gauntlets into his twilight years), Jim Steinman is hopelessly square. His songs are unabashed music theater, he traffics in emotions only at their most operatic, and he has never once been accused of subtlety.

And for that I love his music, with all its bombast and drama. His work has shifted untold numbers of units since Bat Out of Hell debuted in 1977. In the midst of the Punk revolution, his first album with Meat Loaf became one of those inescapable cultural touchstones, like the Kennedy assassination or the last episode of M*A*S*H. It’s also incredibly uncool. Not content with the heightened teenage drama of West Side Story and Born to Run, Steinman pushed everything to its glittery neon extreme, not just abandoning good taste, but denying its existence altogether.

The thing is, for all his success, Steinman was only recently able to fulfill his lifelong dream: A musical based on Peter Pan. Initially written as part of his studies at Amhurst College, The Dream Engine was first produced in embryonic form in 1969. The musical’s theme of teens running amuck in a dystopian world was interesting enough to get him some heat from Broadway producers, and he spent the first half of the 70s toiling in the trenches, writing songs and working on other people’s musicals. By then his pet project was called Neverland, and was even more explicitly about J.M. Barrie’s eternal child. In 2017, nearly 50 years after his initial idea, Bat Out of Hell: The Musical finally premiered, though the seeds of the songs had already been scattered across his various collaborations.

That scattering is a common theme across Steinman’s career, with songs splitting off from his magnum opus to be covered by other artists, or in various projects he created during the decade-long legal battle between him and Meat Loaf. So I start to wonder, who did these songs best? Is Steinman really the best interpreter of his own music? Here’s some songs from his catalog that lived a couple different lives, from little-loved solo albums to huge pop hits.

Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through

Jim Steinman (Bad for Good, 1981)

Meat Loaf (Bat Out of Hell II, 1993)

Bat Out of Hell II was supposed to come out in the late 70s. During the whirlwind support tour, the record company started bugging Steinman for another album. This was when the yearly tour/album/tour cycle was at it’s peak. Steinman didn’t need to tour with Meat Loaf, he was more of a behind the scenes guy anyways, so he took some time off to polish off other songs from his Neverland cycle. Now, anyone’s who’s seen the Meat Loaf Behind the Music knows that every conceivable misfortune befell the duo. Meat Loaf lost his voice, the excess of late 70s touring wore him down nearly to psychosis, and a notebook of lyrics was stolen from Steinman’s dressing room after he rejoined the tour. The wind out of their sails, and the combination of too much money & too many drugs eroding their partnership, they took the first of several long breaks.

When you make the record company the equivalent of several fortunes, they let you do whatever you want to do. What we got was Steinman’s 1981 solo album Bad for Good, which used the songs from the original Bat Out of Hell II. Meat Loaf may not have written the songs, but his undeniable skill and charisma is what sold the audience on mini rock operas about horny teenagers. Steinman… not so much. He tried, hiring a crack band and throwing a ton of money at the videos, but it wasn’t the same as when Meat Loaf was out front belting out his tunes.

Over a decade later, when the duo makes up and finally finished Bat II, “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” was redone with Meat Loaf on vocals. So which version is better? Winner: Meat Loaf. Steinman’s version isn’t even all that bad, it’s just that Meat Loaf elevates the song to operatic heights, while the first version is more akin to the standard Album Rock of the time. It’s competent, if a little one-dimensional.

Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)

Megumi Shiina (Le Port, 1986)

Pandora’s Box (Original Sin, 1989)

Meat Loaf (Bat Out of Hell II, 1993)

This one’s got the strangest trajectory: The first recording is actually a Japanese translation by pop singer Megumi Shiina. Three years later, Steinman’s project Pandora’s Box did their own version, and finally Meat Loaf did his another 4 years later. That’s seven years and a couple continents for a song about horny teenagers wrought in lyrics so purple only Steinman could do it.

Pandora’s Box is a weird beast, a solo project in all but name, containing songs that reach back almost 20 years to The Dream Engine, along with loose interpretations of The Doors’ “20th Century Fox” and Burt Bacharach’s “Little Red Book”. Not content to merely release an album, Steinman had several big-budget videos made, later released on home video as a mini-movie.

It’s not really a surprise that the Pandora’s Box version is the weakest, with its attempt at combining operatic rock and R&B coming off flat and boring. Winner: Meat Loaf. Both it and Megumi Shiina’s version use thick, palm-muted electric guitars and over-compressed tom-toms, but the former piles on even more riffs and instruments to really take it to epic territory. Opening with a cluster of saxophones is surprising, as they don’t appear on Bat II until then, and their slightly atonal, noir vibe is a nice contrast to the rest of the song. From there Steinman adds a descending chromatic guitar riff as Meat sells the hell out of the lyrics from the mountaintop.

And what lyrics. Rock & roll lyrics are not poetry, nobody expects a divine couplet in songs about getting wasted and having sex, but Steinman surrounds lines like “And every limb has been erotic'ly burned” with equally ridiculous music, so it works.

It’s All Coming Back to Me Now

Pandora’s Box (Original Sin, 1989)

Celine Dion (Falling Into You, 1996)

Meat Loaf with Marion Raven (Bat Out of Hell III, 2006)

Winner: Celine Dion. Sometimes a songwriter is far from the best interpreter of their work, and besides, she’s Celine Fucking Dion. She’s got the pipes and charisma to deliver the drama of an epic musical that seems to just be one chorus after another. The Pandora’s Box version comes in second; Elaine Caswell’s voice (recorded as a guide vocal then later used on the final album, without compensating her) is a lot edgier than Celine’s cherubic wail, giving the song some gritty attitude. Way back in 3rd place is Meat Loaf’s eventual take, turned into a duet with Marion Raven. Raven does a good job with what she’s got, but it’s clear Meat’s voice is not the weapon it used to be. Whether it was to cover up his failing voice, or just to differentiate it from Celine Dion’s blockbuster version, making it a duet does not serve the song well. Meat and Raven constantly step over each other’s lines, and the lyrics never gave even a hint that it was a conversation between two people.

All three videos for these songs are bonkers, but the winner in that regard is hiring mad director Ken Russell (The Who’s Tommy, Altered States) for the Pandora’s Box version. Over-budget, nonsensical, and with a Cinemax-level of sexuality, it barely aired on MTV and the album flopped.

Out of the Frying Pan (And into the Fire)

Jim Steinman (Bad for Good, 1981)

Meat Loaf (Bat Out of Hell II, 1993)

When Bat Out of Hell came out in 1977, hair metal didn’t really exist. There was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but Van Halen’s debut wouldn’t come out for another year, ushering in an era of hairspray, guitar acrobatics, and power ballads. It seems like a genre tailor made for Steinman’s vision, but in 1977 his music was still pretty firmly in the classic rock tradition, with boogie woogie guitars and soft rock piano. The funny thing is, by the time he reunited with Meat Loaf for Bat Out of Hell II, hair metal had already come and gone and become passé. That didn’t deter him, and the advances in recording technology meant he could take the proto-metal initial version of “Out of the Frying Pan (And into the Fire)” and crank every element past the point of good taste. Winner: Meat Loaf, but really just for the production, which buffed Steinman’s Wagnerian Metal vision to a fine polish.

Lost Boys and Golden Girls

Jim Steinman (Bad for Good, 1981)

Meat Loaf (Bat Out of Hell II, 1993)

This piano ballad is incredibly sedate for Steinman, not far removed from that late 70s singer/songwriter milieu that took hold of the charts in America. To be honest I’m not a big fan of the song. Most of his work traverses huge peaks and valleys, running the gamut of dynamics, but this is just kinda… there. I understand that it’s supposed to be the emotional, stripped down finale for the original Neverland production, but his music doesn’t really scale down very well. Winner: Jim Steinman. Meat Loaf’s version may have the most advanced production 1993 could offer, but it couldn’t reproduce the chill 70s vibe of the first version. You can practically smell the Naugahyde furniture and hand-rolled cigarette smoke of the studio it was recorded in.