Listening to Meatloaf
The portable polyester era of music
Marvin Lee Aday was an unlikely rock star. A classically-trained singer with a great stage persona. Early in his career, he stumbled across Jim Steinman, who was looking to write the next broadway hit. Instead, Steinman penned “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and later on “I Would do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” These lyrics combined with Aday’s vocals and stellar production (with a touch of Todd Rundgren in the early days), created the bombastic artist known as Meatloaf.
Growing up in a rural Midwestern town in the late 1970s and 80s, there was no place to escape the Meatloaf. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” was incredibly popular, even at 7 and a half minutes long.
What I remembered most about Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell, was watching other teenage girls dance in a circle wearing big puffy dresses to “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” It was some prom or whatever and I was too emotionally terrified and confused to be dating (my sincere apologies to my poor date), let alone at a dance. I remember the itchy lavender taffeta dress I wanted to burn and get back in my jeans. All I could think about was finding a way to run screaming from the building and be anywhere away from these terrifying teenage rituals.
With that being my only memory, I went searching back to Meatloaf’s hits and deep cuts. In listening to his music, there was still something missing. Something vital from the past and it is the choice of medium. Meatloaf does not translate well when his music is digitally blipped on Spotify or iMusic. It’s best heard on polyester-spooled tape with questionable speakers. Because that was the time he came from.
Chromium Oxide, Plastic, and Rock & Roll
Meatloaf rose to star status in the golden age of the portable cassette. This 4 x 2.5-inch plastic container was a mini reel-to-reel with a whole album that would be played in a boombox or a car if you were lucky.
Music happened via press play, eject, flip, insert, and repeat. It was the time of album-oriented rock. If you loved a song, you would have to buy the whole album and come to learn it and at times love it. If you were playing a boombox while at work, you put in the cassette and let it play. If you were at a party, the host popped in the rock album of the day and let it play. In your car, you kept the 1–3 cassettes at the ready for your drive.
Sure you could listen to just one song, but only if you bought a compilation or took the time to record a mix tape. The old school mix tape was created by recording songs off the radio in meticulous order. Making a mix tape could take weeks and many attempts.
There were other frustrations with this medium. You also kept a pencil in the glove box to work the spools if something went wrong with all the little plastic pieces moving the tape over the pressure pad. Or then there was the horrible wreckage if the cassette unwound in a player. The album was now pretty much dead and possibly your player, unless you could carefully remove the scrambled tape. In those days it was not unusual to come across a lost cause unspooled cassette at the side of the road, shimmering like tinsel in the ditch, thrown with pure frustration.
Press Play…
One of my favorite cassette stories was from an acquaintance and his band on a long overnight drive. He chose to slip a guilty pleasure into the van’s cassette deck for the early morning leg of the trip. His ill-fated choice was an 80’s greatest hits compilation by the band Chicago, the high-fructose era of Peter Cetera. The bass player got up from a dead sleep, slid into the passenger seat, and rolled down the window. Thinking the bass man was going to keep him company, the driver was not fast enough to stop him from ejecting Chicago and tossing the cassette out the window somewhere into the fields of Iowa. Without a word the bass player returned to the back and sleep, his musical critique of Chicago complete.
And this memory exemplifies why I like this era that existed just before music videos. These albums were the soundtrack of real life. Not curated images to accompany the music. It was the music and scenes from daily life burned into the brain, to be saved for future nostalgia. Once videos came along, it was another medium to share with listeners. But the images also paved over these everyday memories of songs.
For this reason, the the short-lived early cassette era brings up memories…
A house party where a stoned classmate kept rewinding the first side of Cinderella’s Night Songs and playing it over and over and over and over.
Sitting on the hood of a Pontiac Thunderbird, looking at the stars and drinking schnapps in March with a couple of friends listening to Eddie Money’s No Control.
Working the bar rush shift at a restaurant with Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance blaring in the kitchen keeping us moving through another chaotic night.
Playing frisbee in the bowling alley parking lot with Electric Light Orchestra’s Greatest Hits on repeat. Still love Jeff Lynne and company to this day.
A barefoot drunk guy picking up Sammy Hagar’s Standing Hampton at a rummage sale, where a pile of cassettes and its musical treasures lay in front of us. He shared his 5-minute soliloquy on his love for that album and Chevy Camaros. It was 9:00 am.
The 2-months I drove to and from work and college listening only to Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings and Toys in the Attic. Before their 80’s reinvention where they decided to be a ballad band.
And the likes of the Scorpions, Loverboy, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and other musical obsessions (some regrettable) rotating in and out. This soundtrack helped build appreciation for music and store my memories in a way not as possible in the age of YouTube, TikTok and videos.
So if you drift back to “Paradise for the Dashboard Light,” you can do so digitally. But you may want to save it for the next time you see a boombox at a rummage sale. Be that person who pops in the cassette and presses play. It will sound how Marvin first imagined it. A little gritty, a little imperfect, a little questionable. In other words…cassette perfection.
