I really love music. Lots of people do, but I tend to love it more than lots of people. It's my belief that it's not good enough to just have music playing, you have to have the RIGHT music playing. Want to be calm and restful? Don't put Beethovan on, even if it's the Moonlight Sonata (there's an underlying tension in it, the gravitational pull of the moon). Want to amp up and get the blood flowing? I don't care how much you play Like A Rolling Stone or Highway 61, Dylan won't work, he's too dense and cerebral. You need lyrics that mean nothing, an excuse to turn the human voice into another instrument. Hmm, how about that Iggy fellow and his stoogies? Something about Lust For Life?
So knowing this about me, recently someone asked, "Okay, one song, one piece of music, the musical composition that says everything anyone would want to know about you, what is it?"
I'm sure this person expected me to say some Springsteen song like Thunder Road, or some Benny Goodman piece like Sing, Sing, Sing, or something classical like the Jupiter Symphony, or maybe go philisophical and bring up Coltrane's Love Supreme. Theater major in college? Bet there's some obscure Sondheim floating around in the brain.
It's none of them. And it's without hesitation. I don't have to sleep on it or give you an answer in the morning. I know right now.
It's rock and roll. Maybe the epitomy of rock and roll. It's musical theatre. The album it comes from was first conceived as a rock and roll opera. Certainly it's epic in scope (it takes eight and a half minutes to play and there is a long passage of time in the storytelling). If Brecht and Weill had written rock, they would have written it. It's operatic, it's jazz; a movie of it would have to be directed by the bastard child of Frank Capra and Martin Scorsese. It's as American a song as you can get, yet deconstructs the classic American love song to it's core principles. It's themes center on the American desire to conquer and aquire that which doesn't belong to us, but we have difficulty with the idea of having conquered we now must occupy. It takes place in a car, the most treasured of manly possessions, is all about sex, the most treasured of manly persuits, and in the middle of the song Phil Rizzuto comes in to do play by play of a baseball game, only of course it's not a baseball game and the action being recounted gives new meaning to the phrase "suicide squeeze". Holy crap it even reimagines Gatsby's light at the end of the pier, his orgiastic future, as the glow of an AM radio.
Ain't no doubt about it we were doubly blessed, cause we were barely seventeen and we were barely dressed.
Yes, hello Mr. Loaf, it's Paradise By The Dashboard Light.
How can you not get a thrill from this song on some level? Take it as a rememberance of things past. Take it as an anthem of teen angst. Take it as a cautionary tale. Take it as some great freaking rock and roll and if you don't believe me check out who the drummer is (Max Weinberg), who's playing the piano (Professor Roy Bittan) and who produced the damn thing (Todd Rundgren). And on a personal level, it's sung by a fat guy in a wildly inappropriate white shirt with sweat pouring down his face to a hard body curly haired brunette with an attitude of her own and an opinion on where and how this encounter will end. Not that I've ever been or known anyone like that.
And when it's all over, when eight and a half glorious, rocking, hysterical, envigorating minutes have passed, you get the second greatest fuck you line in the history of literature: "So now I'm praying for the end of time to hurry up and arrive, cause if I gotta spend another minute with you I don't think that I could really survive".
(For the record, the greatest fuck you in literature is Mr. Dylan in Positively Fourth Street, the last two stanzas)
It's the next line though that really hits it out of the park for me. Because after all the laughter, all the sexual tension, all the base thumping, driving, beating, pulse rattling crescendos, after all of that invective for a life lost due to a moment's bad judgement, the hero swears "I'll never break my promise or forget my vow".
He's a standup guy. He made his bed and he'll lay in it. Or is it lie in it? He's what we all want to be. Okay, maybe there were better choices in life, but the choice he's made, he's sticking to it, till the end of time. His word means more than anything. He's the Sydney Carton of rock and since I took enough English Lit courses in college to have heard the Carton/Jesus Christ analogy more times than I care to remember...well I'm not going to go there.
So put me on that desert island and give me that MP3 of Bat Out Of Hell (it's the 35th anniversary this year), I'll be swearing on my god and on my mothers grave I'd love you to the end of time.
