first round
(3) georgia satellites, “keep your hands to yourself”
muted
(14) jim steinman, “rock & roll dreams come through”
300-116
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/23.
satellite: jonathan walsh on “keep your hands to yourself”
Oh baby, hold me close
So I cannot breathe.
Hold me close to this sweet earth
So I cannot leave it.—The Georgia Satellites
Onstage at Hank’s it’s like I never quit. Certainly not like I quit two or three times.
Hank’s is a dive bar. You can tell from the paint job a mile away: hotrod flames on a squat black square down by Atlantic Center in Brooklyn. It has more an alcove than a stage, the PA always feels like it’s threatening to electrocute you, and sometimes does. The regulars look like they’ve been coming there to play pool and drink together since the bar first opened as the Doray Tavern a century ago.
Tonight I’m playing guitar with Night Moves. In a few months, we’ll learn another, younger band has laid claim to the name. We’ll be glad to let them have it, we don’t mind. We’re a cover band. The stakes are usually pretty low.
But this show feels important. It’s an end and a beginning. For now, halfway through the night, it’s more sweet than bitter.
*
When Dan Baird sings the opening lines of “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” by the Georgia Satellites, it’s hard to tell if he is actually drunk or merely trying to sound that way.
Got a little change in my pocket goin' jing-a-ling-a-ling
Wants to call you on the telephone baby, a-give you a ring
The cheapest of pickup lines. The kind that comes lurching at you from across the bar not far from closing time, knocking into people and spilling Miller Lite along the way. The kind of line that seems certain to fail, but doesn’t.
Rather than sending him away, the reply is: “no hug-ee, no kiss-ee until I get a weddin’ ring.” It’s a pretty surprising response—marriage. To the jing-a-ling guy. But till then he’s got to keep his hands off her body, put up with the rest of her.
You get the sense they’ve gone through this before, that this is an old dynamic. This pickup line is a tired trick, maybe a joke between them by now, our narrator and his target. There’s affection there, and they play this out two more times before the song is done. You imagine it gets played out like this every weekend at their local spot, that maybe this has been going on since high school. He, content to chase someone he doesn’t really want; she, content to chase someone who doesn’t really want her.
*
I wanted to be in a band for as long as I can remember. My first guitar lessons were in grade school. I recollect being in a small back room of the local music shop in LaGrange, Georgia, learning chords from the long-haired guy who taught guitar on the side.
I quit after only a few lessons. The strings on my mom’s old classical dug into my tiny fingers, despite being made of nylon. It was at those lessons I saw the first guitar I’d ever covet: an electric, hanging there in the shop. I don’t remember the brand, but if I had to guess it was an old Dean ML, the kind Dimebag Darrell of Pantera used to play before switching to another brand, years before he’d be shot to death onstage at the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, the city where I live with some reluctance today.
That guitar, in my recollection, was black and angular, set off by lightning bolts airbrushed across its shiny body.
Yes, lightning bolts. Airbrushed ones.
My tastes are more sophisticated now, but only just.
For years after I’d given up lessons, I’d fantasize about ripping some incredible guitar solo before my entire middle school, all gathered together in the auditorium. In some of the fantasies I’m pretty sure I actually descend from the ceiling while shredding on that guitar. The crowd, in my imaginings, went wild.
In terms of my own musical cultivation, around the age I was picturing myself sliding on my knees in front of my classmates a la Marty McFly (in the moments before, in the film, it’s intimated a white suburbanite invented rock and roll), my entire music collection consisted of one of my dad’s Blondie tapes and a cassette of spooky haunted house sounds that I kept in my Walkman, ostensibly for the versions of Monster Mash and the Munsters theme on the B-side. This was eventually discovered by an enterprising classmate and I was mocked mercilessly for it.
Despite that, music, and the idea of performing it in a band, held me from then on.
*
The narrator in “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is not monastic in his devotion to bachelordom. At one point he considers paying in love the price of his lust: “see I wanted her real bad,” he says, “and I was about to give in.” Later he admits, “honey, I'll live with you for the rest of my life”—no small offer. It’s not clear to me if this is another cheap line or if maybe he’s not as averse to commitment as he seems. Like most guys in bars, like most people in general, he doesn’t seem to know what it is he really wants.
He’s not unlike the object of his affections in that way. She seems deadset on matrimony, but we glimpse that maybe it’s more than just the tokens of commitment that matter to her. She starts “talking about true love” and “talking about sin,” and I wonder if she’s tired of sex, tired of waiting for a love that will never come, or simply tired of being alone. Maybe she doesn’t know, either.
It’s a familiar kind of ambivalence to anyone imbued with a soul. The human heart is more like a blindfolded kid playing Marco Polo, adrift in the water, than a bloodhound. It’s not always clear what it’s chasing after.
*
Dan Baird has a gap in his teeth. It is either because of this or in spite of it his smile is so rakish you feel he could sell your own car back to you and you’d thank him for it. You can hear that smile when he sings; it’s part of the reason “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is such a good song. You’re not grossed out by the jing-a-ling guy, you’re rooting for him.
The Georgia Satellites’ sound was, as Baird once put it to Rolling Stone, “Carl Perkins, with Joe Perry on guitar … and AC/DC on drums.” It’s a good description of the Satellites’ rock and roll heart with a hillbilly soul: Baird’s no hug-ee, no kiss-ee yodel is echoed later on in songs by Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn, the guitar lick is pure Chuck Berry, and the rhythm section would be at home on a track by, well, AC/DC.
In old photographs, the Georgia Satellites seem like a group of guys who’d be fun to hang out with but maybe you wouldn’t let housesit for you. You imagine they might smell a little bit. Body odor, probably; cigarettes and stale beer, definitely. In those photos they wear tight jeans and leather jackets, beat-up Converse and torn t-shirts, chains, aviators, a punk-rock officer’s cap. They look more Guns N’ Roses than Waylon & Willie.
Complicating that barroom image is that Baird is smarter than most folks, and funnier too. The simplicity of songs like “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is by design, and like most good art it looks easier to make than it actually is. “Simplicity is something I still chase down over and over,” Baird said to Rolling Stone. “It is the hardest thing to do. Elegant simplicity is just so rare and you know it when you hear it, when you read it, when you see it in a movie.”
The unofficial motto at the foot of Baird’s website is “Rock and Roll doesn't have to be dumb to be good, but it definitely helps!” It captures his sense of humor nicely: self-deprecating and a little raunchy, but not so blue you’d blush. “Teenage pregnancy and teenage runaways are hysterical,” Baird once said. “It’s so funny.”
That combination of wit, wisdom, and humor brings to mind another group of eighties misfits: indie-rock legends the Replacements. Just as they could put a track like “Gary’s Got a Boner” alongside transcendent numbers like “Androgynous” and “Unsatisfied,” the Georgia Satellites had “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” on the same record as songs like “Nights of Mystery” and “Golden Light,” where Baird sings:
Let go, this ribbon of darkness, now,
And like a drunk I'll go, fall, laughing down …
They tell you truth is a moment, it shines…
Like a bit of whisky in your coffee, a little salt in your sweet, Baird’s intelligence and empathy take the universal appeal of the Georgia Satellites’ barn-burning mission and tilts it. Suddenly the jing-a-ling guy gets a bit more depth. Maybe he’s a catch after all.
*
I don’t know if David hated me at the end of 2005, but I suspect he did.
I’d met him in Boston. He had played drums in the band I’d helped start for a hot second in our last year of college, which we’d eventually name the Nightlights. Our best gig, in my recollection, was a basement show David nearly had to miss due to some nasty tubercular flu. He allowed us to ferry him over in a taxi, heroically, just long enough to run the set. In my memory he collapses, final chord still ringing, and we throw a blanket over him, James-Brown-style. By then I’d moved over to bass, the instrument that would remain closest to my heart thereafter. I can remember the instrument I played that night: a 1973 Fender Precision bass I’d gotten for a song, one I’d trade looking for something else a few weeks later.
A year after we’d graduated, David invited me to join him in Atlanta for a project he he’d started with another musician from Boston named Mike. I was feeling stagnant in the Nightlights and was ready to seek out something a little more serious and so, without too much thought, I quit my band and headed south.
My summer back in Georgia was a fever dream. David, Mike, and I formed a mercurial kind of power trio: David and Mike would switch off on drums and guitar while I played bass as loudly as my amp would allow. We practiced every night we weren’t performing at shows David or Mike had booked for us at the EARL, the Drunken Unicorn, 10 High.
The days had a different rhythm. David hooked me up with an hourly gig at a law firm where it was my job to help process foreclosures. I’d punch property coordinates into a database, a bright yellow Discman Sport feeding my ears constantly in those days, then spend hours checking that the listings were posted correctly in the newspaper. This would be punctuated by the occasional desperate phone call from people trying to keep their homes. Sometimes they’d be crying, sometimes they wouldn’t. I got to know the paralegals there a little bit, older women, mostly, who were smarter, nicer, and had their shit together far better than I did. One of them insisted that the best cure for a migraine was a Snickers bar until, one day, she went into a diabetic coma right there at her desk.
Thanks to some light postal malfeasance, my total lack of initiative, or some combination of the two, I wasn’t able to access the bank account in Atlanta where my checks were being deposited. As a result I was constantly broke, borrowing money and living off the kindness of my bandmates. I ate a lot of sandwich crackers from the office vending machine that summer, filled my coffee with powdered creamer for the sweet, tangy calories. By the time I left, I’d lost fifteen pounds and saved a couple thousand dollars.
Money was a specter in my mind back then. I had over $40,000 in student loans that had come due to the tune of $500 a month. Before my law office job, I had managed to turn my expensive college degree into various unskilled hourly gigs at some disappointment to myself and my family. I began to wonder if indie music might not be an entirely surefire pathway to financial security. In the meantime I checked and rechecked lot coordinates on foreclosed homes, wondering when eviction notices would post.
My imagination ran small in those days. Where David and Mike saw a future packed with tours and albums and memories, I began to trace the myriad pathways to failure. Back in Boston, I’d worked the box office at the legendary Middle East Club in Central Square. It was a part-time job, weekends and some evenings, hooked up by my friend Kieran from the Nightlights. I would sit behind the box office desk eating my complimentary plate of mujadara with spicy harissa, my nose buried in a Stephen King novel as some of the most gifted musicians alive came through to talk with the talented crew that worked up there.
More than those that made it, what stuck with me were the countless bands that didn’t. Groups of guys in their late thirties, forties—basically dead, to my eyes back then—coming in for their weekly or monthly gigs in the upstairs room. Guys—for they were mostly men—with soft beer bellies stuffed into blue jeans that had once looked tight and sexy, long hair thinning at the top, teeth going bad, drinking starting to catch up, playing music that had gone out of style a decade before and all chasing a ship that had long since sailed. Seeing them, I recalled something I’d read in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. “Rock music,” David Thomas of art-punk gods Pere Ubu says, “is about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other in the back of your car.”
During those humid summer nights in Atlanta, after a show or wrapping up rehearsal, that image would come back to me. As we hoisted amps and drums into the back of David’s Honda Element [1], alone in empty, rain-drenched parking lots, ears ringing, half-awake, I saw in us the also-rans I’d seen at the Middle East. It never occurred to me that maybe those guys were having fun, that they were happy.
A few months after I’d arrived, I told Mike and David that I was moving back to Boston. They were gutted, confused; only later, I think, would they become angry. Mike almost borrowed money to pay off my student loans for me.
The three of us had clicked in a way that I realize now was exceedingly rare. We were writing music that excited us, even developing a little following down there. And we had formed a friendship that only working tirelessly toward some common end can forge. Just a month before I left we’d literally been in Shangri-la: a delightful analog studio across from a federal penitentiary where we cut an EP, the lone document of my time back home in Georgia. I’d believed in the dream of the band, if only for a minute, then left in search of another.
*
The lights are always dim at Hank’s Saloon, thanks to neon PBR and Budweiser signs and a few Christmas lights strung across any inch of space not already occupied by stickers and photos that are by turns ironic and earnest. In chalk, above the tap list, it always says “HANK’S FOR COMING!” Sometimes the regulars are into the band playing just a few feet away from the bar, other times they try to tune them out.
Onstage, David is gyrating his hips and nailing guitar licks with the deft hand of someone who practices nightly. To his left, Alex is laying down chunky rhythm on a bass he built himself during his time at a boutique guitar maker years before. Behind them, Charlie, our leader, is defending his title as the hardest-hitting drummer in Brooklyn, hammering fills note-for-note on songs he learned in a heartbeat.
I am also there.
It’s not my playing that has me feeling out of place. I know my way around a guitar well enough that you have to watch pretty close before you realize I’m so-so at best. Anyway, Night Moves is a labor of love; none of us is setting out to impress anyone. It’s an excuse to hang out as much as anything else, and at least sixty percent of our practices have historically consisted of talking about, acquiring, or eating food.
Our covers—songs by ZZ Top and Rod Stewart, Thin Lizzy and Dire Straits, BTO, Heart, Blondie, Procol Harem, Queen, Madonna, Foreigner, Wilson Phillips, Seals & Crofts, Fogerty, Petty, Bowie, Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Elton John—all are pretty rough around the edges. Some are a lot rough. We play them a little too fast, drive the guitars a little too much. But we have fun.
If endless rounds of Among Us taught us anything during the pandemic, though, it’s that the thing about imposter syndrome is that sometimes you’re not the imposter. But sometimes you are.
*
Only a couple of years after I’d left the band, I was back in it.
The plans for our reunion were hatched at a festival in Toronto modeled on South by Southwest, predictably named North by Northeast. Along with a talented and supernaturally muscular drummer named Greg, Mike and David traveled from Georgia in a brick-red church van they’d bought while I boarded a nine-hour Greyhound from Boston. We rented a rehearsal space in Toronto to run through the set and performed it that night. I remember it being one of the best shows of my life.
Shortly thereafter, David and Mike found a permanent drummer, Alex—a musical prodigy who’d already found some success as a guitarist touring around the southeast—and needed a bass player to complete the picture. By then we’d gotten back in touch, emailing demos, album recommendations, and a slew of op-eds and hot takes on the Bush administration. The anger, by then, had faded.
The plan was for everyone to spin down their lives in Georgia and Massachusetts and reconvene in Brooklyn. From there, we’d take over New York, then the rest of the country. Mike and David were understandably nervous about having me back. I promised that there’d be no repeat of Atlanta, and they believed me.
With four songwriters, a dedicated rhythm section, two guitars, and songs slathered in harmonies—a style Alex would dub “team-o”—the band was transformed. We all started to get the feeling that something good could happen. In New York we found a practice space the size and shape of a doorstop across from the Acme Smoked Fish factory and began rehearsing nightly. After just a few months, we were tighter than we had ever been, writing songs and booking gigs around Brooklyn, New England, even a tour out west. We cut an EP, then recorded an album with plans to shop it around to labels. Designs for a second, larger tour were in the works.
Then, for the second time in the span of just a few years, I quit.
The reasons this time were the same, if fuzzier: I wanted to find stability, I was worried about money. Plans for my upcoming marriage added a new wrinkle, a fresh reason to pull away. The split opened up more gradually this time, a slow yawn as I backed further and further away from my friends. The anger, this time, was immediate.
After I quit, the band pressed on. Alex switched to bass and Charlie, a friend of David’s, joined on drums. The four of them became, to my ears, the best band in Brooklyn, for a time at least. Eventually they, too, stopped playing out and I’ve always felt, vainly, that the seeds to their demise were cast by my acts of sabotage over the years. That being abandoned at key moments cost them crucial momentum. But that would be to put myself at the center of something that reached its apotheosis without me.
I caught just one live show of theirs after I left. It was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and they had become a pumping, vibrant noise machine. The songs were better than anything I’d helped to write. I remember the room being packed in a way it had never been when I was in the band, and in the front row people were singing along in a way I’d never experienced. I stood at the back, a stranger to the sound.
*
My friend Omer [2] calls it a tone quest: the hunt for some perfect noise and the instrument that holds it. You buy and sell, trade and barter, endlessly searching for that one magical guitar, or bass, or pedal. It is a chimera, of course: tone, as they say, is in the hands. It’s a uniquely capitalist form of displacement, pure and simple: the drive to buy what you cannot create. What follows is the meandering route of my tone quest, a path of pathological bass-trading you can trace rough-shod across a decade of my life like a drunk driver crossing the center line:
Squier Precision Bass Special, black
Fender Hot-Rodded Precision Bass, “Sunset Orange Transparent”
Ernie Ball Stingray, sunburst
Fender Precision Bass, sunburst
Fender Jazz Bass, black
Fender Precision Bass, sunburst
Ernie Ball Stingray, black
1973 Fender Precision Bass, natural
Fender ‘62 Reissue Jazz Bass, sunburst
Fender Precision bass, transparent white
Fender Jazz Bass, black
Ernie Ball Stingray, black
Fender Jazz Bass, “Charcoal Frost Metallic”
They were all great instruments, some a bit more special than others, maybe, yet none of them ever sounded like anything other than myself.
*
It started with a message from David, a year or so after my marriage detonated messily in my face. He had a side project and needed a new bass player, so I joined him for a few shows.
Then Alex reached out: another side project—a country band, this time—in need of a bass player. That lasted a little longer, and we played together more often.
Eventually I started my own band, Self Help, with a drummer I’d met in Alex’s project (also named Mike, also one of the most gifted and sweetest people I have met) and my partner, writer and rocker Melissa Faliveno. Because I lack the mental fortitude to sing and play bass at the same time, I played guitar. Then, in a bold reversal, I reached out to David to play bass. Much to my good fortune, he agreed.
That was a decade ago and, after more than five years spent performing around Brooklyn, we still play together today, despite the fact that we live in different states and that there are now about a dozen other bands named Self Help (though I can almost guarantee ours is the only one named after the Lorrie Moore book). As I write this, we’re putting a song together through the magic of email [3].
It turns out I never wanted to be a musician. At least not in the sense I once understood it. I couldn’t make those sacrifices, didn’t enjoy the rewards. In Self Help, making it big has never been the plan; hauling black boxes across town is the point. Not long after starting Self Help, Melissa and I joined a soul music project led by David’s partner, Angela. Over the years, our musical and personal lives became more and more incestuously intertwined, the sticky strands of friendship weaving us together tighter than we had been before. I started a monthly acoustic series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn; someone would always bring donuts. It felt like Sunday dinner with a big, talented family.
David, Alex, and Charlie kicked off Night Moves with a gig in Times Square. I joined later, on rhythm guitar. By then David, Alex, and Charlie were all married, each of us with careers and relationships that took up more time than music. We played together only a few times after I joined, but by then we were seeing a lot of each other in our various side projects, making plans for more. It is much to my own chagrin I admit that playing cover songs is about the happiest I’ve ever been as a musician.
Then life began to pull at the threads of our friendship. Charlie became a father, then David, then Alex. David and Angela moved to Nashville; not long after, Alex moved to Philadelphia. Along with Charlie, I stuck it out in Brooklyn a while longer before packing up and moving to Ohio, that great, flattened heart of the Rust Belt. After a brief stint in a new location, Hank’s Saloon closed in 2019.
As soon as I’d found these people again, it seemed, we were moving on.
Before that, though, we played one final show. David had just announced he was moving to Tennessee, which meant the end of Night Moves, the end of Self Help, the end of the soul band with Angela. The gig at Hank’s Saloon was Alex’s idea—our last hurrah. We’d pull out all the stops, play two sets. For some reason Alex thought it important we order a tremendous number of pizzas and have them all delivered to the bar. We’d do a song with Angela, Melissa, and Alex’s wife, also named Alex; old friends and former bandmates would open up the show. The strands of our incestuous little music scene would be all over the stage, holding us together for just a few more hours.
*
In “The Myth of Love,” Dan Baird shows us the notched underside of the shiny nickel that is “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.” If the narrator and his quarry in “Keep Your Hands” are engaged in an endless game of cat and mouse, in “The Myth of Love,” Baird reveals that game to be unwinnable:
Oh, the myth of love,
Like some new best friend;
The bright promise of tomorrow
And tomorrow without end.
Oh but I should know better,
Life is no wishing well …
It’s a hard truth to hear, even through Baird’s winking, charismatic drawl. True love, he tells us, is a sham. Trying to find it, the original tone quest.
There is no one person, no one thing that will shine a light on life’s filthy parking lot and turn it into a rolling prairie. There is no safe, warm place. Just those few people willing to stand in the rain, loading big black boxes out in the darkness with you, if you can find the wisdom to hang on to them.
*
One of the most useful lessons I learned from David was about gear. It was one he learned in a moment of shifting priorities when he’d somewhat hilariously traded a valuable Gibson Les Paul for a banjo and a djembe, both of which would go on to collect a fair amount of dust. “Never trade anything,” he said, commiserating over the wonderful instruments we’d both let go of over the years. “Just add to the collection.”
It’s old wisdom: what makes an instrument sound good is playing it as often as you possibly can.
*
The pizza arrives between sets, right on time. Glorious towers of steaming pies are stacked along pool tables; outside, smokers stub out their cigarettes to come in and eat, crisp December air rushing in. The jukebox cuts back on and some of the crowd starts to shift from loose to just slightly sloppy.
We grab a slice or two and get ready for the second set. Alex and David handle most of the vocal duties in Night Moves, but I sing lead on a couple of tunes and I’m nervous about this next one. “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is not a hard song to play, but it’s a tough song to sell. It takes confidence. Somewhere beneath the heat, the noise, and the booze, I wonder if I’m still the weak link. I wonder if I’m going to be the one to bring this whole magical moment crashing back down to Earth. If, when I step up to the mic to sing, people will see that what I really am, deep down, is a quitter.
The sun drops low in the early evening and the jukebox is switched off as we make our way back onto the stage. Behind us, old amps lean on one another in great piles of speakers; the floor underneath is snaked with cables, littered with pedals. We launch into the set and it’s a hell of a ride. The crowd, fueled by pepperoni and pools of grease, is louder and more energetic than before. Even some of the regulars up at the bar seem to be bobbing their heads along. Alex sounds like Springsteen at his best as we pound through “Dancing in the Dark;” David tears through our rendition of Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” like it’s a punk-rock psalm.
By the time we come to “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” the crowd is warm and we are dripping with sweat under the twinkling fairy lights above the stage. David steps back to make room for me up front, and it no longer matters whether I can channel Dan Baird or not, whether I can sell this fantastic, timeless song about chasing. What matters is this room, this stage, these people all gathered together as snow starts to fall outside. What matters is the hours, the years it took to get here, the text chains and emails, the departures and returns, the threads of this friendship we’ll cast ahead across the years, across state lines. What matters is holding onto each of these people as tightly as I can. I want them to know that, how much they mean to me. I want them to know how much they’ve always meant. I step up to the mic and try to show them.
[1] PSA: the Honda Element is a terrible vehicle for a band. “But surely it’s the perfect cross between an SUV and a van,” you might say. Once I shared your folly. Its size is deceptive: through some warping of Newtonian physics it is significantly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. It can barely fit a drum kit, let alone all the associated amps and guitars, and its peripheral visibility is somehow less than zero. Riding in a Honda Element is like riding in a discarded refrigerator but without the sex appeal.
[2] Omer Leibovitz, one of the finest musicians and producers I know. You can check out his music at www.omerleibovitz.com.
[3] As part of the SongWriter podcast: www.songwriterpodcast.com.
Jonathan Walsh is a writer, musician, and history teacher. He sings, plays guitar, and writes for his band, Self Help, and is currently at work on a novel about the absurdity of teaching high school.
frankensteinman’s monster: a duet by mark butler and laura lorson on “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through”
Pop music leans hard on dreams…dreams of love, dreams of getting out and going anywhere but here, dreams of a different life. The combination of dreams and a beat that makes your heart race is potent. Everything about it is thrilling, and immersive. It’s hot, it’s big, it’s wild, and when it’s done well, it’s addictive. “More,” you think. “I want more of this feeling. “
Jim Steinman, the architect of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, is all about “more.” He was rock’s resident bigger-better-faster-more impresario. Beneath the Dionysian excess of choirs and codas and angst, his work whispers “Hey, kid…there’s something amazing out there waiting for you. Go on, take a look. First taste is free.”
How could the restless youth of Reagan’s America not be drawn in by a lurid carnival of teenage hormones, celestial choirs and American guitars? Certainly, the two of us succumbed. We were kids in our respective middles of nowhere—Mark in Kansas, Laura in Kentucky—who were feverish for pop songs, American Top 40, and anything big and loud. We did have rock and roll dreams. Accordingly, we understood that someone (namely, Jim Steinman) must have blessed us when he gave us his songs.
The two of us decided to tackle the giant, wonderful behemoth of a song that has rewired our brains, cemented a friendship, and made us question our own dreams by putting it into context, through a record of the time and the zeitgeist. And yeah, it’s rock and roll, so this is a duet. The why of this approach will become clear as we move forward. Laura and Mark’s solos are helpfully labeled for your reading pleasure. Everything else (like this segment) is in unison. So…settle in. Surely you didn’t think a meditation on a six minute and twenty-three second magnum opus was going to be the sort of thing you could read in 4 minutes?
But, stop right there, before we go any further… behold the one-hit wonder who also sold 100 million records by eclipsing hearts, making all the stadiums rock, and doing (almost) anything for love. It's Jim Steinman and “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through.”
Part One: Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Laura: 1981, Kentucky
I’m listening to the American Top 40, like I always do, on a Saturday. I’m 13. I hear a song that is definitely NOT by Stars on 45. It is also not “Gemini Dream,” which is the song I’m actually waiting to hear. I have plans to tape it. But this song is vaguely ominous, and enormous. It’s too big for my GE clock radio speaker. I have no idea what it is. I hear Casey explain it’s by Jim Steinman. I write down the name in my special American Top 40 notebook. (You don’t understand how challenging it was in the pre-internet world to find out what a song you heard in passing on the radio was called, or who it was by. I took copious notes every week. I made flow charts. Capsule reviews.) “Jim Steinman,” I think. “I wonder who that is.” I underline the name. I wonder if I’ll hear it again next week.
I hear it again next week. This song is…and I distinctly remember thinking this…completely hilarious, and awful, and absolutely wonderful.
I hear it on the radio, NOT on Casey Kasem, the following week. It’s gaining traction. That means I can look for it at Musicland.
I find it at Musicland. I buy the 45 with some of my birthday money. I bring it home and put it on the record player in my bedroom. My dad let me put his old Voice of Music stereo in my room when they bought a new walnut cabinet console for the living room. It’s old, the motor smells like dust cooking, but it plays just fine. It has a fascinating spindle adapter. I put it on the turntable, lower the single onto it, start the record, and listen. I am thrilled by this. The song continues to feel enormous. I listen to it again, a little louder this time. I want to fill up the entire space with it, with the weird choir of angels at the end. I have no idea what this song is supposed to mean, but it is big and majestic and about rock and roll coming through…for you…in a world of things that never come through, for you. I listen to the song three more times before my mom comes upstairs to find out why I keep playing this song. I stop, and do my algebra homework. I listen to it again before I go to sleep. “You can’t run away forever,” I sing along in my head. “...but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.”
Mark, 1981, Kansas
In 1981... I was on the verge of being lost. I was a lonely kid with a brain that was sizzling all day long. I was flying fast, but with no destination. My old friends couldn’t keep up with my boundless curiosity and my “why so many questions” parents gave up on trying to understand me. I was smart enough to know that adolescent troublemakers get all the wrong attention and compliant weirdos get left to their own devices. That gave me hours every day with The Music, which I remember with vivid clarity.
For a curious kid in the middle of Kansas, “somewhere else” was my destination and the radio was my only mode of transportation. I could goose that engine to get me to Topeka and Wichita, or even Chicago, if I held the antenna just right. No matter where I traveled, I found the same thing: a steady diet of meat and potatoes rock. The best stations gave me more, pushing me towards what I really needed without knowing it: a guru, a curator, and something close enough to a friend—the DJ.
The smart, funny, excited adult voices of the DJs afforded me companionship, enthusiasm and old fashioned gospel-style sermonizing but minus all that church stuff. You better believe I made note of those sermons: rock and roll is what you need, and possibly *all* you need.
My sizzle brain was thrilled that for once I could not keep up with this endless stream of music curated by my new friends. Like Laura, I took notes on breakouts and picks to click. I taped stuff… fingers hovering over the Record button. I hoarded Billboard Hot 100s and started memorizing that week’s AT40.
The charts sent a vital signal to this lonely kid. If I like a song on the countdown this week, there must be others like me because lots of people like it too. And here was this guy Jim Steinman putting his all into this song that was telling me everything I needed to hear at the end of the summer of seventh grade. So, of course, I remember the music. What else was there?
Laura and Mark, 1986, Kansas
It’s 1986 and we have both ended up in Lawrence, Kansas, adrift among endless possibilities and brimming with curiosity about everything. We might have cooled on the tired old rock and roll dreams of classic rock radio - but we are absolutely feverish about each and every next big thing.
Laura is a sophomore at KU, and feeling a bit lost. Most of her friends from freshman year had been seniors, and graduated. Aside from the social isolation, it means that her source of free jazz and art rock has dried up. Her other friends from high school had evolved into big Windham Hill fans and were spending a lot of time with each other, which seems to her to be kind of a waste of the college experience. She spends a lot of time reading NME and Spin and Melody Maker, because everyone else she knows seems to be utterly fixated on the Grateful Dead or Hot Tuna, with the one weird Andreas Vollenweider contingent. It’s fine, but it just feels like…there must be something more out there. She visits a record store on her first day back in Lawrence, and the store is playing “Virginia Plain” on the p.a. “This,” she thinks. “This is what I want. I want to be the sort of person who goes places where the staff plays glam-era Roxy Music.” She buys a King Crimson album, to the approval of the guy at the counter. The future felt enormous, and like there ought to be more to it, musically speaking, than her new roommate’s fixation on Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” and Michael McDonald. There’s a time and a place for the popular, but right now, she’s on fire for arcana, apocrypha, incunabula.
After a very unengaged and random college search process, Mark has uprooted himself for the first time in his life, a whopping 90 miles down the interstate, largely due to The University of Kansas offering a high saturation rate per capita of very with-it record stores.
In the years leading up to college, he had carefully cultivated a seismic shift in his musical tastes. He didn’t need Foreigner 4 and Eagles’ Greatest Hits when he had Let’s Active and The Damned. This makeover wasn’t calculated for social status. He was doing this for himself, no longer wishing to shoulder the burden of big, obvious rock. He’d discovered weirder, edgier, more deeply felt stuff and couldn’t get enough of it. As a 17 year-old freshman, he hadn’t mastered high school social dynamics, so certainly did not know how to attempt a college reboot.
New town, new people. He hadn’t exactly thought that through, schlepping into college with an uncool haircut, no sense of purpose, and an inability to instigate a conversation with anyone. Thank god for the John Hughes approach (obsess over good stuff, put up tons of posters, wear band shirts, and organically find your real tribe) and their uncanny ability to broadcast a signal to the folks you want to reach.
Mark: I don’t know if I was wearing my beloved fuchsia R.E.M. Little America shirt when my roommate William introduced me to “Laurel Orson, who is also weird like you”. (He might have said “cool” but we both know he meant “weird.”) But that shirt with the cruddy bicycle on it definitely sparked a connection. I had found a key person in my tribe, so much so that she’s here in this very essay. Smart AF and ready to dig into anything. We instantly and constantly sparred and bonded over philosophy, religion, literature, and yeah, music.
Laura: I don’t remember William being there at all—I remember looking for him and you were, rather thrillingly, putting up posters, cheat codes to the as-yet-unknown puzzle of you. Cocteau Twins. Kate Bush. I remember thinking, “This is a person who likes the sort of music I like.” I don’t make friends easily, so this whole meet-cute would usually be my cue to flee the scene, but it turned out you were funny, and clever, and smart. We ended up talking music, of course, and we talked a long time, because you were putting up posters for bands that I liked, or had read about, and you were handling albums like they were precious, like they meant something almost religious to you. It was a long time ago. Either way, the die was cast.
We spoke in tongues as one must in those formative early days of early days.
“This Mortal Coil?”
“Of course, That Petrol Emotion?”
“Alex Chilton?”
“The song or the guy?”
Music and friends who loved music sustained us more in that year of college than any beer and pizza ever could.
Part Two: Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire)
In these times of curious and cool, there was little room to air guilty pleasures, because the genuine pleasures of the new, the weird, and the transgressive gave no room for the oldies of yore.
Mark: So… Laura, if I’m vague on specifics about how we met, I also don’t remember how we outed ourselves on the least cool thing that you or I liked. My guess is that it was “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” a song that continued to leak out of dorm rooms, car speakers, and house parties (for squares, natch.) And it was probably an involuntary response to Rory Dodd (take note, foreshadowing fans) and his falsetto “turn around” and you and I excitedly blurting out “every now and then I fall apart!”
Laura: The conversation somehow got around to me asking “what is the worst popular song you have ever heard” and to be honest I think this was because someone was probably blasting Boston’s “Amanda” just down the hallway. You said, “You probably won’t know this song, it wasn’t a massive hit, but it’s by this guy, Jim Steinman, the producer? It’s kind of simultaneously wonderful and terrible. Have you heard of a song called ‘Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through’?” and I suddenly knew with complete certainty and absolute clarity: I am going to be friends with Mark Butler for the rest of my life.
We both wanted to keep the cool kid conversation focused on random NME cover stars and Julian Cope and the 4AD design aesthetic, but it kept creeping back to this overblown, overwrought AOR rock dude who kept putting his name on the front cover of other people’s records—“Songs By Jim Steinman.”
Mark: Forget about Bonnie Tyler. What about “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All?”
Laura: Oh, the one that can make all the stadiums rock? Didja know there’s a Streisand one? Oh yeah, and a Manilow one.
Weirdly (or deeply on brand for this fast-forming friendship), we almost NEVER bring the conversation back to Meat Loaf and Bat Out Of Hell, where Jim Steinman made his name, his reputation, and his fortune. No, we return to “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,” the song where Jim Steinman became the center of gravitational pull in his own universe… where he became in his mind a true auteur, an ur-songsmith. This song became our touchstone, the codex that we need to crack to understand this singular and puzzling body of work. And as it turns out decades later, “Songs By Jim Steinman” feed the current of a continuing obsession of our friendship.
What are these songs?!? For one thing, they’re our songs. They’ve bonded to us. The absurdist statements built out of non-sequitur titles. The bombastic swells of choristers. The forever-teenage angst. It’s saturated all the way down into us. And somehow, it’s bonded us together. We didn’t know this at that moment and we may not have fully realized it until a litany of social media posts made it impossible to ignore that we couldn’t stop talking about Jim Freaking Steinman.
Mark: I’d much rather talk about Love’s Forever Changes—the heartbreaking masterpiece that still reveals new secrets even today. (The best birthday present a kid ever wanted, by the way. 1987. Thanks, Laura.) But maybe—ok, definitely—Forever Changes is perfect even in its imperfections and how long can you talk about perfection before you get bored? Go listen to the perfect thing and hush up. The oeuvre of Jim Steinman is far from perfect. It’s a hot mess, frankly, of mixed metaphors and constant sonic overkill. And that mess is one of the things that brings us back.
In fact, it’s fair to say that we have many of the same questions today as we had on the night we first met.
If someone’s been through the fires of hell, would they really save the ashes to prove it?
When he wants “ to wrap myself around you like a winter skin,” is it as creepy as you think?
Who among us has truly made love out of nothing at all or suffered from a partial eclipse of the heart?
Wouldn’t you rather have a rock and roll dream come true instead of come through?
C’mon, Jim, we love you, but make better choices. Religions were built on lesser inscrutability. When we praise these songs, we also want to bury them. But much like the generic American teen dude that seems to loom large throughout so many “Songs By Jim Steinman,” we never stop coming back for more.
Part Three: Left in the Dark
Laura: To really get at the core of that endless attraction, we’re going to need to digress for a minute. In retrospect, one extremely weird thing about culture in the late 70s and early 80s is that nostalgia was big. REALLY big. Kids like us were swimming in it, the whole 50s revival thing. But we were kids. It wasn’t OUR nostalgia. It was our parents’. We didn’t even know it was nostalgia. We thought it was just…culture. Happy Days and its attendant spinoffs were just kind of what you watched, because they were there, like Mount Everest. So as a kid, my popular culture was actually nostalgic comfort food schlock for my parents, who did not in fact even watch it themselves, because they were busy generating new experiences to create more content for the military-industrial-entertainment complex. This sort of thing is probably why I ended up in grad school.
Anyway, all that aside, nostalgia was everywhere, it’s just that it wasn’t nostalgia for which I had any frame of reference…except in music. If you grew up with a radio, you heard 50s songs. You heard 60s songs. So I could recognize “nostalgia” as a broad category in songs being produced in the 70s and 80s. Plus, the songs were largely about recapturing a kind of youthful insouciance of which I had absolutely no experience. I realized at the time that clearly I was missing out, because I was certainly not hitting winning home runs or having someone walk right up and ask me if I wanted to dance, or having some guy pull up in front of my house waiting for me to slam the screen door (as my dress swayed) so we could pull out of this town full of losers. It was only later that I figured out practically none of the people for whom these nostalgic songs were written actually had those experiences, either. All that rock and roll “glory days” Americana was fundamentally reliant upon archetypes that had no basis in reality for the vast majority of the listening audience, but collectively they Meant Something. Pure simulacra.
The important part of this, aside from establishing how insufferable I am, is that at a very young age I became aware that the whole enterprise, once you get to the center of the Tootsie Pop, turns out to be hollow. Which brings me to my actual point about rock and roll dreams. Steinman was an astonishingly effective dream merchant because he understood what made dreams addictive to a kid in a mid-size town, or at least a town that wasn’t New York City or LA. He left a trail of breadcrumbs in his work—that Hal Blaine heartbeat drumline? Check. Non-specific dramatic tension? Check. Big guitars? Check. This is such stuff as dreams are made on: nostalgia, longing, and the promise of the new. This is a composer and lyricist who understood the nature of fame, and how if it’s anything, it’s the proverbial monkey’s paw. You want to be famous? There is a cost. You want to be fulfilled artistically? There is a cost. But that doesn’t make the dream any less beautiful. Rock and roll dreams are particularly beautiful when you’re a teenager, because you still buy the whole package. Years pass before you understand how the sausage is made. Spangles look tawdry up close; stage cosmetics up close are vaguely repellent; what looks like heaven from the cheap seats turns out to be smoke and mirrors. I think this is why even as a kid at ground zero of the MTV era, I always preferred the radio to video—music as mindscape felt limitless, whereas music videos always felt limited, bounded, ultimately claustrophobic. “Here’s our approved vision of the song,” said the Machine. “Whatever you were thinking, consumer…uh, I mean, uh, kid…that’s not it.”
Anyway…back to the issue of the rock and roll dream, a la Jim. The song is frankly a strange interlude. It taps into the pain of isolation, but in a way that you don’t realize it ‘til you zoom in tight. It’s about escaping into a kind of fugue state, propelled by bass and guitar and drums that make you forget for a minute that you are sitting on your bed listening to a radio. Jim Steinman’s rock and roll dreams put our little lives on pause for a moment. And however cynical you end up becoming about rock and roll, or dreams…that’s not nothing. That’s straight-up magic.
Mark: With a clearer view of that nostalgia factory that we grew up in, it made me question what my rock and roll dreams were. Even if rock was starting to be consumed by focus groups and corporate earnings, the dreams were real and they could still bring dreamers together. In 1981, those dreams were basic and colossal: Be in a band. (Guitar, obviously.) Be really loud. Buy every good record. Be a DJ that played only the best of those songs. Make out with someone. Work in a record store. Be a big deal.
Nothing fancy here and nothing complex for a lonely kid. Just basic double-necked guitar and Marshall stacks. At 12, though, these felt like unobtainable lifelong goals, born of growing up in a household governed by a slowly smothering mantra of “that’s not a good idea.” A steady diet of “no” would have sparked rebellion, but I found myself choosing stealth and harboring my rock and roll dreams in my secret rock and roll lair of 45s and music magazines.
But then… wow! Within the next five years, thanks to Jim Steinman or possibly despite Jim Steinman, my rock and roll dreams did come through (with the exception of the last one, where I learned I have a severe allergy to being anywhere near the center of attention). Rock and roll dreams were… easy. A bit of a let down, to be honest.
By the time I met Laura in 1986, the only rock and roll dream that hadn’t been crossed off was “buy every good record,” a dream which remains naggingly unfulfilled even today. I wanted to find out about the amazing redemptive and inspirational powers of rock and roll, but I wanted to find out on my own. Or…even better…with kindred spirits to join me on hunts through the record racks. Music could still be a solitary experience, but now by choice—it suddenly tasted more rich and flavorful with friends.
Once I discovered the possibility of frenetic interactions with fellow music fans, my obsessions intensified. I needed the new, the innovative, the never-before-heard, the weird. I could not stop and play one record over and over for the rest of my life. I couldn’t even play one genre of music exclusively for a day. Rock and roll was meant to be intensely exciting. Every return to an old favorite drained a little more blood from it until I would find those songs almost empty. Nothing could replace the first time you heard your new favorite song.
Laura: Oh, exactly, I was trying to explain this not long ago, about why it’s so hard to write a truly great pop song. The best I could come up with was “it’s extraordinarily hard to write a song that makes someone fall in love with it every time they hear it, whether it’s time one or time 87.” You become a different sort of listener, the more you add tools to your toolbox. I have a very different sense of DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing…” now that I have 25 more years of listening intensively to more records under my belt than I did back in 1996. Then, it was just this big aural soundscape with interesting moments, and now that I actually really recognize the beats and breaks, it’s a much different kind of experience. But you were saying….
Mark: I’m always intrigued when a song can be reinvigorated. Sometimes, it’s as simple as hearing it under new circumstances, but often, it’s who you hear it with. In 1986, we’d share new finds and beloved oldies that found new life and new affection when the enthusiasm of a fellow believer would reawaken them. And yes, even the ridiculously oversized works of Jim Steinman took on new meaning when I found someone to share it with. The two of us would talk feverishly about those Steinman Events where a song of ginormous proportions would be a guaranteed hit. (Of course, we did not know that Jim’s imperial phase had already wound down by 1986. Neither did Jim, I would wager.)
You could not shut the two of us up when we found out our Jim was working with The Sisters Of Mercy. Mister Magnum Opus was going to work with those morose mopesters! “This is going to be amazing,” we’d exclaim to anyone who’d listen. “Yeah, well, is it going to be good,” they’d ask. And we’d yelp back in delight, “That literally doesn’t matter!” And yes, “This Corrosion” was great and ridiculous and ridiculously great, but it felt like a dead-end. He’d gone from Manilow to Goth in a matter of years…where else could he go? (“Broadway!” was our long-running answer to this rhetorical question.)
Jim Steinman and the 12-year-old me had done big already—bombastic and grandiose and widescreen spoke volumes to me in my early R&R dreaming. Signs were indicating that Jim had taken big as far as he could, but he kept going. I, however, couldn’t. His songs became wings of the Winchester Mansion… he had to keep building forever to fend off evil spirits. I realized I’d rather hang out with the ghosts instead of contending with constant construction and convoluted results. I needed new thrills and a regular dose of them.
These songs that always opted for overload became too much for me. So, I moved on. Most people did. But just like we praise intrepid pioneers of yore, we still celebrate the audacity and the scope of Jim Steinman’s epics.
Laura: Now that you mention audacity and scope, this seems like a decent place to get into the nuts and bolts of “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through.” It’s profoundly odd. That’s what makes a song that doesn’t necessarily have a hook as big as a house memorable and noteworthy. Love it or hate it, it makes an impression (much like Wile E. Coyote slamming into the side of a cliff. Perhaps “indentation” is a better term here). The whole enterprise is designed to make an impression. One does not simply walk into Bearsville Studios, my friend. Let’s take a look at this lineup. There's only room for E-Streeters, most of Utopia, Elton’s guitarist, and even some Blues Brothers.
And all this is before you get to the producers, who were John Jansen (Britney Fox, reprazent!), Todd Rundgren (well, sure), Steinman (duh), and…wait for it…Jimmy Iovine (needs no explanation.)
It’s just one more way that this song managed to compile all the components of the cultural movements that were brewing at the time. I actually think of it as an example of what made postmodernity—in philosophy and the social sciences anyway—so appealing as writers started to develop a new kind of cultural criticism. Steinman took a form that relied on cultural synthesis (i.e. rock and roll) and then went ahead and threw everything but the kitchen sink at it (i.e., multiple historic undercurrents in rock that had been perceived as outdated and old-fashioned, using Tin Pan Alley song structure and Brill Building hookiness, combined with cabaret intimacy and Broadway theatricality and arena-rock excess). It’s pastiche, it’s synthesis, it’s commodification. But why is THIS song from the Steinman oeuvre the one I just can’t quit poking at, like a sore tooth? What is it about THIS one that made it such an odd touchstone? I, of course, have a theory.
It’s impossible to talk about Jim Steinman without at least considering one Marvin, later Michael, Lee Aday, which is to say Meat Loaf. He had an enormous physical presence, and an enormous voice. He was, in short, perfect for performing Steinman’s work. Bat Out of Hell was such a cultural juggernaut that it, and the songs (“by Jim Steinman,” we are once again helpfully reminded) it comprised, took on a life of their own. For better or for worse, it cemented the two men together creatively and artistically. But if you listen to Meat Loaf’s recording of “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” from 1994, it seems pallid and unmemorable. So what’s missing? I would have loved to hear a circa-1977 Meat Loaf give it a go. Watch one of those old, grainy video clips of the band out flacking BOoH at the time—known as the, uh, Neverland Express, if you can believe it. You probably saw some of this footage at least once in the earlier incarnations of MTV, or maybe on USA Network’s Night Flight. I have an absolutely terrifying clip of them tearing up “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” on The Old Grey Whistle Test. This staggering chaos was aggressively pure performance. It felt genuine. That drama, that passion, that theatre is what is missing from the 1994 remake, which felt lazy and languid like a massive, over-indulged cat, sprawled on a Victorian settee. A performance of “RRDCT” requires a kind of theatrical, adolescent recklessness if it’s not just going to be seen as ludicrous in every way. Shades of the Pamchenko Twist from The Cutting Edge, right? If you don’t commit to it completely, someone’s gonna get seriously hurt. The key to a Jim Steinman song is not so much the phony rock-and-roll dramatics or the subtextual violence and sexuality. It’s the danger of the performance. Everything about it is so highly strung that it could just snap at any moment—a Jim Steinman composition is literally the staged experience of teen angst. And this song, honestly, is the Steinmaniest.
Mark: By the way, I think it’s vital to point out here that Jim didn’t sing on his one and only Top 40 entry. Those credited “featured vocals” mean that Rory Dodd took the lead. (You all know Rory. He also sang the “turn around, bright eyes” hook on “Total Eclipse.”) This fact still shocks me. It suggests that Jim was either fully committed to the all-star performance strategy to get this song onto the charts - or he felt like his own voice paled next to that of his partner/nemesis Meat Loaf. If you listen to the rest of Bad For Good where Jim sings, it’s a bit of both.
Laura: The thing about this song is that it starts from the presumption that you, the listener, are well-versed enough in the history of rock and the mechanics of performance that OF COURSE you are going to get all the references. Just the act of listening to it made you part of the club. OF COURSE you are familiar with the 32-bar A-A-B-A structure of Tin Pan Alley songcraft. OF COURSE you understand operatic pacing, recitative, and the dramatic coda. OF COURSE you are familiar with Grand Guignol. OF COURSE he does not need to spell this out for you, you’re in the club. For those of us who were of the right age and know-it-all temperament when this thing came out, it wasn’t just a song—it was bait.
But the best bait in the world won’t work unless the fish are in the mood to bite. There was something in the air at the time, something this song tapped into. There was a whole lot of “rock is redemptive” going on. A whale-ship might have been Herman Melville’s Yale College and his Harvard, but ours was rock and roll radio. Chapter and verse of our common scripture was Bruce Springsteen No(t) Surrender(ing), Bob Seger still liking that old time rock’n’roll, Joan Jett not giving a damn about her bad reputation. The Sex Pistols…not that you ever got to hear them on the radio in the American heartland…wondered if we ever got the feeling we’d been cheated, and the answer was yes. Something fascinating was always going on just over the horizon, and you were worried that you might miss it. But rock radio was a periscope, a pair of binoculars.
Radio isn’t like it used to be in the 80s. While a short stint listening to Midwestern broadcast commercial radio right this minute might lead one to believe that “no, in fact it is almost precisely like it used to be, right down to the very songs being played,” it’s really not. There’s way more information available. There’s streaming, there’s social media, decades of music articles online—back in the 80s, you had to work hard to find out anything, anything at all about a song you heard once and might have liked. You had no idea what was in the pipeline. You might have some sense of what was up and coming and what people in the big cities were listening to via induction, when you saw a sketch on a variety show or maybe someone made a reference to something on Saturday Night Live. This is how I learned about punk rock. I was lucky enough to grow up in Louisville, with a quirky set of AM stations and a thriving AOR FM scene…I vividly recall the launch of a quadraphonic station and hearing Funkadelic for the first time over the commercial airwaves, which now seems impossible. I remember hearing “Ça Plane Pour Moi” on WAKY-79 AM and thinking “this is INCREDIBLE, how can I get more of this?” But by the time I was a teenager, mostly it had all stratified into Rock Stations and Lite Rock Stations and the obligatory community radio station with that one grizzled announcer who was really into Ornette Coleman.
As a kid first hearing “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,” there were already articles of faith within the Church of Rock: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave; baby, we were born to run; and music could save your mortal soul. We believed these things in the same way our parents believed in the strength of the U.S. dollar and the superiority of American V8 automobiles that ran on leaded gasoline. We knew that on any given broadcast countdown of the Top 100 Rock Songs of All Time, “Stairway to Heaven” would be Number One. What we did not know, what would remain unwritten, was…where do we go from here?
Mark: From here? For you and me, it’s everywhere, not just where classic rock radio takes us. I’ve come to realize that the true fuel for my rock and roll dreams is not big anthems or overblown bluster. I love the wild knife’s edge of music. I want stuff that explores the darkness within us. I need transgression. I crave something new. I am counting on younger bands, laptop punks, jazzy freaks, and budding weirdos to come kick the ass of the old school. You won’t actually harm the classics but you’ll write a whole new chapter. And you know what, there’s always room for the next Jim Steinman. We won’t know that he or she has arrived until we collectively say “what the hell was that all about?” in the most affectionate way. And of course, “play that insane one again.”
I often wonder if Jim Steinman forgot that dark edge of rock and roll dreaming and instead fixated on rock and roll excess. If he’d thrown a smoke bomb and disappeared through a trap door on the stage in 1984, he’d be the mythical rock beast that appeared on the cover of Bad For Good. “He wrote these insane epic hit singles and then one night, at the stroke of midnight in the middle of a thunderstorm, he was gone.” Instead, he’s also the guy that became the proprietor and CEO of the Bat Out of Hell franchise. BOoH2! And parts of BOoH3! And the musical! The laurels of his original record with Meat Loaf are some fancy digs to rest upon, but when his whole body of work started sounding familiar, Jim’s legacy got significantly diluted.
Nonetheless, as a moment frozen in time, as someone with my own rock and roll dreams, there was something irreplaceably captivating about hearing Jim (or…Rory, whatever) tell you about his own dreams. It felt like he wrote that song for me, and every other adolescent or still-clinging-to-adolescence person out there.
Laura: This gets at a kind of epiphany I had about Jim when I was working at NPR headquarters in the 90s. I was working on a radio feature about Kander & Ebb, trying to find a way to trim it to 8 minutes and I was thinking “this music is too much of an intimate experience to just axe this way” and it hit me all at once, for no good reason: Jim Steinman was writing cabaret. I headed down to the reference library and discovered that he had worked with Joseph Papp with the idea of producing a piece of musical theater that Steinman had developed in college. Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place. The 70s were the pinnacle of arena rock excess. Part of the experience of arena rock at the time involved physical distance from the performers. So when you’re trying to break new ground, how do you overcome that? By dramatically (pun intended) reducing the emotional distance from the musicians. That’s what Steinman did: he upped the emotional intimacy logarithmically, to compensate for the lack of physical proximity. He was writing cabaret, and staging it as rock and roll. Once you posit that it’s all designed with the physical constraints of musical theater in mind, it suddenly isn’t awkwardly grandiose. It’s intimacy turned up to eleven. This is perfectly in line with the kind of emotional drama of the American Teenager, when you feel like every moment is…well, momentous. Steinman songs are designed to preserve every perceived slight or minor drama in amber, eternal and meaningful and fever-pitched, adding to the sense that you’ll always feel this way about whatever it is that’s bumming you out as a teen, whether it was loneliness or getting a bad grade or wishing you were someplace else more thrilling.
Mark: Absolutely. Jim’s compositions were all siren songs for angsty teens. Objectively, Steinman wrote much better songs than his one hit and absolutely everyone who sang them did a much better job than him. But listen, this is rock and roll we’re talking about. Objectivity does not rock. “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” was the perfect song for my absolutely imperfect dawn of adolescence—and all of the 31 other songs that outranked it when it peaked on the charts were not. This song spoke about chasing away loneliness with music, hitting me where no other song had yet hit—and that’s all you need for perfection when you are a lonely kid looking for hope - and for other rock and roll dreamers.
Laura: That tracks with my tween experiences in Louisville, with the particulars just being a bit different. Funny how it turns out in our culture that endlessly capitalizes on “you are special! The most special! No one in the world is like you! Your drama is the most dramatic!”, that most of everyone’s experience of that time is, at the core, more or less the same. Where we diverge, in the end, is that you ended up going deeper into the vaults to find something a bit more stripped-down. I, on the other hand, wanted more of that glorious, unashamed excess. Fortunately for me, there exists such a thing as progressive rock, and much of it was available at astonishingly reasonable prices at used record stores and garage sales. There was certainly quite a bit of Steinman on the airwaves, but none of it had that snap and weirdly wired flair of “RRDCT.” The possible exception to this was “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is equally bonkers lyrically (though for my money no Steinman lyric is as weird as “and the angels had guitars even before they had wings”, which aside from its theological shakiness is just strange). All of this is the long way ‘round of saying: “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” was a springboard into weird rock, the rock that was not being played on the radio in the 80s, the rock that had vision with a capital VISION, so I owe Jim for opening the floodgates of prog rock for me. I wanted big, I wanted complex, I wanted music that required footnotes and a minor in Comparative Literature. Hello, Van der Graaf Generator. Hello, Amon Düül II. Hey there, Queensrÿche. Which is not to say that I was ignoring everything else—I certainly loved punk and garage, indie and top 40 radio play hits, dumb schlocky arena rock and Madchester as much as anyone. But I believe that “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” was the song that pushed me into being the sort of person who wanted to hear more, who wanted to try everything, who ever after wanted to recapture that sort of immersive thrill that I got from that initial Steinman-esque hit of excess. And that’s the magic of what on the surface is admittedly one extremely perplexing moment in 1981, and why it’s a song I keep revisiting. If I hear it come up in a shuffle mix or a feed, I will listen to it, and be vocally judgmental if it’s the radio edit. I will not leap to get it off the speakers in the same way that I would, say “I Love You” by Climax Blues Band or that Vitamin C graduation song. I unapologetically like it, and it’s a part of what shaped my musical taste.
I may be going out on a pretty shaky limb here, but it’s possible “RRDCT” pushed me toward textual analysis as an academic. I spent a lot of time by myself as a teenager, not popular but popular-adjacent, busy but not exactly sought-after. I’d listen to records in that alone-time. I spent an inordinate amount of time mentally dissecting the lyrical nuances of this song. Who is this song for? The singer is singing to someone…who is that person? Is it a girlfriend or boyfriend? Is this a person the songwriter knows? Is it a person at all? I believe that at the core, this is a song about loneliness. It was a song about being young and being lonely, and having rock and roll music be your friend.
Mark: At 12, I was desperate for a friend who understood me. Being told that “you have your entire future ahead of you” is no solace for the lonely. The best I could do in 1981 was find friendship on the radio - and even though it feels foolish to say, Jim Steinman found me when I needed him the most.
Laura: I think Jim pushed me to figure out WHETHER I had rock and roll dreams, actually. My dreams were never “write a hit song” or “perform on a giant stage to a sold-out crowd where everyone loves you”—those both sounded like a trap to me. My dreams were more along the lines of “someday, I will have all the records I want” or “someday, I’ll meet someone I can talk about records with for hours. I will also have amazing speakers.” Those particular rock and roll dreams came through, by the way.
Mark: Yay for that. I realize now the best dreams are the ones that change your life - and when our individual dreams brought us together to talk about pop music (and Talk Talk), our lives got better. Our enthusiasm for music and everything remains fierce and diverse. And yet, we come back again and again to Jim Steinman, giggling over the big bluster of Jim Steinman’s teenage dreams, obsessing over his bold confidence and unshakeable faith in the redemptive power of music that “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” promised.
Laura: He was really good at trapping and preserving that ‘lonely teen’ feeling and spinning it into gold, like Rumplestiltskin. This is a guy who understood his audience, and understood pop music under the hood, as it were. It’s made up of thousands of little spinning cogs and wheels that have to sync up just right or the whole thing will seize like an indifferently-maintained 1982 Iron Duke Camaro and self-destruct. The point of the performance is for us to see past what we think we want, for it to show us something we never imagined we’d see. The point of the spectacle is to create new dreams, rock ‘n’ roll or otherwise, petering out or coming through. That’s why we keep returning to Steinmania. In the end, he was able to channel dreams through ink and paper and pour them out through massive guitars and amps. He’s captured, in music, that whole Lewis Carroll dreamy wistfulness about youth that you find in Through the Looking Glass—just doing it with session players and a production suite the size of a city block: “In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die; Ever drifting down the stream—Lingering in the golden gleam—Life, what is it but a dream?”
Part Four: The Beat Is Yours Forever. The Beat Is Always New.
Jim Steinman’s dreams were a big bombastic celebration of rock and roll excess, a Lost Boy seeking deliverance through music. But unlike Peter Pan…and unlike Jim Steinman…we grew up. Yet, even though we knew better, it turns out the two of us never completely left Jim’s Neverland.
What kept us in his thrall long after his songcraft and his success slowed? We clung to one unexpected dream sprung fully formed from Steinmania: the dream of being audacious, ridiculous and weird. Jim, we cherish your WTF-ness, not your high-rent pickup band, not your clumsy and confusing wordplay, not your choral reprises. (OK, yes, maybe we do love the choral reprises.) And we cherish that you had the world singing along.
It took guts to make records as epic and odd as these. It also took guts for the two of us to ‘fess up to obsessing over these songs in 1986 as the sun had set on Jim’s empire. Steinmania goes beyond guilty pleasures, for us. We shared dreams with Jim Steinman long enough to forge an indelible Mark-and-Laura bond, strong enough that we can always find our back to each other. That’s the true golden nugget…a gift from a wannabe god.
We’ll never go to the mat trying to convince you that “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” is some kind of pinnacle of anything. But this song was a key to a locked door for us. It independently wedged itself into the mind palace of two kids stuck in separate-but-similar places made up of shopping malls, cineplexes and chain restaurants, where the guiding principle for music was “everyone else likes it, so therefore you do, too.” What the song did, in all its six-minute, twenty-seven second overproduced glory, was tap something inside both of us that said “there is more out there for you, if you want it.” Turns out, we did.
We’ve moved on to more brilliant corners and surreal landscapes. Mark became absolutely encyclopedic on rock, garage, punk, dance, electronica, and alphabet pop (J-pop, K-pop, and all that). Laura became a person who gravitated toward energy and excess, which probably explains her love of disco and soul and psychedelia and prog rock, but she also became addicted to the idea of intensity in performance and songcraft, so that led her to experimental jazz, post-rock and extremely gloomy trip-hop, the darker and sparer the better.
No matter how our preferences have evolved, Steinman was a big enough deal then that he is actually kinda inescapable now. When we bump into him on the waiting room speakers at the Toyota dealership or as we wade past a pack of sorority pledges screaming “turn around, bright eyes”, it all comes back to us and our Steinmania easily reignites.
It’s increasingly rare, as you age, that you can pinpoint things that have to do with your personal aesthetics. But those musical moments, for each of us, are the ones we continually mentally revisit: there is something happening in this song. Objectively, it’s ridiculous. Subjectively, those moments of Weird Artistic Transcendence, that moment of sublime connection with a product for which there is an extremely niche market, are incomparable. “Maybe there’s more of that odd thing,” you think. “I would like more of that,” you think. You will now look for that beneath the layers of corporate veneer. You get, on an intrinsic level that you cannot yet name, that the entire enterprise is a kind of commodification of desire. Maybe the thing you’re looking for from art, that lightning-in-a-bottle moment of connection, is not on the highway. Maybe it’s in a cul-de-sac. Let’s go find out.
This one song, from its initial blast of castanet-laden intro, basically opened us up to the possibilities of music, popular and otherwise. Jim Steinman didn’t make us weird, but he opened our eyes to the infinite potential of weird. “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” gave us something to work with, a big, overblown reference point, something that years later, inspired you to ask “do you remember this song?” and when that person said yes, you knew you’d found your tribe of weirdos like you, whether they said yes and smiled or said yes and grimaced. There’s always something magic. There’s always something new. This is how rock and roll dreams come through. The violins swell. The beat is yours forever.
Laura Lorson is a news editor, radio producer, and announcer at Kansas Public Radio in Lawrence. Her husband owns and operates Love Garden Sounds in Lawrence. They spend an inordinate amount of time listening to new music, arguing about optimal speaker positioning, and the relative merits of tube amps.
Mark Butler is a writer, editor, and karaoke enthusiast in Seattle. He previously wrote about Kirsty MacColl for March Fadness. He still can’t believe that Jim Steinman got away with writing a nine-minute song called “Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.”