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If you think the songs of composer Jim Steinman are populated by fantastic people and places right out of central casting, they ain’t got nothin’ on the real life sojourn of the 300 pound interior lineman dressed in a prom tuxedo named Marvin Lee Aday from Dallas Texas, aka Meat Loaf. Here is a rare colorful classic rock conversation with the man to a mark the thirtieth anniversary of “Bat” sequel,” Bat II: Back Into Hell”.
Jon Bon Jovi remembered to slip me a cassette of this acoustic demo of “Born to Be My Baby”, which remained unreleased for decades.
I have interviewed literally hundreds of the greatest rock musicians , but George Thorogood is the only one who told me that he was planning to be a professional comedian, not a musician. The best-selling album by bare-knuckle electric bluesrocker George Thorogood with July 1982’s Bad to the Bone. George marks the occasion here In the Studio with his unlikely journey featuring all of his biggest hits including “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer”,”Move It On Over”, Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love”, “I Drink Alone”, Chuck Berry’s “It Wasn’t Me”, and of course “Bad to the Bone”.
Widely viewed along with Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and Gram Parsons as fathers of the Americana musical movement, The Band also may have been one of rock’s first alternative groups. In part one of this classic rock interview, main songwriter Robbie Robertson (“The Weight”,”The Night They Drove Ol’Dixie Down”,”Up on Cripple Creek”,”The Shape I’m In”) helps me make that case.
The Cars’ co-founder singer/songwriter the late Ric Ocasek goes under the hood with keyboard player Greg Hawkes for the 45th anniversary of their 1978 debut.
Melissa Etheridge:”And I got to lie still, and I stopped being a rock star. I stopped working, I stopped striving, I stopped everything. And I was completely still . And being still is the best thing you can do for yourself. I mean it. We just don’t do enough of it in our lives , and it is so important. And I just laid still, and I finally got to the point where my brain stopped chattering. It stopped waking up and wandering, and I started dreaming again. I started dreaming of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like .”
RB: “With the diagnosis of breast cancer, you still could make plans for the future even before you completed chemotherapy and radiation ?”
ME:” Oh my gosh , I want the rest of my life ! No no no, I’m not done at all, I’m just beginning . And with that new excitement, I started looking at what I had created , what I’m creating now, and what I wanted to create. I started reading like crazy , I started reading everything from cosmology to quantum physics , string theory, agnostic gospels, Buddhism, everything ! And everybody is saying the same thing , this simple thing : that we’re all here to create, to be happy, and to love. You know, give me the peace signs and all the gooey stuff, but that’s really what I started feeling.And when I started thinking ,’Oh my gosh , I want to write a new album ‘ , I had this joy behind it . I had this great desire to put my experience down and to ignite people and light ’em up and say , ‘Look , you can do this too . We don’t have to do it this way ‘. ”
RB: What attitudes and behaviors should we all look at ?
ME: Today , right now, we have a choice .We have marketed ourselves into a little bitty corner of sound bites and fast food , and we think we can sustain ourselves on this . We think we can go to McDonald’s every day , eat in our car , and be fine . We can just download that one little song that sounds just like that other song . They’re little pieces . If you want to live your life on just little pieces of life , okay , that’s your choice . But I think that there’s a large bunch of us who really want more , who really do believe that the best food comes from the earth ; that it grows up out of the dirt ; and then you eat it and it nourishes you . And that music is made channeled through an artist . They craft it , they put it down in a certain place , and you can enjoy it for three minutes , or an hour , or you can even go to a live concert and enjoy it for three hours . Imagine giving yourself that time ! But I think our society needs to take a breath and step back , and get off this wheel that we’re on of faster , faster , faster . I do .”
It was their third album,”Shabooh Shoobah”, where INXS finally made the leap to America and the UK late in 1982 with “The One Thing”and “Don’t Change”. For the story of INXS’ formative years, the band’s keyboard player/ songwriter Andrew Farriss, guitar-playing brother Tim Farriss, and guitar/sax man Kirk Pengilly, tell of the tough and tender early days forming in the most remote city in the world, Perth Australia; surviving the one-nighters there, in Sydney and in Melbourne; allying with a talented singer from Hong Kong-via-Hollywood, the mercurial snake-hipped Michael Hutchence;
Styx co-founder Dennis DeYoung, lifer James “JY” Young, and then recently recruited Alabama boy Tommy Shaw all join me here with current Styx keyboardist/vocalist Lawrence Gowan In the Studio for the early days of being the perennial opening act, saddled with the curse “big in the Flyover States”, all the while writing and recording “Fooling Yourself”,”Come Sail Away”,”Miss America”, “Man in the Wilderness”, and “Grand Illusion”.
“We did two hundred sixty-five shows that year 1975,” says Bob Seger with a mixture of pride and amazement, as explanation on why it was so hard to find the solitary time necessary to write well-crafted songs prior to “Night Moves”. The double disc “Live Bullet”, recorded in Fall 1975 and released six months later, provided that precious period…by October 1976 with Night Moves containing “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”,”Main Street”,”The Fire Down Below”,”Come to Poppa”, and the title song which Bob calls “…a little novelette.”
By the time October 1981 ‘s fourth Police album “Ghost in the Machine” was dispatched, the exposed roots and influences shown by the London-based trio founded by Yankee drummer Stewart Copeland, who had emerged from the dying embers of the Punk Rock scene there, were more Miles and Mingus than Johnny Rotten. “Ghost in the Machine” topped the UK sales chart, #2 on Billboard album chart, over three million copies sold in America alone, and Rolling Stone magazine ranking it at #322 on their Top 500 Albums of All Time list. Police commissioner Stewart Copeland and six-string sharpshooter Andy Summers are your personal Ghost…busters with me here In the Studio in this classic rock interview.