1993 Meat Loaf: I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)

In Fassbinder's 'Lili Marleen', Giancarlo Giannini's 'Robert' is imprisoned by the Gestapo and locked in a room, tortured to insanity by having to listen to 'Lili Marleen' being played on a broken record for 24 hours a day. I have some sympathy; in 1993 I was living on the top floor of a three storey house and for around three months solid the guy in the room immediately below took it upon himself to play (the then newly released) 'I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)' over and over and over again. And again.

To be fair, he wasn't doing it just to annoy me - he genuinely liked the song that much. But make no mistake, we're not talking about the already lengthy single version here; this was the full length, twelve plus minutes of the album version. Needless to say it got very old very quickly to the point I used to joke that I knew what Meat Loaf wouldn't do for love even more than he did. Better by far to joke than to go down, kick his door in and grab him by the throat anyway. Which is what I dearly wanted to do. Happy days.

That parent album he was playing, of course, was Meat Loaf's 'Bat Out Of Hell 2 - Back Into Hell'. Not many albums get their own sequel, but this one was kind of inevitable. The only surprise is that it took so long. Meat Loaf and 'Bat Out Of Hell' are so intertwined as to be the double helix of their own DNA strand, each being so closely identified with the other that it's pointless to try and separate them. Everything that Meat Loaf did post that album was always game for "it's not as good as 'Bat Out Of Hell'" comparisons or "it sounds a lot like 'Bat Out Of Hell'" criticisms. Often it could justifiably be accused of both, and on that score 'I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)' is a good enough example.

Because this does sound like 'Bat Out Of Hell'. Not overtly maybe, but from the opening motorbike revving and Roy Bittan's busy finger piano intro there are enough nudges and winks to the earlier song to brook no illusion as to exactly what territory we're in here. There are comparators in its scope too - the original 'Bat Out Of Hell' ran for a shade under ten minutes whilst this (as I learned the hard way) runs to twelve in its full length form. Even on the single it's pushing six, yet while the original 'Bat' flowed like a standard rock track stretched in it's propounding of the virtues of a one night stand, 'I'd Do Anything' is far less varied in its grand statement of eternal love.

Lacking an anthemic chorus and Todd Rundgren's guitar hero soling it lurches between in its main musical themes like the centrepiece of a new Lloyd Webber musical - i.e. with all the grace of a three legged dog. Steinman's lyric pays predictable homage to the holy 'sex and drugs and rock & roll' trinity (yes, that phrase/cliché appears in the song) in a Springsteen crossed with Wagner posture of macho chest beating as Meat Loaf boasts how he'd run "to hell and back" for the chance of a snog. For five whole minutes.

But at about the point where I start looking at my watch, Cher soundalike (via Newcastle Upon Tyne) Lorraine Crosby initiates a dialogue of equally bombastic, labours of Hercules desires and needs that border on the ludicrous ("Can you colorise my life I'm so sick of black and white?", "Will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?") but which Meat Loaf is unquestioningly happy to go along with ("I can do that!"). But then in a breathtaking act of table turning rug pulling, Crosby reveals she was taking the piss all along and that she's got the measure of the man and his promises of the earth and proceeds to burst his balloon with "I know the territory - I've been around, It'll all turn to dust and we'll all fall down, and sooner or later you'll be screwing around" that cuts him and the entire preceding song off at the knees with a reality check. His only response is "I won't do that" in a little boy voice that combines both shock at being found out and guilt in the realisation that she's probably right. You can almost sense his cock wilting in his pants.

It's a marvellous piece of street theatre, a moment of emotional realism that a Lou Reed couldn't have bettered and it's what the whole song has been building to - a self built mythology of love on a mountaintop rock and roll dreams that's pierced and brought crashing down to earth by a woman who's heard it all before and knows better than to buy into it. The idealism and imager of all this rock and roll romance has the curtain pulled away from it to show that it's all just another case of boys with their toys and it leaves 'I'd Do Anything' to close on a surprisingly downbeat note and one that negates virtually everything Meat Loaf and the genre was supposed to stand for.

After all, in the macho world of rock the men are meant to get the hot chicks, not have their balls cut off and the 'I don't listen to Meat Loaf for THIS' angle leaves me feeling as cheated as watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon where the balloon that floats an anvil onto Tom's head does in fact end up killing him. But it's the trick that switches the ridiculous to the sublime to save the song from itself; until that point 'I'd Do Anything' was going nowhere that I'd want to follow and it's appearance is the grain of sand in the oyster that, if not quite creating a pearl (it's still too long and dull for that - Jim Steinman seems contractually obligated never to write anything less that four minutes long even when the song doesn't need it), does at least raise it above the dreary yawn of soft rock balladry it would have found itself inhabiting.