Does "Dead Ringer" Still Have A Pulse?

In 1993, I fell in love with music listening to Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman, and "Bat Out Of Hell II". Because cassette tapes abounded, I wound up with a copy of the original "Bat Out Of Hell" at the same time. Those tapes would get worn out as I listened to music that would come to define the rest of my life, but what is interesting to me right now is how back then I never gave a thought to the sixteen years that existed between them. They were simply two albums I loved, and not (at the time) bookends of a career that had a bigger story arc to explore and understand. In that moment, I had no idea albums existed between them, nor did I particularly care.

Eventually, as music became a bigger piece of my identity, I began listening to those chapters that usually got skipped over. While I would never criticize anyone who pretends "Midnight At The Lost And Found" or "Blind Before I Stop" don't exist, the younger version of me was caught off-guard to discover Steinman had provided the follow-up record to "Bat Out Of Hell", because nothing in all the discussion of Meat Loaf's resurrection made any mention of that album.

When I first listened to "Dead Ringer", I thought I understood exactly why Meat Loaf had fallen into relative obscurity so quickly. The record was a pale imitation of "Bat Out Of Hell", copying the sound and structure, only reminding us every facet was just 'less' enough to make the whole experience sad. It was depressing to hear Meat's damaged voice, it was frustrating to hear Steinman hit the same story beats in a less interesting way, and it was fatiguing to sit through the flat and tinny sound that should have been the low-budget precursor and not the long-awaited follow-up.

For years, I dismissed "Dead Ringer" for those reasons. I had a burned version I kept around simply because Steinman was my musical hero, but I gave little thought or care to the album. Meat Loaf was moving on to "Welcome To The Neighborhood" and "Couldn't Have Said It Better", which were albums I loved immediately, so looking backwards did not feel like an important task.

When "Bat Out Of Hell III" came out, I could sense Meat's second career decline beginning. That was the impetus for me to give a second chance to Meat's 80s albums. The two already mentioned would only sound worse the further we moved away from the time they were trapped in, "Bad Attitude" proved to be a worthy record in an entirely different style, and "Dead Ringer" took on a new life.

Meat Loaf's attempts to record Steinman's music without Steinman's presence has been a mixed bag. He was able to deliver "Nowhere Fast" and "Surf's Up" better than Steinman himself, and "Original Sin" and "Left In The Dark" were perfectly capable replications, but there were also the misfires on "Bat Out Of Hell III" that made clear who was the more important voice between the two of them. As disappointed as I was in the Steinman-penned half of that album being the lesser side, I held out hope a relatively unexplored full album of their collaboration would be my salvation.

Slowly, that would indeed prove to be the case, but I would have to uncover the mindset behind the album. By this point, I knew Steinman had taken half of the songs he wrote for the project and released them as his own solo album (which I wrote an essay about earlier this year), and I thought he had taken all the best songs for himself. It might sound that way at first blush, but there was a method to Steinman's madness. He kept for himself the songs that were most personally his, and that tried to climb the same heights of rock excess as "Bat Out Of Hell". He gave to Meat Loaf the songs that formed an album that echoed "Bat Out Of Hell", but with a more theatrical bent.

The key to understanding "Dead Ringer" is to hear that Steinman was working around Meat's vocal issues by putting more Broadway theater into the music itself, because Meat was not capable of the same level of emotional projection. "I'm Gonna Love Her For Both Of Us" and "More Than You Deserve" are straight musical theater, letting the stories and piano movement stretch the limits that Meat's narrow voice could not. "Bat Out Of Hell" was a rock and roll record with hints of theater, but "Dead Ringer" is a theater record with hints of rock and roll. They are mirror images of each other, which is why it was hard for people to see "Dead Ringer" as what it actually was. It looked 'wrong' to people, because they were expecting the wrong thing.

My favorite illustration of this comes in "I'll Kill You If You Don't Come Back", which is the album's "Paradise By The Dashboard Light". In this one, Steinman shifts the song into a second movement, again building to the ultimate expression of teenage hormones. Rather than being denied carnal pleasure in the back seat of a car, this time the characters are going through with the act because that is what is expected of prom goers. There is sadness built into the lyrics, because Steinman understands what the teenagers do not, which is that they are not at all aware of the deeper psychology and emotions behind their physical attractions. "Bless all the homecoming queens of the night, they're looking for magic in gymnasium lights," Steinman writes. They never find that, only the self-inflicted violence that comes from doing what is expected, rather than what is desired. "They try not to cry, then they try to put out." Damn.

That theme manifests the record as a whole. "Dead Ringer" is the album people were expecting, but it is also the record Steinman wanted to make. He found a way to follow the blueprint of "Bat Out Of Hell", while at the same time injecting more of his theater roots. As it turned out, no one wanted to hear that version of Meat Loaf, but it was a sly way of threading the needle between carrying on and moving forward.

"Dead Ringer" has become one of those albums I love more the more I hear it. Without the expectation of following "Bat Out Of Hell", I can hear the record for what it is, and how Steinman was subverting expectations the whole way through. From the horns and doo-wop of the Cher duet "Dead Ringer For Love", to the schmaltz of "Read 'Em And Weep" that Barry Manilow would later cover, Steinman was showing us the melodrama was his, and not Todd Rundgren's doing.

Getting to the point of love with "Dead Ringer" was a long journey, but one I think was more rewarding for the wait. I don't know if I would have appreciated the album as much if I had loved it right from the start the way I did the others. "Dead Ringer" is in a way 'my record', because I did not share the experience with anyone else. It was the record I had to listen to, reason through, and identify with solely in my own mind. There's something comforting about that.

"Dead Ringer" is two years older than me, and if I'm being honest, it's probably aging better than I am. I can't be mad at it for that.