I grew up watching reruns of "The A-Team" every weekend, and the words of Hannibal Smith have always been lingering in the background. No matter how dire the situation, no matter how ridiculous the tools at your disposal, a plan could be devised to get out of whatever hole you were in. I don't think the show was trying to teach us lessons about perseverance, and they certainly haven't all been taken to heart, but I would like to think there was more to the show than shooting tires and flipping cars.
Sometimes, it's hard to see any plan at all, or at least any way it can ever succeed. Meat Loaf's comeback with "Bat Out Of Hell II" was something no one could have seen coming, but it was putting all the old pieces back together at the exact right time. Looking back, it makes sense that two people who caught the world off-guard would be able to do it again.
Meat Loaf continued his success by hiring people to copy what already worked. While I adore "I'd Lie For You (And That's The Truth)", Diane Warren was brought in to write the best Jim Steinman song he never wrote. She had just as much flare for the dramatic, so the plan was easy to understand. It worked, and it would have made a lot of sense for the next chapter to continue on in that direction.
But it didn't. Meat Loaf's next album was constructed from a plan that never should have gotten off the drawing board. With half the record written by Nikki Sixx (yes, that Nikki Sixx) and his collaborators, it sounded at the time like perhaps the worst idea I had ever heard. It's funny, though, how expectations are often our worst enemy, because the resulting album is my favorite of all the records Meat Loaf put out after he and Steinman realized they would never capture that magic a third time.
"Couldn't Have Said It Better" is one of Meat's less heralded albums, and it's not hard to see why. It came out at a time when he was even less cool than he ever was, and it lacked the massive levels of ham and cheese that allowed him to survive in the pop mainstream as long as he did. It was a straight-laced affair that spoke to the die-hard Meat Loaf fans, so long as they wanted him to rock out more than ever.
Maybe it should have made sense that a hair metal icon would understand how to translate his genre's absurdity to Meat Loaf's. As would be evidenced even further on "Bat Out Of Hell III", Sixx and his crew had fresh ideas and a better sense of how to make a Meat Loaf record at that time than whatever Steinman leftovers would be unearthed in the coming years. You might not think of Meat Loaf as a harder rocker, but the increased presence of guitars on this record played into the big man's big voice.
The title track served as the first single, and is perhaps Meat's finest duet. Yes, I say that in all sincerity. He and Patti Russo were always perfect foils, and the extra volume Sixx's arrangement affords them amplifies the drama of their call-and-response. They belt the song as only they can, the defiant streak of the narrators pours through, and the line "you said nothing at all/well, I couldn't have said it better myself" is a sarcastic quip from the Steinman playbook. Throw in the shredding guitar solo, and we were hearing the future of Meat Loaf.
The other songs from that half of the record drip with the usual Meat Loaf drama. They revisit the want/need/love quandary of "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad", this time asking why the first two aren't enough. Listening to these songs, it's clear the love the writers had for Meat's legacy, as they hold true to the past while forging a new future. With a song contributed by Dianne Warren as well, there is so much available on the record that should have achieved more than it did.
But like every Meat record that wasn't overseen by Steinman, there were the questionable decisions and song choices that kept things from reaching the heights they should have. I have no idea why they included the barely-a-song "Do It!", or why Meat recorded a cover of "Forever Young" to cap things off. But the most puzzling choice of all was singing "Man Of Steel" as a duet with his daughter. The song comes across as a love ballad, and is lovely... until you stop and think about their relationship. He is singing about "making love to you all night long" WITH HIS DAUGHTER. I understand Meat sings his songs as characters, and envisioned them as little plays, but even miming a romance with his own child is beyond creepy. It's no wonder the song was a failure as a single.
At the time the record came out, my own tastes were trending heavier, so this was the exact record I needed to hear. It kept me grounded in my musical roots, but showed me where I would be heading as well. In a way, perhaps no album better served as the fulcrum between two periods in my life. I was changing, Meat was changing, and the convergence was quite fortuitous.
Twenty years on, I don't have particular memories of that time springing to mind when I put the record on, but I still regularly pull it out and get swept away in the question of 'what if?' The plan worked on this album, but it was soon abandoned. When this record failed, Meat started picking up whatever scraps of Steinman material he could find, and we didn't get to hear what the last phase of his career could have been. In these songs, I hear a vibrant new Meat Loaf I wanted to spend the next decade-plus seeing grow into a hulking monster of dramatic rock. Instead, we got dull records, bad concepts, and the unfortunate song where he sang about barely being able to fit his dick in his pants.
In a way, this was the end of Meat Loaf as I had always known and loved him. So perhaps I should say nothing more, because I couldn't say it any better myself.
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