Art can be a difficult thing to wrap our heads around, because we bring our own conceptions and biases to the proceedings. The art doesn't exist merely as the art, it must be filtered through the way we look at it, which creates layers of issues that have nothing to do with whether or not the music we're listening to is good or not, and yet we find ourselves making decisions based on the flaws of psychology. It is only natural, but that doesn't mean it holds up to logical scrutiny. Humans have been called 'rational creatures', but that was a bit of projection we have seldom been able to live up to.
When music is made explicitly as a pastiche/homage/tribute, do we give it enough credit? That's the question I'm contemplating today, as I was thinking about the album "The Bat Strikes Back" put out by Dean Torkington fifteen years ago. Torkington was the self-proclaimed #1 Meat Loaf tribute artist at the time, and used that 'fame' to write and release an album of original songs.
Original songs... by a tribute artist... a recipe for disaster, no?
'No' is the correct answer. As a tribute to Meat Loaf, Torkington was slightly miscast. He had the right tone, but his voice was more reminiscent of the period in the 80s when Meat's voice was damaged and had not yet recovered. Whether intentional or not, the album he wrote fit into that same period. These were songs that knew they could not reach the Steinman-esque level of bombast, so they focused on replicating Meat's more rock-oriented direction in the fallow days of the 80s. Those are albums that even Meat's fans often have trouble with, me included, but it leaves more room to impress us.
And impress it does. Torkington has the right vibe to channel Meat's defiant 'I don't need Jim Steinman (even though I do)' attitude, and the songs work because they are copying people who were badly copying Steinman's approach. That is something that could be done, and here it was done well.
The opening title track is the most Meat Loaf-ian song of the bunch, and is as much a follow up to "Bat Out Of Hell" as Steinman was able to come up with for "Dead Ringer". It isn't epic to the Nth degree, but it serves the purpose. More interesting is when they veer off the beaten path, as they do with "Last Survivor", which is an odd ballad that ends with a harmonica solo that brings to mind Elton John circa "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues". That may not be a coincidence, since Torkington later shifted to being an Elton John tribute act. There is something here beyond merely copying the past, even if the ties are to thick its hard to see past them.
That brings us back to the main point; when an artist is not even trying to be themselves, what are we to make of them? We take for granted that a musician has a personality of their own, and their performances are trying to reveal that to us, whether they have written the songs or not. Singers aren't actors stepping into established roles, they are performers trying to make a connection with the audience. Tribute singers are not that, they are trained to replicate what people already know for the explicit purpose of filling a role the name in question no longer does.
When "The Bat Strikes Back" came out, no one was clamoring for new Meat Loaf music. He had failed to generate a third act in the mainstream, and the world no longer needed what his music had to offer. You could argue that Meat never understood what made his own music work, and I would probably agree with you. (One of these days, I will write about all the music Meat made without Steinman, and why much of it never stood a chance.) Torkington does understand that, or at least does understand what Meat should have been doing in the 80s.
"Midnight At The Lost & Found" and "Blind Before I Stop" are terrible albums. Meat sounds bad, and the songs aren't good. They were mistakes that had to be made just to keep his name out there, even if they did lead people to think Meat was more of a joke than they already did. If "The Bat Strikes Back" had been the album Meat put out at that time, I don't think he would have turned his career around sooner nor had any extra hits, but he wouldn't have fallen so far in the public's estimation. His career would not have been pock-marked with as many potholes as it wound up being.
Again, this leads us to consider just what to make of "The Bat Strikes Back". Dean Torkington made an album that was better than two of Meat Loaf's worst, but it's not 'his' album, is it? Honestly, I don't know how to answer that question, even after writing this much.
What I ultimately settle on is that albums like this aren't made as artistic statements, so thinking in those terms is banging my head against a brick wall. This is fan-service, a bit in the same mold as fan-fiction, and if we think in those terms this was a rousing success.
It just isn't, and could never be, what we would want it to be.
