After the stunning album opener, Steinman surprisingly follows up with probably the closest thing he’s ever written to a straight-up metal song. It’s a cavernous, booming rocker that absolutely thrums with teenaged misdirected anger.

On release, many critics ripped the lyrics on this album, claiming that they were infantile and ludicrous. I suspect an awful lot of those critics were thinking solely of this song. I can see why they would think that the lyrics are immature and dunderheaded, but I think it’s another point changed by this being the deliberate sequel to an album from 16 years prior. It’s not a teenager screaming or a middle-aged man pretending to be a teenager screaming. It’s a commentary on the arrested development celebrated by rock and roll. We don’t normally really think about the fact that “newcomers” to rock stardom are often well into their thirties and screaming like teenagers, but this album is deliberately telling its audience, “They’re old; just like you” going in, which makes the exercise in teenaged angst even more ludicrous than usual. With it already so ridiculous, why not just crank it to full volume and scream like a lunatic?

We open with echoing, cavernous drums and a refrain of “I want my money back” that sounds like it’s being shouted from far away. That rarest of beasts, a Steinman guitar riff, then joins along with some Roy Bittan electronic (!) keyboards and more backing vocal shouts. Meat Loaf joins in, shouting more than singing. After one verse, we get the brief chorus, which doesn’t change the presence of any instruments but changes the guitar and keyboards to a simple chord progression behind a different, more restrained melody and multiple layers of backing vocals. We repeat this pattern one more time and everything seems uncharacteristically short for Steinman’s work–we’ve had two verses and two choruses in about two and a half minutes.

But then we get to the real heart of this song: A call-and-response between Meat Loaf and the backing vocals (which, by the way, are credited to fifteen different people, interestingly including Steinman) in which the backing vocals ask about various aspects of the singer’s life and then answer themselves “It’s/They’re defective!” with Meat Loaf providing a single explanatory line each time. He complains about love (“It’s always breaking in half”), sex (“It’s never built to really last”), his family (“All the batteries are shot”), his friends (“All the parts are out of stock”), hope (“It’s corroded and decayed”), faith (“It’s tattered and it’s frayed”), his gods (“They forgot the warranty”), his town (“It’s a dead end street to me”), his school (“It’s a pack of useless lies”), his work (“It’s a crock and then you die”), and his childhood (“It’s dead and buried in the past”) all to build to the glorious crescendo about his future: “You can shove it up your ass!”

Can you argue that this is all immature and stupid? Easily. But is it the type of infantile thinking that rock and roll usually celebrates? Hell yes. I can’t really prove that it’s deliberate parody–there really isn’t anything in the lyrics that says it is. But Steinman has spent too much of his career parodying the standard images and ideas of rock and roll for me to think that he’s gone serious with a song that is entirely built around having Meat Loaf scream, “You can shove it up your ass!” The fact that it sits on this album right next to his ode to the power of rock and roll, to me, adds to the feeling that it’s a parody–this is one side of rock and roll but we put up with it, so to speak, for the side we see in the next song.

The song ends with over two and a half minutes of (essentially) a guitar solo. My guess (Which is just a guess from listening many times) is that both Eddie Martinez and Tim Pierce play solos in this space, since there are multiple rather abrupt changes in style and a few places sound to me more like one than the other (though they were both accomplished studio guitarists and thus more than capable of It’s not the first time there’s ever been a long solo in a Steinman song (Remember “Stark Raving Love?”), but its length is definitely a surprise.

Meat Loaf delivers a vocal on this song that honestly feels like it was out of his range back in 1977. He alternates between shouting rather tunelessly and singing melodically throughout with little challenge, and this song has some of his best high notes of his career–it makes five appearances on his Range Planet page for a reason.

If one were, reasonably, to come into Bat out of Hell II with trepidation because of the missteps of Bad for Good and Dead Ringer, this is really the song that should assuage that concern. It isn’t the best song on the album by any means, but it is so alien to any of the sounds or even the themes of Bat out of Hell that it’s clear this album is its own entity, even as much as it is indebted and related to its predecessor.

Notes

• The backing vocal credits on this song are strange. “Background Vocals” are by Lorraine Crosby, Rory Dodd, Stuart Emmerson, Amy Goff, Elaine Goff, Gunnar Nelson, Matthew Nelson, Todd Rundgren, and Kasim Sulton. “Additional Vocals” are by Robert Coron, Brett Cullen, Cynthia Geary, Michelle Little, Meat Loaf, and Jim Steinman. And then Chris Sokol is credited for “Vocal Inspiration.” (His Discogs page provides as much explanation of that as I can find.)
• In case anyone wonders about the “style” of Eddie Martinez v. Tim Pierce: They are admittedly very similar guitarists, but I’ve listened to Pierce’s solo album Guitarland quite a lot, so there are some sections of this solo that just don’t sound like that same guy. Since they’re both not just studio musicians but absolute studio wizards, it’s quite possible that I’m wrong in my guess that both solo in this song–that kind of session playing often results in musicians being extraordinarily adept at changing styles.
• “All the parts are out of stock” is the best way of saying, “I don’t have any friends” I’ve ever heard.