The 1981 Listening Post - Jim Steinman - Bad for Good

 Jim Steinman - Bad for Good

#165

By Rob Slater

April 1981

Jim Steinman

Bad for Good

Genre: Wishing I was Marvin O’Day...

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Rating: 4 out of 5. [Cutting the spoken word pap, would make it 4.5!]

Highlights: Too many

Allen’s Highlights:

Bad for Good

Out Of The Frying Pan (And Into The Fire)

Washouts: Love And Death And An American Guitar and the rest of the spoken word monologues that don’t in any way come close to Bat out of Hell’s. The producer should’ve deleted about 90%. Which is what happened when these were rerecorded by Meatloaf.

Warning. I am a big Meatloaf/Steinman fan. I’ve even written a song in their style and themes. A duet that is probably about 7 minutes long titled Come Back from Heaven!

If you ever wondered what Meatloaf would sound like without quite so much bombast listen to this album. Most of these were written for Meat, but for reasons that may have included the studio not willing to pay Steinman and Meat’s vocal cords… Jim released it himself. Much of the time he does sound a lot like Mr. Loaf! 

This is Jim Steinman's original plan for the order of the songs, starting with the instrumental The Storm, which is really quite good and very theatrical, soundtracky. And it ends with Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through. But when it came out on LP these were the only two songs on a 7in. 33 ⅓ rpm EP that accompanied the main LP. This order is the best way to listen to it.

1. 1. The Storm (Prologue To The Album "Bad For Good")
2. 2. Bad For Good - “Instead of being bad for just a little while… you know that I’ll be…”
3. 3. Lost Boys and Golden Girls - Tracks 2 & 3 were written for Steinman’s long planned Sci-fi dystopian musical, Neverland, based on Peter Pan. It finally became Bat Out of Hell: The Musical in 2017. 
4. 4. Love And Death And An American Guitar Skip this one. Really!
5. 5. Stark Raving Love - The intro to "Stark Raving Love" was used for "Holding Out for a Hero", a 1984 hit for Bonnie Tyler
6. 6. Out Of The Frying Pan (And Into The Fire) - Solid. Almost identical to the ML versions.
7. 7. Surf's Up - “Surf’s up and so am I.”
8. 8. Dance In My Pants - Cute and naughty. “I can show you some moves.”
9. 9. Left In The Dark - {Listen for the Sam Kinison growl!}
10. 10. Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through (Epilogue To The Album "Bad For Good") - When the Main vocalist sings, “Treasure your Love…” I really want the backup vocalists to echo [a la the Impressive Clergyman from Princess Bride] with this: “Tweasure your wuv…

1. Meatloaf has rerecorded almost all of these, often with Steinman producing. The best thing about Meatloaf's version of Bad For Good has little to do with Meatloaf other than that he had the star power to get Brian May of Queen to play the guitar. And, oh my God, does that sound level things up.

1. Check out this Who’s Who of Rock and Roll who worked on this album.
   Rory Dodd 
2. Karla DeVito 
3. Todd Rundgren
4. Kasim Sulton 
5. Roger Powell 
6. Roy Bittan 
7. Max Weinberg 
8. Ellen Foley
9. Jimmy Iovine
10. Shelly Yakus

1. Definitely buying this, ripping it, cutting the spoken word stuff and putting it in Steinman’s order!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Finest