70's Pick of the Week
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, Meatloaf (1977)
The twins had this album first. I was over there shooting pool and drinking beer. It seems like that was long ago and far away now. The older I got, the more I realized this album had an impact on a lot of people’s lives. Everybody can think of some melodrama around it, at least it sure seems like it...
This was not new or groundbreaking. “Rocky Horror Picture Show” had done it already in terms of being a glam-Rock Opera. Rock Operas themselves were not new: The U.K. band the ‘Pretty Things’ did the brilliant “S.F. Sorrow” (1968), The Who did “Tommy” (1969) and “Quadrophenia” (1973). David Bowie did “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” (1972). Bizarrely the first reference to the term “Rock Opera” seems to have been in RPM magazine (published in Toronto) in 1966, noting that Bruce Cockburn and William Hawkins, were working on a ‘Rock opera” which they did not seem to complete.
This is music that had a time and a place. The relevance now, or to us now, is limited. It did for a small window in time give us a soundtrack for what was the teenage soap-opera of our lives. Now it stands as a bit of a curious time piece for those that were not around for it.
