Bringing the lost boys home

In a 1997 interview with the Washington Post, songwriter Jim Steinman discussed the classic story that has inspired his body of work: "Peter Pan is the ultimate rock-and-roll myth -- lost boys who don't grow up." And so it is with Steinman himself ("I still feel the same as I did when I was 20 or 21") but also with his children. He has no physical offspring, but he does have his songs. "I care as deeply about this music as other people care about their children." The music takes place in Neverland, and fittingly the songs themselves do not age.

I am too young to have been there when Bat Out Of Hell went platinum or "Total Eclipse of the Heart" topped the charts, but when I heard them for the first time I could still feel the magic. And each time I hear them they still transport me to another world, and I still hear something new.

Last year I had the great privilege of being the first person to listen to some of Jim Steinman's "lost children," as I have dubbed them, for the first time in decades. Here's how it happened.

After college, before the smash success of Bat Out Of Hell, Jim Steinman worked for Joseph Papp, writing music for shows in the New York Shakespeare Festival. When Papp died in 1991, he donated his entire NYSF archives to the New York Public Library.

In 2008, an interesting thread was started on the JimSteinman.com message board. It pointed out that if one were to search Jim's name in the NYPL catalog, it would generate some intriguing results from the NYSF collection, like early demos of songs sung by Jim himself and song titles that never appear on any commercial recording. This thread sparked a lot of discussion and speculation, but the fact remained that the only people who knew what was on those tapes were the people present when they were recorded. It was highly unlikely that a person could walk in off the street and check out a rare vintage tape from the library. What was to be done?

That's where I come in.

In January 2011 I sent an email to the NYPL's Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. I listed the call numbers of the tapes I was interested in and inquired about the library's policies. I got a response back from curator Jonathan Hiam. He explained that they could make me copies of the tapes, but only if I could get Jim Steinman's permission.

So that was my next task. Fortunately two years earlier I had developed a rapport with Jacqueline Dillon -- the operator of JimSteinman.com and the head of the Jim Steinman Society for the Arts -- when I secured permission to create a YouTube channel for Jim Steinman. (Side note: it was through this channel that I later became friends with Karla DeVito.)

So I shot off a message to Jacqueline. Later that day I received a pleasant surprise back from her. "I spoke to Jim and it's fine with him. Please keep me posted as Jim (and I) would like a copy." I immediately forwarded it to Mr. Hiam, who passed it on to Katrina Dixon, the library's newly hired A/V specialist. Over the next few weeks Katrina and I exchanged emails and phone calls to work out exactly which tapes to copy, as well as shipping information. She is a very kind and helpful lady.

I couldn't believe that I was actually going to get to hear these amazing pieces of history! I was on pins and needles as I waited for the tapes to be processed, copied, and shipped. But finally on March 30th a box arrived in the mail. It was truly an unforgettable experience to listen to the tapes and realize that I was the first person to do so in 20, 30, even 40 years! As Jacqueline requested, I made copies and mailed them to Jim's former touring sound technician and current project manager Don Ketteler so he could forward them to Jim's "small circle of friends."

Here is what was on those tapes.

The Dream Engine audition

As a senior at Amherst College in 1969, Jim Steinman wrote and starred in his first musical theater work, The Dream Engine. Joseph Papp was in the audience and loved it, which is how he came to hire Jim for the NYSF.

Photo credit: Unknown

 
On February 28th 1970, Jim auditioned the songs from the show to Warner Records. Jim spoke about the audition in a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone:

According to Steinman, Papp was interested in touring the show around to various venues. Paul Rothchild, producer of the Doors, was eager to oversee the cast album. Toward that end, an audition with Warner/Reprise Records was set up for Steinman in Los Angeles.

"Rothchild was all excited," Steinman remembers. "He said, 'I gonna take this to Warner Bros., and it's carte blanche.' So we got this audition for Lenny Waronker. It turns out that they've got the entire staff of Warner/Reprise in a big airline hangar they have out there in Burbank, one of those places where Frank Sinatra used to record. I don't think they realized it was only gonna be me and two other people from the school and a piano, just like a theatrical audition."

"This is, like, '72, when Warner/Reprise was really the folk-rock label: James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, that was their image. And my opening number was a song called 'How Do You Bury The Skull Of Your Country?' The second song was called 'You've Got To Love Me With The Sun In Your Eyes Until The Day That You Go Blind.' It went on from there. You could just see the horror on their faces. Finally, one guy got up and said, 'I have to say this bluntly. We don't need people like you in the world.'

"So they turned down the album, and Rothchild calls me up and says, 'You really let me down, Steinman. You rushed the tempos.'"

Having previously heard the recording of the 1969 Amherst production, it is really cool to hear stripped-down, piano-and-vocal versions of these epic songs. Two songs in the audition do not appear in the Amherst production. One is "City Night," which appears later in Jim's 1977 musical Neverland. The other is a song with a title so grandiose that until I discovered this tape I thought it was a figment of Jim's imagination -- "You've Got to Love Me With The Sun In Your Eyes Until The Day That You Go Blind." The tape is worth it just to hear this song; I just wish it had better sound quality.

In September 2011, Jacqueline posted the following message regarding Jim: "He's just been in the studio and did a REMARKABLE new version of You've Got To Love Me With The Sun In Your Eyes (Until The Day That You Go Blind)." I'm sure it's fantastic! I hope he releases it.

The Dream Engine demos

I don't have a lot of details on this tape, but it is fascinating nonetheless. It has five tracks. One track is "Who Needs The Young," which is the first song Jim ever wrote and which appeared in The Dream Engine as well as Neverland.

Also appearing on this tape are two different versions of a previously unheard song: "Train Of Love." One is sung by Jim Steinman himself, and the other is sung by a person identified only as Brian. It is an up-tempo Motown style song, which is different from Jim's usual style.

The highlight of this tape is a country-western demo of "Heaven Can Wait," a well-known song which appeared on Bat Out Of Hell. Again there are two versions. One is Jim Steinman, the other is Bette Midler. It is my understanding that Jim and Bette met when Jim was piano accompanist for Alaina Reed Hall, who opened for Bette at the Continental Baths in the early 1970s. Bette's accompanist Barry Manilow also went on to stardom. Jim and Barry would later work together in 1984 on a song called "Read 'Em And Weep."

More Than You Deserve demos 

In 1973, Jim Steinman contributed songs to a Michael Weller show called Souvenirs. A young actor known as Meat Loaf auditioned for the show but chose a minor part. Jim wrote a song for Meat to sing called "More Than You Deserve" and that eventually became the show's title, which made Weller furious. But after the show ended, Jim and Meat would embark on a long and illustrious partnership. Jim describes the meeting in a 2003 interview:

We met when Meat Loaf auditioned for me. I was doing a show that I wrote the music and lyrics for at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Oh God I don't even remember what year; it was, probably 1972 or '73, one of those two years, and he came in and auditioned. It was just, we saw 2,000 or 3,000 people. He came in one day and I thought he was, from the minute he walked in, I was stunned.

I thought he was astonishing. He's just one of those people who walks in and it's the equivalent of an enormous cat pissing on the door. Just stakes territory immediately. Just charismatic and he wasn't the character of Meat Loaf then, he was much more like this enormous inflated farm boy. He wore like overalls, he didn't have that much experience singing rock and roll specifically.

He had done Hair on stage. Mostly he sang gospel and blues, which is what he grew up learning and knowing. He came in with this amazing accompanist, who I still work with, named Steve Margoshes, an incredible pianist, and he sang a song called You Got To Give Your Heart To Jesus, 'cause he sang all gospel and blues. I just remember thinking this is the most amazing presence and voice that I've encountered ever.

It was pretty natural for me because I grew up with opera and Wagner was my hero, and Meat Loaf was like all the operatic stars. He was, you know, they play Sigfried as a 16-year-old sort of Brad Pitt character, but they're all like 400 pounds. So it didn't bother me, the weight, it was perfectly natural and when he sang it was mind-boggling. This huge volcanic eruption of sound that was totally awesome in that you could feel the room shake.

This is something actually no one can tell from the records. It's odd but I don't think the records have ever captured Meat's voice the way it was. We would rehearse in a room that was smaller than where he auditioned and in the room you could totally feel the piano shake, the chairs shake, it was a physical phenomena.

I also loved the way he performed physically, his eyes would disappear so you couldn't see anything but the whites of his eyes. They would roll up to the top of his head. So he sort of had a little Linda Blair thing going and he'd do amazing things with his hands. They would convulse while he was singing in a strange sort of rhythm and counterpoint, and he basically seemed possessed and sang this song, You Got To Give Your Heart To Jesus, amazingly.

When it was done I was just dumbstruck and I remember at the end of the day everyone gathers, the director, producer, writers, to discuss the people you've seen who auditioned. I was the only one who had him down on my list. I said, well what about that guy Meat Loaf? It seemed very natural to me to say Meat Loaf, strangely enough, from the minute I met him. I don't know why, but I (laugh) was the only one who didn't make jokes about his name.

Nobody else had him on the list and I remember them all saying, Meat Loaf? That big fat guy? There's no part for him. I mean, it's ridiculous. And I said, we got to write a part for him, he's just astonishing, and there was a big fight but we ended up writing a part for him that didn't exist. It was a show about Vietnam and he played a soldier in Vietnam who was prone to throw hand grenades at his superior officers.

And it was just a stunning moment. I'll never forget it 'cause I needed someone to sing my songs. I had always thought I would sing my own songs. I came out of college and I had Robert Stigwood as a manager who at the time was Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees (manager) and I, of course, was right up there with Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees, I was number three.

I was going to be a singer and a songwriter but I had gotten into a terrible medical problem with broken bones, my nose, and it was too complicated to go into. But I couldn’t sing, basically. It was too excruciating and painful, and when he came in it was like a gift from the gods. Like they had sent someone who could sing far better than I could and who actually was the only person I could imagine on earth who had the perfect voice for what I was imagining.

This tape contains demos of several songs from the show, such as "Song of the Golden Egg" performed by Kim Milford and "Give Me the Simple Life" performed by Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, and Barry Keating.

Jim also performs on demos of the title song "More Than You Deserve" and the former title song "Souvenirs" which was cut out of the show. "Souvenirs" contains the line "you've been cold to me so long, I'm crying icicles instead of tears," which was later used in the song "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad" on Bat Out Of Hell.

This tape also contains three demos of songs from an unproduced Steinman adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman Of Szechwan.

More Than You Deserve performance 

I also obtained two tapes containing the recordings of the matinee and evening performances of More Than You Deserve on closing night, January 13th 1974.

Photo credit: Unknown

The show starred Fred Gwynne of The Munsters fame as Major Michael Dillon. He appears in the matinee show. But he was called away to another project and could not make the final evening performance, so Stephen Collins, who normally played Herbie, stepped into the lead role. Perhaps the most exciting moment in this performance is Meat Loaf's show-stopping performance of the title song. As Jim Steinman later recounted:

They all stood up and cheered wildly. And he was in tears. It was one of the most thrilling things I've ever seen. And you could tell not only was he an astonishing singer but also a great actor.

Photo credit: George E. Joseph

It's interesting to compare the performances of Gwynne and Collins. It's also interesting to compare the show to one of Weller's draft scripts, a copy of which I was able to obtain from the special collections library at the University of South Carolina (I have no idea how it got there). This script already has the title Souvenirs changed to More Than You Deserve, but it still has a lot of stuff that was later cut out. See a sample page below containing the title song sung by Meat Loaf.

Photo credit: Ben Miller

Kid Champion demos

In 1975, Jim Steinman contributed songs to a show by Thomas Babe called Kid Champion, which starred Christopher Walken.

Photo credit: Unknown

The demo tape contains several instrumental songs and two songs with vocals performed by a person who unfortunately has not yet been identified.

One is a beautiful folk/country song called "Yogi." The other is "For Crying Out Loud," which was later performed by Meat Loaf on Bat Out Of Hell. "For Crying Out Loud" appears on the demo tape once as a country-western song and once as an up-tempo rock reprise. Jim Steinman contributes background vocals. I wish I knew who the lead vocalist is.

Phantom of the Paradise demos

I don't know the history of this tape. There is a 1974 movie called Phantom of the Paradise. Maybe Jim Steinman was working on an adaptation. Maybe it was an entirely different project with the same name. Either way this tape contains some amazing demos from the 1980s.

Remember the song "Who Needs The Young" I mentioned earlier? This song gets an update with an extended introduction.

This tape also contains the introduction to a song Jim did with Rory Dodd called "A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste." Unfortunately the full version of the song, which was once leaked to the fan community with very poor sound quality, does not appear here.

In 1989, Jim Steinman formed a band with four female vocalists called Pandora's Box. They released one album, Original Sin. This demo tape contains unfinished mixes of two songs from that album, "Original Sin" and "Good Girls Go To Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)", without the guitars and background vocals.

The crème de la crème of this tape, and perhaps all the tapes together, is the original demo recording of "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" performed by vocalist Rory Dodd with Jim Steinman on piano. It contains an extra verse which did not appear on the hit single by Air Supply.

I can make your money double
Or I can make you lose your shirt
I can make your old wounds start to heal
Or I can make the new ones hurt

I can make the music louder
Or I can make the songs all fade
I can make every girl just wanna get up and dance
And make the boys in the band start to play

Rory's vocal work and Jim's piano work are both astonishing on this track. I will close with this review from Karla DeVito:

So passionately beautiful -- dear god in heaven... never heard this unplugged version before!!!!!!! Rory pulls it off like no other, and NOBODY plays Jim Steinman like JIM STEINMAN!!!!!!!!