“It was long ago/ and it was far away/ And it was so much better than it is today....”: Deceased Artiste Jim Steinman

I have been a big fan of Jim Steinman’s special brand of rock ’n’ roll melodrama for decades. I wrote about this fascination previously on the blog on the occasion of seeing the Toronto production of his life-long passion project, the dystopian teen sci-fi soap opera/Peter Pan mashup Bat Out of Hell. You can read my piece on Steinman and the show here, but I realized that my second blog post about Jim’s amazingly sincere yet overwhelmingly hammy (and I mean that in a complimentary way) Wagnerian pop-rock, focusing on his big European hit musical Tanz Der Vampires, had to be completely rewritten and updated. This was because the better of the two versions of the show that were on YouTube and had English subs was taken down. 

The one that was left up is derived from the same original video in German that the “departed” vids was generated from — only in this instance, the poster of the remaining videos decided for some inexplicable reason to change the ratio of the video from “flat” to “widescreen,” thus stretching the damned thing visually. The remaining version is incredibly ugly to watch, but it is the only way to see and understand the full original production if you’re not fluent in German.

In discussing the musical, I focus on an earlier production since it was not only recorded more professionally (when I first wrote this, there was also what looked like a fan-shot full-length video of the show on YT — now gone), but the earlier production was closer to the original vision of the show as personally directed by Roman Polanski, who co-wrote and directed the source material, the horror farce The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967). The show began in 1997 in Austria as directed by Polanski, but the subtitled video of it hails from Germany in the early 2000s.

I have mixed feelings about FVR. Polanski’s farces pale beside his brilliant darkly humored pictures (like Bitter Moon). The reworking of the film for Tanz, however, is fascinating in that the stage show takes its characters and situations a bit more seriously — the result, no doubt, of the show running over an hour longer than the film.

The other reason the show is a must-see is that it finds Polanski directing a stage musical scored by the king of pop-rock melodrama, Jim Steinman. As mentioned, I’ve rhapsodized about Steinman before (and noted his difficulties with writing librettos), so I will simply note that, since we never got to see the proposed “video album” for Steinman’s girl-group project “Pandora’s Box” that would’ve been directed by “Unkle Ken” Russell, we can only content ourselves with a Broadway/West End-style musical with Steinman music and Polanski visuals.

As for L’affaire Polanski and the fact that his last two films — Based on a True Story (2017), co-written with Olivier Assayas, and the award-winning (and excellent) J’Accuse (2019) — haven’t come out in the U.S. and won’t for the foreseeable future, it has to be said yet again that one *must* separate the art from the artist or one will only experience art from squeaky-clean hands — and who wants any more Spielberg-Ron Howard-Tom Hanks-Tyler Perry-Marvel movies?

Polanski, Michael
Kunze, Steinman.

As for his participation in this show, the piece was clearly undertaken with visions of Phantom box office receipts dancing in the producers’ heads. Thus, the budget was clearly large enough to indulge Polanski’s gothic impulses. (As for his stage credentials, he did take time out from the cinema to costar and direct productions of Amadeus in ’81 and ’99 in Warsaw, Paris, and Milan.)

The sets are large and the cast is filled with “background vampire” singers and dancers. The key ingredient, though, is Steinman’s music, which, true to form with Jim, consists of songs that he composed for earlier projects, both musicals and pop-rock albums.

The most-heard tune in the piece is “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is the central vampire’s signature theme and is repeated over and over in the show. Steinman has been quoted as saying that he used the very well-known hit song as a kind of place holder for some other song to be written later. Given that the tune is the central piece of music, I doubt he threw the song in there provisionally.

There is certainly something amazing about hearing Steinman’s Wagnerian pop-rock in German. For decades now he has crafted songs that require singers with “big” voices and a solid vocal range (well… maybe not Air Supply), and his aim was always to write Broadway musicals. Hearing his music in German is a hand-in-glove fit.

Tanz was his first big-budgeted musical to become a hit (it has run in various permutations in Germany over the past 20 years). That’s a chronological distinction, since an earlier collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whistle Down the Wind, flopped in the U.S. in ’96 but ran for several years in the West End, starting in ’98, a year after Tanz opened in Austria. Steinman’s long-gestating dystopian sci-fi/Peter Pan musical, Bat Out of Hell (which I, yet again, reviewed here), toured around the UK (where it did very well) and North America and only played in NYC as a limited edition run (where that show was cut as well, but nothing new was inserted — the plot was streamlined and songs were removed).

One other individual should very definitely be highlighted here. Michael Kunze wrote the libretto adapting Polanski’s film to the stage. He also wrote the German lyrics, which confirm the show’s status as an “almost operetta,” since the dialogue is minimal and the songs drive the plot entirely. Kunze has written German lyrics for many British and American shows, has had a number of his own hit musicals in Germany, and wrote and produced the disco hit “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention (!).

It should be noted that the very short-lived American version of the show starring Michael (“Phantom”!) Crawford had a troubled production and ultimately flopped big-time on Broadway. Steinman was initially hired as co-director, then fired, and he has never spoken well of the show, titled (rather obviously) Dance of the Vampires. By the time of the American failure, Polanski was long gone from the project.

Mr. Steinman and Mr. Loaf.

So here is all of Tanz from its German incarnation. The YT poster has broken it into six segments, each of which has its standout scenes and songs. Note: The English lyrics seen here are completely different from the other set of English lyrics that were posted in the “square” (correct-looking) version of the video. I have no grasp of German, so I can’t tell who did a better job of translation. (I did keep .mp4 copies of the other person’s better-looking videos.)

The first part has an amazing paean to garlic (tongue in cheek, of course) and the first appearance of “Total Eclipse” as the vampire’s signature song. It ends with a very Gilbert and Sullivan-esque song sung by the professor character (played in Fearless Vampire Killers by Jack MacGowran).

  

The second part has the first big duet between the youthful sidekick of the professor and the daughter of the innkeeper (played in the film by Polanski and Sharon Tate).

  

The third part leads up to the famed “Jewish vampire” scene, which explains why one character looks like he’s Fagin or a Semitic stereotype. The initial scenes are set in a shtetl, and Polanski and his original co-scipter Gerard Brach provided a nice comedic pay-off to go with that choice of location.

  

The fourth part, which begins Act Two, starts off with a full performance of “Total Eclipse” and the bravura vampiric nighttime fantasy “Seize the Night.” (A title so good I’d like to attribute it to Steinman, but it surely was Kunze’s contribution.)

 

The fifth part contains another big ensemble number — “Eternity,” performed by a host of vampires after they exit their coffins.

 

The sixth part is the finale (bows included), leading up to the big closing number, “Dance of the Vampires.” The song is really “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” an incredibly rousing Steinman song from the Walter Hill film Streets of Fire (1984). It’s a great way to end the show — kinda like Rocky Horror, but as if “Time Warp” was the finale.

 

So there you have it — the entirety of Steinman’s “lost” (in America at least) gothic vampire musical as scripted/with lyrics by Michael Kunze and directed by none other than Roman Polanski. It’s a shame that the YouTube poster did indeed alter the image so the video looks dreadful all the way through, but perhaps that was the only way to keep it from being taken down? (Since YT’s rules are arbitrary, whimsical, capricious, and absolutely without rhyme or reason. It’s a video-viewing site run by robots that pretends it’s the creation of people.)

*****

Jim and garlic.

As a closer I want to add some items that were not in the preceding posts about Steinman. Three are from his only album, Bad for Good (1981), which is an odd affair — made up of songs that would’ve been on the sequel to Bat Out of Hell that never materialized because of Meatloaf losing his voice (although he used these songs and other Steinman tunes for both Bats 2 and 3). Steinman also doesn’t sing on some of the tracks — the one hit from the album, “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,” was sung by session singer Rory Dodd.

Here, Steinman delivers a Jim Morrison-esque spoken-word piece, “Love and Death and an American Guitar” (although Jim S. was kidding — or at least half-kidding). He had started doing this monologue at Meat Loaf live shows and later re-used it for the EPK of the Original Sin album he wrote and produced for his attempt at a prefab girl group, Pandora’s Box.

 

The album’s title song, “Bad for Good,” is a classic Steinman tune, with full-blown rock-drama in effect. (And quite corny interpretive dancing in the music-vid.)

 

The last video from his album is not found on YouTube (no reason why, really) but can be found on Vimeo. He often referred in interviews to the “boner moments” in his songs, where he indicated that the male narrator was getting crazy over his object of desire. Here, Jim not only sings (lip-synch of course) with the ever-lovely Karla De Vito (who took over for Ellen Foley and toured with Meat Loaf, performing back-up vocals and duets from the first Bat LP) — he also dances. (Or something resembling dancing.) This is his silliest epic song (and intended to be so):

I can’t resist closing another tribute to Steinman with the Holy Grail of the music-videos for his songs. No, not “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” This video for a song Jim wrote and produced in 1989 for his girl-group Pandora’s Box (but which became a giant hit for Celine Dion several years later) is directed by none other than Funhouse interview subject Ken Russell.

Steinman and
the Pandora's Box
ladies.

It is the union of a filmmaker who often went deliriously, deliciously over the top and a songwriter who stayed in that register all the time. (Jim’s oft-stated heroes were Richard Wagner and Little Richard, and clearly many tragic story-songs of the early Sixties.) The video finds “Unkle Ken” (as he liked to be called in his later years) repeating a plot he developed for his contribution to the anthology film Aria (1987), and in the process producing frenzied, stylized visuals that perfectly match Steinman’s words and music.

In a recently posted piece by Sylvie Simmons, Steinman is quoted as saying that Russell “'shot enough footage for a whole porno movie.... The record company,' he added with a grin, was 'horrified.' ” (Jim had a penchant for hyperbole that never failed him.)

The singer, for the record, is Elaine Caswell. And this is a mega-blast of Steinman (and Russell) grandiosity.

A gothic dream team: Roman Polanski and Jim Steinman

In tribute to the finest holiday that was ever invented, I shine a spotlight on an artistic collaboration that we in the U.S. had no access to — unless you had the money for an international flight and a strong working knowledge of German.

Now not one but two fully subtitled videos of the Austrian musical Tanz Der Vampire are on YouTube. I focus on the earlier production here since it was not only recorded more professionally but it was closer to the original vision of the show, as personally directed by Roman Polanski, who co-wrote and directed the source material, the horror farce The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967). The show began in 1997 in Austria as directed by Polanski, but this recording of it hails from Germany in the early 2000s.

I have mixed feelings about FVR. Polanski’s farces pale beside his brilliant darkly humored pictures (like Bitter Moon). The reworking of the film for Tanz, however, is fascinating in that the stage show takes its characters and situations a bit more seriously — the result, no doubt, of the show running over an hour longer than the film.

The other reason the show is a must-see is that it finds Polanski directing a stage musical scored by the king of pop-rock melodrama, Jim Steinman. I’ve rhapsodized about Steinman before (and noted his difficulties with librettos), so I will simply note that, since we never got to see the proposed “video album” for Steinman’s girl-group project “Pandora’s Box” that would’ve been directed by “Unkle Ken” Russell, we can content ourselves with a Broadway/West End-style musical with Steinman music and Polanski visuals.

As for L’affaire Polanski and the fact that his latest film, Based on a True Story (2017), co-written with Olivier Assayas, was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics but not released in the U.S., it has to be said yet again that one *must* separate the art from the artist or one will only experience art from squeaky-clean hands – and who wants any more Spielberg-Ron Howard-Tom Hanks-Tyler Perry-Marvel movies?

As for his participation in this show, the piece was clearly undertaken with visions of Phantom box office receipts dancing in the producers’ heads. Thus the budget was clearly large enough to indulge Polanski’s gothic impulses. (As for his stage credentials, he did take time out from the cinema to costar and direct productions of Amadeus in ’81 and ’99 in Warsaw, Paris, and Milan.)

The sets are large and the cast is filled with “background vampire” singers and dancers. The key ingredient, though, is Steinman’s music, which, true to form with Jim, consists of songs that he composed for earlier projects, both musicals and pop-rock albums.

The most-heard tune in the piece is “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is the central vampire’s signature theme and is repeated over and over in the show. Steinman has been quoted as saying that he used the very well-known hit song as a kind of place holder for some other song to be written later. Given that the tune is the central piece of music, I doubt he threw the song in there provisionally.

There is certainly something amazing about hearing Steinman’s Wagnerian pop-rock in German. For decades now he has crafted songs that require singers with “big” voices and a solid vocal range (well… maybe not Air Supply), and his aim was always to write Broadway musicals. Hearing his music in German is a hand-in-glove fit.

Tanz was his first big-budgeted musical to become a hit (it has run in various permutations in Germany over the past 20 years). That’s a chronological distinction, since an earlier collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whistle Down the Wind, flopped in the U.S. in ’96 but ran for several years in the West End, starting in ’98, a year after Tanz opened in Austria. Steinman’s current musical, Bat Out of Hell, is wisely being toured around the UK (where it’s done very well) and North America before a Broadway run is even considered.

Polanski, Kunze, Steinman.

One other individual should very definitely be highlighted here. Michael Kunze wrote the libretto adapting Polanski’s film to the stage. He also wrote the German lyrics, which, as seen here (in rhyming couplets in English), confirm the show’s status as an “almost operetta,” since the dialogue is minimal and the songs drive the plot entirely. Kunze has written German lyrics for many British and American shows, has had a number of his own hit musicals in Germany, and wrote and produced the disco hit “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention (!).

It should be noted that the very short-lived American version of the show starring Michael (“Phantom”!) Crawford had a troubled production and ultimately flopped big-time on Broadway. Steinman was initially hired as co-director, then fired, and he has never spoken well of the show, titled (rather obviously) Dance of the Vampires. By the time of the American failure, Polanski was long gone from the project.

So here is all of Tanz from its German incarnation. The YT poster has broken it into seven segments, each of which has its standout scenes and songs. Note: The lyrics seen here are indeed the English-language versions of the songs. So I have no idea if the precise original lyrics of “Total Eclipse” were sung in German, but it’s highly unlikely.

The first part has an amazing paean to garlic (tongue in cheek, of course) and the first appearance of “Total Eclipse” as the vampire’s signature song.

The second part has a very Gilbert and Sullivan-esque song sung by the professor character (played in Fearless Vampire Killers by Jack MacGowran), as well as the first big duet between the youthful sidekick of the professor and the daughter of the innkeeper (played in the film by Polanski and Sharon Tate).

The third part leads up to the famed “Jewish vampire” scene (which explains why one character looks like he’s Fagin and/or a Semitic stereotype — the initial scenes are set in a shtetl, and Polanski and his original co-scipter Gerard Brach provided a nice comedic pay-off to go with that choice of location).

The fourth part starts off with a full performance of “Total Eclipse” and the bravura vampiric nighttime fantasy “Seize the Night.” (A title so good I’d like to attribute it to Steinman, but it surely was Kunze’s contribution.)

The fifth part contains another big ensemble number — “Eternity,” performed by a host of vampires after they exit their coffins.

The sixth part is the finale (the seventh video contains the bows), leading up to the big closing number, “Dance of the Vampires.” The song is really “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” an incredibly rousing Steinman song from the Walter Hill film Streets of Fire (1984). It’s a great way to end the show – kinda like Rocky Horror, but if “Time Warp” was the finale.

Jukebox dystopia: ‘Bat Out of Hell: the Musical’

I love Jim Steinman. I mean, I've never met the man, but I'm a diehard fan of his bombastic, excess-laden melo-dra-matic (hyphens needed) pop-rock for several decades now.

So when I heard that Steinman's long-planned Bat Out of Hell musical had finally seen the light of day and was playing in Toronto (it closes this coming Sunday), I knew I needed to see it, since there is no assurance it will ever reach Broadway. (The fact that it’s playing at the Ed Mirvish Theater, named after the owner of the much-missed “Honest Ed’s” emporium, only made the trip more essential.)

The show is a mess but a fun one. Steinman is an unrepentant master of excess, so it follows that problems with the show aren't simple miscalculations but are instead pretty sizable mistakes. The first is the book by Steinman. One must remember that Sondheim himself, the greatest living Broadway composer, has never written his own librettos — Steinman is a control freak, so he did so in Bat.

The result is a futuristic, dystopian scenario involving street kids that grow no older than 18 (one of Steinman's big dream-projects has been a Peter Pan musical), an evil yet oddly charismatic business mogul/dictator, and a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story romance. Add in odd supporting characters, like a “soulmate” for our hero named “Tink” (a male — and no, we didn't have to applaud to keep him alive), and you begin to see the confused, placeholder status of the storyline.

To help viewers understand the plotline, there are both mock newspapers from the city of “Obsidian” (the location of the play, a future identity for NYC) given to each audience member and introductory projected titles before the show begins. These nuggets of info are helpful but also distracting — the show inevitably boils down to “romance between rich girl and street gang leader” and “evil leader learns he'll lose his daughter if he stays evil.” The fantasy aspect — which seems to have come from two Walter Hill films (The Warriors and a film Steinman supplied songs for, Streets of Fire) — is distracting and unnecessary.

The other distraction from the blissfully overwrought score is Emma Portner's choreography. She chose to go with moves that evoke the past — namely the well-remembered (but solely as kitsch) music videos of Bob Giraldi. This isn't modern dance, nor is it classical ballet or Agnes de Mille's revamp of same. It blends the moves of old MTV staples with the “hand jive” synchronized dancing from Grease, an odd choice for a harder-edged pop-rock enterprise. Here is a sample, from a person who shot scenes from the play on their phone.

And finally there is the cast. The show was first performed in London and Manchester, so the performers are primarily English. On the night I saw the show — a Wednesday in early December — stand-ins were substituting for the two main performers (the younger couple). Of these two, Georgia Carling acquitted herself nicely, but Benjamin Purkiss seemed to be struggling to stay in key during some of Steinman's extremely demanding rock anthems.

In one department, both performers did deliver (they had to — it was in the script). The lead female character, “Raven,” the 18-year-old daughter of the evil mogul, spends a good deal of the play in a teddy and other form-fitting outfits. Not to make this a sexist affair, the male lead, “Strat,” appears shirtless at every opportunity, to lend his character an Iggy/Daltrey air. This is clearly done to add a rock 'n' roll aspect to the proceedings but instead serves to distract viewers in a pleasant way during the moments of exposition.

Sharon Sexton is quite good as “Sloane,” the mogul's wife, who has to tackle the “Will you love me forever?” half of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” among other great songs. Her duet partner is Rob Fowler as the mogul “Falco,” a character who is supposed to be an evil prick but is in fact the most likable character in the show. Fowler's singing voice has the right combination of rock 'n' roll bravado and theatrical belting, and he is thus perfectly suited for the material.

Sexton and Fowler are involved in the one of the show's most memorable moments, a bit of stagecraft  that is memorable enough to stay with one well after the show (and needs to be “undone” by stage hands during the intermission). Falco and Sloane are at dinner when they reminisce about their first seduction — which, of course, leads to “Dashboard Light.” Their dining table slides away to reveal a car, which, as the song concludes, crashes down into the orchestra pit (which exists for this sole purpose — the rock band accompanying the singers is located backstage). Two other special effects occur later in the show, but I won't give them away here.

Suffice it to say that the production design is impressive enough to distract one from the simple-yet-still -too-dubiously-complicated plot line. The set is a dystopian landscape — composed of a tilted, Blade Runner-esque skyscraper, the teen gang's hideout, and Raven's bedroom, which achieves greater depth (and, yes evokes early MTV once more) through the use of a video camera that is used to project it onto monitors and screens (why the cameraman is visible isn't explained, but that's the least of the odd plot points).

This brings me to the show's strong suit, and the reason it exists in the first place, namely Steinman's sublime earworm tunes. Every one is an anthem of one sort or another, be it a full-out rocker or a power ballad, all ideal inclusions in a stage musical. When the performer's voice is right for the material and the backstage band is cookin', the plotline seems to disappear and Steinman's work shines in all its deeply-sincere-yet-slyly tongue-in-cheek glory.

The humor in Steinman's work is a factor missed by those who view the Meat Loaf/Steinman albums as kitsch. While Steinman aspires to take rock into the arena inhabited by one of his two heroic Richards, Richard Wagner (the other one is Little Richard), many times he's also kidding. 

In this interview in Billboard, Todd Rundgren presented the best analysis of Steinman’s music by exploring how the Bat Out of Hell album seemed to him (Todd) to be a spoof of Springsteen, whom he felt had brought rock back to Fifties iconography but took it all too seriously. Steinman, on other hand, “wove this sense of humor into the material in a way that Springsteen never did.”

The songs included here hail primarily from the three Bat Out of Hell albums, with the inclusion of the soft pop Air Supply hit “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” (a Steinman composition). The “epic” numbers are of course accorded the biggest set-pieces (and the attendant crazy fx), while the shorter ballads and pop-rock classics keep the evening moving right along (and, again, thankfully distract from the plot).

Steinman receives a degree from Amherst College (he's in the studded outfit).

Steinman's genius for crazed, sensational “melo” (as opposed to mellow) music comes through when the songs are at the forefront. It's indeed uncertain whether the show will ever reach Broadway — and, if so, whether it can catch the attention of the folks who made Rock of Ages such a long-running hit (nearly six years).

If the plotline is retooled or trimmed back, Bat Out of Hell could easily be a hit on Broadway, since the Meat Loaf/Steinman albums were always big, boisterous musicals waiting to happen. Perhaps if the piece can simply become a suite of Steinman's pop-rock classics with the barest hint of a West Side Story through-line for the characters, Bat could truly take off to hell and back.
*****

Steinman with the original 'Bat"
women: Karla DeVito and Ellen Foley.

As video “bonuses,” here are a few choice bits of music that relate to Steinman and the show. The first is a killer monologue that he first did on his one and only solo album, Bad for Good. It is performed by "Strat" right at the opening of Bat Out of Hell: the Musical, but this particular version is the craziest. It appeared on the electronic press kit for the Original Sin album by Pandora’s Box, a group of female studio singers (including Ellen Foley), who were intended to be Steinman’s own version of another one of his fave musical acts, the Shangri-Las.

Steinman has done one of these monologues per album since the original Bat LP. They are clearly homages to, and satires of, the poetry of Jim Morrison. This piece in particular evokes Morrison’s super-arch spoken-word interlude in “The End.”

I in no way advocate or support people bringing video devices to a theater. But, since someone did, I refer you to this song as wonderfully performed in the Toronto version of Bat. One of Steinman’s great evocations of the Phil Spector school of songwriting, “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)”:

Steinman has reworked some of his songs for different purposes. Here is the original demo version of a song that appears in the Bat musical. Intended for the never-produced Batman musical, it is a grim little number called “In the Land of the Pig (the Butcher is King).” You want “melo”? You got it.

Throughout the show, one flashes on the original versions of the songs by one Marvin Lee Aday, aka Meat Loaf. Meat is an incredible performer, a rock singer of operatic range and intensity. He will always be *the* foremost interpreter of Steinman’s work.

Here he is performing one of the “epic” Steinman compositions (and one of the biggest-ever hits for both “Mr. Loaf” and Steinman), “I'd Do Anything for Love.” This is from a concert performance where Meat was in full kick-ass mode. He is the most elegant Big Man who has ever sung a rock song (and yes, Jack Black has stolen his every move for those rock “performances” he does….).

To my mind, the song below is the Steinman's finest pop-rock classic — his epic tunes are indeed what he will always be remembered for, but there’s something about this rapid-fire attack. It truly works as a spoof of Springsteen’s heartsick Americana, per Todd Rundgren’s formulation of the album (“I was a varsity tackle/and a helluva block./When I played my guitar/I made the canyons rock…”).

Pursuing the idea that sometimes other folks can alter Steinman’s material for the better, Jim is interviewed here about how Rundgren sped this song up in the studio when Steinman was sick with the flu, trying to get a standard-length rock song into the album (the irony being that the two songs played to death by the radio at the time of the album’s success were always the epic-length “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and the snowy ballad, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”).

The insanely sincere lyrics, Edgar Winter’s sax, Meat’s incredible vocal, and the speed with which the damned thing is delivered make this, for me, the ultimate Steinman composition (and, needless to add, theatrical to the max).

And to close this out, I must showcase my all-time fave visualization of a Steinman song, a music video made for the Pandora’s Box album by none other than Funhouse interview subject “Unkle” Ken Russell. I can’t imagine a better combination of wonderful madmen than a fusion of Jim Steinman’s operatic rock and Ken Russell’s frenzied genius for dream imagery.

Here Unkle Ken is borrowing from himself, using the scenario from his moving segment for the film Aria (1987). The result, however, is the most gloriously delirious visualization of a Steinman tune ever — bikers, gods and goddesses (who might be aliens, or not), glitter, fire, studs, snakes, and a sacred ritual. It’s hard to ask for more than this.

It was noted somewhere that the initial idea was to produce a “video album” for the Pandora’s Box album, to be directed entirely by Ken Russell. The mind fairly reels at what we lost in the way of brilliant (and brilliantly sincere) excess.