In Memoriam: Jim Steinman

“If you don’t go over the top,” the American composer, producer and songwriter Jim Steinman told Howard Miller in 2019, “you can’t see what’s on the other side.” Steinman was speaking of his jukebox musical, “Bat Out of Hell”, based on the famed 1977 album Steinman made with Meat Loaf, an especially apt quote for a production about which Miller wrote, not all that critically, “please don’t ask me to explain what it’s about.” That’s a fitting summary of Steinman. You didn’t need to know what “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, the 1983 chart-topper that Steinman wrote and produced for Bonnie Tyler, was about to innately grasp its sonic majesty. And though “Bat Out of Hell” might go down as Steinman’s magnum opus, I will always remember him for his work with Tyler, not just the epic “Total Eclipse” but the even more epic “Faster Than the Speed of Night”, the title track of the album on which “Total Eclipse” appeared, a propulsive six-plus minutes that in some way I know but cannot quite explain more utterly embodies the fantastical idea of a stairway to heaven than “Stairway to Heaven.” (I have long dreamt about Lady Gaga covering “Faster Than the Speed of Night” just as I long dreamt of a Lady Gaga/Jim Steinman collaboration, which probably did not happen if only because Earth, tedious Earth, could never have handled it.) The E Street Band’s Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg played, respectively, piano and drums on “Faster Than the Speed of Night”, just as they played on the whole album, betraying a similarity to Springsteen for which Steinman was often cited – at least, the early, mid-70s Springsteen, when he was as much “West Side Story” as Heartland Rock, though Steinman’s work always felt more intergalactic, catching a rainbow-colored wormhole, not a wave, to some other dimension. 

Speaking of Springsteen, Walter Hill’s 1984 cult-ish classic-ish rock musical “Streets of Fire” took its name from Bruce’s 1978 song of the same title. Billed as “A Rock & Roll Fable”, “Streets of Fire” was set in “Another Time, Another Place”, one that felt like a mishmash of the 1950s and 1980s, just like its music, akin to Springsteen’s “Born to Run” running, to quote Greil Marcus, “on melted down Crystals records.” It’s a movie I dearly love, “an extravagantly stylized pulp burlesque,” wrote critic Sean Burns in 2018, “that is at once an objectively lousy picture and just about the coolest damn thing I’ve ever seen”, which doesn’t feel too far off from Howard Miller essentially throwing up his hands in the face of “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” and just taking the ride.

The production originally intended to use Springsteen’s “Streets of Fire” as its closing anthem, to be performed by the movie’s rock ’n roll heroes, Ellen Aim & the Attackers. (Diane Lane played Ellen Aim with Holly Sherwood’s voice dubbed in for the music.) But when Bruce, notoriously protective of his work, learned the vocals would be re-recorded by someone else, he withdrew permission. And really, that was for the best. I’m not sure his “Streets of Fire” would have fit. Jim Steinman, then, was enlisted to write a song to take its place, coming up, reportedly in all of two days, with “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young”, a glittering ballad if not quite at the level of his song that opened the movie - “Nowhere Fast” - if only because “Nowhere Fast” is soundtrack royalty, top of the movie-song pops, an astonishing expression of That Teenage Feeling of being in a hurry with nowhere to go.

This blog has referenced “Nowhere Fast” ad nauseum over the years. In fact, tomorrow’s post, in the can for a week, references it. A few months back we painstakingly confirmed it to be the Best Fake Song In a Movie. No, it did not win the Best Original Song Oscar in 1984 because it was not even nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar in 1984. But, who needs an Oscar? Don’t let the man get you down, as Mr. Cool noted in “The School of Rock.” There has never been a better Original Song in a movie than “Nowhere Fast”, written by Jim Steinman, dead on Monday at the age of 73, and there never will be.

Vive la Ellen Aim. Vive la Jim Steinman.

Vive Ellen Aim

It was the damndest thing. As the Internet collectively freaked out over the new "Interstellar" trailer (see it here), I immediately planned, as long-time (frustrated) readers of Cinema Romantico know so well, to NOT be the 774,323rd media outlet providing the latest biggest trailer in the history of motion pictures by instead providing the trailer for Walter Hill's thirty-year old, not very beloved "Streets of Fire". It's a joke that never gets old got old a long time ago.

Except plans changed when later in the day I made a daily pit stop over at Roger Ebert's site and, lo and behold, found an Odie Henderson penned "Streets of Fire" retrospective. Kismet, you might say. And I enjoyed it, because while I enjoy forcing my "Streets of Fire" fascination on everyone else, it's a film I rarely "consider". Possibly because a film "from another time, another place" that looks suspiciously like Chicago in the 80's re-imagined as if 2020 was the 50's chronicling a rock 'n' roll diva named Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) being kidnapped by Willem Dafoe - presaging his roles in "To Live and Die In L.A." and "Speed 2: Cruise Control" as if they were rolled into one in an Anne Rice novel - who must then be rescued by the obligatory leather jacketed swashbuckler (Michael Pare) and his accomplice played by Amy Madigan who is almost - almost - as tenacious as an Iowan doesn't deserve "consideration". Yet, Henderson's piece made me consider why I love it.

The title, of course, is taken from a Bruce Springsteen song, but Springsteen, as Springsteen often does, refused to grant the rights for the song to the movie. Which worked out harmoniously because, frankly, that Springsteen song was in no way apropos to the rock 'n' roll fable that director Walter Hill was making. He was making something garish and bombastic, and so Jim Steinman's original tuneage in the form of "Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young" and especially "Nowhere Fast" (see below), which I would in all seriousness name as one of my Top 10 All-Time Movie Soundtrack songs, was exquisitely apt. And that I love these songs so much probably wouldn't surprise you upon advising that on said songs Roy Bittan played piano and Max Weinberg played drums. It's not Springsteen but it's nonetheless infused with the sound of E Street. Of course, I love them!

It wasn't just the music I loved, however, it was the movie too. Why, I wonder? Well, because I saw it when I was an impressionable teenager, I think, and as Henderson writes, "teenaged boys and men who find something in the film to evoke nostalgic feelings for their youth will like it enough to forgive the film its trespasses." One of those trespasses, no doubt, is an attitude toward women, which Henderson fairly addresses. "Her tough-as-nails stage persona hints that she’s strong enough to go on with her life after being dumped by the hero," Henderson writes of Ellen Aim, "yet she becomes completely helpless and victimized as soon as she’s taken hostage." It's an ancient melody. Of course, Thirties Me recognizes these sorts of issues more readily than Teenage Me. So why then, I wonder, does "Streets of Fire" still endure in my mind?

Because of a campy kinda nostalgia, sure, but then there other films I watched in the heyday of my youth that I have long since set out to compost. Like, say, "Commando", the grandiose Schwarzenegger exercise in machismo that I watched near about the same time as "Streets of Fire" and loved just as much. But then while "Commando" did feature Alyssa Milano, the heartthrob of every teenage boy in the 80's, it did not have a pop diva. And my affection for pop divas, we know too well, remains. So maybe it's not "Streets of Fire" that I remember so whimsically. Maybe it's just "Nowhere Fast." Maybe it's just The Attackers. Maybe it's just Ellen Aim.

Don't See The Interstellar Trailer Here!

The first trailer for Christopher Nolan's much-ballyhooed, seriously-anticipated "Interstellar" made its appearance this weekend. There are roughly 575,000 media outlets you can check for coverage. Here, you can watch a music video for "Nowhere Fast" from 1984's rock opera "Streets of Fire"!!! Now this is truly interstellar!