Friday, March 29

The eternal years of Meat Loaf

No matter how much time has passed, I still remember the touch of the chalk, the numbers on the blackboard and the first vowels. Also the pen stains on the school clothes and the aroma of times past, when the bell rang and I went out with a shotgun.

In two strides I was at the crossroads, where Bravo Murillo is on the corner of San Germán, where once there was a record store. In its shop window, the vibrant color of a cover stood out; a vignette showing a long-haired biker driving his machine at full throttle. He was escaping from the graveyard and heading towards a twilight sky. Behind the biker, the disturbing figure of a bat spread its wings on the roof of a tower.

I was always curious about that record. Years later, I found him at the house of a friend from Villaverde. It belonged to the collection of his older brother. As soon as I saw it, I told my friend to put it on the gig. Then the mystery that had remained hidden for so long was cleared up. That was how I discovered the music of Meat Loaf, a heavy rock that did not give up German opera. Stevie Van Zandt recounts in her memoir (Libros del Kultrum) that if he had been German, Meat Loaf would have been called Chop of Saxony. Joke aside, Richard Wagner’s influence on Meat Loaf is indisputable.

I liked the album so much that my friend recorded it for me on one of those 90-minute tapes that were around then. On one side Meat Loaf sounded and on the other the Kiss with their cursed album “Music from The Elder”, which turned out to be something more than a mere coincidence. Because, now that I think about it, both Meat Loaf and the Gene Simmons group drank from the same sources. In both, their staging was influenced by the theater, as well as by the world of comics, a graphic dimension that I would discover while listening to that music.

The cover of Meat Loaf was signed by Richard Corben, the American cartoonist who combined sex with the sinister in the same way that Eros is combined with Thanatos. His fantastic stories, full-color illustrated vignettes, could be found on newsstands, in monthly publications like 1984 or Metal Hurlant. Now, the Planeta publishing house has compiled his work, but in those days you had to wait until the next month to find out what happened to Den and all those heroic fantasy characters created by Corben. The story was cut off after an irritating “to be continued” at the bottom of the last panel.

That’s what happened, while I was trying to get the chords on the guitar following the music of that Meat Loaf album. It was a guitar that my mother had obtained by filling out coupons in the Spar booklets, the supermarkets at the time, and on which she had changed the strings for other electric guitar strings. She had also put him on a pill. I remember that with such inventions I ruined the amplifier of the equipment that was in the living room at home.

With the death of Meat Loaf, these assaults of memory come to mind, from when the kiosks wore the color of the comics of that time, and I did not dare to dream that some very distant day I would tell it to be read on an illuminated screen . The arrival of the Internet has brought about a technological revolution that —among many other things— allows us to immediately find any record that used to shine in store windows like the one before which I stopped my steps. Today it’s a greengrocer, but in my day they sold records.

For all these reasons, although nostalgia is a common impulse to human beings, and now they sell it to us in its sickest dimension, wrapped in melancholy, we must know how to appreciate the moment we are living. Above all else, because it won’t come back again.



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