Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By the Dashboard Lights:” A Love Song With a Baseball Twist
One of the greatest rock albums of all time puts a baseball spin on a power ballad about teenage romance.
by Rich Watson
He was born Marvin Lee Aday, but the world knows him as Meat Loaf, the plus-sized rock star with the bombastic voice and operatic songs. He has toured with Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Bob Seger and more. He has also acted on TV and in movies such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Fight Club.
In 1977, after appearing on stage in musicals such as Hair and touring as part of several acts, he released a debut solo record, Bat Out of Hell. It wasn’t a big hit at first but it would eventually go multi-platinum.
One of the best-known hits from that album was “Paradise By the Dashboard Lights,” a song about teenage lust with an unusual twist: a spoken-word movement halfway through performed by a baseball Hall of Famer.
Jim Steinman and Bat Out of Hell
Bat Out of Hell was produced by Todd Rundgren and written by composer Jim Steinman, who would write hits for Barry Manilow, Air Supply, Bonnie Tyler, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion and more. Steinman died earlier this year.
Bat was the product of a musical adaptation of Peter Pan called Neverland, which Steinman had worked on in 1974. He and Meat Loaf had met while on tour with a live show produced by National Lampoon. They developed three of the songs from that musical and the album grew from there.
Every company they took the record to rejected it. When Rundgren heard it, however, he insisted on producing it himself, at Epic Records’ subsidiary Cleveland International. His band Utopia performed on it, plus Edgar Winter and members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Meat Loaf initially didn’t want Rundgren’s mix of “Paradise,” but eventually it was remixed into the version known today.
Though Epic Records didn’t like Bat at first, word of mouth made it grow. It peaked on the Billboard album chart at 14 and has gone on to sell an estimated forty-three million copies worldwide. Here’s a track-by-track appreciation of the album.
Ellen Foley and “Paradise”
“Paradise” may sound juvenile at first (e.g. “Baby don’t you hear my heart/You got it drowning out the radio”), but it’s performed with absolute sincerity and an energy that’s infectious.
The lyrics tell the story of two young lovers making out in the backseat of a car. The girl wants the boy to commit to her before they have sex. He’s hesitant, but in the end he wants her too badly to say no. Meat Loaf shares lead vocals with a woman named Ellen Foley.
Foley, like Meat Loaf and Steinman, was part of that National Lampoon road show and was in Steinman’s musical Neverland. Throughout her career, she has performed with Blue Oyster Cult, The Clash and Joe Jackson in addition to her own band, Pandora’s Box. She has performed on stage, TV (the sitcom Night Court) and film (Fatal Attraction, Married to the Mob, Cocktail). Here’s an interview from earlier this year about her latest solo album and her career.
When Meat Loaf went on tour to promote Bat, Foley was unavailable, so in her place was Karla DeVito (in the image at the top), another Neverland alumnus. She is in the videos for “Paradise” and “Bat Out of Hell,” lip-syncing to Foley’s vocals. She, like Foley, has performed solo and on stage. In 2016 she appeared on Meat Loaf’s album Braver Than We Are.
“Paradise” also has a spoken-word section, done by an unlikely recording artist: former baseball star Phil Rizzuto.
Phil Rizzuto and “Paradise”
Rizzuto was a baseball legend. A member of seven World Series-winning Yankee teams, he was a five-time All-Star at shortstop and a former American League MVP. In 1957 he began a forty-year career as a Yankee broadcaster for radio and TV.
In “Paradise,” Rizzuto plays an announcer calling a ball game. A batter gets a hit and rounds the bases one at a time. He’s about to reach home plate, but that’s when the girl demands the boy promise to love her. Thus the ball game is a metaphor for… well, take a guess.
For years afterward, Rizzuto claimed he didn’t know what his part represented in the song, but according to an 2007 ESPN interview with Meat Loaf following Rizzuto’s death, nothing could be further from the truth:
Phil was no dummy—he knew exactly what was going on, and he told me such…He was just getting some heat from a priest and felt like he had to do something. I totally understood. But I believe Phil was proud of that song and his participation.
Bat Out of Hell sequels and a musical
The album spawned a pair of sequels: Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell in 1993 and Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose in 2006.
Steinman recently wrote a stage musical inspired by the album and his own Neverland. Bat Out of Hell: The Musical premiered in Manchester, England in 2017. Rob Fowler and Sharon Sexton performed “Paradise.” The musical made its New York debut off-Broadway in August 2019. It has since played around the world, interrupted by the pandemic, but is now expected to tour the UK.
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Do you like the song “Paradise By the Dashboard Lights”?