Hang Cool Teddy Bear

Hang Cool Teddy Bear / Meat Loaf











As some of you know, I am a mega Meat Loaf fan.  Today, as this Blog entry gets posted, I will be at the Hang Cool Teddy Bear concert.  Floor seats, I might add, loosing my hearing and my voice. 

Thankfully, M. is very tolerant of this and has come to many Meat Loaf concerts with me.  Sometimes the same concert tour multiple times.  As much as I like to watch Keanu, I like to listen to Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman music.

There is a touch of irony in this.  Growing up, my mother was a lot of things, but one thing generally to her credit I think, was she offered a lot of freedom.  I could watch what I wanted.  If it was R rated, if I could find an adult to take me, I could go. (First R rated movie - Dracula, of course. Langella, not Keanu.)  Of course, finding the consenting adult wasn't always easy, and she wouldn't go herself, but she didn't stop me.

I could read anything I wanted.  In 8th grade I declaired my two favorite books The Exorcist and The Godfather.

But one Saturday night, as I was camped out and enthralled in front of SNL, they aired Meat Loaf doing Paradise by the Dashboard Light.  I had been clamoring  for the Bat out of Hell album.  In my excitment I was shouting something like, ohohoh that's from the album I want....

Yeah, she took one look at the screen, listened for about 30 seconds and said something like that album cannot enter this house!  There were tears, fighting, yelling, etc. etc. etc.  And it remained the one peice of media in my family life that was censored.

I won't lie, I do sometimes wonder if my love of his music would have been as strong if it had not initially been forbidden.  But I don't think so.  I have every album.  Yup, every one will be showing up here in the next 11 months.  And yes, I ordered Hang Cool Teddy Bear before it was released and I already have it all memorized.

It's a great album by the way.  It has a duet with Jack Black - fabulous.  (Some day I'll write about Jack...and Adam Sandler, two that I really like though for the life of me, I don't get why.  Perhaps it's that same part that likes shooting the urnals in the arcade.) And Hugh Laurie plays on the album too.  I'll try to refrain from giving y'all a big gushing review tomorrow morning!