Far Out There Character Soundtracks - Von Cannon

Okay, I teased this before, but now it’s time to finally do it! As I’ve mentioned SEVERAL times by now, most of those new Nitpickers introduced in the Christmas 2020 comics were actually created soundtrack first. I went ahead and made short playlists around various musical themes, then drew up characters I thought would listen to them. And at long last, I’m gonna start unleashing those playlists on you, the unsuspecting reader!

To kick things off, we have Helmut Von Cannon: a sweaty, long-haired, heavyset dude in a flowing loose-fitting shirt. How can it surprise anybody that Von Cannon was drawn under the influence of Meat Loaf? Well, more to the point, he was drawn under the influence of Jim Steinman’s Wagnerian Rock, of which Meat Loaf was probably the best known practitioner.  Hugely melodramatic and theatrical versions of old school Rock & Roll tropes blown up to eleven and filtered through more contemporary production styles. Depending on when he was working, that could either mean 70s Glam Rock or 80s Synth Pop or even 90s Power Ballads, underneath it all there was the constant of a bizarre world version of the “teenagers in fast cars” Rock & Roll myth. And there was also Jim Steinman himself, as “Wagnerian Rock” was one of the few sub-genres to be almost completely owned by a single individual. While there are ten artists featured on Von Cannon’s soundtrack, one is Steinman himself, and four more are either projects Steinman used as vehicles for himself or artists working more or less in partnership with him. So really, half this whole soundtrack is just Jim Steinman in different guises, and that’s easily the heaviest dominance by a single creative force of any of these playlists.

Thus, I think it’d be easier to start off with the NON-Steinman entries on Von Cannon’s soundtrack, even though most of them still strongly suggest his influence, or at least drawing from shared sources. Take, for example, Queen’s “I’m In Love With My Car.” Musically, the song is one of the more straightforward Hard Rock songs on this playlist, but those lyrics… If you don’t know or haven’t paid close attention, there’s not some weird double entendre or subtext to the lyrics, it really is a passionate ode from Roger Taylor to his prized Alfa Romero. With how large Car Culture looms over the classic Rock & Roll mythos, that’s honestly a natural fit for the over-the-top posturing of Wagnerian Rock, even before you get to Taylor’s overheated vocal performance. More explicitly based on Steinman’s template is “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse, whose hodgepodge of Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western and Prog Rock synths is simultaneously every bit as self-serious as it is laughably ridiculous. I mean the song’s lyrics are nothing but clichés strung together in an unbroken line, and what is the Jim Steinman oeuvre if not familiar clichés folded back over themselves and played at maximum volume? Also on tap is “Hold Back The Night” by The Protomen, which starts out sounding like another especially straightforward Metal song until all the choirs and theatrical back and forth vocals kick in in the second half. Oh, and while Von Cannon’s overall appearance was obviously inspired by the stereotypical Meat Loaf look, the decision to give him blonde hair, a headband, and big ol’ sunglasses was directly inspired by Raul Panther III. And in one of the most blatant examples of deliberate Steinman copying, we have our obligatory Japanese song: “Konya wa Hurricane” by Kinuko Ohmori. Anybody who knows anything about 80s Japan knows Steinman was a fairly big deal at the time, especially via the film Streets of Fire. In particular both the look and sound of that film heavily influenced Bubblegum Crisis, from which “Konya wa Hurricane” is derived.

Ironically, however, the best known artist here with no direct connection to Jim Steinman is somehow simultaneously the one that sounds the closest while also being the absolute farthest possible from him: Bruce Springsteen. The Boss is represented by two tracks off of Born To Run, the title track and “Jungleland,” and it’s is at once totally understandable and completely bewildering how well they work in this context. I mean, if you look at “Born to Run” on paper, it seems to have all the same components of any song off of Bat Out Of Hell: elements of early 50s rock and Phil Spector wall of sound, hopeless characters stranded on the wrong side of the tracks, primal emotions blown up to epic proportions, passionate to the point of exhausting performances, and even frequent allusions to cars! And yet, at the same time, there’s something about the tone that’s irreconcilably different. The short explanation is “camp.” For all his larger than life bombast, Bruce Springsteen does not have a campy bone in his body, whereas Jim Steinman couldn’t so much as fart without a dozen leather-clad ballerinas pirouetting to mark the occasion. Thus, there’s a fundamental sense of grit and realism to even the most impossibly big of Springsteen’s songs that Steinman’s don’t come close to achieving. Look at the other track here, “Jungleland.” In its own way, the song’s tale of a desperate man coming to a bad end is the exact same kind of thing one would find on Bat Out Of Hell, but for as poetic as the lyrics may be, there’s no sense that Springsteen is romanticizing the plight of these losers the way Steinman does. If Springsteen feels like he’s writing about the Real Life gritty underbelly of New Jersey, then Steinman seems to be building the theme park version: loud and flashy but ultimately harmless.

That’s not actually a dig against Jim Steinman, even though I know it sounds like it is. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement that while the two may be drawing from a shared body of influences, they’re putting those pieces together for a different purpose. Steinman, for all the time he spent in the world of Rock, was ultimately a theater kid at heart, and there’s a certain level of acceptable unreality, a suspension of disbelief, that ignores a lot of Rock’s periodic obsessions with “legitimacy” or “authenticity.” So what if a Jim Steinman is the theme park equivalent of a back alley? Theme parks are still fun! Besides, if there’s one thing everyone everywhere needs to bring up when talking about Steinman’s songs, it’s how “teenage” they are. And really, what could be more quintessentially teenage than making a huge, massive deal over things that turn out to be utterly trivial? What better way to describe youthful emotions than to present them with utterly vapid, surface-level clichés delivered as though they were utterly original? In amassing a library of utterly fake, showboating, empty spectacles, Jim Steinman accidentally created the most truthful and resonant picture of the teenage experience ever written.

And with that, the time has come to discus the songs here by the man himself. Again, the line between “artist who worked closely with Jim Steinman” and “Jim Steinman using a project as a mouthpiece” is a hazy one, especially since both are equally likely to have Steinman himself take over the mic for some ludicrous spoken-word theatrics. For example, while the track “Wasted Youth” is officially credited as a Meat Loaf song, it’s totally a Steinman solo performance… to the point that he’d already performed it on his Bad for Good solo album under the title “Love and Death and an American Guitar.” The only OFFICIALLY solo Jim Steinman track on this soundtrack is “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,” also off of Bad for Good. That whole album was originally supposed to be Meat Loaf’s follow up to Bat out of Hell, but when he had to take time off after blowing out his voice (take comfort, everybody who’s failed at a Meat Loaf song on karaoke night, it turns out even Meat Loaf himself couldn’t sing like Meat Loaf all the time) so Steinman recorded the album himself. I won’t lie, most of Bad for Good is a bit of an embarrassing listen, because ol’ Jim clearly didn’t write the songs with his own meager voice in mind. There’s a big difference between reading some semi-poetry and actually singing, after all.  Thankfully, the ballad “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” actually is in Steinman’s vocal range, and is the standout of the album as a result. (It should be noted that Meat Loaf would eventually record a version of his own, as we would with most of the Bad for Good songs, but the 90s production is substantially less effective than Jim’s original.)

Moving on from Steinman himself to the “bands” he just happened to do literally everything for, we have the soundtrack’s opener: “Nowhere Fast” by Fire Inc. Never really a functional band of its own, “Fire Inc.” was the credit used on Steinman’s two contributions to Streets of Fire. Honestly, I probably SHOULD have done the Steinman songs before the other ones, if only to make it easier to mention how much the “Konya wa Hurricane” sequence that opened Bubblegum Crisis borrows from the “Nowhere Fast” opening of Streets of Fire. Again, that movie was WAY more influential in Japan than it was anywhere else. And before you ask, no. That’s not actually actress Dian Laine singing in the film, she’s lipsyncing to a sort of Frankenstein mashup of vocalists Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood, plus a layer of Steinman himself. Again, authenticity isn’t much of a priority in the land of Wagnerian Rock. Case in point, see our next song: the bombastic power ballad “Original Sin (The Natives Are Restless Tonight)” by Pandora’s Box. Officially, Pandora’s Box was the Steinman-backed quartet of Ellen Foley, Elaine Caswell, Gina Taylor and Deliria Wilde… except “Deliria Wilde” wasn’t even a real person, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know, right there. Also, the opening and closing verses of “Original Sin” are credited to non-member Laura Theodore… except they sound to all the world like Jim Steinman himself. I dunno, really every single thing about Pandora’s Box is all Jim Steinman, regardless of whether or not he’s the specific individual doing it.

But, of course, you’ve almost certainly never heard of Pandora’s Box, because the projects where ol’ Jim’s rampaging id had free reign rarely even got completed, let alone received mainstream success. The reason we know who the guy is at all is thanks to his more balanced collaborations with artists who actually existed outside of Steinman’s imagination. Take, for example, Bonnie Tyler, who’d already been around as a Country singer for years before recruiting Steinman to kickstart her career in a Rock direction. Pop culture today tends to remember Tyler’s career through the lens of her Steinman-penned hits like “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but he really didn’t write THAT many songs for her. There were always other producers and handlers to keep his excesses in check, which no doubt contributed to her albums not becoming gloriously self-destructive indulgences like the Pandora’s Box album. Not that Bonnie Tyler songs WEREN’T excessive or indulgent, of course, as seen in our selection for Von Cannon’s soundtrack: the immortal “I Need A Hero.” What can I even say about this song? You already know how it goes, it’s more meme than music at this point. This song is so frantic and rampaging and overwrought that it’s physically exhausting to listen to for too long… which is pretty much exactly how I imagine most people would describe Von Cannon himself. Oh, and as an aside, I slotted “I Need A Hero” in right before “Hold Back The Night,” and didn’t realize until well afterwards that they actually make for a really interesting contrast lyrically. Pay attention and you’ll see what I mean, it’s another one of those things I wish I was clever enough to have done on purpose.

And finally, the inevitable. Meat Loaf. Technically, Mr. Meat is the most heavily represented artist on Von Cannon’s playlist, with three tracks. However, this comes with a bit of an asterisk next to it thanks to the question of how many of the other “artists” are just Jim Steinman working behind somebody else. Heck, even one of those three Meat Loaf tracks, the aforementioned “Wasted Youth” is basically a Steinman solo performance. But at the end of the day, when you think of Jim Steinman songs, you think of Meat Loaf belting ‘em out. The other two songs here are “Bat Out of Hell” and “You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth,” and the former is another one of those tunes where I struggle to come up with anything to say that hasn’t already been said several times over. So I’ll put a bit more energy into talking about “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth,” which seems to get a bit overlooked compared to some of the other tracks on Bat Out of Hell. The thing opens with nearly a minute of Steinman and Marcia McClain doing yet another overheated spoken word piece, before kicking into a big cheesy 50s in the form of a stage musical (or maybe a Vegas show) with some tasty Todd Rundgren guitar riffs. While not as iconic as the rocking “Bat Out of Hell” or the ballad “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” “You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth” might be single best cross-section of the Bat Out of Hell album as a whole, since it covers all of the various twists and turns in a just over five minutes. But yeah, the big deal here is the album’s title track. Never has the image of a small town loser with no future dying in a fiery motorcycle crash ‘cos he was too busy thinking about his hookup the night before seemed to EPIC. “Bat Out of Hell” is the final track on Von Cannon’s soundtrack, and it absolutely belongs at the climax of any musical collection. I don’t envy the song that find itself in the unfortunate position of having to follow up “Bat Out of Hell” …which is funny, since it’s actually the OPENING track of the album, not the closer. I actually wonder if that’s why “You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth,” the next track, has that minute of spoken word stuff at the beginning. You’d need at LEAST that much of a palette cleanser to be able to take another song seriously. “Bat Out of Hell” is a song that leaves me sweaty and overheated and out of breath once its nearly ten minutes are up… and that right there is the very essence of Helmut Von Cannon as a character.

(From a simple region lock standpoint, this was a fairly easy playlist to put together. From an actual PRESENTATION standpoint, however, it was more frustrating than it really should have been. Since the whole Jim Steinman/Wagnerian Rock thing has “theatrical” as one of its primary tenets, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I wanted use actual music VIDEOS instead of just reposts of the songs wherever possible. After all, Steinman really did influence the blossoming of music videos as an art form way more than a lot of people tend to admit. The performance videos for Bat Out of Hell were one of the main things that helped push the album into public consciousness. Thus, it hurts my soul that there isn’t a version of the video on YouTube with the entire song. The only one I can find cuts off over a minute of the song. This isn’t the only song where I had that problem either, “I Need A Hero” also has around a minute of song missing from the official music video. I’m also a bit annoyed with the “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth” video, as it replaces the studio recording of the spoken word bit with a new, decidedly less good performance. I mean, I get why they would have felt the need to do that, I’m sure trying to convincingly lipsync to the original audio would have been a nightmare to film. Still, it’s just not as good of a read on the video. Speaking of unwanted extra audio, I would have loved to use the original scenes from Streets of Fire and Bubblegum Crisis for “Nowhere Fast” and “Konya wa Hurricane” respectively, but there’s just too many edits and sound effects and dialog all over those clips to use in a playlist like this. Why, it’s almost as if they were filmed to serve the narrative needs of a FILM instead of just pimping out a song or something! I was also annoyed with looking for a video for “I’m In Love With My Car,” since the “official music video” on Queen’s own channel is decidedly different than the old one that several fans have reposted in lower quality. If you’re going to advertise a video of 70s Queen performing, I expect actual clips of Queen performing, not a montage of old car stock footage! Finally, I was tempted to NOT use the official video for “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” because, well, it’s terrible quality. It was posted in 2014 but sounds like it’s straight out of 2009. But while there’s plenty of posts with higher quality audio… well, just watch the clip and see why there was absolutely no chance of me depriving you of these visuals.)

Von Cannon's YouTube Playlist