For Valentine's Day, I received Meat Loaf's latest album Couldn't Have Said It Better (Nov. 2003 release). You probably know his hit "Paradise from the Dashboard Light" from the album Bat Out of Hell included a spoken segment about "baseball" (in the middle of the song) narrated by Phil Rizzuto. Well, Meat Loaf tried it again with a song called "Tear Me Down," this time with a spoken segment about the Alamo (in the middle of the song) narrated by Giselda Vatchky: On March 6th, 1836 the walls of the Alamo fell to the Mexican army. After a 12-day siege, the troops of Santa Ana were victorious but too exhausted to hold on and the Texans won the war. It's further from El Paso to Texarkana, then from New York to Chicago. And when it joined the Union, Texas was the biggest state. Yeah, everything from Texas is big, larger than life and none bigger than little Marvin Aday. So big his daddy called him Meat Loaf. He grew into a big man, with a big voice. And he sings big songs and has big hits. You can try and tear him down. OK. You don't often hear about historical battles in pop songs. Something like "Waterloo" by Abba comes to mind, although I wouldn't count "Ballad of the Green Berets" -- it's too generic. Still, it's interesting that they even mention the battle at all, although I can't think of any others off the top of my head. Any other rock songs you can think of that specifically mentioned a historical battle? E-Mail MagWeb: support@magweb.com if you can think of any... As for the album itself, I find it mediocre at best. There's nothing really hummable about it. "Man of Steel" and "Testify" are OK as filler, the rest are not memorable at all. The best song is not even mentioned at all. The last track, "Forever Young" (written by Bob Dylan) is listed at 10:50, but peters out before that. At around 7:00, up pops this song about driving a Mercury (car). I don't know if this was used for a car commercial or not, but it's got that pop gloss and hook to it. It runs just short of 4 minutes, and it moves and grooves right along... Back to 1st Quarter 2004 List of News Items Back to Master List of News Items Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com