Whatever happened to Saturday night?

If it was last Saturday, Meat Loaf played at the House of Blues in Houston, and that was the first line of his first song. Hot patootie, bless my soul, I really love that rock and roll.

But first, the opening act--Pearl. Pearl's frontwoman is Pearl Aday, Meat Loaf's step-daughter. The band seems technically proficiant and she can belt them out, and if she finds a Jim Steinman of her own, I'm sure she'll be a pleasure to listen to. But that's enough about them. To quote Christopher Lee's infamous Saturday Night Live introduction, "And now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to meet... Loaf! I beg your pardon? What? Oh! I'm... I'm sorry. Yes, of course. Ladies and gentlemen... Meat Loaf!"

On the scale of over-the-top awesomeness, "Bat Out of Hell" goes to 11, and doesn't stop there. In retrospect, I think it's the best album of the 70s, which really surprised me because I always thought "Dark Side of the Moon" had it locked up. Who'd of thunk it?

The band was great, and big enough to do justice to the music. Two guys on guitar, plus Meat Loaf towards the end of the show, one on the bass, another playing piano, another on keyboards and the sax, the drummer, and two additional singers.

I particularly liked the guy on the Flying-V with the Nigel Tufnel thing going on with his chin. You can't really see it in the pictures, but it looked like he'd taken a Sharpie to the cleft in his chin. I'm kind of surprised they let him out of the 80s.

The female lead was really good too, although when they opened the show with Meat Loaf's song from Rocky Horror ("Hot Patootie - Bless My Soul"), she was disturbingly reminiscent of Frank-N-Furter--the hair, the color of the dress, the rubber gloves.... Again, the cell phone camera pictures don't really show it, but they're all I've got.

She had a couple costume changes during the show and shed the Sweet Transvestite look. And she and Mr. Loaf made Paradise by the Dashboard Light as fun as that song deserves. Which is a whole lot of fun.

They played everything you would have wanted to hear, and then some. The show did drag a bit in the middle when they played several songs from the new album back-to-back, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd familiarized myself with the new songs first. There were also a couple parts that were slow intentionally, like Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, which didn't drag at all.

I don't remember what they were playing here, but it was good too.

And that's all I have to say about that.