Hope it's okay to do this...
"We were the last act to go on. I was so into 'Crying Out Loud,' that when I finished, I had my eyes closed. Now normally when you finish a song, the audience will start applauding. But the room was silent. It felt like an eternity. I'm standing there with my eyes closed expecting applause but hearing absolutely nothing. Two or three seconds after the song is over, there's still nothing. I had enough time to think this one thought: 'They've all left.' That's how long it was. On stage, a moment is an eternity.
I'm sure my face showed real fear during those few seconds of 'Oh my God, they simply left.' Because that song is a nine-minute song. We start with piano and voice, and then the band comes in, and it ends with piano and voice. The ending itself is a good two minutes of piano and voice. At the end, I take the mike away and it's just my voice cutting through the theater.
And then, as I started to open my eyes to see the awful truth, the room exploded. They stood up and started to scream.
They were yelling and whistling and climbing on chairs. There were people standing in the middle of the big round dinner tables. All for a damn ballad.
...
...There are pictures of the audience at this moment taken from the stage looking out, and you can see the whole place standing on the tables and all these people on the stage and the band all looking like deer caught in the headlights. We were that stunned. People were jumping and dancing and carrying on. They went crazy, completely berserk. Billy Joel was standing on a table. They were throwing chairs. They did something like forty thousand dollars' damage to the room.'
To Hell and Back - an autobiography : Meat Loaf with David Dalton
There is definitely something about this song...
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