British author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton once said, “Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.” Coincidentally, an anonymous violinist in London once said, “Screw Chesterton. I wouldn’t invite him over for dinner anyway.” Me--I love music with dinner. Now I don’t want it to overshadow the food, like I’m at a Hard Rock Cafe. 

Did you know that there are a hundred and fifty Hard Rock Cafes around the world? I wonder if at some point, they’re gonna expand too much, open a new location, and realize too late that they’re out of the really cool rock memorabilia. They’ll have to display things like Mick Jagger’s dry cleaning ticket, or a guitar used by the guy who sang harmony for Air Supply.

Back to music and food. I’m always looking for ways to combine my two passions. OK, I have more than two passions, but we don’t have time to get into the others. Anyway, I was listening to some music the other day, and I wondered what groups from the ‘rock era’ could also be menu items. I was strict about it--the name of the group, by itself, had to be something you could actually eat or drink—no ‘Smashing Pumpkins,’ or ‘Strawberry Alarm Clock.’ And I was a little sad to find out there’s no such thing as ‘April Wine.’ Still one of the hardest rocking bands ever to come from Nova Scotia.

I threw together a three-course meal based on only these acts—twelve chart-toppers who, between them, sold millions of singles and albums, and together, would make a damned fine dinner. Just for clarification, ‘singles’ were individual songs you could actually buy in a store and hold in your hand, and ‘albums’ were entire collections of songs by the same artist, pressed into slabs of vinyl. You had to use a special device to access the songs called a ‘record player,’ and you had to listen to the songs in the order the artist intended. Hard to believe how primitive music was then.

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Hot Tuna on Bread with Hot Butter

 We whet our appetites by paying tribute to a band that oozed out of the musical lava lamp that was late sixties San Francisco. Hot Tuna’s first album hit #30 on the charts in 1970, and here I’ve paired this patchouli-scented Jefferson Airplane side project with the relentlessly bland stylings of Bread (13 freakin’ Hot 100 singles between 1970 and 1977! How did we let that happen?). Make sure to use plain white bread, and don’t forget the Hot Butter—believe me, if you’ve ever heard their #9 hit from 1972, ‘Popcorn,’ you’ll never be able to. If you do remember it, you’ve probably got it stuck in your head right now. Sorry.

  Main Course

Salt and Pepa Meatloaf

Black-eyed Peas with Red Hot Chili Peppers

Sure he’s descended into self-parody with appearances on ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ but let’s remind ourselves that Meat Loaf’s 1977 opus, “Bat out of Hell,” went FOURTEEN TIMES PLATINUM. That represents something like fourteen gazillion records sold! Unfortunately it also spawned “Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” which inspired frat boys and their girlfriends the world over to try to ‘perform’ the song at karaoke.

For seasoning, a good meatloaf needs some Salt and Pepa, the best-selling female rap act of all-time with six platinum singles between ’86 and ’97. And chili peppers (five Top Five albums) with black-eyed peas (over sixty million records sold since 2003)? That’s a big bowl of quasi-funk, right there. It’s like having a near-funk experience.

 Dessert

Ambrosia with Raspberries and Cranberries

Vanilla Fudge with Cream

“Cake”

Ambrosia can be a little too sweet for some tastes, but they did have five Top 40 singles between 1975 and 1980. Someone must have liked it. I figure we’ll balance that with a little tartness from the Cranberries (a little yelpy for my tastes, but four Top Twenty albums) and the Raspberries, who, from 1970-75, featured Eric Carmen, before he decided to craft a solo career of mopey self-absorbed treacle.

Beginning in 1967, Vanilla Fudge released eight albums and reached #6 on the U.S. charts with a slow, proto-grunge, ultimately creepy cover of the Supremes “You Keep Me Hanging On.” Top that with some Cream (1966-1970), you get two more Top Ten hits, and the only milion-selling album in history named after Benjamin Disraeli.

Lastly,we serve up a little alt-indie-postmodern rock with Cake. Between 1996 and 2011, they’ve had five albums debut in the top fifty, so looking and sounding bored must sell. If you really want to end the meal with a hipster’s sensibility, serve something that isn’t cake, but still call it “cake.”

 Beverages

Hot Chocolate with Sugarcubes

Mmm…Hot Chocolate. Although mostly known here for the disco earworm “You Sexy Thing,” in the U.K. they had a Top 100 chart hit every year between 1970 and 1984. Even they’re not sure why. Toss in some Sugarcubes, and you’ll have an Icelandic group whose first three albums were Top Twenty hits, featuring a young swan-obsessed girl named Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

 Here are some tips for connecting the meal with the music. For the tuna appetizer, try sauteeing the tuna in some herb butter, and by herb, I mean marijuana—your house will reek for a few hours, but you’ll be tripping to some psychedelic blues, so it won’t matter, and why are you trying to harsh my buzz, man—wait, is someone at the door? Are you a narc?

You can find plenty of meatloaf recipes online, but, I rely on a handful of very old, musty, tattered ACTUAL cookbooks. You know, made out of paper, like in olden tymes. The reason I’m so drawn to these old books is that, if they’re old enough, they’re in the public domain, and I don’t have to pay anything.

The following comes from a 1914 collection put out by the Boston alumnae chapter of Alpha Phi. Doesn’t seem like there’s anything particularly ‘Swedish’ about it, and apparently there’s no middle ground as far as the onion is concerned—two thin slices, or just shove the whole onion in. In honor of Meat Loaf the singer, be really dramatic and loud when you cook this.