Michael (nee Marvin) Lee Aday, better known by his stage name, Meat Loaf, died yesterday, age 74, just nine months after the death of Jim Steinman, who composed “Bat Out of Hell,” the album that made Meat Loaf a star. That LP, rejected by numerous record companies, is the third-best-selling album in history. An estimated 40 million copies have been purchased since its 1977 release, and it still racks up about 200,000 in sales per year.
“Bat Out of Hell” grew out of a stage musical Steinman wrote and reworked for years that used elements of “Peter Pan” in a post-apocalyptic world. When he couldn’t secure rights for the Peter Pan elements, he decided to use what he considered its three strongest songs as the basis of an album.
When Steinman started recording the songs in 1975, Meat Loaf was an actor — he had already appeared on stage in “Hair” and “The Rocky Horror Show” and in the film version of the latter — whom he knew because they had worked together in the touring National Lampoon stage show. “He was much bigger than he is now,” Steinman told an interviewer in 2000. “He was fucking huge.” Given his size and theatricality, Steinman said, “He was the most mesmerizing thing I’d ever seen.”
The album, produced by Todd Rundgren, features an all-star lineup of musicians. Drummer Max Weinberg and pianist Roy Bittan of the E Street Band made the music sound even more like a Bruce Springsteen record that it did already, and Rundgren and members of his band Utopia comprised the rest of the band. Despite that, in perhaps the most glaring example of record-executive short-sightedness in rock history, “Bat Out of Hell” was turned down by virtually every labelin America over the course of two years.
It finally found a home with the help of Steve Van Zandt, who brought it to Cleveland International Records. Label chief Steve Popovich green-lighted the project after listening to the spoken-word intro to this song, which Steinman wrote when Meat Loaf challenged him to write a “pop song” that “wasn’t 15 or 20 minutes long.” It became the first of five singles from the LP.
The video, like those for other singles from the LP, looks like concert footage but was filmed on a closed sound stage. Karla DeVito, who appears in the videos, is lip-synching parts sung by Ellen Foley on the album.
