Feakes Meat Loaf

Bat Out Of Hell
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-389-8
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 88 Seiten

Bat Out Of Hell was released in 1977 during the height of disco fever and punk rock. The product of two larger-than-life figures in composer Jim Steinman and vocalist Meatloaf, it remains an ambitious debut album that bucked the trend and confounded critics. With the help of several hit singles, it struck a chord with record buyers and became one of the best-selling albums of all time. Benefitting from a combination of catchy melodies, anthemic rock, dazzling musicianship, inventive choral work and audacious narratives, the songs - like 'You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth' and the epic title track - have a universal appeal that has stood the test of time. The memorable hooks and high production values also signposted the power ballads and arena rock style of the 1980s.
This book examines the individual songs that make up Bat Out Of Hell, along with the album's conception, recording, reception, subsequent tour, and legacy. It also traces the backstory of its creators and their work - together and apart - that followed in the album's wake. This includes two successors, released in 1993 and 2006, respectively, and Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical, which premiered in 2017.

Geoffrey Feakes is an author, music journalist and retired design engineer based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. He has five previous books to his credit: The Moody Blues On Track published in 2019, The Who On Track in 2020, Steve Hackett on track in 2021, 1973: The Golden Age of Progressive Rock in 2022 and Rick Wakeman in the 1970s in 2023. He has been a writer for the online Dutch Progressive Rock Page since 2005 with hundreds of reviews and interviews to his credit.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Feakes, Geoffrey

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Two Hearts Beat As One

In 1975, Jim sat down and wrote ‘You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth’ and then he wrote ‘Bat’. At that point, I decided I wasn’t going to do any more theatre! I was just going to work with Jim, and we were going to pursue our music.

Meat Loaf quoted in his autobiography.

The most significant outcome of More Than You Deserve is the meeting of two like-minded – but very different – personalities that would change both their lives. In the biography by Mick Wall, Jim Steinman said of his encounter with Meat Loaf:

I liked his voice so much that I had them write a part in [More Than You Deserve] for him. That was my first exposure to Meat as an actor and when I discovered what a very good actor he was, as well as a singer – which was the key to Meat Loaf all along, right from the beginning – I knew, therefore, he would be perfect for my own songs because I knew he would be able to act out what I wanted to create.

In More Than You Deserve, Meat played the part of a manic junkie nicknamed ‘Rabbit’ and it was the first time he had worked from a script. His performance of Steinman’s title song regularly received a standing ovation and he would re-record it in 1981 for the Dead Ringer album.

Encouraged by Joseph Papp, Meat auditioned for As You Like It to be performed at Shakespeare In The Park, but when the director David Rabe heard his Texas drawl, he declared: ‘That’s the worst Shakespeare I have ever heard in my entire life’. Nonetheless, he secured the role of Amiens and performed the song ‘Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind’. It was a novel experience for the young singer and his co-stars included future Hollywood starlets Meryl Streep and Mary Beth Hurt. Meat confirmed in his autobiography that while he was performing on stage in New York:

I’m also trying to talk Jim Steinman into doing an album with me, but Jimmy wants [More Than You Deserve cast member] Kim Milford as his lead singer. Kim Milford was tall, skinny and good-looking, with long blond hair. He looked like a rock star and I, well, didn’t. I hassled Jim and hassled him and hassled him. I went over to see Robert Stigwood, head of RSO Records, to make my case. Stigwood had seen me perform and told Jim, ‘No, no, no! Forget Milford. Meat Loaf’s the guy. This is the guy I want to sign’.

Meat and Jim signed to RSO and recorded ‘More Than You Deserve’ as a single, with George Harrison’s ‘In The Presence Of The Lord’ on the B-side. It received regular airplay on Boston radio, but following Stigwood’s purge at RSO, it faltered through lack of promotion.

In the Winter of 1973, Meat returned to the stage in Rainbow at the Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C., but due to a lack of finance, the show closed after one week. Just as one door closes, another opens, and that same week, he received an offer of work in Los Angeles, and it would prove to be his most significant role yet. He recalled in his autobiography:

I went out West to start work on The Rocky Horror Show. When we got there, there was no script. They just told me that Rocky Horror was going to be a science-fiction, musical comedy. Okay, cool. For the first two weeks, all we’re doing is rehearsing music and learning songs. Still no script. Eventually, we move from this little room where we’ve been working to a theatre and they start to bring in the script – bit by bit.

Meat played two characters – crazed biker Eddie and Dr. Scott – opposite Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Initially, he was reluctant to be involved with what he called ‘a drag show’, but eventually, he entered the spirit of this dark musical spoof – written by Richard O’Brien – and as Eddie, he sang ‘Whatever Happened To Saturday Night’. It was launched at the Roxy Theatre on Sunset Boulevard in 1974, and as the show’s fame spread, he recalled numerous celebrities in the audience, including John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Elvis and Raquel Welch. Meat idolised both Lennon and Elvis, so, for him, it was a dream come true. When the film version, retitled The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was released in 1975, Meat reprised the role of Eddie, and despite a poor opening, the movie became a cult phenomenon on the strength of midnight screenings in New York and St Louis.

While Meat was in L.A., Steinman remained in New York, where he tried to convince Joseph Papp of the viability of an ambitious new musical called Adventures In Neverland. Based loosely on J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, it was a darker vision than the author had ever contemplated, and Steinman wrote a part especially for Meat.

After L.A., Meat returned to his home on 74th Street in New York and played a singing priest in Rock-A-Bye Hamlet, an unlikely musical update of Shakespeare’s play. Unsurprisingly, it had a short run, lasting just seven performances. He and Steinman were also working together, with the songwriter shaping the songs and the singer contributing ideas from his own personal experiences. In 1975, they took time out in the touring production of The National Lampoon Show, with Meat as an understudy to actor and comedian John Belushi. Steinman was the musical director and played piano. Also in the show was another talented young singer, as Meat recalled in his autobiography:

Ellen Foley was singing in the National Lampoon show, so that’s how we met her. ‘Let’s do the duet in ‘Paradise’ with Ellen’, I said. It was when we were out on the road doing the Lampoon show that things really started moving ahead. In the afternoons, Jimmy and I, and sometimes Ellen Foley, would work on the songs. We would play the piano and sing songs. And, gradually, out of the songs came the fantastic characters of Bat Out Of Hell.

Meat and Belushi became good friends, but the comedian was battling his own inner demons, and in March 1982, he succumbed to a lethal cocktail of heroin and cocaine.

Meat played several supporting parts in the shows where he would ad-lib and play to the audience. It was ideal training for a rock frontman. In the book Like A Bat Out Of Hell, Steinman later recalled: ‘They would chant his name at the end and it partly made me realise what a great name it was. To hear 1,500 people, who had never seen him before or heard of him, at the end going ‘Meat Loaf, Meat Loaf!’ It was very cool’.

Back in New York at the Ansonia Hotel building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Meat and Jim worked hard and the songs for the Neverland project evolved slowly over a period of two years into Bat. ‘For Crying Out Loud’, ‘You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth’, ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’ and ‘All Revved Up With No Place To Go’ took shape and ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ grew to semi-epic proportions. The title song, especially, was a major leap forward for Steinman in realising his ambition to write a dramatic piece that encompassed a variety of moods and emotions. The sessions had their own moments of drama and, on one occasion, during a heated argument, Meat overturned Steinman’s piano. Meat admitted: ‘Jim is a better writer than I am; I can think of things, of stories, but I don’t put it down in words too well’. Steinman, himself, later confessed to writer Mick Wall: ‘I had to teach myself how to write when I got out of college. The ten years over the next period, I was busy intuitively teaching myself how to write. And what I wrote was very influenced by movies and by Hitchcock, who I adore. He’s still my favourite of all time, I think, in any field’.

They next put their efforts into securing a record deal. A demo tape would not have done justice to the complexity of the songs, so they decided to trust their instincts and do the rounds, performing live to the record company bigwigs. The auditions, however, fell on deaf ears, and later, Meat described the whole process as ‘Purgatory’ and Steinman said it was ‘A medley of the most brutal rejections you could imagine’. Despite their misgivings, they were united in their self-belief and determination to find a home for the songs. As such, they would probably never be as close again as they were during this period. Meat described a typical audition in his autobiography:

Jim would play piano and I’d sing. Sometimes, Ellen Foley and Rory Dodd would sing backup, but sometimes, it was just me and Jim. These meetings were pretty much in and out of there in 20 minutes. Without fail, they’d turn us down. It was fun, though, especially the reactions. We’d be singing along and these record company guys would be sitting there open-mouthed. Aghast.

The best would be when Ellen would go with us and we’d do ‘Paradise’, and Ellen and I would start making out in the office, with Steinman doing the play-by-play. ‘There it is. A line shot up the middle. Look at him go’. Not exactly that, because he wrote that especially for Phil Rizzuto. But, something similar, and we’d just start making out like crazy – she was my girlfriend at the time. It made people uneasy. We were freaks to them.

As many hopefuls before and since have discovered, the A&R scouts had little time for originality, preferring their acts to follow tried...