There is a mean-spirited and cynical argument that Michael Lee Aday owed his career to someone else’s talent: the late songwriter Jim Steinman, who wrote everything on Meat Loaf’s 43m-selling breakthrough album Bat Out of Hell, rescued his career when it was in the doldrums by agreeing to make 1993’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell and was behind virtually every song for which Meat Loaf will be remembered. Of the 18 tracks on The Very Best of Meat Loaf, only four were not written by Steinman.
It’s certainly true that Meat Loaf found things much tougher without Steinman on board. Steinman had hits with other people – the Sisters of Mercy and Celine Dion among them – but not one of the Steinman-less albums Meat Loaf released in the 80s was a hit in the US. European fans remained a little more loyal and he occasionally scored a UK hit, most notably the distinctly Steinman-esque Modern Girl in 1984. But he spent most of the decade relentlessly touring in order to stave off bankruptcy, and the leap in sales between his 1986 album Blind Before I Stop – which had its greatest success in Switzerland, reaching No 22 – and Bat Out of Hell II, a global number one that sold 14m copies, tells its own story.
Later in his career, when he and Steinman were on the outs – their famously fractious relationship at one point saw Meat Loaf attempting to sue the songwriter for $500m – Meat Loaf would simply cobble together albums using songs Steinman had written for other people and projects. He could assemble an all-star supporting cast, as he did on 2010’s Hang Cool Teddy Bear – which featured credits for Jon Bon Jovi, Brian May, Jack Black and Hugh Laurie among others – but the difference between a flop Meat Loaf album and a successful one seemed to be whether or not its cover bore the subtitle “Songs by Jim Steinman”.
Nevertheless, their partnership was far from one-way traffic. Steinman’s songs were nothing if not unique: wilfully preposterous exercises in more-is-more campy grandiloquence, influenced in equal part by the teenage melodramas of 60s girl groups, Bruce Springsteen at his most chest-beating and – as Steinman never tired of pointing out – Richard Wagner. They were so over the top that it took a very particular kind of vocalist to perform them: “Obviously playing a role, but obviously genuine,” as Steinman put it – a tough trick to pull off. Certainly Steinman himself couldn’t do it, as evidenced by his only solo album, Bad for Good. Nor could many others: Steinman tried to put together bands to perform his material, but there were few takers for Pandora’s Box or the Dream Engine. Meat Loaf, though, could apparently do it with ease.
He had a background in musical theatre and comedy, and a powerhouse voice that worked with histrionic hard rock; before Bat Out of Hell, he had sung lead vocals on a Ted Nugent album. It was a cocktail that gave him the peculiar ability to sing the most absurd Steinman lyrics with absolute commitment and sincerity, while the contrast between his exaggerated stage persona – eyes bulging, red handkerchief clutched in his fist – and the everyman he appeared to be off stage let you know he was in on the joke. That fitted Steinman to a tee.
Whatever ridiculous extremes his music went to, there was something realistic and relatable about the emotions at the centre of his songs: millions of people didn’t go out and buy Bat Out of Hell in order to snigger at it; they bought it because the saga of the teenage romancers turned warring couple on Paradise By the Dashboard Light or All Revved Up With No Place to Go’s depiction of adolescent self-aggrandising and yearning for escape rang true. You could believe it even when what you were listening to beggared belief, and that was down to Meat Loaf. With the greatest respect to Bonnie Tyler – whose versions of Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out for a Hero are masterpieces of take-no-prisoners emoting – and indeed Cher, whose bravura performance on Dead Ringer for Love is a thing of wonder, absolutely no one could sell a Steinman song the way Meat Loaf did.
The simple truth is that no one was interested in Bat Out of Hell until they saw Meat Loaf performing its songs. Its first success came in Australia and the UK when a live video of the title track was shown on TV. The record label that released it, Epic, hated the album – it had been signed by one of their minor subsidiary labels, Cleveland International – and declined to promote it properly until someone came up with the idea of getting Meat Loaf to perform live at the label’s sales convention; steady touring and an appearance on Saturday Night Live saw to the rest. When Meat Loaf and band actually turned up to play on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978, their appearance caused a sensation.
And why wouldn’t it? Look at the footage of them performing Paradise By the Dashboard Light. His voice is already showing signs of the touring-induced wear that would scupper Bat Out Of Hell’s follow-up, but it hardly matters. Meat Loaf is in all his ruff-shirted, pop-eyed, finger-pointing, handkerchief-flapping majesty, while his duet partner Karla DeVito hams it up for all she’s worth, alternately looking bored rigid, furious or contemptuous.
They spend the section of the song where a baseball announcer details the progress of a backseat fumble pretending to get off with each other. While DeVito rages at him about marriage, Meat Loaf stares down the camera with an expression that reads “can you believe this crap?” At another juncture, he creeps up behind her, wielding the microphone stand as if he’s about to smash her over the head with it. The song ends with Meat Loaf doubled over, repeatedly screaming “I can’t take it any more!” while DeVito rests her foot on his back and raises her arms in triumph.
It still looks completely deranged 44 years on. Now imagine it appearing alongside the rest of the stuff Whistle Test dished up that year: Dean Friedman, 10CC, Dire Straits, Billy Joel, Jefferson Starship. You might have got the odd new wave band in there but really, what price the Vibrators after something this arresting and berserk?
It’s hard to think of anyone else who could have pulled off such a performance, who could have done something so simultaneously absurd and thrilling: proof of Meat Loaf and Steinman’s perfectly matched partnership. It’s difficult to work out what Meat Loaf’s career would have been like had he not met Steinman, but it’s equally difficult to imagine what would have happened to Steinman had he not met Meat Loaf. “We belonged heart and soul to each other – we didn’t know each other, we were each other,” Meat Loaf said after Steinman’s death last year. “I don’t want to die, but I may die this year because of Jim.” He was 20 days out.
