What A Boring Musical World It Will Be Without Meat Loaf

Meat Loaf in 2019. Photo by Super Festivals, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Our friend Kristin Devine already explained Meat Loaf so well during her deep dive into the auditory rabbit hole that is Jim Steinman music that all that is required here is to repeat it:

Listening to a song by Jim Steinman is an exercise in musical gluttony. If a human being was a Steinman song, that human being would look pretty much exactly like 70’s era Meat Loaf.

With the passing of both Steinman in April of 2021 and now Meat Loaf yesterday at the age of 74, the music world is a much less interesting place.

I unapologetically love Meat Loaf’s music. The alarm on my phone for years has been the bombastic, full-throated pipe organ opening of “Home By Now (No Matter What), yet another of the seemingly endless Steinman/Meat Loaf collaborations that ranged from the twisted adolescent ragers to ballads that could be soaring or touching, and often both. Steinman’s theory on musical imagery being that if less is more, imagine how much more more would be found its perfect conduit in Michael Lee Aday. Pitched in the abstract, the over weight, over dressed, over acting, perpetually sweating Meat Loaf sounds like the furthest thing from a rock star, but on stage with The Neverland Express backing him and Steinman’s musical insanity flowing through him, all those diverse parts formed something epic. Even that term, rock star, is something he hated and would push back on. Singer, yes. Actor, absolutely. Sex god, cringy but whatevs by 70s standards. But not rock star. He’s performing, don’t you see, always, all the time, cranked to 11. An artist, working in the often highly questionable imagery and unsustainable decadence of Jim Steinman’s creations the way Picasso used oils.

Not that Meat Loaf was exactly what you would call stable. His temper is notorious, with everyone from record executives to rando’s on his social media feeling the wrath of Meat Loaf. Folks had heard about it, been told about, heard the stories about it, but his stint on Celebrity Apprentice in which among other things Meat Loaf unleashed a five minute expletive-filled rage bomb on fellow lunatic fringe dweller Gary Busey over paint immortalized it. But as fast as the fury came, it went, with Meat Loaf apologizing and pressing on, like a beach town that just accepts the occasional hurricane coming through and dutifully cleans up after without thinking too much about it.

Pressing on was a theme for Meat Loaf. The last few years had been very unkind, with health issues wrecking his body to the point he could no longer perform. When Rolling Stone came a visiting in 2018 he was using a walker, was in agony sitting or standing, but was as complicated and interesting as ever.

He takes a swig of sparkling water, eases himself back in his chair and looks miserable. And miserable is not how you want Meat Loaf to look. You want him to look all fat and sweaty – great masses of hair flopping back and forth, eyeballs bulging right out of their sockets, voice soaring to hammy operatic heights – more or less just as he did back in 1977 with the release of his debut album, Bat Out of Hell (and its two greatest, most bombastic, over-the-top songs, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”), which went on to sell more than 40 million copies and is now marking its 40th glorious anniversary, despite most rock critics hating it (and this magazine calling it “mannered and derivative,” full of puerile comic-book “pretensions”). That’s how you want to see him. A born-to-lose Texas redneck who teamed up with a genius-type songwriter-producer named Jim Steinman and beat the odds to become a rock star, a fine bit-part movie actor and a temper-tantrum-thrower of some renown. So, it just doesn’t seem right to see him here like this. It’s a real bummer.

Sure is, but time is undefeated, even as glorious and improbable a run Meat Loaf went on. Bat Out Of Hell is one of the biggest selling albums ever, and the improbable success of Bat Out Of Hell II in 1993 that sold another 14 million albums, introduced the Meat Loaf/Steinman madcap musical universe of sex, and drums, and way over-the-top rock and roll to a new generation proved it was no fluke. To succeed with pseudo-operatic adolescent fantasy rock theater in the era of grunge was no small feat. The third Bat Out Of Hell couldn’t make the trick a three-peat but, hey, two outta three….well, you know.

One critic wrote in Q of that second Bat record and the wonderful, personal favorite of mine, Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are that “here even the ballads are Roman orgies of sound and fury (Objects In The Etcetera is 10 minutes 15 seconds long; not necessary).”

Not necessary? What are you, new here? This is Meat Loaf, distilling down with sweat, verve, and high octaves the vivid adolescent fantasies of Jim Steinman cooked down on a spoon of rock opera and shot into a music scene that to this day still doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Meat Loaf’s music is polarizing; you either love it or hate it. But it was big, loud, over-the-top, excessive, wonderful, and impossible to ignore.

That ain’t bad, at all.