Meat Loaf, one of the most beloved and commercially successful hard rock and heavy metal singers, who was also a film actor among other things, has died at the age of 74.
The news was announced by his agent, who wrote the following in an official statement to the public: “Our hearts are broken as we announce the passing of the one and only Meat Loaf, who died tonight, with his wife Deborah, daughters Pearl and Amanda, and close friends by his side.
“His incredible career spanned more than six decades and brought him over 100 million records sold worldwide, and he appeared in more than 65 movies, including “Fight Club”, “Focus”, “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Wayne’s World”. His album “Bat Out of Hell” remains one of the top ten best-selling albums of all time.”
“We know he meant a great deal to many of you, and we deeply appreciate all your love and support as we mourn the loss of such an inspiring artist and beautiful soul. Thank you for understanding and for respecting our privacy at this time.”
Meat Loaf, born Marvin Lee Aday in Dallas, Texas, at the end of September 1947, started his career performing in musicals. He appeared in Hair, understudied John Belushi in the comedy revue Lemmings (National Lampoon), and was part of the original Los Angeles cast of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975), where he played Eddie in the production phase of the film.
He made his way into the music world four years later, when he put out a first album together with singer Shaun “Stoney” Murphy, who went on to sing for Bob Seger and Eric Clapton, and for a short while in the nineties for Little Feat. The album came out on Rare Earth. In 1976, Meat Loaf also contributed lead vocals on five tracks of Ted Nugent’s album “Free-for-All”.
Still, his real debut is considered to be “Bat Out Of Hell”. The album took a long time to make and went through some serious ‘labor pains’. Its roots go back to 1972, when Jim Steinman wrote a few songs for a musical about Peter Pan. Those slowly morphed into the collection of songs the whole world would later come to know. Labels were skeptical, and the situation was saved at the last minute by Canadian musician and producer Todd Rundgren, whom Steinman called ‘the only genius genius he ever worked with’. When Rundgren listened to the songs meant for “Bat Out Of Hell”, he rolled around on the floor laughing. He told himself that this was exactly why he had to get this album on tape, since the record was conceived as completely untrendy for its time.
For the musicians, Rundgren leaned on his backing band Utopia, drummer Max Weinberg and pianist Roy Bittan from Springsteen’s E Street Band, and the album saw the light of day on October 21, 1977, on Cleveland International.
But Meat Loaf still had to wait a bit for success. Half a year after release, the British TV show “Old Grey Whistle Test” gathered up the nerve to air a live performance of the album’s nine-minute title track. The response was incredible and approving, so they decided to run the clip again a week later. In March 1978, the album finally broke into the UK best-selling charts. Just think about it. Punk was at its absolute peak. In the same week that Never Mind The Bollocks by the notorious Sex Pistols settled at number 31 on the chart, Bat Out Of Hell ‘scraped’ its way up to number 60.
In a year when the music business and industry were going through a massive transformation, “Bat Out Of Hell” looked, by the trends of the day, completely off the mark and misguided. It came across as theatrical and bloated, at a time when punk, riding on the wings of ‘anti-rock stars’, was recklessly sketching new images of bitter reality. Maybe that’s exactly where the key to success lay. It was a fun ‘antidote’ to punk nihilism, and Meat Loaf became a new kind of rock star.
Big and bold, with gloriously pompous bombast in songs about teenage love and uncompromising, sometimes downright reckless risk-taking at any cost, “Bat Out Of Hell” seemed kind of absurd, even laughable at the time, since the trends of the day certainly didn’t call for little stories about first kisses, first love, losing your innocence and so on….
Well, over time every track on the album became a hit single, and the record grew into a phenomenon of its own. It also went down as one of the best-selling albums in music history, leaving even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” behind in sales, even though its production cost ten times as much.
“Bat Out Of Hell” became the third best-selling album ever, with 50 million copies sold. It spent 500 weeks on the UK chart and is considered one of the best-selling albums that never hit number one there. Its successor “Bat Out Of Hell II” gave Meat Loaf the single I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), which hit number one on the charts in a whopping 28 countries and became the best-selling hit of 1993 on British soil.
But the massive success of the album took its toll. The partnership between Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman soured, with arguments over paying bills and loans, and the two went their separate ways. The planned follow-up “Bad For Good” ended up as Steinman’s solo album, but Steinman still came back and got to work on material for Meat Loaf’s next album “Dead Ringer”, released in 1981. It hit number one on the charts around the world, and the title track, a duet with Cher, Dead Ringer For Love, reached number five on the UK singles chart.
Over his career Meat Loaf released twelve studio albums, and even though they all lived in the shadow of the debut “Bat Out Of Hell”, including the third installment “Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose” from 2006, every one of them made it onto the best-selling album charts and racked up new hits, and they’re also marked by a string of interesting collaborations. Among others, Mick Ronson, Cher, Rick Derringer, Nicky Hopkins, Roger Daltrey, Pat Thrall and Sammy Hagar worked with Meat Loaf on them.
Alongside the music career, his acting didn’t go unnoticed either. The man appeared in over 40 films, including “Fight Club” by director David Fincher, released in 1999. Sadly, though, his health and physical condition held back his creativity. As far back as 1978 he broke a leg falling off the stage at a concert in Ottawa. Three shows, in 2003, 2011 and 2016, are known where he collapsed. At a show in 2019 he fell off the stage again, this time breaking his collarbone. Meat Loaf also went through emergency surgery after a pinched nerve led to spondylolisthesis (spinal fusion). That’s a condition where one of the vertebrae in the spine slips out of place onto the vertebra below it. His health had already started to fade in the latter half of his life because of drug addiction and heavy drinking.
His “Bat Out Of Hell” partner Jim Steinman passed away last year.
The cause of Meat Loaf’s death is not known.
Uh, RIP, Meat Loaf. V mnogih pogledih je velikan. Zame med top 3 vokali in top 3 frontmani. In Bat Out Of Hell je seveda med tistimi redkimi albumi za čisto desetko.
Vesel sem, da sem možakarja uspel videti na delu, kakšno desetletje nazaj v Münchnu, v celoti je odigral BOOH album. Žal pa je bil takrat skoraj čisto brez glasu, a legenda je pač legenda.
Sicer pa si lepo napisal, za razliko od slovenskih mainstream medijev, kjer tovrstne novice o smrti rock zvezdnikov običajno napiše nekdo, ki ne pozna niti njihove glasbe niti življenjske zgodbe. In potem pač malo napaberkujejo tu in tam. V primeru Meat Loafa denimo v najboljšem primeru poznajo I Would Do Anything For Love, o Bat Out Of Hell pa napišejo, da je med 35 najbolje prodajanimi albumi v ZDA, pa niti duha in sluha o tem, da je med top 5 na svetu.
Sem pa vesel, da novice niso ignorirali na Blabbermouthu, tako kot so ignorirali novico o Steinmanovi smrti.