#343 - Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell (1977)

MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:

MEAT LOAF BIO

Michael Lee Aday, aka Meat Loaf was born in Dallas in 1947. The acting bug bit him in high school, and after his mother died in the mid 1960s when he was in his late teens, he moved to Los Angeles. It was there that his first band was formed and called "Meat Loaf Soul", a nickname his high school football coach used for him because of his size. The band named changed numerous times, but they did open for acts like Janis Joplin, The Who, MC5, Grateful Dead, and the Stooges. He then went back to acting in the late 1960s and joined the L.A. production of Hair. That led to him recording an album with Motown records and Shaun "Stoney" Murphy. After touring in support of the album, Meat Loaf left the label because his vocals were replaced on a track that he particularly liked on a re-release. After dabbling in some more acting, including being cast in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (playing the parts of Eddie and Dr. Everett Scott), he also recorded lead vocals for 5 of the 9 tracks on Ted Nugent's 1976 release "Free-for-All". Meat Loaf had wanted to get more serious about doing music in the early 1970s, but it was today's release that both he and composer Jim Steinman buckled themselves down to focus on making successful in the mid 1970s. "Bat Out Of Hell" put Meat Loaf on a very successful career path in the coming decades. 

BACKGROUND – BAT OUT OF HELL

This is Meat Loaf's debut album, recorded in 1975 and 1976 at multiple studios in New York and New Jersey, and was released on October 21, 1977. The album was produced by 2021 RnR HOF Inductee Todd Rundgren, who also produced Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band" and the New York Dolls' self-titled album. The album was developed from a musical written by Jim Steinman called "Neverland", which was a futuristic rock version of Peter Pan.  Steinman and Meat Loaf performed Neverland at the Kennedy Center Music Theatre Lab in 1977 (while touring with the National Lampoon show) and felt like they had 3 standout songs that they wanted to be the base of an album - Bat Out Of Hell, Heaven Can Wait, and The Formation of the Pack (later retitled to All Revved Up with No Place To Go). They were turned down by numerous record labels before being taken on by a subsidiary of Epic Records (Cleveland International Records) with an assist from E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt making the connection. In 1993, Steinman reflected that the album was "timeless in that it didn't fit into any trend. It's never been a part of what's going on. You could release that record at any time and it would be out of place." 

Bat Out Of Hell is one of the best selling albums of all time, selling over 50 million copies worldwide. It has been certified platinum 14 times and spent 522 weeks on the UK Albums Chart (6th most in the history of that chart). Response in the United States was slow, but got it's break when an executive from CBS Canada recommended it to Warren Cosford, Program Director at Toronto's CHUM-FM. He fell in love with it, put it in heavy rotation, and American stations started to follow suit. It went on to sell over 14 million copies since. 

In 2001, Q magazine listed the cover as number 71 in its list of "The Hundred Best Record Covers of All Time"