Meat Loaf would have turned 79 on Sunday, September 27. Long before he became a household name, Meat Loaf was making his mark in musical theater. After moving to Los Angeles in 1967, he formed a band and performed with acts including The Who and the Grateful Dead. He later appeared in productions of ‘Hair’ in Los Angeles and on Broadway, where his powerful vocals helped establish him as a performer capable of commanding a stage.
His early career also included a 1971 album with singer Shaun “Stoney” Murphy, years before he found international fame as a solo artist. He was born Marvin Lee Aday on September 27, 1947, in Dallas, according to CNN, and he legally changed his first name to Michael in 1984.
The Unlikely Story Behind “Bat Out of Hell”
The voice arrived before the fame. He played Eddie in ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ in 1975, per Wikipedia, and two years later he and songwriter Jim Steinman released ‘Bat Out of Hell,’ an album that record executives had passed on repeatedly. It went on to sell roughly 43 million copies worldwide, and CNN calls it one of the best-selling albums of all time. It spent 485 weeks on the UK albums chart as of 2015.
The road to ‘Bat Out of Hell’ was anything but easy. Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman struggled to convince record companies that their unusual combination of rock music, theatrical storytelling, and lengthy songs could find an audience. Producer Todd Rundgren eventually helped bring the project to life, even taking on financial responsibility for the recording when the pair found themselves without a record label. In a 2021 interview, Rundgren recalled that Warner Bros. and other labels passed on the finished album, leaving Meat Loaf and Steinman searching for a company willing to release it.
The comeback was even bigger than the debut. “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” from 1993’s ‘Bat Out of Hell II,’ hit number one in 28 countries and held the top spot in Britain for seven straight weeks. It won him the Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Solo, in March 1994. He never stopped acting either. A generation who never bought a record knows him as Robert Paulsen in ‘Fight Club’ in 1999, and he turned up in ‘Wayne’s World’ as well. Steinman, the partner who wrote the whole ‘Bat Out of Hell’ trilogy, died of kidney failure on April 19, 2021.
One question followed Meat Loaf for decades: What exactly was the one thing he wouldn’t do for love? In a 2014 interview with Yahoo!, he finally explained that the answer was hiding in the lyrics all along. The mysterious “that” referred to promises made earlier in the song, such as never forgetting his lover’s feelings or stopping dreaming about her. Meat Loaf recalled that Steinman had warned him listeners would misunderstand the lyrics, although he initially thought the meaning was obvious. The confusion became one of the song’s most enduring talking points.
Meat Loaf followed nine months later. He died January 20, 2022, in Nashville at age 74, with his wife, Deborah, and daughters Pearl and Amanda at his side, according to CNN. The family did not release a cause of death. The music has not gone anywhere. Steve Steinman’s stage show ‘Anything for Love: The Meat Loaf Story’ sailed a second tribute cruise from Southampton this month after its 2024 voyage became MSC Cruises’ fastest-selling independent booking ever, per Cruise Mummy, and his former band, the Neverland Express, played a tribute at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City in August. Seventy-nine years after Dallas, the bat is still out of hell. Happy heavenly birthday, Meat.
