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| C O O L F E A T U R E S |
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| I N T E R A C T |
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| R E L A T E D I N F O |
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| MEAT LOAF: BAT OUT OF HELL |
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Meat Loaf: “Three Bucks and Bat Out of Hell Will Get Me a Cappuccino at Starbucks.”
Jim Steinman wrote the songs and Todd Rundgren gave them with their rock ‘n’ roll muscle. But it was Meat Loaf who sent them roaring out of the speakers and into rock history. Perhaps it's no surprise that supplying such passion was a Herculean task that nearly cost him both his voice and his life. The singer spoke to Ultimate Albums about his suicide attempt, why Celine Dion can’t sing his songs, and why even a caveman could appreciate the glory of “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.”
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VH1: How did you first meet Jim Steinman?
Meat Loaf: My agent said to me, "If you're going to be an actor in New York, there's only two places you need to go and work right now: Cafe La Mama, an experimental theater downtown, and Joseph Papp's Public Theater." So he sent me down to Cafe La Mama and I got that show. I still don't know what the show was about. And I went to Joseph Papp's to audition for this Michael Weller play. His most famous play was called Moon Children and he wrote the screenplay for Hair. I walked into the room to audition with my piano player Steve Margoshes - who also worked on Bat Out of Hell - and Jim Steinman was sitting there. I sang a song called "I'd Love to Be as Heavy as Jesus" for Jim. He said, "Can you wait right here?," and left. It was probably only five minutes, but it felt like forever. All of a sudden, Joseph Papp comes in the room with Jim and a director named Kim Friedman. Jim goes, "Okay, sing for them." They stopped me [in the middle] and said, "Do you mind going across the hall and working with Jim on this song?" The song was called "More Than You Deserve." Then I got the part in Rocky Horror, and I had Jim come and play piano for the audition. I did "Jailhouse Rock" with Jim and three background singers. Everybody in theater did the same kind of songs at auditions - "Man of La Mancha" or something. I'd sing "I'd Love To Be As Heavy As Jesus" or "Satisfaction," something that totally had nothing with legitimate theater. That's kind of where it got started.
VH1: How different were your two personalities when you first met?
Meat Loaf: I sleep at night, he sleeps during the day. I don't need to say anything else. He's a vampire, I'm not.
VH1: You and Jim are so different, how did this bleed into one thing?
Meat Loaf: Three people were really responsible for Bat. The producer Todd Rundgren was a major force. He understood it right away, and if he didn't, he faked it brilliantly. Obviously Jim was crucial, because of how he writes and the passion that he has. I'm capable of understanding it and delivering it. If you heard early Steinman stuff, you know it's Steinman, but it's very different than Bat stuff. "For Crying Out Loud" got slightly changed. We were touring with the National Lampoon Road Show, when I said, "Jim, we need this pop song," and he came up with "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth." I was courting Ellen Foley, so I wanted to get her to do a duet on the record. I told Jim about this girl I'd dated. I had a red convertible with this huge beautiful dashboard and we would drive to the lake. She used to say, "Stop right there!" all the time. She couldn't go all the way. I gave him that piece of information, so he wrote the song. But it was three people putting it together: Jim was the playwright, I was the actor, Todd was the director.
VH1: What was the experience like for you having those two eccentric personalities . . .
Meat Loaf: Todd and Jim eccentric? They're out of their minds! I tried to kill myself! I took an overdose of sleeping pills and they had to have my stomach pumped. Did Jim tell you the story of Todd mixing the record in eight hours? I get this record, I took it home, and I'm going, "This sounds horrible!"
VH1: What is the connection between you and Jim's songs?
Meat Loaf: Jim's songs are very intelligent. I'm an actor. I don't sing songs. Most singers hear the words, but they don't pull them apart. Jim Steinman's lyrics are like Arthur Miller. Jim Steinman's got all these levels, level after level after level. As an actor who is going to do this scene, you have to understand those levels. I like Bonnie Tyler a lot, but did she really understand "Total Eclipse Of The Heart?" I don't think so. When Celine did my song "It's All Coming Back To Me Now," she did a great vocal, but she didn't own it. Robert De Niro could sing a song like "Left In The Dark." It may not have all the right notes, but an actor is going to understand the scene.
VH1: There's so much humor in Steinman, but do you ever play it for comedy?
Meat Loaf: I never do it tongue in cheek. These characters are dead on. The first time I heard "Left in the Dark" I laughed. I've never heard a song that pointed about jealousy. When Barbra Streisand did it, she just blew right by it. When Barry Manilow did "Read 'Em and Weep" on the The Tonight Show he got down on his knees, and I was going "Boy, you missed the point." Jim's all internal. To do a Steinman song, you have to go into the Strasberg method. I'm a method singer. I really analyze it. I pull from past things, but I don't use them. I do the image work.
VH1: What are people responding to in Bat Out of Hell?
Meat Loaf: Magic. And they also see themselves in it. They get into those situations. Take a song like "Paradise By the Dashboard Light." It's literally timeless. "Paradise" was going on with the cavemen. That's animal instinct. Look at the words: "Heaven Can Wait," "All Revved Up and No Place to Go," "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad." It's about magic and passion. Jim's just said it in this mythical kind of way.
VH1: How did you feel, emotionally, the first time you heard it on the radio?
Meat Loaf: I was just numb. It was at midnight. I had just come home, and somebody said to me, "Look, we think that the DJ's gonna play it." It was great. Even when I hear myself now on the radio I get numb. I hear it somewhere once or twice a week. Then you start thinking, "God, there's other people listening to this." I get totally paranoid.
VH1: do you remember of the reviews that came out about this album?
Meat Loaf: The only one that I paid any attention to is Dave Marsh. He was such a Bruce Springsteen fanatic that he went out of his way to review it even before it came out. I think they were upset that [E Street Band members] Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan were on it. They've always tried to compare Bat Out of Hell to Springsteen and the only thing I could ever figure out is that we both like Phil Spector. I always look at Bruce in black and white. We were in color. When Jim wrote "Bat Out of Hell," we had never heard of Bruce Springsteen. Dave Marsh made it sound like we had heard Bruce Springsteen's record and then went to copy him. That was a complete lie. Springsteen doesn't have a song like "Two Out Of Three" and "Bat" or "Paradise" or "Crying Out Loud" or "Heaven Can Wait" or "All Revved Up."
VH1: How did Bat Out of Hell become an international phenomenon?
Meat Loaf: You can play all the word games you want, but a lot of Bat is basic instinct stuff. 85 percent of the world thinks about sex 85 percent of the time. Jim Steinman thinks about sex 97 percent of the time. I mean "Bat Out of Hell" is a story where a guy's saying that if the girl doesn't come with him, he's going to die. He doesn't really die. And to me, "For Crying Out Loud" is the ultimate love song of all time. I've never heard a love song where any one person is so much in love with someone than that.
VH1: You then toured the album very hard. What kind of price did you pay with all that hard work?
Meat Loaf: I beat that album to death. If I hadn't gone crazy, we could have done more dates. But it all fell apart. They all talk about me losing my voice. It was all psychosomatic. At first I was telling everybody I couldn't sing so I didn't have to record. Then I played the game so long I drove myself crazy. I started going to hypnotists and psychologists and all kinds of people to pull myself out of it. It took me a while to recover from all that, but there wasn't anything physically wrong with the instrument. It was all in my head.
VH1: Is Bat Out of Hell is an impossible act to follow?
Meat Loaf: You don't follow it. You just do the best you can. People always go, "How you gonna top that, huh?" I'm just gonna do what I can do. You can't live your life trying to beat Bat Out of Hell. You can't live your life trying to duplicate it. I don't live my life because of it. Bat Out of Hell and three bucks will get me a grande cappuccino at Starbucks. That's how I look at my life. It still takes me three bucks to get the coffee. And I still gotta go get it.
> Go To Jim Steinman Interview
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