Taking a moment to grieve

It's been a tough week for me in Sicily. My mother in law has passed away after many years of illness.

My Sicilian family is grieving the loss of their matriarch, Nonna, Zia and mother.

Sending prayers to anyone else who has lost a family member at Christmas or Easter time it is tough to grieve when others are celebrating.

Needless to say I'll be disappearing from social media and blogging for a while out of respect for my family's loss.

Thank you for understanding.

See you soon

Here is a poem I'd like to share with you.

In loving memory of my dearest mother in law💙

Gone

The bride has gone to her groom

after years of suffering and doom

Her last breath left her body tonight

as she struggled through the last moments of life.

May she find peace and light

as the wailing grief of her children

floats upon the veil between us now.

Go sweet lady, mother and child

find those who are waiting for you

beyond this life and the next.

You are gone, but you are here

in our hearts, memories and minds.

Go with peace and light as we

weep, our hearts will be forever

heavier at your loss but it is

something we are destined to bare.

Go to your father and mother, they

have been waiting for so long.

There are so many there waiting for you, more than are here now.

She has gone to the home our restless souls seek, where all destinies end.

This is my prayer for you to the holy Maria della Stella on the days Jesus defeats death may he shine his light and guide Maria Stella to the heavens.

The exceptional life of Michael Lee Aday (Part3)

The genesis of Bat 

Meat Loaf was the kind of person who liked to sing in small venues, hang out and play with the house band, he was content with singing around in intimate clubs, but his agent kept calling him with new roles and auditions. All Meat Loaf wanted was to take Jim Steinman's songs and turn them into an album. But that had to wait as he flew down to LA to audition for the Rocky Horror Show.

M.L was hired in 1973 to play Eddie in Rocky Horror because he was the only actor who could get through the character’s song, Hot Patootie. He also played the part of Dr Travis Scott. And very nearly walked out of the production. The cast had been rehearsing song by song and nobody actually knew what the Rocky Horror was about. One day the lead actor, Tim Curry came in and performed Frankenfurter’s main song Sweet Transvestite, in full costume and Meat Loaf simply left the theatre. The quite naive young actor was freaked out by the prospect of having to perform in drag. But after he read the complete script and understood the comic nature of the musical, he happily donned the fishnet stockings and revelled in getting the biggest laugh of his career.

Meat Loaf came back to New York to meet with Jimmy Steinman again; he wanted to make a rock album.

In the meantime, the two found work on a touring comic skit show called the National Lampoon Show. The show was a spin-off of a 1973 satirical comic which was a precursor to shows like Saturday Night Live and helped launch the likes of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase.

The first part of the show were sketches, while the second was a mock rock festival which became a cult success as it toured around college campuses.

Meat Loaf had managed to get himself hired as an understudy to John Belushi, and Jim was the show's musical director.

Later in 1975, most of the National Lampoon cast was hired for NBC's Saturday night, which became SNL.

Even Meat Loaf was asked to do the show, but he said no. Later he regretted this choice, but he appeared several times in skits and singing. Thanks to his friends and connections ML made while working on National Lampoon, he was able to perform on television. Later, he sang some songs from Bat Out of Hell on SNL, which helped get the album finally selling. But that is s little further ahead in Meat Loaf's story.

When Meat was finally able to commit time to sit down with Jim, the two spent months locked up in Jim's boho apartment in the Upper Westside neighbourhood of Ansonia.

According to Meat, he convinced Steinman to write more down to earth material, moving away from the weird experimental stuff Jim was usually interested in. ML pulled Jimmy down from his lofty intellectual ideas, which often pulled his material into dark, violent and hyperactive experimentation. Steinman was interested in being different from everyone else; he wanted to push boundaries and go to the extreme. Steinman wanted to shock; he was just as interested in being hated as he was in becoming loved. Meat Loaf pulled Jimmy into reality, and the project became a little more down to earth and accessible.

The two shared their ideas, stories and experiences and wrote the material together. Who wouldn't have liked to be a fly on the wall to hear how the process went.

According to Meat Loaf, they first wrote You took the words right out of my mouth. Then they sat in a car and worked out Paradise by the Dashboard Light. They developed the title track's lyrics beyond the image of a magnificent motorcycle accident into a longer, more complete story with added details. Next came All Revved Up with No Place to go, based on a date Meat had back in high school. Meat shared the stories, and Steinman wrote them down and expressed them in music.

They spent months writing, editing, cutting and reworking their ideas and concepts.

At first, Jim Steinman had thought of Two Out of Three Ain't Bad as a Hank Williams type of melancholy country song. The Lyric came from a conversation he had with a friend, actress Mimi Kennedy. He complained that no one liked his music, and she said that it was probably too complicated. Elvis was on the radio singing, "I want you, I need you, I love you", and Mimi remarked, "you should write something like that". So he tried.

You took the words right out of my mouth is a homage to The Who, with a full-on Phil Spector melody.

For Crying Out, Loud was a ten-minute cinematographic ultra ballad that begins tenderly and shows Jim's cleverly playful wordplay.

It took them two years to finish the songs. The next problem was that it was difficult to make a demo for their record. Jim's songs were too complicated to record as a simple few minute demo; they had filled them with complex images, fantasy, big sounds like motorcycles revving and drums pounding. All too much to be conveyed in a simple demo tape.

The songs were bigger than life, as was Meat Loaf. So they thought the best thing was to call up the record companies, find a piano and play the songs live. Unfortunately for them, most people didn't understand what the hell they were hearing. The result was a seemingly endless stream of rejection.

They managed to get an appointment with Clive Davis, the head of Columbia Records who had signed Janis Joplin, Santana, Springsteen, and many more. As Jimmy and Meat played their set they felt like this might be their big occasion.

But Davis ended up telling Jim that he had no idea how to write a pop song and that he should listen to more radio. For years Steinman had kept the piece of paper that Clive Davis had scribbled the 'correct' chord progression a good pop song should have. It was the most crushing rejection the pair had ever experienced, yet.

Then Jim and Meat met Todd Rundgren, who seemed to solve many of their problems. Todd was an amazing musician; he could play many different instruments. He had written an endless assortment of songs, performed solo, recorded, arranged and produced in a mind-boggling variety of styles and genres. But above all, Todd understood their concept and believed in their music.

After listening to their 25-minute set, Todd said all they needed was a record deal, and then he'd go into the studio and record with them. The thing is that there wasn't any deal in sight.

The rejections came hard and fast. Some liked the songs but were appalled at the odd couple that sang and played them. Jim and Meat were far from your classic good looking standard rock stars. 

Meat had a big gospel voice filled with a trembling vibrato which was positively operatic. He also weighed more than 220 pounds (100 kg), sweated profusely and in his duet performance with Ellen Foley; he proceeded to grope and kiss the delicate blonde. Steinman was a serious-looking man with pale skin long black hair who had a penchant for wearing all leather, including gloves. Steinman would pound the piano like a madman.

It sounds like a magnificent spectacle to witness. But this motley crew must have been a shocking sight for the primarily conservative record company executives.

So the roll call of record companies that passed on their album and the brutal rejections kept piling up in front of them.

They wisely chose not to share these rejections with their prospective producer, Todd Rundgren, who seemed to answer their prayers.

Todd did not try to change their songs or mould them to fit into the constraints of contemporary radio; instead, he accepted the music as it was.

Later Rundgren confessed he thought they were hilarious. Talking about the experience years later, he said he thought they were making a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, taking the music to its highest extreme.

The only problem was that when Todd and Jimmy went into the studio, the two musicians became like master and apprentice leaving Meat out of the loop.

Recording at Rundgren's home studio at Woodstock, Jim and Todd almost developed their own musical language and telepathic understanding. Meat Loaf, who wasn't a musician, felt excluded, and on rare occasions, he tried to approach them with some suggestions; he was dismissed and berated by Rundgren.

This new dynamic was extremely difficult for Meat Loaf to handle. ML's difficult school days of teasing and bullying left him with a deeply rooted sense of paranoia, which triggered something deeper within his subconscious. Jimmy soon began to worry about Meat's mental state as he took Todd's treatment of him way too personally. 

One night after another failed attempt to get Todd's attention and input into the production process, Meat stormed out of the studio and then didn't show up at the local movie theatre where they had all planned to watch a movie. Jim began to fret.

But it turns out that the singer had got lost on the way and convinced himself that they had given him the wrong directions on purpose and then stomped off home to his then-girlfriend Ellen Foley. 

Other times Meat threatened to kill himself and would disappear without warning.

Things escalated one night when the singer took an overdose of painkillers and passed out in the shower. Jimmy and another friend managed to wake up Meat and drove him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. But when Jim discovered Meat had used the prescription painkillers that he was using to treat the pain of his badly broken nose from the year before, he was furious.

Later after the album was released and became successful, Meat looked back on these problems with a completely different perspective. He told the writer Ritchie Yorke that the record concept was essentially the realm of Jimmy. And that Jimmy doesn't tell him how to do the stage show or perform. When they go into the studio, he interprets the songs because it is what he does best. But in the studio, Jim worked with Todd to make it happen.

But for Jimmy, Meat Loaf, and Bat, things were still far from smooth sailing; the ride was still filled with choppy seas and the real danger of capsizing out in the middle of the ocean.

They still needed to find a back door entrance into a record company. They had caught the attention of Albert Grossman, who had been Bob Dylan's manager and was at the head of Warner Brothers. Grossman had heard a demo and wanted to hear more.

So Jim and Meat were invited to LA to perform for label executives. They also took singer Rory Dodd and Ellen Foley with them. Foley was the singer who duetted on the album. Even this time, it didn't turn out well. When Meat and Ellen started acting out the famous making out scene at the beginning of Paradise, they immediately didn't want to know about it.

But now, in a strange series of circumstances and good luck, Bat seemed to finally have all of the elements aligned to get Meat and Jimmy signed with a label.

In a succession of beautiful coincidences and good networking, they had heard of a new start-up record label called Cleveland International, which was under the same branch of the parent company as Epic Records.

The new label's founder Steve Popovitch was quite the character, a Serbian American known for carrying his boombox everywhere he went to blast out music wherever he went. But above all, Steve loved unearthing new talent, making deals and loved music too. He'd already signed Boston, Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, Southside Johnny and several other hot-selling bands.

So through their connections in the music industry, Meat and Jimmy managed to get other people talking about their album.

In 1977 Popovitch had formed his label, Cleveland International and decided to take a chance on the oddest couple in Rock history. It also helped that Popovitch thought that Meat and Jim were about to sign with Warner's, so he felt he was out manoeuvring a big competitor. And so the Bat was nearly out!

By now, you'd think most of the problems were resolved for Meat and Jimmy's album. But then the real hurdles started cropping up. This epic record needed an equally epic odyssey to bring it into the world, and its background story is just as spectacular as the record itself.

The record was finally released in 1977, then came the critical response, and if you thought all of those rejections from the record companies were bad, wait until you read the critics.

Barry Cain for the Record Mirror wrote how Bat Out of Hell was an album of insurrection and the incessant adolescent fight against all odds. Meat Loaf hangs out everywhere, mainly because of a hamburger-swollen body. He sings all the Bat Out of Hell songs in a hamburger-swollen voice. He's swell.

Other critics said the album was some kind of joke made by 'Led Zeppelin wannabes'. Another said Meat Loaf was nothing other than a 'bargain-basement Elvis.' 

One particularly confused critic said Bat Out of Hell sounded 'Like Lou Reed met Tom Waits in a very small elevator.' Not even the critics knew what to make of it?

Bat Out of Hell was seen as an anomaly, as punk rock was thriving in the UK; this long-winded rock opera album seemed indifferent to all other musical trends of the late 70s.

Music Journalist Mick Wall explains how Bat Out of Hell gave us grand operatic super rock when punk strived to turn rock to ashes. 

Meat Loaf gave us a vastly overweight thirty-year-old whose voice could topple mountains, stomping around in a frilly shirt and tux at a time when the coolest rock star in the world was a twenty-year-old with an even sillier name, Sid Vicious, who couldn't sing, couldn't play, and was so junkie-thin he vanished when he turned sideways.

Putting all the strange criticisms aside, Meat and Jimmy went along with the game. They began as most new groups did by opening gigs for other more established bands.

In Chicago, Meat Loaf and Steinman were scheduled to open for Cheap Trick, a band just hitting their successful commercial sweet spot with the public and radio stations. This was perfect because it guaranteed a packed venue. But it was also bad because no one had ever heard of Meat Loaf … well not yet.

Jim Steinman wasn't interested in competing with crowd pleasers and commercially successful bands like Cheap Trick. His vision was of a larger than life staged and fully loaded presentation. As far as Jimmy was concerned, Meat Loaf was a stand-alone act. A unique one-off, take it or leave it proposition. Love it or hate it, nothing in between and no compromising. That night in Chicago, the audience resoundingly decided to take their show and throw it right back into their faces.

Steinman had decided to play the piano on tour, and he was deeply immersed into the theatrical fantasy of what he had imagined for the Bat Out of Hell stage show. Jimmy dressed in the most flamboyant costumes of leather, boots, capes, gloves and hats. He would start the show by peeling off his large black biker gloves – only to reveal a pair of white silk gloves beneath. A truly bizarre sight to behold. 

Ellen Foley had left Meat Loaf to pursue better-paid stage work; so they found a replacement in 24-year-old Karla DeVito. Karla was a brunette bombshell from Chicago who wasn't afraid of being sensuous and over the top. With Meat Loaf in full tux, frilled dress shirt and loose red handkerchief used to mop up the sweat from his profusely perspiring face.

Meat Loaf had created the most flamboyant stage persona. On a ball of animalistic crazy energy, ML would pace the stage, leaping around, belting out each song with unbridled passion as the music required. When the song was heroic, he would become the knight in shining armor. If it were a ballad he would become heartbroken, pathetic, or passionate as required. For Meat Loaf, the eternal actor, it was always about the story, the character or the emotion. He was an extraordinary sight to behold.

To add to the unusual nature of the show, Steinman would start everything with a spoken word tongue in cheek presentation filled with images of cold winds, harsh suns and tears that turn to dust. 

At the Cheap Trick gig the booing started almost immediately, with people yelling out insults about Meats weight, urging the Fat pig to go back home. They were booed and jeered off the stage.

In reality, the breakthrough for Bat Out of Hell was still a long way off. It was a classic sleeper hit, creeping slowly into the public eye.

Meat and Jim worked on their presentation, focused on the music, played at any small venue that would have them and gradually, through word of mouth and sheer determination and faith, things began to turn around slowly. It took another nine months of hard work to grow a fan base who appreciated the songs.

In January of 1978, Meats record company Cleveland International put them up as their representative act at the annual CBS conference in New Orleans. It was the most brilliant move that Steve Popovitch could have come up with. The most successful executives gathered to watch some of the best newly signed bands around. Cheap Trick, Billy Joel, Elvis Costello, and Ted Nugent were on the bill. 

Meat Loaf's performance received a standing ovation. After the conference, Cleveland Records sanctioned the making of three promotional video clips for Paradise by the dashboard light; You took the words right out of my mouth and Bat out of hell (this being before video clips were a central focus in marketing campaigns).

The clip for Bat out of Hell became immensely popular in Great Britain, a country that became great and enduring fans of both Bat Out of Hell and Meat Loaf. The album would spend 485 consecutive weeks in the UK charts; a record only surpassed by Fleetwood Mac's Rumors.

Bat and beyond

Bat Out of Hell is the most incredible album of seven songs with seven different stories, some five minutes long and others up to ten minutes which at times seemed impossibly long for the 1970's popular audience. In a period when any commercial rock or pop song was two and a half to three minutes long and followed the standard hook, verse, chorus, verse, hook formula, it seemed inconceivable that this kind of music would find its audience.

I cannot help but imagine what if Jim and Meat had met up today to write and publish their music together. I can see them writing and recording, and if they didn't get picked up by a record company, they would have taken the same route as Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes or Billie Eilish and countless others. The songs would have been loved and discovered just the same by uploading and performing online, together with live performances.

Perhaps we would have more recordings from this early period of the Steinman/ Aday collaboration, with less pressure to make a record deal; they would have had more time to write and record. Who knows, perhaps Bat 1 could have become a double record after breaking all streaming records. 

Those seven songs today feel like so little. Listening to them daily since Meat Loaf's passing has left me thirsty to hear more from the world created by Steinman. 

Sure this world was one based very much on male fantasy, lots of beautiful women, damsels in distress, men with faded Levis bursting apart with desire, revving motorbikes and young adolescent boys who are all revved up with nowhere to go. Steinman's imagination was a weird place, yet it all fitted perfectly into his fascination with the mythology of Peter Pan, a story he had been in love with since childhood.

Meat Loaf's talent as an actor, raccounter and storyteller gave him an ability to connect to his audience. His fan base fell in love with him and would happily listen to him sing a shopping list, as long as he put in the same amount of feeling and emotion as he did with his other songs.

We have another two Bat out of Hell albums, numerous other songs and the final epic experimental Steinman and Aday album Braver than we are from 2016, but those are different, more mature works. 

During the Bat Out of Hell tour, Meat had irrevocably damaged his voice thanks to a gruelling tour schedule without any rest and more pressure still from the tour promoters that demanded Meat and Jimmy perform more and more dates.

M.L would push his voice and himself physically, singing through the pain. At one stage on the tour he developed painful nodules on his vocal cords, which burst and bled. He would sing while spitting blood out of his throat.

 Later Meat completely lost his voice and could not record the next album, Bad for good. Steinman went on to record the songs himself, but the album wasn't very successful without Meat belting out the tunes.

Then after Bat one, the problems with the record companies, managers and law cases piled up. Unable to work on the next album Meat Loaf was being sued for 80 million dollars for breach of contract. He had to declare bankruptcy and never saw any money from Bat Out of Hell as the bank froze all of his assets, and he was unable to tour thanks to various legal injunctions which blocked him from performing. 

You cannot tell me that this situation didn't put a lot of bad blood between Steinman and Meat. Even though Meal Loaf said the two never stopped talking and remained friends, it took them years to get back to working together.

I only wish we had more work from that early Steinman/ Meat Loaf period when the original odd couple got together and wove their magic. Without the greed of big business, I'm sure they would have been able to do more. Who knows what else they would have come up with while writing, recording, and uploading their songs in some dank bohemian apartment without any external pressures. 

But then any Meat Loaf/ Steinman song is pretty magical, and the magic still happened whenever they collaborated. 

My current favourite (and they change every day according to my mood) has to be from what became Meat's eventual follow up to Bat Out of Hell, Dead Ringer, a diverse and fun album that included a catchy duet with Cher.

But the giant melodramatic Bat Out of Hell type of rock opera song is I'm gonna love her for Both of Us which is undeniably from the same universe that Steinman created on the first album. The song is a beautiful mix of passion, outrage, shocking details and bizarre combinations of extremes that only could come from the contorted Steinman imagination. 

The plot of this song is a kind of warped love triangle. Meat Loaf addresses his best friend, a man he considered like his brother. He is shocked at how his friend treats his girlfriend, stabbing her in the back and treating her terribly. Outraged by how his friend treats the girl, he steps in to defend her. The suggestion is that she has asked Meat to help her. 

So in comes, Meat Loaf, like a knight in shining armor to rescue a girl from an abusive relationship. The girl is singing like a siren on the waves, so he cannot resist. Meat's passion has been awoken; he berates his friend's behaviour, how the friend put out the girl's light and puts her into a deep, dark prison. He can't stand it. He will take the girl away and have her burning with desire by the end of the night and restore her to her original state, like a jewel in the crown. 

I'm gonna love her for Both of Us is pure Steinman gold, his unique blend of romanticism, big broad brushstrokes of melodrama, with those clever little twists. It's all corny and over the top, but it works.

Yes, Meat is setting himself up as the hero saving a girl who is suffering but really, what it boils down to is he is stealing his best friend's girl, no matter how noble his intentions are.

Steinman had so much mischievous fun with his music. In many cases, Jimmy was like an eternally playful and capricious child. He would take something like a ballad or a love song and turn it around into something unexpected. I mean, what does he exactly mean when he says he will ‘ove her for the both of us? Is there a menage a trois involved?

Not only lyrically but also musically, Steinman had a gift of melding together different elements to create his musical form. He would take bits and pieces of his favourite musical influences and combine them to create a new sound. 

Steinman's music quotes elements as diverse as Wagner, 1950s Country music, Johnny Cash, boogy woogie, classic American Rock and Roll like Elvis, Phil Spector, The Beachboys and Led Zeppelin. 

Steinman mixed the most unexpected extreme elements from chivalry to stealing someone else's girlfriend, conflicting concepts that undermined the story's intention—turning things on their heads and putting a twist or punch line. And he did it all purely for his amusement. 

Nearly 45 years since Bat Out of Hell was released, Steinman is still laughing and winking at us, wondering if we will get the joke.

The exceptional life of Michael Lee Aday (Part2)

Early life and childhood: Poor fat Marvin

Meat Loaf's early life was difficult and filled with deep trauma. Marvin Lee Aday was born in Dallas, Texas, on the 27th of September 1947. His mother, Wilma Artie, was an English teacher and sang in her own Gospel group. While his father, Orvis Wesley Aday, was a former police officer and war veteran. After being wounded, his father was medically discharged from the US army during World War II; it was after this he developed a problem with alcohol.

Marvin's father soon became a full-blown alcoholic, and often, he and his mother would have to go in search of his father, who would disappear for days at a time. Marvin would have to drag his father out of bars and pubs late at night and frequently fell victim to his violent outbursts. 

It was Orvis that gave Meat Loaf the first piece of his nickname. Seeing his chubby newborn son, he remarked his bright red colour made him look like mincemeat. He cruelly insisted the nurses label his son's bassinet in the hospital nursery 'meat' and that Marvin be displayed front and centre so others could see his giant meaty offspring. 

The Loaf part of his name came later when he was in school. Playing gridiron, he accidentally trod on his coach's foot with his football shoe spikes and was promptly called a Meat Loaf, a nickname which stuck with him his whole life.

To say Marvin Aday had a difficult childhood would be an understatement. His big meaty stature and general clumsiness led him to be teased mercilessly. He was a big baby and as he grew and developed, his weight became a problem. By 12, he was 5 foot 2 inches (158 cms) and weighed 240 pounds (108kg). As a result, he was bullied and ostracised at school. His classmates' parents even told him that he was too fat to play with their children. 

As a result, he became timid and spent a lot of time alone. This one factor led him to become extremely shy and persistently suffer from social anxiety throughout his life. But later, he did say that this time alone allowed him to develop his creativity and imagination.

Another story Meat Loaf told about this period was about a radio advertisement for Levi jeans which used his name to say 'Poor fat Marvin couldn't wear Levi's.' This led to ever more teasing at school. He never forgot this and grew to hate his name. Later he legally changed his first name to Michael.

Meat Loaf was a boisterous child; he was always getting himself hurt and getting into trouble. He went through a stage at around five years of age where he persistently ran away from home. 

As a child, he was extraordinarily accident-prone and began gathering concussions like boy scout badges. Later in several interviews, he even bragged he had a total of 18 concussions in all shapes and sizes, from being hit in the head by different objects, on the football field, car accidents, running into things and through other scrapes he got into.

One of Meat Loaf's most famous tales that he fed to journalists with embellishments for his amusement was when he got hit in the head with a shot put. He was knocked out and spent a week in the hospital. He was proud of how tough it made him sound. He said many people wouldn't live to tell the tale, and he credited the accident with making him realise he had a voice. After being hit in the head, he said he found out he could sing.

Besides getting into trouble and playing sports, Meat Loaf also discovered acting. Through high school, he got a part in every school play. He found he had a talent for making people laugh, and he come out of his shell. He loved to connect to the audience and his fellow performers. Later, Meat Loaf reflected how going on stage was a good way of concealing his shyness.

When he was fourteen, he got a part as an extra in the 1962 remake of Rodgers & Hammerstein musical State Fair. He watched the filming on a friend's farm and was roped into becoming a part of the action. He also got a walk-on role in a local production of Carmen, and witnessing the reality of professional acting life; he fell in love with the rebellious nature of a career on the stage and screen. 

Soon he walked away from the football and baseball field and delved into performing getting involved in local bands.

His mother Wilma didn't want Meat to get into the music scene, but he did it anyway. The first song he ever sang was a cover of the Stones' Satisfaction, and he was promptly asked to tour with a local band.

Rebelling against his mother's wishes, he became the quintessential problematic teenager, staying out late and getting into trouble. Meat Loaf's mother promptly took away his car and grounded him. Losing his temper he slapped his mother; immediately remorseful and afraid of what his father would do if he found out, he promised to walk the line and never disrespect her again. Wilma made sure he kept this promise.

After high school Meat Loaf enrolled in Lubbock Christian University, where he threw himself back into sports like baseball.

Just when you think Meat Loaf's childhood and adolescence couldn't get any worse, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was sick for many years and eventually passed away when ML was 19.

Music journalist Mick Hall in his biography Like a bat out of hell: the larger than life story of Meat Loaf, describes the events after the death of Wilma. At the funeral, Meat was so insane with grief he tried to lift Wilma out of her coffin in the funeral parlour and yelled out for them not to take her away from him. He blocked out the funeral from his memory. He told Rolling Stone many years later that it all felt like he was in a movie.

The truth was that Meat Loaf had been in denial and had run from the confronting situation of his mother's terminal illness. After Wilma's death, Meat Loaf's relationship with his father went from bad to worse. Meat's father, Orvis, was even worse at coping with the emotions surrounding the death of his wife than his son. Orvis went on one of his drinking binges and took everything out on his son.

Wilma had left Meat Loaf a small inheritance, but Orvis was trying to take control over it. So Meat went before a judge where the money was given directly to him. Orvis became more unstable and hurled abuse at his son. One night, he grabbed a kitchen knife, and tried to stab Meat. 

Luckily Meat Loaf dodged his father's drunken attempted murder and fought back. Later ML told how he had to fight for his life, breaking his father's nose and three of his ribs. He left his childhood home that night. Meat walked out of the house in nothing but his t-shirt and shorts, got into his '65 Chevy, and drove off.

He took his inheritance from Wilma and rented an apartment in Dallas where he closed the door on the outside world and didn't open it for three months. Wrapped inside his grief during those months, he slowly came out of it with a strange new resolve and purpose. He took his pain and loss and fed it into his psyche and desires. Whenever he had a song, he knew what he was singing about and who he was singing for. So he bought a ticket to LA to find out what he could do with his talent.

Early career: Finding his way

The early months in LA for Meat Loaf were still heavy with grief and sadness. He rented a small apartment on Ventura Boulevard and felt incredibly lonely and sad over his first Christmas and New Year alone. But it was music that helped him to find focus in his life.

For anyone wanting to get into music or acting 1960's Los Angeles was the place to be. The swinging 60s were filled with an energy of new sounds, bands and creative opportunities. He began to socialise at the Balboa Youth Centre in Encino, where he watched many contemporary bands who still hadn't made it to Texas. He saw Jimmy Hendrix, then the Yardbirds featuring a young Jimmy Page. He fell under the spell of Janis Joplin with her massive emotional voice, and performances were a tremendous inspiration to him.

While singing a cover of Janis's Piece of my heart, he caught the eye of LA garage band musician Gary Spagnolo who was a part of the local trendy psychedelic scene. Gary hooked up Meat with a band called The Prunes, and they recorded two songs that Meat had written by himself. He sang the songs as hard as he could, and even though he wasn't a songwriter, he made them work, and people began to notice his powerful and expressive voice.

In 1968, Meat Loaf formed his first band named Meat Loaf Soul. The band started off doing small gigs around the place and opened for Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Who and Buffalo Springfield.

Soon, Meat was courted by record business executives looking for new talent to exploit. He hid his insecurities behind a new rock star persona he invented for himself, strutting around the stage with confidence, showing off his big voice and bigger than life sweaty extravagant showmanship.

Not wanting to be taken for a ride by smooching record execs, Meat Loaf Soul began touring along the west coast, opening shows for well-established acts like Van Morrison, Janice Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Meat was sleeping in the back of his car up in the Highland Hills, but he would get a hotel room when he made some money. He said he made ends meet doing little odds and ends, including dodgy things like selling hallucinogens. After all, it was 1968, the summer of love filled with a new rebellious generation of recreational drug-taking, weed-smoking and alcohol consuming hippies.

Meat Loaf continued to concentrate on his band, who were performing wherever they could. They would load up their gear into a truck and drive 36 hours to Michigan to play with bands like the Iggy Pop fronted Stooges. His band's lineup changed regularly, as did their name; they even tried calling themselves Popcorn Blizzard. But they kept going on the road for the next couple of years. They opened for Ted Nugent and played with MC5.

As Meat Loaf was making his name on the music scene, he was also being offered roles in musical theatre. In between gigs and jobs, a friend of his had lined up some work parking cars outside the Aquarius Theater, where a production of the new musical Hair was playing.

Meat's friend introduced him to Greg Carlos in the car park, who was playing the lead in Hair. Striking up a conversation, he told Greg he was trying to put a band together and that he sang and was invited to audition as the production was going on tour. 

Seeing a queue of hundreds of hopefuls, he refused to wait for hours for an audition. So Greg took him to the front of the line and introduced him to the director Armand Coullet.

Meat told the story of how, when meeting Coullet, he was asked what he wanted to do. Meat shrugged and said he was trying out for a job in the parking lot. He made everyone laugh, and now they were curious to hear him sing. He sang a blues number which sounded like something epic coming from his gospel voice. That night he wasn't parking cars outside rather inside, watching and preparing to perform his part in the show.

Meat Loaf and Hair were a perfect fit; they were rebellious, trailblazers who didn't look or sound like anything else. Hair: the American tribal love-rock musical was about a Vietnam war draftee who befriends a tribe of hippies on his way to sign up for the army. The hippies introduce him to marijuana, LSD and their network of unorthodox relationships and anti-war draft evasion. Meat's soulful voice shined out from the chaos of the then-experimental new age music. Both Meat and Hair were a massive hit.

By the time the tour got to Detroit, Meat's performance review was on the front page of the local Detroit Free Press paper, and it got the attention of record companies. The legendary Motown records approached him. Meat met with Harry Balk, who offered him a record deal but with a condition. Meat wanted to form a duo with a girl named Stoney, a fellow cast member from Hair who he thought was one of the best singers he'd ever heard. Meat got approval from Harry and was elated at the prospect of recording his first album.

Motown initially saw Stoney & Meatloaf as the perfect addition to their new rock imprint, Rare Earth which was supposed to branch out and showcase new non-Afro American talent in the Motown signature style and genre.

But Motown wasn't like other record companies. Singers were just singers, and if they didn't sell records, they were unceremoniously dumped. 

While Stoney & Meat Loaf's album launched with a bit of a buzz and excitement, listeners were enthusiastic at first. But the public was confused when they discovered the duo was white and felt as if they had been misled. So through no fault of his Meat Loaf found himself back to square one.

But just when Meat was wondering what to do next, he got a call from Hair director Armand Coullet to say the production was going to Broadway and if Meat wanted to come.

Unfortunately, Hair in New York was a disaster. The producers had fired half of the cast, so everyone who turned up to replace them found themselves in very turbulent waters. After a few days of negativity and stress, Meat Loaf left town and joined another production in Pittsburgh and another in Buffalo.

Just as he wondered if he was destined to move from town to town singing Aquarius forever, he did a few other shows, including an off-Broadway gospel musical titled Rainbow in New York produced by the legendary NY impresario Joseph Papp.

Under Papp's wing, Meat Loaf worked for the New York Public Theatre as a part of the Shakespeare in the Park Festival. He starred in As You Like It alongside Raul Julia, Meryl Streep and Mary Beth Hurt.

Meat knew he wasn't a traditional thespian, and after the production, he headed to Kansas City and back to singing.

Years later, he told the story that he had to sing during his Shakespeare in the Park role, and his voice drew the attention of some opera patrons. They approached him and offered him $60,000 a year to train for five years as an opera singer and then debut at the Metropolitan Opera house. But he refused after he realised the controlling nature of opera conductors. He was too rebellious to be limited by others. So he refused. But if he had taken advantage of this classical training, he may have been able to take better care of his voice.

In the post-Shakespeare in the Park period, he auditioned for a part in the new musical Grease. He got the region and was literally on the way to sign his work contract when he met Jim Rado, the creator of Hair who had a new play and wanted Meat to star in it. Rado sent Meat to talk to his agent Jeff Hunter. And before Jim could do anything, Jeff told him about a different project. 

More Than You Deserve was an experimental theatre piece produced by Joe Papp, which was even more crazy and out there than Hair had been. The auditions were happening on the same day in the East Village auditorium. So Meat walked down to the audition, which turned out to be probably the best decision he would make in his life.

When Meat got to the building, the only person there was a strange-looking guy named Jim Steinman. The wealthy young intellectual rebel who had convinced perplexed academics from the prestigious Amherst College into allowing him to produce experimental theatre while also nearly flunking out of the school. And who now had caught the eye of Joe Papp, who was producing More Than You Deserve.  

Meat sang a song from the album he recorded with Stoney titled: I'd love to be as heavy as Jesus. Jim Steinman quipped that Meat might be as heavy as two Jesuses when he finished. Apart from Steinman's sarcasm, this first meeting was the beginning of one of the most successful collaborations in contemporary rock music history.

As soon as Steinman heard Meat Loaf sing, he fell in love with his voice and immediately thought Meat should be singing Wagnerian rock opera. Jim said that Meat Loaf had his dream voice. So it was like an epiphany. Mear was perfect. The only problem was he didn't have any idea what. 

Steinman didn't know what to do. So he had them write a part for him in More Than You Deserve. After singing the main show-stopping song in the performances, the audience would burst into thunderous applause. So then Jim discovered that Meat was a great singer and an outstanding actor. From that moment, Jim knew Meat would be perfect for performing his songs because Meat would be able to act out what Steinman had in his imagination.

Later in an interview, Steinman described Meat Loaf's singing as witnessing paranormal activity. His voice was booming; he made the room shake, his eyes would roll into his head so you'd only see the whites, and his hands would contort. It was a spectacle to be beheld. In the performances with his touring band, the Neverland express Steinman said Meat would get so worked up that his body would sweat so much that there would be steam emanating from him, like an athlete working out in a gym.

So after Joseph Papp was called in to hear Meat, he was offered a part in More Than You Deserve. The bizarre plot was about a US army major stationed in Vietnam who falls in love with a nymphomanic news reporter after other soldiers gang-raped her. Meat was offered the part of the maniac soldier named Rabbit, a good-hearted junkie conscript with an obsession with blowing up people with grenades.

In the middle of the show, Rabbit gets a letter from his mother telling him his wife has left him, and that's when Meat sings the song More Than You Deserve. The title song was a showstopper, and from the first time, Meat sang, it immediately got a standing ovation.

For Steinman, this was the first sign of what would happen next. Meat Loaf was the catalyst and cornerstone for Steinman's most successful compositions. Meat Loaf would become the embodiment of Steinman's entire creative universe.

More than you deserve was a song about an outsider, an outcast in love who not only loses but is also humiliated. It's a song for anyone who has ever been bullied, left out, betrayed or unaccepted in life. 

Meat Loaf took the pathetic figure of Rabbit and gave him a deep sense of pathos. He wasn't simply a man whose wife cheated on him several times, and with several people instead, he became a natural person who a cruel destiny had thwarted. 

There was something of pure innocence, and deep hurt in the way ML sang More than you deserve. In the hands of any other performer, it could have become something of a cruel farce, but Meat Loaf gave it a real sense of emotion which turned it into something different. It was still very theatrical, yet it had a genuine emotional heart that connected to the audience.

Steinman would spend the next forty years exploring the theme of the heartbroken outsider in his songs, from the yearning of those who didn't have and never will, the hurt of betrayal, and the romantic melodrama of desire and obsession, otherworldliness, fantasy and broken unrequited love.

More Than You Deserve is the song that inspires the songs from one of the most popular albums of all time Bat Out of Hell. It led to the creation of Two Out of Three ain't bad, For crying out loud, I'm going to love her for the both of us and later I'd do anything for love (but I won't do that). An intense broken, hearted epic genre that Meat Loaf brought to life with his superb acting and pureness of voice.

The exceptional life of Michael Lee Aday (Part 1)

Since I heard the news of the death of Meat Loaf last month, I felt somehow compelled to go back and listen to his music after realising his performing career spanned an astounding six decades. Now it's been over a month later, I'm still in a Meat Loaf rabbit hole, and I refuse to come out of it.

I've been obsessively listening to all possible interviews, t.v appearances, performances from the '70s to the '90s. I'm still working my way through. Meat Loaf's collaborative and solo albums, including one of the most popular albums of all time. There are also his numerous acting credits from cameos, cinematographic music videos, timeless cult classics and the best character acting you'll ever see.

I've had his music constantly playing either in the background or on my headphones to the point I hear his songs ringing in my ears during the night as I sleep. I had to stop listening to Meat Loaf before going to bed as it simply wouldn't let me sleep.

I listened to his very first theatre work with Jim Steinman and was blown away by the power of his early voice, which was truly epic. I have found fantastic stripped back versions of his songs that show off every syllable of Meat Loaf's emotion and expression.

I've watched all of the interviews I can find on Youtube, from crazy interviews on quirky German t.v in the '80s, interviews on stuffy British t.v talk shows and even watched his exquisitely cringy but strangely good early movies Dead Ringer and Roadie. And I have loved it all.

I even found and listened to the very first album he recorded for Motown in 1971, duetting with female vocalist Shaun Murphy. It was such a fun and it showed off the talents of two beautifully talented younge singers who had been working together singing in the musical Hair.

I also listened to all of the songs he recorded with 1970s American psychedelic guitar rock legend Ted Nugent which were all so blissfully rock it hurts to listen to and makes you wish for a 70's rock comeback. I have to admit I even love his 1980s records eventhough it hasn't aged well but it's still Meat Loaf. All of his work has his personality written all over it, and if you are a fan, you will always recognize it and love it.

In a single month, I have officially become a Meat Head. It's a shame I was so late to the party. It took his death to realise how many things of value he made. I'm afraid this is the same old story for me, its happened before. I became a fan of Roy Orbison as a teenager in the 90s when he released his last album and soon after had a massive heart attack and died. I then made my way back through his music and now the Big O is firmly in my music-loving heart.

As I continue to work through Meat Loaf's impressive out put, I read endless articles about his life, biographies and his autobiography. Doing this I have gradually unearthed an artist of exceptional versatility, scope, determination and work ethic. His life was filled with difficulty, but he overcame everything, and the sheer volume he created is astounding. Now that he is gone his fans can be grateful to have so much to remember him by.

It is heartbreaking to think the world has lost such an artist, but then the life, philosophy and creations he left behind are great examples of his creativity. This man's passion, inventiveness, and fearlessness are examples for all of us.

I was born in 1977, the year that Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman's collaborative album A bat out of Hell came out and became one of the highest-selling albums of all time. So I was blissfully unaware of his early music. I recall seeing the album's cover and thinking it was heavy metal, a genre that would never interest any pop-loving teenager.

The '80s saw him fall into a kind of obscurity. I mean, he was still making albums and touring, but he had problems to work through, and there was no possible way anything that followed Bat Out of Hell could have ever been matched in any way.

He once highlighted a local music festival in my native Western Australia in 1991. The Bindoon Music festival was the most infamous event in WA history. I recall seeing hoards of bikers revving their hogs as they passed by my house towards Bindoon outside the city of Perth for a few days of beer, rock, and god knows what else. The festival was later banned after annual drug busts, gang violence, assaults, and total mayhem got too out of hand. I shudder to think what poor Meat Loaf had to put up with and see. I'm sure he didn't have a great impression of Western Australia after experiencing the chaos of Bindoon.

His story is endearing. Marvin Lee Aday was the introverted, shy, overweight kid everyone who everyone made fun of at school. Yet he followed his dream to become an actor and later became one of the most extravagant rock star personas ever. His charisma, big-hearted performances, down to earth nature and powerful gospel voice made everyone fall in love with him.

Meat Loaf was passionate, magnificently rebellious, sensitive, vivid and ultimately highly dramatic. His early live performance videos make you want to get a time machine to the 1970s and go to see him rocking in small smoky venues around LA and Detroit, where he honed the skills he later used to immortalise the characters in Jim Steinman songs. Or at least to see him on stage singing in Hair or in an experimental Steinman musical singing the first song that sparked the journey. That first song was More than you deserve who when audiences heard Meat sing it would erupt into a standing ovation. It was the song that made Jim Steinman realise not only did M.L have a voice but that he was also a talented actor. Meat Loaf's early voice was phenomenal so very gospel and soulful which still makes listening to them today a deeply emotional experience.

His performances were filled with loads of heart, which he seemed to wear on his sleeve, and people loved him for it. Even in his later career, when the voice had changed and when it occasionally let him down, he still gave everything he had.

I found a recording from the 1970s on Youtube of his raw recorded studio voice with no instrumentation, and it was so beautiful and undeniably sexy. I imagine how many women were turned on by his voice and performances. How many kept their eyes shut and imagined ML the whole time.

His performances of the songs from his breakout album are my absolute favourites. There is no sign of the shy, overweight kid being teased in school. Instead, he became an extravagant character acting out the melodrama of every song written by Jim Steinman.

The Steinman Meat Loaf vision was a completely new genre of musical, a kind of extravagant rock and roll romanticism. In the 1970s, Meat Loaf strutted across the stage gesturing like a man possessed, belting out the fantastic songs that tell stories of heartbreak, passion, teenage lust, disappointments, unrequited love in a kind of album for anyone who has been lied to, disappointed or cheated on in life. His stage show and rock persona were carefully choreographed and rehearsed with Steinman, who had a specific vision for his music.

Meat Loaf and Steinman were two exceptionally talented outsiders. Meat was immense in voice, stature, and weight. He was someone who was constantly rebelling against society's expectations.

While long-haired, pasty-faced Steinman lived a nocturnal existence like a vampire and wrote experimental theatre talking producers into staging long-winded productions usually involving Jim Morrison style spoken word poetry, nudity and violence. He had a perchance for dressing in leather, wearing gloves during performances and loved pushing his performances to the extreme. Steinman once told the story of the first Bat Out of Hell tour where he cut his finger nails so short and played the piano keys so hard so that he would be able to bleed over they keyboard.

The two could not have been more different. Meat Loaf was a tall, booming, rough, and tumble Texan who had fashioned a career in music and theatre based on little more than his raw talent and personality. He left home after the premature death of his mother and a violent attack from his alcoholic father who tried to kill him with a kitchen knife. M.L had to fight for everything in his life even against his own father.

Steinman on the other hand was from a wealthy family but chose to live a bohemian life writing music and working in theatre. Highly intelligent and convincing Steinman had talked his way into creating experimental theatre for a final project at his prestigious ivy league university, despite nearly flunking out of all of his classes.

Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman wrote Bat Out of Hell, which is a one of a kind album. Seven tracks range from 5 to 10 minutes long, each telling its own specific story. Meat Loaf acts out each of the tales by exploring the nature of freedom, passion, love, teenage angst, heartbreak, mortality, violence, sex, lust and motorbikes.

Bat is one of the top five all-time selling albums of all time and has sold over 43 million copies worldwide. According to the Guinness book of world records, Bat out of Hell is the highest selling record of all time in the UK.

There has been a bit of a Meat Loaf renaissance since he passed. Like myself, a new generation is discovering his music, and the fans are going back and reconnecting in a kind of collective grief and nostalgia.

A week after his death, his first album, A bat out of Hell, leapt back up the charts; it reached the 7th position in the album classifications in Australia.

Later Steinmanl adapted the songs from the Bat album into a musical in 2017. Steinman's original concept for his songs was to create a futuristic rock version of Peter Pan, and it has been a great success. Steinman passed away in 2021, and Bat the musical is currently touring the UK and next year is set to tour worldwide.

Since Meat Loaf's death, his fans have posted endless new videos on Youtube. Dozens of old interviews and vintage clips are resurfacing in memory of their beloved Meat. Working through all of the material online, I can slowly piece together the complex character of the man behind Meat Loaf, that of Michael Lee Aday.

Michael chose to change his name, shedding the persona of poor fat Marvin that haunted him through school. Aday, in reality, was an even more fascinating and contradicting character than his onstage rock persona.

Michael Aday was a highly driven man who desired to learn something new every day. He was as disciplined as the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers; his purpose in life was to improve himself and get better every day. He thought he somehow had been a terrible person in his past and felt like he needed to redeem himself. He certainly wasn't afraid to call out hypocrisy, and he didn't suffer fools gladly. He had a hate-hate relationship with the press, who he considered idiotic and didn't respect critics. Yet he always read the reviews and news articles about his work and sometimes took them personally.

It wasn't evident what specific lousy behaviour he was trying to redeem himself from; perhaps he was referring to his adolescence. The Bat out of Hell tour sounded kind of wild as he dabbled in drugs and alcohol to combat the stress and pressure surrounding the immense success. In the 1977 world tour, he was headlining and performing two-hours six nights a week, including an extreme vocal and physical workout. He damaged his voice with the sheer volume of work he was demanded to do. And later the trauma of his childhood, legal problems with his record company and his inability to cope with fame led to him having a breakdown.

Meat Loaf always had a reputation as being a tyrant with his bands and was always obsessively working himself and those around him hard. Like most creatives, he was plagued with self-doubt and anxiety. There is no doubt he had a lot of pent up anger from his childhood, and he did try to run away from it until it all caught up with him later on in life.

Towards the end of his career, many people accused him of losing relevance and his voice. He continued to tour well into his 60s and was the creator of some cringy faux pas and embarrassing remarks. While participating in the Donald Trump hosted US reality show, The Apprentice, he lost his temper with a fellow participant. He unleashed a horrible outpour of anger, rage and f-bombs, which really didn't endear him to the public and perhaps signalled a problem with unresolved anger.

Meat Loaf once stated that he didn't believe in climate change and suggested Greta Thunberg had been brainwashed, a comment he later apologised for. His cause of death is also a little controversial as people begin to question whether or not he had been vaccinated against Covid.

But despite any controversies, there is no doubt Michael Lee Aday was a man of exceptional talent who punished himself physically and mentally in every one of his performances. As an actor, he was a literal chameleon disappearing into his roles. He appeared in over 60 feature films and tv series, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Fight Club, Wayne's World, the Spice Girl movie, Dr House, Monk, Elementary and Crazy in Alabama.

The original 1977 Bat out of Hell stage show was filled with acrobatics; the songs were positively operatic, he acted, choreographed and pushed his body, voice and heart to the limits in every performance. Often he would collapse from exhaustion after a concert and regularly had an oxygen tank ready for him as he also had asthma.

Throughout his long career, Meat Loaf broke bones, strained his back, his knees were shot, he gave himself 18 concussions, he once fell from a third storey balcony, he lost and damaged his voice persistently through the years. His head injuries gave him vertigo, and he had to have four back surgeries, the last in 2018 left him with significant pain issues.

After collapsing on stage in 2003, he was diagnosed with a heart condition called Wolff Parkinson White which caused an irregular heartbeat, and he underwent surgery in London.

Michael Aday always spoke about the importance of love, kindness, humility, and connecting with others. Ultimately he had a generous heart which he gave willingly in his performances and was constantly working on himself, and for that alone, he should be admired.

Meat loaf's most significant legacy is something we all should keep in mind. Aday once mentioned how often people are limited by their own expectations. His advice to everyone was to try everything you can, never give up, and put your heart into everything you do, which will ultimately take you somewhere you'd never imagine.

The best example of this philosophy is Meat Loaf's own journey. Steinman and Meat Loaf started writing a Bat out of Hell in 1974. Their album concept was rejected four times by every major music company in the US. They managed to find a producer who believed in their work and recorded the album in 1975-76.

Even after recording and publishing through Cleveland International/Epic Records in 1977, no one was willing to spend money to promote it.

So Steinman and Meat toured around the US in any venue that would have them for nine months, gradually building their fan base. Only two US radio stations were willing to play their super-long songs, nonetheless they believed in the album so much that they kept working.

It was only after Meat Loaf’s appearance on SNL that the album began to sell. If it weren't for their determination Bat Out of Hell would never have existed.

And thank goodness they kept going.