A Babel of words

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.