Right Off The Bat: A Conversation With Meat Loaf
A Conversation With Meat Loaf about Bat Out of Hell, from 2009.
By Paul Myers.
[When I was writing my book, A Wizard, A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio, I did a whole chapter on Meat Loaf’s landmark Bat Out Of Hell album which Todd Rundgren had not only produced but bankrolled the whole enterprise until it was picked up by Steve Popovich’s Cleveland International label and went on to become a global hit record. Preparing for the book, I spoke with many of the principles involved in making the album, including Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman, Todd Rundgren, Ellen Foley, Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell, and more.
Upon hearing of Meat Loaf’s passing, I went back and found the transcript of our interview. I tidied up some of it for readability but it’s mostly the tale of the tape.]
Paul Myers: Let’s talk about Bat, right off the bat.
Meat Loaf: Ha, ha! Well, at this point everything’s been said about Bat Out Of Hell, basically, that you can say. You know. I’ve talked for years about the extraordinary background vocals that Todd did. The album’s 32 years old and everybody and their mother has talked about it all. (laughs).
PM: How did you end up working with Todd Rundgren?
ML: Moogy Klingman brought us to Todd, initially, but Todd took the helm. I can’t recall how we got hooked up with Moogy, Jim would recall that story. It seemed like for the first week it started out as Todd and Moogy, but after the first week or so, Moogy was out of the picture.
PM: Was the album really, as Todd sometimes says, a parody of Bruce Springsteen?
ML: Here’s what happened. Around 1975 Jimmy went to see Springsteen at The Bottom Line, in New York. By then, Jim had already written the Bat songs. This is where all the previously published stories on Bat Out Of Hell, all the Dave Marsh and Rolling Stone crap go completely awry. Jim had written Bat Out Of Hell, or most of it anyway, at least two-thirds of it, at that point. He had already written ‘You Took The Words…’, he had ‘Crying Out Loud,’ we would have had ‘Paradise…’, pretty much everything but ‘Two Out Of Three…’ or ‘All Revved Up…’ at that point were pretty much in place, as far as what was going on that record. Jimmy went down to The Bottom Line even before Born To Run came out, or [perhaps] it had just come out or it was getting ready to come out. If you don’t know, when you played the Bottom Line, you did two shows, one at 8pm and one at 10:30 or something. Bruce was doing one of his two shows, and Jim went to the first show, so he called me up from the payphone at the Bottom Line. He called me at like 10 o’clock, and I’ve never been one to go out late, and he says, ‘You gotta get down here!’ I said, ‘Nah, I’m not going down there.’ So he goes, ‘Well, there’s this guy down here named Bruce Springsteen.’ I didn’t know who that was! So, I just said, ‘Oh?’. So, Jim said ‘He’s doing kinda what we do, you should see him.’ ‘He’s doing what we do!’ That was his exact quote to me!”
At that point, Jimmy saw Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan play and he thought that Max and Roy would be the perfect musicians to complement the stuff that we were doing for Bat Out Of Hell. Where it’s always fallen apart before, is that Rolling Stone has always placed us after Born To Run, in other words, they proclaim that we heard, or Jim heard Born To Run and we stole that! Which is a complete, out and out lie! It’s a complete misrepresentation of the history of how these events took place.
It’s always been a thorn in my side that the press has the means to create a lie and then it becomes ‘the truth.’ They don’t always say ‘rip-off’, but they’ve always compared us, unfavorably, to Springsteen. I always have to say, ‘You’re out of your mind’, because Springsteen never did anything like ‘Took The Words’, he didn’t do anything like ‘Heaven Can Wait’, he didn’t do anything like ‘For Crying Out Loud’, that’s for sure! He never did anything like ‘Paradise…’ There’s no ‘Two Out Of Three…’ on his record! There’s no ‘All Revved Up…’ The closest you’ve got is the beginning of ‘Bat Out Of Hell.’ I’ve always said, if Springsteen’s black and white, we’re color! No, it’s just like we’ve always been called a Springsteen clone, basically. Which, to me, is like saying ‘Springsteen rip-off.’ I mean, I love Bruce, and I’ve probably got every one of the records! But that clone thing all came from Rolling Stone Magazine. I mean, they went out of their way over there to put a real dark negative spin on Bat Out Of Hell and they did it early. They did it almost three months before the record came out. Which is unusual.
PM: So, you’re telling me that Steinman had the whole thing down before even hearing Bruce? Wow.
ML: Jimmy and I were well into Bat Out Of Hell by ’75, before Born To Run. Bat Out Of Hell had been written. A lot of that stuff came even before Rockabye Hamlet, which I did in late ’75. We were singing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ and ‘Paradise’ and everything in ’75 and ’76 for Clive Davis, to everybody. So, it was before Born To Run.
PM: Didn’t Clive Davis compare it to Ethel Merman or Robert Goulet?
ML: Clive didn’t even come close to ‘getting it’, although now he gets it! (laughs). I was an actor long before Bat Out Of Hell, I had done Rocky Horror and other things on the stage. I knew Ellen Foley from the National Lampoon Show and she was my girlfriend at the time. I had done tons of theatre in New York, I did Shakespeare, I worked at Café La MaMa, I worked off-Broadway, I worked at Circle in the Square, I worked at Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, that’s all I did was theater. I did Hair, I did Rocky Horror, that’s our background, Jim and me. That’s also kind of Todd’s background, he still is in theater! So, it wasn’t so far-fetched for him to come in and do Bat Out Of Hell.
PM: When did you transition into rock and roll proper?
ML: When I was doing Rockabye Hamlet on Broadway, this was 1975, I decided that I wasn’t going to do any more theater I was just going to concentrate on getting this record to happen.
So, after he heard the Bat songs, Clive called me, and he said ‘You’re an actor. Actors don’t make rock records! You’re like Ethel Merman. Now, I was okay with Ethel Merman, I wasn’t upset with Ethel Merman, I happen to be a big fan of Ethel Merman! But then he called me Robert Goulet, and I didn’t like that one. I didn’t mind Robert Goulet; I just didn’t want to be compared to him. Much rather be compared to Ethel. Then, what upset even more than that, he turned to Jim and told him ‘You know nothing about writing.’ I’m still mad, well not anymore because Clive has since told me that he was wrong. But back then, he explained to Jim, ‘You’re A-B-G-F-Z-D, but hit songwriting [structure] is A-B-C-A-C-C-C.’ He said, ‘Do you know anything about rock music?’ Now, I would put Jim Steinman up against anybody on Rock n Roll Jeopardy, hosted by Alex Trebek, and let Jim go at it. Because Jim would win!’
PM: Steinman told me that rock is inherently theatrical, and that he merely heightened the melodrama based on his love of both Little Richard and Wagner.
ML: The majority of the rock world still refuse to accept that theatrical rock is really rock. To be perfectly honest, we live in a world of sheep. There are not too many people out there who are leaders, and when you find one, everybody flocks to follow them. But if you break from the herd, then the other sheep automatically think, ‘Oh they’re not any good!’ Nobody can think for themselves. That’s what I’ve always liked about my fans, I always thought that the fans that loved Bat Out Of Hell and loved what me and Jimmy did, they were not sheep. They were individuals who made up their own minds, and made their own decisions based on their own feelings. I hate sheep. I’ve taught my daughters, do not be a sheep.
PM: Enter Rundgren, I guess, the self-described “individualist.”
ML: Todd was the perfect producer for us because Todd was an individual. That was the whole thing with him. Nobody else got it. Nobody else understood it. You know, I had people sometimes who’d go behind Jim’s back after we’d showed them the music and they’d call me up on the phone and go, ‘Oh you’re fantastic, but get rid of this Steinman guy.’ I was like, ‘What are you people, nuts?’ Or some people would come to hear us play a show and they’d see the crowd and say, well they don’t count, these are just your friends’ I’d say, ‘I don’t have any friends!’ These were real people reacting to us live in New York, which is admittedly very theatrical, but the record executives just didn’t buy it. They didn’t believe that we could get that level of emotion and response out of somebody. They accused us of having ‘plants’ or that it was rigged, or that we faked it and they were only screaming because the label guys were out. It became funny, but I became very angry over it. I wanted to say ‘Guys, this isn’t a magic trick. This is what it is.’
PM: But how do you keep at it when Clive, the biggest gatekeeper in music, denies you entry?
ML: It was after the Clive thing that I decided that this was going to happen, come hell or high water. I just became the most tenacious person on the face of the earth at that point.
PM: But Todd got it.
ML: We played him the songs and then Jim started to talk to him, I mean I was sitting in a chair, and I was talking too, but Jim and Todd were doing most of the talking. Todd’s saying ‘Yeah, I get that. I see that.’ Then Jim goes ‘Yeah, but you know then it’s this…’ and Todd just goes ‘Well yeah, that’s how it should be.’ I remember being in that room and listening to him talk and smiling. Then after he left, Jim and I just went ‘Well, alright then. How do get this to happen?’”
PM: So, you got a deal, then lost the deal. Is that right?
ML: RCA said no to Todd Rundgren producing it, so we pulled a fast one. We went and started recording anyway, behind RCA’s back, up at Bearsville, in November of ’76. We told the Bearsville people we were on RCA, they didn’t call anybody up or get a number or anything. We just started recording based on Todd’s deal. I think somewhere around the fifth week, they started sending tracks to RCA. RCA then says, ‘We didn’t approve this! We didn’t approve Todd.’ Then it kind of came to a dead stop, but it was at Christmas, so we were gonna stop anyway.
PM: But you kept up after the holidays? Did RCA pull out their support?
ML: I got some guy, who owned gas stations and truck stops out in New Jersey, I can’t remember his name, but he owned a lot of ’em and he had a lot of money. He gave me the money to buy out RCA, at a percentage, and I eventually bought him out. And we moved over to Todd’s label, Utopia which was part of Albert Grossman’s Bearsville. Then we could start recording again in January. I signed away, gosh I don’t know, like 15% of everything I made, for life, to make that deal go through. But like I said, I got outta that. We bought it out, within months. The guy didn’t care, he just said, ‘Just give me back what I gave, with some interest, and go away!’ I think Todd was basically doing it ‘on spec’ at that point, but I have no idea.
PM: Wasn’t the record going to be on Warner Bros. at one point, through Albert Grossman’s distribution deal with Bearsville? What happened there?
ML: Mo Ostin and another guy whose name I can’t remember, came up to Bearsville. I sang for Mo. Mo invited us to come out, this is after the record was finished, or close to it anyway, and we went over to Warner Bros building. I went with Ellen and Rory Dodd and Jimmy, and we sang in Lenny Waronker’s office. The story that was always passed down to me was that we didn’t get signed because Lenny Waronker found out it was Jim Steinman and Jim had already offended him. But what I’ve since found out, that I believe to be the true story, is that when we got to ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light,’ I started making out in Lenny Waronker’s office, with Ellen. He found it completely offensive that that kind of business went on in his office. He totally misunderstood, I mean, guys, this isn’t real you know? Where are you at? Where is your brain? Obviously, we weren’t doing that for real in his office with 75 people sitting in there and Jim Steinman banging on the piano. We did that every time we performed anywhere, it was just part of the act. Part of the song. Sure, Ellen was my girlfriend, and that’s why I wanted her on the duet. I can’t imagine what went through Lenny’s mind. But that’s what I’ve been told. I only found that out about a year and a half ago, so it had nothing to do with Jim.
PM: Todd and Kasim Sulton told me a lot the main tracks were recorded live off the floor.
ML: I only know one way to record. I know people do it other ways, but that’s how I still make every record. To cut the basic tracks you would have had Roy on piano, you would have had Kasim on bass, you would have had either Max or Willie Wilcox on drums, you would have had Roger Powell playing that weird synthesizer that he put together (laughs), and Todd on guitar. Most of the time you would have Rory Dodd singing along with them, not me. It was standard fair, you got piano player, bass player, drummer, guitar player. That’s a standard thing. We’d cut the vocals separately. And the backing vocals were separate, mainly Todd and Kasim and Rory.
PM: Tell me about Todd’s “motorcycle guitar” session.
ML: He did that in one take! Todd can be very condescending. Jim had said he wanted a motorcycle sound effect, and Todd was like ‘So, you want a motorcycle, do you? Okay, how about this?’ So sarcastic, you know, I love him but he’s really an ornery old cuss!
Todd had the songwriting ability, the guitar playing ability, I mean Todd is one of the great guitar players in the world, underrated as a guitar player, underrated as a songwriter and he could have been one of the biggest acts in the world. I think he’s one of the most talented people on the face of the earth, but I think he has a fear of failure… when you have that you don’t puff your feathers up quite as much.
PM: But he did famously perform in peacock feathers [on The Midnight Special].
ML: You see that was the problem, peacock feathers are bad luck for anybody in the entertainment business. You don’t want peacock feathers.
PM: I know that Jim had the grand design, but he credits Todd with arranging it all on the record. How was your view of it?
ML: ‘Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth’ was all Todd, he made it into a song. ‘All Revved Up…’ was pretty much Todd and myself, but it’s pretty much true to Jim’s original arrangement. ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ is Jimmy’s arrangement, ‘Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad’ is pretty much Jimmy’s arrangement, ‘Paradise…’ is a combination, really, Todd did a lot of editing on that to make into an eight-minute song. It’s still Jimmy’s vision, just with a big edit from Todd. And ‘Crying Out Loud’ is Jimmy’s arrangement all the way.
PM: Jim said he also really loved what Todd did with the backing vocal sections.
ML: I never wanted a lot of backing vocals, I was fighting them on that all the time. I fought them tooth and nail. Probably because of my ego, I didn’t want somebody covering up my vocals!
