Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, two artists whose contribution to the world of rock music should under no circumstances ever be dismissed to a mere foot note in the history of popular culture. In the autumn of 1977, they gave the world the first of three albums that were destined to shape a generation.
Meat Loaf’s career may have begun doing the rounds a few years earlier with performances in the musical Hair and with his first album released in 1971, the unremarkable Stoney and Meatloaf but it was his ground-breaking work with Jim Steinman that sent temperatures soaring in the October of the year when Punk was no longer a musical form of expression that could be contained and old Progressive Rock bands were feeling the force of musical rebellion.
Bat Out Of Hell was unleashed into the public’s imagination on October 21st 1977 and as the year was coming to its close, the Rock opera dominated the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The phenomenal leading man, the giant of a personality that was Meat Loaf strode across the music scene and set out to show how one man’s voice could define a genre.
The year 1977 had started out with the sacking of British Punk band, The Sex Pistols from their record label EMI, the first execution in America after the re-introduction of the death penalty. The Democratic Party would become the party of choice as Jimmy Carter took the Presidency, South African activist Steven Biko and British Glam Rock star Marc Bolan would leave their supporters and fans mourning, Star Wars became a global film money maker and the previous all American hero, Elvis Presley, passed on at the age of 42 and quietly the flame of American music seemed to die with him.
Up would step a man whose voice would become distinctive and over the course of many albums, some more than others, a pleasure to hear and who rightly became a star.
Meatloaf, Jim Steinman and the cast of imaginable talent that joined them on the Bat Out of Hell, had been recording the album over the course of two years and despite the numerous court room battles and sue and counter sue wars between the two main men, Bat Out of Hell remains to this day one of the most exceptional albums of all time. The joining together of the unstoppable Jim Steinman and the immovable Meat Loaf was inspired as well as musically genius.
From the opening track, the album is power personified, pure adrenalin and positive in its approach to shake the comfortable out of the listeners that were mourning the death of Elvis Presley. The King was dead; long live the new king, a reign that would be tempestuous, thrilling, perplexing and not without the odd moan here and there, a reign that by and large has lasted for over 30 years and it all started with one of the most dramatic songs of a young life taken by a motor bike. In the greatest of odds to the death songs of the 1950’s and 1960’s, The Leader of the Pack and Tell Laura I Love Her, the story of one man’s fascination with the fast life, bikes, music and women leads him on a course that would lead him to his destruction and ultimate death as he watches his heart torn from his body and go on without him.
Bat out of Hell as a song is as gargantuan and as epic as you could wish for in a song. It is not a great leap to put it in the same class as Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody for its sheer audacity and musical brilliance. It gives the album a quality that would come to be the level that all songs by the pair would later be judged, a few would gain the same importance but none would have the same enduring quality apart from I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That). The whole song screams operatic, rock and the power to convey a story. A true Progressive Rock flag-bearing opus that was being seen as old hat, dull and dated in the Punk dominated charts of Britain.
From the classic 1950’s film like appeal of Bat Out of Hell opening, the listener is taken on a journey through some of the defining songs of the genre. The outstanding You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth with its iconic B-movie dialogue between Jim Steinman and the innocent sounding Marcia McClain as they discuss whether she would offer herself to the wolf is chillingly sexy. The haunting love lament of Two out of Three Ain’t Bad gives the album an adult like gravitas and finally the eight minutes and 28 seconds duet with Ellen Foley about young sexual adventures and the regret of them in older life is just outstanding.
This last song is played against the back drop of a baseball game and the lines, “We were barely 17 and barely dressed” and the knowledge that eventually due to pressure on both sides, the one of pleasure will turn to a bitterness and disappointment that for both the boy and girl will come to view as a waste of a life. It is a song full of warning of young love but played against some of the best and most simple guitar playing laid down on record.
Looking back on an album that is now 35 years old, the question still remain on what makes Bat Out Of Hell so remarkable, is it the unique voice that Meat Loaf bought to the table, the authority of a man who could send shivers down the most starched spines and who could even make death sound like an adventure or was it the brilliance of Jim Steinman’s writing and musical compositions that made the entire album one of absolute joy. Never before had an album had the conundrum of chicken and egg so aptly placed before it!
Bat Out Of Hell spawned two sequels but only one of them with Jim Steinman at the helm. One is considered another piece of musical theatre, a sublime piece or work and the other doesn’t have a sniff at even being in the top five albums with Meat Loaf in, as always the listener is left to decipher which is which and why it works with one and then doesn’t with the other.
Ian D. Hall