The actor, singer, and songwriter Meat Loaf died on Thursday, reportedly from complications owing to COVID-19. Given his penchant for dramatics, it feels appropriate, somehow, that people struggled to say for sure how old he was—probably seventy-four, but possibly seventy, or maybe twenty-five, or a hundred. Meat Loaf was an instinctive and jubilant raconteur, a guy who traded in outrageous stories. Over time, his waggishness came to be my favorite thing about him. In 2016, the Washington Post reported on the various fibs that he’d fed sportswriters about his fantasy-football prowess; he once told ESPN that he played golf with a crew of men with meat-adjacent names (Chili, Stew, Chuck, and Frank). Humor and intrigue are central to Meat Loaf’s music, which combines the canned bravado of a certain strain of musical theatre with the canned bravado of a certain strain of rock and roll: the notes are long, the choruses are thundering, the gestures are enormous. His début album, the sprawling and preposterous “Bat Out of Hell,” from 1977, remains one of the best-selling records of all time. Meat Loaf sold more than a hundred million albums over a five-decade career, and appeared in many films, including “Fight Club” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Meat Loaf’s intensity made his work feel dangerous. There was a voraciousness—a deep, determined hunger—to his performances that appeared to be unsustainable, and yet he did sustain it. He frequently appeared onstage in a frilly blouse, cufflinks, and suspenders. After he got going, his long, thin hair would be plastered to the sides of his face by sweat. While he sang, his shirt often came a little untucked in the back, giving him the slightly desperate air of a still-drunken office worker lurching home from a T.G.I. Fridays. Sometimes he would get so red and damp it appeared that some sort of dire cardiac event was inevitable. Nonetheless, he pushed on: wild-eyed, openly lecherous, panting, insane, beautiful. Often, these concerts went on for several hours. (He collapsed onstage more than once.) Though his work is about as far, stylistically, from punk rock as music can get, Meat Loaf embraced a kind of courageous, fuck-it aplomb—he made records that were loud, infectious, theatrical, rebellious, dorky, sex-crazed, and beloved.
Meat Loaf was born Marvin Lee Aday, in Dallas, the only child of Wilma, a schoolteacher, and Orvis, a former police officer. The origin story of his nickname varies—of course—but it is always tied to his size, and it is always unflattering. Orvis was an abusive alcoholic, and Meat Loaf’s childhood was tumultuous. He said that his father once tried to murder him with a butcher knife; Meat Loaf forgave him. “I have no time for people who blame their parents,” he told a reporter in 2012. “ ‘My father tried to kill me’ is a lame excuse. Everyone has a mind of their own and is capable of change.” Meat Loaf was exceptionally close with his mother—he has recalled how they spent nights driving around Dallas, hoping to collect Orvis from whatever barstool he was occupying—and he was devastated by her death, in 1967. An article in Classic Rock magazine described how he apparently collapsed at the funeral, grabbing at her body and screaming “You can’t have her!”
In the late sixties, he relocated to Los Angeles and started a band, Meat Loaf Soul. He was cast in a Los Angeles production of “Hair,” and later appeared in the same role on Broadway. He met the composer, lyricist, and playwright Jim Steinman, who would go on to become his musical partner and spiritual brother, when they each became involved in a production at the Public Theatre. In the mid-seventies, they began working on the songs that would become “Bat Out of Hell.” The album was recorded in 1975 and 1976 at studios including Bearsville, in Woodstock, New York, and produced by Todd Rundgren. Upon its release, “Bat Out of Hell” was called “Springsteenian,” though I find it fundamentally at odds with Bruce Springsteen’s particular articulation of bombast and glory. If Springsteen is ripped jeans and a white T-shirt, Meat Loaf is a rented tuxedo with a sequined cummerbund and pockets filled with splits of rum. “Bat Out of Hell” contains no gestures toward ordinary, working-class life; the record is overblown, histrionic, and awesome, per the formal definition of the word. Its chief concerns are romantic longing, irrepressible lust, and the deafening expression of both.
Critics weren’t too sure about “Bat Out of Hell”—the Times called Meat Loaf large and tasteless—but the singles (“Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”) went on to become standards of classic-rock radio, high-school proms, and karaoke rooms. “Bat Out of Hell” had two sequels (“Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” in 1993, and “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose,” in 2006). Meat Loaf released nine other studio albums, and appeared in further movies and television shows, including “Celebrity Apprentice,” in which he had a meltdown about paint and was fired by Donald Trump in the penultimate episode.
I suspect that what made Meat Loaf such an enduring and adored figure was his utter commitment to the work, even—especially—when it looked as if it was destroying him physically and possibly emotionally. It sounds silly and clichéd to point to Meat Loaf’s zeal, to the way he engaged every cell in his body when he was onstage, and yet it’s impossible to think about his legacy without invoking it. In 1978, in Ottawa, he was so seized by feeling that he fell from the stage and damaged his leg. (He completed the rest of the tour in a wheelchair.) He was inelegant and libidinous and passionate, and his songs became American standards despite never hewing to the whims of the marketplace, and never quite fitting in on the charts. Above all else, he believed in music as a redemptive force, something that can save you from your beginnings, can save you from yourself: “The beat is yours forever, the beat is always true / And when you really, really need it the most / That’s when rock and roll dreams come through for you.”
