On Bat Out of Hell , Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman immortalized each other
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Bat Out of Hell is a love story. Not in the sense of a single narrative that runs through the album's tales of motorcycle crashes and car sex, but between the two titanic forces behind its creation: songwriter-composer Jim Steinman and singer Meat Loaf. The record represented the consummation of the relationship forged by the duo, who were always intertwined after meeting in the early 1970s, right up until the end — the artist's death on Thursday, at age 74, came less than a year after the songwriter's, at 73.
"After [Steinman] died, his nurse, Mary Beth, left me a message saying how much he loved me," Meat Loaf told Rolling Stone last year. "She said I was the one person he needed more than anyone else in his life. I don't want to die, but I may die this year because of Jim. I'm always with him and he's right here with me now. I've always been with Jim and Jim has always been with me. We belonged heart and soul to each other. We didn't know each other. We were each other."
Michael Putland/Getty Images Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf in the 1970s
Bat Out of Hell epitomized and solidified that chemistry. The 1977 album was the product of a years-long struggle by Meat Loaf and Steinman to bring their operatic version of rock music to the masses, in the form of Wagnerian sagas of teenage angst with long, ridiculous titles and ridiculously long runtimes. Musically, it's a fusion of the Who, Phil Spector, and 1950s and early-'60s rock & roll; lyrically, it sounds like what would happen if a musical theater nerd wrote Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run.
Steinman was that musical theater nerd. The songwriter got his start working on the fringes of the Broadway scene, developing elaborate stage musicals with songs that would evolve into Bat Out of Hell tracks. He and Meat Loaf first encountered each other at an audition for Steinman's musical More Than You Deserve; the singer ended up performing the show's titular number onstage. And, as he told Rolling Stone, "When I sang Jim's song, everyone stood on their feet and went crazy."
"You could tell, not only was [Meat Loaf] an astonishing singer, but… a truly great actor," Steinman would later recall. "He responded to the kind of music I was writing. I don't think he had heard music like that, but he responded to it, whereas a lot of people didn't get it. He got it immediately… I started thinking, 'I'll write for this guy.'"
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Meat Loaf performing, circa 1977
It was an ideal marriage of performer and material. If Meat Loaf was one of the few who "responded" to Steinman's work, he was also one of the few who could realize its full potential glory. "Feverish, strong, romantic, violent, rebellious, fun, and heroic" is how the songwriter once described his music, but it also demands the adjectives "sincere, heightened, and emotional." Belying — or maybe accentuating — Bat Out of Hell's bombast is a huge, beating heart that its songs wear defiantly on their sleeves, a heart that practically bursts from the tracks and flies away (like a bat out of hell).
"Every Jim Steinman song is alive," Meat Loaf told England's Lancashire Telegraph in 2016. "It's not just pen on a piece of paper. It lives, it walks around, it haunts you, and it'll eat at your heart and soul."
Accordingly, Steinman's songs can't just be sung; they have to be performed. And Meat Loaf, to whom the word "subtle" was probably incomprehensible, was the perfect instrument to interpret Bat Out of Hell, to bring it to vivid, screeching, in-your-face life. (It's no wonder that music videos showing Meat Loaf's full-body performance style helped propel sales of the album, or that executives doubted the duo's live energy could be captured on record.)
"Meat's like a Method actor as a singer," Steinman explained in a Classic Albums documentary about Bat. "He can't just sing a song. It's not like he needs an hour to become the character, but he definitely sings every song as a character. And he wouldn't be able to shake it off too easily afterward, either."
Terry Lott/Sony Music Archive via Getty Images 'Bat Out of Hell' songwriter Jim Steinman
That level of performative excess matched the excess of Steinman's compositions — and elevated it, too. Occasionally, the songwriter could save himself: As Bat Out of Hell producer Todd Rundgren has noted, the lyrical wryness of hit single "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" keeps the song from becoming "terribly sappy." (The chorus, for instance, goes: "I want you, I need you/But there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you/Now don't be sad/'Cause two out of three ain't bad.")
But usually, Meat Loaf's full-bore commitment and larger-than-life persona were the only things that could sell Steinman's overwrought balladry. The singer's performance, coupled with Rundgren's extravagant production, turned what might have been inflated versions of rock-song archetypes into what Steinman always seemed to know they could be: glorious monuments to those archetypes and the characters within them that captured a primal, testosterone-fueled ideal of love, lust, and the spirit of rock music.
"Of course it's bombastic," Steinman once told an interviewer of his work. "I take that as a compliment. Rock & roll is the most bombastic form ever — heightened, oversized, gigantic, thrilling, and silly."
See, for instance, Bat Out of Hell's 10-minute title track, an extreme yet heartfelt rock-opera take on the teen car crash song. "Like a sinner before the gates of heaven/I'll come crawling on back to you," Meat Loaf croons, moments before a guitar solo imitating a motorcycle roar begins, and before the song concludes with the dying narrator's heart exploding out of his body "like a bat out of hell" — Broadway meets heavy metal meets the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack." No ordinary rock singer could make that combination work.
Indeed, Steinman would pen great songs for other artists (notably "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which Bonnie Tyler performed with Loafesque verve), but Meat Loaf was his "greatest muse," as the songwriter himself told The New York Times in 2019. And no songs suited the singer like Steinman's.
Their relationship would grow strained (to the point of lawsuits), yet they always found their way back to each other, first for 1993's Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell — featuring the extravagant (even for Steinman), Grammy-winning "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" — and later to bring a Bat Out of Hell musical inspired by their tunes to the stage. And that original LP, a seven-song record that improbably became and remains one of the best-selling albums of all time, is the enduring totem of their bond.
"We were never apart even though we were apart. We never lost each other," Meat Loaf told Rolling Stone last year. "I never sued Jim. Jim never sued me. Our managers sued each other. But my heart never sued Jim. And I know Jim's heart never sued me."
He added, "Since I met Jim, he has been the centerpiece to my life. And I was always the centerpiece of his."
Only that kind of spiritual and creative connection could result in a work like Bat Out of Hell, so devoted and committed to its own peculiar sensibility. Only together could Meat Loaf and Steinman truly glow, like the metal on the edge of a knife.
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