MEAT LOAF (1947 - 2022)

The singer with the big, powerful voice, Meat Loaf passed away on January 20th at the age of seventy-four. Best known for the 1977 theatrical rock album, "Bat Out of Hell", the singer/actor died from an undisclosed cause although members of his family had revealed that had been diagnosed with COVID earlier in the month.

Born Marvin Lee Aday (but later legally changed his name to Michael) in Dallas, he appeared in school plays and played football as a teenager which was when he first got the nickname "Meat Loaf" due to his weight gain. After attending college, Aday headed to Los Angeles to try his luck as a performer. He first formed a blues-rock band called Meat Loaf Soul with the band going through personnel and name changes over time. Aday decided to get involved in musical theater and won a role in a local production of "Hair". This lead to Meat Loaf being signed to a Motown subsidiary, Rare Earth and the label teamed him up with female vocalist, Shaun "Stoney" Murphy. This duo released the album, "Stoney & Meatloaf" in 1971, a collection of soul and psychedelic pop songs. It wasn't much of a success and after the singers decided to part ways, Meat Loaf headed East to try his luck on Broadway.

He appeared in several shows Off-Broadway and Broadway including "Hair". After producer, Lou Adler secured the rights in 1974, Meat Loaf was cast in the American premiere of a new hit West End musical, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" in Los Angeles. When Adler adapted the show into a movie musical the following year, Meat Loaf made a brief appearance as "Eddie" and performed, "Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul". "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" has gone on to become a very popular stage show and cinematic cult classic.

Meat Loaf first met composer, Jim Steinman (who passed away last year in April) while he was working in the theater in New York and the two maintained a friendship. They had begun working on what would later become "Bat Out of Hell" in 1972 but did not get serious until two years later. They had shopped the demos around to several record labels but nobody was interested. Todd Rundgren heard the songs and decided to produce the album, leading to an indie label, Cleveland International Records to take a chance and release the project. The album was hardly an immediate success but overtime, due to Steinman's operatic styled, rock songs and Meat Loaf's dramatically soaring vocals on "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" and "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad", "Bat Out of Hell" has gone on to sell over forty million copies. There were two 'sequels' to the album; "Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell" in 1993 (which features the single, "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", reaching number one in an impressive twenty-eight countries) and "Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose" in 2006.