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The Loaf and Hell: On the Death of Meat Loaf

2022-01-21T15:56:54.177Z


Overweight, highly emotional, powerful-voiced: With the operetta rock of the "Bat Out Of Hell" albums, Meat Loaf became the most unlikely world star in pop history. His life was even more dramatic than his music.


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Musician Meat Loaf (2010): "If you piss me off, you'll know"

Photo: SERGIO DIONISIO / EPA

Meat Loaf delivered one of his best performances late in his career.

But not on the big concert stage, where he has delighted thousands for decades, but on television, of all things, in a Donald Trump show.

As a candidate for the US show »Celebrity Apprentice«, the then 63-year-old was supposed to paint works of art together with other stars in 2011 that would later be auctioned off for charity. But there was a dispute with actor Gary Busey over who got certain colors. Meat Loaf freaked out, spectacularly and highly dramatically: "Look into my eyes," he hissed at the puzzled Busey, "I am the last person in the world you wanna fuck with. EVERRRRR«. His face was contorted into a grimace reminiscent of the devil-possessed child in the Hollywood shocker The Exorcist; all that was missing was for him to spit green bile.

Highly emotional, powerful-voiced, a hot, bubbling human volcano that could erupt at any time, no matter how insignificant the occasion: Meat Loaf, born Marvin Lee Aday in Dallas, Texas in 1947, was raw in the best sense of the word, "raw" like an open one Wound;

an overweight hunk who appeared unhewn on the outside but was actually very delicate and vulnerable on the inside.

All his life he had to stand up to the most violent resistance and humiliation, but his talent as a singer and performer prevailed, perhaps in the end simply his stubbornness.

The biggest struggle he's had to overcome in his career, he once said, was not being taken seriously by the music industry.

He was treated like a circus clown.

Heartbreaking teenage antihero

A role, chosen voluntarily or not, that made him one of the most successful - and unlikely - rock stars in history. In 1977, together with songwriter Jim Steinman, who died the previous year, he released an album so hopelessly overblown, pretentious and operetta-like funny that critics tear their hair out over it to this day.

Steinman wanted to turn Wagner, Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run" pathos and Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" into a rock album based on a musical version of Peter Pan, which he recorded with a lot of doo-wop nostalgia in the mid-70s and biker romance in mind. In the hitherto hapless actor and singer Meat Loaf, who had appeared as the zombie-like Elvis revenant Eddie in the »Rocky Horror Picture Show« and had released several unsuccessful records, he found the perfect protagonist, a monstrous-looking »misfit« who rises from Hell as a heartbreaking teenage anti-hero.

Steinman once said that his music walks a fine line between "thrilling and silly" - exciting and silly. Mannered, luxuriously expansive, thundering songs like "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" and "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" that became world hits anticipated the heroic retro spirit of the eighties to come in a year when the the politically hangover decade of the seventies had actually arrived in cynical nihilism and minimalism.

Ironically, in the year when punk became popular, »Bat Out Of Hell« was the most successful album in the USA.

With over 40 million copies sold, it became a milestone in music history - and Meat Loaf a sweaty, eye-rolling, theatrically juicy counterpart to the emaciated punk rockers on stage.

In 1993, after falling out and reconciling, Steinman and Meat Loaf repeated their million-dollar hit with Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell, which also included the ballad I'd Do Anything For Love ( But I Won't Do That)« - number one in 28 countries.

A life like a "fight club"

Marvin Lee Aday, who later changed his first name to Michael, would have done just about anything for a little love. His father was an alcoholic, abusive policeman who allegedly said of his son a few days after his birth that he looked like a piece of raw meat: "Meat". The name, supplemented by "Loaf", meaning meatloaf or meatball, mainly stuck with his teasing classmates, also because Marvin stuffed himself with sweets against the bitterness at home.

He weighed up to 240 pounds when he was still in school, but he really wanted to be a professional football player.

He is said to have suffered 19 concussions in his life, most of them on the field.

After being hit in the head at close range by a six-kilo bullet in a shot put, he discovered his talent for singing, which at its best spanned three octaves.

Born of pain, so the legend goes.

His mother died of cancer in 1966, and a little later his drunk father stormed into his bedroom with a knife and tried to kill him.

He broke his father's nose and three ribs himself - eventually escaping to Los Angeles, where he played in bands and studied acting.

Among his most significant off-music appearances is support group participant Bob Paulson in David Fincher's film Fight Club (1999), an aging bodybuilder with cancer who is teased for his "bitch tits."

In the touching supporting role, Meat Loaf condensed almost his entire life: his mother's illness, the self-confidence that was beaten, the violence and the addiction to belonging.

In 1968 he got a role in the ensemble of the Broadway production of »Hair«, in 1971 he recorded the album »Stoney & Meat Loaf« for Motown with his musical partner Shaun Murphy, but without much response.

He soon met Jim Steinman and began working on Bat Out Of Hell with producer Todd Rundgren, who thought it was a hilarious Springsteen parody but was hooked.

Meat Loaf recorded a good two dozen albums during his career, with changing songwriters and musical partners, but none was nearly as successful as what Steinman wrote for him.

A third Bat album was released in 2006, and even Meat Loaf's last record, 2016's Braver Than We Are, featured Steinman compositions from earlier decades.

"He was the heart of my life," Meat Loaf said of his late partner last year.

"I know there are people out there who think I'm the Frankenstein monster to Jim's Dr.

Frankenstein," he told the New York Times in 2019, "but it wasn't like that at all.

I never do anything the way the author intended.

Jim wrote it, but it became my song.”

The sex god and the rubber duckies

When Rolling Stone magazine visited him at his estate near Austin in 2018, Meat Loaf was suffering from a chronic back condition and other ailments, and appeared bitter. He meekly admitted to voting for Trump in the presidential election and was furious with people on Facebook who mocked him for saying he couldn't hit all the notes, like the high C in Bat Out Of Hell, or generally too weak for concerts. In the years before he had had to stop performing several times because his voice failed him, among other things, due to a vocal cord cyst, sometimes he simply fell over on the open stage.

But that was always just an act, a dramatizing act, he once said in an interview, and, as has often been assumed, he never abused drugs throughout his life.

Even in old age, after all the successes, all the loyal love of an audience of millions, doubts about his abilities or perceived injustices like in "Celebrity Apprentice" still upset him.

"I'm not an internal guy," he said to "Rolling Stone," perhaps a little exhausted himself from his extroverted nature, "if you annoy me, you'll notice."

more on the subject

  • Singer and actor: Meat Loaf is dead

  • Meat Loaf Farewell Tour: "I Was A Regular At The Psychiatrist" By Alex Gernandt

  • On the death of Jim Steinman: he dared to dive into kitsch, an obituary by Arno Frank

  • Memories of the Rockstar:Meat Loaf - Pictures of a Rock Life

One of his prized possessions was a collection of rubber duckies he'd accumulated over the years, he told Mojo magazine in 2016.

“I have about 100 of them.

The fans bring them to the shows for me."

One of the Rocky Horror Picture Show characters Frank-N-Furter is also there.

"They're on top of my roadcase in the cloakroom at every show."

Pretty childish for a larger than life rock star?

'Look,' he told Rolling Stone, 'I'm a sex god.

But I'm not a rock star.

When people call me a legend, I say: Don't call me that, I'm not a legend: I don't pretend to be one.

I just want to be a normal person.«

Meat Loaf, who recently suffered from a heart condition, died on Thursday in the presence of his wife Deborah.

His two daughters Pearl and Amanda and some close friends could also have said goodbye to him.

He was 74 years old.

Source: spiegel

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