MEAT LOAF: There Is A MOUNTAIN

MEAT LOAF: There Is A MOUNTAIN

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Harold DeMuir

Several months back, members of the British press were alerted to the availability of new Meat Loaf product through a harrowing round of those dopey mockbattlefield games where people shoot paint pellets at each other. Luckily for this healthy, sexually secure American journalist, Meat—who’s in New York promoting his new LP, Blind Before I Stop, and preparing to launch a six-and-a-half month tour—is feeling overworked and under the weather, and is in no mood to subject me to anything more strenuous than a sit-down interview.

“I’ve had the flu for two weeks straight, but I have not stopped." brags the slimmed-down-but-still-imposing Loaf. “I finally went to the doctor yesterday to get some medicine. I’ve been rehearsing until three o’clock in the morning, and I was up at eight today. I’ve been talking to people all day. and then I go to rehearsals after this.

"I go through these stages where I think. What am I doin’ this for? I’m killin’ myself.’ And then the band starts playing, and I start singing those songs, and I’m gone. After 20 years, it’s still that way. It’s unbelievable; it just takes me. and I go with it. I’m sitting here and talking to you and I’m getting tireder by the minute, but at eight o’clock tonight I’ll be at rehearsal and in the middle of it again, and nothing else will matter.”

Hefty Texan Marvin Lee Aday had performed as Meat Loaf for a decade prior to 1977’s Bat Out Of Hell, but it was the multi-platinum success of that LP which made him a household name—and has perversely haunted his career ever since. Jim Steinman’s teen-melodrama songwriting. Todd Rundgren’s Wagnerian production and Meat’s grandiose vocal renderings combined to create a ubiquitous blockbuster that, if nothing else, sure sounded more exciting than most of the drab mainstream rock of the time.

"It was mega, and I don’t know if I was prepared for that,” reflects the singer. “It was a great record, but I don’t know if it was that great."

Bat Out Of Hell was big. real big. But such things rarely last, of course, and efforts to record a suitable follow-up were fraught with trouble. Bad For Good, the album that was originally intended to be Meat Loaf’s Bat sequel, eventually appeared in 1981 with Jim Steinman singing lead. Stories involving Meat’s supposed vocal and/or emotional problems circulated at the time; all he’ll say about it now is: “On Bad For Good, everybody was trying to live up to Bat Out Of Hell, and I rebelled. That’s when the whole thing started getting funny for me.”

By the time a new Loaf ef'^rt, Dead Ringer, was released later in ’81, Meat mania had died down substantially. “Bat sold 12 million, and Dead Ringer sold 2.5 million, so it was considered a disaster,” the big guy recalls, with a surprising lack of bitterness.

Dead Ringer ushered in a messy, traumatic period marked by lawsuits, management problems and a split with Steinman. “It was like being in King Henry Vlll’s dungeon,” Meat says of that time. “I don’t hate but, even if I did, I would not want my worst enemy to go through what I went through. But all that stuff comes along with the territory, and everybody goes through it at some point. It’s just something that happens, and you have to let it go by.”

“If I believe something to be absolutely right, I’m like a big oak tree —I don’t move.”

1983’s Midnight At The Lost And Found, an album which now he characterizes as "blackmail,” featured a few of Meat’s own writing efforts and none of Steinman’s. Loaf hates it: "That was a very confusing time in my life, and it’s a very confusing record.” Midnight was ignored by the same American consumers who’d stretched their cultural arms to embrace Bat a few years before. The subsequent Bad Attitude, which featured contributions from Roger Daltrey and John Parr, met with similar disinterest.

The latter disc’s title was an acknowledgement of Meat’s reputation as a hard guy to deal with—an image he feels is largely undeserved. "You hear a lot of people say, ‘I don’t want to work with that son of a bitch’ or ‘He’s got an attitude problem,’ but I don’t think it’s true. I am real open to everything, and I work real hard—but when I really believe in something, I stick to my guns. If I believe something to be absolutely right, I’m like a big oak tree—I don’t move. And thus I get a rep of bein’ a man with a bad attitude.

"In my 20 years in this business, I’ve tried never to burn a bridge. But there’s always gonna be somebody that doesn’t like you, and there’s nothin’ you can do about it. I think things get built up, like when Bonnie and Clyde were runnin’ around and they’d get blamed for robbin’ banks in places they’d never been to.

“I’ll give you an example. I wanted to see if I could get on Saturday Night Live recently, and I got a call back sayin’, ‘You’re not one of Lome Michaels’s favorite people.’ I said, ‘What did I do?’ and they said, ‘Did you tell him to fuck off?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I generally remember the people that I tell to fuck off.”

Just out of curiosity, I checked with several acquaintances who’d worked with Meat at various times. All agreed they’d had exceedingly agreeable experiences. So don’t believe everything you read. Or don’t believe my friends.

"I think I’m a very intense individual,” admits Meat. "I’m never middle-of-theroad: people either like me or they hate me. I can be real light-hearted sometimes. I can take a situation that’s very tense and make it very light—or I can take a situation that’s light and create total tension. But I don’t think I’m difficult to work with at all, really. I demand more from myself than I do from anyone else.

"I think I’m a bit calmer now than I used to be. I’m not calmer onstage, but in my personal life, I maintain a bit of tranquility that I didn’t have eight years ago. It’s just a matter of channeling my natural energy and wildness into the music, instead of it going into the rest of my life.”

As for Blind Before I Stop, which infuses the performer’s established near-operatic style with an updated techno-sheen, the Loafer says he likes it a whole lot. "I just wanted to do some different kinds of things. It’s a real studio record, and it’s well-produced, but there’s not that many tricks involved in it. We utilized the Emulator, but that’s not new, and it’s nothing anybody else isn’t doing.

"Ultimately, the bottom line is the songs and the performances—and the songs and the performances are there. This record has the tension and the drama of my best stuff, but I’m not playing King Kong on every song.”

So does he see this as a comeback effort? ‘‘Whatever they wanna call it is fine with me. I’d rather have them sayin’ ‘come back’ than ‘go away.’ ”

Blind Before I Stop, four of whose tracks were co-written by the singer, was recorded in Germany, with German producer Frank Farian and a mostly-German supporting cast (Englishman John Parr pops up on ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Mercenaries,” though). Meat says he was inspired to try a new recording approach after hearing a remake of “Stairway To Heaven,” by Farian’s studio band, the Far Corporation.

"I heard it, and I said, ‘Who is this, who produced this?’ It sounded like it cost a million and a half dollars and was eight years in the making. I was talking to all kinds of producers about doing an album, so I met with this guy Frank Farian. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but there was real communication there. I basically said to him, ‘You’ve never done a rock ’n’ roll record,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I have,’ and I explained to him that he hadn’t, and it went on from there.”

The decision to try a new direction met with opposition from Meat’s usual sidemen, which is why they didn’t play on the album. “People were fighting me, and telling me, ‘No, you don’t do this stuff.’ So I just got rid of everybody that I ever worked with, and went off and worked with these people that I didn’t know. It took me a long time to make that decision, and I was scared to death about it. But I’m glad I did it, because it’s made everything stronger and created a whole new energy in the band.

“The songs from Bat always worked great live, but the songs on the other records never worked as well. But rehearsing with my band now, the new stuff is working great, and it has the same energy level as the stuff from Bat. Like, we follow ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’ with ‘Blind Before I Stop,’ and instead of ‘Paradise’ being a peak and everything after it going lower, ‘Blind Before I Stop’ just explodes.”

Meat recently resumed his film career (which had previously been derailed by bombs like Roadie and Americathon) with a role in the new Michael Keaton/Rae Dawn Chong starrer, Skip Tracer. Working days on the movie set and rehearsing with his band at night, he applied the unmistakable Meat Loaf acting method to a character he describes as “a combination of Jaws in the James Bond films, Jason from Friday The 13th and Dorn DeLuise.” You would not want to have lunch with this guy.

Hollywood will probably have to wait awhile for further Loaf thespian activities. After he finishes touring behind Blind Before I Stop, Meat is set to make an LP with his old partner Jim Steinman—the same Steinman who sued him after Dead Ringer.

“It’s just a matter of Jim really wanting to work with me again, and me really wanting to work with Jim. It’ll be different; it’s not gonna be Bat, Volume 2. After Bat, everybody tried to lock Jim and me into doing that thing. With Blind Before I Stop,

I broke the chain, and that’s why Jim and I are free to do something different now. The record I do with Jim is gonna be big and epic, but it’s gonna be something totally different.

"I’ve made two records that I love: Bat Out Of Hell and Blind Before I Stop,” he concludes. "I like some of the songs on Dead Ringer, but as an album it had a lot of holes in it. Midnight At The Lost And Found was just a disaster. Bad Attitude was like recovering from a car crash. And I really love Blind Before I Stop. Even if it doesn’t sell at all, at least I’ve got a record that I like.

"I really believe in this record, but I’m not gonna worry about how it’s gonna sell, because I gave that up a long time ago. Right now, I have no conception of how anyone else feels about this record. All I know is that I can put it on in the cassette player in my car, and I can listen to it and like it. And I think if other people put it on in their cars, they’ll like it. And if they don’t, they don’t. But I do.” ®