The larger-than-life rocker Meat Loaf, who died at the age of 74, rose to fame in the 1970s with his debut album “Bat Out of Hell.” It was one of the best-selling albums of all time and is still widely regarded as one of hard rock’s classics.
His death was verified by his business manager, Michael Greene.
The tenacious, red-haired meatloaf is well credited as the source of Meat Loaf’s stage name. He was a trained Broadway belter and multiplatinum-selling megastar whose biggest hits, such as “Bat Out of Hell” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” were radio standards — and barroom singalongs — for decades.
Despite his accomplishments, he was largely ignored by rock critics. In the 1993 edition of Rolling Stone’s CD guidebook, “Nutrition-free audio lunch meat” was how the magazine dismissed “Bat Out of Hell,” which went on to sell at least 14 million copies in the United States.
Some critics, however, were more gracious. In a 1977 review in The New York Times by John Rockwell, he noted that Meat Loaf had “a good, passionate low rock tenor and enough stage presence to dispense with spotlights.”
He’s been in a slew of movies, including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Fight Club,” and others.
Just a year after Jim Steinman, the songwriter who wrote “Bat Out of Hell,” a musical that brought Broadway-style operatic rock to audiences at a time when it couldn’t have been more uncool, died. The pair met when Mr. Steinman was engaged to co-write a musical called “More Than You Deserve,” which played at the Public Theater in New York from 1973 to 1974. Meat Loaf auditioned for and later joined the cast of “More Than You Deserve.”
Meat Loaf, on the other hand, was fully in on the joke. His girth was a target of jokes from disc jockeys and magazine caption writers; nevertheless, Meat Loaf was aware of it.
Meat Loaf explained his meeting with Mr. Steinman to the British music magazine Mojo in 2017, when he said he tried out for “(I’d Love to Be as) Heavy as Jesus,” a song. Mr. Steinman was impressed and told Meat Loaf that he was “as heavy as two Jesuses.”
“It was my kind of humor,” Meat Loaf said.
After that, Mr. Steinman was attempting to write a post-apocalyptic musical based on “Peter Pan.” Unable to acquire the rights for the tale, he transformed it into “Bat Out of Hell,” enlisting Meat Loaf to give the songs the style and energy that made them hits.
“The Old Masters,” Todd Rundgren’s 1980 concept album on which Meat Loaf teamed up with iconic acts like Boz Scaggs, B.B. King, and Elton John (who replaced David Bowie), combines hard-rock power chords, 1950s bubble gum, and brief bursts of disco rhythms into multipart suites that span nearly ten minutes in length. The title track is a lengthy 10 minutes long. In many ways, the record was comparable to rock-style Broadway musicals such as “Hair” during which Meat Loaf had performed early in his career.
The band’s backup musicians were incredible, including Max Weinberg, the drummer for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Roy Bittan, a keyboardist who has worked with the pianist Van Cliburn. The New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra sent members; even the eight-and-a-half-minute “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” included a mention of Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto while also serving as an account of seduction.
Despite the fact that Meat Loaf’s second album, Bat Out of Hell, was a huge success, he struggled to duplicate it. He temporarily lost his voice and became involved in a number of legal disputes. Follow-up albums like Dead Ringer (1981) and Midnight at the Lost and Found (1983), both released shortly after Bat Out of Hell, were commercial disappointments. He subsequently declared personal bankruptcy.
“The problem was with a million different forces — his manager, his lawyers, his vocal cords, his brain,” Mr. Steinman told Rolling Stone in 1993. “He had lost his voice, he had lost his house, and he was pretty much losing his mind.”
