Jan. 21, 1978 feature/review: Meat Loaf for lunch
A lunch at Chef’s Restaurant that’s stuck around in my memory for 45 years.
Jan. 21, 1978 feature/review
Meat
Loaf’s Powerful Rock
Is Sizzling Despite the Cold
“Don’t tell Steinman about the weather
forecast,” the rock singer Meat Loaf advises as we get ready to disembark into
a drift outside a downtown Italian restaurant Friday. “He’ll do something
crazy. His idea of perfect weather is 70 degrees and overcast.”
Songwriter and keyboardman Jim
Steinman is totally unprepared for the depths of winter hereabouts. And since
the Meat Loaf tour is about to veer toward the sunny South, he doesn’t want to
prepare. He wraps his head in a hotel towel and slip-slides to the door in his
Adidas sneakers.
The heavy snow and the storm warnings
don’t bode well for the latest chapter in the odyssey that began in October
after the release of Meat Loaf’s first album, “Bat Out of Hell.” The singer
figures the only fans who’ll trudge in for his show in the Century Theater are
Big Foot and the Abominable Snowman.”
The Dallas-born singer and the Long
Island-bred songwriter hooked up five years ago when Meat Loaf successfully
auditioned for a part in Steinman’s “More Than You Deserve,” which was being
produced for
Meat Loaf (he adopted the name in
1961) once led a band out of
The two of them are playing
adversaries. Steinman recommends linguine in red clam sauce to Meat Loaf,
knowing the surly singer will opt for the contrary and get the white sauce. He
follows it by raiding the songwriter’s chicken cacciatore.
“It’s made us all a little crazy,”
Steinman says of the tour.
There was the date in
“It was one of the greatest live
broadcasts of all time,” he laughs, finishing his third glass of diet soda.
“They’re going, ‘He’s down, he’s down, he ain’t gonna come back up. Wait, he’s
getting up …”
The sports-announcer sequence recalls one
of the cuts from the album – “
“I’d listened to him enough so I could
recreate his speech patterns,” Steinman recounts. “We got to the studio and he
told me, ‘Why don’t you do it? You do me better than I do.’ Todd (Rundgren, the
producer) was totally bored with the whole thing. He didn’t even know who Phil
Rizzuto is.”
“Paradise” is the
The frustrated males in the crowd
stand up and cheer. Despite the weather, some 1,500 rough-and-ready late-teens
and early 20s are on hand for the reduced-price show, the tickets underwritten
by Epic Records.
Meat Loaf, the most memorable pop
singer since Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant, worked himself up into a
sweating, steaming mass in short order. His long hair sticking to his face, he
belted out the tunes with incredible force.
Steinman conceived “Bat Out of Hell”
out of his frustration with the homogenization of pop music. He wants to revive
the old mythology of rock ‘n roll and restore its four basic elements – fever,
fantasy, romance and violence.
“I wanted a great teen album that was
also a great universal album,” he says, but he adds that he didn’t write it
exclusively for high-schoolers.
* *
* * *
IN
THE PHOTOS: Meat Loaf, left, and Jim Steinman in 1977 Cleveland International Records publicity photo and Meat Loaf with Karla DeVito (Richard E. Aaron/Redferns).
* *
* * *
FOOTNOTE:
Another review that feels like it ends in the wrong place. Probably chopped
from the bottom.
January 1978 was so snowy here in
“Bat Out of Hell” became one of the
most popular albums of all time, selling 15 million copies in the
Meat Loaf, aka Michael Lee Aday, continued to collaborate with Jim Steinman for the next 40 years. When Steinman passed in April 2021, he reacted by saying: “We didn’t know each other, we were each other.” Mr. Loaf, as The New York Times used to call him, died Jan. 20, 2022, probably from Covid-19.
Here’s what setlist.fm says about what
was played Jan. 20, 1978, in the Century Theater:
Great Boleros of Fire
Bat Out of Hell
You Took the Words Right Out of My
Mouth (Hot Summer Night)
For Crying Out Loud
Wasted Youth
All Revved Up With
River Deep, Mountain High (yes, that
one, the Ellie Greenwich song)
Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad (followed
by reprise of “All Revved Up”)
Hammerdown (Ted Nugent cover)
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