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 New York City’s Shakespeare Festival.

          Meat Loaf (he adopted the name in 1961) once led a band out of Detroit, sang on Ted Nugent’s “Free For All” album, then dropped out of music (“to keep from doin’ Top 40 and bars”) in favor of theater. One of his parts was Eddie, the lobotomized degenerate in “The Rocky Horror Show.”

          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 New York City, where the burly 365-pound singer was revived after a particularly frenzied live broadcast.

          “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 – “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” – where the voice of the New York Yankees, Phil Rizzuto, gives a play-by-play of the night games in the front seat.

          “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 high point of the Century Theater show, to be sure. Meat Loaf and backup singer Karla DeVito grapple in front of the band in a classic teenage drama. She asks if he’ll love her forever. He says he wants to sleep on it.

          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.

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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).

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FOOTNOTE: Another review that feels like it ends in the wrong place. Probably chopped from the bottom.

          January 1978 was so snowy here in Buffalo it had everybody comparing it to the month leading up to the Blizzard of ’77.

          “Bat Out of Hell” became one of the most popular albums of all time, selling 15 million copies in the U.S. and spending 522 weeks on the British pop music charts.

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

          Paradise by the Dashboard Light

          Wasted Youth

          All Revved Up With No Place to Go

          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)