Post by petrolino on Aug 10, 2019 18:41:27 GMT
Please post your thoughts on Meat Loaf here, be they negative, or positive. He's made some impassioned recordings and is a successful actor too. In Texas they call him "the man who cheated death" as he's survived several scrapes with death.
"I had a friend and occasional bandmate named Moogy Klingman, and in the mid-'70s, I was getting a lot of production work -- probably more production work than I could handle -- and so Moogy approached me [to say] "Well, if I find a band or an act that you think is worth producing, I'll do the legwork on it, and that'll help me get into the production game." So I said, "Okay, that's a fine idea. If I hear something, sure, we can give that a try."
So a couple weeks later, he came to me with this act. It was Meat Loaf, and he explained it was also this guy Steinman who I hadn't heard of. I knew who Meat Loaf was; I'd seen him in the Rocky Horror show on Broadway. So I said "Okay, interesting enough, let's listen to it" -- and the only way that they would demo the material was to do it live. They didn't have a demo tape, or they didn't want me to have a demo tape, because they thought that was not representative of what they were trying to do.
So they set up in a rehearsal studio, Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley and Rory Dodd, just the four of them, and they essentially performed most of what turned out to be the first record. They did it all live, just the four of them, with all the familiar tropes that would become the video later -- the whole "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" thing, that whole part of it. And they related to me that they'd essentially done this for any producer who would entertain coming to see them, and that they had been essentially turned down by everybody. And I could understand why, because it didn't have an obvious commerciality.
But I saw it as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Because the songs were sort of very basic changes, the themes were all... [Laughs.] By the time it was the '70s, the themes were kind of nostalgic. Even though Bruce Springsteen would represent them as still being real, the iconography was still out of the '50s, you know? It was switchblades and leather jackets and motorcycles and that sort of junk. So I saw the whole presentation as being a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why I decided to do it.
Well, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there, like the fact that Jim Steinman kind of wove this sense of humor into the material in a way that Springsteen never did. But it was also so annoying to me personally that Bruce Springsteen was being declared the savior of rock and roll. You know, he was on the cover of TIME magazine, and I thought, "this music is going nowhere." He may represent the image that people want, but from a musical standpoint, it's going backwards. So I thought he needed to be spoofed.
So a couple weeks later, he came to me with this act. It was Meat Loaf, and he explained it was also this guy Steinman who I hadn't heard of. I knew who Meat Loaf was; I'd seen him in the Rocky Horror show on Broadway. So I said "Okay, interesting enough, let's listen to it" -- and the only way that they would demo the material was to do it live. They didn't have a demo tape, or they didn't want me to have a demo tape, because they thought that was not representative of what they were trying to do.
So they set up in a rehearsal studio, Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley and Rory Dodd, just the four of them, and they essentially performed most of what turned out to be the first record. They did it all live, just the four of them, with all the familiar tropes that would become the video later -- the whole "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" thing, that whole part of it. And they related to me that they'd essentially done this for any producer who would entertain coming to see them, and that they had been essentially turned down by everybody. And I could understand why, because it didn't have an obvious commerciality.
But I saw it as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Because the songs were sort of very basic changes, the themes were all... [Laughs.] By the time it was the '70s, the themes were kind of nostalgic. Even though Bruce Springsteen would represent them as still being real, the iconography was still out of the '50s, you know? It was switchblades and leather jackets and motorcycles and that sort of junk. So I saw the whole presentation as being a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why I decided to do it.
Well, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there, like the fact that Jim Steinman kind of wove this sense of humor into the material in a way that Springsteen never did. But it was also so annoying to me personally that Bruce Springsteen was being declared the savior of rock and roll. You know, he was on the cover of TIME magazine, and I thought, "this music is going nowhere." He may represent the image that people want, but from a musical standpoint, it's going backwards. So I thought he needed to be spoofed.
Well, I don't know whether I used the term "spoof." [Laughs.] But as it turned out, you know, Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan from the E Street Band wound up playing on the record, so that kind of made it even spoofier. But I don't think I instructed them in any way to think of it differently than they would have otherwise. But quite obviously they were cast because they could bring that Springsteeniness to the whole project."
- Todd Rundgren, Billboard
"Rock n' Roll came from the slaves singing gospel in the fields. Their lives were hell and they used music to lift out of it, to take them away. That's what rock n' roll should do - take you to a better place."
- Meat Loaf
Thanks.
