In the department of heroic fantasy, this is one of the most famous covers that rock has produced. Under an apocalyptic red sky, a handsome biker like Conan the Barbarian takes off from the bowels of a cemetery under the gaze of a giant bat perched on a vault. The Scrapbook Bat Out of Hell signed, in October 1977, the sensational entry of the American singer Meat Loaf on the rock market, since it was to flow to more than 40 million copies in the world.
Alas, this earthquake was not to experience an aftershock of such intensity in his career, despite two sequels, Bat Out of Hell II : Back Into Hell (1993) and Bat Out of Hell III : The Monster Is Loose (2006). Died on January 20, at the age of 74, the vocalist and actor, who for a long time played on his corpulence – his name means “meatloaf” –, later refined by vegetarianism, will remain as the man of an initial and colossal success.
Born on September 27, 1947, in Dallas, Marvin Lee Aday, Texan with a powerful, ample and theatrical voice, had previously tried his luck in Los Angeles under incessant group name changes. After recording a first single in 1968 with Popcorn Blizzard, he turned to musicals by joining the creation ofHair, on Broadway in 1968, then that of More Than You Deserve, in 1973. An anti-militarist farce along the lines of MASH (1970), the Robert Altman, set during the Vietnam War, and from another time: a reporter discovers herself a nymphomaniac after being gang-raped…
The experience offers the singer a decisive meeting, that of the musician Jim Steinman (1947-2021), who will compose all the songs of Bat Out of Hell. In its early days, Meat Loaf was also linked to a curiosity, Stoney & Meatloaf, duo formed with singer Shaun Murphy. Their only album, in 1971, will be published by Rare Earth, the division of the legendary black music label Motown welcoming white musicians.
The road to stardom then goes through the triumph of the musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which he participated in Los Angeles, in 1974, and the cult film that followed (directed by Jim Sharman in 1975), where he was left, to his great regret, only a secondary role. After the fiasco of a rock opera around Hamlet, he decided to abandon the musicals to focus on recording studios. Singer on the album Free-for-All (1976), mad guitarist Ted Nugent, he puts everything on his first album, Bat Out of Hell.
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