mlukfc.com Forums - Oui magazine: July 1980

A conversation with Meat Loaf, The Baby Huey of rock explains all about the remarkable success of Bat out of Hell, his imminent stardom in Roadie, his unnatural dedication to Frank Sinatra and - most importantly - the essence of “brainlock.”

oui: Is Meat Loaf really a sex symbol? 
MEAT LOAF: That's for sure! 
oui: What is it about you that turns women on? 
MEAT LOAF: I'm real. I'm an individual. I don't look like all the other blond guys on television that you can't tell apart. I'm not the cute type. I have a kind of long-running sex appeal that's difficult to explain. All I can tell you is that I've always had it. When I was in high school, I had the best-looking girls in the school. Every guy wanted to know how a fat mother~~~~er like me could go out with all those girls. They all wanted me to set them up. I was like a dating service. I knew everybody. I can communicate with women. I've never had any problem with females in my life. 
oui: What's your secret? 
MEAT LOAF: My eyes. I communicate with my eyes. Everything in me stems from my eyes. If you can't see 'em, you feel 'em. That's how I can play a concert audience of twenty-two thousand people. The people in the back row can't see my eyes, but they can feel 'em. That's how I perform. If you get over twenty-two thousand people, then my eyes don't work anymore. When we were doing Roadie, Alan Rudolph, the director, told me, "God, I don't know what it is about you, boy, but everything you do works in close-up." It's because I act with my eyes. That's why I'm a sex symbol - that and the fact that I've hyped it up enough so that everybody knows I'm one now. 
oui: Do you have a lot of groupies? 
MEAT LOAF: Yeah, but they get mad at me ,cause I don't have anything to do with them. They yell at me, call me a son of a bitch and follow me around. But I don't have anything to do with them. Never did. I never really bought that kind of stuff. Before I was married, I used to go out with the women caterers I'd meet backstage at the concerts - the type of girls who'd bring leftovers home to their mothers. I never liked groupies. I guess I'm too snobby for that. I don't like putting down women 'cause women are what they are. I'm not going to say one type of woman is better than another, but that style of woman just doesn't suit me. I'm a very conservative person, and I like more conservative women. 
oui: What type of women are attracted to Meat Loaf? 
MEAT LOAF: Every kind; you name it. I have a file that must be filled with at least six thousand letters, all labeled WOMEN IN LOVE WITH MEAT LOAF. They're from women very similar to the ones who dug Elvis Presley. I haven't stolen his fans, but it's the same kind of thing. 
oui: Didn't one survey show that two out of three of your fans are "adult females"? 
MEAT LOAF: That's exactly right. Between twenty-six and thirty-four years old.,The Meat Loaf TV special in Canada last year was rated the number-six show of the year, and the number-one show of the year for females twenty-six to thirty-four. 
oui: What type of women are you attracted to? 
MEAT LOAF: I'm attracted to my wife. I don't even look at other women anymore. I'm in love with her, and you can't explain love. My favorite woman, my ideal woman, is Leslie, my wife, and that's it. 
oui: How long have you been married? 
MEAT LOAF: A year. For a long time there, as possessed as I was by show business, I found it hard to put up with anybody for more than ten minutes -including myself. I thought you could never really have a strong relationship and be in showbiz. But I was wrong. 
oui: Does your wife go by the name Leslie Loaf? 
MEAT LOAF: Yeah. 
oui: And your daughter [by Leslie's previous marriage], do you call her Pearl Loaf? 
MEAT LOAF: Pearl Loaf, yeah. She won't use that name when she goes to school but, on the airplane tickets, it's always Pearl Loaf, Leslie Loaf and Meat Loaf. I've got an American Express card that says "Meat Loaf." I've joined actors' and musicians' unions with that name. Most of my legal documents are under "Meat Loaf" 
oui: There have been a number of stories about how you got your name. One is that it just grew out of your initials and the fact that you weighed two hundred forty pound when you were in junior high. Another is that you stepped on your high school foot ball coach's foot, and he said, "Get off o me, you big loaf of meat." Another story involves a motorcycle incident. What's the truth? 
MEAT LOAF: I don't know what the truth is. I really don't know how I got my name. But I tell a good story. I don't believe what comes out of my mouth sometimes. I could've come from playing pool. I don't remember how it happened. I'm not in the mood to make it up. 
oui: Did you once drive a motorcycle through a window? 
MEAT LOAF: No. That was a joke about how I got my name. I drove a motorcycle through the front window of a cheese shop and, when I came out the other side, I had cheese on top of me, so they called me Meat Loaf I like cycles but, if I ever tried to ride one for more than ten minutes, I'd probably kill myself. I've wrecked a few bikes in my day, but that was a joke, a stupid joke. 
oui: There are a lot of wild stories about your early days in Texas - like your getting hit in the head with a shot put, suffering eleven concussions playing football, riding Brahma bulls, crashing cars. Were you a crazy kid? 
MEAT LOAF: I was wilder than most, not as wild as some. I had a car when I was fourteen. My dad was a salesman, and my mother was a teacher. So they both worked, and they never knew where I was, I also drank a lot in school. Now I don't drink at all. I did what all teenagers do, except I had a car, which enabled me to be a little wilder. 
oui: Is it true that the reason you don't use your real name is to protect your deeply religious family in Texas from being embarrassed by your notoriety in a world of drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll? 
MEAT LOAF: I never said that. Who said that? Rolling Stone? 
Oui: People. 
MEAT LOAF: No. That has nothing to do with it. It was something I was doing that was silly. It's like, ask me my real name and, well, I'm not going to tell you, then they want to know. That's all it was, nothing more, nothing less. I don't have much of a family left in Texas. My mother and father are dead, all my grandparents are dead. I've got a couple of aunts. 
oui: Travis W. Redfish, the role you play in Roadie, is a simple Texas boy who gets tangled up in the world of rock 'n' roll. Did you draw on any of your own real-life experiences to develop the character? 
MEAT LOAF: No. Travis doesn't know anything about rock 'n' roll, so I couldn't draw on it. Travis becomes a superroadie, but he doesn't know that. He doesn't know what a roadie is. He's just a guy from Texas who falls in love with a groupie, Lola, and follows her around the country. Travis is in a whole different world. My first real step in establishing the character of Travis Redfish was to have him chew gum: Dentyne. And since Travis can fix anything and I'm a mechanical failure as a human being, I started walking around my house fixing things-which caused some suspicion, because I never fixed anything in my life. 
oui: Travis uses "brainlock" in Roadie.What is brainlock? 
MEAT LOAF: Brainlock was very difficult, and I still don't know what it is. I studied self-hypnosis-that was the process that I used. When Travis is in brainlock, he doesn't blink. One day, when we were shooting in Texas, I had to turn a corner and walk dead into sunlight without blinking. For periods of twenty minutes at a time, I had to leave my eyes open and never blink. That's the kind of concentration it took to do brainlock. Brainlock is a major aspect of Travis' character. It's like a washing machine that's got too much soap in it, and all the soap is foaming out. Travis' brain is like soapsuds. Travis is really a computer. He knows so much about everything that he knows nothing about anything. Meat Loaf is thinking all the time, but Travis doesn't think. He's just there, right where you need him, every time. I had to go along and just totally play the moment. Whenever we'd finish a scene, Alan Rudolph would ask me: "Do you know what happened?" If I said, "Yeah," he'd say, "Let's do it again." That became our cue. If I didn't know what had happened, then it was right. If I knew exactly what was going on, I was thinking too much, and we'd do it again. It's really funny how film reads your thoughts. You can't think one thing and do another and get away with it. It registers. It's like being onstage. If you aren't really up there, people will catch on to it. 
oui: Is Travis stupid ,or just innocent? 
MEAT LOAF: That's the secret of Travis Redfish; you'll never know. And I'm not even the person that knows that. Travis is. 
oui: How do you think the audience will view Travis'? Is he a winner or a loser? 
MEAT LOAF: Travis is a winner. I wouldn't have played him if he wasn't. 
oui: Does he get the girl? 
MEAT LOAF: Yeah. He also gets something else. The idea of the movie was to change the image of the American hero. 
oui: Isn't the experience Travis has a common one among roadies and performers-getting fed up with the road and having to quit? 
MEAT LOAF: I don't know. The movie isn't some psychological rock-'n'-roll metaphor. It's not about a roadie who has to get off the road because of too much drugs and sex. It's a rock-'n'-roll romance. And each person in the audience is going to get a different feeling about Travis. Actually, Travis is a sex symbol. That's what I told United Artists. They told me they were looking for a sex symbol to play the role, and I said, "Well, I am a sex symbol." They sort of giggled, and I said, "~~~~ you, I'm telling you the truth."
 
oui: The script for Roadie wasn't written with you in mind, was it? 
MEAT LOAF: No. They were looking for somebody like Nick Nolte. 
oui: So how did you wind up getting the part? 
MEAT LOAF: lt iust happened. I was sitting at the Roxy in Los Angeles talking to its owner, Mario, with a beer in one hand and two girls sitting on my lap, and Shep Gordon walked in and saw me there. When it came time to cast the movie, he told 'em he had the perfect person to play Travis. 
oui: Didn't you say that you don't even look at other women ... 
MEAT LOAF: This was before I met my wife. 
oui: Oh. Where did you meet Leslie? 
MEAT LOAF: I met her in Woodstock. She was running Bearsville Sound Studio, where I was making my record. We had dinner, went out a few times, and then I asked her to marry me. She said, "No." I said, "I always get what I want." 
oui: How long did it take you to break her resistance? 
MEAT LOAF: A month. Our wedding was one of the wildest scenes you've ever seen in your life. It was at Todd Rundgren's house, and the people who came were in two camps. Boy, they were screamin' and yellin'-people were going crazy. When the guy who was marryin' us said, "if there is anyone in this room who feels these two shouldn't be married, let him speak now or forever hold his peace," I thought the entire place was going to go up for grabs. 
oui: Why? 
MEAT LOAF: Nobody wanted us to get married. Everybody thought we were getting married for all the wrong reasons. Nobody thought it would last more than six weeks. Everybody was tellin' Leslie that I was crazy-which was true. But I went through a lot of therapy after that. I had therapy every day for nine months. I was in bad shape. 
oui: What kind of therapy? 
MEAT LOAF: Whatever. Electric shock- not really. I was beat to death. I'd been grinding away for four years without a break. It took two years to do Bat out Of Hell, due to the fact that we changed labels five times. And then we toured for a year straight. Before that, I was with The Lampoon Show for a long time. Mentally, I had just had it. 
oui: You are always wasted at the end of your concerts, and you frequently pass out and need to take oxygen. Do you suffer a mental, as well as a physical, collapse? 
MEAT LOAF: Both. I always pass out. When I walk onstage, I am obsessed. The only thing I'm thinking about is how to put across that show and make people believe what I'm doing. My shows are two and a half hours of pure, intense energy. I'm not just in total control of the stage; I'm in total control of the building. >From the minute I step on that stage, the building is mine. I don't care if they're stacked out to the parking lot-everything and everybody in that building, down to the flies on the ceiling, are mine. If they're not, the show isn't any good. To do that requires so much energy and concentration that, when it's over, I don't really pass out, I just slip away for a few minutes. I'm always awake and conscious of what's going on around me. I'm just too tired to speak, and I don't care. Nobody has anything to say to me that's relevant at that point. They can tell me it was a good show-I don't care. They can say it was a bad show-I don't care. They can tell me I'm dying- I don't care. All I want at that point is for my mental faculties to come back to me so that I know what happened. Listen, if you have total control of a building, and then you let it go and it falls on your head, you're gonna pass out, believe me. 
oui: Reportedly, you spend hours preparing for each show, much like an opera singer. What do you do? 
MEAT LOAF: I do warm-ups, I do steam, I do scales, I do exercises and, all the while, I think. I think about past performances, about how to improve on them, about new things to do. It's just total preparation. I don't communicate very well with people at that stage. I communicate within myself. 
oui: How do you respond to critics that say the tremendous success of your first album was due primarily to record-company hype? 
MEAT LOAF: The hype came from me. It didn't come from them. You can't invent me. I am not an inventable object. You just can't ~~~~ing invent me. [pounding fist on table] You can't invent Meat Loaf!