People Weekly: April 3, 1978
 

Rock's Spicy new recipe for superstardom 1
260 - pound Meat Loaf.
Written by Jim Jerome: People Weekly; April 3 1978

At the end of a scheduled concert set, some wrung-out rock
stars stagger offstage and do something -Southern Comfort, grass, uppers
-to gather the energy to hurl themselves back out in response to fans
howling for encores. But rock's newest monster act (in every sense of the
word) is a titanic, dynamic 260 pound Texan who's refined the pre-finale
kick to its purest form. At the end of his act, Meat Loaf (his legal name
as well as the band's) stumbles gasping into the wings and takes a snort:
not of coke but of uncut oxygen, straight from the tank.

"After four shows in two nights in New York," Meat says, "I
didn't even remember going out or coming off. I passed out completely. In
Atlanta I was paralyzed on the floor. I looked up and this gorgeous blond
Scandinavian nurse all in white was leaning over me asking if I was all
right. Shit, I thought I had died and gone to heaven." After another
bruising gig, recounts composer-keyboardist Jim Steinman, "Meat was
passed out and my knuckles and nails were bleeding. We looked like the
Eagles after a bad day-I mean the Philadelphia Eagles."

Stayin' alive, of course, isn't all that Loaf is about. Stuffed into his
ruffled size-52 shirt and bulging black tux, and stomping, shaking and
sweating, the 29-year-old Texan is the Brobdingnagian epicenter of the
most visual new show in rock. When his powerful stage sound was packaged
last fall into a debut album, Bat out of Hell, it made a late entry on
many 10-best lists and has since sold 350,000 copies in the U.S. alone.

"Our show creates a lot of real excitement," understates Meat.
During his eight-minute anthem to adolescent sexuality, Paradise by the
dashboard Light, he paws his bakup singer in a choreographed make-out.
When he recently mounted a piano, Steinman winces, "He cracked the
soundboard. I started out that night playing a Steinway and ended up with
a Steinman." Meat counters, "I'm really very agile-I can do
seven pirouettes in a row. My mind thinks I weigh 110."

Actually, Meat can't remember ever weighing less than 185 when he was
growing up in Dallas. His father was a salesman, and his hymn-singing
mother and aunts sang on Bing Crosby's old radio show. Both parents are
now dead, but their star son adopted his stage name and closely guarded
his real one-Marvin Lee Aday to save his devout Church of Christ kin from
embarrassment. The nom de guerre itself originated with seventh-grade
classmates in commemoration of his initials and size-5'2", 240 lbs.
Though a brilliant student, he remembers feeling relatively "poor and
denied" at Thomas Jefferson High, a school of 2,600 with "2,400
cars in the parking lot. M.L. drove an old Buick and joined the choir
"to get out of study hall." Otherwise his youth was rough. He
recalls going out for football practice and accidentally "getting hit
in the head by a 12-pound shot-at 62 feet." He claims, "I used
to throw guys through plate glass windows. I drove through one myself on a
cycle."

Meat says he breezed through high school by age 15-and picked up summer
school credits at Lubbock Christian College. He then joined a string of
itinerant bands, including a stretch as vocalist with Ted Nugent's Amboy
Dukes. He broke briefly into films as the lobotomized rocker in the cult
hit The RockyHorrorPicture Show -but later turned down a part as a '
rapist in Charles Bronson's Death Wish.

Loaf got hot in 1973 when he hooked up with Steinman, a gifted composer
and Amherst graduate ("I was thrown out four or five times"). He
writes all the group's vividly absurdist songs for Meat's multi-octave
bellowing. The rest of the "motorcycle rock" sound comes from
Loaf's eight-member backup group. "Our songs," judges Steinman,
"are sardonic, operatic, desperate, extreme and really passionate.
There's something dangerous to it-rock should have a mystic dimension. The
fun is going over the edge."

Loaf and Steinman hole up in separate apartments on New York's Upper West
Side. Meat shares his place with 23-year-old Candy Darling, a dancer
singer who once was backup vocalist Rory Dodd's girlfriend. "I'm
ruthless -got no heart," Loaf explains. "She's the only woman I
can stand for more than 10 minutes." But he adds, "If you're
obsessed with this business, then you've got no time to be obsessed with
women, and many of them can't stand that. But if you're not obsessed with
this business, then you've got no right to be in it."