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<h1><img ALT="bookcover.jpg" border="1" align="left" SRC="/images/bookcover.jpg" WIDTH="303" HEIGHT="455"> To Hell and Back</h1>
He's larger than life, he's bigger than Elvis (in size anyway), he's been high, he's
been low, he's starred on the silver screen and sold over 41 million records and now he's
ready to tell the amazing story of his life. Meat Loaf is a survivor and his story is
stranger than fiction.

Mockingly called Meat Loaf by his alcoholic and abusive father, Marvin Lee Aday ran away
from home at 17 and got straight on the rock and roll rollercoaster. After a time spent as
a parking valet he started his rise to fame with a part in the cult musical, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show. His first visit to a recording studio produced Bat Out of Hell, still
the third best-selling album of all time (although it was only last year that he has
received his first royalties from the success of that album). But this meteoric rise came
to an end in the 80s when he hit the skids in the depths of drink and drug addiction which
culminated in a nervous breakdown.

Bleak years toiling on the club circuit followed, until in 1993 Meat Loaf was reunited
with his musical mentor Jim Steinman and recorded the extraordinary Bat Out Of Hell 2
which featured the colossal hit single I'd Do Anything For Love. Since then he has gone
from strength to strength, selling millions of records, playing to sold out arenas, acting
in a number of movies and even picking up a Grammy award along the way.

Written by Meat Loaf in collaboration with David Dalton who has written much acclaimed
biographies of Marianne Faithfull, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Sid Vicious, To Hell and
Back is the completely candid, remarkable story of this larger than life star.

Virgin Publishing

Steinman's Brain

When I first met Jim Steinman, he was sharing an apartment somewhere around 102nd Street
with I don't know how many people. There were magazines and newspapers piled on every
surface, junk stuffed in every nook and cranny. Jim's bed was in the kitchen. He had a
rollaway cot; its headboard was the refrigerator. I said, "Jim, what if anybody wants
anything in the refrigerator?" "Believe me, no one wants anything in the
refrigerator."

My curiosity finally got the better of me, so when he went into the other room for a
moment, I scooted the bed back and opened the refrigerator. It looked like a psychedelic
jungle. There were all these colored strands -- green and yellow and blue -- running all
the way from the top to the bottom, like extraterrestrial vines. Through the nest of
frozen vines you could just see a milk bottle. I went, "Whoa!" and slammed the
door, hoping no one would ever open it again.

I've often wondered if all that alien life inside the refrigerator didn't have some effect
on Steinman's brain. He slept next to it, he dreamed next to it. Perhaps that refrigerator
was the source of Jim's later eccentricities. Nah, he was always nuts.

Eventually Steinman moved to this apartment on Eighth-sixth Street. He packed all his
stuff in boxes, and I helped him move. I put all those boxes on the floor of the new
apartment, and there they stayed -- unopened -- for eight years. Not only weren't they
unpacked, they hadn't been moved from where I left them. Steinman hasn't changed. Even as
a multimillionaire he still has boxes, those same boxes. In 1983 he moved into a house in
Putnam Valley,New York, and those very boxes were sitting in the living room. Still packed
the way I had packed them thirteen years before! He had never opened them.

Anyway, one day we were sitting on those boxes in front of his science-project
refrigerator when I had an inspiration.

"You know what we need, Jim? A duet. I wanna do a duet. With a girl. Maybe a guy and
a girl in a car making out and the girl is telling him to stop." Then I told him the
story about me and Rene Allen out at the lake and how I never managed to score. Jim loved
the image of the guy and the girl in this car at night by a lake. He burrowed off into his
cave to write "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."
<hr WIDTH="100%" SIZE="1">
I Was John Belushi's Double

Bat Out of Hell was germinating a long time. Jim and I had been working together since
'72, and by the end of '74 we started to get serious. In 1975, Jim sat down and wrote
"You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth," and then he wrote "Bat."
At that point, I decided I wasn't going to do any more theater! I was just going to work
with Jim, and we were going to pursue our music. Of course, as soon as I decided I wasn't
going to do theater anymore, I ended up in another show.

The National Lampoon Show was opening on Broadway, and they needed an understudy for John
Belushi. When John was asked, "Who can understudy you?" he said, "Meat
Loaf."

I'd met Chevy Chase and John Belushi back in 1972 when they were doing Lemmings down at
the Village Gate. Belushi and I had since become friends. He was a wonderful maniac.

I was at a movie one night and John saw me sitting several rows in front of him. He could
easily have gotten up and walked down the aisle to say hello. But, noooooo! He crawled.
The movie theater was full, but he crawled on his stomach down the aisle and grabbed a
hold of the bottom of my leg. Scared me half to death.

They offered me five hundred dollars a week to understudy Belushi. I said, "Okay, if
I don't have to come down to the theater."

"You don't have to," they said, "because John'll never miss a show"
and he didn't.

Eventually, they asked me to take the show out on the road. I said the only way I'd do it
was if they'd take Jim Steinman as the piano player. They agreed. Jim and I were busy
working on the album, and we really needed the money. Because of the musicians' union, he
ended up making more money than I did.

Ellen Foley was singing in the Lampoon show, so that's how we met her. "Let's do that
duet in 'Paradise' with Ellen," I said. It was when we were out on the road doing the
Lampoon show that things really started moving ahead. In the afternoons, Jimmy and I and
sometimes Ellen Foley would work on the songs. We would play the piano and sing songs. And
gradually out of the songs came the fantastic characters of Bat Out of Hell.

Excerpts from the autobiography "To Hell and Back"
courtesy of Left Bank Management. 

 Meat Loaf's autobiography
"To Hell and Back" is available both in hardback and paperback in book stores or you can order a copy online now.

<a href="http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/075350443X/meatloafukfanclu" TARGET="blank">
Order To Hell and Back (Paperback) Today!</a>