“My label doesn’t understand”: How Todd Rundgren helped to save Meat Loaf from the ash heap of history
1977 was a massive year for the blockbuster LP. Nestled between Bee Gees’ immortal Saturday Night Fever disco soundtrack and Fleetwood Mac’s soap opera soft rock behemoth Rumours, Meat Loaf‘s rock opera debut Bat Out of Hell still stands as the ninth biggest-selling album of all time, boasting over 40 million reported sales worldwide.
A slice of hard rock theatre centred on Jim Steinman’s Broadway songcraft and Meat Loaf’s bellowing powerhouse vocals and effortless charisma, Bat Out of Hell borrowed a little of Heartland rock’s anthemic stir—helped by the E Street Band’s Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan’s assistance in the studio—coupled with its lyrical anchorage of teen America’s suburban dreams and angst pushed to Wagnerian heights landed in the era of punk as a wholly unique beast.
Helped in no small part by Richard Corben’s biker-gothic cover, Bat out of Hell‘s arresting comic artwork likely helped sell an extra few thousand alone.
Such a bombastic vision of musical pop needed a suitably eccentric maverick in the producer’s chair. Having forged a successful solo career after fronting the psychedelic Nazz, Todd Rundgren was also building a reputation in the music industry for his innovative studio expertise, slathering 1973’s A Wizard, A True Star in immersive sonic textures and conjuring the heady progressive project Utopia. In between futurist solo LPs and mammoth stage shows, Rundgren was producing key albums from New York Dolls, Sparks—back when they were known as Halfnelson—and early Hall & Oates.
Bat Out of Hell‘s appeal to Rundgren was its perceived spoof of old 1950s ‘troubled teen’ movies like Rebel Without a Cause and Bruce Springsteen’s widescreen Born to Run rock. While Meat Loaf found him initially “cocky”, feelings soon warmed and the trio began to work in earnest to realise Steinman’s bombastic vision. Rigorously rehearsing the songs for a week before entering the studio, initial claims that the band had been signed by RCA were soon revealed to have collapsed just as they began production in Woodstock’s Bearsville studio.
“‘Ah! My label doesn’t understand me. I want to get off them’,” Rundgren told Songwriter in 2015, imitating Meat Loaf’s knee-jerk rejection of RCA. “So he essentially fired his label and they were happy not to have the responsibility. So I had to essentially underwrite the album until they did find a label. And so my whole idea of making a spoof became a lot more serious after I realized I’d be stuck holding the bag if nobody took the record”.
He added: “Fortunately, they did find a distributor, and fortunately, he believed enough in the record to release three singles, because it didn’t hit right away. It took endless touring by Meat Loaf, three singles and ultimately a video on MTV to cause it to break open”.
Finally joining the roster of Epic’s Cleveland International sub-label, it took the band’s performance on BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978 and the following year’s video for ‘Bat Out of Hell’ for Meat Loaf to truly make sense to the rock world: the essential optics of Steinman’s grand musical showmanship. Meat Loaf would persist as one of rock’s biggest names after Bat Out of Hell‘s phenomenal success, and Steinman would pen some of the following years’ biggest numbers for everybody from Bonnie Tyler, The Sisters of Mercy, and Boyzone.
