“Abysmal”: How Grateful Dead became the worst live band Meat Loaf ever witnessed
Whether you love him or loathe him, no one would ever doubt Meat Loaf’s sheer commitment to his live shows.
During his Bat Out of Hell pomp and beyond, Meat Loaf felt the full weight of responsibility to his fans and the audience who’d paid good money and potentially travelled some distance to witness his gusto performance of hard rock radio fixtures like the said album’s theatrical title track or the glossy operatic ballad of ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’.
Whether amorously cavorting with Karla DeVito for the memorable ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ on the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test or the performances he mustered during his final regular shows in 2016, Meat Loaf always held a firm grasp of his duties both as a showman and a singer.
He’d been taking notes for years, both what to do and what to avoid like the plague. Meat Loaf had cycled through various projects before his fateful collaborations with Jim Steinman, briefly seeking fortune in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, before fronting the nebulous and ever-changing band sometimes known as Popcorn Blizzard or Floating Circus during a spell in Michigan. While in Detroit’s orbit, he even joined the Motown subsidiary Rare Earth as one half of the psychedelic soul duo Stoney & Meatloaf—the latter misspell an error on the label’s part.
From serving as the opening act to sharing bills, Meat Loaf had played with some of the day’s most enduring acts, as disparate as Janis Joplin, Sun Ra, and an early Alice Cooper. Dwelling in the centre of Detroit’s febrile garage scene at the 1960s’ close, Meat Loaf and his band’s routine shows at the city’s Grande Ballroom would expose the ambitious young singer to the day’s musical heights, including The Stooges back when they were still titled as “psychedelic”, but also Grateful Dead’s eternal blues noodling, a set that Meat Loaf hadn’t forgotten for all the wrong reasons.
“Man, they were abysmal,” Meat Loaf told Classic Rock in 2016. “The support acts included the MC5, Bob Seger and us – all high-energy. Jerry Garcia and his crew came on and started playing this song and it seemed to last for weeks! After about 20 minutes half the audience had gone”.
Meat Loaf couldn’t even find an escape route: “The problem was that we couldn’t leave. Because of weather problems the Dead’s equipment hadn’t arrived and we had lent them our back line. I didn’t know anything about the band at the time and didn’t realise that their sets went on for days [laughs] – well that’s what it felt like. We were stuck there all night”.
Another band one either loves or hates, Grateful Dead garners intense devotional fandom that’s wholly puzzling to anyone outside the ‘Deadhead’ community, often trying to stay awake during their penchant for elongated jams that would extend a song well over ten minutes. Garcia’s undeniable proficiency on the guitar is what his fans find spellbinding, however, losing themselves in the elastic and amorphous directions any of their numbers can take to such a degree that sometimes known pieces can be half-improvised there and then for one night only.
It wasn’t for Meat Loaf, though. Coming from a different school of rock and decisively shaped by the explosive volatility of Detroit’s countercultural end times, Meat Loaf would hurtle through the 1970s toward his bombastic, Broadway-style opus, charged with a mission agenda to seize his fans’ attention from the moment he took the stage and never lapse into a Grateful Dead bout of perceived self-indulgence.
