6. Bat Out of Hell
Artist: Meat Loaf
Album: Bat Out of Hell (1977)
Todd's role(s): producer, arranger, guitar, keyboards, percussion, backing vocals
Writer(s): Jim Steinman
The song: What a hell of a way to open an album. The very beginning of the song has some prog-like trills, in keeping with producer Todd Rundgren's obsession at the time, and then gets into majestic metal territory before the guitars disappear, the piano takes over and Meat Loaf starts to sing. For the entirety of the near 10-minute running time, which hits everywhere on the fast/slow and loud/quiet spectra, this is highly dramatic stuff, part Bruce Springsteen, part Broadway, part hard rock/metal theatrics and all fist-pumping glory. Just after the 6-minute mark, we get what sounds like a revving motorcycle; this is Rundgren's guitar conveying writer Jim Steinman's goal of creating "the most extreme crash song of all time." Indeed, Meat Loaf's final note of "helllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll" is some of the most "extreme" singing you'll hear anywhere.
Steinman conceived the song as part of "a rock 'n roll sci-fi version of Peter Pan" but decided to use it and two other songs from that project for a rock album that he and Meat Loaf started shopping around. (The Peter Pan musical, title changed from
Neverland to
Bat Out of Hell, finally came to fruition in 2018.)
Meat Loaf said on a DVD commentary that, despite the sonic similarities to Springsteen (including performances by E Streeters Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums), the inspiration for the track came not from him but from the movie Psycho, and it was written from the perspective of visitors to the Bates Motel who "wish they would have left like a bat out of hell."
Steinman said the lyrics are based on something Peter Pan would have sang to Wendy; this is made more explicit in the musical version. But it also involves the protagonist dying in a gnarly motorcycle crash.
Steinman wanted an actual motorcycle to make the crash sounds, but Rundgren refused and instead replicated the sound on his guitar. "In fifteen minutes he played the lead solo and then played the harmony guitars at the beginning," Meat Loaf told biographer David Dalton. "I guarantee the whole thing didn't take him more than forty-five minutes, and the song itself is ten minutes long. The most astounding thing I have ever seen in my life."
As if the song wasn't wild enough, Steinman wanted to use a boys' choir in one of the quieter sections, and he wanted "a choir sounding like it was singing whole clusters of notes" in the motorcycle crash section, but Rundgren vetoed both ideas.
"Bat Out of Hell" received the "Classic Song" award from Q magazine in 2008, it was named as one of the top 5 driving songs by Top Gear listeners and Rundgren's motorcycle-sounding solo was named one of the 100 greatest guitar solos by udiscovermusic.com.
Amazingly, this behemoth of a song was released as a single in the UK, where it hit #15, higher than any other song from the album. It also had a video (with most of the instrumental intro cut out)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QGMCSCFoKA that was occasionally aired on MTV, though not as often as those for "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" and "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth."
In addition to Meat Loaf, Rundgren, Bittan and Weinberg, the performers on this track are Steinman, who played keyboards and percussion, Utopia bassist Kasim Sulton, Utopia synth player Roger Powell and backing singers Rory Dodd and Ellen Foley.
The album: Most people would have never heard of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman if not for Todd Rundgren. They shopped the
Bat Out of Hell songs to numerous labels and were rejected by all of them, a process that took two and a half years. Clive Davis told Meat Loaf that "actors don't make records" and asked Steinman "do you even know how to write a song? If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C."
Rundgren was fascinated by the material -- his own work between 1973 and early 1977 was equally complex -- and thought it was a Springsteen parody. He agreed to produce the record when Meat Loaf and Steinman told him they had a deal with RCA, which was false.
As Steinman did not write sheet music, Rundgren did the arrangements based on Steinman humming to him what he was hearing in his head. After learning that the RCA deal did not exist and unsuccessfully asking Albert Grossman to finance the album and release it on Bearsville, Rundgren paid for the recording himself. With an assist from another E Streeter, Steven Van Zandt, Meat Loaf's manager got an audience with Cleveland International, a subsidiary of Epic, and they accepted the record. (Label head Steve Popovich loved the record and took it on over the objections of most of his staff.) Meat Loaf and Steinman did not like Rundgren's original mix of the album, and some tracks were remixed by themselves and others before release.
The success of the record happened slowly and it first broke in the UK and Australia, where the music videos filmed for it caught on. Canada was next to embrace the record. By the end of 1977, it had sold more than 100,000 copies in the US, but was only a success in certain markets, New York being one of them. It did not become a phenomenon in the States until spring 1978, when "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" became a hit, peaking at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100. (This also coincides with a surge in the volume of Rundgren's production work -- he has a ton of production credits in 1979 because everyone wanted to hire him in 1978.) And after that, like a musical Meat Loaf had been a part of, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it became a phenomenon.
The Allmusic.com review sums up the album's appeal well: "It may elevate adolescent passion to operatic dimensions, and that's certainly silly, but it's hard not to marvel at the skill behind this grandly silly, irresistible album."
Bat Out of Hell went platinum 14 times over in the US, has the fourth-longest run on the UK album charts and is the all-time best selling album in Australia. It has sold 43 million copies worldwide, almost as much as
The Dark Side of the Moon. It has shown up on the album version of the Rolling Stone Garbage List and in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Maybe even more than
Something/Anything?, it paid for Rundgren's estate in Hawaii.
Rundgren covered "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" on the (re)Production album.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7mbkWpJLTo8HqGrl2PvQnU?si=c030cd6e89c24514
You Might Also Like: What the hell, here's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." It needs no introduction with this crowd.
https://open.spotify.com/track/2g7gviEeJr6pyxO7G35EWQ?si=45bd5936e9c04e6f
At #5, my highest-ranking Todd-produced song by a non-Todd-related artist. I have written about it before and I'm gonna do it again.
