Meat Loaf
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

2006 was a illustrious year in music for many reasons, but certainly the release of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell III was one of them. Meat Loaf and his longtime Bat Out Of Hell collaborator, Jim Steinman, were able to heal their wounds long enough to finish their trilogy.

Meat Loaf has been a cult figure since the release of his first albums in the early 1970’s but it was his role as Eddie the biker in The Rocky Horror Picture Show that cemented his legendary status. Meat Loaf has had only middling hits in-between his Bat Out Of Hell albums but he is still creating music and still picking amazing roles in Fight Club and Dario Argento’s most recent episode of Masters of Horror, Pelts.

Buy Bat Out Of Hell III

Daniel Robert Epstein: I read that you were feeling a little dejected after the last album [Welcome to the Neighborhood] and that’s what brought you back to Bat Out of Hell.

Meat Loaf: Oh you read that thing; I saw that in the Chicago paper. No, that didn’t bring me back to Bat Out of Hell. What brought me back to Bat Out of Hell was Jim Steinman. I was ready to pack it up and do my acting thing, which I could have done just fine. Nothing major but I could make a living easily doing films. I couldn’t have done all of the movies they asked me to do but I could have easily done three of them since July because they’re all independent with short schedules..

DRE: How did you and Jim Steinman hook up again?

Meat: Jim called me right when Welcome to the Neighborhood was released and said, “Let’s do Bat Three.” So I said, “Okay.” He started sending me songs. He sent me Seize the Night, In The Land of the Pig and another song called What Part of My Body Hurts the Most. Then that little bit of a war started and we didn’t record What Part of My Body Hurts the Worst. Then when the war was over it was too late to get it on the album. But Jim contacted me again about a project called Conclusions and Climaxes. So a lot of songs will go on that and it will probably wind up being a boxed set.

DRE: How are you and Jim getting along now?

Meat: Fine. Yeah it’s fine.

DRE: As per usual, you have some very long songs on this third album but not as many as you’ve had in the past. Were you less inclined to do some ballad type things?

Meat: No, if the song holds up then we do it. Jimmy just writes in that style that most people don’t write. When it comes time to go on TV, the producers ask four minute edit of the song. I was watching Lionel Richie and Barry Manilow doing medleys at the American Music Awards and I’m sitting there going, “I could never do what they did with my songs.” They could do a verse, a chorus, a bridge and a chorus and be done in a minute and 45 seconds. In a minute and 45 seconds I’m still in the middle of the first verse. I came up with variations for The Today Show and things like that but it took a while. The songs either call for themselves to be long and if they can’t maintain it, then it’s like putting too much chocolate syrup on an ice cream sundae. It’s eventually going to make you sick and I’ve got a lot of chocolate syrup on my record. I think the average critic out there doesn’t think I’m careful but he has no idea how much more chocolate syrup I have.

DRE: That’s what we love about it though.

Meat: Yeah. I should have been Italian so I could do operas. How many people actually go and see an opera in the world? Maybe three percent? It could be as little as one percent of the population that has actually seen an opera unless they live in Italy. If you go to an opera, it’s overwrought, overdramatic and it is in another language. But it has to be that way for the storyline to play out. I am nothing more than an opera singer doing rock. In that sense it’s rock opera but people have the wrong vision of rock opera because they don’t know opera.

People think they know who I am and they have no idea. My wife’s best friend asked her the other day, “Is he really a nice guy?” My wife goes, “Yeah” and her friend says, “Gosh he comes off really aggressive on TV.” I just giggle and I go, “I don’t think I’m that aggressive.” “I’m edgy, and I’m energetic and I try to be funny.” I’ve got that harsh Don Rickles grating humor. I have a real National Lampoon style is what I have. Not the new National Lampoon, the old Lampoon.

DRE: Yeah from the 60’s.

Meat: Yeah, the 60’s and the 70’s National Lampoon, where nothing was sacred and it is very aggressive styled humor, like Saturday Night Live originally was.

DRE: I know you don’t see these albums as concept albums but is there a story in them?

Meat: No, it’s the story of life. What ties these records together is that they’re all about catastrophic events in one’s life. They’re not about mundane things. They’re not about songs about parties. Now, if the party is raided by the cops and the cops open fire and people are jumping off a three story building to get away, that’s a good song. All the good songs are about that adrenaline rush. When you’re in the adrenaline rush of love, the adrenaline rush of sorrow and they’re about to peak, that’s a song. I always thought people loved it or hated it because there was no middle ground.

Some people don’t want to listen to politics in their music and I’m one of those. I can watch CNN or the nightly news. I know what’s going on and I’m not stupid so I don’t need it hammered over my head. I know there are 12 million orphans in Africa and I help when I can but I don’t need to be told that at a concert and I don’t need to be told that on a record. I find that totally offensive. When I come in here and boogie on down the night, I don’t want to know about this other stuff.

DRE: I’m assuming it’s you that brought in [producer] Desmond Child.

Meat: Well, Desmond Child brought in Desmond Child. He said it was his destiny. He said he was born to do it and he approached it with the excitement and the energy of a first time artist. I had tried to get Desmond Child to produce another record and he was aloof. Then when he came back around I was like, “I don’t know.” But he convinced me and he is a songsmith so he understood it. I miss Jim, trust me but Desmond and Jim are very similar and they bring very similar things to the table.

DRE: Your music, especially the Bat Out of Hells, have been popular in eras where the kind of music you do isn’t popular. Do you find it difficult to keep relevant?

Meat: I don’t try to keep relevant. I don’t pay any attention to what anybody else is doing. Though reviews keep saying that there are bands out there that sound like a mix between me and Springsteen, that’s My Chemical Romance and The Killers. So I just ordered those two records.

DRE: What made you put the Celine Dion song It's All Coming Back to Me Now on the album?

Meat: That’s a song that Jim wrote and it was going to be on Bat II but I said it should be on Bat III. I had no idea the caustic relationship that Dion has with American radio. So when they started testing it, it came back negative because of Celine Dion. It had nothing to do with our version at all. That’s the second time something like that has happened to me. In ’81, Cher had a caustic relationship with American radio and we had a top hit with Dead Ringer For Love, which she was on.

DRE: How much of your work is done on the computer now?

Meat: The whole album was tracked live. We tracked sometimes two guitars, sometimes three guitars, piano, organ, bass, drums, two guitars and a lot of times, three guitars playing. We used ProTools because it’s better than tape, since it saves everything. If you’re running tape and there’s something in a take you like, you can never keep it for long. You lose too many tape generations. But with ProTools it’s fantastic. It is always there somewhere, hidden.

DRE: SuicideGirls is a big fan of the movie Fight Club.

Meat: You can ask me anything you want about that wonderful movie.

DRE: Do people call you Robert Paulsen a lot?

Meat: I get that walking down the street. I’ve gone into places and I’ll be standing at the grocery store counter and behind me you’ll hear, “His name is Robert Paulsen. But most people don’t recognize me right away. Unless they know it’s Meat Loaf and they know that I was in the movie. I get another reaction and I love it. I say to somebody, “Yeah, I’ve been in films.” They say, “Well, what films?” I say, “I was in Fight Club.” “Who’d you play in Fight Club?” “I played the big guy, Robert Paulsen.” There’s a delay and then “Oh my God it was you!” I really was Robert Paulsen. Meat Loaf completely left the screen and Robert Paulsen took over and that’s what acting is about. That’s what happens on stage. Meat Loaf, the character, comes on stage then in individual songs these characters take shape and come to life and then Meat Loaf is on the stage at the end. Then I go to my dressing room and Meat Loaf doesn’t exist anymore. I have so many personalities that I’m like Cybil.

DRE: [laughs] I know they made that movie of your life.

Meat: I’ve never seen it.

DRE: I thought you were involved with it.

Meat: I was originally and I approved the script. Then the script got totally changed and butchered. They said it was artistic choices made by actors and you can’t ever argue with that. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

DRE: Are you interested in trying to generate more movies?

Meat: No, I don’t want to. I’ll just be in other people’s movies. I tried getting some movies off the ground a few years ago and had a really good script written and had Dennis Quaid involved for a minute but I could never get a director that he wanted. So that fell apart.

DRE: How was it working with Dario Argento on the Masters of Horror episode Pelts?

Meat: Oh God I love him. I have two favorite directors that I’ve worked with, David Fincher and Dario Argento. If I don’t remember their names it wasn’t great. The other movie that I really had a great time was Focus with Bill Macy and Laura Dern. But also Dennis Quaid directed me in a movie [Everything That Rises] and Antonio Banderas directed me in a movie [Crazy in Alabama] and I enjoyed both immensely. I really like being directed by an actor. Actors have a real communication with other actors. Fincher does too, it’s just a different way of doing it and I really like that.

DRE: I saw this one small movie you have coming up called Urban Decay.

Meat: Oh, that’s a joke.

DRE: It’s no good?

Meat: No, I’m saying it’s a joke. The producer ran away with the money.

DRE: I know you get asked this every time you get out of Bat Out of Hell, but do you want to do another Bat Out of Hell?

Meat: No, we’re just going to do the boxed set and that Confessions and Conclusions.

DRE: Are you a fan of SuicideGirls?

Meat: I’ve been on there a few times. What I find really interesting is all the girls that send their pictures in. I keep going, “How come when I was young I couldn’t find these women?”

DRE: You must have known women like that!

Meat: No, when I was young I couldn’t find these women. I always found preachers’ kids. I found the head cheerleader who was a virgin and the preacher’s daughter who always said, “Not until we’re married.” That’s where the song Paradise By The Dashboard Light came from. She was the mayor’s daughter and she would always stop. So no, I never found these women when I was young. Now I’m too old for them.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Meat+Loaf/