Meat Loaf made his final curtain call

In just about every way, the Texas-bred belter known as Meat Loaf, who passed away in January from COVID-­related complications at 74, made a most unlikely rock star.

Besides being uncommonly accident prone (he organized his autobiography To Hell and Back around his first 17 concussions), he tipped the scales at 300 pounds throughout much of his career, cultivating an intense, leave-it-all-on-the-floor persona at stark odds with prevailing notions of how a multiplatinum artist should look, act, and sound.

Born Marvin Lee Aday (he later legally changed his first name to Michael), he exploded onto the scene at the height of disco with the Todd Rundgren–produced Bat Out of Hell, a stentorian opus bursting at the seams with melodramatic rock ’n’ roll overkill that spawned three distinctly un-disco-like hits (the Top 20 ballad “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” among them) en route to becoming one of the biggest-­selling albums of all time.

Like most “overnight sensations,” he’d spent years paying dues. He was an alumnus of stage (Hair, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and screen (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). He’d fronted a band called Meat Loaf Soul (later Popcorn Blizzard, later Floating Circus) that, as he put it, “opened for everybody from Dr. John to Sun Ra.” He’d been half of the Motown-based duo Stoney & Meatloaf (which snuck a single onto the R&B charts before word got out that they were white). He’d even sung lead for Ted Nugent.

His biggest break, however, occurred in 1973, when he auditioned for the musical More Than You Deserve and met its composer, Jim Steinman.

Not only did Steinman, who died last April, write every song on Bat Out of Hell and its follow-up, Dead Ringer, but he also wrote every song on Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, the quintuple-platinum 1993 album whose hits “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” and “Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are” rescued Meat Loaf’s career from more than a decade of doldrums. The infernal nature of their collaborations’ titles notwithstanding, the Meat Loaf–Steinman partnership was a musical marriage made in heaven.

Understandably, Meat Loaf and the defining characteristics of a Steinman song—extravagant emotions, no-holds-barred production, extended song lengths bordering on the passive-aggressive—became ­synonymous.

He kept finding ways to go against the grain. When most other celebrities were all-in for anti-COVID restrictions in 2021, he stated that he’d rather die than knuckle under.

“I know that I will never be politically correct,” he’d sung on Bat Out of Hell II. It turned out to be one of the sincerest lines that he’d ever deliver.