How I fell in love with Meat Loaf and why I stalk him now

I never realised I could fall in love with such a fat man.

The fact is we live in a society where everyone, all of us, perceives a direct negative correlation between weight and credibility, whereby the fatter a person is, the more idiotic we perceive them to be, unless they actually show us otherwise.

We live in a society where the only real media attention the grossly overweight get is when ET decides to winch one of them from their homes with a cherry picker, gives them their 15 minutes, which largely consists of saying how much they eat and how many arses they have, giving us time to shudder before throwing to commercials.

We live in a society where the contemporary image of the grossly overweight individual is them, tears dribbling down their face, sitting in the studio audience of Dr Phil , because he’s decided he cares, which he shows by making them bow and scrape and answer such questions as, quote, “When did you decide you were going to be a fat girl?”

And if it’s not that, it’s them running up the side of a cliff, tied together with rope, their dignity chewed up and spat out by Biggest Loser trainer Gillian, before stripping them down to what is basically the nude for their “weigh-in”, which the makers of the program like to accompany with earth tremor sound effects.

In short, time and again, when we see the obese on TV, they’re the subject of disgrace. They’re there because they’re trying to overcome their failure of being fat, or because we just want to look at them (case in point: Maury’s “fat baby” specials, including “Help me! My fat baby weighs 300 pounds!” and “My son weighs over 700 pounds!”, in which it was explained that the son was so fat, he had crashed through the floor of their home). When this is the manner by which TV programs showcase the obese, it is inevitable that we, in turn, will, at least on a sub-conscious level, pity them.

When Meat Loaf’s debut album Bat Out of Hell was released in 1977, the sales of which went from platinum to multi-platinum in a week , almost every journalist one, mentioned Meat Loaf’s weight in the first sentence (or at least first paragraph) and, two, made some fat pun. Sound magazine described the album as “dripping with guts”. People magazine ran the headline, “Rock’s spicy new recipe for stardom: a 260-pound Meat Loaf”, described Meat Loaf as “[s]tuffed into his ruffled size 52 shirt and bulging black tux” and relayed an occasion where Meat Loaf mounted a piano and cracked the soundboard. Rolling Stone called Meat Loaf “appropriately named”, weighing “something in excess of 250 pounds”, “hardly the stuff of which groupies’ dreams are made” and reported that when he arrived at their interview, he “dump[ed] his girth into a chair” and “open[ed] a can of diet soda”. Sylvie Simmons’ review of Meat Loaf’s concert in Los Angeles — a review simply entitled “A Fat Out of Hell” — mentioned Meat Loaf’s weight in nearly every paragraph, described him as “waving ten fat fingers”, “taking off his jacket and revealing braces, frills, an impressive gut, looking like a ghostly inflated Rick Wakeman blimp” and remarked that England should anticipate a concert from him when “CBS can charter a plane big enough to carry him”. Barry Cain, in his article for Record Mirror , entitled “Beast of Burgerland”, wrote that Meat Loaf “hangs out everywhere mainly because of a hamburger-swollen body” and that he sings “in a hamburger-swollen voice”.

May I ask, what the fuck is a “hamburger-swollen voice”? Presumably this is a voice that the throat cannot release, because the person in question has crammed it with hamburgers, thus swelling it. News flash, Barry Cain, you retard. Meat Loaf does not have a hamburger-swollen voice. That would certainly render him mute. Presumably Cain wrote this comment — this opening comment — in order to illustrate Meat Loaf’s obesity, in turn justifying the headline “Beast of Burgerland”.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Meat Loaf was, or is, obsessed with burgers — he’s not, he prefers chops — but let’s just say he was, or is. Why would this be key? Why should this affect all comments made about him? Why should Cain describe Meat Loaf’s voice as not an “orgasm”, but an “overweight orgasm”? Again, what the fuck is an “overweight orgasm”? It’s a cheap joke that doesn’t make sense, and it’s made at the expense of understanding why Meat Loaf is more than just a big fat burger man who eats burgers and sings like a burger.

Meat Loaf is fat, yes. This much is obvious. But Cain, like most writers, describes Meat Loaf almost exclusively in those terms. In a recent retrospective in Q magazine about the Bat Out of Hell artwork, the photo of Meat Loaf was simply captioned, “More food!” This is typical. But this is typical of a failure to understand what Meat Loaf actually is. Meat Loaf is not just fat. Meat Loaf is a fat god.

To understand Meat Loaf, which they obviously don’t, you have to understand his past. You have to go back to Dallas, where Meat Loaf grew up with a shell-shocked, alcoholic father, who threw Meat Loaf out the window for fun. You have to understand that when Meat Loaf was 8, he was going into bars to drag his father out. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was running away from home to the 7-11 (an issue that his mother solved by tying him up with a rope to the clothes-line, like a dog).

When Meat Loaf was 12, weighing some 240 pounds (109 kilograms), he was beaten up by other children, who would come at him en masse, injure him, then lock him in a wooden box. When Meat Loaf approached other children in his street to play, their mothers yelled, “Go away! You can’t play with my son, you’re too fat .”

When Meat Loaf did have friends, later, they went on “Texas-Oklahoma weekends”, where Oklahoma guys would approach them, ask, “You from Oklahoma?” to which they would say, “No, Texas,” which would precipitate everyone beating the crap out of each other. When Meat Loaf was a youth in Texas “everyone was always beating everybody else up” (ML, direct quote), most people’s cars had gunracks that carried shotguns, his own father carried a gun in the glove compartment and Meat Loaf himself carried a sawn-off baseball bat with nails driven through it.

When Meat Loaf came home one day from North Texas State University and found his mother sick, emaciated and in a plastic oxygen tent, he freaked out, got the first plane to LA and moved in with some hippies he met on the street. When Meat Loaf returned to Dallas for his mother’s funeral, he pulled her corpse out of the casket, tried to drag her away, screamed that they couldn’t have her, but was eventually restrained. When Meat Loaf’s father came home that night, he found Meat Loaf alone, screamed, “Get all these whores out of here!” then grabbed a butcher’s knife and ran screaming towards Meat Loaf, pushed him against the bed, put both hands on the handle of the knife and brought it down. When Meat Loaf rolled aside, he heard the knife ripping through the bedding and into the mattress. When Meat Loaf’s father couldn’t kill him with the knife, he went after him with his bare hands, threw him across the room and kept hitting him in the face until Meat Loaf was able to run away.

Flashfoward: May 2006. Katharine McPhee does a duet with Meat Loaf on American Idol . They sing a version of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”. NBC officially call it a “thumbs down” moment. Shortly after the season finale, in which McPhee places runner-up, but not before the “McPheever” dies down entirely, Entertainment Weekly ask her about the performance:

EW : Did you ask producers to hook you up with a Meat Loaf duet?

McPhee: They just came to me. It wasn’t like it was my choice. They just said, “Okay, you’ll be singing with so-and-so.”

EW : I haven’t heard the guy in a while.

McPhee: I didn’t even know who he was. But now I do. He was like really big in the 70s, right?

EW : Well, and more recently than that. You must know “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, right?

McPhee: I don’t.

McPhee also addresses a press conference, in which she explains to the press who Meat Loaf is:

McPhee: He’s like this frumpy, older man, you know? [McPhee walks like a hunchback, press laugh]

McPhee goes on to describe their rehearsal:

McPhee: He warned me that he does it full-out. Every time. And I was like, “Okay, do what you need to do.” … And he was literally [laughs, trails off] … He was like, “WHEN I TOUCH YOU LIKE THIS!” [press laugh] And I was like, “Oh, god.” [press laugh] I have to admit he was singing a little off-pitch … I thought it was a joke. I mean, I really did.

What exactly did McPhee think was a joke? The fact that he did it “full-out”? The fact that he sang it like he meant it? The fact that he’s a “frumpy, older man” and doesn’t quite fit whatever dishwater paradigm she has of what a male singer should look like? Please. What should Meat Loaf look like? A dude? McPhee said that she was so disoriented by Meat Loaf that she genuinely expected Ashton Kutcher to appear informing her that she had been punk’d.

McPhee, the human byproduct of a reality show, was expecting another reality show to explain to her what was going on in the first reality show. Whatever. The point is that McPhee, in her perpetual struggle to follow who people are and what they’re doing, didn’t realise that she was singing with a god.

I wouldn’t have expected McPhee to understand this, any more that I would expect Barry Cain to understand this. In 1978, Cain described him as the “Beast of Burgerland”. Today, Katharine McPhee describes him as “like, just the sweetest guy in the world, but … looks like, like one of my best friend’s dads that I love, you know?” Neither of them are, unto themselves, wrong. Meat Loaf is, I suppose, a “beast” and Meat Loaf is, quite possibly, “the sweetest guy in the world”. I mean, I doubt it, but whatever. Let’s just say. The point is that ultimately, these comments are irrelevant. They confuse the perception of Meat Loaf as alternately a human hot dog and an ineffectual has-been.

There’s really no need to describe exactly how Meat Loaf became a singer-slash-actor. Suffice to say, he walked in on an audition for the stage production of Hair , found the director dripping with beads and lying on a giant pillow, sang “The World is All Right, It’s the People that Make It Bad” and was immediately cast to sing “Aquarius”. Blah blah blah, met people, did Shakespeare in the park, blah blah blah, met Jim Steinman who wrote Bat , got record deal, whatever. This much is identical to any other singer-slash-actor’s early career. Meat Loaf got turned down by X number of record executives. Who hasn’t? None of this makes him a god. What makes him a god is his all-consuming, unforgiving, sweatball charisma. What makes him a god is that (according to The Washington Post ) he needs an “inexhaustible supply of … tuxedo pants” on hand for concerts because his arse keeps bursting them. What makes him a god is that, despite his unfashionable wide load and despite his rogue arse, Meat Loaf manages to communicate hot, animal lust.

I love Meat Loaf. And I don’t mean that in some vague, bullshit, figurative, symbolic, artistic way. I mean that he touches me. I mean that hearing him sing and watching him dance stirs my loins. I mean that he represents a greatness that I genuinely aspire to.

Heap this level of criticism on an ordinary man and watch him break down. Watch him sob and moan and try Dr Phil’s “Ultimate Weight Loss Solution” and fail. Yet Meat Loaf, despite being perceived as too fat, despite being beaten because he was fat, despite his father trying to butcher him, is unperturbed. That strength unto itself is magnetic, one. But two, the fact that he is an unhinged sweatball, who sings most songs like someone is dead or dying, who moves with such self-possession (and here I’m talking about him as a zombie, wearing an Elvis wig and dressed in tight leather in The Rocky Horror Picture Show ), frankly, takes my breath away.

And I do mean “unhinged” sweatball. Meat Loaf wrote a film in 1981 called Dead Ringer , in which Meat Loaf plays Meat Loaf and Marvin — by which I mean that Meat Loaf plays himself and a fan of his, who is also an identical twin, who later has to impersonate Meat Loaf and sing a duet with Cher. Meat Loaf does interviews on German TV, gets bored, fires himself onto the host and makes out with them.

What is more, I am not the only one who is nuts about Loaf. Bat continues to sell some 200,000 copies a year .

On October 31 2006, Virgin Records will launch Bat Out of Hell 3: The Monster is Loose . This album will complete the trilogy that Jim Steinman envisaged as a soundtrack to a film called Neverland . The film would have been a futuristic, sci-fi version of Peter Pan , in which the world is desolated by chemical warfare and people live in cities under sterile domes. A handful of children, whose genes have been altered by the chemical warfare in such a way that they cannot grow up, band together and roam outside of the cities. The film would have starred Meat Loaf as Tinkerbell.

In a press release, Jason Flom, Virgin Records CEO, announced, “We are excited to be involved with Meat Loaf and Bat Out of Hell 3 because good things always come in threes.” Fuck! You sound excited, Jason! Although I, myself, am excited for reasons other than Jason’s greeting card wisdom.

For one, Bat 3 includes the song “Bad for Good”. “Bad for Good” was originally written for Meat Loaf by Jim Steinman as a follow up to the first Bat . However, due to Steinman and Meat Loaf’s falling out over the course of the Bat tour, during which Meat Loaf threw regular tantrums and hit the band with mic stands (violence that he now attributes to a temporary “drug psychosis”), Meat Loaf never recorded the song. Eventually, “Bad for Good” was sung by Steinman for his own album, which he also called Bad for Good . Based on Steinman’s “Bad for Good” (which, frankly, takes my breath away), and assuming they use exactly the same lyrics (and I can’t see why they wouldn’t), Meat Loaf’s version should go: “If it’s somethang I want, then it’s somethang I need, I wasn’t built for comfort, I was built for speeeeeeeed! … And I know that I’m gonna be like this forever, I’m never gonna be what I should. And you think that I’ll be bad for just a little while, but I know that I’ll be bad for good. I know that I’ll be baaaaaaaad … FOR GOOD!”

Meat Loaf told TV Guide magazine that when he heard the finished Bat 3 , he thought it was so good, he broke down and cried.

As to whether the world at large will react accordingly is another matter. Bat Out of Hell 2: Back into Hell was called “the worst album of 1993”, in which Meat Loaf was accused of “vomit[ing] up 75 minutes of endlessly repeated choruses”. The Entertainment Weekly Review actually ran the headline, “Meat is Murder”.

Never mind that Bat 2 occupied the number one slot on Billboard ’s album chart above Nirvana . But the press complained that he hadn’t changed. The Montreal Gazette described the album as, “Something old, nothing new, plenty borrowed, something blew — as in the gaskets that explode whenever Jim Steinman is allowed out of the Frankenstein Hospital for the Incurable Baroque and into a recording studio. Steinman huffs, puffs, reinflates Meat Loaf’s lungs and his own mock-opera ambitions and lets go of the balloon.”

They talk about Meat Loaf as if he is obliged to move on. Yes, he’s doing basically the same thing, and so what? What do they want? No one ever said that Meat Loaf is, or could be, David Bowie. In an interview in 1978, Meat Loaf actually said, “ Bat Out of Hell , it’s like on a freeway when there’s a traffic accident. You don’t necessarily want to be in the traffic accident, but you definitely want to look at it. And that’s what Bat Out of Hell is. It’s a thing that you’re driving by and you’re watching, and you can either really enjoy what you’re watching, or you can go, ‘Oh, man, I’m glad that’s not me.’”

Meat Loaf did an album with Frank Ferian, who created Milli Vanilli, for Christ’s sake! But to be fair, that was really dance Meat Loaf, and Meat Loaf was not happy with it. But the point is this: Bat and Bat 2 have together sold an estimated 45 million copies. 45 million. Hello, that is South Korea.

Meat Loaf ends his bio with the line, “I came to the realisation that like Popeye, ‘I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam.’” Well, presumably. Meat Loaf is Meat Loaf. But Meat Loaf is also Orson Welles, not only in terms of power and size, but also inasmuch as Meat Loaf owns what he does, whether it’s shit or not, whether he’s repeating choruses for 75 minutes or singing with Katharine McPhee. So I say, “Shine on, Meat. Shine on.

“P.S. I’m stalking you.”

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