Meat Loaf With David Dalton
VH1 Storytellers
Despite his long, strange resumé, high school smart-asses today may know Meat Loaf most intimately as Robert Paulson, the bearhugging, “bitch-titted” testicular cancer survivor in Fight Club. Meat Loaf’s autobiography, To Hell and Back, and his newest CD, an installment in the “VH1 Storytellers” series, both came out the day Fight Club opened–which was perhaps the most savvy marketing move so far in a professional life strewn with poor decisions, miserable timing, and ruinous management. In one fell swoop, Meat Loaf has reentered the public consciousness, reinvented his image without costumes or fog machines, and extended a musical career that’s already floated for more than two decades on a single album–1977’s bombastic, theatrical Bat out of Hell. On the cover of his book, Mr. Loaf looks downright dignified, a weathered, flattopped man in black a la Johnny Cash.
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The disc raised my interest enough to return to the book, where things started rolling a little faster. How this white guy from Texas, by his own account rhythmless, gets signed to Motown is never adequately explained, but his slow rise to glory and his subsequent downfall have all the trappings of the classic rock fairy tale: the unhappy childhood, the fucked-up parenting, the crappy garage band, the hippies and freaks, the good breaks, the long-term creative partnership (with Jim Steinman, who built Bat out of Hell out of a musical meant to update Peter Pan), the discovery, the fame, the fortune, the drugs, the hotel trashings, the nasty split with the long-term creative partner, the nervous breakdown, the greedy management screwover, the dead drummer, the redeeming love of a woman. It’s all in there, some of it twice.
