Omega
Post by beth on Apr 28, 2010 15:14:20 GMT -5
Meat Loaf's 10th studio album, Hang Cool Teddy Bear, was released on April 19th.
(from The Times Online)
Meat Loaf: ‘I felt surrounded by evil’
Illness, legal battles, a tour cancelled: the bat out of hell has endured a tumultuous few years. But he’s bouncing back
- - - - - - -
Marvin Lee Aday knows how to make an entrance. In 1975 he burst into The Rocky Horror Picture Show by riding a motorbike out of a block of ice. In 2006, at the playback for Bat out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose, he emerged from a cloud of dry ice atop a huge throne.
No underworld pomp or chilly revving heralds the singer’s arrival at the Hospital Club in Central London today; he’s his own human blare of trumpets. “HI KIDS!” He leaps from around a corner, all smart leather jacket and jangling jewellery, his hair greyed and his features well lived in. Jabbering like a preacher-turned- motivational speaker, he berates the journalists at the rear of the playback for his tenth studio album Hang Cool Teddy Bear — “Are you scared of me? You should be!” — talks us through the 12ft backdrop of the album’s artwork, praises the producer Rob Cavallo for giving him “the most important record of my life”, bemoans his ridiculous stage name — “why the f***?” — and then takes a seat among the journos to rock out to his own album. “I like it LOUD,” he roars. “Enough for your ears to bleed when it’s over.”
Meat Loaf makes every room a wind tunnel. Despite age (he’s 62) and health issues, he still exudes charisma. This is the man who in his 35-year career bellowed garish theatrical rock deep into the heart of the mainstream, becoming the clown prince of operatic sex-metal by mixing up Black Sabbath, Grease and Wagner. With 43 million sales, Bat out of Hell from 1977 is the fifth bestselling album yet. There have been some 30 movie appearances and earlier this year he judged ITV’s Popstar to Operastar.
But it’s all an act, the singer says. “I am a very deep thinker. Even though I have the name Meat Loaf and I appear to be a clown, over the top, it’s a persona. On Popstar to Operastar I was trying to be serious and they came in right before the show started and went ‘Um, can you do Meatisms?’ and I went ‘OK, fine, I getcha.’ One of my first comments was ‘WOW! That was like two girls kissing in the subway!’”
The performer also knows how to make an exit. At the Newcastle Metro Radio Arena in October 2007 the Bat III tour shrieked to an abrupt and dramatic close. Having previously undergone heart surgery after collapsing at Wembley Arena in 2003, Meat Loaf struggled through the Newcastle gig unknowingly suffering from a cyst on his vocal cords. But when he reached his anthem to teenage fumbling Paradise by the Dashboard Light he couldn’t make a sound. Exasperated, Meat Loaf thanked the audience for 30 years of support, declared it his last show and left the stage. Tour cancelled — and no refunds. The cyst popped harmlessly a fortnight later; the emotional scars were longer healing.
I talk about Newcastle almost every day,” the singer says, head bowed. “There was a lot of animosity about that. They came after me every which way they possibly could to make my life absolute hell. That whole period was the most negative period in my entire life. I’d never had a positive experience in the studio and Bat out of Hell III was the worst of the worst. I fought like I’ve never fought on something — I didn’t want things on that record, they were going behind my back, getting record company executives telling me this is the right thing to do and basically blackmail me. That’s hardcore. I felt I was surrounded by evil. It was so negative and so oppressive. I fired everybody in January 2008. Lawyers, managers, across the board. When I got the new [managers] I went ‘I will walk away before I’ll ever compromise again’
Setting to work in 2009 in the LA home studio of Cavallo, producer of My Chemical Romance and Green Day, was enough to exorcise the demons. “People call this album Dark Meat but it was the most positive experience and it shows. That record is full of life. Rob never said to me ‘That’s not gonna work.’ All he said was ‘I’ll make it work and we’ll make it sound great’.”
Despite its cheesy beatnik title, Hang Cool Teddy Bear does sound great — the mightiest and most imaginative Meat Loaf album (not involving the Bat trilogy collaborator Jim Steinman) yet. Named after a line in the Russ Meyer movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the album’s concept is typically dramatic, based on a story by the singer’s screenwriter friend Kilian Kerwin. A soldier dying on a battlefield sees his life flash forward rather than back; each song is a scenario from a variety of his possible futures, all involving the same girl in different guises.
The anti-war people will probably say this is an anti-war record,” the singer says, “the pro-war people could probably say it’s pro-war. But it’s not about a war, it’s about a human being and where he is; the guy is keeping himself alive with these nightmarish events. This entire record is the same character, so I sang with the attitude of someone who was 21 to 24. I had to forget anything I could have possibly learnt in the last 40 years.”
So with Method Actor Meat to the fore, he sang the freeway pop single Los Angeloser as the desperate doormat to a gold-digging LA starlet, and California isn’t Big Enough in the character of a man in love with a prostitute, complete with the album’s most shocking lyric.
“I am a big prude,” he grins. “Nobody understands what it took for me to sing that line.” He sings it now, unleashing the full gale-force into my face: “Woah! I can barely fit my dick in my pants!” He smiles. “I had to leave Meat Loaf out of the equation. I said, ‘Meat Loaf is gonna leave now and this character is going to sing that line’.”
The collaborations on the record are equally surprising. You might expect the guest appearances from Brian May and the metal guitarist Steve Vai, but co-writing two songs with Justin Hawkins from the Darkness and singing Like a Rose with Jack Black — particularly after Meat Loaf played Black’s dad in the Tenacious D movie — might seem narcissistic, like hiring a couple of Mini-Meats. And strangest of all, on If I Can’t Have You the singer is accompanied on piano by one Hugh Laurie.
“I did House and found out he could play piano,” Meat Loaf explains, “so I gave him a demo and a note and the next morning I walked on the set, he comes running up to me with his arms open, ‘Yeah, I’d love to!’”
It’s strange to hear Meat Loaf speak of only now emerging from his darkest period — after all, he’s had a rough ride. As a child his father tried to stab him in a drunken rage, a trauma he shrugs off. “No big deal. He was out of his mind, my mother had just died, he was an alcoholic, I’ve long forgiven him. Yes, I fought for my life and I got out, and he was a big man. Everybody has maybe not exactly that story, where their dad tried to take a butcher knife to them, but the psychological equivalent exists in a lot of lives.”
As a teenager he was almost killed when a schoolmate hit him with a shot put (he happily lets me feel the dent it left in his head) and had a brush with true evil when he once gave a lift to a hitch-hiking Charles Manson. Then, after getting his break in early stage productions of Hair and The Rocky Horror Show, he convinced a small US label to back his and Steinman’s Gothic rock project Bat out of Hell. The stress of success, however, prompted one nervous breakdown and two suicide attempts and the ensuing legal battles with Steinman over royalties left the singer bankrupt by the late Eighties.
The gossip hounds naturally blamed his then-rampant cocaine and alcohol abuse. “I’m gonna tell you, bottom line, I never made anything off Bat out of Hell,” he says. “The only time I made anything was when we sued them and we had some settlement and still, I had a really unscrupulous lawyer and it became an advance! I’ve gotten cheques for maybe $600,000 for Bat out of Hell, everybody else has made millions. Millions."
The singer adds: “The bankruptcy wasn’t about me spending money, it was about our suit for $100 million from a guy who eventually went to prison, so I never want to say I was a victim, but I was a f***ing victim. It wasn’t about ‘He got all this money and spent it all on drugs and booze and loose women.’ I didn’t have any money! The one time I got a cheque for $285,000 I bought a house for my kids and my wife in Connecticut. And it wasn’t that big of a house.”
He has now buried the legal hatchets with Steinman and hit the big time — again — with their 15-million-selling Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell in 1993 and its accompanying monster hit I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’ (his favourite thing anyone’s suggested he wouldn’t do? “Anal sex. Hahaha!”). The singer has become a comfortably ubiquitous multimedia figure. He’s been ghost-hunting on American TV, guested as a stick-thin version of himself on South Park and made cameos in everything from Fight Club to Spice World. His favourite acting moment was being complimented by playwright Arthur Miller on the set of Second World War drama Focus in 2001: “He goes ‘I really like what you’re doing with my character.’ I almost died right there.”
After a traumatic divorce in 2001 the singer now lives in LA with his second wife and remains close to his two children. But how has the overblown pomp of his music influenced the current generation? Has he, for instance, ever heard Muse? “No,” he chuckles, “but everyone tells me I would love Muse. I don’t like much music because most people are standing on the outside watching themselves. [Most bands] walk in the same footprints every night. I’ve had bands open for me and at the same bar every night they go to the drum, play the tambourine, go stand on the monitor, pose this way, pose that way. You can ask my band, every night they have no clue what I’m about to do, and neither do I.”
Is he a guilty pleasure? Meat Loaf beams. “Yeah, why not? I think that’s wonderful. Analyse that for a while. It’s like ice cream, it’s like chocolate. I’m like chocolate and ice cream. I’m like everything you really want to do.”
Hang Cool Teddy Bear is released by Mercury on April 19
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7091852.ece
(from The Times Online)
Meat Loaf: ‘I felt surrounded by evil’
Illness, legal battles, a tour cancelled: the bat out of hell has endured a tumultuous few years. But he’s bouncing back
- - - - - - -
Marvin Lee Aday knows how to make an entrance. In 1975 he burst into The Rocky Horror Picture Show by riding a motorbike out of a block of ice. In 2006, at the playback for Bat out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose, he emerged from a cloud of dry ice atop a huge throne.
No underworld pomp or chilly revving heralds the singer’s arrival at the Hospital Club in Central London today; he’s his own human blare of trumpets. “HI KIDS!” He leaps from around a corner, all smart leather jacket and jangling jewellery, his hair greyed and his features well lived in. Jabbering like a preacher-turned- motivational speaker, he berates the journalists at the rear of the playback for his tenth studio album Hang Cool Teddy Bear — “Are you scared of me? You should be!” — talks us through the 12ft backdrop of the album’s artwork, praises the producer Rob Cavallo for giving him “the most important record of my life”, bemoans his ridiculous stage name — “why the f***?” — and then takes a seat among the journos to rock out to his own album. “I like it LOUD,” he roars. “Enough for your ears to bleed when it’s over.”
Meat Loaf makes every room a wind tunnel. Despite age (he’s 62) and health issues, he still exudes charisma. This is the man who in his 35-year career bellowed garish theatrical rock deep into the heart of the mainstream, becoming the clown prince of operatic sex-metal by mixing up Black Sabbath, Grease and Wagner. With 43 million sales, Bat out of Hell from 1977 is the fifth bestselling album yet. There have been some 30 movie appearances and earlier this year he judged ITV’s Popstar to Operastar.
But it’s all an act, the singer says. “I am a very deep thinker. Even though I have the name Meat Loaf and I appear to be a clown, over the top, it’s a persona. On Popstar to Operastar I was trying to be serious and they came in right before the show started and went ‘Um, can you do Meatisms?’ and I went ‘OK, fine, I getcha.’ One of my first comments was ‘WOW! That was like two girls kissing in the subway!’”
The performer also knows how to make an exit. At the Newcastle Metro Radio Arena in October 2007 the Bat III tour shrieked to an abrupt and dramatic close. Having previously undergone heart surgery after collapsing at Wembley Arena in 2003, Meat Loaf struggled through the Newcastle gig unknowingly suffering from a cyst on his vocal cords. But when he reached his anthem to teenage fumbling Paradise by the Dashboard Light he couldn’t make a sound. Exasperated, Meat Loaf thanked the audience for 30 years of support, declared it his last show and left the stage. Tour cancelled — and no refunds. The cyst popped harmlessly a fortnight later; the emotional scars were longer healing.
I talk about Newcastle almost every day,” the singer says, head bowed. “There was a lot of animosity about that. They came after me every which way they possibly could to make my life absolute hell. That whole period was the most negative period in my entire life. I’d never had a positive experience in the studio and Bat out of Hell III was the worst of the worst. I fought like I’ve never fought on something — I didn’t want things on that record, they were going behind my back, getting record company executives telling me this is the right thing to do and basically blackmail me. That’s hardcore. I felt I was surrounded by evil. It was so negative and so oppressive. I fired everybody in January 2008. Lawyers, managers, across the board. When I got the new [managers] I went ‘I will walk away before I’ll ever compromise again’
Setting to work in 2009 in the LA home studio of Cavallo, producer of My Chemical Romance and Green Day, was enough to exorcise the demons. “People call this album Dark Meat but it was the most positive experience and it shows. That record is full of life. Rob never said to me ‘That’s not gonna work.’ All he said was ‘I’ll make it work and we’ll make it sound great’.”
Despite its cheesy beatnik title, Hang Cool Teddy Bear does sound great — the mightiest and most imaginative Meat Loaf album (not involving the Bat trilogy collaborator Jim Steinman) yet. Named after a line in the Russ Meyer movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the album’s concept is typically dramatic, based on a story by the singer’s screenwriter friend Kilian Kerwin. A soldier dying on a battlefield sees his life flash forward rather than back; each song is a scenario from a variety of his possible futures, all involving the same girl in different guises.
The anti-war people will probably say this is an anti-war record,” the singer says, “the pro-war people could probably say it’s pro-war. But it’s not about a war, it’s about a human being and where he is; the guy is keeping himself alive with these nightmarish events. This entire record is the same character, so I sang with the attitude of someone who was 21 to 24. I had to forget anything I could have possibly learnt in the last 40 years.”
So with Method Actor Meat to the fore, he sang the freeway pop single Los Angeloser as the desperate doormat to a gold-digging LA starlet, and California isn’t Big Enough in the character of a man in love with a prostitute, complete with the album’s most shocking lyric.
“I am a big prude,” he grins. “Nobody understands what it took for me to sing that line.” He sings it now, unleashing the full gale-force into my face: “Woah! I can barely fit my dick in my pants!” He smiles. “I had to leave Meat Loaf out of the equation. I said, ‘Meat Loaf is gonna leave now and this character is going to sing that line’.”
The collaborations on the record are equally surprising. You might expect the guest appearances from Brian May and the metal guitarist Steve Vai, but co-writing two songs with Justin Hawkins from the Darkness and singing Like a Rose with Jack Black — particularly after Meat Loaf played Black’s dad in the Tenacious D movie — might seem narcissistic, like hiring a couple of Mini-Meats. And strangest of all, on If I Can’t Have You the singer is accompanied on piano by one Hugh Laurie.
“I did House and found out he could play piano,” Meat Loaf explains, “so I gave him a demo and a note and the next morning I walked on the set, he comes running up to me with his arms open, ‘Yeah, I’d love to!’”
It’s strange to hear Meat Loaf speak of only now emerging from his darkest period — after all, he’s had a rough ride. As a child his father tried to stab him in a drunken rage, a trauma he shrugs off. “No big deal. He was out of his mind, my mother had just died, he was an alcoholic, I’ve long forgiven him. Yes, I fought for my life and I got out, and he was a big man. Everybody has maybe not exactly that story, where their dad tried to take a butcher knife to them, but the psychological equivalent exists in a lot of lives.”
As a teenager he was almost killed when a schoolmate hit him with a shot put (he happily lets me feel the dent it left in his head) and had a brush with true evil when he once gave a lift to a hitch-hiking Charles Manson. Then, after getting his break in early stage productions of Hair and The Rocky Horror Show, he convinced a small US label to back his and Steinman’s Gothic rock project Bat out of Hell. The stress of success, however, prompted one nervous breakdown and two suicide attempts and the ensuing legal battles with Steinman over royalties left the singer bankrupt by the late Eighties.
The gossip hounds naturally blamed his then-rampant cocaine and alcohol abuse. “I’m gonna tell you, bottom line, I never made anything off Bat out of Hell,” he says. “The only time I made anything was when we sued them and we had some settlement and still, I had a really unscrupulous lawyer and it became an advance! I’ve gotten cheques for maybe $600,000 for Bat out of Hell, everybody else has made millions. Millions."
The singer adds: “The bankruptcy wasn’t about me spending money, it was about our suit for $100 million from a guy who eventually went to prison, so I never want to say I was a victim, but I was a f***ing victim. It wasn’t about ‘He got all this money and spent it all on drugs and booze and loose women.’ I didn’t have any money! The one time I got a cheque for $285,000 I bought a house for my kids and my wife in Connecticut. And it wasn’t that big of a house.”
He has now buried the legal hatchets with Steinman and hit the big time — again — with their 15-million-selling Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell in 1993 and its accompanying monster hit I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’ (his favourite thing anyone’s suggested he wouldn’t do? “Anal sex. Hahaha!”). The singer has become a comfortably ubiquitous multimedia figure. He’s been ghost-hunting on American TV, guested as a stick-thin version of himself on South Park and made cameos in everything from Fight Club to Spice World. His favourite acting moment was being complimented by playwright Arthur Miller on the set of Second World War drama Focus in 2001: “He goes ‘I really like what you’re doing with my character.’ I almost died right there.”
After a traumatic divorce in 2001 the singer now lives in LA with his second wife and remains close to his two children. But how has the overblown pomp of his music influenced the current generation? Has he, for instance, ever heard Muse? “No,” he chuckles, “but everyone tells me I would love Muse. I don’t like much music because most people are standing on the outside watching themselves. [Most bands] walk in the same footprints every night. I’ve had bands open for me and at the same bar every night they go to the drum, play the tambourine, go stand on the monitor, pose this way, pose that way. You can ask my band, every night they have no clue what I’m about to do, and neither do I.”
Is he a guilty pleasure? Meat Loaf beams. “Yeah, why not? I think that’s wonderful. Analyse that for a while. It’s like ice cream, it’s like chocolate. I’m like chocolate and ice cream. I’m like everything you really want to do.”
Hang Cool Teddy Bear is released by Mercury on April 19
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7091852.ece
