Where did the name "Meat Loaf" really come from?
Was he really an uncredited editor on "Fight Club?"
And did a ghost really watch him record "Bat Out of Hell?"
Everyone knows him as Meat Loaf, but he was born Marvin Aday.
The story of his name is actually sort of a complicated one, and he's been known just
as "Meat" for a long, long time.
He told Rolling Stone that he got the name when he was just 4 days old.
It was a gift from his father, who — upon seeing his newborn son — remarked, "He looks
like meat."
It wasn't flattering, but it seems to have stuck.
Lots of people take stage names and keep their birth names, but Meat got rid of "Marvin"
as soon as he could.
According to The Guardian, he had it legally changed to Michael.
Why?
Supposedly because of a commercial that had left a lifelong scar.
Meat claimed that it was a Levi's radio commercial that featured a child who was overweight,
just like him.
It lamented, "Poor, fat Marvin can't wear Levi's," and hearing it had brought him to
tears.
Being an overweight child was what shaped him, he wrote in his autobiography, recalling
that he had been too fat to play with others and consequently spent most of his time alone.
While getting used to finding his own entertainment meant that he got good at not being bored,
even decades later, it still hurt.
Meat Loaf had an impressive 3-and-a-half octave vocal range, what does that mean?
According to School of Rock, on average men have a range of one-and-a-half to two octaves.
Freddie Mercury could hit four, and at the top?
Axl Rose, with a whopping six-octave range.
Still, Meat Loaf's range was amazing, and it stayed as he got older.
In a 2016 interview with People, he noted that he was still singing in the same key
that he was when he was in his 20s, but he was also fond of saying that he hadn't always
been a singer.
It was quite the opposite, in fact: He told Rolling Stone that his mother, who was a gospel
singer, was weirdly fond of telling him, "Good thing you're not going to be a singer, because
you can't carry a tune in a bucket."
What happened?
According to him, he was a sophomore in high school when he was out on the track field
and was hit by a 12-pound shot put.
As he tells it, once he recovered from the initial impact of the blow to his head, he
discovered he had walked away from the accident with his impressive vocal range.
It was early on in his career that Meat Loaf met Jim Steinman, and Meat's biggest album
— "Bat Out Of Hell" — was famously born from that union.
It was never an easy partnership, but it hit a major low in the late 1970s.
"Bat" was released in 1977, but it wasn't until 1978 that it really took off.
Not one to rest on their laurels, a sequel was in the works almost immediately ... but
as Meat explained to Rolling Stone, it started with Steinman heading off to work on it not
with him, but with keyboardist Roy Bittan.
Meat was devastated:
"When I found out, I thought I was going to kill myself, and I think I had already tried
... I basically had a nervous breakdown."
And that included a complete loss of his voice.
Steinman described him as sounding like "the little girl in 'The Exorcist,'" and it took
months of therapy for Meat to regain his ability to sing.
They were very long months.
The split with Steinman wasn't an amicable one, and Meat found himself drowning in debt
as they hurled lawsuits at each other.
According to People, it got so bad that he declared bankruptcy.
He spent much of the early part of the decade at home with his wife and daughters.
When Jim Steinman died in 2021, Rolling Stone called Meat for an interview.
He immediately broke down in tears.
He explained:
"Since I met Jim, he has been the centerpiece to my life.
And I was always the centerpiece of his.
... And I didn't care.
I wanted that."
Meat said that it had taken some convincing to get Steinman on board with the partnership,
and it wasn't always easy.
At first, record labels would want one or the other, but according to Meat, they always
stuck together.
Not all the stories are great, though: When Steinman and Meat temporarily went their separate
ways after "Bat," Meat's depression — amid a whopping $80 million in lawsuits — led
to a massive weight loss.
The two reconciled for "Bat 2," but according to Rolling Stone, Steinman was so mad that
he was going to ruin the image that he had built that he stocked the studio with dozens
of donuts in hopes of getting Meat Loaf to put the weight back on.
At the same time, says The Guardian, he had given Meat strict orders to sing, and never
talk on stage.
Why?
Steinman was quoted as saying,
"When he speaks, the audience suddenly sees he's just the fat kid who works at the gas station."
Everyone has their own opinions about what happens after death, and according to what
Meat Loaf once told Shortlist, he knew there was an afterlife because he'd once had an
encounter that made him a believer.
They were in the process of making "Bat Out Of Hell," he said, when he happened to look
up and see a blonde girl in a white dress standing on the balcony above them.
There shouldn't have been anyone there, and when Meat told the others, they went looking
for her.
Stepping out onto the same balcony, there was no one there.
It might seem almost unthinkable that a rocker who relies on his voice also had asthma, but
he did — and because of it, Meat Loaf kept oxygen tanks close at hand.
In a 2016 interview, he said that inhalers just didn't cut it for him — he needed oxygen
tanks.
He explained:
"When you go on, and you hit that zone, and you're in that energy, you're going to want
to come off-stage and have that oxygen."
It was absolutely nothing new, either.
According to what he said way back in 2011, he'd been carrying oxygen masks and tanks
around since 1967.
One of Meat Loaf's biggest songs is "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)."
Unsurprisingly, there have been a lot of questions about what "that" refers to, and he's explained
it a handful of times.
He's said:
"It's the line before every chorus.
There's nine of them, I think.
The problem lies because Jimmy likes to write, so you forget what the line was before you
get to 'I won't do that.'"
"I'll never stop dreaming of you every night of my life.
I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that."
But what about the real-life Meat Loaf, the one that exists outside of the lyrics?
Ali Wentworth asked him just what he would — and wouldn't — do for love.
He would, for example, become vegan for love, saying that he didn't actually mind vegan
food.
He'd also record a song with Justin Bieber, although he added that Bieber might not actually
like the deal, because, quote, "it would come with a really good lecture."
He'd even take a bullet for his wife, but we still don't know what he wouldn't do for
love.
Meat Loaf has an impressive 108 acting credits to his name, but the most famous will always
be "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Fight Club."
Meat told the New York Post that "Fight Club" was one of the most challenging movies he'd
been in, because David Fincher had a very specific vision for his character.
He got it, he revealed, by filling in the details of Bob's history and answering the
question:
"Who the hell was this guy, and how many bridges did he burn when he was on steroids?"
He said later that he actually did much more than just appear on-screen in "Fight Club;"
he helped edit the film, too.
According to Variety, Meat said that Fincher often called him into his trailer while he
was editing, and asked him to help pick which takes would make it into the final cut.
Once he piped up with an opinion, Meat said, Fincher asked him to do it again and again.
Given that they had an average of 44 takes for each piece of the film, it's safe to say
that it was a lot to watch.
When Meat Loaf was just getting started, he got offered a huge opportunity.
According to The Guardian, he had been doing Shakespeare in the Park when he was offered
$60,000 a year for five years of training as an opera singer, followed by a gig at the
Met.
He turned it down, because, as he said,
"There's no improv, there's no freedom, there's no, you know, soaring.
You can't go off in the clouds and just escape.
So ... I couldn't do that."
There's a little more to it, too.
Meat Loaf has explained that he could only sing as a character.
He explained,
"Because I don't sing.
It's almost like being schizophrenic — I don't sing, the character sings.
And if I'm not in touch with my characters on any given night — sort of like channeling
— I can't sing."
Getting in touch with those characters meant an extensive, pre-concert set of rituals he'd
go through, and he spoke a bit about who some of those characters were.
He told Rolling Stone that the person actually singing "Anything For Love" was a 15-year-old
boy, and it was the same person that came back to sing on "Bat 2" — 16 years later.
And in "Hang Cool Teddy Bear," he's actually a soldier named Patrick.
He told The Scotsman:
"I gotta sing it.
But not as myself.
That's why I had to become Patrick."
While it might be impossible to envision Meat Loaf-free music, it almost didn't happen:
According to what he told Rolling Stone, he never had any intentions of making a living
with his voice.
At first, his dream had been to play professional football.
That didn't pan out, and it still wasn't his next choice.
He told Shortlist that he had then set his sights on being an actor — and while he
was a surprisingly prolific actor, that hadn't gone according to plan, either.
Cast as Billy Bibbit in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," a role that would ultimately
go to Brad Dourif, what might have been his big break fell through thanks to a writers' strike.
It all worked out eventually, though, since he went on to "Rocky Horror" instead, where
he made his own impact in the cult classic.
When Meat Loaf talked to Rolling Stone in 2018, he had a lot to gripe about — including
a long struggle to recover from back surgery.
He complained about social media, too:
"Those Facebook people, man, you know, yeah, I get upset."
And he was always right there to say it, too, calling out the trolls left and right.
Meat, it turned out, had been thinking there was a lot wrong with the world for some time.
In 2012, he had talked to Esquire about exactly that.
He had just released the album "Hell in a Handbasket," and explained:
"For the last six or seven years, I've been saying the world has gone to hell in a handbasket."
He was talking about "the humanity and the compassion of the world," which he saw as
being sorely lacking.
That, coupled with the fact that "people don't pay attention," and didn't bother learning
about their own history, made things pretty dire in Meat Loaf's book.
He did, however, have a solution.
"There's a song, 'Our Love and Our Souls," and I think those are really the things people
need to return to.
... 'Nothing lasts forever but our love and our souls.'
That's what people need to think about."
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