How Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell Survived Rejection, Debt and a Bruce Springsteen Spoof Theory

The moment that unlocked Bat Out of Hell did not happen in a boardroom. It happened in a room where Jim Steinman sat at the piano, two background singers helped fill out the sound, and Meat Loaf paced, sang and wiped his brow while Todd Rundgren watched and suddenly heard a way the whole wild idea could work. That is the strange, unlikely starting point for an album now treated as a classic, but one that spent a long time as the record almost nobody wanted.

The room where one producer finally heard it

[Embedded video: Meat Loaf, Paradise by the Dashboard Light]

Before Bat Out of Hell was finished, Meat Loaf and Steinman had already tried practically everyone they could. Rundgren recalled that they had taken the music to every producer they could reach. They even had a label in RCA Records, but not a producer who was willing to take on the concept.

What Rundgren saw when the material was performed for him was not a polished studio presentation. In his memory, most of the album was acted out in the room itself. Steinman played piano. Two background singers added force. Meat Loaf moved around the room, singing and mopping his brow.

That was when Rundgren found his own angle on it. He said he got it into his head that the whole thing was a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. To him, the music drew from the same kind of retro imagery, all motorcycles, switchblades and leather jackets. Springsteen had recently appeared on the cover of Time as the savior of rock and roll, and Rundgren remembered thinking that rock was being pushed back toward the 1950s. When he looked at Meat Loaf, he saw the person who could send up that whole idea.

He did not make a big issue of that interpretation with the people in the room. What mattered more was that someone was finally willing to take the project seriously. At that stage, that alone was enough to move things forward.

A deal existed, but the freedom did not

The album's problems were not solved just because a label name was attached to it. Rundgren said there were issues getting actual money from RCA, and both he and Meat Loaf described the same basic obstacle. The people making Bat Out of Hell wanted to build it on a scale the label did not seem eager to support.

Rundgren said RCA balked at plans that included using members of the E Street Band, bringing in baseball announcer Phil Rizzuto for the play by play section of Paradise by the Dashboard Light, and other additions they had in mind. He remembered the kind of pushback they were getting: the idea that you could not hire a full orchestra for one song.

His response was simple. He let them make the record they wanted to make.

That freedom mattered because Bat Out of Hell was never a small, tidy pitch. It was theatrical, oversized and hard to slot next to what many labels were used to hearing. Even before the album had a home, the people around it were already dealing with a central tension that would follow the record all the way to release: the very qualities that made it different were the same qualities that made the business side nervous.

Another important figure entered the story here as well. David Sonenberg, an attorney in the New York area, took on Meat Loaf, Steinman and Bat Out of Hell as his first management project. Meat Loaf later wrote in his memoir To Hell and Back that Sonenberg became a valuable ally.

The buyout, the Bearsville tab and more rejection

According to Meat Loaf's memoir, Sonenberg helped clear a path when the project looked stuck. He found a man who owned a number of truck stops in New Jersey and got him to put up 150,000 dollars to buy Meat Loaf and Steinman out of their RCA contract. In Meat Loaf's telling, that meant they were moving again.

Rundgren then took on risk of his own. He said that in the end he paid to make the record by putting it on his tab at Bearsville, the label and studio tied to Albert Grossman, where Rundgren worked. The arrangement, as he described it, was that Bearsville would get the first right of refusal once the album was finished.

That did not produce the ending anyone around the record would have wanted. Bearsville passed. Warner Brothers passed too. Rundgren said it then took another six months for Meat Loaf and Steinman to keep shopping the album before it finally saw daylight.

Meat Loaf later summed up the experience in even harsher terms. He said Bat Out of Hell was turned down by everybody and their mother four times. He also said that Clive Davis was the only person who ever came up to him and admitted that passing on it had been a mistake.

For a nostalgia audience looking back now, this may be the hardest part of the story to imagine. Songs that later became deeply familiar were, at the time, attached to a project that kept hearing no.

The executive who heard the magic

Steve Popovich was the record executive who finally understood what others had missed. He said every major label had passed on Bat Out of Hell before Cleveland International picked it up. In his view, the industry climate did not exactly favor an act like Meat Loaf. He contrasted the period's wimpy-looking Peter Frampton types with Meat Loaf, whom he described as a huge guy with an amazing voice.

Another memory from the era helps show why the album could inspire both excitement and hesitation. Producer Tom Werman recalled Meat Loaf and Steinman coming into Epic for an audition. Steinman played piano, Meat Loaf sang, and Werman remembered the walls coming down. He told them they were incredible, but he did not think the label could do anything with them. His explanation was that the material felt very theatrical compared with what they normally handled. Looking back, he said he did not know whether he had been right or wrong. What he did remember clearly was Popovich's reaction. Popovich got very enthusiastic and ran with it.

[Embedded video: Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell]

That enthusiasm mattered because Bat Out of Hell still needed more than a signature. Popovich worked the phones tirelessly so the right people would hear the songs, people who could play them and sell records. At the same time, Meat Loaf and his band toured relentlessly, taking the music to audiences night after night.

In the end, the album connected for the same reason it had once been so easy to reject. It did not sound like everything else on the radio. It sounded different. The songs that emerged from that long struggle are now easy to list, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night), and Bat Out of Hell. The hard part was getting enough people, and enough money, behind them for the rest of the world to hear what was there.