Your opinions on the album Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf?

Lighting in a bottle. Overblown, grand, magnanimous and unlikely. The title track rocks like a tyrannosaurus.

 

Fair point. I think the order in which you hear something will always have a massive effect. I prefer Starcastle to Seventies-era Yes, much to the bewilderment of my prog friends, for that very reason.

I love Jim's album but there's no doubt that Meat Loaf does the songs serious justice too.

 

5 stars from me. Jim Steinman's pastiche on 50s dead boyfriend lyrics...Meat's INCREDIBLE voice..Ellen Folley singing her ass off. It's fun..it reminds me of my youth and as a complete album it stands up. Not many LPs coming out today that stand up as complete albums.
I just wish and hope they release an audiophile pressing one day.

 

5 stars from me too. It's not one of the top 10 best sellers for nothing. Grandiose, overblown, delicate, passionate and full throttle. It could never be any other way. A bona fide classic.

 

Obviously, a classic album, but even so could have been done slightly differently. Here's a fanedit by a Meatloaf / Steinman fan (known as The Archivist), which changes things slightly, and comes from a comment by Meatloaf that it was deliberately speeded up to make a louder sound...

 

A monument to bad taste. Zero wasn't an available option. So I gave it one star.

 

There’s an audiophile release on SACD, but the original 2 track master is not very good to begin with. And I think that for some of the tracks the original master tapes are lost or destroyed.

I have a number of different CDs, and I think the SACD is the best, but only marginally. For the price a used original CD is fine too. Maybe an original LP would be the best option, but I don’t have those to compare.

 

I changed my vote to a 5.
The songs are staying in my head all the time these days, I love the album again after many years first discovering it.

And speaking of Ellen Foley:

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

“I’ve never sang on a record before…. and I did ‘Paradise’ in one take. It wasn’t in a booth, it was in an open studio. I had Meat sitting in a chair so I could communicate it to him, and it was one take. I can hear Steinman telling me, ‘Funky’ — he called me Funky — ‘make it urgent! Urgent, urgent!’”

When Meat Loaf and his songwriter Jim Steinman scored a record deal shortly after That National Lampoon Show, they called on their old pal Foley (who also sang in Steinman’s short-lived show Neverland) to fill a crucial role. She’s the vocal foil to Meat Loaf’s frustrated back-seat suitor in the horny rock operetta “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” the evergreen single from Meat Loaf’s smash debut, Bat Out of Hell.

Todd Rundgren lent his production skills to the epically over-the-top album.

“I just remember him laughing a lot because he was getting it and the outrageousness of it,” says Foley. Recalling Steinman and Meat Loaf’s working relationship, she says, “He and Meat, they fought a lot, but I never did. He [Steinman] worshipped me and I worshipped him. That sounds a little braggy, but he has called me ‘the Maria Callas of rock n roll,’ so…”

ELLEN FOLEY: BRINGING NEW MEANING TO THE WORD ‘VERSATILE’ Ellen Foley might have the most eclectic resume in rock ‘n’ roll. She’s not just a solo artist with a commanding voice and a tough new album (Fighting Words), she has worked with such luminaries as girl-group legend Ellie Greenwood, Stephen Sondheim, the Clash, Ian Hunter, Jim Steinman. She has also been a sitcom star, appeared on the cover of TV Guide, and starred in a Jonathan Demme film (Married to the Mob). Jim Allen talked with the amazingly versatile Ellen Foley for PKM.
(wow, that's the link above to the full interview!)

 

Love Bat Out of Hell. Every track is so distinctive and dramatic but I probably love Steinman's "Bad for Good" even more. I don't think the arrangements on the Meat Loaf versions of some of the songs are anywhere near as exciting, despite the more technically "proper" vocals. I would like to have had the whole album re-released just with Meat Loaf's re-recorded vocals and everything else left the same.

 

i've never owned it, never will.

i have heard it and find it to be obnoxiously loud and bombastic.

IMHO, the single most over-rated album of all time, possibly the single most over-rated artist in rock history.

 

that dashboard thing was too long a song at the middle high school dance when you weren't really into your dance partner

 

I haven’t heard it since at least 1980, and I have no plans on revisiting it any time soon, but I enjoyed it as a kid in the late ‘70s.

 

I recall this record getting pretty mixed reviews, and most everything else by Meatloaf getting pretty lukewarm reviews. Rolling Stone and Christgau both pretty much gave it 2.5 / 5 stars which I kind of agree with....terrible bombastic music but if that was the intention then it was well executed (F for result, A for effort) so you kind of split the difference or something like that. Even on here, I can't ever recall a poll where 1/5 got like 20% of the votes. Whatever you think of it...I don't like it either.... "Bat Out of Hell" never struck me as a record that was very well liked except by it's rabid fans.

 

well, being honest about it and telling it like it is......it was huge with the teenagers because the song about having sex in a car is exactly what they were doing, or wished they doing, and it just caught on......bigtime.

 

This is an album I've been aware of my entire life, heard certain songs in the dentist chair, but didn't get into until my 30s, and I'm not really sure who or what inspired me to pick it up and give it an honest listen. Once I did, I was blown away and pretty much listened to it nonstop for close to a month, which is something I'd not really done with an artist since my teens. There is no other album like this one, bombastic and kitschy and gorgeous and hilarious and flat out rockin'. While I agree it's not for everyone, I think it could be, because it's a situation where you just have to let yourself go and enjoy the songs and performances for everything they're bringing. Essentially...leave your pretensions at the door and you won't be disappointed. A flawless 5/5.

 

agree...When I was in high school...late 1970s....kids either LOVED it or HATED it. I was in the latter camp, but man...like it or not you couldn't get away from it!

 

I generally think it's better for an album to have a mix of frequent disdain but "rabid fans" rather than widespread modest acclaim.
However, according to Wiki this sold 14 million copies in the USA alone and 3.3 million in the UK. That's a lot of fans over the years. It's getting towards Fleetwood Mac, Rumours numbers.

 

Well then I guess you're not the only alien. Never been a fan of this album myself.

 

Side questions... and weird ones at that... Have alternate takes of "Paradise..." ever leaked out? How many takes did it take for Phil Rizzuto to get his part right? Are there outtakes of him working through it?

 

I must say after Bat Out of Hell and Bad for Good I've got no interest in Steinman's work at all really. Everything else just seems to be more or less a re-hash of those two.

 

I agree with pretty much every word you've said. Good to know I'm not the only one.

 

Sounds like bad Broadway.

 

5 Stars. C'mon people, where's your sense of fun?

 

I didn't get all-in for the Rocky Horror Picture Show either