“He said, ‘I really don’t like the way I’m walking, anyway. “I’m thinking, ‘How are we going to do this?’” she recalled. DeVito said that less than a month before his death, he called her about staging a tour. Over the years, performances of the song would sprawl to the 20-minute mark because “Meat would milk it for all it was worth,” Sulton said.Įven as his health waned, Meat Loaf was intent on performing live. “He just wanted to put on the best show possible every night,” she said.
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Its popularity was boosted by a promotional video clip for “Paradise,” in which Meat Loaf and the singer Karla DeVito - lip syncing over Foley’s vocals - performed onstage.ĭeVito, who replaced Foley for the initial “Bat Out of Hell” tour, said audiences “went nuts” when the band got to “Paradise.” For these shows, she was given free rein to create the character of what she called “the girl in white” - the innocent counterpart to Meat Loaf’s lascivious singer.
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Dodd recalled the record executive Clive Davis telling Steinman “that he had to learn how to write rock ’n’ roll.” But the album was eventually accepted and released by the executive Steve Popovich’s Cleveland International Records, and it slowly gained traction upon its 1977 release. The initial recording was originally longer, clocking in at around 11 minutes Dodd said about three minutes of background vocals at the song’s outro were cut out.Įven with a completed album, Meat Loaf and Steinman had difficulty finding a record deal. “We were both in character he was that poor, frightened, horny guy.” Dodd, who was one of the few people in the room when Meat Loaf recorded his own vocals, said Meat Loaf also performed in character as he sang. “I did my part individually, but I had Meat come into the room so that I could act, and sing at him,” she said. “But he would tell me to hit those things so hard they fall over, and you can hear it in ‘Paradise.’ By the end of it, I’m just slamming away at the cymbals.”įoley’s singing parts were recorded in one take.
Weinberg said Steinman pushed him to play “like an out-of-control teenager.” “Teenage drumming is overplaying and very histrionic it’s like a spice, because it’s not something you want to do all the time,” he said. “It’s kind of a boogie-woogie shuffle, and then there’s the Phil Spector part, and then there’s a bit of ‘Thunder Road.’ The song laid itself out for us in its entirety with just Jim playing the piano, and Meat Loaf singing it live.”Īfter rehearsals, the band recorded “Paradise” in sections, without vocals. “My first time hearing ‘Paradise,’ I remember thinking ‘it’s obvious what the song is,’” he said. Sulton said the group “all had a hand” in how the songs were arranged. One of those admirers was the artist Todd Rundgren, who, under the mistaken impression that Meat Loaf and Steinman had a record deal, agreed to produce “Bat Out of Hell.” (When the truth came out, he also agreed to fund the recording himself.) In the fall of 1975, the musicians convened at Bearsville Studio in Woodstock, N.Y., where they were joined by members of Rundgren’s band Utopia, as well as Weinberg and Roy Bittan, the piano player for the E Street Band. As a quartet, they performed these songs at clubs across the city as Meat Loaf and Steinman went looking for a record deal. I’d get Jim to add a word, change the melody.”īack in New York, the three were joined by the singer Rory Dodd, who met Meat Loaf in 1975 while working on the Broadway musical “Rockabye Hamlet.” “We would rehearse every day, singing the same songs and working out the arrangements,” Dodd said in an interview. “My job was to make the songs focused, the same way you’d get a character focused. “My input was more arrangement, methods, a word or two here and there,” he said.
In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, Meat Loaf discussed his uncredited contributions to Steinman’s writing process. He just wanted to create something that nobody had ever heard before.” “I don’t want to be a shrink, but I think it was probably him working out his own teenage desires that he hadn’t done in real life, but was able to experience in this hyper-emotional material.
“We were driving around the country in a little blue van, and wherever we would play the ‘National Lampoon’ show, Jim would find a piano,” Ellen Foley said in a phone interview. It was on that tour that “Paradise,” and many of the songs that would turn up on “Bat Out of Hell,” first took shape.