 Who'd
have guessed that the man credited with bringing rock & roll to a whole new level of
garishness would pen such a vastly entertaining, funny, touching, and plainspoken
autobiography? But Meat Loaf (christened Marvin Lee Aday) and coauthor David Dalton
succeed by skillfully modifying the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole and the bombastic
befuddlement of the man's Wagner-crossed-with-the-Shangri-Las music to fit the printed
page. Meat Loaf grew up in Dallas, Texas, the son of a schoolteacher (she penned a locally
popular textbook on Communism) and an alcoholic cop (who happened to be an acquaintance of
Jack Ruby). Meat--he earned the nickname early on--got in touch with his theatrical side
as a teen and was soon off on his haphazard way, stumbling from misadventure to
misadventure, and taking more than his fair share of knocks along the way.
(Literally--he's suffered 17 concussions thus far, which provide an oddly effective
narrative device.) He lurched into the middle of the JFK assassination scene, picked up a
hitchhiking Charlie Manson, earned a part in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and
recorded one of the most successful albums of the '70s, Bat out of Hell. His ample
fame inevitably tied to his ample frame, Meat Loaf quickly became something of an amped-up
Fatty Arbuckle. Then came the colossal excesses and flop follow-ups, capped by a rebound
called--you guessed it--Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell. Yes, it's a familiar
framework, but the telling of Meat Loaf's rise, fall, and recovery is never anything less
than fresh and absorbing. --Steven Stolder |