First of all, Bat Out Of Hell isn’t even the best song on the album. But it is the title track, and therefore the most representative of that mammoth, life-changing, world-eating magnum opus. Is there any other album ever produced that is viewed so favourably as one recognisable, self-standing entity? Did it even need singles? It was meant to be devoured in one ravenous sitting, and that’s exactly how we all did it.
If anything represents the concept of “album rock”, it’s Bat Out Of Hell. It is album rock. And it’s probably the greatest stand-alone rock album ever made. It’s also completely ridiculous, albeit in the best way possible. Consider the source: Meat Loaf, a sweaty, overweight leather-lunged theatre kid hungry for an arena, and Jim Steinman, the piano-plinking, black-gloved, Wagner-worshipping trickster who wanted to create immortal rock'n'roll death operas.
"Meat was the most mesmerising thing I'd ever seen," Steinman told Classic Rock. "He was much bigger than he is now; he was fucking huge, and since I grew up with (German composer Richard) Wagner, all my heroes were larger than life. His eyes went into his head, like he was transfixed. [At the audition], he sang "You gotta give your heart to Jesus"… I can seem arrogant at times because I'm certain of things and I was certain of him."
In any other era, they’d be sent to the loony bin or the unemployment line. Instead, they were locked in a room with Todd Rundgren, and gold was inexplicably spun in vast quantities.
Of course, no one knew it at first. Here’s the crazy part. Well, the crazier part. Bat-the-album was released in 1977. Bat-the-single wasn’t released until two years later. And let us not forget it’s 10 minutes long (sure, there’s a four-and-a-half minute radio edit, but everybody knows that one is bullshit). Bat is completely inexplicable in every way, and yet it was perfect for the time, place, emotions and parlances of the day. 1979 demanded Bat Out Of Hell, and when it finally got it, it steamed up countless cars blasting the song at make-out points all over the US and the UK.
The structure is your basic teenage death ballad, complete with leather-clad street gangs, gleaming motorcycles, a breathlessly beautiful teenage virgin, and ‘even young boys down in the gutter’ foaming from the heat. Who knew you could foam from heat?
It starts out as a theatrical piano ballad, but you just know from the first chord that it’s eventually going to explode into an orgy of over-amped hard rock madness, and that’s just what it does. It entangles you in its drama, shakes you back and forth like a wolf with a rabbit, and leaves you bloody, bruised, and thoroughly satisfied. Steinman originally wrote it for a Peter Pan musical. We should all be eminently thankful that Meat showed up in his life.
"I never really saw classical music and rock 'n' roll as different. I still don't," Steinman told Classic Rock. "I grew up liking extremes in music - big gothic textures. I never have much regard for more subtle stuff. Dire Straits may be good, but it just doesn't do it for me. I was attracted to William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, I couldn't see the point in writing songs about ordinary, real-life stuff."
