It Takes a Hell of a Long Time to Get a Bat Out of Hell

“A great song should be an erection of the heart.” — Jim Steinman

I wasn’t expecting much when I saw the musical “Bat Out of Hell” the other night. I thought it would just be a musical revue of songs from the album. I was wrong. It was a great piece of theatre in its own right.

The story is sort of a punk Peter Pan meets Romeo and Juliet kind of thing. I shouldn’t have been surprised it was so good. It was 50 years in the making, and, in fact, it was a musical before it was an album.

Back in 1968, Jim Steinman was a lacklustre student at Amherst College. Bets were taken on whether or not he would graduate. For his final year, he applied for the Independent Study programme. He planned to take an article he had written for the student newspaper and turn it into a musical. The article's title was “revolution…rock…the doors…jumping jack flash… Nietzsche…mayor Daley’s armpit.”

To be accepted for the Independent Study programme, Steinman had to sell this idea to a panel of three professors. He describes the experience in a speech he gave at Amherst in 2013. He thought it was going pretty well until one of the profs said, “Well, Mr. Steinman, we do have to deal with reality.”

And Steinman thought, “Well, I’m fucked.”

Steinman says, “They brought up a huge stack of folders — which I guess is reality — and they looked at me very sternly and said, ‘We see here that you got a 34 in Physics and a 19 in Calculus. How do you explain that?’

“And I said, ‘Well, I was always better at Math than Science.’ And, despite themselves, they laughed.”

Steinman is convinced that adlib is what clinched the deal for him.

The result was a musical called The Dream Engine, described by Eric Sawyer, head of the music department at Amherst, as “a 3-hour long rock epic performed largely in the nude.”

Not everyone liked it. One faculty member commented, “Amherst now has its premiere priapic purveyor of pornography.” Steinman was flattered.

Nevertheless, it was a hit. There were 20-minute standing ovations and study groups about it. Joseph Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, came to see it and loved it. At the interval, he went to the dressing room. It was filled with about 30 cast members, most of whom were nude. He tracked down Steinman and signed a contract with him then and there for the rights to Dream Engine.

Unfortunately, Papp and Steinman could not produce The Dream Engine in New York. At one point, David Bowie was interested in being involved. Steinman eventually produced it for a short run in Washington, D.C., with Richard Gere in the lead. Gere had hair down past his shoulders in those days. He accompanied himself on piano at the audition and impressed Steinman with his ability to handle the complicated vocal arrangements.

One surviving piece of Dream Engine that made it to the Bat Out of Hell album and the resultant musical is the spoken word piece at the beginning of the song, You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth.

Boy: On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?

Girl: Will he offer me his mouth?

Boy: Yes.

Girl: Will he offer me his teeth?

Boy: Yes.

Girl: Will he offer me his jaws?

Boy: Yes.

Girl: Will he offer me his hunger?

Boy: Yes.

Girl: Again, will he offer me his hunger?

Boy: Yes!

Girl: And will he starve without me?

Boy: Yes!

Girl: And does he love me?

Boy: Yes.

Girl: Yes.

Boy: On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?

Girl: Yes.

Boy: I bet you say that to all the boys.

About five years later, Steinman used Dream Engine as the basis of a new musical called Neverland. By this time, Steinman was working in theatre with Meat Loaf. They both loved three of the songs from Neverland so much that they decided to use them as the starting point for an album. The songs were “Bat Out Of Hell,” “Heaven Can Wait,” and “Formation of the Pack” (aka “All Revved Up with No Place to Go”).

They spent a year writing four more songs for the album. The last song written for the album was “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” Steinman was complaining to actress Mimi Kennedy about his difficulties getting a record deal, and the Elvis song “I Want You. I Need You. I Love You” came on.

Mimi said to him, “your stuff is so complicated. Why don’t you write something simple like that?”

I want you,

I need you,

But I’m never going to love you.

Now don’t be sad,

’Cause two out of three ain’t bad.

Steinman and Meat Loaf spent the next two and a half years trying to get someone to produce the album. Steinman would play through the entire album on the piano in a record company office while Meat Loaf sang. Sometimes they would get Ellen Foley to join them for the female parts of Paradise by the Dashboard Light. They were brutally rejected everywhere they went.

“Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? … Have you ever listened to pop music? Have you ever heard any rock-and-roll music. … You should go downstairs when you leave here … and buy some rock-and-roll records!” — Clive Davis, Record Executive at CBS

Steinman may have admitted to himself there was some truth in that sentiment. He was trying to create something closer to a film than a rock and roll album. At the time, there wasn’t really anything like it. One problem the executives had was that the songs were too long for radio. The shortest song on the album, “All Revved Up with No Place to Go,” is four minutes and 19 seconds long. “Bat Out of Hell,” “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” and “For Crying Out Loud” are all well over eight minutes.

This might be because Steinman listened more to classical music than he did to Rock and Roll. He claimed to have first encountered Wagner’s The Ring Cycle when he was six or seven years old.

“I turned on the radio just as this one station was starting a complete broadcast of ‘The Ring Cycle’ by Richard Wagner — which is about 24 hours long. I just laid on the bed listening. I didn’t move a muscle for most of the whole thing. I thought if I did, maybe I’d break the spell or something.”

If you’re used to pieces of music that are 24 hours long, a ten-minute song doesn’t seem so crazy.

Steinman eventually got Todd Rundgren to produce the album. Reportedly, Rundgren rolled on the floor laughing when he heard it. He felt it was so out there, he just had to do it. It helped that Steinman and Meat Loaf lied to him and said they had signed a deal with RCA.

Rundgren brought in some of the musicians from his band, Utopia, as well as Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band.

Once the album was recorded, they still struggled to get it released, but another member of the E Street band came to the rescue. Steve Van Zandt helped them get a deal with Cleveland International, a subsidiary of Epic Records. Despite a slow start, it became one of the biggest-selling albums ever and has now sold more than 43 million copies.

Steinman’s musical career took off. He worked with and wrote songs for Air Supply, Bonnie Tyler, Barbara Streisand, Sisters of Music, Celine Dion, and the Everly Brothers, amongst others.

Selected non-Meat Loaf songs written by Jim Steinman

• Making Love Out of Nothing at All by Air Supply
• Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler
• It’s All Coming Back to Me Now by Celine Dion
• Hulk Hogan’s theme song

He continued to work in theatre, writing the music for Roman Polanski’s Tanz der Vampire and the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind.

But, through it all, he continued to tinker with the ideas and concepts around Bat Out of Hell. He made two more Bat Out of Hell albums with Meat Loaf, “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell” in 1993 and “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose.” These provided more songs and more dialogue for what finally became produced as Bat Out of Hell the Musical in 2017, almost 50 years since he first started work on The Dream Engine.

Steinman died four years later. Hopefully, he has found a heaven filled with motorcycles, teen angst, and rock and roll.

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This post was originally published on Medium.com.