In other words, it’s a departure from classic Meat Loaf, rather than continuing to mine that Bat vein. Yet, as I reminded him, the album cover reeks of bat, right down to having a small bat in a corner with the tiny Roman numeral ‘IV’ emblazoned on its chest. Significant? “Yeah, because the record company wanted to call it Bat out of Hell IV and I told them no. I said, ‘you’ve gotta be kidding me, that’s a negative. First of all it’s a negative for Jim Steinman and it’s a negative for [producer] Rob Cavallo’. So I said I would call it Hang Cool Teddy Bear IV, but I didn’t put the IV on the front, I put it on the back – it’s a joke.” What’s the significance of the title? “If you haven’t heard it you’re looking for what you normally ask someone, but the way I’ve been promoting this record is completely different – I am pioneering a new way of promotion, which is being in a room, introducing the record, then playing the record, and then explaining more about the record, and then talking. But I sit in the room while we listen to it, and I’m gonna do that in about 20 minutes with some journalists. “The significance of the title is nothing more than for you to question and go, ‘what?’ Because everybody has their titles like ‘A long road home’, or ‘Fighting my way back’, ‘come on over’ – and then they give us these weepy tales about, ‘well, God, it was this and I felt I had to give myself more to you’ – you know, violins – stop with the b/s and tell me the truth! And the truth is it’s nothing more than where it’s so far removed from Bat out of Hell or any connotation of a clichéd Meat Loaf title, that you go, ‘what?!’” For the record (no pun intended) Hang Cool Teddy Bear is also a line from Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. Most of his album titles incidentally don’t have the word ‘bat’ in them. For those with a passing acquaintance, Meat Loaf has always been bigger than bat. Both musically and literally. He piled on 31kg in the mid 1960s in a bid to beat being drafted into the military, and when that failed he stole his police officer father’s credit card and legged it to LA where he worked as a beefy teen nightclub bouncer. He was still carrying weight when Bat Out Of Hell was released in 1977. He and Jim Steinman had begun collaborating on Bat in 1973, around the time that New Zealander Richard O’Brien gave Meat Loaf a big break by casting him as Eddie in The Rocky Horror Show. 48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM April 2010
It took four years to write, record, and shop around to a bunch of tyre-kicking record company execs who felt it didn’t fit any recognised musical genre and therefore wasn’t commercial. And yet, when it finally came out, Bat 1 became one of the biggestselling albums of all time with more than 43 million copies sold. It still sells around 200,000 units a year, 33 years after its release. After Bat came Dead Ringer – another collaboration with Steinman who by then had also penned “Total Eclipse of The Heart” for Bonnie Tyler and “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All” for Aussie duo Air Supply – before Meat Loaf became bogged down in ill-health and financial woes. A third album, 1983’s Midnight At The Lost And Found, featured no Steinman compositions, and wasn’t a hit. 1984’s Bad Attitude, marked a return to form not just because of a couple of Steinman tracks but also because of a more consistent theme across the entire album. Blind Before I Stop and a Live compilation rounded out the eighties with pretty much a whimper, before Meat Loaf and Steinman pulled off one of the greatest comebacks of all time with 1992’s Bat Out Of Hell II, the album that launched the career of one Angelina Jolie, a then-19 year old who starred as the love interest in the music video for the Rock n Roll Dreams Come Through single. Over the phone, Meat Loaf insists to me that Hang Cool Teddy Bear is not a reprise of the Bat franchise. “And yet,” I venture foolishly, “I’ve heard Hugh Laurie’s piano playing on the Youtube
Meat Loaf in concert as part of the British Motorshow at the Excel Centre London, England / WENN
preview clip and it is reminiscent of Roy Bittan on Bat out of Hell –” “There’s nothing reminiscent of Bat on this record!” interrupts Meat. “Get rid of Bat. As much as I love that record, you have to get rid of that. It goes away, it completely goes away. We’re not piano based on this record, we’re guitar based. The lyrics are more reality based; yes, they’re poetic because they’re lyrics, but they’re reality based. It’s the story of a soldier who’s dying, whose life flashes forward instead of backwards. It’s all the scenarios that he goes to. There’s a song called “LosAngeloser” which is something like you’ve never heard before. But Roy Bittan, and what Hugh Laurie plays on the beginning of “If I Can’t Have You” – the difference between that and anything Roy Bittan plays is night and day. All you want to do is reference to the past. There is no reference to the past on this album.” In a Youtube preview, Loaf has described himself as “captain of this ship” and said this is probably the most important album he’s done. “It is, and it is by far,” he confirms. “Some of the early reviews from the UK have come in and they’ve called it my best work to date.” Indeed, they have. Music journalists who’ve been closeted for a special sitting report seeing a man clearly proud of his