Written by Jim Steinman was one of rock’n’roll’s great visionaries, a raging maniac with a head full of noise, romance and death. As a composer and producer, he brought the drama of Broadway and the scale of opera to almost everything he touched. He was Richard Wagner in a leather jacket, Phil Spector without the homicidal tendencies, the power behind the throne who refused to stay hidden.
Born in New York in 1947, Steinman was weaned on rock’n’roll, girl groups and musical theatre. By the late 1960s he had summoned up his own creative touchstone in the shape of The Dream Engine, a fantastical dystopian sci-fi musical written as a college project, that would provide source material for many of his later songs.
It was another musical, More Than You Deserve, that marked the biggest turning point in his life. Among the cast was a hulking, wild-eyed Texan named Marvin Lee Aday, known to friends and family alike as Meat Loaf. The two of them hit it off and decided to work together. It would be the making of them both.
The story of how Meat and Steinman spent two years getting laughed out of every record label office in New York while hawking the album that eventually became Bat Out Of Hell has passed into legend. Even the album’s eventual producer, Todd Rundgren, found Steinman’s outrageous vision ridiculous. “When I heard the record, I rolled on the floor laughing,” Rundgren later said. “It was so out there.”
Of course, Bat Out Of Hell was released eventually, and became phenomenally successful and swept all before it. It did more than make Steinman wealthy – it was a springboard for his greatness. Throughout the 80s and 90s, he put his stamp on albums and songs by such a diverse range of artists as Bonnie Tyler, Air Supply, the Sisters Of Mercy, Celine Dion and, of course, his old friend and sometime enemy Meat Loaf. He was a master recycler, using and re-using parts or whole songs for different artists – everyone he worked with became part of the Jim Steinman Extended Universe.
Steinman’s ambitions in his later years were thwarted by illness, and when he died in 2020 the world became a less epic place. “When I sang Jim’s song, everyone stood on their feet and went crazy,” Meat Loaf said after his passing. He was referring to a single number from the musical they did all those years ago, but he could have been talking about Steinman’s whole career.
…and one to avoid
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