The exceptional life of Michael Lee Aday (Part2)

Early life and childhood: Poor fat Marvin

Meat Loaf's early life was difficult and filled with deep trauma. Marvin Lee Aday was born in Dallas, Texas, on the 27th of September 1947. His mother, Wilma Artie, was an English teacher and sang in her own Gospel group. While his father, Orvis Wesley Aday, was a former police officer and war veteran. After being wounded, his father was medically discharged from the US army during World War II; it was after this he developed a problem with alcohol.

Marvin's father soon became a full-blown alcoholic, and often, he and his mother would have to go in search of his father, who would disappear for days at a time. Marvin would have to drag his father out of bars and pubs late at night and frequently fell victim to his violent outbursts. 

It was Orvis that gave Meat Loaf the first piece of his nickname. Seeing his chubby newborn son, he remarked his bright red colour made him look like mincemeat. He cruelly insisted the nurses label his son's bassinet in the hospital nursery 'meat' and that Marvin be displayed front and centre so others could see his giant meaty offspring. 

The Loaf part of his name came later when he was in school. Playing gridiron, he accidentally trod on his coach's foot with his football shoe spikes and was promptly called a Meat Loaf, a nickname which stuck with him his whole life.

To say Marvin Aday had a difficult childhood would be an understatement. His big meaty stature and general clumsiness led him to be teased mercilessly. He was a big baby and as he grew and developed, his weight became a problem. By 12, he was 5 foot 2 inches (158 cms) and weighed 240 pounds (108kg). As a result, he was bullied and ostracised at school. His classmates' parents even told him that he was too fat to play with their children. 

As a result, he became timid and spent a lot of time alone. This one factor led him to become extremely shy and persistently suffer from social anxiety throughout his life. But later, he did say that this time alone allowed him to develop his creativity and imagination.

Another story Meat Loaf told about this period was about a radio advertisement for Levi jeans which used his name to say 'Poor fat Marvin couldn't wear Levi's.' This led to ever more teasing at school. He never forgot this and grew to hate his name. Later he legally changed his first name to Michael.

Meat Loaf was a boisterous child; he was always getting himself hurt and getting into trouble. He went through a stage at around five years of age where he persistently ran away from home. 

As a child, he was extraordinarily accident-prone and began gathering concussions like boy scout badges. Later in several interviews, he even bragged he had a total of 18 concussions in all shapes and sizes, from being hit in the head by different objects, on the football field, car accidents, running into things and through other scrapes he got into.

One of Meat Loaf's most famous tales that he fed to journalists with embellishments for his amusement was when he got hit in the head with a shot put. He was knocked out and spent a week in the hospital. He was proud of how tough it made him sound. He said many people wouldn't live to tell the tale, and he credited the accident with making him realise he had a voice. After being hit in the head, he said he found out he could sing.

Besides getting into trouble and playing sports, Meat Loaf also discovered acting. Through high school, he got a part in every school play. He found he had a talent for making people laugh, and he come out of his shell. He loved to connect to the audience and his fellow performers. Later, Meat Loaf reflected how going on stage was a good way of concealing his shyness.

When he was fourteen, he got a part as an extra in the 1962 remake of Rodgers & Hammerstein musical State Fair. He watched the filming on a friend's farm and was roped into becoming a part of the action. He also got a walk-on role in a local production of Carmen, and witnessing the reality of professional acting life; he fell in love with the rebellious nature of a career on the stage and screen. 

Soon he walked away from the football and baseball field and delved into performing getting involved in local bands.

His mother Wilma didn't want Meat to get into the music scene, but he did it anyway. The first song he ever sang was a cover of the Stones' Satisfaction, and he was promptly asked to tour with a local band.

Rebelling against his mother's wishes, he became the quintessential problematic teenager, staying out late and getting into trouble. Meat Loaf's mother promptly took away his car and grounded him. Losing his temper he slapped his mother; immediately remorseful and afraid of what his father would do if he found out, he promised to walk the line and never disrespect her again. Wilma made sure he kept this promise.

After high school Meat Loaf enrolled in Lubbock Christian University, where he threw himself back into sports like baseball.

Just when you think Meat Loaf's childhood and adolescence couldn't get any worse, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was sick for many years and eventually passed away when ML was 19.

Music journalist Mick Hall in his biography Like a bat out of hell: the larger than life story of Meat Loaf, describes the events after the death of Wilma. At the funeral, Meat was so insane with grief he tried to lift Wilma out of her coffin in the funeral parlour and yelled out for them not to take her away from him. He blocked out the funeral from his memory. He told Rolling Stone many years later that it all felt like he was in a movie.

The truth was that Meat Loaf had been in denial and had run from the confronting situation of his mother's terminal illness. After Wilma's death, Meat Loaf's relationship with his father went from bad to worse. Meat's father, Orvis, was even worse at coping with the emotions surrounding the death of his wife than his son. Orvis went on one of his drinking binges and took everything out on his son.

Wilma had left Meat Loaf a small inheritance, but Orvis was trying to take control over it. So Meat went before a judge where the money was given directly to him. Orvis became more unstable and hurled abuse at his son. One night, he grabbed a kitchen knife, and tried to stab Meat. 

Luckily Meat Loaf dodged his father's drunken attempted murder and fought back. Later ML told how he had to fight for his life, breaking his father's nose and three of his ribs. He left his childhood home that night. Meat walked out of the house in nothing but his t-shirt and shorts, got into his '65 Chevy, and drove off.

He took his inheritance from Wilma and rented an apartment in Dallas where he closed the door on the outside world and didn't open it for three months. Wrapped inside his grief during those months, he slowly came out of it with a strange new resolve and purpose. He took his pain and loss and fed it into his psyche and desires. Whenever he had a song, he knew what he was singing about and who he was singing for. So he bought a ticket to LA to find out what he could do with his talent.

Early career: Finding his way

The early months in LA for Meat Loaf were still heavy with grief and sadness. He rented a small apartment on Ventura Boulevard and felt incredibly lonely and sad over his first Christmas and New Year alone. But it was music that helped him to find focus in his life.

For anyone wanting to get into music or acting 1960's Los Angeles was the place to be. The swinging 60s were filled with an energy of new sounds, bands and creative opportunities. He began to socialise at the Balboa Youth Centre in Encino, where he watched many contemporary bands who still hadn't made it to Texas. He saw Jimmy Hendrix, then the Yardbirds featuring a young Jimmy Page. He fell under the spell of Janis Joplin with her massive emotional voice, and performances were a tremendous inspiration to him.

While singing a cover of Janis's Piece of my heart, he caught the eye of LA garage band musician Gary Spagnolo who was a part of the local trendy psychedelic scene. Gary hooked up Meat with a band called The Prunes, and they recorded two songs that Meat had written by himself. He sang the songs as hard as he could, and even though he wasn't a songwriter, he made them work, and people began to notice his powerful and expressive voice.

In 1968, Meat Loaf formed his first band named Meat Loaf Soul. The band started off doing small gigs around the place and opened for Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Who and Buffalo Springfield.

Soon, Meat was courted by record business executives looking for new talent to exploit. He hid his insecurities behind a new rock star persona he invented for himself, strutting around the stage with confidence, showing off his big voice and bigger than life sweaty extravagant showmanship.

Not wanting to be taken for a ride by smooching record execs, Meat Loaf Soul began touring along the west coast, opening shows for well-established acts like Van Morrison, Janice Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Meat was sleeping in the back of his car up in the Highland Hills, but he would get a hotel room when he made some money. He said he made ends meet doing little odds and ends, including dodgy things like selling hallucinogens. After all, it was 1968, the summer of love filled with a new rebellious generation of recreational drug-taking, weed-smoking and alcohol consuming hippies.

Meat Loaf continued to concentrate on his band, who were performing wherever they could. They would load up their gear into a truck and drive 36 hours to Michigan to play with bands like the Iggy Pop fronted Stooges. His band's lineup changed regularly, as did their name; they even tried calling themselves Popcorn Blizzard. But they kept going on the road for the next couple of years. They opened for Ted Nugent and played with MC5.

As Meat Loaf was making his name on the music scene, he was also being offered roles in musical theatre. In between gigs and jobs, a friend of his had lined up some work parking cars outside the Aquarius Theater, where a production of the new musical Hair was playing.

Meat's friend introduced him to Greg Carlos in the car park, who was playing the lead in Hair. Striking up a conversation, he told Greg he was trying to put a band together and that he sang and was invited to audition as the production was going on tour. 

Seeing a queue of hundreds of hopefuls, he refused to wait for hours for an audition. So Greg took him to the front of the line and introduced him to the director Armand Coullet.

Meat told the story of how, when meeting Coullet, he was asked what he wanted to do. Meat shrugged and said he was trying out for a job in the parking lot. He made everyone laugh, and now they were curious to hear him sing. He sang a blues number which sounded like something epic coming from his gospel voice. That night he wasn't parking cars outside rather inside, watching and preparing to perform his part in the show.

Meat Loaf and Hair were a perfect fit; they were rebellious, trailblazers who didn't look or sound like anything else. Hair: the American tribal love-rock musical was about a Vietnam war draftee who befriends a tribe of hippies on his way to sign up for the army. The hippies introduce him to marijuana, LSD and their network of unorthodox relationships and anti-war draft evasion. Meat's soulful voice shined out from the chaos of the then-experimental new age music. Both Meat and Hair were a massive hit.

By the time the tour got to Detroit, Meat's performance review was on the front page of the local Detroit Free Press paper, and it got the attention of record companies. The legendary Motown records approached him. Meat met with Harry Balk, who offered him a record deal but with a condition. Meat wanted to form a duo with a girl named Stoney, a fellow cast member from Hair who he thought was one of the best singers he'd ever heard. Meat got approval from Harry and was elated at the prospect of recording his first album.

Motown initially saw Stoney & Meatloaf as the perfect addition to their new rock imprint, Rare Earth which was supposed to branch out and showcase new non-Afro American talent in the Motown signature style and genre.

But Motown wasn't like other record companies. Singers were just singers, and if they didn't sell records, they were unceremoniously dumped. 

While Stoney & Meat Loaf's album launched with a bit of a buzz and excitement, listeners were enthusiastic at first. But the public was confused when they discovered the duo was white and felt as if they had been misled. So through no fault of his Meat Loaf found himself back to square one.

But just when Meat was wondering what to do next, he got a call from Hair director Armand Coullet to say the production was going to Broadway and if Meat wanted to come.

Unfortunately, Hair in New York was a disaster. The producers had fired half of the cast, so everyone who turned up to replace them found themselves in very turbulent waters. After a few days of negativity and stress, Meat Loaf left town and joined another production in Pittsburgh and another in Buffalo.

Just as he wondered if he was destined to move from town to town singing Aquarius forever, he did a few other shows, including an off-Broadway gospel musical titled Rainbow in New York produced by the legendary NY impresario Joseph Papp.

Under Papp's wing, Meat Loaf worked for the New York Public Theatre as a part of the Shakespeare in the Park Festival. He starred in As You Like It alongside Raul Julia, Meryl Streep and Mary Beth Hurt.

Meat knew he wasn't a traditional thespian, and after the production, he headed to Kansas City and back to singing.

Years later, he told the story that he had to sing during his Shakespeare in the Park role, and his voice drew the attention of some opera patrons. They approached him and offered him $60,000 a year to train for five years as an opera singer and then debut at the Metropolitan Opera house. But he refused after he realised the controlling nature of opera conductors. He was too rebellious to be limited by others. So he refused. But if he had taken advantage of this classical training, he may have been able to take better care of his voice.

In the post-Shakespeare in the Park period, he auditioned for a part in the new musical Grease. He got the region and was literally on the way to sign his work contract when he met Jim Rado, the creator of Hair who had a new play and wanted Meat to star in it. Rado sent Meat to talk to his agent Jeff Hunter. And before Jim could do anything, Jeff told him about a different project. 

More Than You Deserve was an experimental theatre piece produced by Joe Papp, which was even more crazy and out there than Hair had been. The auditions were happening on the same day in the East Village auditorium. So Meat walked down to the audition, which turned out to be probably the best decision he would make in his life.

When Meat got to the building, the only person there was a strange-looking guy named Jim Steinman. The wealthy young intellectual rebel who had convinced perplexed academics from the prestigious Amherst College into allowing him to produce experimental theatre while also nearly flunking out of the school. And who now had caught the eye of Joe Papp, who was producing More Than You Deserve.  

Meat sang a song from the album he recorded with Stoney titled: I'd love to be as heavy as Jesus. Jim Steinman quipped that Meat might be as heavy as two Jesuses when he finished. Apart from Steinman's sarcasm, this first meeting was the beginning of one of the most successful collaborations in contemporary rock music history.

As soon as Steinman heard Meat Loaf sing, he fell in love with his voice and immediately thought Meat should be singing Wagnerian rock opera. Jim said that Meat Loaf had his dream voice. So it was like an epiphany. Mear was perfect. The only problem was he didn't have any idea what. 

Steinman didn't know what to do. So he had them write a part for him in More Than You Deserve. After singing the main show-stopping song in the performances, the audience would burst into thunderous applause. So then Jim discovered that Meat was a great singer and an outstanding actor. From that moment, Jim knew Meat would be perfect for performing his songs because Meat would be able to act out what Steinman had in his imagination.

Later in an interview, Steinman described Meat Loaf's singing as witnessing paranormal activity. His voice was booming; he made the room shake, his eyes would roll into his head so you'd only see the whites, and his hands would contort. It was a spectacle to be beheld. In the performances with his touring band, the Neverland express Steinman said Meat would get so worked up that his body would sweat so much that there would be steam emanating from him, like an athlete working out in a gym.

So after Joseph Papp was called in to hear Meat, he was offered a part in More Than You Deserve. The bizarre plot was about a US army major stationed in Vietnam who falls in love with a nymphomanic news reporter after other soldiers gang-raped her. Meat was offered the part of the maniac soldier named Rabbit, a good-hearted junkie conscript with an obsession with blowing up people with grenades.

In the middle of the show, Rabbit gets a letter from his mother telling him his wife has left him, and that's when Meat sings the song More Than You Deserve. The title song was a showstopper, and from the first time, Meat sang, it immediately got a standing ovation.

For Steinman, this was the first sign of what would happen next. Meat Loaf was the catalyst and cornerstone for Steinman's most successful compositions. Meat Loaf would become the embodiment of Steinman's entire creative universe.

More than you deserve was a song about an outsider, an outcast in love who not only loses but is also humiliated. It's a song for anyone who has ever been bullied, left out, betrayed or unaccepted in life. 

Meat Loaf took the pathetic figure of Rabbit and gave him a deep sense of pathos. He wasn't simply a man whose wife cheated on him several times, and with several people instead, he became a natural person who a cruel destiny had thwarted. 

There was something of pure innocence, and deep hurt in the way ML sang More than you deserve. In the hands of any other performer, it could have become something of a cruel farce, but Meat Loaf gave it a real sense of emotion which turned it into something different. It was still very theatrical, yet it had a genuine emotional heart that connected to the audience.

Steinman would spend the next forty years exploring the theme of the heartbroken outsider in his songs, from the yearning of those who didn't have and never will, the hurt of betrayal, and the romantic melodrama of desire and obsession, otherworldliness, fantasy and broken unrequited love.

More Than You Deserve is the song that inspires the songs from one of the most popular albums of all time Bat Out of Hell. It led to the creation of Two Out of Three ain't bad, For crying out loud, I'm going to love her for the both of us and later I'd do anything for love (but I won't do that). An intense broken, hearted epic genre that Meat Loaf brought to life with his superb acting and pureness of voice.

The exceptional life of Michael Lee Aday (Part 1)

Since I heard the news of the death of Meat Loaf last month, I felt somehow compelled to go back and listen to his music after realising his performing career spanned an astounding six decades. Now it's been over a month later, I'm still in a Meat Loaf rabbit hole, and I refuse to come out of it.

I've been obsessively listening to all possible interviews, t.v appearances, performances from the '70s to the '90s. I'm still working my way through. Meat Loaf's collaborative and solo albums, including one of the most popular albums of all time. There are also his numerous acting credits from cameos, cinematographic music videos, timeless cult classics and the best character acting you'll ever see.

I've had his music constantly playing either in the background or on my headphones to the point I hear his songs ringing in my ears during the night as I sleep. I had to stop listening to Meat Loaf before going to bed as it simply wouldn't let me sleep.

I listened to his very first theatre work with Jim Steinman and was blown away by the power of his early voice, which was truly epic. I have found fantastic stripped back versions of his songs that show off every syllable of Meat Loaf's emotion and expression.

I've watched all of the interviews I can find on Youtube, from crazy interviews on quirky German t.v in the '80s, interviews on stuffy British t.v talk shows and even watched his exquisitely cringy but strangely good early movies Dead Ringer and Roadie. And I have loved it all.

I even found and listened to the very first album he recorded for Motown in 1971, duetting with female vocalist Shaun Murphy. It was such a fun and it showed off the talents of two beautifully talented younge singers who had been working together singing in the musical Hair.

I also listened to all of the songs he recorded with 1970s American psychedelic guitar rock legend Ted Nugent which were all so blissfully rock it hurts to listen to and makes you wish for a 70's rock comeback. I have to admit I even love his 1980s records eventhough it hasn't aged well but it's still Meat Loaf. All of his work has his personality written all over it, and if you are a fan, you will always recognize it and love it.

In a single month, I have officially become a Meat Head. It's a shame I was so late to the party. It took his death to realise how many things of value he made. I'm afraid this is the same old story for me, its happened before. I became a fan of Roy Orbison as a teenager in the 90s when he released his last album and soon after had a massive heart attack and died. I then made my way back through his music and now the Big O is firmly in my music-loving heart.

As I continue to work through Meat Loaf's impressive out put, I read endless articles about his life, biographies and his autobiography. Doing this I have gradually unearthed an artist of exceptional versatility, scope, determination and work ethic. His life was filled with difficulty, but he overcame everything, and the sheer volume he created is astounding. Now that he is gone his fans can be grateful to have so much to remember him by.

It is heartbreaking to think the world has lost such an artist, but then the life, philosophy and creations he left behind are great examples of his creativity. This man's passion, inventiveness, and fearlessness are examples for all of us.

I was born in 1977, the year that Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman's collaborative album A bat out of Hell came out and became one of the highest-selling albums of all time. So I was blissfully unaware of his early music. I recall seeing the album's cover and thinking it was heavy metal, a genre that would never interest any pop-loving teenager.

The '80s saw him fall into a kind of obscurity. I mean, he was still making albums and touring, but he had problems to work through, and there was no possible way anything that followed Bat Out of Hell could have ever been matched in any way.

He once highlighted a local music festival in my native Western Australia in 1991. The Bindoon Music festival was the most infamous event in WA history. I recall seeing hoards of bikers revving their hogs as they passed by my house towards Bindoon outside the city of Perth for a few days of beer, rock, and god knows what else. The festival was later banned after annual drug busts, gang violence, assaults, and total mayhem got too out of hand. I shudder to think what poor Meat Loaf had to put up with and see. I'm sure he didn't have a great impression of Western Australia after experiencing the chaos of Bindoon.

His story is endearing. Marvin Lee Aday was the introverted, shy, overweight kid everyone who everyone made fun of at school. Yet he followed his dream to become an actor and later became one of the most extravagant rock star personas ever. His charisma, big-hearted performances, down to earth nature and powerful gospel voice made everyone fall in love with him.

Meat Loaf was passionate, magnificently rebellious, sensitive, vivid and ultimately highly dramatic. His early live performance videos make you want to get a time machine to the 1970s and go to see him rocking in small smoky venues around LA and Detroit, where he honed the skills he later used to immortalise the characters in Jim Steinman songs. Or at least to see him on stage singing in Hair or in an experimental Steinman musical singing the first song that sparked the journey. That first song was More than you deserve who when audiences heard Meat sing it would erupt into a standing ovation. It was the song that made Jim Steinman realise not only did M.L have a voice but that he was also a talented actor. Meat Loaf's early voice was phenomenal so very gospel and soulful which still makes listening to them today a deeply emotional experience.

His performances were filled with loads of heart, which he seemed to wear on his sleeve, and people loved him for it. Even in his later career, when the voice had changed and when it occasionally let him down, he still gave everything he had.

I found a recording from the 1970s on Youtube of his raw recorded studio voice with no instrumentation, and it was so beautiful and undeniably sexy. I imagine how many women were turned on by his voice and performances. How many kept their eyes shut and imagined ML the whole time.

His performances of the songs from his breakout album are my absolute favourites. There is no sign of the shy, overweight kid being teased in school. Instead, he became an extravagant character acting out the melodrama of every song written by Jim Steinman.

The Steinman Meat Loaf vision was a completely new genre of musical, a kind of extravagant rock and roll romanticism. In the 1970s, Meat Loaf strutted across the stage gesturing like a man possessed, belting out the fantastic songs that tell stories of heartbreak, passion, teenage lust, disappointments, unrequited love in a kind of album for anyone who has been lied to, disappointed or cheated on in life. His stage show and rock persona were carefully choreographed and rehearsed with Steinman, who had a specific vision for his music.

Meat Loaf and Steinman were two exceptionally talented outsiders. Meat was immense in voice, stature, and weight. He was someone who was constantly rebelling against society's expectations.

While long-haired, pasty-faced Steinman lived a nocturnal existence like a vampire and wrote experimental theatre talking producers into staging long-winded productions usually involving Jim Morrison style spoken word poetry, nudity and violence. He had a perchance for dressing in leather, wearing gloves during performances and loved pushing his performances to the extreme. Steinman once told the story of the first Bat Out of Hell tour where he cut his finger nails so short and played the piano keys so hard so that he would be able to bleed over they keyboard.

The two could not have been more different. Meat Loaf was a tall, booming, rough, and tumble Texan who had fashioned a career in music and theatre based on little more than his raw talent and personality. He left home after the premature death of his mother and a violent attack from his alcoholic father who tried to kill him with a kitchen knife. M.L had to fight for everything in his life even against his own father.

Steinman on the other hand was from a wealthy family but chose to live a bohemian life writing music and working in theatre. Highly intelligent and convincing Steinman had talked his way into creating experimental theatre for a final project at his prestigious ivy league university, despite nearly flunking out of all of his classes.

Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman wrote Bat Out of Hell, which is a one of a kind album. Seven tracks range from 5 to 10 minutes long, each telling its own specific story. Meat Loaf acts out each of the tales by exploring the nature of freedom, passion, love, teenage angst, heartbreak, mortality, violence, sex, lust and motorbikes.

Bat is one of the top five all-time selling albums of all time and has sold over 43 million copies worldwide. According to the Guinness book of world records, Bat out of Hell is the highest selling record of all time in the UK.

There has been a bit of a Meat Loaf renaissance since he passed. Like myself, a new generation is discovering his music, and the fans are going back and reconnecting in a kind of collective grief and nostalgia.

A week after his death, his first album, A bat out of Hell, leapt back up the charts; it reached the 7th position in the album classifications in Australia.

Later Steinmanl adapted the songs from the Bat album into a musical in 2017. Steinman's original concept for his songs was to create a futuristic rock version of Peter Pan, and it has been a great success. Steinman passed away in 2021, and Bat the musical is currently touring the UK and next year is set to tour worldwide.

Since Meat Loaf's death, his fans have posted endless new videos on Youtube. Dozens of old interviews and vintage clips are resurfacing in memory of their beloved Meat. Working through all of the material online, I can slowly piece together the complex character of the man behind Meat Loaf, that of Michael Lee Aday.

Michael chose to change his name, shedding the persona of poor fat Marvin that haunted him through school. Aday, in reality, was an even more fascinating and contradicting character than his onstage rock persona.

Michael Aday was a highly driven man who desired to learn something new every day. He was as disciplined as the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers; his purpose in life was to improve himself and get better every day. He thought he somehow had been a terrible person in his past and felt like he needed to redeem himself. He certainly wasn't afraid to call out hypocrisy, and he didn't suffer fools gladly. He had a hate-hate relationship with the press, who he considered idiotic and didn't respect critics. Yet he always read the reviews and news articles about his work and sometimes took them personally.

It wasn't evident what specific lousy behaviour he was trying to redeem himself from; perhaps he was referring to his adolescence. The Bat out of Hell tour sounded kind of wild as he dabbled in drugs and alcohol to combat the stress and pressure surrounding the immense success. In the 1977 world tour, he was headlining and performing two-hours six nights a week, including an extreme vocal and physical workout. He damaged his voice with the sheer volume of work he was demanded to do. And later the trauma of his childhood, legal problems with his record company and his inability to cope with fame led to him having a breakdown.

Meat Loaf always had a reputation as being a tyrant with his bands and was always obsessively working himself and those around him hard. Like most creatives, he was plagued with self-doubt and anxiety. There is no doubt he had a lot of pent up anger from his childhood, and he did try to run away from it until it all caught up with him later on in life.

Towards the end of his career, many people accused him of losing relevance and his voice. He continued to tour well into his 60s and was the creator of some cringy faux pas and embarrassing remarks. While participating in the Donald Trump hosted US reality show, The Apprentice, he lost his temper with a fellow participant. He unleashed a horrible outpour of anger, rage and f-bombs, which really didn't endear him to the public and perhaps signalled a problem with unresolved anger.

Meat Loaf once stated that he didn't believe in climate change and suggested Greta Thunberg had been brainwashed, a comment he later apologised for. His cause of death is also a little controversial as people begin to question whether or not he had been vaccinated against Covid.

But despite any controversies, there is no doubt Michael Lee Aday was a man of exceptional talent who punished himself physically and mentally in every one of his performances. As an actor, he was a literal chameleon disappearing into his roles. He appeared in over 60 feature films and tv series, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Fight Club, Wayne's World, the Spice Girl movie, Dr House, Monk, Elementary and Crazy in Alabama.

The original 1977 Bat out of Hell stage show was filled with acrobatics; the songs were positively operatic, he acted, choreographed and pushed his body, voice and heart to the limits in every performance. Often he would collapse from exhaustion after a concert and regularly had an oxygen tank ready for him as he also had asthma.

Throughout his long career, Meat Loaf broke bones, strained his back, his knees were shot, he gave himself 18 concussions, he once fell from a third storey balcony, he lost and damaged his voice persistently through the years. His head injuries gave him vertigo, and he had to have four back surgeries, the last in 2018 left him with significant pain issues.

After collapsing on stage in 2003, he was diagnosed with a heart condition called Wolff Parkinson White which caused an irregular heartbeat, and he underwent surgery in London.

Michael Aday always spoke about the importance of love, kindness, humility, and connecting with others. Ultimately he had a generous heart which he gave willingly in his performances and was constantly working on himself, and for that alone, he should be admired.

Meat loaf's most significant legacy is something we all should keep in mind. Aday once mentioned how often people are limited by their own expectations. His advice to everyone was to try everything you can, never give up, and put your heart into everything you do, which will ultimately take you somewhere you'd never imagine.

The best example of this philosophy is Meat Loaf's own journey. Steinman and Meat Loaf started writing a Bat out of Hell in 1974. Their album concept was rejected four times by every major music company in the US. They managed to find a producer who believed in their work and recorded the album in 1975-76.

Even after recording and publishing through Cleveland International/Epic Records in 1977, no one was willing to spend money to promote it.

So Steinman and Meat toured around the US in any venue that would have them for nine months, gradually building their fan base. Only two US radio stations were willing to play their super-long songs, nonetheless they believed in the album so much that they kept working.

It was only after Meat Loaf’s appearance on SNL that the album began to sell. If it weren't for their determination Bat Out of Hell would never have existed.

And thank goodness they kept going.