A Lesson in Economics

“The songs are myths, panoramas, vistas, voyages — voyages to a country of lost girls and golden boys who refuse to grow up. It’s a land everybody wants to get to, a rock kingdom in which the major theme is: all revved up with no place to go.” —Jim Steinman

Selling it by the pound wasn’t easy, however. As Steinman saw the ivory keys of a beautiful downtown Burbank piano stain red with the blood of his own fingertips, he gazed up at Meat Loaf, who stopped bellowing momentarily to give femmé vocaliser Ellen Foley a dramatically relevant French kiss. This wasn’t going t be easy. The Warners A&R man thought this Bat Out Of Hell project had “a lot of energy”. This equated to a polite dismissal, like when teachers would stroll up after one of Jim’s high school plays and say, “Wow! How’d you guys remember all those words?”

The Warners guy was Lenny Waronker, famed for his work with such soft-rock genius boys as Randy Newman. Years before he’d rejected one of Steinman’s projects, a sort of kung-fu rock movie idea. “I thought because he liked Randy Newman he’d love my stuff,” recalls Jim. “He hated it. He thought it was too violent. He said, ‘The world doesn’t need this.’ I could tell he was longing for the days when Warners was full of artists like Joni Mitchell …”

“All I can say is: You can’t take this shit seriously” —Meat Loaf.

“IMPLACABLE AS A SALES TAX” —Norman Mailer describing Bill Burroughs.

A year rehearsing at New York’s Ansomia Hotel. Unveiling. “We didn’t have a demo,” sighs Steinman, remembering how resolutely uncommercial the project seemed back then, before the more snide among us took the easy option of equating massive sales with the crass and obvious (Think: a huge guy doing 8-minute complex Spectorisms? Commercial? In 1977? Come on! That’s inspiration). “It was met at the piano and Meat singing in these tiny offices, like for Clive Davis at Arista. Me pounding away and bleeding, Meat sweating like a maniac. No one could deal with it, they couldn’t figure out what it would sound like when it was finished.”

They began the deal at RCA (“The worst record company in the world,” avows Steinman), but that company refused the only producer who was both interested and to the duo’s liking. Big time twiddlers such as Glyn Johns and Bob Erzin didn’t want to know or weren’t contactable. producer Todd Rundgren put up some bread and sold the idea to his label, Bearsville. But the album went over a certain budget, which meant re-audtioning for parent company Warners! Insanely, they said they’d issue it but with no promo. In the bowels of despair, rescue came via Steve Popovich, Stan Snyder and Sam Lederman, three CBS breakaway execs who formed Cleveland International Records and licensed it thru CBS label Epic. So Epic/CBS, who initially gave the thumbs down to Bat, ended up with it anyway, more from good luck than sound judgement …

Starting form the outside, there is, the sleeve, created by Richard Corben, about who, a few words …