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How Meat Loaf Became Music’s Most Unlikely Megaseller

A little over 50 years ago, in the early summer of 1971, a pair of singers who’d gotten their big break in the roadshow version of the musical Hair made their debut on the Billboard charts. The duo’s breakthrough hit, “What You See Is What You Get,” was a groovy kind of electric soul—very on-trend for a year of classic chart-toppers by the likes of Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, and Sly Stone. The single was on a Motown subsidiary label called Rare Earth, and it made its debut on the Hot 100 and Soul Singles charts virtually simultaneously. It didn’t do much on the pop side, peaking at No. 71 in June. But it did considerably better at R&B, cracking the Soul chart’s Top 40 at No. 36. Which is remarkable, because both singers were white. (In its heyday, Motown’s promotional team really could get anything on the charts.) Even more remarkable, one of the two singers was the Dallas-born Marvin Lee Aday, who already went by the moniker Meat Loaf. His short-lived duo, with the woman singer Shaun “Stoney” Murphy, was called Stoney and Meatloaf.

The fact that Meat Loaf once charted R&B is only one of the many improbabilities of his decades-long career, which came to an end with his death on Thursday night at age 74. Of course, Meat (who preferred that his friends call him that, and not, as the New York Times is wrongly alleged to have described him, Mr. Loaf) would soon become better known for a different professional pairing: his partnership with the brilliantly bombastic songwriter Jim Steinman. That pairing generated the Meat Loaf–branded, Steinman-powered and Todd Rundgren–produced 1977 sleeper blockbuster Bat Out of Hell, which by some measures is the fourth-biggest-selling album of all time worldwide at 44 million copies. Global sales stats are notoriously fudgable—in the U.S., the Recording Industry Association of America has Bat certified for sales of 14 million—but what is inarguable is that Steinman’s and Meat Loaf’s passion project wildly exceeded everybody’s expectations, including theirs. Not bad for two guys told by industry legend Clive Davis that Jim couldn’t write and Meat couldn’t sing.

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