Monday, April 26, 2010

Day 16: The Wolf at Meat's Door

It's the early 1980s and Meat Loaf was being eviscerated by anyone and everyone who had made an investment in his career. Fortunately, he still had a recording contract. One that required another album for Epic. Meat showed up with a selection of songs. The label PtB shook his head and strongly suggested that Meat write his own songs for the release.

Write? Write his own songs? 
Erm.

Meat's crumbling ego had already accepted song writing wasn't his forte. His career as an actor and a singer was based on bringing the words and music he had been provided to life, imbuing them with sentiment and meaning. His job was to pull the audience into the experience, not to score the production. He admitted then (and still admits today) that he's not really a singer either; he's an actor who happens to sing. Getting a track "right" required multiple takes until he found the character, the persona who owned the song. Once he became the character, he understood the lyrics and knew if the music sounded "right." Like an editor with a manuscript, he had an instinct for what worked. He could scream about point out the flaws in arrangements, demand suggest transition changes, even tweak a lyric here or there.

Write? Write his own songs?
Ack.

Given his history as a control freak, one might think he'd have been all over that suggestion. Nope. Not so much. There was a certain logic behind writing his own songs seeing as how his former songwriter was suing his ass, ensuring Epic wanted nothing to do with him, and handing out hits like "Making Love Out of Nothing at All" to Air Supply and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to Bonnie Tyler.

Meat went home and asked his wife what the hell he should do.. 
Leslie looked around the devastation caused by greed and, with a wee bit of anger, they wrote, 
"The Wolf at Your Door."

2 comments:

  1. It's good he had someone in his corner. Can't believe they took his Rocky Horror jacket. The outrage!

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  2. Thirty years later, you'd think that sucker would'a popped up on eBay by now. ~le sigh~

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