Day 21: In Twenty-One Days, Meat Will Own Your Heart

Nutter Loaf dragged himself out of NYC and up to Woodstock in February 1979, to begin work on the follow-up to Bat I, Bad for Good. The label, being a business, wanted a "ditto" album and they wanted it yesterday. Erhm, hello? Bat I took five years to make. It was still in heavy rotation on the music circuit. Meat suspected he and Steinman were dancing that fine line of market over-saturation, and he was stridently opposed to putting out copy album. However, by the time he showed up in Woodstock, Steinman and Rundgren were already working on the new album. He voiced his concerns, pushed back on segues, melodies, and entire songs that were just ... wrong. His one-time co-conspirators in greatness made him feel relegated to "just the vocalist." 

You do recall he's a wee-bit of a control freak, yes?

If ever there was a time to let the Meaty madness rage without interference, that would have been a good time.  

Wuv, twue wuv, doesn't believe in convenience.

Meat needed a place to live during the Bad for Good debacle. Enter the beautiful beatnik single-mother who is the go-to gal for all the rock stars in residence at Woodstock. Leslie Edmonds cooked, cleaned, babysat, and pretty much did whatever grunt work would help her pay the bills, including showing the newcomers around so they could find a place to live. Eventually, she became an assistant studio manager. Yep, that still required a lot of grunt work.

Twenty-one days after they met, Meat married Leslie atop a snow-capped mountain with a doddering old priest who caught his robes on fire during the ceremony. Crepe arms raised, oblivious to the fire licking up his robes, the priest appeared very much like a fiery Bat Out of Hell. It's a good omen that will bond Meat and Leslie for twenty-odd years.

It takes longer than that for Meat Loaf to eventually release the song "Bad for Good" on  

Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose.