320 Hello Meat Loaf - You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth

Chart  entered  : 20  May  1978

Chart  peak  : 33

Number  of  hits : 25

After  Evelyn's  underground  smash  come  two  singles  that  were  played  to  death   on  R1  that  half  term  though  in  neither  case  did  the  single  crack  the  Top  30    ( and  a  third , "Almost  Summer"  by  Mike  Love's  moonlighting outfit,  Celebration  wasn't  a  hit  at  all. )  I  sometimes  wonder  if     pre-download,   records  could  be  over-exposed  on  the  radio  so  that  people  got  tired  of  them  before  they  had  a  chance  to  buy  them.

Michael  Lee  Aday  was  born  in  Dallas  in  1947. He  picked  up  his  nickname  at  school  and  used  it  for  his  first  band  in  the  mid-sixties  "Meat Loaf  Soul"  who  once  opened  for  Them.  The  band  morphed  into  "Floating  Circus"  and  according  to  wiki  released  a  single  "Once  Upon  A  Time"  but  I've  found  no  corroboration  for that. With  the  band  making  no  headway Meat  as  we'll  call  him  went  into  the  Los  Angeles  production  of  Hair.

Meat  made  enough of  an  impression  that  he  and  female  co-star  Shaun "Stoney " Murphy  were  invited  to  record  an  album  for  Motown  subsidiary  Rare  Earth  in  1971.  The  lead  single , credited  to  "Stoney  and  Meatloaf"  was  "What  You  See  Is  What  You  Get" . Shaun's  Tina  Turner  like  screech  is  a  better  fit   for  the  urban  soul  backing  than  Meat's  semi-operatic  declamations  and  without  much  of  a  tune  the  record  is  a  bit  hard on  the  ears. It  reached  number  71 in  the  US. The  follow  up  single  "It  Takes  All  Kinds of  People"  has  a  more  classically  Motown  sound  and  is  a  better  song  but  Meat  still  sounds  a  bit  uncomfortable. The  album  stiffed  and  didn't  do  much  better  when  re-released  to  cash  in  on  his  success. Murphy  was  retained  but  recorded  nothing  more  and  eventually  left  the  label  to  work  with  Bob  Seger ; Meat  was  cast  adrift  once  more.

He  re-joined  Hair  on  Broadway  but  was  attracted  to  a  smaller  production ,  More  Than  You  Deserve  a  risque  Vietnam-set  sex  drama  written  by  the  little  known  Jim  Steinman. Their  life-changing  encounter  took  place  when  Meat  successfully  auditioned  for  a  role.  A  single  of  the  main  theme  song, a  country-flavoured  piano  ballad,  was  lined  up  but  its  release  was  cancelled  when  the  show  prematurely  closed  at  the  beginning  of  1974. Meat  would  re-record  it  for  his  1981  album  "Dead  Ringer".

Meat  moved  on  to  The  Rocky  Horror  Show   when  it  opened  in  Los  Angeles  in  March  1974  playing  two  parts  Eddie   and  Dr  Scott  and  was  signed  up  for  the  film  version  though  only  to  play  the  former  part. Meat  had  one  set  piece  song,  the  rock  and  roll  pastiche  "Whatever  Happened  To  Saturday  Night". The  high  vocal  range  of   the  song  had  defeated  previous  actors  including  its  writer  Richard  O' Brien.

At  the  same  time  Meat  was  working  with  Steinman  on  what  was  to  become  "Bat  Out  Of  Hell".  It  was  developed  from  three  songs  Steinman  had  written  for  a  science  fiction  musical  based  on  Peter  Pan  called  Neverland. The  two  guys  started  recording  it  in  autumn  1975  with  Todd  Rundgren   who  thought  it  an  hilariously  over-the-top  parody  of  Bruce  Springsteen's  work  as  producer  and  members  of  Utopia  and  the  E  Street  Band  providing  the  musical  muscle. Despite  these  connections  they  found  it  hard  to  impress  record  companies  who  couldn't  see  any  potential  in  these  melodramatic  songs  and  the  strange-looking  duo, overweight  rocker  and  black-clad  geek  that  were  presenting  them. During  this  protracted  struggle  Meat  paid  the  rent  with  a  stint  in  the  Broadway  musical  Rockabye  Hamlet  and  vocals  on  Ted  Nugent's  Free-For-All  album  although  it's  not  him  on  the  single  Dog  Eat  Dog.

Cleveland,  a  subdivision  of  Epic, eventually  took  a  chance  on  the  album  and  it  was  finally  released  in  October  1977. Meat  and  Steinman  went  out  on  the  road  to  promote  it.

"You  Took  The  Words  Right  Out  of  My  Mouth"  was  originally  released  at  the  same  time  as  the  album  but  wasn't  a  hit.  It  wasn't  released  as  a  single  in  the  UK  until  after  his  legendary  appearance  on  Old  Grey  Whistle  Test   early  in  1978   ( although  he  didn't  perform  this  song ). Like  all  the  songs  on  the  LP  it's  a  hymn  to  the  teenage  sexual  experience  although  as  Rundgren  gleefully  points  out  it's  likely  that  Steinman  rarely  experienced  the  sort  of  moments  he  was  writing  about. The  song  takes  its  primary  musical  cues  from  Phil  Spector  with  the  glockenspiels , massed  high  backing  vocals,  Be  My  Baby  drums   and  cavernous  production  though  its  multi-part  structure  owes  more  to  the  duo's  background  in  musical  theatre. Meat's  vocal  meshes  perfectly  with  the  song's  stop-start  tempo  suggesting  a  stallion  impatiently  pounding  the  ground  with  its  hooves. Its  fairly  low  placing  might  be  down  to  the  fact  that  people  were  buying  the  whole  album  instead (  where  you  could  hear  the  full  version  with  its  beyond-pretentious  spoken  intro ).