10/30/2025
WOW! We love this album!
On this day in 1977, the Meat Loaf LP “Bat Out of Hell” debuted on the US Billboard 200 Albums Chart at #185 (October 29)
The classic rock LP written by the brilliant Jim Steinman was developed from a musical, Neverland, a futuristic rock version of Peter Pan, which Steinman wrote for a workshop in 1974, and performed at the Kennedy Center Music Theatre Lab in 1977.
Steinman and Meat Loaf, who were touring with the National Lampoon show, felt that three songs were "exceptional" and Steinman began to develop them as part of a seven-song set they wanted to record as an album.
The three songs were "Bat Out of Hell", "Heaven Can Wait" and "The Formation of the Pack", which was later retitled "All Revved Up with No Place to Go".
Steinman and Meat Loaf had difficulty finding a record company willing to sign them.
According to Meat Loaf's autobiography, the band spent most of 1975 writing and recording material, and two and a half years auditioning the record and being rejected.
Steinman says that it was a "medley of the most brutal rejections you could imagine."
According to Meat Loaf's autobiography, a CBS executive rejected the album, saying to Steinman:
“Do you know how to write a song?
Do you know anything about writing?
If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C.
I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C.
You don't know how to write a song....
Have you ever listened to pop music?
Have you ever heard any rock-and-roll music.... You should go downstairs when you leave here...and buy some rock-and-roll records.”
Eventually, E Street Band member, Steven Van Zandt contacted Cleveland International Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records on their behalf, and after listening to the spoken word intro to "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)", founder Steve Popovich accepted the album for Cleveland.
The great Todd Rundgren was the producer.
In time, what started as one album became the epic “Bat Out of Hell” trilogy—“Bat Out of Hell”, “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell”, and “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose”—which has sold more than 65 million albums worldwide.
More than four decades after its release, the first album that no-one wanted still sells an estimated 200,000 copies annually and stayed on the charts for over nine years, making it one of the best-selling albums in history.
It eventually went all the way to #1 in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, #3 in the UK, #5 in Canada, #9 in Switzerland, and #13 in the US and Sweden.
On the back of it, Meat Loaf became one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with worldwide sales of more than 80 million records, including unforgettable rock classics like “Bat out of Hell”, “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth”, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”, and “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”.
The album stayed on the UK album chart for 522 weeks, making it the UK's fourth longest charting studio album behind Fleetwood Mac's “Rumours”, Pink Floyd's “The Dark Side of the Moon”, and Oasis' “(What's The Story) Morning Glory?”.
In 2022, it was named as the biggest-selling debut album in UK chart history.
Click on the link below to watch his timeless “Bat Out Of Hell”:
https://youtu.be/3QGMCSCFoKA
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