To me, he was the original Man in Black,
not knowing
of Johnny Cash’s persona at that time,
and it still being a couple of years away before
I became truly aware of The Stranglers,
He was the Man in Black
who looked like a machine,
sleek, disturbing, powerful,
like a starving Panther
on the prowl,
circling the village,
and waiting, fur bristling in the wind,
patiently for the right moment to
attack.
Bryan and I, cousins of six and seven,
sat spellbound and watched him
Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, two artists whose contribution to the world of rock music should under no circumstances ever be dismissed to a mere foot note in the history of popular culture. In the autumn of 1977, they gave the world the first of three albums that were destined to shape a generation.
Meat Loaf’s career may have begun doing the rounds a few years earlier with performances in the musical Hair and with his first album released in 1971, the unremarkable Stoney and Meatloaf but it was his ground-breaking work with Jim Steinman that sent temperatures soaring in the October of the year when Punk was no longer a musical form of expression that could be contained and old Progressive Rock bands were feeling the force of musical rebellion.