I heard the sequel toBat Out of Hell earlier I had e'er listened to the original. I suppose this is akin to watchingBatman Returns first, but I was born 2 years after the 1977 album came out. I know I bought the cassette at the mall, despite information technology sounding wildly dissimilar than everything else I was playing on my Walkman. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Snoop Dogg, PJ Harvey, Wu-Tang, and the Breeders were all over MTV and the radio, but Meatloaf's brand of operatic burners and power-carol-show tunes weaseled their style in and seeing the video for "Paradise past the Dashboard Low-cal" at the start of every screening forRocky Horror Picture Show at a local theater sealed the deal (and no, I won't echo those callbacks here).

Equally it turned out, there was very much—and still is—a underground musical theater enthusiast burrowed deep within my record drove.

Last week, Meat Loaf, born Marvin Lee Aday, passed away due to COVID-related complications. The vocaliser and star of stage and screen doesn't need much in the manner of biography from usa. But his albumBat Out of Hell, written past composer and lyricist Jim Steinman (who also passed away last April), is one of the best-selling albums of all fourth dimension, moving well over 40 one thousand thousand copies and sitting comfortably between the likes ofThriller andRumours. Role of the attraction of that Todd Rundgren-produced Bruce Springsteen parody (a fact I recently learned in an interview with the producer himself), was the concrete record itself.

Designed past the belatedly illustrator and comic volume artist Richard Corben, the cover forBat Out of Hell is an orgiastic ode to fantasy and sci-fi lurid paperbacks, a fever dream blown upwards to LP-size in hulking, Conan the Barbarian-style proportions, and a dearest piece of rock and roll iconography. On the comprehend, a naked man riding a motorbike with a horse skeleton erupts from the grounds of an apocalyptic-looking cemetery; in the background, a screeching bat sits perched atop a mausoleum. It also looks like the biker is doing a little more than merely rocketing from the crypt, but I digress.

As the story goes, Jim Steinman caught Corben'southward work in the pages ofHeavy Metafifty (or equally it was called in France where the publication originated,Metal Hurlant) By this time, the magazine had already made its manner to the states, merely Corben's piece of work in the globe of secret comix in publications likeCreepy andEerie was generating buzz for the artist, and he would eventually country gigs at DC and Curiosity, in addition to starting how i comic imprint, Fantagor Press. Steinman gave his concept to Corben, and the rest was history.

In an interview withHeavy Metal, Jim Steinman positively gushes about the album cover. "Certain words immediately come to mind in regard to Corben's fine art—heroic, majestic, multidimensional, tactile, cinematic, erotic, obsessive—but for me, most of all, his images seem not so much created as 'unleashed.' They possess the muscular density and abandon of rock 'due north' curlicue as well as the formal stylization and luxuberant turbulence of opera. In Corben's worlds, the 'audio-visual' has been banished—everything is gloriously amplified. Every frame seems to exist born either directly before, during, or after an ecstatic moment of action—and the specific nature of the action is ultimately far less important than the explosive release it provides."

"The sexual richness of Richard Corben'due south work is overwhelming—this is a world that is incessantly horny for wonder and magic," Steinman added for good mensurate.

Corben would also design the tape comprehend for Jim Steinman'due southBad For Good, an album that was slated to be the follow-up toBat Out of Hell only didn't come to fruition considering of Meat Loaf losing his voice (though he would sing many of those songs on afterwards records).

Though he recorded a scattering of albums with other Steinman originals, it would take sixteen years forBat Out of Hell II to materialize. Meat Loaf and company turned to artist and Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee Michael Whelan to create a cover that felt very much in line with its predecessor. Whelan has created hundreds of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy book covers, creating works for Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, and even some of Stephen King'south Nighttime Tower novels.

Again, Meat Loaf gets spelled out in a gothic type, but this time out, the biker and bat return to do boxing at the New York City Chrysler Edifice. An angel is held captive and tied to the peak of the building every bit the biker flies across a skyline of peradventure-burnt-out buildings to save her, though they could also just exist steampunk-fashion creations bathed in the burn down of would exist demons or looters below. According to a recent Instagram mail from Whelan, Meat Loaf and Steinman both had opposing ideas on what should exist on the encompass. Meat wanted the Chrysler edifice and the bat, just Steinman insisted it should instead be New York rendered as a hellscape, with the "motorcycle heading down into the fire."

Regardless, there's a very purposeful feeling of continuity between the covers, every bit if the tape execs are maxim,Hey, recollect that one Meat Loaf album? Well, here's the sequel, and will you get a load of this totally option bat? Also, you don't know this guy Michael Bay  yet, but nosotros tapped him to directly some of the music videos, and we think you're going to see a lot more of this immature auteur.

Several Whelan illustrations likewise brand their way into the liner notes of the booklet, and in that location are enough of orbs, austere hallways, and skeletons driving muscle cars. Co-ordinate to Whelan, Meat Loaf came to his business firm and pointed out several of his favorite paintings, many of which were book covers, similar Melanie Rawn'south Dragon Prince and Joe Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered. I don't know if in that location's a story ane tin can piece together from the entirety of the images, but information technology did make my 13-year quondam brain string together the threads of some story nearly a mutant biker.

(Higher up) Leavetaking was painted in 1992 as Whelan was putting together his tertiary art book. The book was released in 1993 and was his first to include his gallery art. He began splitting fourth dimension between fine art and illustration in the mid-90s.
(Above) Passage:Verge was painted in 1989. This was another art slice notable for inspiring Brandon Sanderson when he was writing his first published novel Elantris.

Whelan would as well become tapped to create the artwork for one of Meat Loaf's greatest hits compilations,The Very All-time of Meat Loaf. Again, the biker character returns sans motorcycle, continuing on the remains of a burnt-out span while the bat hovers beneath. Though maybe we shouldn't say the bike iscompletely gone, as you tin see an outline of the biker and his trusty steed in the clouds—or is it smoke? Either way, the promised future of the Meat Loaf Universe is a dour i.

The trilogy concludes withBat Out of Hell Three, and fine creative person and illustrator Julie Bong takes the reins, with our dear biker racing once more than unto the breach to defeat his winged nemesis. The artwork strikes a more similar tone to the Whelan cover from 1993—now, the biker multitasks from his motorcycle and wields a sword as he tries to save the angel from a fire-breathing bat.

Bell is an award-winning painter and old bodybuilder widely recognized for her wild fauna pieces, merely she has besides imagined hundreds of book covers beyond the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Lest you think she's merely worked on ane meat-related saga, she illustrated the poster for theAqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Moving picture Motion-picture show along with her husband, Boris Vallejo. Bong would too create the artwork for the "Information technology'due south All Coming Back To Me Now" unmarried, which just and so happens to incorporate zero bikers and bats but does have a adult female pouring water from a vase while standing atop a pile of skulls, so there'due south that.

Musically, though, the tertiary entry in the series is a lackluster affair. Jim Steinman was not on lath as a producer, and his vii songs on the album are from other projects, including one pretty famous have on itsWuthering Heights-inspired showstopper. Simply it's still Meat Loaf; y'all're getting 1 more than heaping dose of operatic stadium rock, and if the cover was whatever indication, it felt very much like a concluding stand.

Everything most Meat Loaf was over the peak. Let us non forget that this was the same guy who proposed to his wife, not with a ring, but a whole salmon (actually, yous need to read this Todd Rundgren interview). Merely the album covers for his beloved trilogy cranks the amps well beyond ten for Caligula-level rock activeness. He certainly wasn't the start musician to use sci-fi or fantasy imagery to sell records, but the artwork for his albums gave promise to a world beyond the music itself, a place of "wonder and magic" you could dream on. In an interview from 1978, Jim Steinman said that he envisioned the firstBat Out of Hell album as "seven visions or dreams," a romantic chance set in a world of teenagers that's full of motorcycles and sex, one of excitement, violence, and chills.

"It beats Perry Como, doesn't it?" he joked.

In the end,Bat is everything it promised to be and more, from the grandiose sound of the records to the very artwork itself. What'due south more than, information technology's a romantic celebration of swole dudes beating on evil, fire-breathing bats and a pitch-perfect example of rock and roll dreams coming through.