A year before Meat Loaf made good with his 1977 release ‘Bat Out Of Hell’, he was the lead singer on the Ted Nugent album ‘Free For All’. For his work on an album that would go on to sell over 2,000,000 copies, Meat Loaf was paid $1000.
In his 2010 Noise11.com interview, Meat Loaf told us the story of his time working on Ted Nugent’s Free For All. “I’ll tell you exactly how that came about. I bet they owe me a fortune. Well, I bet they don’t owe for a fortune because at the time I had no money and they said, ‘I’ll give you $1000 to come and sing the lead vocals on this album’. I went “$1000? Really? Okay.”
The whole thing was finished in a couple of days. “I did all those vocals in two days,” Meat Loaf said. “I could never do that now. But all they sent me were lyric sheets and tracks. There was no reference vocals, there was no melodies, there was no anything. So I went in, all of those melodies are mine. I say ‘do you have any idea how long it is until the vocal comes in’. They’d say ‘eight bars, four bars…’. I had to wait four bars before I’d start a vocal”.
Meat Loaf said the planning for the album was a disaster. “There were two producers and they would argue and argue and argue,” he said. “They didn’t like what I was singing here and this melody. I eventually went to them after three hours, the drummer was in there, and I said ‘why don’t you guys do this. Why don’t you leave and you come back in two days from now. I’ll have the vocals done and what you don’t like we’ll do over. We’ll get it done’. They said ‘what?’ I said ‘get the fuck out of here’. And they did and two days later they came back and they loved the vocals and that was that”.
“My favourite song on that was ‘Hammerdown’. I hit the highest note I ever hit on that record, “ Meat added.
Also watch the Noise11 interview with Ellen Foley:
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