DETROIT — Well before the platinum records and packed arenas, Meat Loaf was a striving singer with a stint in Detroit and an obscure Motown release under his belt.
Meat Loaf, who died Thursday at 74, would go on to describe his brief time in Detroit as a happy accident. But it was also a crucial chapter in the saga of the singer-actor raised in Texas as Michael Aday, years before he blossomed into a household name with 1977's "Bat Out of Hell" and a slew of hit singles.
"In a dramatic sense, it was almost like destiny kept bringing him back to Motown," said Paul Barker, director of development with the Motown Museum.
Barker met with Meat Loaf in October at the Motor City Comic Con, getting a first-hand account of the star's Detroit days and the road to "Stoney and Meatloaf," the 1971 Motown release that paired the singer with his "Hair" castmate Shaun Murphy.
In 1969, making a gambit for the lucrative rock market, Motown had launched the label Rare Earth Records, signing a flurry of white acts under the direction of veteran music executive Harry Balk.
A year later, Meat Loaf, in his early 20s, was performing in the Detroit production of the counterculture musical "Hair" when he caught the eye of brothers Ralph and Russ Terrana, then working with Balk at Motown.
The rotund singer certainly stood out onstage, as a Free Press story noted in November 1970: "Meat Loaf weighs only slightly less than 300 pounds and has the incredible voice that booms out 'This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius' to open the play."
For the Terrana brothers, there was intriguing potential in Meat Loaf and fellow cast member Shaun (Stoney) Murphy.
"He had radiators for lungs. He had so much power, and so did Stoney," Ralph Terrana recalled Friday. "That's why we liked them together."
The sibling producers got the greenlight from Motown's Balk: "Oh yeah, they can sing. Go get 'em."
"Hair," playing the Vest Pocket Theater, may have ignited the interest. But it wasn't Meat Loaf's first Detroit foray: The California-based singer had already logged time at the Grande Ballroom and other area rock venues with versions of a band that began as Meat Loaf Soul and morphed into incarnations such as Floating Circus and Popcorn Blizzard. The group shared bills with a host of acts, including Grande house band the MC5.
"It was a great scene," Meat Loaf reflected in a 1994 Free Press interview. "It wasn't the laid-back San Francisco thing. It was high energy, Detroit rock 'n' roll."
The connections he made during the Grande days proved enduring: In 1976, a year before "Bat Out of Hell," he was tapped by Detroit's Ted Nugent for lead vocals on the guitarist's album "Free-For-All." Nugent would later tell the Free Press that Meat Loaf had been a galvanizing performer at the Detroit clubs — "this big man going berserk onstage."
Back at Motown in 1970, the Terrana brothers whipped up a Stoney & Meat Loaf demo for fellow producer Mike Valvano.
"The first time I played the demo to Mike, he said, 'My God, you've got an opera singer,'" Ralph Terrana recalled. "I started to get worried about that. I just wanted to do rock 'n' roll."
The Terranas and Valvano forged ahead with Stoney & Meat Loaf, recording the bed tracks with the Funk Brothers at Motown's Studio A and cutting vocals at Studio B on West Davison.
"If you listen to the song 'She Waits by the Window,' at the end he hits this very high, holding note," Ralph Terrana said. "He was so loud, it came through the control room glass louder than through the control room speakers. We fell off our asses laughing. You'd never heard a note that big."
The record "Stoney and Meatloaf" — deploying an alternate spelling of the singer's name — was released in October 1971, notching a hopeful debut at No. 76 in Billboard before fizzling out.
Terrana said the project was vexed in part by another Detroit group: The album's most promising track, "What You See is What You Get," was released just before the Dramatics issued a similarly titled R&B single — "Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get" — that became a Top 10 pop hit.
The details of Stoney & Meat Loaf's departure from Motown are "kind of a mystery," Terrana said.
"Harry wanted a different (production) team," he recalled. "Stoney and Meat Loaf weren't happy. I was kind of hurt. Then it all gets really vague. And it wasn't too long afterward that they started squeezing Harry out because Motown was closing up (in Detroit)."
Stoney & Meat Loaf may have been short-lived, but Stoney and Meat Loaf went on to big things. Murphy remained with Motown as a solo act for two years before becoming a fixture with Bob Seger, working as a backing singer in the studio and on the road, up through Seger's latest tour in 2019. Now a Nashville resident, she also served a lengthy tenure with the band Little Feat.
As for Meat Loaf, the post-Motown legend looms large. He carried on with stage work — including the Broadway production of "Hair" — and landed a part in 1975's "Rocky Horror Picture Show" before making the epic "Bat Out of Hell" with collaborator Jim Steinman and becoming one of the globe's hottest rock acts. He continued to record and tour through the decades, playing a final Detroit show at Motor City Casino in 2015.
"Meat Loaf's Detroit story was almost accidental, like chance," said the Motown Museum's Barker. "In a weird way, those Detroit roots touched both of his careers, both musically and theater-wise."
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