From the Archive: A Meat Loaf Education

R.I.P, Marvin Lee Aday

The singer and actor Meat Loaf died Friday morning. I grew up an unabashed, even bewilderingly so, Meat Loaf fan. In an essay for my newsletter from August 2019, I explained why. R.I.P., big man.

My musical education began in high school, with Nirvana, with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” somehow bum-rushing WLRW 94.5 pop radio in Champaign, blasting open a huge hole in the middle of my brain which I scrambled to fill with all the culture I now knew existed outside Mattoon, Illinois. Nirvana was the gateway drug to everything, from R.E.M. to Woody Allen to David Letterman to Janis Joplin to “The Larry Sanders Show” to sarcasm to emotional self-awareness to the actual act of creative expression. Nirvana opened up the entire world to a kid who, up to that point, mostly just thought about baseball, girls, “The Legend of Zelda,” Axl Rose and how much he didn’t want to mow the lawn. Nirvana was the intro course to everything.

But Nirvana didn’t come around until 1991, and that gave me nearly 16 years of listening to all sorts of junk before that. We all had our phases. Some weren’t terrible: I wore out my Dad’s “Born to Run” cassette, and “Appetite for Destruction” remains ferocious and primal still today. But, yes, there was a Vanilla Ice phase, which was followed up by an extended hair metal…