Meat Loaf's ‘Bat Out of Hell’ is now the biggest-selling debut album in U.K. chart history. The album from 1977 has sold over 3.5 million copies and spent 530 weeks in the top 100.
Bat Out of Hell is the 4th best-selling debut album here in the U.S., having sold 14-million copies. It’s just behind Guns n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction (18-million); Boston's self-titled debut album (17-million); and Hootie and The Blowfish's Cracked Rear View (14,580,000).
Meat Loaf once credited producer Todd Rundgren and songwriter Jim Steinman for the album’s success. He said, "People had always said, 'Oh, you can sing,' but nobody had ever gone crazy over me singing. I would have probably had a very difficult role, having long hair, weighing 300 pounds, doing anything else other than that kind of dramatic stuff. 'Cause everybody wanted me to do R&B or blues or soul and something. And Jim said, 'That's the obvious. You don't want to do the obvious.' And so we didn't. So, thank goodness for Jim and me and Todd and whoever else worked on that record. It takes a lot of people to do something like that. You never do it by yourself."
Meat Loaf’s widow Deborah has begun sharing memories of him on his Facebook page. The first memory she shared is about about the little notes he used to leave for her, including the birthday card he gave her last year.
Meat Loaf died on January 20th at 74.
[Source: Classic Hits Today]