The rock star born in Dallas as Marvin Lee Aday, known most of his life as Meat Loaf, has died. He was 74.
On stage, Meat Loaf was a hulking, frenzied presence. The albums he produced in the studio sold by the tens of millions. His 1977 debut album, Bat Out of Hell, was one of the best-selling albums of all time. He appeared in several movies, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Fight Club.
He died Thursday, according to a family statement released on Facebook. The cause of his death was not disclosed.
“Our hearts are broken to announce that the incomparable Meat Loaf passed away tonight surrounded by his wife Deborah, daughters Pearl and Amanda and close friends,” according to the post on Meat Loaf’s Facebook page.
“He was quite different, not like everyone else, and he played that to his own advantage — and I admire guys like that,” said Mike Rhyner, a former host on KTCK SportsRadio 1310 The Ticket.
Aday was a native of Dallas. He was the son of Wilma Artie Hukel, a schoolteacher who raised him on her own after divorcing his alcoholic father, Orvis Wesley Aday, a police officer who had befriended Jack Ruby.
Aday told several versions of the origin of his stage name. In an interview with The Dallas Morning News in 2015, when he returned to Thomas Jefferson High School to be recognized in a class of distinguished alumni, he shared one:
“My father gave me the name Meat when I rolled out of [Baylor] hospital,” he told Robert Wilonsky. “The ‘Loaf’ came later, at Cary Middle School, when I stepped on the [football] coach’s foot. Everybody laughed. But everyone in eighth grade thinks everything’s funny. The next day on my locker they taped a piece of paper that said ‘Meat Loaf.’”
In 1963, Aday and a couple of friends were waiting at Dallas Love Field, hoping to catch a glimpse of the president when Air Force One arrived. Kennedy saw the crowd and briefly stopped the motorcade to shake hands with some of the onlookers. A few hours later, after hearing that the president had been shot, Aday and his friends headed to Parkland Hospital.
What happened before they got there was detailed in his 1999 memoir, To Hell and Back.
In the book, he said a Secret Service agent leaped in front of their car, shouting, “Secret Service, move over, I’m driving.”
Once at the hospital, as they were waiting in the car they watched the arrival of the limousine carrying Kennedy. They watched first lady Jackie Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally get out of the car, but they never saw the president. A hospital spokesman later came out and announced that the president was dead. They were told not to leave the parking lot.
Eventually, Aday said, the Secret Service agent returned to offer them a $100 bill for gas money. The boys turned it down, but ultimately agreed to accept $5, which they tore into three pieces to keep as a memento.
After that day, he was always something of a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. In his memoir, he called the Warren Report “the stupidest book ever written.”
At TJ, Aday started his performance career as a singer and actor. He attended Lubbock Christian College and what is now the University of North Texas.
Before acting, he played defensive tackle for TJ. A Sept. 26, 1964, Dallas Morning News article recounts his recovery of a key fumble during TJ’s 27-0 victory over Adamson High School.
His own memories of those days were less glowing.
“The years I was there we had the worst [expletive] football team in the world, and I thought I was a good football player,” he told an audience at Dallas’ House of Blues in 2010.
“I sucked. Good thing that I figured out what I was supposed to do, don’t ya think? But I’ll tell you what: Doing theater in New York and rock and roll and playing football, I’m not so sure it’s a safe thing to do. I’ve had 18 concussions, three knee surgeries, two shoulder [operations]. But you know what? I wouldn’t give it up for anything, because of fans like you,” he said.
“What I miss most about Dallas, other than Big Tex, is fried okra, black-eyed peas and fried Spam. Hey, in 1964, that was a [expletive] staple.”
His mother was a teacher in Dallas public schools for 25 years, spending the final decade of her life at F.P. Caillet Elementary in northwest Dallas, according to her Aug. 5, 1967, obituary in The News.
In 2015, Meat Loaf told The News that he left Dallas shortly after her death.
“When she died it really freaked me out,” he said. “I just blocked it. I still block it. That’s why I left Dallas.”
He left for Los Angeles after college and fronted the band Meat Loaf Soul. He alternated between music and the stage, recording briefly for Motown, opening for such acts as The Who and The Grateful Dead, and appearing in the Broadway production of Hair.
By the mid-1970s, he was playing the lobotomized biker Eddie in the theater and film versions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He had also served as an understudy for his friend John Belushi for the stage production of National Lampoon and had begun working with Jim Steinman and Todd Rundgren on Bat Out of Hell.
Bat Out of Hell came out in 1977. The album’s seven tracks included “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
In 1993, his song “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was his only track to top the Billboard 100 singles chart, but it won him the 1994 Grammy Award for best rock vocal solo performance.
Meat Loaf released 12 studio albums, the last being “Braver Than We Are” in 2016.
He had health problems throughout his career. In 2003, he had heart surgery after collapsing onstage at Wembley Arena in London. In 2013, he told The Guardian that was retiring after another farewell tour, citing his many concussions. “My balance is off. I’ve had a knee replacement. I’ve got to have the other one replaced.”
No official cause has been given for the singer’s death, but on Friday, the internet was alive with speculation, with The Daily Beast proclaiming in a headline: ‘If I Die, I Die’: Meat Loaf Spurned COVID Rules Before Death.
Meat Loaf died near the music hub of Nashville, and on Friday, The News reached the office of the medical examiner in Williamson County, Tenn.
“This is all I can tell you,” said a spokeswoman for the Williamson County medical examiner in Franklin, Tenn., just south of Nashville. “His death was reported to our office. But we can’t release anything more about it,” which is not uncommon if the death occurred in a hospital.
The singer’s daughter, Pearl Aday, posted on Instagram on Jan. 7 that friends and family members had tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days, adding: “We are not sick, but we have too many friends and family testing positive right now, positive but doing OK.”
Last year, Meat Loaf posted a clip online of Eric Clapton’s lockdown protest song “Stand and Deliver.” In August, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “I understood stopping life for a little while, but they cannot continue to stop life because of politics. And right now they’re stopping because of politics.”
He took aim at mask restrictions on air travelers, telling the paper that on a recent flight, “We had to go on the airplane with the paper masks and then on the way back, we got a Nazi: ‘Get your mask on now!’ They’re power-mad now.”
“If I die, I die, but I’m not going to be controlled,” he said.
In 2020, he sued a Dallas hotel and horror convention after a fall from a stage that he said left him seriously injured and unable to perform. In the court filing, the entertainer argued that the Hyatt hotel chain and Texas Frightmare Weekend did not provide a safe environment at the 2019 convention at the Hyatt Regency DFW hotel.
In separate court filings, Hyatt and the convention denied responsibility for the fall. Aday spent 12 days at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center at Grapevine, then an additional 30 days in a Nashville hospital.
In his 2015 visit to Dallas, Meat Loaf addressed TJ students and staff with a brief speech on the stage where he started his career.
“These things happened, and they led to this without me knowing it at the time,” he said of his career. “It wasn’t planned. You just have to be ready for the opportunities. Some people say, ‘He got lucky.’ Sure, because you make your own luck — by hustling, by networking, by really doing it and never giving up.”
Meat Loaf is the second nationally known entertainer from TJ to recently pass away. Last month, Michael Nesmith, a TJ alum who rose to fame as a member of The Monkees, died at 78.
Staff writers Michael Granberry and Rebecca Stumpf contributed to this report.
