10 Outrageous Omissions From The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame

4. Meat Loaf

"The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling way down in the valley tonight..." No one writes lyrics like Jim Steinman, and no one sings them like Marvin Lee Aday, a.k.a. Meat Loaf, the seventies' least likely candidate for a rock heartthrob. After years opening for psychedelic rock bands like Them and Janis Joplin, Meat Loaf gained some notoriety for his perfomance of "Hot Patootie" in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When that film developed its unique cult (spawning the midnight movie tradition in the process), music fans noticed that Meat Loaf not only had the best song in the film, but the best voice. There had to be enough Meat Loaf to go around, right? (Sorry). Enter Steinman, a rock n' roll Gershwin who could make fire and brimstone out of fast cars and faster girls. Steinman became Meat Loaf's muse, and the end product was Bat Out of Hell, an album that mixed low culture with high art, long before that sort of thing was hip. The album is a melting pot of influences, yet still pulls off an original sound, owing a debt to early Springsteen, country and western ballads and of all things, baseball metaphors. It was all carried out by Meat Loaf's trademark voice, an operatic wail that rings in the memory, as well as the ears, long after it's left your speakers. The pair parted ways and reunited a few times later, notably for the Bat Out of Hell sequel and the monster hit "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)," a song so enigmatic, it took an M&M's commercial to tell us what it actually meant.