Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman
Together, they realized they could combine theater and rock in a way that no one else was doing.
Big over-the-top emotional storydriven songs.
And it was another one of Steinman's stage pieces that gave them some of the bones of Bat Out of Hell..
Jim Steinman's Neverland was a rock musical he developed in the mid 1970s.
It was a reimagining of the Peter Pan story set in a dystopian futuristic world.
The story featured characters inspired by Peter Pan like Peter, Wendy, and Captain Hook, but placed them in a darker sci-fi influence setting involving lost boys, rebellious youth, and authoritarian control.
It originated from Steinman's earlier college musical called The Dream Engine, written in 1969 at Amherst College.
He later revised and expanded it into Neverland.
A workshop performance of Neverland was staged at the Kennedy Center in 1977, but it was never fully produced due to
legal and commercial reasons. Some of the material was considered too edgy or bizarre for mainstream theater at that
time.
Frustrated that his creation was being censored, Steinman and Meatloaf decided to repurpose the songs into a
rock album.
Most of the songs on the Bat Out of Hell album came directly from Neverland.
These include
Bat Out of Hell,
Heaven Can Wait,
All Revved Up With No Place to Go,
You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth,
Two Out of Three Ain't Bad,
Paradise by the Dashboard Light.
Jim didn't want it to be just a bunch of songs. He wanted it to feel like you were entering a cinematic or complete theatrical environment.
