Meat Loaf’s Wildest, Most Memorable Iggy Pop Encounter (And the Band He Called “Abysmal”)

If anyone were to have a memorable enough performance to stick in the mind of rock ‘n’ roll’s “Bat Out of Hell” singer Meat Loaf, Iggy Pop seems like a sensible choice. And indeed, the musician’s first encounter with the Stooges’ frontman was so wildly intense that Meat Loaf vividly remembered it decades later, despite Iggy’s performance only lasting around six minutes.

Meat Loaf shared his raucous Iggy Pop memory and other glimpses into his life as a touring musician in the late 1960s—including an “abysmal” contemporary band with whom he shared a bill—with Classic Rock magazine in 2010.

Meat Loaf’s Wild First Encounter With Iggy Pop

From his powerful voice to his domineering stage presence, Meat Loaf was certainly no shrinking violet onstage. But even he was taken aback by the likes of Iggy Pop, who made an entire career out of being as unapologetically feral as possible during his live performances. (We have Jim Morrison to thank for Iggy Pop’s memorable onstage persona, by the way.)

Meat Loaf recalled the first time he watched Iggy Pop play at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, Michigan. The band played their entire set in the key of E—or, perhaps more accurately, the chord of E. E major is all they knew, so that’s all they played. “After an instrumental intro, in the key of E, Iggy came on, immediately took off his T-shirt, and then started maiming himself by sticking needles through his fingertips and in his chest.”

“He then somehow got hold of a cream pie,” Meat Loaf continued, “jumped off stage and started making out with this poor guy’s girlfriend. So, this guy’s freaking out, and Iggy just laughs and slams the pie in this poor kid’s face and starts rubbing the cream all over himself. Then, he jumps back on stage and disappears. That was the whole show. F***ing hilarious! It was over in six minutes.”

The Band The Bat Out of Hell Called “Abysmal”

Of course, not every performance Meat Loaf watched at Detroit’s historic Grande Ballroom was memorable in a good way. Other sets were harder to sit through, like the Grateful Dead. “Man, they were abysmal,” he lamented to Classic Rock.

“I remember they headlined once at the Grande. The support acts included the MC5, Bob Seger, and us—all high-energy. Jerry Garcia and his crew came on and started playing this song, and it seemed to last for weeks! After about 20 minutes, half the audience had gone. The problem was that we couldn’t leave. Because of weather problems, the Dead’s equipment hadn’t arrived, and we had lent them our backline. I didn’t know anything about the band at the time and didn’t realize that their sets went on for days.”

“Well, that’s what it felt like,” Meat Loaf ceded. “We were stuck there all night.” Perhaps someone should’ve grabbed the Dead a cream pie to throw at an audience member á la Iggy Pop.

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