Bare feet perched on the coffee table, he spreads his 275-pound, 6-foot frame evenly on the living room sofa. Although Meat's onstage image makes him out to be one of rock's meanest and toughest characters, in person he is totally devoid of arrogance, and in fact seems almost shy. Sam Ellis, Meat Loaf's glib road manager who arranged the group's recent trips to England, Germany, Canada and Australia, helps the interview along by adding his comments whenever Meat begins to reach for words. All the songs on _Bat Out Of Hell_ -- raucous, earthy, and intense -- were written by fellow Westsider Jim Steinman, who plays keyboard with the group. After he and Meat Loaf met in 1973, they performed together frequently, but their music met with limited success. "People were afraid of it," says Meat. "The songs were long. The voices were loud. People in rock said it was too theatre. People in theatre said it was too rock and roll." When Meat and Jim were finally offered a contract to do an album, Steinman went to work on some new material, and wrote nearly the entire contents of _Bat Out Of Hell_ in four months, including the gold singles _Two Out of Three Ain't Bad_ and _Paradise by the Dashboard Light_ -- a duet celebrating teen sexuality that has been choreographed into an 8-minute show stopper by Meat and lead female vocalist Karla DeVito. "Jim doesn't just write the songs and hand them to me. I do most of the vocal arrangements. It's really a team. It's like Sonny and Cher," says the gargantuan singer. Brought up in Dallas under the name Marvin Lee Aday, he tipped the scales at 185 while in the fifth grade. "I was an only child and my parents always wanted two kids," he jokes. "So they set two places at the dinner table, and I ate both meals. ... I was always on the baseball team, because if they needed a base runner, they'd say, 'Go in there and get hit by the ball.' I'd back up just enough so that I wouldn't get hurt." He joined the high school choir in order to avoid study hall, and from then on, singing became his main passion. After completing high school at 15, he travelled around with a number of bands. By the time he settled down in New York, live rock music was no longer in so much demand as before. "That's one reason I went into theatre," he remarks. "Another reason was because someone hired me and I didn't have a job." As an singer and actor, Meat performed in some 10 Broadway and Off Broadway productions, including _Hair_ and _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_, in which he also appeared in the 1975 film.