Meat Loaf
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49 free Meat Loaf trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
He was born Marvin Lee Aday, his father reckoned he looked like nine pounds of ground chuck, and a football coach yelled the name that stuck. Meat Loaf went on to sing one of the best-selling albums of all time, lose his voice, go bankrupt, win a Grammy for a 12-minute single, and play Eddie in Rocky Horror and Bob in Fight Club along the way. These 49 questions cover his Dallas childhood, Hair and the Motown duet album with Stoney, meeting Jim Steinman at an audition, the long rejection of Bat Out of Hell before Cleveland International took it, Todd Rundgren's motorcycle guitar, Ellen Foley and Phil Rizzuto on Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Dead Ringer for Love with Cher, the songs he says Steinman gave away to Bonnie Tyler and Air Supply, Bat Out of Hell II and the mystery of Mrs. Loud, Bat III and the trademark lawsuit, Celebrity Apprentice, Hartlepool United, his film roles and his death in January 2022. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo or print it for a classic-rock quiz night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By his own account, an advert for which brand drove Meat Loaf to drop his birth name, Marvin?
Levi's
Levi's. He said a commercial with the line 'Poor fat Marvin can't wear Levi's' haunted him so badly that he legally became Michael Lee Aday.
Q 02In which city was Meat Loaf born?
Dallas
Dallas. At 16 he was at Love Field when President Kennedy landed on the morning of 22 November 1963, and after the shooting he and his friends drove to Parkland Hospital.
Q 03By Meat Loaf's own account, his father said that as a newborn he looked like several pounds of what?
Ground chuck
Ground chuck. He said he was born bright red, so his father had 'Meat' written on his hospital crib; the 'Loaf' came later, in a story he told a dozen different ways.
Q 04In Meat Loaf's telling, who gave him the 'Loaf' half of his name by shouting 'meatloaf' at him?
A football coach
A football coach. He said classmates taped a note reading 'Meat Loaf' to his locker the next day, though he told the story of his name in so many ways that one interviewer counted a dozen.
Q 05Under what name did Meat Loaf's first band start out in Los Angeles?
Meat Loaf Soul
Meat Loaf Soul. The group took a new name with each change of lead guitarist, becoming Popcorn Blizzard and then Floating Circus, and opened for the Who and the Grateful Dead.
Q 06Which musical gave Meat Loaf the publicity that led to a Motown invitation?
Hair
Hair. The show carried him from Los Angeles to Detroit, the home of Motown, and later on to Broadway, which is how a Texas rock singer ended up in New York theatre.
Q 07With which singer, billed as 'Stoney', did Meat Loaf record a 1971 duet album for Motown?
Shaun Murphy
Shaun Murphy. Motown billed the pair as Stoney & Meatloaf, running his name together as one word, and the album sank without troubling the charts.
Q 08At the audition for which show did Meat Loaf first meet Jim Steinman?
More Than You Deserve
More Than You Deserve. He auditioned with a soul number called (I'd Love to Be) As Heavy as Jesus, and Steinman told him on the way out, 'You're as heavy as two Jesuses.'
Q 09On stage in The Rocky Horror Show, Meat Loaf played Eddie and which second character?
Dr. Scott
Dr. Scott. When the show was filmed in 1975 the role went to Jonathan Adams, leaving Meat Loaf only Eddie, the lobotomised biker.
Q 10For which guitarist's 1976 album Free-for-All did Meat Loaf sing lead on several tracks?
Ted Nugent
Ted Nugent. He was a hired voice on the million-selling record, and said labels then pressed him to stay with acts like Nugent and drop his own songwriter; he refused.
Q 11Meat Loaf was understudy to which comedian in The National Lampoon Show?
John Belushi
John Belushi. Meat Loaf got his songwriter hired as the tour's pianist, and the two began writing together in the afternoons on whatever piano the theatre had.
Q 12Who produced Bat Out of Hell, believing the duo already had a record deal?
Todd Rundgren
Todd Rundgren. He took the job because he heard the songs as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and ended up paying for the sessions himself when the supposed record deal fell through.
Q 13Which label finally took a chance on Bat Out of Hell in October 1977?
Cleveland International Records
Q 21As of 2022, Bat Out of Hell was the best-selling album ever in which country, by official certifications?
Australia
Australia. It reached 26 times platinum there in 2022, and in Britain, after a slow start, an airing on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test was enough to set sales off.
Q 22Which band did Meat Loaf open for in Chicago at the first show of his Bat Out of Hell tour?
Cheap Trick
Cheap Trick. Seeing 'Tonight: Cheap Trick, with Meat Loaf' on the marquee, he joked that people would think dinner was being served, and the headliners' fans booed him from the start.
Q 23How did Meat Loaf finish his 1978 tour after breaking his leg coming off a stage in Ottawa?
In a wheelchair
Cleveland International Records. The small Epic offshoot said yes after more than two years of rejections; Clive Davis, one of the executives who passed, later admitted he had misjudged the singer.
Q 14Bat Out of Hell grew out of which Steinman musical?
Neverland
Neverland. Steinman's rock retelling of Peter Pan gave the album its title song, Heaven Can Wait and All Revved Up with No Place to Go before the two men decided the songs deserved a record of their own.
Q 15Which two members of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band played on Bat Out of Hell?
Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg
Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg. Steinman had watched Springsteen's band at a New York club in 1975 and came away saying the pianist was better than he was, so he hired him.
Q 16Which Yankees announcer calls the baseball play-by-play in Meat Loaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light?
Phil Rizzuto
Phil Rizzuto. He long claimed not to know the call stood for sex, but Meat Loaf said the old shortstop was in on the joke and pleaded ignorance only after a priest gave him grief.
Q 17Who sings the female part on the album version of Meat Loaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light?
Ellen Foley
Ellen Foley. She recorded it by sitting Meat Loaf in the vocal booth and singing straight at him; when she declined to tour, Karla DeVito took the part on stage and mimed to her voice in the video.
Q 18On the cover of Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, what comes bursting out of a grave?
A motorcycle
A motorcycle. Comics artist Richard Corben painted its rider erupting from the earth, and the bike is on the record too: the songwriter insisted on an engine in the title song, so one was faked on an electric guitar.
Q 19Which saxophonist plays on Meat Loaf's All Revved Up with No Place to Go?
Edgar Winter
Edgar Winter. His horn was set against the album's female singer on the line 'Do you know what it's like?', so that, as she put it, her voice and his sax played together.
Q 20Meat Loaf said which TV show broke Bat Out of Hell?
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live. He said the album went from selling almost nothing to five times platinum after the broadcast; it has since sold an estimated 43 million copies.
In a wheelchair. He kept the shows going, but the injury came as sudden fame was overwhelming him, and the months that followed ended in a breakdown and the loss of his voice.
Q 24Which album, written as the follow-up to Bat Out of Hell, did Jim Steinman sing himself after Meat Loaf lost his voice?
Bad for Good
Bad for Good. Doctors found nothing physically wrong with Meat Loaf, yet he could not sing, so in 1981 the songwriter released the songs under his own name; four of them returned on Bat Out of Hell II.
Q 25Who sings the female lead on Meat Loaf's 1981 hit Dead Ringer for Love?
Cher
Cher. The duet missed the American chart altogether but reached number five in Britain, an early sign that Meat Loaf's most loyal audience was no longer at home.
Q 26Which film did Meat Loaf star in as Travis Redfish while waiting for his voice to return?
Roadie
Roadie. He played a Texas trucker swept into the rock circus alongside Alice Cooper, Blondie and Roy Orbison, but the comedy flopped, taking only about $4 million.
Q 27Which Bonnie Tyler hit did Meat Loaf say Jim Steinman had first written for him?
Total Eclipse of the Heart
Total Eclipse of the Heart. He said his label would not let him record his old partner's songs in 1983, so it went to Tyler and reached number one; he added that he bore her no grudge.
Q 28By his own account, what forced Meat Loaf into bankruptcy in the 1980s?
Lawsuits
Lawsuits. He said 45 suits worth $80 million were 'thrown at' him after the split with his songwriter and manager, and that his Bat Out of Hell royalties did not reach him until 1997.
Q 29Which rock singer duets with Meat Loaf on the title track of his 1984 album Bad Attitude?
Roger Daltrey
Roger Daltrey. One reviewer called the Who singer's duet with him a gladiatorial battle of the tonsils; Meat Loaf had wanted Jim Steinman to write the whole album, but settled for two songs that were already out.
Q 30While making Bat Out of Hell II, what about Meat Loaf reportedly dismayed Jim Steinman?
He had lost weight
He had lost weight. Steinman held that the singer's vocal cords were 'directly related to his id', and is said to have left doughnuts around the studio to put the pounds back.