A Second Sunrise for Stoney & Meatloaf
UNPACKED, UNTANGLED, RE-RELEASED
The one-liners were as corny as they were obvious.
The new release by Stoney & Meatloaf “will carry a lot of weight on the charts,” offered one. “It takes two ears to handle this whopper,” ran another. “Get on the chart watchers diet,” advised a third.
For whatever reason, the full-page Billboard advertisement with those jokes did not feature a photograph of Shaun Murphy and Marvin Lee Aday, otherwise known as Stoney & Meatloaf. Instead, the copywriter picked another heaviness reference for the headline (“407 Pounds of Total Dynamite”) to attract the attention of radio programmers and music retailers.
So long ago, so very young…
This was the work of Motown Records in the spring of 1971 – or, to be precise, of its Rare Earth rock label. Being promoted was “What You See Is What You Get,” the debut 45 by Stoney & Meatloaf, signed one year earlier after turning heads in the Detroit production of counterculture musical Hair.
“The track was so good,” its co-producer, Ralph Terrana, told me last month, “that Betty Ocha, who was the head of A&R under Harry Balk, wanted to abscond with it. She wanted the Supremes to do the song.” (Terrana got to keep it.)
And why, you might ask, are Stoney & Meatloaf back in the spotlight, 51 years later? Because of the June 3 arrival of Everything Under the Sun: The Motown Recordings, a 2CD set from Second Disc Records/Real Gone Music (it was scheduled for May, but experienced manufacturing delays).
The 28-track collection includes the original Stoney & Meatloaf album, as released on Rare Earth in September 1971, and eight solo sides cut at Motown by Stoney after S&M split and she moved to Los Angeles with the company. Six of the eight are previously unissued. “I was so excited to hear all that unreleased stuff that, frankly, I’d forgotten I’d done with Bob Gaudio and Joe Porter,” explains Murphy. “It was such a treat. I was so happy that they did [the reissue], they just went all-out as far as I could see.”
OLD TAPE CARDS AND SESSION LOGS
True enough, with “they” being Joe Marchese and Andy Skurow, the anthology’s producers, with mastering from the original Motown tapes by Kevin Reeves. (Among their previous projects was 2020’s deluxe reissue of Diana Ross & the Supremes Sing and Perform “Funny Girl.”) With Stoney & Meatloaf, there was “a lot to unpack and untangle,” admits Skurow. “I pulled old tape cards and session logs to see what tapes we could find, which leads to building of the song annotations, but also reveals what songs were recorded for the sessions, what songs received vocals, and which ones did not.”
Stoney & Meatloaf circa 1971 (photo: Jim Hendin)
Everything Under The Sun has been four years in the making, although its origins date back to 2010, when Marchese wrote a “reissue theory” article for music website The Second Disc about a hypothetical Stoney & Meatloaf reissue. “We involved Stoney relatively early, back in 2017 or 2018,” says Skurow. “The same with Ralph Terrana. Sadly, we waited with Meat Loaf because we weren’t sure how he would feel about the project. We wanted everything lined up for him to see before bringing him on board, so he could feel more comfortable about it. We obviously regret that decision now.” (The singer died on January 20 this year.)
Murphy remembers first being contacted about the reissue by The Second Disc’s Randy Fairman, whose liner notes delve into remarkable, comprehensive detail about Stoney & Meatloaf’s career and recording history. He did interviews with both Murphy and Terrana, who have stayed in touch since their Motown association. To this day, the latter recalls when he and brother Russ were wowed by S&M’s Hair performance in Detroit, and discussed their potential with Harry Balk, Motown’s then-head of production. “He wanted to hear a demo,” says Terrana. “We got a demo of them singing something – I don’t know what it was – and when we played it for him, he said, ‘Yeah, they can definitely sing, go get ’em.’
EMOTIONAL, WITH CHILD
“I really liked producing Stoney because I liked what she could do. If you take a listen towards the end of ‘Sunshine (Where’s Heaven),’ where Meatloaf comes in – she was pregnant at the time, so she was real emotional. She belted that out. It blew me away, and as soon as she finished that line, she broke down crying. I went into the studio and put my arms around her.”
With the Terrana brothers and Mike Valvano producing, S&M cut vocals to tracks recorded between October 1970 and the following June. “That was the way things went at Motown,” says Murphy. “You went in and cut all the tracks, then they brought us in to spice it up.” Laughing, she adds, “I understood that was the norm. We were just icing on the cake.”
Murphy and Meat in Nashville, 2021
When Stoney & Meatloaf was issued in the autumn of ’71, the Rare Earth label had been in business for two years, but its only significant sales and chart success belonged to the band Rare Earth and R. Dean Taylor. The Hair pair’s album did nothing to improve on that. “We were all a little sad about it,” confesses Murphy, “but it was right at the time when Berry Gordy was stepping away, Suzanne de Passe was coming in, and then they moved the whole contingent out to L.A.”
“That was pretty much the end of the label,” said the late Rare Earth executive Joe Summers when I spoke to him a few years ago. “It hadn’t met expectations. I saw Meat a few years later, after Bat Out Of Hell, and went up to him and said, ‘Do you remember me?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I told you I was going to be big.’ But I really thought we had a hit single with Stoney & Meatloaf’s ‘It Takes All Kinds Of People.’ ” Summers, who went on to run A&M Records in Canada, said he even used it at an A&M conference one year. “That’s how much I liked it.”
Since then, Stoney & Meatloaf have become one of Rare Earth’s few acts to undergo re-assessment and re-release. “It’s still inconceivable to me,” says Joe Marchese, “that Meat isn’t here to share in this project, which is truly a celebration of his extraordinary legacy. While he expressed ambivalence over the years towards these early recordings and his time at Motown, he was always unstinting in his praise of Stoney’s amazing talents. He cherished her as a friend and singing partner.”
Shaun Murphy voices similar positivity about Meatloaf – and Motown. “It was absolutely a great training ground. With all the help we received, it was unbelievable the amount of knowledge that we got. I still carry it to this day.”
And on her late music partner’s behalf, she is evidently not offended by the heaviness jokes, a half-century later.
Reissue notes I: as mentioned, relatively little of the Rare Earth label’s output has been returned to market in recent years. One notable exception was 2008’s Fill Your Head: The Studio Albums 1969-1974, a CD triple of Rare Earth, the band. Another was Power Of Zeus: The Gospel According to Zeus, which British label Mr Bongo issued on vinyl for 2019’s Record Store Day. The original 1970 album was actually Ralph and Russ Terrana’s first production for Rare Earth, preceding Stoney & Meatloaf.
Reissue notes II: the liners for Everything Under the Sun include an account of Motown’s ham-fisted exploitation (at home and abroad) of the Stoney & Meatloaf album when Meat’s Bat Out Of Hell exploded in 1978. This included remixing the original tracks to downplay or omit Stoney’s vocals, plus commissioning new and entirely tasteless cover art. “It was bizarre,” agrees Murphy.