Jim Steinman’s career was marked by crazy peaks and then extended fallow periods. After Bat out of Hell, he really took until “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to regain any kind of momentum, at which point he had one of the biggest hit songs of the decade and another song that only didn’t make number one because of it. But then his next Bonnie Tyler album fizzled, Billy Squire’s album coincided with a downturn in the singer’s career, and Streets of Fire was a miserable failure, taking his songs down with it. Original Sin, while it looked promising, didn’t help matters, and it took until his reunion with Meat Loaf in 1993 to hit again. He then kept up the success for a while, with Celine Dion having a major hit in 1996; Tanz der Vampire turning into a European smash in 1997; and Whistle Down the Wind, while it may be disappointing compared to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s biggest successes, having success in 1998.

But then everything went wrong for a while, and there’s enough that went wrong behind closed doors that I feel certain that we don’t know just how bad things were.

Steinman was arguably the primary creative voice–he at some points served as the composer, lyricist, and director, though it seems his influence waxed and waned throughout–behind a Broadway production of Tanz der Vampire called Dance of the Vampires that ended up being one of the biggest money losers in Broadway history. Seemingly as a result of that disastrous work, Batman: The Musical (On which he had been working since 1998.) was cancelled.1 He co-wrote some of the music for the Swedish stage play Garbo: The Musical,1 which flopped in 2002. And then in 2003 he executive produced an MTV musical version of Wuthering Heights featuring his songs,1 and that went nowhere.

In about 2004, Steinman would suffer a stroke that rendered him unable to speak. Meat Loaf claimed that Steinman also had a heart attack during this period, which Steinman denied. I’ve seen one article mention a triple-bypass seemingly in the same period. His weight had ballooned out of control, and it seemingly was catching up to him. Steinman’s extreme privacy about his personal life makes it difficult to know how bad everything was, but there is enough smoke there that it is at least suggestive of some fire.

Meanwhile, Meat Loaf had gone completely Steinman-free for his 2003 album Couldn’t Have Said It Better, and it ended up being a similar story to his other work without Steinman: a hit in the UK and some other pockets in Europe, but barely a blip in the US. Medical problems cut the subsequent tour short and he returned to the road in 2005, declaring that he and a now-recovered Steinman were working on a new album.

What exactly happened between them is seemingly not public. Meat Loaf’s claim was that he had put together a great situation but Steinman wasn’t well enough to record the album. Steinman’s manager said that his client had been perfectly healthy recently, but I’ve never heard the Steinman camp give any reason for why Meat Loaf wanted to move forward without him. Whatever the issue was, Meat Loaf went to work on Bat out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose without Steinman and lawsuits flew back and forth over the title, Steinman having trademarked “Bat out of Hell” back in 1995.

Eventually, the lawsuits settled, and Meat Loaf got to record his Bat out of Hell III without Steinman, a decision for which he expressed regret later in life. Half of the songs on the album were even covers of Steinman songs, pulled from every corner of the back catalogue (Bad for Good, Original Sin, the aborted Batman: The Musical, Tanz der Vampire, and Wuthering Heights). But perhaps Meat Loaf’s claims about Steinman’s health deserve some credence: Steinman was never credited as a producer again after the Opera Babes recorded “Vittoria!” on his watch in 2002. New songs would be rare for the rest of his life. His public appearances, which had never been all that frequent, almost entirely stopped. Maybe he was worse off than anyone knew.

There isn’t a lot left to cover in this series. While it has a surprisingly happy ending, this moment is a sad one. Looking back, it really looks like he was just done. It’s sort of like seeing Peyton Manning in 2015, when the well had just run dry and he didn’t have any of the old magic left. I had mentally attributed his lack of steady work at this point to age and Dance of the Vampires, but I think that’s actually an oversimplification. Instead, everything seems to have fallen apart for him at once–his health, his relationship with his strongest collaborator (Meat Loaf), and the musical theater career he had always wanted. He had one more trick up his sleeve at the end, but the career that made me into this obsessive fan was over essentially at the point I became one.

Note
I originally mentioned a divorce in 2001. That was apparently a piece of misinformation that wandered across the internet, perhaps from a conflation of Steinman with Meat Loaf, the latter of whom did in fact get divorced in 2001. I have removed those references. I apologize for my part in spreading misinformation, and for taking so long to correct it.