In 1979, after wrapping the recording of their fourth studio album, Eat To The Beat, Blondie signed a new management deal with Alice Cooper‘s manager Shep Gordon. A larger-than-life character who also handled the business affairs of comedian/actor Groucho Marx and actress Raquel Welch, Gordon’s first proposal to the New York band was that they take a cameo role in a new musical comedy film, Roadie, to which he’d already signed up Alice Cooper.
Roadie was produced by Carolyn Pfeiffer, formerly a PR who worked with The Beatles, Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand among others, and more recently, a partner at Shep Gordon’s management company. It was Gordon who suggested Meat Loaf to play the film’s central character, Travis W. Redfish, a Texan good ol’ boy who happened to possess unparalleled skills for fixing broken equipment, and who gets sucked into the rock ‘n’ roll world. Meat Loaf at the time was an international star thanks to the phenomenal success of 1977’s Bat Out Of Hell album, but he had never taken on such a high profile acting role.
In a refreshingly honest interview conducted with Australian TV host Molly Meldrum at the film’s Austin, Texas location in 1980, Meat Loaf admitted that he’d had some “emotional problems” dealing with the success of his debut album – still the biggest selling debut album of all time – admitting that he never wanted to be called a “star”, and revealing that the past few years had been “mentally tough” for him. But his enthusiasm for his new project was clear.
“The idea of the movie is to create the new American hero, or the new world hero, meaning me, which is sorta humorous to me,” he told Meldrum. “He [Travis W. Redfish] knows nothing about the music business at all, and he doesn’t understand why anybody makes records, and why anybody did since Buddy Holly died anyway.”
Giving a brief synopsis of the plot, Meatloaf revealed that his character “gets picked up by a girl named Lola Bouilliabase [actress Kaki Hunter] from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is a groupie and a virgin… so she takes him on this adventure, and he becomes a roadie. He doesn’t know what a roadie is when it first starts… They cut the power on a Blondie concert, and he uses hay wagons and horse manure and and all this stuff and puts it all together and creates this entire unit to run an entire concert…
“And I save Alice Cooper’s concert,” he adds. “Alice has got this brand new world famous sound equipment and nobody can fix it, nobody knows what’s wrong with it… but [Redfish] wants to go home because his sister’s getting married to his best friend, and Alice says, ‘Well if you fix my sound system I’ll get you a bus’.”
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Debbie Harry, meanwhile, had a very specific memory of her band’s time on set in Austin, during which the New Yorkers performed a cover of Johnny Cash’s Ring Of Fire.
“The film had a number of dwarf actors,” she recalled in her excellent 2019 memoir Face It. “There was one scene in a café where a fight broke out with the dwarves and a few of us actually got roughed up, because those little guys were very active and very, very strong. It was chaotic and a lot of fun… Chris [Stein’s] hearing was never the same after he got squirted in the ear during the fight scene.”
Meat Loaf and Blondie share some on-screen time in the film, including a sequence where the band bundle a confused Redfish into their car after their show, and start spouting random lines such as “I love guns” and “Sometimes I travel 3000 miles just to spit on people!”
No doubt it all made sense at the time.
We’ll refrain from any more spoilers. Except to note that Roadie was not a commercial or critical success. It failed to recoup its reputed $5 million budget, and while critics heaped praise on Meat Loaf – “in his first starring role he doesn’t sing a note and still steals the movie” wrote People magazine – most found the film’s storyline weak, confusing and un-engaging.
Awarding the film one and a half stars out of a possible five, legendary US film critic Roger Ebert wrote: “If the movie had given us more of their songs, this could have qualified as a concert movie. If it had given us more of Meatloaf it might have developed into a character study. But Roadie never makes up its mind. The movie’s so genial, disorganized and episodic that we never really care about the characters, and yet whenever someone starts to sing the performance is interrupted for more meaningless plot development.”
But critics be damned, why not watch the film below and decide for yourself?