About The Song
“All Revved Up With No Place to Go” is one of the leaner, punchier tracks on Meat Loaf’s breakthrough album Bat Out of Hell, released on October 21, 1977 by Cleveland International/Epic. Written by Jim Steinman, it appears as the fourth track on the record, clocking in at just over four minutes. On an album famous for sprawling epics and nine-minute melodramas, this song acts like a turbocharged snapshot: a burst of teenage energy, nervous excitement and frustration wrapped up in a compact, hard-rocking package.
The song actually started life on the stage. Steinman first conceived it as part of his futuristic Peter Pan–inspired rock musical Neverland, where an early version was known as “The Formation of the Pack.” When Steinman and Meat Loaf decided to build a studio album out of the strongest songs from the show, they took that piece, reshaped it and renamed it “All Revved Up With No Place to Go,” alongside “Bat Out of Hell” and “Heaven Can Wait.” Those three “miniatures,” as Steinman later called them, became the backbone of the eventual record.
Recording for Bat Out of Hell took place in 1975–76 at Bearsville and other New York–area studios, with Todd Rundgren producing and arranging. Members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, including pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg, were brought in, and Edgar Winter played the prominent saxophone lines on “All Revved Up With No Place to Go.” Rundgren handled the guitars and helped shape the dense, dramatic sound, while engineer John Jansen mixed the final album version, giving the track its crisp, theatrical punch within the Wall-of-Sound-style production.
On the finished album, the song stands out for the way it builds. It opens with a slow, sax-led groove over a simple piano pattern, Meat Loaf delivering the story in his huge, emotive voice while the horns weave around him. For much of the running time the track simmers rather than explodes, almost like a restless kid pacing the room. Near the end, the band slams into a faster, guitar-driven section where he tears through the verses again at high speed, finally releasing all the tension that has been building since the opening bars.
The character at the center of the song is a classic Steinman creation: a small-town all-American boy, star on the football field and local guitar hero, burning with desire and boredom. He dreams big, prowls the outskirts of town and meets a girl who feels like something out of a dream, yet he keeps ending up stuck, overflowing with energy and nowhere to put it. Listeners who grew up with the record often talk about how accurately it captures teenage frustration—revved up on hormones, rock and roll and late-night fantasies, but still trapped in the same streets night after night.
Although “All Revved Up With No Place to Go” was primarily an album track, it did get a taste of single life. In 1978 it was issued in the U.K. as a 7-inch, paired on the B-side with an edited, multi-part version of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” It never became a major chart hit the way “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” or “Paradise” did, but it rode along with the parent album as Bat Out of Hell slowly turned into a global phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies and spending years on album charts in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.
Onstage, the song grew even larger. Setlist archives show that Meat Loaf played “All Revved Up With No Place to Go” hundreds of times over the decades, often as an early highlight or midway adrenaline shot in shows built around Bat Out of Hell. Live versions push the tempo, stretch the sax solos and turn the closing section into a full-band sprint, underlining how much the track was built for performance. Tribute tours built around the album and Steinman’s music have kept it alive, with bands regularly using it to bridge between the grand epics and the big hit ballads in their sets.
Over time, “All Revved Up With No Place to Go” has come to represent one of the purest shots of hard rock on Bat Out of Hell. Critics and fans often describe it as a compact distillation of Steinman’s obsessions: fast cars, restless youth, doomed romance and the sense that the night is always just about to catch fire. It may not be the most famous track on the album, but for many listeners it is the one that best captures the feeling of being young, overcharged with emotion and stuck between the life you have and the one you are desperate to chase.
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Lyric
I was nothing but a lonely boy looking for something new
And you were nothing but a lonely girl
But you were something
Something like a dream come true
I was a varsity tackle and a hell of a block
When I played my guitar
I made the canyons rock, but
Every Saturday night
I felt the fever grow
Do you know what it’s like?
All revved up with no place to go
Do you know what it’s like?
All revved up with no place to go
And in the middle of a steamy night
I’m tossing in my sleep
And in the middle of a red-eyed dream
I see you coming
Coming on to give it to me
Well, I was out on the prowl down by the edge of the track
And like a son of a jackal
I’m the leader of the pack, but
Every Saturday night
I felt the fever grow
Do you know what it’s like?
All revved up with no place to go
Do you know what it’s like?
All revved up with no place to go
Oh baby, I’m a hunter in the dark of the forest
I’ve been stalking you and tracking you down
Cruising up and down the main drag all night long
We could be standing at the top of the world
Instead of sinking further down in the mud
You and me, ’round about midnight
You and me, ’round about midnight
Someone’s got to draw first
Draw first
Someone got to draw first blood
Someone got to draw first blood
Ooh, I got to draw first blood
Ooh, I got to draw first blood
Well, I was out on the prowl down by the edge of the track
And like a son of a jackal
I’m a leader of the pack, but
Every Saturday night
I felt the fever grow
Do you know what it’s like?
All revved up with no place to go
Do you know what it’s like?
All revved up with no place to go
Well, I was nothing but a lonely all-American boy
Looking out for something to do
And you were nothing but a lonely all-American girl
But you were something like a dream come true
I was a varsity tackle and a hell of a block
And when I played my guitar
I made the canyons rock
But every Saturday night
I felt the fever grow
All revved up with no place to go
All revved up with no place to go
All revved up with no place to go
All revved up with no place to go
All revved up with no place to go