Mark Doyle

I got the Meat Loaf gig because of Bob Clearmountain (although I had been asked years earlier to join Meat Loaf’s band, so I knew he and Jim Steinman were aware of me.)

I was at a rehearsal with The New York Flyers in Syracuse, and the phone rang and it was Clearmountain. He asked what I was up to, and I said that as it happened I was headed to New York in the morning to audition for Foreigner as a keyboard player.
He said he had been sitting with Meat Loaf mixing his Dead Ringer album and overheard him talking about needing a guitar player. Bob said, “If you need a guitar player, I know this guy, Mark Doyle…" Before he could finish the sentence, he said Meat jumped over the console and said “You know Mark Doyle? Get him on the phone!!”

So Bob handed the phone to Meat and he said, “Foreigner, what the hell d’ya wanna play with them for, boy? Come play with me! What’re they offering you?”

Well, it wasn’t a done deal yet but I knew what the offer was, so I told him. He asked “Are they givin’ you per diem on top of that?” I said yes, they were. He said, “Well, we can come close. Come to the office after your audition tomorrow.”

When I got back from the rehearsal I called my best friend, Joe Whiting, and ran it by him. His words of wisdom were, “It’s always better to go with someone who DOES want you than with someone who MIGHT want you.”

So I made up my mind that night that I would go with Meat. I went to the Foreigner audition anyway and gave a perfunctory performance just to check it out. The vibe was cold (although Lou Gramm couldn’t have been nicer, being a Rochester boy) and the keyboard player (which would’ve been yours truly) was to play a football field away from the band and not even be visible on stage.

So afterwards I went to the office, where they said “Welcome to the family, we just need to buy out the other guitarist’s contract that we signed before we knew you were available.”
Thus began a three year saga of thrills, spills, and high drama that are better left for a book (maybe someday).

But the high point of this record was definitely working with Tom Dowd, who was yet another of the legendary Atlantic Records team that had figured so prominently in my past.

Unlike Arif, Tom loved to tell stories about all the sessions he had done, and proceeded to regale us with tales of recording Coltrane, Lennie Tristano, Aretha, Ray Charles, Cream, Rod Stewart, etc. We loved it, and I learned so much from him. After starting recording at the Columbia Studio that I recorded Resolution in (which was now so run down that we had to leave, especially after me and Max Weinberg, the drummer on the album, staged a protest that got us into Power Station), we continued on to Power Station, and then I was the only one that they took to Miami with them to finish the work at Criteria. It was my first and only Christmas in Florida, and Meat gifted me with an Atari and all the games we had been playing on the big screen TV in the lounge at Criteria.

A song I co-wrote on this record, Razor’s Edge, became the single and video and still pays me royalties to this day.