Stoney & Meatloaf - What You See Is What You Get / Lady Be Mine - Funk Rock 7 - 45
7"

Stoney & Meatloaf - What You See Is What You Get / Lady Be Mine

Label: Rare Earth
Catalog#: R 5027
Format: Vinyl, 7", Single
Record is VG+ with light marks (listen to our copy)

Country: US
Released: 14 Apr 1971
Genre: Funk / Soul
Style: Soul, Psychedelic

Tracklist:

A What You See Is What You Get / 2:20
Written-By - Mike Valvano , Patti Jerome

B Lady Be Mine 3:20
Arranged By - David Van DePitte
Written-By - Mike Campbell (5) , Ray Monette

Credits:

Producer - Mike Valvano , Ralph Terrana , Russ Terrana

Notes:

Published by & (C) 1971 Jobete, BMI.
A trademark of Motown Record Corp. (C) 1971.

Matrix numbers --
A-side: T2-T3-V-01-T2-876M04
B-side: T2-T3-S-T2-876M05

An aspiring actor and singer, Meat Loaf had taken to the road in a touring company of the Broadway musical Hair by early 1971. Fortuitously, one of the stops on the tour was the Motor City, Detroit. In attendance at one of the performances was Motown engineer Russ Terrana, who was captivated by the oddly-named actor (birth name: Marvin Lee Aday) and big-voiced blue-eyed soul singer Cheryl “Shaun” Murphy, a.k.a. Stoney.

In her role as Sheila, it was Stoney who got to belt the musical’s biggest ballad, “Easy to Be Hard,” popularized by Three Dog Night. Terrana seized upon the idea of pairing Meat Loaf (whose name, somewhere along the way, became one word) and Stoney for Motown, and he enlisted his brother Ralph Terrana, a staff producer.

The Terrana brothers teamed with Mike Valvano to produce Rare Earth 5027, “What You See Is What You Get” b/w “Lady Be Mine.” The single was released on April 14, 1971. It performed respectably, hitting No. 36 on Billboard’s Soul charts and No. 71 on the Hot 100.

Stoney & Meatloaf is a duet of singer Meat Loaf and Stoney (Shaun Murphy). They released only one album in 1971, by the team's same name. Meat Loaf and Murphy met while performing with the Detroit cast of Hair. Meat Loaf's name was "Meatloaf" during the recording, and had a semi-hit "What You See Is What You Get".

Stoney had a solo single which wasn't successful; the record company planned to ditch Meat Loaf in the near future. Meat Loaf was furious when he heard this and settled after they recorded "Who Is the Leader of the People?", which was, as Meat Loaf states, a very good song.