American rock singer Meat Loaf collapsed Thursday night during a concert in Edmonton, Alberta. His condition was not immediately known.
The 68-year-old was singing his Grammy Award-winning hit “I’d Do Anything for Love” when he collapsed on stage.
Assistants rushed towards the singer as he lay on his back, not appearing to be moving, on the Jubilee Auditorium stage.
The collapse was captured on camera by several concertgoers and immediately began making the rounds on social media.
“Is this really happening?” one female concertgoer can be heard on video asking. “Oh my God.”
Another concertgoer called the incident “a little surreal.”
“He had just finished ‘Bat Out of Hell’ and had just started ‘I Would Do [Anything] For Love,’ and it looked at first like he was just being theatrical and lying down on the stage,” Britt Brewer, who attended the show with her brother, mother and a co-worker, told the Edmonton Journal.
The confusion was deepened by the fact that backing tracks appeared to continue for a few seconds even after the singer had stopped singing and collapsed on stage.
Members of the crowd began to chant “Meat Loaf” and clap as the singer lay on the stage.
Joel Gotlib, a reporter and producer at CTV Edmonton, tweeted that Meat Loaf “did not look well” before he collapsed.
The singer had canceled two recent concerts, including one on Monday in Calgary, “due to illness,” according to his official Facebook page.
Local health officials told Global News that they took an unidentified patient from the concert hall to a nearby hospital after a “fainting episode.”
A fan who said he was in the front row told the station he saw the singer collapse, but he heard Meat Loaf quickly regained consciousness.
“The got him revived, is what I was told,” Jim Thibaudeau told Global News. “He knew his name and where he was. And he seemed to be OK.”
A local radio station also reported that Meat Loaf had fainted but been revived.
The operatic rock singer is one of the best-selling singers of all time, boasting worldwide sales of more than 80 million records.
He was born Marvin Lee Aday in Dallas. As a teenager, his alcoholic father tried to kill him with a butcher knife, he wrote in his autobiography, “To Hell and Back.”
That rough childhood gave his soaring voice a dark edge.
Meat Loaf found success with his major-label debut, “Bat Out of Hell,” in 1977. Four years later, his follow-up, “Dead Ringer,” was also a hit.
He struggled to reach the same critical reception with three other albums in the 1980s, before roaring back in 1993 with “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell,” which included his biggest hit, “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).”
Meat Loaf has also acted in television shows and movies, most notably playing cancer survivor turned anarchist boxer Robert “Bob” Paulson in the 1999 film “Fight Club.”
Thursday was not the first time that Meat Loaf has had health problems on stage. In 1978, the singer jumped off a stage in Ottawa, breaking his leg. He finished his tour performing in a wheelchair.
In 2003, he suffered a heart attack during a concert in London, according to Rolling Stone. While performing surgery on the singer, doctors diagnosed the singer with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a condition characterized by an extra electrical pathway in the heart.
Since then, he has suffered other scares. In 2011, he fainted on stage during a concert in Pittsburgh and shortly after a concert in New Jersey.
“I f—- fainted,” he told the crowd in Pittsburgh. “I have asthma. I can’t breathe.”
Then he finished the concert.
That same year, Meat Loaf suffered severe vocal cord trouble that left him temporarily unable to sing.
“I had a swollen vocal cord and protruding blood vessels, so it was a struggle,” he told the Daily Mail in 2012. “But I was determined to continue even though I had to visit a doctor every night.”