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Todd Rundgren: Multi-Instrumentalist, Songwriter & Record Producer (1 Viewer)

Brilliant musical mind.  Reminds me of Zappa in a way.  Always pushing boundaries. Wrote some of the most beautiful, melodic songs with ease.  Total joke this guy isn't in the Hall of Fame. 

 
Bob - holy ####!  Pile'em up!!

I was so disappointed when I first heard the first Utopia album.  Coming off Something/Anything, AWATS, and then Todd - it was nothing like the prior stuff.  More like Spinal Tap's last minute decision to go free form jazz, "Moogy wrote this one!"  Once into the lyrics - the Utopia theme got catchy right away, and the fairly long single "Freedom Fighters" caught me quickly, but this whole new approach was a smack in the face.  I now enjoy this album almost as much as my favorites.  

Another Live is a lot more approachable - with a couple of great songs that became a standard part of his live act - the Wheel and the Seven Rays.  By this time, he hit fans with another curveball with "Initiation" as well.  Change was going to continue to come.

The Metropole Orchestra concert is a thing of beauty.

 
I am constantly amazed by how my impressions and reactions to albums can change over time (On The Corner by Miles was challenging listening and an acquired taste, now one of my favorites).  

 
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Related to Eephus Beatles post upthread - From a 2010 Beatles Celebration show at the Hollywood Bowl (Rundgren's debut there?)

Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except For Me And My Monkey)



 
Holy #### Bob I have never seen this show at the Bowl with him doing the Beatles stuff.  I have heard him do lots of Beatles stuff but not "Me And My Monkey", "Mr. Kite", or "A Day in The Life"

Thanks!  Awesome.

Of course now I'm deep into links that showed up I haven't seen before either ...Austin City Limits show, etc.  

 
Yeah, Binky, pretty sure you know 1,000 X more than I do about all things Todd-related arcana and marginalia.

A lot of this is just matching his wiki bio to what I can find on YouTube. And there isn't too much you can't find on Youtube. :)

For instance, about 30 minute excerpt (VIDEO in nine parts) from the VH1 Classic Albums series entry on the making of Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell album. At last count, it has shifted something like 43 million units (behind only Thriller, Back In Black, Dark Side Of The Moon and The Bodyguard, AHEAD of the Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-1975, Saturday Night Fever and Rumours).

Background (wiki)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Out_of_Hell

Production

Recording started in late 1975 in Bearsville Studios, Woodstock, New York. Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, the pianist and drummer from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band played on the album, in addition to members of Rundgren's group Utopia: Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell and John "Willie" Wilcox. Edgar Winter played the saxophone on "All Revved Up".[9] Rundgren himself played guitar, including the "motorcycle solo" on "Bat Out of Hell".[15] Both Steinman and Rundgren were influenced by Phil Spector and his "wall of sound".[9] According to Meat Loaf, Rundgren put all the arrangements together because although "Jim could hear all the instruments" in his head, Steinman hummed rather than orchestrating.[15]

When Rundgren discovered that the deal with RCA did not actually exist, Albert Grossman, who had been Bob Dylan's manager, offered to put it on his Bearsville label but needed more money.[16] Rundgren had essentially paid for the album himself.[11] Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. was impressed, but other senior people rejected them after they performed live. Steinman had offended them a few years earlier by auditioning with a song named "Who Needs the Young", which contains the lyric "Is there anyone left who can ####? Screw 'em!"[17]

Another E Street Band member, Steve Van Zandt, and Sonenberg arranged to contact Cleveland International Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records. After listening to the spoken word intro to "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth" ("Hot Summer Night"), founder Steve Popovich accepted the album for Cleveland.[17][18]

Rundgren mixed the record in one night. However, the mixes were not suitable to the extent that Meat Loaf did not want "Paradise" on the album. Jimmy Iovine, who had mixed Springsteen's Born to Run, remixed some of the tracks. After several attempts by several people, John Jansen mixed the version of "Paradise" that is on the album. According to Meat Loaf, he, Jansen, and Steinman mixed the title track.[16]

Phil Rizzuto's baseball play-by-play call for "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" was recorded in 1976 at The Hit Factory in New York City by Rundgren, Meat Loaf and Steinman. As an Italian Catholic, Rizzuto publicly maintained he was unaware that his contribution would be equated with sex in the finished song. However, Meat Loaf asserts that Rizzuto only claimed ignorance to stifle some criticism from a priest and was fully aware of the context of what he was recording.



 
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While My Guitar Gently Weeps With Joe Jackson & Ethel - this was a mighty fine tour.  Todd has played with Ethel quite a bit and they make for a great pairing - Joe Jackson knocked it up even more.



 
Todd Rundgren Ubben Lecture at DePauw University (Complete) VIDEO 2 hours, roughly half career spanning interview, half Q & A

"The singer/songwriter/producer/technology pioneer delivered a Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture, "Music, Technology and Risk-Taking," at Indiana's DePauw University on April 8, 2009. The session was moderated by Ken Owen '82, executive director of media relations at DePauw, who engaged in a conversation with Rundgren for about an hour. The second hour of the program was dedicated to a question-and-answer session with the audience.

In a wide-ranging session, Rundgren talked of his childhood, his early musical experiences with Nazz, how his performance and songwriting style evolved, and discussed producing acts such as Meat Loaf and Hall and Oates. Also noted was the impact of The Beatles on his work, and his disdain for cellphones.

He offered, "the worst thing that can happen is you trade your love of music along the way for the success of trying to capitalize off of the music."



 
Well Bob, it looks like neither one is sleeping tonight ...we're gonna run into UH here soon.  For someone like me and other Todd fans this was a really fun interview.  I read a lot of biographies on rock and love all the behind the scenes material.  It is also good to see him getting recognized for his contributions to the music industry over the years.  

He was given the Les Paul award in 2014.

The Les Paul Award, named for the revolutionary inventor and esteemed musician, is presented annually to honor individuals or institutions that have set the highest standards of excellence in the creative application of audio and music technology. Russ Paul, son of Les Paul, will make the presentation on behalf of the Les Paul Foundation, sponsor of the award. Instituted in 1991, the honor has been granted to such luminaries as Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young and Peter Gabriel.

Since he doesn't care about the Rock & Roll HOF - then #### them too.  :P

 
neal cassady said:
Brilliant musical mind.  Reminds me of Zappa in a way.  Always pushing boundaries. Wrote some of the most beautiful, melodic songs with ease.  Total joke this guy isn't in the Hall of Fame. 
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The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?  Yes, well, that's pretty much of a joke in and of itself. 

 
Uruk-Hai said:
God, I just saw this thread and, even before opening it, I imagined Binky doing flips like the church dancers in "The Blues Brothers". Link

A couple of random thoughts.........

Todd is a ####### genius. I can't stand a lot of his stuff, and I bet he'd take that as a compliment.

Like Harry Nilsson, he's woefully underrated. Both of those guys made some of the weirdest, most idiosyncratic music of the 70s. Artists like Yes and ####### ELP got all kinds of raves for their album-length farts but, because they worked from a pop/soul background, Todd & Harry got almost none. They both had more finesse in their little fingers than any of those pretentious "art" rockers.

Todd got Grand Funk to #1 :wub:

Todd has a wonderful, soulful voice and could probably have had a singles career to rival someone like Smokey Robinson's, post-Miracles. 
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Qualified like to this post (future board upgrade feature due in 2024), to everything but the cheap shot at Yes.  :thumbdown:   :D  

 
Uruk-Hai said:
God, I just saw this thread and, even before opening it, I imagined Binky doing flips like the church dancers in "The Blues Brothers". Link

A couple of random thoughts.........

Todd is a ####### genius. I can't stand a lot of his stuff, and I bet he'd take that as a compliment.

Like Harry Nilsson, he's woefully underrated. Both of those guys made some of the weirdest, most idiosyncratic music of the 70s. Artists like Yes and ####### ELP got all kinds of raves for their album-length farts but, because they worked from a pop/soul background, Todd & Harry got almost none. They both had more finesse in their little fingers than any of those pretentious "art" rockers.

Todd got Grand Funk to #1 :wub:

Todd has a wonderful, soulful voice and could probably have had a singles career to rival someone like Smokey Robinson's, post-Miracles. 
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About that last bit, it sometimes aggravates me that he didn't have that singles career. He has so much talent and his whole career after the beginning has been a series of diversions, some of which paid off, some not.

 
Faithful (background), speaking of the Beatles again, side one was devoted to covers including Rain and Strawberry Fields Forever, as well as Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys and If Six Was Nine by Hendrix, while side two was all Rundgren originals, backed by Utopia. This was his seventh album, falling between Initiation and Hermit Of Mink Hollow.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithful_(Todd_Rundgren_album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BwagJJR0Vk

Healing (background), his ninth studio album, after Hermit of Mink Hollow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing_(Todd_Rundgren_album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8VAUvC9Xls

 
Grew up on TR as my father is a legitimate groupie (has seen him 70+ times in concert). Obviously love all the stuff mentioned in here. Little anecdotes that have stuck with me:

he sings background vocals on Celine Dion "it's all coming back to me"

he plays the motorcycle solo in bat out of hell 

Hes a hell of an artist. Truly has done it all. Ahead of his time with online stuff too. 

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
About that last bit, it sometimes aggravates me that he didn't have that singles career. He has so much talent and his whole career after the beginning has been a series of diversions, some of which paid off, some not.
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I didn't know that he fought so hard NOT to release "Izzat Love" as a single.  There are a bunch of his songs that could have been singles hits - I think its a combination of lack of singles desire and lack of record company promotion.  

 
Trey said:
Grew up on TR as my father is a legitimate groupie (has seen him 70+ times in concert). Obviously love all the stuff mentioned in here. Little anecdotes that have stuck with me:

he sings background vocals on Celine Dion "it's all coming back to me"

he plays the motorcycle solo in bat out of hell 

Hes a hell of an artist. Truly has done it all. Ahead of his time with online stuff too. 
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Wise dad - lucky you, with an up bringing of Todd blaring in the house all the time.  

 
With A Twist (background), Rundgren's Bossa nova album (covers include I Saw The Light, Can We Still Be Friends, Hello It's Me and A Dream Goes On Forever). Seriously. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_a_Twist...

AUDIO 40 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOFAM-ahn7c

Up Against It - the script (background). At one time was intended by late writer Joe Orton as the third Beatles movie, even when they passed, Director Richard Lester (who helmed the Beatles' first two theatrical films, A Hard Days Night and Help!) may have had some involvement, but circumstances prevented that. It was eventually turned into an off-Broadway play scored by Rundgren (see below).     

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_It

"Orton's screenplay was a revised version of a 1966 script called Shades of a Personality, by Owen Holder, which producer Walter Shenson wanted Orton to "punch-up", in his words; Orton incorporated portions of this prior draft, but used, as the opening of the story, a concept he and his companion Kenneth Halliwell had explored in a now-lost novel from 1957, The Silver Bucket. The story's skeleton also borrowed liberally from Orton's final novel, written in 1959, called The Vision of Gombold Provol (posthumously published as Head to Toe).

After a proper contract had been drawn up, allowing Orton to buy back the rights to his script should it be refused, Orton submitted the script to the Beatles's manager, Brian Epstein; after a long period without hearing from either Epstein or the Beatles on the subject, his screenplay was returned to him without comment.

Orton further revised Up Against It after this event, paring down the four leads to three (mainly by combining the George and Ringo parts). Producer Oscar Lewenstein accepted the script, considering Mick Jagger and Ian McKellen for two of the leads. Lewenstein and Orton planned a meeting with director Richard Lester at Twickenham Film Studios to discuss filming options on the script. On the morning the chauffeur arrived to take Orton to the meeting, he discovered Orton and Halliwell dead inside their home. Halliwell had bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer and then committed suicide with an overdose of Nembutal tablets."

Up Against It - the album (background)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_It!_(Todd_Rundgren_album)

"Up Against It! is a 1997 album by Todd Rundgren, essentially consisting of Rundgren's song demos for the Off Broadway show. The project was inspired by the never-produced Up Against It which was a play originally written by Joe Orton for The Beatles.[4][5]

This album is Rundgren's score to the stage adaptation of playwright Joe Orton's Up Against It, the unfilmed screenplay originally mooted as the third Beatles film (after Hard Day's Night and Help). They declined it, so he reworked it to lessen their presence, successfully sold it to the producer Oscar Lewenstein, and then was violently done in by boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell in a notorious murder-suicide. With Orton no longer around to help push it along, development stalled and the script was never filmed. It was published in book form a couple of times, however, and in the 1980s Joseph Papp decided to give the script a new lease on life as a piece of musical theater - hence this score.

The full suite of Rundgren's songs for the musical was released as an album only in Japan, though three re-recorded songs from it were included on his album 2nd Wind.[6] A variant version of the song "Parallel Lines" also appears on Rundgren's album Nearly Human.

In 2016 Todd performed the opera in Groningen, with Mathilde Santing, Wouter Penris and the NNO orchestra (conductor Hans Leenders)."

AUDIO 1+ hour 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YdGrFQ2ew8

 
Cool career spanning retrospective interview/article from Guitar World in 2015.

https://www.guitarworld.com/dear-guitar-hero-todd-rundgren-talks-eric-claptons-psychedelic-sg-changing-influences

Excerpt - Is there anybody you would have liked to have produced, or is there anybody you still want to get in the studio with? — E.L. Ashton

"I’ve always felt that it was dangerous for the producer to take the lead in forming a relationship to make a record. It’s a big responsibility being in the producer’s chair, and sometimes you can be at odds with an artist. They want to do what they want, but sometimes you have other ideas about how to make their music better. So in that regard, I’d rather have an artist come to me and ask me to help instead of the other way around.

That said, there have been some opportunities I wish I could have taken advantage of and some I wish could have come to fruition. The Talking Heads asked me to produce them, but I was already committed to the Tubes. They ended up hiring Brian Eno, which was kind of a turning point for them. I heard from Pete Thomas that I was on the list to produce Elvis Costello, and Pete Townshend told me that I was under consideration to produce the Who. I would’ve done those records in a second."

An even more in-depth article delineating Rundgren's personal musical history and select production discography. He notes the primary influence dating back to his earliest days in Philly with Nazz were The Beatles, The Who and The Yardbirds, as well as The Beach Boys (which in his opinion they shared with The Who, who were also Beach Boys fans).

http://www.avclub.com/article/todd-rundgren-on-his-musical-history-from-nazz-to--72070 

 
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Trey said:
Grew up on TR as my father is a legitimate groupie (has seen him 70+ times in concert). Obviously love all the stuff mentioned in here. Little anecdotes that have stuck with me:

he sings background vocals on Celine Dion "it's all coming back to me"

he plays the motorcycle solo in bat out of hell 

Hes a hell of an artist. Truly has done it all. Ahead of his time with online stuff too. 
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He also sings a duet with Bonnie Tyler called "Loving you's a Dirty Job (But Somebody Got To Do It)", which was produced by Jim Steinman. (As was the Celine dion song). Good stuff.

 
On iTunes, Rundgren Radio archived 300 episodes (many 90 minutes to 2 hours). Episode #253 from 5-17-08 had Barney Hoskyns as a guest, noteworthy because he is a gifted writer (I read his Hotel California on the LA music scene), was at one time editor of MOJO Magazine and has gone on record calling AWATS, A Wizard, a True Star the GOAT album, surpassing even Pet Sounds and Sgt. Peppers. I wouldn't go that far, but do think it is massively underappreciated/underrated, was paradoxically ahead of its time and timeless, and as a result is always waiting to be discovered by a new generation of fans.     

http://podbay.fm/show/293824747/e/1211126400

 
Rundgren seems to create hauntingly beautiful melodies by some kind of autonomic, physiological process, like a heart beat or breathing in the case of mere mortals.



 
:D   I don't know if "The Mirror" comes to mind when I think of beautiful melodies but I do find myself singing it in the shower at times.  It is does slowly swing in its own way.  Imagine a skinny 8th-9th grader with a cheap stereo and bad, big headphones laying in bed singing to this.  

"You mean I've walkin' round in that all these years?"

"One lonely red and arrogant zit."

 
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Rundgren described sprawlingly eclectic, experimental and psychedelic albums like AWATS (A Wizard, a True Star) and Todd as like painting with his head, or a mandala/map of his past musical influences, present state of mind and future directions.  

One of my favorite Rundgren instrumentals I've heard since re-exploring his classic '70s body of work, part one of "side two's" Treatise On Cosmic Fire, Intro - Prana from Initiation '75. Most of the synthesizers were reportedly played/programmed by Rundgren.



 
10 hours ago, Bob Magaw said:

More Utopia

Ra (background)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra_(Utopia_album)

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Bob - thanks for posting!  

For those who don't know ...this is 22 feet high.  He is jamming on the way up with no safety ####.  This is 2 stories high.  

The pyramid is now preserved by a fan in Massachutsetts and is sitting out in his field.  Todd and the group Ethel performed there a couple of years ago.  

hqdefault.jpg


 
Binky The Doormat said:
Bob - thanks for posting!  

For those who don't know ...this is 22 feet high.  He is jamming on the way up with no safety ####.  This is 2 stories high.  

The pyramid is now preserved by a fan in Massachutsetts and is sitting out in his field.  Todd and the group Ethel performed there a couple of years ago.  

hqdefault.jpg
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When I saw this footage from the four part doc in the OP (which is not just narration over stills as I initially thought and contains a ton of live interviews and concert footage like this, highly recommended career spanning retrospective to those interested in the thread), it looked completely bonkers. A glorified "pyramid" in name only (more like four sticks with footholds forming a square base conjoined at the top, with no handrails - which he couldn't have used anyway playing guitar), he begins to ascend about the 8:15 mark. He must have had both great balance and concentration to jam on the way up without ever coming close to tumbling off, given the degree of difficulty. He must have liked the challenge. I never saw Trini Lopez do that. :)

 
I was watching an interview by Roy Firestone, when it struck me that Rundgren somewhat resembled John De Lancie (who plays Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation) 

tve18985-00000001-2939.jpg


 
979_con_Todd-Rundgren2.jpg


When XTCs Andy Partridge would see him walking down the hill from his house to the studio in the morning to begin the Skylarking sessions for that day, partly because he was tall and has a long face, he used to play the Munsters theme on the bass. :)

fred-gwynne-the-munsters.jpg
 

 
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A couple of clips from 2000 when Todd was on CNBC.  He was brought on to talk about to play a tune with his old drummer, Kevin Ellman, who had become a Financial Planner and Patronet, a fan internet service he started a couple years prior.  Todd has been talking about the future of music and the internet for years by this time and absolutely nailed the future of music delivery.  Note the market prices ...

Todd Rundgren on CNBC June 21, 2000 @ 5:12 “My belief is that ultimately people will access music more like the way they access cable television, in that music will be an aggregated service, you pay a monthly fee and you listen to all the music you want”.



 
On ‎2‎/‎27‎/‎2016 at 11:20 AM, Bob Magaw said:

One of the more popular Rundgren/Utopia bootlegs, I think from their first British Tour, Hammersmith Odeon '75 (Luther Vandross on backing vocals - this would have been AFTER he was discovered by David Bowie and played on Young Americans)



 
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Thanks Bob!

Once again, you found one I hadn't seen/heard - the old grey whistle stop one.  Will definitely watch this later tonight.

Spring tornados all around us right now - like almost every other year ...

 
Thank you for all your excellent input in the thread, Binky.

Also forgot to mention, by way of catch up/clean up, the four part doc linked in the OP, is NOT exclusively narration over stills, tons of vintage video, concert performances, interviews, studio footage, anybody interested can learn a lot by watching, great place to start for such a protean talent (kind of like a high protean* shake for the mind, heart and soul :)  ), highest possible rec.

* Protean

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/protean

 
Kasim Sultan, bass player for Rundgren's band Utopia, talked about how when they were recording their vocals, three of them would sing the same note together on the low harmony, than the same for middle and high harmony. So nine multi-tracked voices (and sometimes 18 voices when they double tracked it). I thought some of the harmony vocals on Ra (and some of his other solo and Utopia albums from that approx. era) sound exceptionally good, maybe that had something to do with it. 

 
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Todd had the idea for MTV and pitched it to Viacom, who passed, then created MTV a year later ...

Ron Bennington: Well your career—the fact that you’ve done so much more than just be a song writer/musician; you’re an engineer and basically one of the people who came up with music videos. You were doing music videos before there was even a place to play music videos.

Todd Rundgren: Well yeah, it was just a personal fascination of mine and actually the so-called “MTV Concept,” it wasn’t devised by me, but it was suggested by my manager because I had already acquired all the equipment for professional video making and so he got this idea that we would use this equipment also for collecting all of the videos that, in those days, were made to send to foreign territories most of the time to get shown on English television and things like that. So there was a fair collection of them out there, but nobody had gotten it into their head to take the DJ concept and make it the VJ concept. He had that idea and we went and pitched it to a couple of people and one of the people we pitched it to were entities that eventually became Viacom and they said, “We don’t see it,” and a year later they announced MTV.

Ron Bennington: That is unbelievable. So, when MTV came on you’re just like, “Aw thanks, dude.”

Todd Rundgren: Well, you know, I really didn’t know how to respond to it because I couldn’t’ get it where I lived. It was originally cable television, I lived up in the Catskills and they didn’t have cable running to the end of my road. I had a 13 inch satellite dish and that was the only way I could get television and MTV wasn’t on satellite that I could reach. So I would occasionally see it when I was on the road in a hotel that was carrying it, but otherwise the first several years of MTV are a mystery to me.

Entire interview

 
Interview about AWATS (A Wizard, a True Star) from one of my favorite UK sources of music journalism, along with MOJO and Uncut, The Quietus 

Dr Rock


Todd Rundgren Interview: Talking With The Wizard & True Star
The Quietus , September 14th, 2009 09:55


http://thequietus.com/articles/02726-todd-rundgren-interview-drugs-patti-smith-mark-chapman-and-the-new-york-dolls

'Hello, it's me' booms the voice from dreamy Hawaii 7000 miles via a flimsy phoneline to the damp and rainy Hackney. I'm speaking to the wizard, the true star himself, Mr Todd Rundgren; a John Cassavetes of music, if you will, tirelessly doing whatever it takes to finance the next leap of musical ingenuity, be it through producing Meat Loaf, XTC or The Band, collaborating with The Residents or simply adding a twist of happiness to PeeWee's Playhouse.

It's been a busy few years that's seen Todd join up for a tour with The Cars, write a stadium rock long-player called Arena and produce old sparring partners The New York Dolls in recording sessions he compares to 'herding cats'. Mr Rundgren now looks back and ponders over the making of A Wizard, A True Star, which he is taking on the road in the forthcoming months. Wizard, his fourth solo effort, made headlines, and divided opinions on the man they used to call Runt. Todd tells us why.

You're not known for your love of nostalgia, so what makes you want to play A Wizard, A True Star in its entirety, live

I'm not a big fan of nostalgia but I'm something of a fan of challenges. I've played bits of A Wizard, A True Star in other contexts but never really made an attempt to do the whole thing. I look at it as not so much of a musical challenge as a theatrical one. Once you get around to doing it everyone's completely familiar with the music anyway. With an album like this I believe that people have lots of images in their head that go along with the music. It would be a more interesting presentation if we focused on that aspect as opposed to simply trying to be musically accurate with it.

The recordings of A Wizard, A True Star were fuelled by a new found love of psychedelic drugs. Please tell me how much of an impact the drugs had on your music and on your life in general back then?

They didn't have a principle effect on the music. It wasn't like I suddenly threw away everything that I was doing before and decided that I was going to play the music of my mind. I'd actually been through an experience like that. I had been in a band in the 60s and they all discovered drugs and decided to completely change the music they were playing, so I'd realized that such is possible but it didn't affect me in that way. But it did allow me to objectivise a little bit more the way that I wrote music, the subject matter that I was dwelling on and I realised to actively put some of that away and to absorb new ideas and to also hear the final product in a different way. Getting away from those kind of formulaic song-writing methodologies. A lot of it was a result of Something Anything?, me listening to the record afterwards and going 'well, that was pretty much the same chorus just transposed around and you're still singing about that girl who screwed you over in high school' and realising that I was way beyond that by then and probably onto some other girl breaking my heart. I thought I'm not investing myself as an artist and I'm doing this more out of craftsmanship than anything else and that would be fine, it's just not why I got into music.

Around the time of A Wizard, A True Star Todd the loner turned into a full-on scenester. You started dating supermodel Bebe Buell and frequented fashionable hang-outs like Max' Kansas City. What made this shift occur?

It wasn't anything unusual. I'd been a 'hangarounder' for quite a while, it was just that Max's became the place. Previous to that it was Steve Paul's The Scene which was probably the equivalent to the Speak Easy in London. Whenever a new act came over from anywhere they had to play at The Scene. I essentially almost lived there; I would go there every night because of the musical associations that it created. It was a whole different kind of milieu in those days - the only important thing was music. Nobody gave a #### about movie stars, nobody gave a #### about TV stars. The only stars were musicians.

Eventually Max's Kansas City started having live music, on the second floor. Steve Paul's The Scene closed down so Max's Kansas City became the place to see people. I saw the Wailers first gig there, in a tiny little room that held maybe a hundred odd people. I saw Iggy Pop in there and just about everybody. It was just a hip place to play, it didn't matter how small it was. And this evolved essentially into the New York Scene, it didn't have its own musical scene until around the era of just around A Wizard, A True Star and Utopia and that sort of stuff which was moving in one direction. And then the New York Dolls and The Ramones and all the other bands of that ilk appeared, moving in the other direction.

One of your early supporters, Patti Smith, who wrote the sleeve notes for A Wizard, A True Star, probably wasn't all that well known yet at that point

That's right, Patti had just moved into the city from New Jersey. We were both about the same age and I met her actually at a coming-up party for Johnny Winter who'd just been discovered. Patti was there and I was there and neither of us was with anybody and we were both incredibly bored but it must've been something about the New Jersey and Philadelphia vibe, we just kind of started talking and hit it off and started hanging around a lot together. At the time she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe who also had yet to become really famous, he was photographing more conventional things at the time. She was writing with Sam Shepherd then and she was a poet, principally. She would also do one woman shows that would be combinations of poetry readings and other little performances, she would sing songs, she might sing along to a 45 and then she would just go off freeform. Patti was really electric and I was kind of surprised when she went into music. I understood it but in a way it sort of obliterated and obfuscated a whole lot of other stuff that she did, in my mind.

Another of your fans, rather tragically, was John Lennon's killer Mark Chapman. He claimed to have received secret messages through the Wizard artwork, to kill. What do you know about that?

Well, there actually were secret messages on the artwork but I don't know what they mean because the artist who painted it put them in there. He had this little language that he invented and there are these sort of rhythm like things coursing through the artwork, there's this runic sort of stuff in there. I think it was secret love messages to his girlfriend or something like that, nothing really earth-shattering. He never explained to me what they really meant so I wouldn't know. I just pretty much saw a painting of his in a gallery window and I liked the combination of this sort of old classical style with a bizarro symbolically almost Dali-esque symbology. I also liked the way he drew two perspectives at once, the front perspective and the profile at the same time. The whole thing to me just represented graphically what I was going for musically and I sat for him for a couple of sessions and he essentially just painted it and I didn't instruct him at all what it was supposed to resemble. So whatever Mark Chapman was reading wasn't coming from me, it was coming from the artist, Arthur Wood. And, quite obviously, it's in the eye of the beholder, it isn't any real thing.

Talking about production, you recently produced the New York Dolls' new album. What was it like, after 30 odd years since you produced their debut album, to work with those guys again?

Well obviously it was a lot more mellow but beyond that I was only working with two of the guys, the other three are different people. Generally it was a much more musical experience for me than the original one - that was like herding cats, trying to get everyone onto the same page long enough to get a take. I suppose that was the appeal of it, the barely in control aspect of it, but capturing that isn't an easy task and doesn't have a whole lot to do with music, it has to do with crowd management and other sorts of things like pushing the button at the right time. There weren't a whole lot of suggestions to be made except 'the band fell apart in the chorus', or whatever, which should have been obvious to everyone, really. This time around it was much more about the music, even about trying to get a proper performance that captures the essence of the band. And we were able to, in New York Dolls terms, do more unusual music because there was no attitude, we only had the new material to worry about. And because of their enhanced experience is was really pretty interesting, the fact they'd been around and done so much, particularly David Johannson, he'd gone through several incarnations, he actually has some interesting things to say and to write about, that a twenty year old may not have.

Current bands like Simian Mobile Disco, Daft Punk and Hot Chip, to name a few, are all outspoken fans of A Wizard, A True Star. What, in your opinion, gives the album it's lasting appeal?

It's really hard to say. When it first came out it was roundly considered an overt act of career suicide. It may be that, in its own way, it's as different still as it was then from a more conventional approach to making records. The idea that a musical fragment is as valid outside of a conventional setting as it would be within. When it came out, singles were very important and they still are, a song that is essentially three to four minutes long has a certain form to it. But if that's all that music was, it wouldn't be a very interesting format to work in and I suppose anything that's a testament to other ways of approaching music plays part in what keeps the form vital, what keeps it from becoming stagnant.

* Rundgren thread from the Steve Hoffman forums (in general, sometimes these skew heavily to discussions about audio quality as much as the musical content itself)

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/todd-rundgren-solo-with-utopia-and-selected-productions.236521/

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Todd Rundgren's Utopia - Rockpalast - WDR Studio-L Koln, 08.01.1977 (VIDEO 90 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2DABaH0Mjs

01. Overture: Mountaintop and Sunrise - Communion With The Sun
02. When The #### Hits The Fan - Sunset Blvd - Le Feel Internacionale
03. Love Of The Common Man
04. Sunburst Finish
05. Jealousy
06. Windows
07. Emergency Splashdown
08. The Verb "To Love"
09. Initiation
10. Singring And The Glass Guitar (An Electrified Fairytale)
11. Utopia Theme
12. Couldn't I Just Tell You
13. Just One Victory


 

 
One of many favorite Todd albums is one that is considered to be his "throw-away" albums needed to finish off his contract with Bearsville Records - "The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect."

“I knew that the label was not taking, or promoting, my records seriously, so I thought, ‘why don't I do an album where I don’t try so hard, and let’s see if it makes any difference?'” Thus the reference to a ‘tortured artist.’ I had to deliver an album, but I wasn’t totally excited about the prospect.”

Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect Review

Several songs on here should have been hits ...but no promotion from Bearsville.  

 
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