The Beat Patrol

May 1974 Creem magazine review by Wayne Robins of Todd’s Todd double album. Was Todd God? No, but it’s 100% Todd… 

‘Raking Turquoise Ruts Across the Velveeta Sky’

Todd the Mod? Todd the Bod? Todd the Nod, or Todd the God? A little bit of all, as you might expect from young Rundgren’s latest album. Mainly, it’s Todd.

As far as albums go, it vibrates like crazy. The question is, how’s your short wave working? It’s not a matter of him being tuned in to our wavelength – that’s granted, since in the last year Todd has given us, as a producer, both Grand Funk’s milestone We’re An American Band, and America’s milestone, the New York Dolls. Where were those reporters from Time Magazine then? But when Todd changes costume from producer to ‘artist’, he comes close to ignoring it all to let it sonic, raving, all spill out.

It’s a question of us being ready to relate to his wavelength. Strict constructionists might feel that Todd is excessive as anything Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman might roll our way. I say get the banana out of your ear. The only real common ground, aside from the reliance on electronic instrumentation throughout these four meaty sides, is that Todd has undergone the real Brain Salad Surgery. Sometimes it slows his game: movie type themes like ‘Drunken Blue Rooster’, which is psychedelicized Michel Legrand, or ‘In and Out of the Chakras We Go’ (formerly: ‘Shaft Goes to Outer Space’), which is full of ravenous energy but lacking in drama, an exercise in instrumental pyromania.

In a way, it’s kind of unavoidable. Todd is drawn into a massive amount of sound. He still seems obsessed by the powers (implied wizardry) available in today’s sophisticated studio equipment: moogs, mellotrons, equalizers, 256 tracks. He is not nostalgic for the hand-held tape recorder and four-part harmonies in the boys’ room.

And Todd comes at a peculiar time in his career. His last album, A Wizard / A True Star was his most experimental, electronic record to date: his latest single, ‘Hello It’s Me’, broke Todd as a recording artist to a wide range of listeners. Trouble was, the song was drawn from Something/Anything, an album two years old. So he’s perched on the verge of attaining a real mass audience by virtually the only means available to a non-performer; that is, a string of hit singles. And he’s willing, perhaps even glad, to let it all slide.

There are some possible singles on Todd, though they not be immediately evident. ‘A Dream Goes On Forever’ and ‘Useless Begging’ both show the sentimental loveworn side of Rundgren, with lovely melodies offset by whiz doodling, and lyrics so cloying they become bizarre: “A million old soldiers will fade away! But a dream goes on forever.” Come on.

But it’s an important relation. Let’s call it the Philadelphia Connection, that allows Todd to remain in touch with his white kid soul music roots, sonic space gear and all. It’s essential stuff for grounding, and it’s this sense of tradition that keeps Rundgren from flying off the handle. Fortunately, though, the best stuff on this 2-LP set seems to be on the very songs that Todd allows himself to get the most indulgent, lyrically and musically.

Try ‘Everybody’s Going to Heaven! King Kong Reggae’. It’s one of the many explorations of teen culture frustration that has made Todd such a smash among the kids: he understands. “So every night we party, and every night we get too high! And I put myself so close to death, til I think I ain’t gonna die…” But not until we blow it all out by doin’ the King Kong Reggae, which has to be the song title of the month. Anybody out there got some dance steps to go along?

In the same vein is ‘Heavy Metal Kids’, another successful, if dangerous exercise in persona leaping. Musically and lyrically, it plays upon the chaotic, unrequited emotional energies of our favorite teenagers. He uses the song to universalize the concept: “Inside everyone is a heavy metal kid,” while exaggerating the madness to its ridiculous but logical extremes: “I know I could make this place so peaceful, and calm! If I could only get my hands on a hydrogen bomb.”

Rundgren’s uniquely self-centered sense of humor sustains a good part of the album. ‘No. 1 Lowest Common Denominator’ explores a contortionist’s view of physical lust, with a TV commercial thrown in: “I kissed you once, will I kiss you again? Be certain with sex and you’ll always have friends.” Which personally is toenail-picking for philosophy, but I sense it’s done on purpose. The song descends into a moogified narration, with further Rod McKuen on methadone images like “All the birds leave raking turquoise ruts across the Velveeta sky…”

Charming, charming. So is ‘An Ellpee’s Worth of Tunes’, another rock star tribulation, nicely executed with changing voices and accents. It’s more traditionally theatrical than most Todd stuff, farcical in the style of Gilbert & Sullivan (not Gilbert O’Sullivan, kids. Gilbert and Sullivan were the guys who invented rock operas before anybody bothered to invent rock.)

It makes even more sense when we discover that the only non-Rundgren composition follows soon after. It’s ‘Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song’, which was written by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Rundgren really goes conceptually mad dog on ‘Sons of 1984’, which utilizes the visionary gimmick of a large audience in New York singing the choruses and having another audience in San Francisco overdub that. (Musta been a mother to mix, but it sounds good.) I only question what happened to the Daughters of 1985, though I find the likely explanation – that it would’ve made the line too
unwieldy to sing – as acceptable for the moment.

So what’s the verdict? I think through all the noise and the occasional overplayfulness in place of composition, Todd has basically found his tongue. What emerges as the dominant theme through the album is an extraordinary bastardization of ‘Hello It’s Me’ type riffs, combining calliope music, zen gun rhythms, technical finesse and Bazooka Joe madness behind the boards. Much of the credit is due to Todd’s latest group of sidekicks: Ralph Shuckett and Moogy Klingman on keyboards, John Siegler on bass, and Kevin Ellman on drums. Note especially the reckless brilliance of Ellman’s drums on ‘King Kong Reggae’ for a taste of some of the most creative, powerful and adaptable percussion work around.

Last question: is this what Todd wants? He’s created a Grand Bouffe for the ears, which is as creatively rewarding to some as it is repulsive to others. Maybe if he wants to get serious about being a recording artist with hit appeal, he could use some control. Maybe he needs a producer. Meanwhile, I can’t wait for him to do H.M.S. Pinafore in its entirety next time out.

Wayne Robins

Barney Hoskyns wrote this overview of Todd Rundgren’s career for Mojo magazine in February 1998. He once said he thought Todd’s A Wizard, A True Star was the best album ever made. This is a great article on a great artist… 

Hello, it’s him.
Standing in the doorway of a two-story industrial structure on the edge of San Francisco’s Mission District, clad only in a pair of green plaid shorts, is the star-spangled wizard – the sometime rabbit-toothed runt – who goes by the name of Todd Rundgren. Tanned and lean and exuding the rude health one might expect in a man who recently upped and moved lock, stock, barrel and children to Kauai, northernmost of the Hawaiian islands, Rundgren beckons me inside and leads me up some stairs to the loft he keeps as his Bay Area pied-a-terre.
The loft is full of detritus, a combination dressing room and antique store. A row of multi-coloured stage costumes sits atop a long shelf. A pulpit sits in a corner. And bang in the middle of the room, winking at me, is the inevitable Apple Powerbook, from which my arrival has dragged Todd away. Turns out he’s making changes to the browser on his website, primary vehicle these days for communicating with his legion of diehard fans.
Though I myself have never been a fully-fledged Toddist (or Todd-is-Goddist), I count myself among the sizeable number of Rundgren devotees who think the man should – and could – have been the biggest rock star of the ’70s. As I sit watching him tap away at his keyboard, I think back to a mind-blowing show at Hammersmith Odeon in October 1975 when Todd and the second edition of Utopia took me on a psychedelic glam-prog journey that changed the face of rock music for me forever.
“Todd could have been the biggest and most important artist of the era,” Paul Fishkin, former general manager of Rundgren’s ’70s label Bearsville, will tell me a few days later. “If he had taken a little more time to work with me and whoever else saw that potential in him, there’s no question in my mind that we could have had it all. Prince is the Todd that made it because Prince learned from the mistakes and understood what it would take on the commercial and marketing levels. Todd’s whole thing was, he was who he was at any given moment and everyone else be damned. The egomaniacal part of that is that he expected everyone to go along with it. I think he got fooled by the cult, the people who told him they’d follow him no matter what he did. The Toddists.”
Rundgren is still tapping at the Powerbook as his long-serving, long-suffering road manager Mary Lou Arnold drives us north on 101 to Petaluma, the small town in which “The Total Individualist” will play a one-man gig tonight in a quaint establishment called the Mystic Theater. En route we make a pit-stop in Sausalito, the town where for ten years Rundgren and his family lived and where he presently needs to consult with a fellow computer buff whose wooden balcony commands awesome views of San Francisco’s aquamarine, surf-flecked bay. The city’s infamously sudden fogs are rolling in over the hillside, and the early evening temperature drops sharply.
After about an hour, Rundgren puts his Powerbook back in its pouch and we proceed on our way through Marin County. When he jokes that he has “a backup band” in case the computer fails, I realise that much of the music we’ll be hearing tonight is contained inside that small metal box. For several minutes he holds forth on the hot computer-nerd topic of the day, which is Microsoft’s purchase of $150 million worth of shares in Apple. Rundgren has always been an Apple man but concedes that the company has never been able to manage its inventory properly. Bill Gates may be Satan, he says, but ultimately the Microsoft deal can only be good for Apple. I grunt and nod as though deeply familiar with the inner workings of Silicon Valley.
Mary Lou interrupts to check on the route to Petaluma. A nervous driver at the best of times, she awaits Rundgren’s orders with mild trepidation. Time was when he used to bark directions at her through a megaphone: 20 years of driving through America together has made them a hilarious double act.
“Follow the force, Mary Lou,” is all Rundgren will say at this juncture.
Friends say that Todd Rundgren was into computers as early as 1965, when he was a lanky, long-faced 16-year-old growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby. By then he was certainly already a precocious specimen, albeit the product of a typically dysfunctional middle-class family. “My family was not close-knit,” he says. “Everyone was sort of competing with each other. We never said ‘I love you’, we never hugged each other. My dad got into a thing with me that was nearly abusive, not physically but psychologically. As a result everyone in my family [dad Harry, mom Ruth, sisters June and Lynette, and baby brother Robin] turned out to have some psychological problem.”
Rundgren says a major part of his karmic journey has been breaking “the lineage of bad fathers” from whence he sprung: his commitment to his own children Rex, Randy and Rebop (as well as to the actress Liv Tyler, who grew up as his daughter) comes, he claims, before anything else in his life. “Before I ever knew what karma meant,” he says, “I swore to myself that I was not going to be my dad, that I was gonna want to have any kid that I had. The rewards of that are so incalculable. I feel so bad for my father that he never experienced what I do.” For someone who is emotionally more remote than he perhaps realises, Todd Rundgren seems close to tears as he says this.
One thing Harry Rundgren did give Todd was an exposure to a range of music that broadened the boy’s palette beyond mere pop music. If Todd’s first group was a covers band called Money, his own tastes inclined as much to classical music and Broadway show tunes as they did towards the British Invasion hits and soul records of the mid-’60s. As a “weedy and undersized” would-be class clown, he was never into rock’n’roll per se.
“I didn’t particularly like Elvis Presley. He looked like the greasers who beat me up all the time. I thought the whole rock milieu was kinda silly. I listened to anything from Debussy to Richard Rodgers. I remember this one song that was part of Slaughter On Tenth Avenue, and it had a Latin feel that got me interested in figuring out how to write music.” After school was out, Rundgren – the boy the kids teased as “Runt Green” – would sit at the piano in the empty auditorium and tinker with major sevenths and “cool progressions”. He says many of his trademark changes were worked out during these late afternoon sessions.
Debussy and Rodgers notwithstanding, the teenage Rundgren did in time become a rabid guitar fanatic, styling himself, like a thousand other American boys, after the Eric Clapton he heard on Bluesbreakers and Yardbirds records. On 23 June, 1966, the day after his 18th birthday, he packed everything he owned into a case and split for Ocean City, one of the umpteen seaside towns dotted along the New Jersey shoreline. Not long after, he caught a show in nearby Wildwood headlined by The Byrds: bottom of the bill that night was a Philadelphia band called Woody’s Truck Stop, “who’d sort of modelled themselves after the Butterfield Blues Band and were blowing everyone’s minds”. Within a couple of months, Rundgren had joined Woody’s Truck Stop as its resident slide-guitar maestro. “I became the Elvin Bishop of the group,” is how he remembers it.
“Todd was completely different from everyone else,” says Paul Fishkin, who’d assumed managerial duties for the group. “First of all, everyone else was taking drugs, and he took nothing. People just couldn’t believe it. Also, he was very ambitious – all he wanted to do was play. At these very straight fraternity parties, while the rest of the band took breaks, Todd would play right through, just jamming and soloing. At one gig, he saved the day by blowing the minds of these angry drunk frat guys who wanted to beat up on the band. And I remember he was always frantically cleaning up the gear. One time he was cleaning the guitar cords, and one of the other guys asked him why in the hell he was doing that. He said, in case we go on tour!”
Fishkin maintains that Rundgren was actually fired from Woody’s Truck Stop for not taking drugs. Rundgren himself says it was simply a difference of emphasis that led to his departure: “Influenced by the San Francisco scene, the band decided they wanted to take acid and get it together in the country. I had the draw the line when the lifestyle became more important than the music.” Leaving shortly after Rundgren was bassist Carson Van Osten, a Philadelphia College of Art graduate with whom he proceeded to form Nazz, a name that came from Lord Buckley via The Yardbirds’ The Nazz Are Blue. Recruiting drummer Thom Mooney and singer/keyboardist Robert ‘Stewkey’ Antoni from rival Philly bands, Rundgren was unequivocal about his Anglophile goals. “We wanted to combine The Beatles’ genius in the studio with the heavy-duty show business of The Who onstage,” he states simply today.
The Nazz story was one of such failed promise and twisted internal politics that it almost derailed Rundgren’s career. An energetic, good-looking group who wowed crowds at psychedelic dungeons like Trauma and the Electric Factory, they were adopted by Mamas and Papas publicist John Kurland after they saw The Who support the Mamas at a show in early ’67. Kurland was a closet homosexual whose idol was Brian Epstein, and his Beatle-esque gameplan was for Nazz to have their cake and eat it too: they would slay the teenagers and enjoy critical credibility. Quick to recognise Rundgren’s prodigious gifts, Kurland sequestered them in a house in Great Neck, Long Island, and groomed them to be America’s next pop sensation.
“Todd was certainly the leader, and by far the most talented,” says Michael Friedman, Kurland’s assistant when Nazz signed their management contract at the beginning of September 1967. “But Kurland over-promoted the teenage aspect of the band, and their credibility was affected by that. He sort of led them in the direction of, ‘You’re gonna make it through records’, which is always the wrong strategy.” Apart from letting the band out to play the odd gig at the Cheetah in Manhattan, Kurland kept them cooped up in the Great Neck house, the resulting cabin fever leading to predictable squabbles and resentments. The group didn’t play its first official show till January 1968.
When the debut Nazz single ‘Hello, It’s Me’/'Open My Eyes’ was released on Atlantic affiliate SGC [Screen-Gems-Columbia] in the summer of 1968, it instantly signalled that here was a pop genius who could do blistering hard rock, heavenly chord changes, and lilting pop ballads, and do them all equally well. The parameters were clear just within ‘Open My Eyes’, a psych-pop classic and Top 50 hit subsequently included on Lenny Kaye’s immortal Nuggets compilation: it starts like The Who’s ‘Can’t Explain’, features a screaming guitar solo and some outrageous ‘Itchycoo Park’ phasing, yet still finds room for a meltingly gorgeous Brian Wilson middle eight. Then there was ‘Hello, It’s Me’, putative A-side and massive hit for the solo Rundgren when rearranged and released as a single from Something/Anything? in 1973. The only catch was that Rundgren didn’t sing lead vocals on either of these Nazz songs, or on almost any Nazz song. Instead vocals were handled by the blandly uninteresting Stewkey, who had the gall to be rude about Todd’s supposedly thin voice.
Nazz, recorded in Los Angeles with an old-school hack of a producer named Bill Traut, made Rundgren’s talents even more clear. Moving from the Cream-style power-trio blues of ‘She’s Goin’ Down’ to the Jimmy Webb orch-pop balladry of ‘If That’s The Way You Feel’ (string arrangement: TR) was diverse and then some. “The eclecticism was part of the Beatles formula,” says Rundgren. “They weren’t self-conscious about experimenting and nor were we, even if other people might have thought, What’s this with The Beach Boys and the heavy metal in the same song?”
Kurland’s hyping of Nazz made little appreciable difference to the album’s fate, for all the money splashed out on mod togs and haircuts. Released in August 1968, the record never rose any higher than #118. At the end of the year, the band flew to London to start work on their second album, ambitiously planned as a double with the title Fungo Bat. After the completion of just one song (‘Christopher Columbus’, subsequently included on Nazz III), the Musicians’ Union learned that the group played instruments as well as sang and swiftly terminated the session. Returning to New York, Nazz quickly began to splinter, the retitled Nazz Nazz (1969) fomenting the envy and jealousy within the band. Rundgren’s deep immersion in the music of Laura Nyro – most evident on the closing, eleven-minute ‘A Beautiful Song’ – particularly rankled with Stewkey and “Moody” Thom Mooney.
“I was starting to find myself as a songwriter, which they didn’t like,” says Rundgren. “I pretty much took over the production and the spokesmanship, because whenever Stewkey opened his mouth everyone started laughing.” It didn’t help that John Kurland began playing the members off against each other. “Kurland had a very sick dynamic going,” says Paul Fishkin, who kept up with Todd during the Nazz period. “Ultimately he wasn’t a manager at all. He was just a publicist and he thought like a publicist.” Rundgren recalls that the scales only fell from his eyes after Kurland’s wife died and he announced that he wanted to give Todd his wife’s wedding ring. Supposedly, Kurland wrote a novel about the rise and fall of Nazz, in which (according to the famed rock encyclopaedist Lillian Roxon) Rundgren “emerges as a sort of anti-hero… someone incapable of feeling real love… [who is] “quite cold and ruthless”. Several years later, tragically, he would commit suicide.
By the time Nazz III (made up of tracks from the Fungo Bat/Nazz Nazz sessions) appeared in 1970, Rundgren had long fled the coop, moving out of the Great Neck house into a Manhattan apartment owned by the Screen-Gems music publishing company. Profoundly disillusioned by the Nazz experience, he decided to set his sights on producing. “Todd came out of the Nazz tremendously embittered that it had failed,” says Paul Fishkin. “He would get people telling him how great he was, and yet he was pretty much broke. It wasn’t like he quit music, although from time to time he threatened to quit and become a computer programmer – that was his other choice.”
Falling in with the Greenwich Village fashion crowd, Rundgren hung out with the proprietors of Stone The Crows, a sister store to London’s Granny Takes A Trip – “I got into a much more co-operative lifestyle… girls who were real nice to me!” He decided he was never going to be in a band again.
Rundgren is still wearing his green plaid shorts as he takes the stage in Petaluma. The small theater is packed for what Todd isn’t shy about describing as “a warm-up show for my imminent appearances in Japan and Shanghai”. Kicking off the gig with a selection of one-man-and-his-axe back pages, he howls his way through ‘Hammer In My Heart’ and ‘Mystified’, segueing from the latter into the faux-ZZ Top of ‘Broke Down And Busted’. “I’m just in a manly mood tonight,” he confides after singing himself ragged.
A significant portion of the show is given over to material from the interactive No World Order and the recent The Individualist, with Rundgren singing over backing tracks played by the Powerbook. When the disk malfunctions and Todd is obliged to run it again, the thought occurs that a) he is being hoist by his own petard and b) there might be more dignified ways to earn a living. A kind of “shut up n’ play yer guitar” mood is detectable in the audience, who breathe an audible sigh of relief when Rundgren shuts down the computer and seats himself behind the piano for an extended suite of 88-key classics. From a fluffed ‘Fidelity’ to a Freddie Mercury-esque ‘Song Of The Viking’, the guy almost gets away with his Victor Borge Of Rock act – but not quite.
After another Powerbook karaoke sequence that includes the propulsively danceable ‘Family Values’, Rundgren – always an entertainingly cynical raconteur onstage – muses on the making of With A Twist, a new album of what he terms “personal standards” re-recorded in a loungecore/bossa nova style in Hawaii. The album is actually a treasure, serving more than anything to remind us just how great his “greatest hits” (‘I Saw The Light’, ‘Can We Still Be Friends’, ‘A Dream Goes On Forever’ et al) really are, and to rekindle interest in such overlooked Rundgren pearls as ‘Influenza’, ‘Fidelity’ and ‘Love Is The Answer’. Onstage tonight he treats us to his bossa nova version of ‘Saw The Light’, and to the album’s serene reading of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Want You’.
And then he sings what may be my favourite Todd Rundgren song of all: ‘Cliché’. I am jetlagged but happy.
Sally Grossman pokes at a plate of Chinese food in the Little Bear, one of the restaurants founded by her late husband Albert in Bearsville, the tiny hamlet that serves as a satellite to the more famous town of Woodstock. Sitting a stone’s throw from the disused video studio Albert built for Todd in 1980 – “the big white elephant building”, as she puts it – she is remembering the goofy prodigy who first surfaced in Grossman’s New York office in the late summer of 1969.
“Todd was this boy wonder,” she says. “To be such a renaissance man as he was at the age of 21 was very striking. We were spoiled, of course, because we were so used to brilliant people – Dylan, Janis, Butterfield, The Band. But he was like all of them, his talent was already full-blown. It wasn’t like you heard him and thought, Gee, with the right songs and the right producer…”
In the late summer of 1969, Rundgren was at large in Manhattan. Days were spent girlwatching with Paul Fishkin on St. Mark’s Place, nights were devoted to scoping rock’s beau monde at Steve Paul’s The Scene. But Todd Rundgren’s wastrel days were numbered, since it turned out that he had a major champion in John Kurland’s old partner Michael Friedman, by now working as right hand man to none other than Albert Grossman. “Albert at that point was spending large chunks of time up in Woodstock, so I ended up being up to my ears,” says Friedman. “Initially he didn’t like Todd or think he was talented, but Todd was with me and I basically presented him as a producer. Even at that point, he was brilliant in the studio.”
“I knew Albert was supposed to be this Allen Klein kind of guy,” says Rundgren. “It wasn’t too long before he started to see something in me, and to give me engineering and production jobs on a trial basis. Very early on, he put me with Libby Titus, who was Levon Helm’s girlfriend. And then I went up to Toronto with Robbie Robertson to produce Jesse Winchester’s first album. They were pretty happy with the results, so they made me the titular sound guy on The Band’s Stage Fright.”
It was possibly during the sessions for Stage Fright, recorded with a mobile truck at the Woodstock Playhouse in 1970, that Rundgren first acquired a reputation for brattish arrogance – a rep which has accompanied him throughout his career as a producer. “He stood out like a sore thumb among the Woodstock crowd,” says Mike Friedman. “He was wearing red velvet pants and had green hair, and he was never accepted socially in that context. He should have been in London or Los Angeles, because he had no use for most of that scene and he thought The Band were a bunch of old farts.” Friedman told Fred Goodman, author of The Mansion On The Hill (which includes a fascinating chapter on Grossman), that he once witnessed Levon Helm chasing Rundgren around the studio “trying to kill him because he’d made these nasty remarks about Garth Hudson being an old man”.
While he alleges that Stage Fright was “one of the more maddening experiences I had as a sound guy”, Rundgren admits somewhat ruefully that he was “not quite fully fleshed out in terms of socio-political skills”. There would, he says, “be friction in the studio because of my inexperience and lack of wisdom in dealing with people”. Yet in a sense the arrogance was endemic to Woodstock and the Grossman stable. Grossman certainly didn’t help when he told Rundgren he was going to make him “the highest-paid producer in the world”, and then proceeded to do it. When Rundgren took over the production of Badfinger’s Straight Up from George Harrison (then busy with the Concert for Bangladesh), Grossman demanded an unheard-of fee for his wunderkind. “He asked for a shitload of money, more than any producer had ever been paid,” says Rundgren. “And they paid it because it was Albert Grossman.”
Recalled Badfinger’s Joey Molland of the experience: “Todd was unbelievably rude. He would insult us. He’d say we couldn’t play, we couldn’t write and couldn’t sing and couldn’t do anything. I don’t know where he got off.” The list of Rundgren clients who would concur with such grievances is long and impressive. “Nobody ever used him twice,” says Mike Friedman. “He was just so self-involved. And there was never a thankyou – Albert would never have given him those projects if it hadn’t been for me.”
A point came, inevitably, when Rundgren thought he might like to cut his own album. “They figured, Let the kid make a record,” he remembers. He moved out to L.A., hired former Electric Prune Jim Lowe to engineer the session, and set to work on his debut album Runt. It was very close to brilliant. “We’d already met him and jammed with him in New York,” says Tony Sales, who with his drummer brother Hunt formed the album’s rhythm section. “But we’d thought he was just this guitar player who sounded like Eric Clapton. We had no idea what he could really do.” Here was the runt of the rock litter proving, straight off the bat, that he could do it all: the jubilant pure pop of ‘We’ve Gotta Get You A Woman’, a Top 20 hit in November 1970; the Brian Wilson balladry of ‘Believe In Me’; the throwaway Big Star trash-rock of ‘Who’s That Man?’; and the heavenly ‘Once Burned’, recorded back in New York with Levon Helm and Rick Danko. Here were all the blueprints for Rundgren’s styles, stirred into a pot by an impish, Disney-esque wizard not unlike the one pictured on the album’s back cover.
“I finished the record and Bearsville were, like, floored by the range and variety of it,” says Rundgren. “They were even more floored when ‘We Gotta Get You A Woman’ became a hit.” Unfortunately, the song also ran aground on the perilous shore of early ’70s feminism. “The line about women – ‘they may be stupid, but they sure are fun’ – caused a lot of problems when a key female music director in Detroit took exception to it,” chuckles Paul Fishkin, on whose lack of success with the ladies the song was based, and who by this time was himself working for Bearsville. “And then a women’s dorm in Connecticut threatened to blow up the campus radio station if they continued to play the record.”
A group of women who made rather less fuss about the song were the groupies who glommed on to Todd in California – especially Miss Christine, one of the Girls Together Outrageously who’d recorded for Frank Zappa’s Straight label. “Christine was really strange, but Todd liked the adulation he was getting from her,” says Tony Sales, himself stepping out with Miss Pamela (later Des Barres). Rundgren’s adventures in Tinseltown continued with the recording of 1971’s The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren, another smorgasbord of effortlessly accomplished pop songs and ballads. Rundgren had by this time started smoking pot, “and the results were immediate in terms of the refinement of a style”.
“I didn’t take any kind of drugs until after the first album. Why? I never do anything because it’s a fad. I do it because I need to do it. Pot made me aware of my own thought processes. I had been a totally reactive person, and I started thinking about how my brain worked and what I could do with it. I cared more about lyrics: they weren’t just words that rhymed. The symbology of language took on new meaning for me, rather than just reflexive meaning. I didn’t look at the drug as recreational or escapist. It was always about going to something.”
What stuck out most of all on Ballad were the dazzling tunes, most of them on ballads or mid-tempo tracks written on the piano – songs by the callow troubadour he now slightly dismisses as “the amateur singer, the amateur piano player, the funk-free boy doing his little song”. Funk-free they may be; unmemorable ‘Wailing Wall’, ‘The Range War’ and ‘The Ballad (Denny And Jean)’ are not. This was Todd tipping his hat to Laura Nyro and Carole King, for sure, but doing it exquisitely. The album sold a lot less than Runt but elicited excellent reviews, including one in Rock Magazine from Patti Smith, the proto-punk New York poetess with whom Rundgren had had a brief affair and begun a more lasting friendship. “We became friends because we were both sort of alien, misfit-type people,” says Smith. “We were wiry, skinny, hard-working people who didn’t quite fit in. Neither one of us was involved with drugs or anything at the time, and it was a relief just to meet somebody to talk to where you didn’t have that kind of drug-culture peer pressure to worry about. He was very interested in firecrackers and computers and writing music.”
More important, The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren led seamlessly to the breathtaking Something/Anything?, in the estimation of many Todd Rundgren’s finest achievement. Recorded again in L.A., Something was never meant to be a double album – a record that now sounds like the missing link between the White Album and Sign O’ The Times. “Something was pretty much gonna follow along the lines of Ballad,” says Rundgren. “But it just went and went and went, fuelled by pot and Ritalin [a speedlike prescription drug once used by addicts in conjunction with methadone]. I’d record for eight hours during the day, but I’d also rented an 8-track machine and some synths for other ideas I didn’t wanna burn studio time on. So at night I’d take Ritalin and finish writing a couple of songs, then go over to record some more till four or five in the morning. The first three sides of the album were done in three weeks. I was, like, Mr. Music.”
No less crammed with treasures than its predecessors, Something was also a conscious display of tricks, flaunted with the chutzpah of a rock’n’roll jester. Seven years before Prince recorded his first album tout seul, Rundgren turned the studio into a solipsistic laboratory. One minute he was the guitar-toting hard-rocker of the slow, mesmerising ‘Black Maria’, the next the power-pop god of the chiming ‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You’, the next the epic balladeer of the ecstatic ‘Sweeter Memories’. ‘Song of the Viking’ drew on his boyhood love of Gilbert and Sullivan; ‘Marlene’ – about his pert 17-year-old girlfriend Marlene Pinkard – was the most delicately pretty thing he’d ever written. The synth instrumental ‘Breathless’ anticipated the symphonic interludes of A Wizard, A True Star, and ‘I Saw The Light’ could have been Badfinger in George Harrison mode. On the album’s fouth and final side, Rundgren brought the Sales brothers into the studio, along with keyboard whiz Moogy Klingman and former McCoy/Johnny Winter sideman Ricky Derringer. The tour de force sequence of songs included a catchy new mid-tempo version of ‘Hello, It’s Me’.
“Go ahead, ignore me,” challenged the ads in the music press, which showed an unhinged Rundgren clutching a stick of dynamite. (In a Rolling Stone profile in April 1972, he told Ed McCormack that he envisioned himself becoming “the Elvis Presley of the ’70s”! In the same piece, Patti Smith is quoted as saying that Todd “has absolutely no heroes”.) Well, he wasn’t ignored for long. ‘I Saw the Light’ climbed to #16 in May ’72 and by the summer the album was in the Top 30. Tours supporting Jeff Beck and Alice Cooper gave him important live exposure. At this point, Rundgren met Bebe Buell, a young Virginia-born model on the books of the Eileen Ford agency. “He rang me up and asked me on a date,” Buell recalls. “We went to Max’s, but we didn’t sit in the famous back room because I don’t think he thought he would fit in.” Over the course of the next three years, Bebe made sure that she and Todd “fit in” wherever they damn well pleased. “I became his social director,” she says. “A lot of the fun he had, he had because I dragged him by his multi-coloured mop of hair. He was always an abstract little buddha, always preferred to be thinking rather than drinking.”
Creem described Todd and Bebe “the prettiest stars on the New York turntable”. “I guess that’s what we were,” says Bebe. “We didn’t do the uptown, I’m-too-prissy-to-go-to-Max’s act like Mick and David.” For Buell, Rundgren was close to being a father-figure: her own dad had died when she was very young. For Rundgren, Buell was the conduit to a hipper-than-thou scene than he might never have embraced of his own volition. It was Bebe who insisted he see The New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, who marched him up to Mick Jagger at Max’s, who first turned him on to magic mushrooms. Which brings us neatly to the tale of Todd Rundgren’s radical left-turn into the stream-of-consciousness sphere of psychedelia.
“Psychedelics brought me to an awareness of myself that I’d no comprehension of previously,” Rundgren says of his first trips. “The pot gave me a window into my thinking process, but that’s just the process. You don’t know your ‘You’ until you’ve had your ego stripped away, and you realise you’re all that stuff. For most people, I think it’s a good thing to realise there’s an essential part of you that’s really sort of alone but that’s also very universal. You begin to see your ego elements as these weird, goofy, aberrational appendages.” Rundgren claims it was surrendering to “this sort of flow of stuff” that made him question his musical procedures. “So much musical product is just a function of habit and ego, in that you wanna come off a certain way. It’s almost like putting on clothes or makeup. So rarely is the music honest. It’s like Michael Jackson trying to write any song where he comes off as normal. So many people use music as obfuscation, as a wall between them and the audience.”
A Wizard, A True Star, recorded in late 1972 in Rundgren’s new Secret Sound studio on Manhattan’s West 24th Street, was Todd “just mapping my head right onto a record… battling against any sort of filtering process”. It was also a gloriously unpunctuated rollercoaster ride through the various musics Rundgren had colonised – a voyage through the cosmos garnished with synthesizers that twinkled like stars, nineteen tracks that leaked into each other or tripped on each other’s heels, jumping from the fuzztone metal of ‘Rock And Roll Pussy’ to the surreal ephemera of ‘Dogfight Giggle’, from the nonsense of ‘Just Another Onionhead’ to the anthemic rush of ‘When The Shit Hits The Fan’, and even finding room for a medley that drew on Rundgren’s love for Curtis Mayfield (‘I’m So Proud’), Smokey Robinson (‘Ooh Baby Baby’) and the sweet Philly soul of Thom Bell (The Delfonics’ ‘La La Means I Love You’). For some, myself included, Wizard was and is the most awesomely ambitious rock record ever made.
“I remember an epiphanal moment in the subway one Sunday afternoon when it was real quiet,” says Rundgren. “I suddenly heard this noise, and I realised it was in my head, and it started freaking me out. It wasn’t tinnitus, it was that I’d gotten aware enough of my internal environment that I had reached the noise floor in my head. I could actually hear the hum of my own nervous system. Well, I went back to the studio and spent the whole day wiring the studio. I’d had some guy draw me out a diagram about how to wire a pre-amp channel, and I built a cabinet for it which was essentially made of wood and blue alligator-skin naugahyde. I bought a graphic equalizer for each channel, and full graphic equalization became my style of recording from that point on. Everything sounded great from the first note. All of us [Klingman, Derringer, Ralph Shuckett et al] were on drugs of some kind or another, and we were just musical maniacs.”
“Rock and Roll for the Skull,” raved Patti Smith in her Circus review of Wizard when it came out in March 1973. Sadly, the record never rose any higher than #86, and it baffled many listeners, including the good folks at Bearsville Records. “I’m sure Albert was as perturbed as anyone else by the way I followed up Something/ Anything?” says Rundgren. “But when I was listening to Something six months after I’d made it, I realised there were songs on there that had taken me twenty minutes to write, and I thought, Are you just going to be writing to these same formulas I’d essentially come up with in high school?”
There was an added complication when the new version of ‘Hello, It’s Me’ mysteriously took off on radio and started making fast for the Top 10. When this relatively straightforward rock’n’soul ballad hit #5, A Wizard, A True Star started, in comparison, to sound even more wildly offbeat. “There was bad luck with timing,” says Paul Fishkin, by now in charge of Bearsville. “We didn’t put out ‘Hello’ right away, which was my mistake. Meanwhile Todd was off on his psychedelic adventure, and then a year later ‘Hello’ becomes a hit. At which point we’re up against Todd in a completely different mindspace. With five more potential hits on Something, he says, No fucking way am I releasing anything else off that album. And the culmination of all the madness is the Midnight Special appearance where he gets on the piano singing ‘Hello, It’s Me’ and looking like a fucking drag queen.”
“I called it the Man-Eating Peacock outfit,” laughs Bebe Buell. “I mean, you look back now and it was no nuttier than Peter Gabriel dressed as a sunflower. But we were all so upset. It wasn’t self-sabotage, I think Todd thought everyone would like it. But [makeup artist] Nicky Nichols was not only highly creative and highly gay but he was stoned out of his mind with unlimited access to paint and feathers!”
“At this point, Todd was into a sort of existential use-me-as-a-piece-of-art kick, and he let Nicky do whatever he wanted,” recalls Fishkin. “Todd had iron fucking balls, I will say that about him, but the Midnight Special appearance was for me the moment when it all came crashing down. This is his chance to be Elton John and The Beatles and more, and he goes on TV singing this beautiful loping smash-hit ballad and Nicky has made him up with wings and painted his eyes as multi-coloured teardrops! The world is watching, and this is the Todd they see.”
Whether or not this was the moment at which Todd Rundgren’s career “came crashing down”, it was certainly symbolic of the man’s refusal to march to any beat but his own. “Todd wouldn’t take any advice, not even from Albert,” says Mike Friedman. “He was just so impossible to deal with, you had no influence at all. I tried to get him to put together a bunch of great musicians and have a great producer produce him. I mean, directors don’t usually direct themselves when they’re acting. But Todd knew everything, and he always wanted to be five miles down the road from where he was. The bottom line was that the public didn’t buy it. He wasn’t Stevie Wonder, who was another guy who could do it all but who knew how to make commercial records.”
The first signs that Rundgren was wilfully turning his back on pop success was the 1973 tour with the band that was eventually christened Utopia. Assembling a lineup that included the Sales brothers, keyboard players David Mason and Moogy Klingman, and a demented, Eno-esque synth twiddler named Jean-Yves ‘Frog’ Labat, Rundgren developed what he remembers as “an expensive, high-concept, technically complicated show” that featured an 8-foot geodesic dome and exploding flashbulbs, not to mention multi-coloured hair for all concerned. It wasn’t a resounding success.
“Frog was inside the dome, and Hunt sat on top of it,” recalls Tony Sales. “Hunt was so high up he’d get a one-second delay before he heard the guitars! All of our hair was different colours. Mine was fuschia-pink and blond, Hunt had a skunk hairdo with fuckin’ tail coming off it. Frog was green, and Todd’s just looked like vomit. I remember we spent a shitload of money, but we only did eight gigs. Things weren’t working correctly, and it was really frustrating because we’d rehearsed this thing up in Woodstock for a while.”
“We delivered one memorable show in Cleveland,” says Rundgren. “But we had a disastrous gig in Philadelphia when this big elaborate intro built to a point of thunderous loudness and then the flashbulbs didn’t go off, there was no sound coming out of the guitar amps, and we were just standing there with our thumbs up our asses. It was a nightmare, and for a long time Utopia had little credibility in Philly.”
This Tap-esque fiasco was not enough to deter Todd from pushing the prog-rock envelope still further. A second incarnation of Utopia was unashamedly inspired by the flashy virtuosity of Yes and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. “Todd was constantly milling over his fucking Yes albums,” remembers Bebe Buell. “He would wake up every morning and put freaking ‘Roundabout’ on, and it just used to make me insane! We really didn’t have the same musical tastes. Even when I did finally get him to see The New York Dolls, he just thought they were funny. He sat there on the couch as they did a showcase for us, and I just remember him laughing hysterically from beginning to end. See, I really think he should have continued as Todd Rundgren and developed a band around his persona. But the psychedelic experience really did change him, it opened up that third eye. Utopia was a concept he really believed in, musically but also a potential way of life.”
With the intermittently brilliant double album Todd (1974), and then with Initiation (1975), Rundgren’s music increasingly began to reflect the arcane ideas and theories he was picking up from books on mysticism and Eastern philosophy. “I hadn’t done much dabbling around in the mystical at all,” he says, “but I was looking at these books and they were explaining some of the phenomena I was experiencing. I started devouring these Eastern philosophies, never buying any of them whole but following the thread of anything that was consonant with what I was experiencing. I got very much into Theosophical writers like C.W. Ledbetter, who applied scientific methods to Hindu philosophy and came up with a new synthesis. These were concepts that found their way into my personal cosmology and into my music. I mean, I never read the actual Treatise On Cosmic Fire [inspiration behind the long sequence that concludes Initiation] because it was just too damn opaque, but I figured it made a good concept to hang the music on.”
The Utopia theme, which had been tentatively introduced on Wizard’s ‘International Feel’, was officially unveiled on 1974’s Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, complete with all thirty minutes and 22 seconds of ‘The Ikon’. “City in my head/Utopia/Heaven in my body/Utopia/It’s time for me/For me to go,” went the opening track, recorded live in Atlanta. Looking back from our current vantage point, much of the music on the record wasn’t bad at all: if we’re going to rehabilitate Pomp Rock and posit Radiohead as neo-prog gods, then the least we owe Utopia is a bit of a look-in. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that many people – including Bearsville once again – looked on Utopia with distaste that bordered on alarm. “Albert was more tolerant of Todd’s eclectic tastes than a lot of people,” says Bebe Buell, “but from a business point of view he decided this just wasn’t marketable. He’d thought he had something commercial with Todd that would be around forever, but Utopia was like starting from scratch all over again. Music was getting simpler and Todd Rundgren was getting more complicated.”
The climax of Todd’s technocratic madness was undoubtedly the bombastic Ra (1977), the first album credited simply to Utopia and the first to feature the trimmed-down four-piece lineup (Rundgren, keyboardist Roger Powell, bassist Kasim Sulton, and drummer Willie Wilcox) that would stay together for almost a decade. At a point when the ’70s pomp rock of Pink Floyd was being overturned by hoards of scabby punks, Rundgren chose to go on the road with a beyond-Spinal-Tap stage set built around a 25-foot pyramid and a giant gold sphinx that shot laser beams out of its forehead.
“The four-piece band was oriented much more towards songwriting and singing, but we still had the legacy of pomp rock,” reflects Rundgren. “Ra had an 18-minute track called ‘Singring And The Glass Guitar’, and it was based on this quasi-mystical Egyptian concept.” Having witnessed the tour twice in 1977, I can myself vouch for the fact that the Ra shows deeply divided Rundgren’s audience between prog fiends who dug the laser beams and solo Todd fanatics who wanted to hear songs like ‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You’ – who clung as though their lives depended on it to the fact that the solo album Faithful (1976) boasted such nuggets of genius as ‘Cliché’, ‘The Verb ‘To Love’’, and ‘Love Of The Common Man’. (It also boasted an entire side devoted to meticulous – indeed, faithful – remakes of ’60s psych-pop classics like ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘If Six Was Nine’, and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.)
“There was a whole period where I continued to make Todd Rundgren records but only toured with Utopia,” concedes Rundgren. “So it became this double life where Utopia was the live thing and drew giant crowds. There was a split in the audience, but there was also a big overlap. As we moved out of the ’70s and into the ’80s, we didn’t realise what an embarrassment of riches music in general had been, and that you could completely disregard something as being just another example of prog-rock.”
Ironically, even the 20-year-old Kasim Sulton was bemused by material like the histrionic seven-minute ‘Hiroshima’. “I felt like most people,” he says. “I really wanted to do the singer-songwriter stuff because that’s where I came from. It was difficult for me to reconcile myself to this high-concept tour: I thought, why can’t we just do things like ‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You’ for two hours? Wouldn’t that be a lot easier and more fun? Why do we have to play this song about the atom bomb? But you have to understand that Todd never looked at Utopia as having anything to do with his solo stuff. It was a totally separate vehicle for him. I can remember when we were discussing what songs we’d do on the first tour, I suggested ‘Hello, It’s Me’. He said absolutely no way was he gonna do that song, because it wasn’t what Utopia was about. He said, ‘The kinda songs people expect to hear, I ain’t doing them’.”
Perhaps it was no surprise that Rundgren began slowly to retreat from the music scene. Although he continued to work as a producer, most notably on Meat Loaf’s multi-million-selling Bat Out Of Hell (1977), he began to spend increasing amounts of time in the house he’d bought in Mink Hollow, near Woodstock. He also left the Albert Grossman management stable, though he would continue to work with Grossman on various projects till his death in 1986. “I don’t enjoy rock’n’roll anymore,” Todd told Creem in October 1975, three months after the move to Mink Hollow. “I have to say honestly that I don’t enjoy the scene. And I seriously wonder if I was meant to make myself deaf in front of a bunch of people, just playing this super-loud frantic music.” One of the tracks on Initiation was a bitter tirade entitled ‘The Death Of Rock’n’Roll’.
“Todd felt under duress,” says Bebe Buell, who lived with him and their dogs Puppet and Furburger at Mink Hollow. “I noticed that his boyishness began to diminish and he became harder. I saw him toughen up and lose a lot of his sensitivity. He became an angry young man.” Exactly how much Rundgren’s anger was a result of Bebe’s infidelity with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler – the result being the birth of ’90s screen starlet Liv Tyler in July 1977 – is something Buell herself either doesn’t care (or feels no need) to consider. When the issue of Liv’s paternity finally became public in 1991, it led to a complete cessation of relations between Rundgren and Buell, who’d split up a year after Liv’s birth in 1978.
March 1978 brought the release of the aptly-titled Hermit Of Mink Hollow, a splendid return to solo melodiousness that included a smattering of classic breakup songs (‘Too Far Gone’, ‘Hurting For You’, the oft-covered ‘Can We Still Be Friends’). Entirely performed and recorded by Rundgren in the new Utopia Sound studio he’d built at Mink Hollow, Hermit should have been a much bigger hit than it was. Following on its heels that year was Back To The Bars, a double live album of Rundgren’s best-loved songs recorded – as a kind of anthology – at the suggestion of Paul Fishkin. On the all-star finale of ‘Hello, It’s Me’ taped at L.A.’s Troubadour, Rundgren was joined by Rick Derringer, Spencer Davis, Stevie Nicks, and Hall & Oates (whose War Babies he’d produced in 1974). If you want a checklist of the man’s greatest songs, there’s no better place to look than here – unless it’s on With A Twist, which duplicates five of the songs from Bars.
Meanwhile, Utopia did a volte-face from the pomp of Ra, releasing the decidedly poppier Oops! Wrong Planet (1977), an album summarised by Roger Powell as “an Armageddon-ish earth-on-the-skids opera” and by Goldmine as “power pop meets Blade Runner”. The inimitable Rundgren melodies were still there in abundance, but so were the new sounds of Powell, Sulton, and Wilcox: Todd made a point of stressing that the group was a democracy. By 1980, on the moderately successful Adventures In Utopia, the band had climbed aboard the new wave bandwagon and were busy in the studio with the burgeoning technology of ’80s pop: the result was sub-par, even if ‘Set Me Free’ actually managed to dent the Top 30.
“With that whole Utopia thing, he lost not only me but hundreds of thousands of people,” says Sally Grossman. “The whole misguided notion that they were doing it all together, when in retrospect all they did was drag Todd down… in my candid opinion.” Rundgren himself felt that Utopia were never given a fair chance by Bearsville: “We never sold records commensurate with the size of the crowds we drew – mostly because, whatever the fans thought, Bearsville did not take the records seriously. After Foghat, which became the biggest commercial success the label had had at that point, we got no support whatever from the label.”
Another person who thinks Utopia were hindered from making it is Chris Andersen, who became Rundgren’s principal sound engineer in 1977. “Albert never thought Utopia was very good,” Andersen says, talking at Nevessa, the Woodstock studio whose clients include NRBQ and Graham Parker. “There was a love-hate relationship with Albert all the time. He’d constantly complain about Albert.” But Andersen lays more of the blame at the door of Eric Gardner, who’d taken over the management of Todd’s career in 1976. “Gardner’s office couldn’t keep a credit card paid,” says Andersen. “We’d show up at hotels with a busload of people and find that the American Express was no good. Furthermore, certain business decisions were made to suck cash out of the operation. We’d get $4000 upfront from a promoter for sound and lights, but Gardner would instruct me to spend no more than $1500 of that. The result was that the show looked and sounded cheap. In terms of the larger picture of Todd’s career, I don’t think they had that in mind. I mean, Eric Gardner lives in a mansion in Hollywood now, and Todd’s broke.”
An alternative explanation, Andersen concedes, is that Rundgren was and is “a completely unmanageable personality”, someone who, when presented with an opportunity to have success, shunned it. “When Adventures did well, instead of buckling down and capitalising on it, he went off in another direction… on purpose, I think. I think in some ways he’s afraid of success.” Kasim Sulton concurs with this: “Todd never did anything to please anybody else. After Adventures, the most successful record we had, we wanted to follow up with another record like it. So what does Todd do? He announces that we’re gonna do a Beatles parody record [Deface The Music]. And that’s what we did. As much as Todd wanted Utopia to be a four-man band, he still wanted the final say over whether or not something would fly. Of course, it didn’t help that John Lennon was killed a month after the album came out.”
Rundgren’s attention, in any case, was being diverted towards toys other than Utopia. “Bat Out Of Hell became a giant cash cow for me,” he says, “and it created an incredible amount of money that I found all kinds of ways to squander.” Squander it he did, first and foremost on the new video studio he and Albert Grossman built at Bearsville. Ever the techno-pioneer, Todd had first merged video images with computer-generated electronic music on the first Utopia tour in 1974. Now he was again ahead of the curve, producing videos that composited live action with computer graphics. (‘Time Heals’ would become the second video ever to be played on MTV, after Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’.) “Rundgren by 1980 was a town industry,” wrote P. Smart in his book Rock And Woodstock. “He hired dozens of people to do studio dates, to put together a body of video work. Employees came and went, complaining about his ever-increasing ego, unprofessional ways, shrewishness and miserliness.”
“Todd’s lack of communication skills became a real problem,” says Chris Andersen. “I mean, you can make records by yourself, and write a computer graphics programme by yourself, but when you try to do video it requires clear communication of the idea and of what all the jobs are. That was something he never successfully did. He kept all the concepts in his own head and only told people what they needed to know.” Other people think Rundgren was simply too far ahead of his time. “I wouldn’t say Todd was exactly squandering money,” says Kasim Sulton. “But things could maybe have been done a little differently. When they were putting the video studio together, Todd would say we were gonna get all kinds of production work up there – this was when MTV hadn’t even started! I think he made a mistake in thinking people were gonna travel 100 miles out of New York to use a production facility when they had the same facilities in the city.”
On 13 August, 1980, four masked men broke into the Mink Hollow house, bound and gagged Rundgren and his new girlfriend Karen “Bean” Darvin, and loaded up a truck with various items of studio equipment. “One of the stories I heard was that one of them was actually whistling some of his songs while they were going round the house,” says Chris Andersen. The intruders were never apprehended, and Rundgren was badly shaken by the experience. “Todd was very traumatized by the experience,” says Andersen. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it played a part in Todd’s eventual decision to leave Woodstock.”
Almost as traumatic was the fact that just a few days before he shot John Lennon in December 1980, Mark Chapman made up a trip to Woodstock to look for Rundgren. It turned out that Rundgren had replaced Lennon in his obsessive affections, and it seems highly likely that he might have shot Todd had he found him. The connection is particularly ironic when one considers Lennon’s “Open Lettuce to Sodd Runtwhistle”, published in Melody Maker in September 1974 after Rundgren had slagged off the music of the ex-Beatles. “I think the real reason you’re mad at me is ’cause I didn’t know who you were at the Rainbow in L.A.,” Lennon wrote. “When I found out later, I was cursing ’cause I wanted to tell you how good you were.”
The entirely DIY album Healing (1981) was written and recorded partly as therapy after these dreadful events. Primarily using synthesizers, Rundgren used the record to make a moving plea for compassion in an increasingly brutal world. As the ’80s progressed, moreover, Rundgren’s writing began address society’s ills head-on, not least on the 1982 Utopia release Swing To The Right. “I’m unlikely to be directly political,” he says. “People mistake things like Johnee Jingo [from 1985’s A Capella] for political commentaries rather than sociological ones. I realised that you do have to be in the world, that you can’t build a philosophy that’s only an excuse not to get engaged with anything. So the subject matter changed into a manifesto for somebody who knows the difference between himself and the rest of the world but who also accepts some responsibility not to be completely detached from it. We went through the disco era, with the big lapels and the coke snorting, and everybody’s mood just became a bit more ruthless.”
A new contract with Al Khoury’s Network label brought Utopia (1982), an album of new wave power-pop in a style redolent of XTC, themselves soon to be produced by Rundgren. By the time the band had turned in the last of three very listenable electro-rock albums for Passport [Oblivion, P.O.V., and Trivia], band morale had hit an all-time low. “We saw less money upfront, and the tours were winding down,” says Kasim Sulton. “We were doing half-houses. It was really discouraging for everybody. We weren’t expanding our fan base. Willie wanted to do a record one way, and Todd wanted to do it another way. Roger and I were sort of caught in the middle. Willie and Todd really butted heads after Oblivion. I think P.O.V. is one of the better Utopia records, but it was a nightmare to make. People yelling and screaming at each other, Willie with drum machines breaking down on him and Todd saying he could just as well do this by himself.”
That is in effect what Rundgren did do. With Utopia taking an indefinite sabbatical, Todd recorded A Capella, a bold album composed entirely of solo vocal tracks that also marked the end of Todd’s relationship with Bearsville, leading eventually to a deal with Warner Brothers and to his move to San Francisco. “Albert connived that A Capella was not acceptable,” he says. “I’d worked really hard on the record and thought I’d achieved as complete a concept as I’d ever visualized, and yet he refused to accept it. This went on for a year, and I was just freakin’ livid. It all worked out that I moved to Warners for a three-album deal, with Albert getting the publishing. I settled for that because it meant I have to deal with him any longer.” As it turned out, Grossman died in 1986, while on a plane to London.
For a while, Rundgren virtually commuted between Woodstock and San Francisco, continuing to produce acts at Utopia Sound while at the same time cultivating a new circle of acquaintances among what – on the ‘Mystory’ page of his TR-1 website – he calls “the artsy counter-cultural elite” of the Bay Area. More often than not, his bread-and-butter cashflow came from work as a studio gun-for-hire. “His own projects were the joy of his life,” recalls Chris Andersen. “He liked to work on the floor, and there’d be keyboards all over the floor, wires everywhere. In contrast to that were the production projects. His level of participation varied greatly, because basically these were jobs lined up by Eric Gardner to make money. Eric would get $150,000 for Todd to produce a record. There were some artists he was really interested in working with, like Patti Smith, The Psychedelic Furs, The Tubes and Cheap Trick. With others it was just a job, and he wasn’t good at pretending he wasn’t interested. He’d sit on a bed at the back of a studio reading computer magazines while I engineered.”
Ironically, says Andersen, one of the projects to which Rundgren genuinely did commit himself was XTC’s brilliant Skylarking (1986) – ironically, because the band’s Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding expended a great deal of energy slagging Todd off after the record was finished. “It may be one of the best records he’s ever made, and yet he got such shit from the band in the press,” says Andersen. “That had to hurt quite a bit. They complained about everything, from the grittiness of the toilet paper to Todd smoking pot in the studio.” Bebe Buell thinks that Andy Partridge was “as much a control freak and as diversely brilliant as Todd was”, and that putting two such scientists in one laboratory was always going to be a disaster. For the record, she also claims that Todd and Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs (for whom Rundgren produced the big hit ‘Love My Way’) almost came to blows at Utopia Sound: “I used to thank God that the stairs separated the control room from the room where the bands played, because at least it was a trip up or down the stairs to kill somebody!”
Chris Andersen says the most stressful part of any Rundgren production was always the mixdown stage: “Todd developed a technique of basically ramming the mix down the artist’s throat. He wouldn’t allow the artist in the studio – the band would be sequestered down in the guest house. Then I’d call down and tell them to come up and listen, whereupon Todd would turn the volume up to 130 decibels, pin their ears against the back of the wall, and say, Well, whaddya think? No one in that situation can have anything constructive to say. And since he was so domineering, and the artists were generally fairly intimidated, they wouldn’t say, Can we take a cassette back to the house? And once he could get them to say OK, he was on to the next project. With Cheap Trick’s Next Position Please [1983], the camaraderie between Rick [Nielsen] and Bun E. [Carlos] and Todd was totally enjoyable, until the day we started mixing.”
Another act in whom Rundgren took at least a putative interest was The Pursuit Of Happiness, a Canadian band led by Rundgren disciple Moe Berg. Berg’s songs took their cue directly from Todd, many of them sounding not unlike tracks from such Utopia albums as Oblivion and P.O.V.. “When I hear about people not getting along with Todd in the studio, it’s totally understandable to me,” says Berg, who vividly remembers the Love Junk sessions at Mink Hollow in the summer of 1988. “Fortunately I sort of got off on all his antics. Like, he’d read while you were doing a take. The way the studio was set up was that the band played in a kind of basement, and you could only really see him up in the control room through a mirror. And I’d look up and see him reading a magazine with his feet up on the console. Every once in a while he’d stop you and say, You sped up!, and that was it. When he found out that ‘Survival’ [on 1990’s One-Sided Story ] was gonna be five minutes long, he went, Oh my God, I better get a book and a magazine! The whole idea was that you were boring him to tears.” On the other hand, Berg says that Rundgren was an invaluable help at the preproduction stage. “With ‘Walking In The Woods’ [Love Junk], for example, he said the music was too happy for the subject matter, so I rewrote the chorus and it became a lot darker. He also had this thing about making things too pretty. He’d say, Listen to this line, it’s just purple prose; be more specific.”
At the tail end of the ’80s, Rundgren recorded one of the greatest albums of his career. Nearly Human (1989) had its inception in three things: Warner Brothers’ request for commercially viable music, Todd’s desire to get back to live, full-band sound, and a new immersion in the black soul music of his youth. “It was the first time I had built soul generally into the concept,” he reflects. “What really inspired me was Terence Trent d’Arby. When I first saw him perform, I was knocked out by the intense dynamics, the fact that he sung like a motherfucker, and the fact that he was on this quest as well. And I went back and listened to a lot of Marvin Gaye. When I was modelling myself on Stevie Wonder, I was very appreciative of his athletic ability vocally, but in terms of conveying emotional depth, I was always much more moved by Marvin Gaye.” Bolstering the soulfulness of the album was Bobby Womack, who sang alongside Rundgren on ‘The Want Of A Nail’, and a large gospel-style chorus of backing vocalists. Suffice to say that there was barely a duff track on the record, and that songs like ‘Fidelity’, ‘Parallel Games’ and ‘The Waiting Game’ must count among the most euphoric and uplifting music of Rundgren’s oeuvre.
“I thought Nearly Human was brilliant,” says Sally Grossman, who threw parties for Todd in New York and L.A. when the album was released. “But people were not interested, and are still not interested. Anybody I got to go to those shows raved about them, but I couldn’t get many people to go. It’s like this complete perception problem. Albert used to say, We know you’re capable of making commercial records, and Michael Ostin as Warners would say the same thing. He must have heard it from Albert and Mo [his father]. The line must have gone down and become institutionalised: Todd, we know you can do something that appeals to more people. I mean, it gets scary when you can’t sell 100,000 records.”
By the early ’90s, Rundgren was back to being a cult artist without a major-label deal. Not that it affected the man’s prodigious output, or the quality of his music. The fifteen songs he wrote for the off-Broadway musical version of Joe Orton’s Beatles screenplay Up Against It (recently released on the Japanese Pony Canyon label) brilliantly utilised Todd’s early love of show tunes, veering from the influence of Gilbert & Sullivan to that of Brecht & Weill. The minor hoopla surrounding his interactive No World Order CD (1992) obscured the fact that it contained some charged techno-rap diatribes; the same goes for 1994’s The Individualist. Yet it was difficult not to feel that, for all the vaunted Rundgren rhetoric about “aggressive personal evolution”, he had become a desperately marginalised figure, of interest only to the legion of Todd obsessives with whom he communicated via his websites. The culmination of the whole process was his decision to give up on record companies and sell his music directly to his fans through the Internet – hardly radical now, but (as always with Rundgren) too far ahead of its time.
“He’s his own worst enemy, commercially,” says Sally Grossman. “By doing this to himself, he cannot fulfil the visions he has because he has to do everything on the cheap. It steadily gets more myopic. And I have another very strong opinion, which is that the fan clubs are disastrous. In the last few years of going to shows he hasn’t got a new audience, partially because if you went to a show it was so fucking insular. It’s not good for him or the music.”
How insular does it feel this Saturday night at Slim’s, the San Francisco club founded by Boz Scaggs back in 1988? Actually, not very: there’s a nicely diverse mix of people crammed into this spacious, revamped restaurant, testament to the esteem in which Rundgren is still held in the city that was his adopted home for over a decade. From the moment he breaks into the sludgy fuzz-rock of Todd’s No. 1 ‘Lowest Common Denominator’, Todd, attired in a fetching turquoise sarong, sounds considerably more together than he was in Petaluma. “I’m trying to get a slight grip tonight,” he chortles after a spontaneous, off-the-cuff cover of ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’.
But the same sense of slight unease descends on the spectators when Todd fires up the Powerbook and runs through ‘Temporary Sanity’ and ‘Beloved Infidel’ from The Individualist. A singer with the support act had cheekily remarked that Todd was “gonna do some karoake and home movies for you tonight”, and the swipe wasn’t so wide of the mark. Despite calls for ‘The Last Ride’ and ‘Just One Victory’, Rundgren concentrates on lesser-known material like ‘Compassion’ and ‘Up Against It’s Free’, ‘Male And 21′. He sings ‘I Saw The Light’ in its new Astrud Gilberto incarnation – “we’ve been lounging since before lounge was hip” – and he returns to the interminable one-man jam of ‘Mystified’, torturing his vocal cords and parodying the figure of the blues-rock guitar god. As I watch him, alone on the stage, it strikes me that there’s a kind of splendid isolation about the guy that’s also a little sad. It’s as if he’s painted himself into a corner from which there’s no way back to the musical mainstream. Should that matter? Does he care?
“I started changing when I realised that, when you get to my age, there’s no way to make a comeback,” he says to me as we wind up a four-hour conversation in his San Francisco loft. “Especially if you haven’t gone that far away to start with. I could still make a healthy living just off my musical output if I was a little looser about producing people I don’t really want to produce. There are any amount of compromises I could take on, and even if I don’t my family can live fairly comfortably – except the IRS isn’t happy with that. [A reference to Rundgren’s recent declaration of bankruptcy.] I’m not particularly smart about money, and when I get a big chunk of it from Meat Loaf, what do I do? Blow it all on a video studio.
“At certain points you have to make decisions: to continue on your current path or make necessary changes. I made personal changes that are nobody’s business but mine, but I also assessed my position in the scheme of musical things and came up with what to me were completely logical conclusions but to everyone else seemed to me the equivalent of having found some new drug, i.e. this computer thing. The problem was, I had to redefine myself one way or another. I could have decided to redefine musically, take the Neil Young route and redeem myself with the kids and squeeze I don’t know how many more years out of my career. But I realised it wasn’t just about the style of music, it was about deconstructing the whole musical process including the delivery medium.”
“He’s always been the Davey Crockett of rock’n’roll,” says Bebe Buell. “He thinks of all these things before everyone else, beats the door down and then gets none of the money or credit. All of the big stars come along during a movement, whereas Todd created a movement. The pioneers are always the people who either have to die or take the flak. Has Prince ever uttered Todd’s name? I met Prince when he was sixteen, when Todd played Minneapolis in 1974 – this tiny little person with huge hair standing backstage who wanted to meet Todd. And Todd did his usual ‘Oh, hi, kid’ number, and Prince was like, ‘I play everything and I’m real talented…’
“Todd should never be under financial duress. A lot of multi-platinum artists were born from the little eclectic buddha called Todd Rundgren, and not one of them has admitted it. Todd is somebody we should all be taking care of and protecting. Now I just think of him as the lonely wayward genius. He doesn’t realise how many people still love him. There’s a kindness and goodness inside of him. Bless his heart, no matter how many ups and downs he had, my daughter always went to private school, always had a new wardrobe for school every fall. He’s like a wounded creature who’s been hurt so much that outsiders probably don’t notice these gestures of his as much as I do.”
“He has always been a very kind and personable friend,” says Patti Smith. “He’s very supportive, and he’s a good father. He was very kind to my children after my husband passed away. See, stardom and fame are fleeting things, they’re totally relative. The fact that Todd did exactly what he wanted to and didn’t bend to trends is admirable to me. When you look back on your life, wouldn’t you rather have been a pioneer than a rich person who cashed in? And he’s not just rebellious, because he has a very strong, articulate philosophy and he backs it up with action. He’s always had very revolutionary ideas, and I think that the ideas he has now about work presentation will be ground-breaking. The way he’s going will probably the way of the future. ”
“Todd was more of a specialist thing than, say, Bowie or even Iggy,” says Tony Sales, who has played with both those men. “It’s almost the way my father [cult comic Soupy Sales] was: a unique talent to be appreciated by the people who understand the joke. With Todd, you had to understand the joke.”
“Todd thought that eventually everyone would get it,” says his old friend Paul Fishkin. “By the time he got the credibility, all it did was reinforce the cult even more. And yes, he did have continual problems getting along with people, because his defensiveness caused him to be arrogant. It made for a tumultuous time: the juxtaposition of the people around him who knew he could be huge and the fanatics who would have done anything for him. And I think the saddest part of all this is that, underneath it all, he was very disappointed.”
“The things I’m involved in, and the ideas that I have, are as accessible and as fascinating as anyone’s music,” Todd Rundgren told NME’s Paul Morley fifteen years ago. “It’s not my loss if no one discovers it. I’m living it all the time. I have more important priorities. By the time people discover where I am, if they ever do, I’ll be someplace else anyway.”
Catch you there in the next millenium.