May 24, 2022 • 41 mins
Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Todd Rundgren is in a class all his own. Whether scoring Top 40 hits, playing all of the instruments on his albums or wildly experimenting with musical genres, Rundgren is continuously pushing the boundaries of creativity. That ethos and ingenuity can be found in his numerous solo albums from the 70s to present day, with his band Utopia and as a record producer for musicians like Patti Smith, The Psychedelic Furs and MeatLoaf. The trailblazing Rundgren is also a pioneer in computer technology and multimedia – creating the first color graphics tablet, first interactive album and first interactive concert tour. Todd Rundgren tells Alec how he pulls off making the music he wants to make, how he almost changed careers to become a computer programmer and how psychedelics helped him rethink music completely.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing
from iHeart Radio. A few artists come close to the
(00:28):
prolific accomplishments and influence on future generations. As my guest today, singer, songwriter,
multi instrumentalist and producer Todd Rundgren. Following his work in
the band Naz, Rundgren win solo and received widespread acclaim
with his nineteen seventy two double album Something Anything. Rundgren wrote,
(00:54):
produced and played almost every instrument on the album. It
landed him a top ten hit with Hello, It's Me
and features this track I Saw the Light. Something Anything
brought Rundgren such commercial success that in its wake, he
abandoned conventional pop music to push the boundaries of his creativity.
(01:18):
The resulting album, A Wizard a True Star, was influenced
by soul, jazz, funk, and various psychedelics. The album established
Rundgren as a pioneer of prog rock and electronic music.
Todd Rundgren continued to explore musical styles in his numerous
(01:38):
solo releases and with his band Utopia. He was also
innovative behind the scenes with computer technology and as a
prominent producer for bands like XTC, The New York Dolls,
and Meatloaf. I sort of backed into producing. It was
an unusual situation, and I started very and I had
(02:00):
a band in Philadelphia and we got signed when I
was like nineteen years old. I was very much into
like what goes into making records, and we thought that
English producers were better than American producers. We really didn't
know what a producer did, and we thought he was
(02:21):
responsible mostly for the sound, misunderstanding that the engineer is
responsible for the sound. The producer, well American producer, particularly
in those days, was not necessarily a creative contributor to
the process. He was there to make sure that the
session didn't go over budget, you know. And in the
(02:43):
old days, pre Beatles, let's say, people didn't always write
their own material and they didn't arrange their own materials.
So the producer's job was to hire a songwriter, and
hire an arranger, and hire a contractor to get all
the musicians in there, and then to make sure that
the session didn't run long. That was his biggest responsibility.
(03:05):
And as it turned out, that's completely different from the
role that George Martin played. For instance, in the making
of the Beatles records. He was a musical contributor. He
had an opinion about what they did. Sometimes he even
played on their records. So it was first of all
kind of like a readjustment in my head about what
(03:27):
a producer was. And we hired a guy who we
thought made good sounding records for our first records, and
we didn't like the mix he made. So that was
the first time I put my hands on a mixing
console to remix our first record with this Money or NAS.
This was NAS Now Money was my high school band.
(03:48):
We never got a contract or anything, but NAS. The
NAS was supposed to be like the next Monkeys, or
at least in the minds of the people who signed us.
You know, we were supposed to be a manufactured product.
We were on the cover of sixteen magazine before we
had ever made a record, so there was so much
(04:09):
hype involved, and that was one reason why the bandily
lasted like eighteen months. And then I found myself on
the street and the only skill that I had at
that point, aside from playing and writing music, was that
I had put my hands on a mixing console. And ironically,
the partner of the manager of the Naz who had
(04:31):
departed and gone to work for Albert Grossman. Albert Grossman
is not a household name nowadays, but back in those
days he was the world's most pre eminent manager. He
managed Bob Dylan, he managed the band, He managed Janis Joplin,
and they needed somebody to take his old roster of
(04:53):
folk ax and modernize them. Some such as while such
as Ian and Sold the Uh and James Cotton. But
the first project that I got put on was an
artist called Jesse Winchester, and he was a conscientious objector
who lived in Canada from whence the band came and
(05:15):
so I got as the engineer that record, and Robbie
Robertson was the producer of the record, and they liked
what I did so much that they hired me for
what was the band's arguably their biggest album, Stage right.
And that's where I really cut my teeth, learning to
engineer serious records. Not really a producer at that point,
(05:35):
I was more of an engineer, but that became my forte.
I didn't need an engineer to do a recording project.
I can sit behind the desk and worked the knobs
and dials and all that stuff and also contribute musically
to what was going on. Did someone teach you? Did
you have a mentor this your self taught? No, I
have no fear of technology. Put it that way, you know.
(05:58):
So when I was sitting in for to this sea
of knobs and buttons, I thought, Okay, I'll touch this
one and I'll touch that one, and I'm gonna touch
every one of them. What does this do? Yeah? What
does this do? And then you turn it around and
you hear, oh, it changes to sound this way. And
then there are some other things you have to learn,
like mike placement. That's a different skill, and that evolved
(06:19):
a little bit more over time, figuring out exactly especially
drums and things like that, where do you put a
mike to get the best snare drum sound? That sort
of thing. And I eventually learned that and Stage Fright
was something of a breakthrough. And then I did Bad
Finger and Graham Funk Railroad, and that's what really broke
(06:41):
me as a producer. Now, while you're producing other people
and you're heavily involved in that, you're making your own,
your own music. Is it a question of when someone
calls you? I mean, were you more of a purist
and you sat there and go, yeah, that's not my bag,
that music I don't really want to be a part
of that. Were you for hire, you want to come in,
(07:02):
and you weren't too fussy, like what was the metric?
By what you decided who you would and wouldn't work with.
As a producer and as a mixer, well, it's kind
of um the same as my choices as an artist.
I want to do the things that nobody else will
do or that nobody else can do as an artist.
Because I was a producer, I never had to worry
(07:24):
about my own music paying the rent, and so my
own music doesn't follow any particular path. I get an idea. Yeah,
I have complete freedom to do what I want as
an artist because I was leveraging those skills to produce
other people's records, and some of them were hysterically successful,
(07:45):
you know, So I really didn't have to worry about
the money when I went into do my own stuff.
But then I eventually gained a reputation as a trouble shooter,
someone who would go into the studio, no nonsense, let's
get a record done here. That was one aspect of it.
The other aspect is that I would do artists that
(08:06):
nobody would touch like Meat Loaf. Remind people as to
why nobody would touch him back then because the songs
were all too long. None of them were that seemed
like singles to a record person. They were all very long.
He was a giant, fat, sweaty guy. He wasn't a
handsome you know. He wasn't John bon Jovi. No, he
(08:26):
was not a bon Jovie or any of those other
pretty boys and things like that. And the subject matter
had a certain kind of retro thing about it. It
was Brett in a w well. To my mind, there
was a weird combination of things. Jim Stimon, who wrote
all the material for Meat Loaf, he likened himself to
(08:48):
Richard Wagner. He thought he was the Wagner of rock
and roll. And I'm more characterized him as a Stephen
Foster of rock and roll because because he just keep
using these plain sevenths and things like that. You know,
there are lots and lots of course, but all of
them are just playing triads and things like that, and
(09:10):
nothing harmonically super challenging about the kind of music that
Jim Stimon wrote. But it was grandiose. From a lyrical standpoint,
I'm gonna tell his story of the first time that
I saw the band and they have been turned down
by every producer. The band essentially was Jim Stimon on
(09:31):
the piano and meat Loaf and two background singers. They
performed the record for me, all of the music that
had been turned down by everybody else. And I'm thinking,
this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why
I have to do it right. This essentially is taking
Bruce Springsteen's whole retro thing. I mean, he was on
(09:53):
the cover of Time magazine Savior of rock and Roll
and everything is about motorcycles and leather jack. As the
Switch plays, you know, it's rebel without a cause, and
I thought, you're saving rock and roll by going back
twenty years. And then when I saw a meat Load
performed that, I thought, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen.
And That's how I'm going to approach it. I'm gonna
(10:14):
take it totally seriously, but it's going to be way
more than Bruce ever attempted to do. You know, As
it turned out, that was the only way to think
about it, because otherwise the record never would have gotten made.
It was not my kind of music naturally. You know, well,
(10:36):
I didn't identify first of all with the rebel without
a cause thing, you know they called leather jacket, But
these are the guys who beat me up in school.
So I didn't no sympathy for that kind of that
kind of music. But also I'm an acolyte of the
Beatles and the arc of their career in which they
(10:57):
started out very simple imitation of their influences. Yeah, they
were covering their influences and stuff like that, and then
they kind of got pushed into the corner where they
had to write their own material. But they didn't stop there.
They started inventing genre, whole genres that other bands built
their careers on, and then it would abandoned them as
(11:17):
like eleanor Rigby classical rock. There was no such genre
before that, and then the whole bands would decide that
they were classical rock bands and orchestral backing for everything
they did, or you know, psychedelic rock. They invented that
with like Tomorrow Never Knows, and then whole bands like
Pink Floyd made a career out of it. But exactly,
(11:39):
and I want to get to that in your life,
the kind of I'm not going to say the transcendental,
but I don't want to lose line of this, the
line of this track, which is that when you leave Naz,
if you stopped working, you didn't want to work in
the musician, you wanted to be going too. Computer programming, well,
I was always into computers when I was very young.
(11:59):
As I say, I was a weedy child and I
tended to get picked on a lot. And when I
saw the movie Forbidden Planet with Robbie the robot, he
had special powers and he could produce anything you wanted.
And I needed like a best friend, robot protector. And
so when I was very young, I started trying to
(12:21):
figure out how I could build a robot. And once
you like figure out the mechanics of a robot, you
realize that that has to have a brain. And that's
when I started to learn about computers. This was always
like a sideline through my whole career because personal computers
didn't exist. Then you could learn about them, but you
couldn't have one, you know. Well, all through the seventies
(12:47):
that's when personal computers started coming in. There was a
Commodore pet, which actually looked like a cash register, and
the first apples that were like they look like little
TV sets. Yeah. I had one of the first computer
kids ever made, which was called an Outre, and the
only way you could communicate with it was through a
teletype machine that had a tape a paper tape reader
(13:11):
on the side of it. So I got into it
very early. And then Apple, the Apple Personal computer came out,
and that was kind of a real breakthrough because it
had a language built in. You turned it on and
it was ready to take commands from you. Uh. It
had waste easy ways to load software programs into it.
(13:33):
So I learned to program the computer, and eventually I
developed a program that Apple marketed in like the early
eighties because they had a piece of hardware called a
graphic tablet, fairly commonplace nowadays, but it's a big square
thing with a pen on a wire and you draw
on that thing and whatever you draw up here is
(13:53):
on the computer screen. And I first saw that at
a place called the New York Institute to Technology, where
all the people who eventually built Pixar and I l M.
That's where they were before then. It was ed Catmoll
and Alvi Ray Smith we're all working at New York
Institute of Technology, and their big new development was a
(14:16):
paint box program, you know, And so I got inspired
by that and I became serious programmer, and Apple marketed
the first program that I ever wrote, which was for
this graphics tablet that Apple was going to market. Unfortunately,
it failed it's FCC emissions tests, so the hardware never
(14:38):
came out. So nobody ever bought SUFFER because it was
no hardware to run it on. But in any case,
I got me into that realm. But right on top
of this, because you're so young, then, I mean, you
come out with something anything in two and this is
right on the heels of you going into computers and
(14:59):
you leave NAS and everything like did all of a
sudden success. Obviously success will be aligns a lot of things.
But you're considered a very very purest artist. You got
that whole vibe. You're a guy that had hit records,
and then you went and said, well I'm gonna go
over here, you know, I mean, you took off into
another direction, and you didn't necessarily kind of cardal your
(15:22):
audience or the industry like a lot of people do.
But when this happened, what changed for you when you
had success, big success and making music? Did anything change? Well?
My biggest success was after Something Anything came out, the
double album that was never intended to be a double album.
I just I got into this songwriting groove and they
(15:44):
were just coming out day and night. I was recording
and writing like sixteen hours a day, and I had
fallen into sort of a formula, a certain kind of
combination of things that you write about, you know, which
is usually like the Girl who Broke your Heart. And
after it was done, it was highly lauded and people
(16:06):
started referring to me as the male Carol King, which
is a high compliment. But also, I don't want to
be compared to other people. I don't want to be anything. Yeah,
I want to be you know, eventually people who would
be compared to me, but I don't want to be
compared to anything before. So the next record, which was
(16:28):
a Wizard of True Star, was not like any record
I had made, and maybe not like any record anybody
had ever made before, because I completely deconstructed the process.
And again, the only reason why I could do that
was because I was still producing records for other people.
When I didn't follow up something anything with another batch
(16:50):
of easily consumable pop songs. There was a complete freak
out at the record label. They say, how do we
sell this record compared to Life's record? The expectations are
in a completely other place, and I had no care
for that. I was still producing a lot of artists
(17:12):
for Bears Full Records, so they couldn't exactly kick me
off the label, you know, if they were forced to
indulge me. And that just turned out to be the
whole modus operandi. You know. I was the fly in
the ointment in some ways because I wouldn't stop making records,
(17:35):
and yet they couldn't figure out how to market them.
And eventually they got into a such a mindset that
they completely overlooked hits on some of my records. Musician
Todd Rundgren. If you love conversations with legendary singers, be
sure to check out my talk with another musical icon,
(17:58):
Darryl Hall. I'm zy man. I'm much busier now than
I was. In fact, I don't have time to make
a record. I've been trying to make a record, and
I have to do it in little dribs and drabs
and starts and stops to try and get into a
flow is really really hard. Was there a spot in
your career where you southern when you go this is
it man, we we this is the top. There was
a period of time where we did we are the world.
(18:21):
I reopened the Apollo Theater with the Temptations live aid
all within a month and a half, and I remember
thinking to myself, Okay, I I feel like I'm here
here the rest of my conversation with Darryl Hall at
Here's the Thing dot org and find Darryl Hall and
(18:41):
Todd Rundgren on tour together this spring. After the Break,
Todd Rundgren demonstrates why he's one of the most insightful
and prescient artists in all of music, and discusses his
career as a psycho. Not m I'm Alec Baldwin and
(19:13):
you're listening to Here's the Thing? Okay, Okay? This is
(19:45):
Bang the Drum All Day, one of Todd Rundgren's biggest hits.
It's the seventh of nine tracks on album The ever
popular Tortured Artist Effect. The song was all but overlooked
by his record label. Bang the Drum All Day was
never released as a single, never occurred to him that
(20:05):
it was just one of my other another nutty thing
that I was doing. But the record promoted itself and
made itself. DJ started playing it every Friday during drive time,
and then somehow fans adopted it at sporting events anytime
somebody wanted to create a party atmosphere, you know, even
(20:29):
if it was like a movie like Ants. The song
was never in the movie, but they used it for
the trailer because it made the movie seem more fun.
I guess. I think first ice hockey games, and then
it became like the Green Bay Packers touchdown song, and
then it eventually became the Carnival Cruise Lines theme song,
(20:52):
for which I got paid handsomely until they started sinking
all those boats. And I have no idea where the
song came from. I mean, it's not like I sat
down and said I'm going to write this song. No,
I actually dreamed the song. Sometimes when you start working,
you know, and you get really embedded in the work,
it permeates your subconscious at the point you never get
(21:15):
away from it. And I was writing songs in my
sleep and this song just came to me. And wondering
for you when you were young because you go off
on a different path and only with utopian in terms
of the style of music. What was your rishikesh? I mean,
did you have a moment of drug experimentation and enlightenment
and whatever it was that when you were very young? Okay,
(21:38):
I'm trying to trying to tread lightly here, I'm tread lightly.
I gained a reputation of something of a psychonaut at
one point. I guess a Wizard of True Star helped
with that, and it was definitely there was some psychedelic
experiences that made me rethink music and what I wanted
to do, and a wizard or truth Star was a result.
(22:00):
But some time after that, somebody sent me a shoe
box full of peyote buttons and I was high for
a month. I would get up in the morning, I
would clean three pyote buttons and I have one for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. And I was not straight for an entire month.
And I did rehearsals and gigs and wiring my studio.
(22:23):
While I was doing that, I know it was one
of the most amazing periods of my life. Does it
stop me? Do you stop for if someone else stops him? Button?
I ate all the payote. I ate all the peyote
and it was done. You know, he ate the Whitman
sampler of peyote that you were given. Yeah, take me
(22:45):
through if you can, you go into utopia. When I
was originally just a guitar player, I didn't have any confidence.
I didn't have the confidence to sing or front a band.
And you know, when I quit the band, and I
didn't want to put an out of the band together.
I didn't understand the politics of it, you know, And
so I just went into production and I my first
(23:07):
album was a vanity project. I didn't plan to do
anything with it, and then accidentally had a hit single.
It was called we Gotta Get You a Woman. It
was off of my very first record, so I had
to rethink the idea of going out and performing. It
got top forty, I think, and that's when I had
to learn to perform. You know. I had you gotta
(23:28):
hit sing? Oh yeah, I go out and play and
I couldn't sing twenty minutes without blowing my voice out.
Really yeah, and you never and you never thought about
getting trained for that at all. Well, it started out
as a mental thing. I never thought of myself as
a frontman, a gut person who would stand in front
of the band and sing. I was singing background vocals,
and I'd be happy with that. There was some things
(23:50):
I knew about singing. A lot I didn't know about singing,
most importantly the diaphram, and it took me a while
to sort of figure it out. And I think the
best education I ever got was from listening to a
Stevie Wonder record sign seal delivered. What they used to
do is compress his voice so much that you could
(24:10):
hear every breath he was taking, and you could hear
before he would sing a phrase, how we would do this,
you know, how his diaphragm would punch up into his
lungs to create the necessary pressure in order to sing
the song. The thing that never occurred to me. A
lot of people don't realize that it isn't about your throat.
(24:31):
It's about your diaphragm, your breath, how much breath you
can put behind it, trying to sing just with your throat,
and you know you'll get twenty minutes out of it
and then it will die. And it took me a
long time to learn how to do that. I remember,
I think it was right around something anything because of
what that was also about when I first started driving
(24:53):
a car and I was in l A and I
would drive around the freeways screaming my ass off. I
would just scream for twenty thirty minutes at a time
while driving my car around. It missed to look pretty weird.
But eventually, through doing that constantly and applying that when
I was singing live, I built up my diaphragm to
(25:15):
the point now that it's like ridiculous. You know, if
you get that muscle in shape, you can sing forever.
I can sing for three hours a night if I
have to at the you know, at the very top
of my range, as long as I have the wind
for it. Now, when you form utopia and you decide
to go in that direction, is it an idea of
(25:35):
a direction you want to go in? Do you see
to yourself, here's a kind of music I want to
play now, and this is where my head is at
now in my writing, do you meet people that influence
How does utopia congio? How does that come together? As
I was progressing as a songwriter, I started losing touch
with the guitar because it's not as flexible a songwriting too.
(26:00):
As a piano was because the piano you have all
the notes and you've got ten fingers. You know, guitar
has only got six strings. You were trained piano player, No,
I was never trained, But I began to write on
the piano, and it's a great songwriting tool. And I
started to think that I was losing all of the
(26:21):
effort I had put into trying to learn how to
play the guitar and be, you know, an effective guitar player.
I was losing that. So I thought, I have to
start a band just so I can play guitar more.
You know, I still have my own thing, which is
my song to my stuff, but I want to start
a group where where my principal role is playing guitar
(26:42):
and a lot of the guys that eventually became part
of Utopia. And also this is Utopia too, because there
was an original Utopia with me and Hunt and Tony Sales,
SUPI Sales Kids that lasted for like, got to a
couple of months or something like that, and it was
(27:03):
really high concept, so high concept that we failed to
pull it off and that unit broke up. But then
decided I still needed to have a guitar oriented outlet,
and that's when we started Utopian and was a lot
of the people who have played on my records. A
lot of this revolves around the studio that we built
(27:24):
in New York called Secret Sound, which was that was
in It was like twenty six Street and maybe seventh
then it was right near the Grammercy Park Hotel. The
friend of mine, Moogie Klingman, he bought aloft and we said,
let's build a studio in it. It was like a
(27:45):
very unusual thing because most studios were commercial enterprises. You know,
it was expensive to build a studio, but I just
kept taking any money that I got and plowing it
back into you know, my projects and tools for my projects.
And so we built our own studio and that's the
(28:05):
very first thing to recorded there was a Wizard True Star,
and then it became our playpen. We would go in
there and just fiddle around right music, record little bits
of it, splice it together. Later there was nobody to
tell us what not to do, so we would do
anything that we could think of. And the first um
(28:27):
Utopia album we just sat around the studio throwing ideas
out on the floor and trying to turn them into songs.
And part of what makes it so interesting musically is
all it represents all the influences of each person, kind
of collected under a pro rock banner. But for me
(28:49):
that that time, if I thought about it, I could
come up with probably a lot of speculation about why
people were craving that music. I mean, music to me
either is or is not related to the culture and
the political spectrum. And you know, Kennedy is killed, and
I mean a lot of people obviously think that the
(29:09):
Beatles ascension is linked to that. We need something happy,
we need something sweet, we need those ballads. You know,
well before we get to expert texpert choking smokers. You know,
all of the kind of poetry and insanity of Lennon
and McCartney as they get older, wonderful insanity by the way.
(29:31):
But you know, in the beginning with like Love Me
Do and all those there's things. There's there's something about people,
what people need, and at that time in the seventies,
people really needed music to take them somewhere. They really
needed to have music. You mentioned before, Roger Waters and
those guys, I mean, you know they're being Floyd. I mean, man,
(29:52):
when I went to college. Everybody was laying on the
floor with the biggest joint in their mouths you could
possibly imagine, and with the headphones on, and they just
had to listen to that music to transport them. Did
you feel when you were making the music with Utopia
your audience wanted you to transport them somewhere? Well, you know,
(30:14):
I try to think of myself as an artist and
as a true artist. We've talked about me as a producer,
and as a producer, I have to be aware of
the way that the audience may respond to the project
that I'm responsible for. But when I'm making my own music,
you know, and when I feel like I'm in my
(30:34):
most artistic head, I'm not trying to manipulate people. I'm
not thinking about them. I'm thinking about me, you know.
I'm trying to think, how can I make music that
will satisfy me? How can I make music that won't
be just simply a repetition of something someone else has
done already, Which is two challenges right there. To satisfy yourself,
(30:58):
you know, it's difficult enough. And that did not replicate
something that's already been done. And I guess when you're
talking about that my mind is going to a different place.
My mind is going to that place where music is
meant for that individual experience. It's like you say, you
(31:20):
may be in a dorm room where a bunch of
guys getting high, but the music doesn't have an effect
until you feel like you're alone with it. And the
problem with music nowadays is it's like nobody's fault, you know,
like human evolution is not really any individual's fault. It's
part of our evolution. Part of it is the simple
(31:42):
hardware evolution. The fact that the way we listen to
music is not the way we used to listen to music.
If you wanted a quality time music experience, it used
to be you had to go home to do it,
you know, and listen to your own little Hi fi
and and and that's what we did. A record that
you were anticipating came out, and you sat in a
(32:04):
sweet spot between the speakers, and you put that record on.
You listed it from beginning to end. You unplug the phone.
You didn't let anybody just house. Back then, I had
one in my kids. It was a phone on the
kitchen wall, and that was in Yeah. But I mean
the dynamic was that it was you and the music,
and for you to really get your money's worth out
(32:26):
of it, you and the music had to get down
there alone and experience it together in a certain way.
And eventually we came up with portable music systems like
the Walkman and things like that. Suddenly it was not
a quality time experience anymore. But things have evolved so
far to the point that so called musicians aren't actually musicians.
(32:51):
Music is the wedge you use to get yourself into
the public consciousness. So you start out calling yourself a musician,
but essentially you're just a merchandizer. You're selling shoes, hats,
shirts and things like that. You know, it's actually become
a little bit more real in the sense that you're
(33:12):
not pretending that the music is anything more than self promotion.
There is no pretense about the music being actually more
important than people simply remembering your name. You know, It's
it's not like the oldest axiom of advertising todd run.
(33:33):
If you're enjoying this episode, don't keep it to yourself.
Tell a friend, and be sure to follow us on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. You can also listen to all of
the music from this episode and more in a curated
playlist of my favorite pieces from Todd Rundgren. You'll find
(33:53):
a link to the playlist in the show notes of
this episode. When we return, Todd Rundgren tells us how
anthropology factors into his songwriting. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
(34:17):
listening to Here's the thing? Do you read the least time?
See five? Lie? I'd rather think of that instead, and
(34:42):
maybe this is It wouldn't have made any difference from
Todd Rundgren's album Something Anything. Consumers have come to expect
the ease and accessibility that today's stream platforms give us
to an infinite musical catalog. Incredibly, Todd Rundgren had the
(35:06):
foresight to see where music technology was taking us, but
he was slightly ahead of his time. I am a
technologist and a theorist in some kind, and in the
early late eighties early nineties I started to gain some
awareness that technology was going to take music to other places.
(35:26):
I started thinking about other ways that music could be delivered,
and I came up with this concept called no World Order,
in which you could, as a listener, describe some parameters
about the music you want to hear, and then this
system would go out and find the music that satisfied
your criterion. So I did a demonstration of that. It
(35:49):
was called No World Order. It was released as a record,
and there were various computer versions as well, and you
could actually navigate the music if you had the right hardware.
And I got approached by Warner Full Service Network, which
was attempting to establish an interactive TV community in Orlando, Florida,
(36:11):
as a test thing, and we wanted to see whether
people wanted to have on demand music services. This is
when you still have to buy music on a CD.
So we went to all the major labels and said,
we're just experimenting with a community in or Lands in
Florida to see whether there is demand for music that's
(36:35):
delivered by some kind of criteria something like that designed
the whole system. Then went to the five major labels
at that point see whether they would put their music
on servers so we could just experiment with it. All
five refused. They said, we can't even imagine this putting
music on servers just because beyond our comprehension, let alone
(36:58):
explaining it to all our artists and the retailers that
we have to deal with and stuff like that, and
every single one of them with refused two years later Napster,
and that was the beginning of the end because they
didn't see that music had to be on servers, and
that essentially collapsed what was the music business. And the
(37:21):
end result is now you don't sell music. Music is
as I mentioned before, music is advertising for something else
that you're selling that people seem to perceive as more
valuable than the music, like a T shirt, like a
big puffy jacket like some sneakers, or something like that.
I mean, Kanye is bragging about the fact not that
(37:44):
he sold so much music, that he sold two million
dollars worth of his players that the music will be
on He's bragging about selling hardware, not music. And that's
kind of where music has outen to at this particular point.
It's just part of putting forward a personal brand, and
(38:06):
then once you have that brand, you sell anything and
it doesn't have to be music. Do world events ever
shape your music? Do they ever influence your music? I
write my music about human nature. My whole music is anthropological.
I'm trying to figure out why people think the way
they think and why they do the things that they do,
(38:26):
and that covers everything. That pretty much covers it all.
How would you say that the shoe box full of yeah,
the big baggy full the peyonte buttons, that was a
while ago. What do you do now to raise your consciousness?
Are you into meditation? Like? What do you do now
to achieve a state where you feel comfortable? I moved
(38:49):
twenty five years ago to the Island of c and
I live in heaven. You know, I hear you well listen.
I am a great, great admirer of your music and
your career and I don't know what it is, but
like I went back and listened to so much, so
much of your music, and it's that Utopia phase of
your career. I love that music. I love utopiae which
(39:13):
we know. It's beautiful music. It's it's, it's, it's it
was beautiful music then and it still is. You are
one of the great artists. You say you like to
call yourself an artist. Well, everybody I know when they
think about you, they think about what a great artist
you are, on the diversity of your sound and the
music you made. And thank you so much for taking
the time to talk to us. I appreciate it. Thank you.
(39:35):
My thanks to producer, songwriter and musician Todd Rundgren. I'll
leave you with Love is the answer from Utopia's album Oops,
Wrong Planet. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
to you by my Heart Radio. I can't stay and
(40:03):
more Ell, I've been from shore to short to shore.
Defends a short time to found it. But this a
easy way around day world shaming. Love is shut up,
(40:35):
so said scream Loving Lose. Why so we are all
us time, We're a poising girl away it's at work.
(41:08):
People turn their heads to work on time. Tell it, listen,
try tur
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing
from iHeart Radio. A few artists come close to the
(00:28):
prolific accomplishments and influence on future generations. As my guest today, singer, songwriter,
multi instrumentalist and producer Todd Rundgren. Following his work in
the band Naz, Rundgren win solo and received widespread acclaim
with his nineteen seventy two double album Something Anything. Rundgren wrote,
(00:54):
produced and played almost every instrument on the album. It
landed him a top ten hit with Hello, It's Me
and features this track I Saw the Light. Something Anything
brought Rundgren such commercial success that in its wake, he
abandoned conventional pop music to push the boundaries of his creativity.
(01:18):
The resulting album, A Wizard a True Star, was influenced
by soul, jazz, funk, and various psychedelics. The album established
Rundgren as a pioneer of prog rock and electronic music.
Todd Rundgren continued to explore musical styles in his numerous
(01:38):
solo releases and with his band Utopia. He was also
innovative behind the scenes with computer technology and as a
prominent producer for bands like XTC, The New York Dolls,
and Meatloaf. I sort of backed into producing. It was
an unusual situation, and I started very and I had
(02:00):
a band in Philadelphia and we got signed when I
was like nineteen years old. I was very much into
like what goes into making records, and we thought that
English producers were better than American producers. We really didn't
know what a producer did, and we thought he was
(02:21):
responsible mostly for the sound, misunderstanding that the engineer is
responsible for the sound. The producer, well American producer, particularly
in those days, was not necessarily a creative contributor to
the process. He was there to make sure that the
session didn't go over budget, you know. And in the
(02:43):
old days, pre Beatles, let's say, people didn't always write
their own material and they didn't arrange their own materials.
So the producer's job was to hire a songwriter, and
hire an arranger, and hire a contractor to get all
the musicians in there, and then to make sure that
the session didn't run long. That was his biggest responsibility.
(03:05):
And as it turned out, that's completely different from the
role that George Martin played. For instance, in the making
of the Beatles records. He was a musical contributor. He
had an opinion about what they did. Sometimes he even
played on their records. So it was first of all
kind of like a readjustment in my head about what
(03:27):
a producer was. And we hired a guy who we
thought made good sounding records for our first records, and
we didn't like the mix he made. So that was
the first time I put my hands on a mixing
console to remix our first record with this Money or NAS.
This was NAS Now Money was my high school band.
(03:48):
We never got a contract or anything, but NAS. The
NAS was supposed to be like the next Monkeys, or
at least in the minds of the people who signed us.
You know, we were supposed to be a manufactured product.
We were on the cover of sixteen magazine before we
had ever made a record, so there was so much
(04:09):
hype involved, and that was one reason why the bandily
lasted like eighteen months. And then I found myself on
the street and the only skill that I had at
that point, aside from playing and writing music, was that
I had put my hands on a mixing console. And ironically,
the partner of the manager of the Naz who had
(04:31):
departed and gone to work for Albert Grossman. Albert Grossman
is not a household name nowadays, but back in those
days he was the world's most pre eminent manager. He
managed Bob Dylan, he managed the band, He managed Janis Joplin,
and they needed somebody to take his old roster of
(04:53):
folk ax and modernize them. Some such as while such
as Ian and Sold the Uh and James Cotton. But
the first project that I got put on was an
artist called Jesse Winchester, and he was a conscientious objector
who lived in Canada from whence the band came and
(05:15):
so I got as the engineer that record, and Robbie
Robertson was the producer of the record, and they liked
what I did so much that they hired me for
what was the band's arguably their biggest album, Stage right.
And that's where I really cut my teeth, learning to
engineer serious records. Not really a producer at that point,
(05:35):
I was more of an engineer, but that became my forte.
I didn't need an engineer to do a recording project.
I can sit behind the desk and worked the knobs
and dials and all that stuff and also contribute musically
to what was going on. Did someone teach you? Did
you have a mentor this your self taught? No, I
have no fear of technology. Put it that way, you know.
(05:58):
So when I was sitting in for to this sea
of knobs and buttons, I thought, Okay, I'll touch this
one and I'll touch that one, and I'm gonna touch
every one of them. What does this do? Yeah? What
does this do? And then you turn it around and
you hear, oh, it changes to sound this way. And
then there are some other things you have to learn,
like mike placement. That's a different skill, and that evolved
(06:19):
a little bit more over time, figuring out exactly especially
drums and things like that, where do you put a
mike to get the best snare drum sound? That sort
of thing. And I eventually learned that and Stage Fright
was something of a breakthrough. And then I did Bad
Finger and Graham Funk Railroad, and that's what really broke
(06:41):
me as a producer. Now, while you're producing other people
and you're heavily involved in that, you're making your own,
your own music. Is it a question of when someone
calls you? I mean, were you more of a purist
and you sat there and go, yeah, that's not my bag,
that music I don't really want to be a part
of that. Were you for hire, you want to come in,
(07:02):
and you weren't too fussy, like what was the metric?
By what you decided who you would and wouldn't work with.
As a producer and as a mixer, well, it's kind
of um the same as my choices as an artist.
I want to do the things that nobody else will
do or that nobody else can do as an artist.
Because I was a producer, I never had to worry
(07:24):
about my own music paying the rent, and so my
own music doesn't follow any particular path. I get an idea. Yeah,
I have complete freedom to do what I want as
an artist because I was leveraging those skills to produce
other people's records, and some of them were hysterically successful,
(07:45):
you know, So I really didn't have to worry about
the money when I went into do my own stuff.
But then I eventually gained a reputation as a trouble shooter,
someone who would go into the studio, no nonsense, let's
get a record done here. That was one aspect of it.
The other aspect is that I would do artists that
(08:06):
nobody would touch like Meat Loaf. Remind people as to
why nobody would touch him back then because the songs
were all too long. None of them were that seemed
like singles to a record person. They were all very long.
He was a giant, fat, sweaty guy. He wasn't a
handsome you know. He wasn't John bon Jovi. No, he
(08:26):
was not a bon Jovie or any of those other
pretty boys and things like that. And the subject matter
had a certain kind of retro thing about it. It
was Brett in a w well. To my mind, there
was a weird combination of things. Jim Stimon, who wrote
all the material for Meat Loaf, he likened himself to
(08:48):
Richard Wagner. He thought he was the Wagner of rock
and roll. And I'm more characterized him as a Stephen
Foster of rock and roll because because he just keep
using these plain sevenths and things like that. You know,
there are lots and lots of course, but all of
them are just playing triads and things like that, and
(09:10):
nothing harmonically super challenging about the kind of music that
Jim Stimon wrote. But it was grandiose. From a lyrical standpoint,
I'm gonna tell his story of the first time that
I saw the band and they have been turned down
by every producer. The band essentially was Jim Stimon on
(09:31):
the piano and meat Loaf and two background singers. They
performed the record for me, all of the music that
had been turned down by everybody else. And I'm thinking,
this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why
I have to do it right. This essentially is taking
Bruce Springsteen's whole retro thing. I mean, he was on
(09:53):
the cover of Time magazine Savior of rock and Roll
and everything is about motorcycles and leather jack. As the
Switch plays, you know, it's rebel without a cause, and
I thought, you're saving rock and roll by going back
twenty years. And then when I saw a meat Load
performed that, I thought, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen.
And That's how I'm going to approach it. I'm gonna
(10:14):
take it totally seriously, but it's going to be way
more than Bruce ever attempted to do. You know, As
it turned out, that was the only way to think
about it, because otherwise the record never would have gotten made.
It was not my kind of music naturally. You know, well,
(10:36):
I didn't identify first of all with the rebel without
a cause thing, you know they called leather jacket, But
these are the guys who beat me up in school.
So I didn't no sympathy for that kind of that
kind of music. But also I'm an acolyte of the
Beatles and the arc of their career in which they
(10:57):
started out very simple imitation of their influences. Yeah, they
were covering their influences and stuff like that, and then
they kind of got pushed into the corner where they
had to write their own material. But they didn't stop there.
They started inventing genre, whole genres that other bands built
their careers on, and then it would abandoned them as
(11:17):
like eleanor Rigby classical rock. There was no such genre
before that, and then the whole bands would decide that
they were classical rock bands and orchestral backing for everything
they did, or you know, psychedelic rock. They invented that
with like Tomorrow Never Knows, and then whole bands like
Pink Floyd made a career out of it. But exactly,
(11:39):
and I want to get to that in your life,
the kind of I'm not going to say the transcendental,
but I don't want to lose line of this, the
line of this track, which is that when you leave Naz,
if you stopped working, you didn't want to work in
the musician, you wanted to be going too. Computer programming, well,
I was always into computers when I was very young.
(11:59):
As I say, I was a weedy child and I
tended to get picked on a lot. And when I
saw the movie Forbidden Planet with Robbie the robot, he
had special powers and he could produce anything you wanted.
And I needed like a best friend, robot protector. And
so when I was very young, I started trying to
(12:21):
figure out how I could build a robot. And once
you like figure out the mechanics of a robot, you
realize that that has to have a brain. And that's
when I started to learn about computers. This was always
like a sideline through my whole career because personal computers
didn't exist. Then you could learn about them, but you
couldn't have one, you know. Well, all through the seventies
(12:47):
that's when personal computers started coming in. There was a
Commodore pet, which actually looked like a cash register, and
the first apples that were like they look like little
TV sets. Yeah. I had one of the first computer
kids ever made, which was called an Outre, and the
only way you could communicate with it was through a
teletype machine that had a tape a paper tape reader
(13:11):
on the side of it. So I got into it
very early. And then Apple, the Apple Personal computer came out,
and that was kind of a real breakthrough because it
had a language built in. You turned it on and
it was ready to take commands from you. Uh. It
had waste easy ways to load software programs into it.
(13:33):
So I learned to program the computer, and eventually I
developed a program that Apple marketed in like the early
eighties because they had a piece of hardware called a
graphic tablet, fairly commonplace nowadays, but it's a big square
thing with a pen on a wire and you draw
on that thing and whatever you draw up here is
(13:53):
on the computer screen. And I first saw that at
a place called the New York Institute to Technology, where
all the people who eventually built Pixar and I l M.
That's where they were before then. It was ed Catmoll
and Alvi Ray Smith we're all working at New York
Institute of Technology, and their big new development was a
(14:16):
paint box program, you know, And so I got inspired
by that and I became serious programmer, and Apple marketed
the first program that I ever wrote, which was for
this graphics tablet that Apple was going to market. Unfortunately,
it failed it's FCC emissions tests, so the hardware never
(14:38):
came out. So nobody ever bought SUFFER because it was
no hardware to run it on. But in any case,
I got me into that realm. But right on top
of this, because you're so young, then, I mean, you
come out with something anything in two and this is
right on the heels of you going into computers and
(14:59):
you leave NAS and everything like did all of a
sudden success. Obviously success will be aligns a lot of things.
But you're considered a very very purest artist. You got
that whole vibe. You're a guy that had hit records,
and then you went and said, well I'm gonna go
over here, you know, I mean, you took off into
another direction, and you didn't necessarily kind of cardal your
(15:22):
audience or the industry like a lot of people do.
But when this happened, what changed for you when you
had success, big success and making music? Did anything change? Well?
My biggest success was after Something Anything came out, the
double album that was never intended to be a double album.
I just I got into this songwriting groove and they
(15:44):
were just coming out day and night. I was recording
and writing like sixteen hours a day, and I had
fallen into sort of a formula, a certain kind of
combination of things that you write about, you know, which
is usually like the Girl who Broke your Heart. And
after it was done, it was highly lauded and people
(16:06):
started referring to me as the male Carol King, which
is a high compliment. But also, I don't want to
be compared to other people. I don't want to be anything. Yeah,
I want to be you know, eventually people who would
be compared to me, but I don't want to be
compared to anything before. So the next record, which was
(16:28):
a Wizard of True Star, was not like any record
I had made, and maybe not like any record anybody
had ever made before, because I completely deconstructed the process.
And again, the only reason why I could do that
was because I was still producing records for other people.
When I didn't follow up something anything with another batch
(16:50):
of easily consumable pop songs. There was a complete freak
out at the record label. They say, how do we
sell this record compared to Life's record? The expectations are
in a completely other place, and I had no care
for that. I was still producing a lot of artists
(17:12):
for Bears Full Records, so they couldn't exactly kick me
off the label, you know, if they were forced to
indulge me. And that just turned out to be the
whole modus operandi. You know. I was the fly in
the ointment in some ways because I wouldn't stop making records,
(17:35):
and yet they couldn't figure out how to market them.
And eventually they got into a such a mindset that
they completely overlooked hits on some of my records. Musician
Todd Rundgren. If you love conversations with legendary singers, be
sure to check out my talk with another musical icon,
(17:58):
Darryl Hall. I'm zy man. I'm much busier now than
I was. In fact, I don't have time to make
a record. I've been trying to make a record, and
I have to do it in little dribs and drabs
and starts and stops to try and get into a
flow is really really hard. Was there a spot in
your career where you southern when you go this is
it man, we we this is the top. There was
a period of time where we did we are the world.
(18:21):
I reopened the Apollo Theater with the Temptations live aid
all within a month and a half, and I remember
thinking to myself, Okay, I I feel like I'm here
here the rest of my conversation with Darryl Hall at
Here's the Thing dot org and find Darryl Hall and
(18:41):
Todd Rundgren on tour together this spring. After the Break,
Todd Rundgren demonstrates why he's one of the most insightful
and prescient artists in all of music, and discusses his
career as a psycho. Not m I'm Alec Baldwin and
(19:13):
you're listening to Here's the Thing? Okay, Okay? This is
(19:45):
Bang the Drum All Day, one of Todd Rundgren's biggest hits.
It's the seventh of nine tracks on album The ever
popular Tortured Artist Effect. The song was all but overlooked
by his record label. Bang the Drum All Day was
never released as a single, never occurred to him that
(20:05):
it was just one of my other another nutty thing
that I was doing. But the record promoted itself and
made itself. DJ started playing it every Friday during drive time,
and then somehow fans adopted it at sporting events anytime
somebody wanted to create a party atmosphere, you know, even
(20:29):
if it was like a movie like Ants. The song
was never in the movie, but they used it for
the trailer because it made the movie seem more fun.
I guess. I think first ice hockey games, and then
it became like the Green Bay Packers touchdown song, and
then it eventually became the Carnival Cruise Lines theme song,
(20:52):
for which I got paid handsomely until they started sinking
all those boats. And I have no idea where the
song came from. I mean, it's not like I sat
down and said I'm going to write this song. No,
I actually dreamed the song. Sometimes when you start working,
you know, and you get really embedded in the work,
it permeates your subconscious at the point you never get
(21:15):
away from it. And I was writing songs in my
sleep and this song just came to me. And wondering
for you when you were young because you go off
on a different path and only with utopian in terms
of the style of music. What was your rishikesh? I mean,
did you have a moment of drug experimentation and enlightenment
and whatever it was that when you were very young? Okay,
(21:38):
I'm trying to trying to tread lightly here, I'm tread lightly.
I gained a reputation of something of a psychonaut at
one point. I guess a Wizard of True Star helped
with that, and it was definitely there was some psychedelic
experiences that made me rethink music and what I wanted
to do, and a wizard or truth Star was a result.
(22:00):
But some time after that, somebody sent me a shoe
box full of peyote buttons and I was high for
a month. I would get up in the morning, I
would clean three pyote buttons and I have one for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. And I was not straight for an entire month.
And I did rehearsals and gigs and wiring my studio.
(22:23):
While I was doing that, I know it was one
of the most amazing periods of my life. Does it
stop me? Do you stop for if someone else stops him? Button?
I ate all the payote. I ate all the peyote
and it was done. You know, he ate the Whitman
sampler of peyote that you were given. Yeah, take me
(22:45):
through if you can, you go into utopia. When I
was originally just a guitar player, I didn't have any confidence.
I didn't have the confidence to sing or front a band.
And you know, when I quit the band, and I
didn't want to put an out of the band together.
I didn't understand the politics of it, you know, And
so I just went into production and I my first
(23:07):
album was a vanity project. I didn't plan to do
anything with it, and then accidentally had a hit single.
It was called we Gotta Get You a Woman. It
was off of my very first record, so I had
to rethink the idea of going out and performing. It
got top forty, I think, and that's when I had
to learn to perform. You know. I had you gotta
(23:28):
hit sing? Oh yeah, I go out and play and
I couldn't sing twenty minutes without blowing my voice out.
Really yeah, and you never and you never thought about
getting trained for that at all. Well, it started out
as a mental thing. I never thought of myself as
a frontman, a gut person who would stand in front
of the band and sing. I was singing background vocals,
and I'd be happy with that. There was some things
(23:50):
I knew about singing. A lot I didn't know about singing,
most importantly the diaphram, and it took me a while
to sort of figure it out. And I think the
best education I ever got was from listening to a
Stevie Wonder record sign seal delivered. What they used to
do is compress his voice so much that you could
(24:10):
hear every breath he was taking, and you could hear
before he would sing a phrase, how we would do this,
you know, how his diaphragm would punch up into his
lungs to create the necessary pressure in order to sing
the song. The thing that never occurred to me. A
lot of people don't realize that it isn't about your throat.
(24:31):
It's about your diaphragm, your breath, how much breath you
can put behind it, trying to sing just with your throat,
and you know you'll get twenty minutes out of it
and then it will die. And it took me a
long time to learn how to do that. I remember,
I think it was right around something anything because of
what that was also about when I first started driving
(24:53):
a car and I was in l A and I
would drive around the freeways screaming my ass off. I
would just scream for twenty thirty minutes at a time
while driving my car around. It missed to look pretty weird.
But eventually, through doing that constantly and applying that when
I was singing live, I built up my diaphragm to
(25:15):
the point now that it's like ridiculous. You know, if
you get that muscle in shape, you can sing forever.
I can sing for three hours a night if I
have to at the you know, at the very top
of my range, as long as I have the wind
for it. Now, when you form utopia and you decide
to go in that direction, is it an idea of
(25:35):
a direction you want to go in? Do you see
to yourself, here's a kind of music I want to
play now, and this is where my head is at
now in my writing, do you meet people that influence
How does utopia congio? How does that come together? As
I was progressing as a songwriter, I started losing touch
with the guitar because it's not as flexible a songwriting too.
(26:00):
As a piano was because the piano you have all
the notes and you've got ten fingers. You know, guitar
has only got six strings. You were trained piano player, No,
I was never trained, But I began to write on
the piano, and it's a great songwriting tool. And I
started to think that I was losing all of the
(26:21):
effort I had put into trying to learn how to
play the guitar and be, you know, an effective guitar player.
I was losing that. So I thought, I have to
start a band just so I can play guitar more.
You know, I still have my own thing, which is
my song to my stuff, but I want to start
a group where where my principal role is playing guitar
(26:42):
and a lot of the guys that eventually became part
of Utopia. And also this is Utopia too, because there
was an original Utopia with me and Hunt and Tony Sales,
SUPI Sales Kids that lasted for like, got to a
couple of months or something like that, and it was
(27:03):
really high concept, so high concept that we failed to
pull it off and that unit broke up. But then
decided I still needed to have a guitar oriented outlet,
and that's when we started Utopian and was a lot
of the people who have played on my records. A
lot of this revolves around the studio that we built
(27:24):
in New York called Secret Sound, which was that was
in It was like twenty six Street and maybe seventh
then it was right near the Grammercy Park Hotel. The
friend of mine, Moogie Klingman, he bought aloft and we said,
let's build a studio in it. It was like a
(27:45):
very unusual thing because most studios were commercial enterprises. You know,
it was expensive to build a studio, but I just
kept taking any money that I got and plowing it
back into you know, my projects and tools for my projects.
And so we built our own studio and that's the
(28:05):
very first thing to recorded there was a Wizard True Star,
and then it became our playpen. We would go in
there and just fiddle around right music, record little bits
of it, splice it together. Later there was nobody to
tell us what not to do, so we would do
anything that we could think of. And the first um
(28:27):
Utopia album we just sat around the studio throwing ideas
out on the floor and trying to turn them into songs.
And part of what makes it so interesting musically is
all it represents all the influences of each person, kind
of collected under a pro rock banner. But for me
(28:49):
that that time, if I thought about it, I could
come up with probably a lot of speculation about why
people were craving that music. I mean, music to me
either is or is not related to the culture and
the political spectrum. And you know, Kennedy is killed, and
I mean a lot of people obviously think that the
(29:09):
Beatles ascension is linked to that. We need something happy,
we need something sweet, we need those ballads. You know,
well before we get to expert texpert choking smokers. You know,
all of the kind of poetry and insanity of Lennon
and McCartney as they get older, wonderful insanity by the way.
(29:31):
But you know, in the beginning with like Love Me
Do and all those there's things. There's there's something about people,
what people need, and at that time in the seventies,
people really needed music to take them somewhere. They really
needed to have music. You mentioned before, Roger Waters and
those guys, I mean, you know they're being Floyd. I mean, man,
(29:52):
when I went to college. Everybody was laying on the
floor with the biggest joint in their mouths you could
possibly imagine, and with the headphones on, and they just
had to listen to that music to transport them. Did
you feel when you were making the music with Utopia
your audience wanted you to transport them somewhere? Well, you know,
(30:14):
I try to think of myself as an artist and
as a true artist. We've talked about me as a producer,
and as a producer, I have to be aware of
the way that the audience may respond to the project
that I'm responsible for. But when I'm making my own music,
you know, and when I feel like I'm in my
(30:34):
most artistic head, I'm not trying to manipulate people. I'm
not thinking about them. I'm thinking about me, you know.
I'm trying to think, how can I make music that
will satisfy me? How can I make music that won't
be just simply a repetition of something someone else has
done already, Which is two challenges right there. To satisfy yourself,
(30:58):
you know, it's difficult enough. And that did not replicate
something that's already been done. And I guess when you're
talking about that my mind is going to a different place.
My mind is going to that place where music is
meant for that individual experience. It's like you say, you
(31:20):
may be in a dorm room where a bunch of
guys getting high, but the music doesn't have an effect
until you feel like you're alone with it. And the
problem with music nowadays is it's like nobody's fault, you know,
like human evolution is not really any individual's fault. It's
part of our evolution. Part of it is the simple
(31:42):
hardware evolution. The fact that the way we listen to
music is not the way we used to listen to music.
If you wanted a quality time music experience, it used
to be you had to go home to do it,
you know, and listen to your own little Hi fi
and and and that's what we did. A record that
you were anticipating came out, and you sat in a
(32:04):
sweet spot between the speakers, and you put that record on.
You listed it from beginning to end. You unplug the phone.
You didn't let anybody just house. Back then, I had
one in my kids. It was a phone on the
kitchen wall, and that was in Yeah. But I mean
the dynamic was that it was you and the music,
and for you to really get your money's worth out
(32:26):
of it, you and the music had to get down
there alone and experience it together in a certain way.
And eventually we came up with portable music systems like
the Walkman and things like that. Suddenly it was not
a quality time experience anymore. But things have evolved so
far to the point that so called musicians aren't actually musicians.
(32:51):
Music is the wedge you use to get yourself into
the public consciousness. So you start out calling yourself a musician,
but essentially you're just a merchandizer. You're selling shoes, hats,
shirts and things like that. You know, it's actually become
a little bit more real in the sense that you're
(33:12):
not pretending that the music is anything more than self promotion.
There is no pretense about the music being actually more
important than people simply remembering your name. You know, It's
it's not like the oldest axiom of advertising todd run.
(33:33):
If you're enjoying this episode, don't keep it to yourself.
Tell a friend, and be sure to follow us on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. You can also listen to all of
the music from this episode and more in a curated
playlist of my favorite pieces from Todd Rundgren. You'll find
(33:53):
a link to the playlist in the show notes of
this episode. When we return, Todd Rundgren tells us how
anthropology factors into his songwriting. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
(34:17):
listening to Here's the thing? Do you read the least time?
See five? Lie? I'd rather think of that instead, and
(34:42):
maybe this is It wouldn't have made any difference from
Todd Rundgren's album Something Anything. Consumers have come to expect
the ease and accessibility that today's stream platforms give us
to an infinite musical catalog. Incredibly, Todd Rundgren had the
(35:06):
foresight to see where music technology was taking us, but
he was slightly ahead of his time. I am a
technologist and a theorist in some kind, and in the
early late eighties early nineties I started to gain some
awareness that technology was going to take music to other places.
(35:26):
I started thinking about other ways that music could be delivered,
and I came up with this concept called no World Order,
in which you could, as a listener, describe some parameters
about the music you want to hear, and then this
system would go out and find the music that satisfied
your criterion. So I did a demonstration of that. It
(35:49):
was called No World Order. It was released as a record,
and there were various computer versions as well, and you
could actually navigate the music if you had the right hardware.
And I got approached by Warner Full Service Network, which
was attempting to establish an interactive TV community in Orlando, Florida,
(36:11):
as a test thing, and we wanted to see whether
people wanted to have on demand music services. This is
when you still have to buy music on a CD.
So we went to all the major labels and said,
we're just experimenting with a community in or Lands in
Florida to see whether there is demand for music that's
(36:35):
delivered by some kind of criteria something like that designed
the whole system. Then went to the five major labels
at that point see whether they would put their music
on servers so we could just experiment with it. All
five refused. They said, we can't even imagine this putting
music on servers just because beyond our comprehension, let alone
(36:58):
explaining it to all our artists and the retailers that
we have to deal with and stuff like that, and
every single one of them with refused two years later Napster,
and that was the beginning of the end because they
didn't see that music had to be on servers, and
that essentially collapsed what was the music business. And the
(37:21):
end result is now you don't sell music. Music is
as I mentioned before, music is advertising for something else
that you're selling that people seem to perceive as more
valuable than the music, like a T shirt, like a
big puffy jacket like some sneakers, or something like that.
I mean, Kanye is bragging about the fact not that
(37:44):
he sold so much music, that he sold two million
dollars worth of his players that the music will be
on He's bragging about selling hardware, not music. And that's
kind of where music has outen to at this particular point.
It's just part of putting forward a personal brand, and
(38:06):
then once you have that brand, you sell anything and
it doesn't have to be music. Do world events ever
shape your music? Do they ever influence your music? I
write my music about human nature. My whole music is anthropological.
I'm trying to figure out why people think the way
they think and why they do the things that they do,
(38:26):
and that covers everything. That pretty much covers it all.
How would you say that the shoe box full of yeah,
the big baggy full the peyonte buttons, that was a
while ago. What do you do now to raise your consciousness?
Are you into meditation? Like? What do you do now
to achieve a state where you feel comfortable? I moved
(38:49):
twenty five years ago to the Island of c and
I live in heaven. You know, I hear you well listen.
I am a great, great admirer of your music and
your career and I don't know what it is, but
like I went back and listened to so much, so
much of your music, and it's that Utopia phase of
your career. I love that music. I love utopiae which
(39:13):
we know. It's beautiful music. It's it's, it's, it's it
was beautiful music then and it still is. You are
one of the great artists. You say you like to
call yourself an artist. Well, everybody I know when they
think about you, they think about what a great artist
you are, on the diversity of your sound and the
music you made. And thank you so much for taking
the time to talk to us. I appreciate it. Thank you.
(39:35):
My thanks to producer, songwriter and musician Todd Rundgren. I'll
leave you with Love is the answer from Utopia's album Oops,
Wrong Planet. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
to you by my Heart Radio. I can't stay and
(40:03):
more Ell, I've been from shore to short to shore.
Defends a short time to found it. But this a
easy way around day world shaming. Love is shut up,
(40:35):
so said scream Loving Lose. Why so we are all
us time, We're a poising girl away it's at work.
(41:08):
People turn their heads to work on time. Tell it, listen,
try tur
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