Todd Rundgren

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left SUTs podcast.
My guest today is the one and only Todd run
Gray Todd good dap Here, Hi, Bob, how goes? It? Goes?
Pretty well? And then being locked up in this COVID era.
So you're going on this virtual tour this winter? Can
you tell us a little bit about that? Well? I

(00:30):
was supposed to be out this year in May and
June as part of my regular touring schedule, and then
that got moved to July and August. Then I got
moved to October November, then I got moved to next February,
and then when they moved it from February, I said,

(00:51):
all right, enough enough that would have been by the
time I go out on the road, it will be
two years since I've done a tour, and that's too
long a time for me. If I don't do it
with some regularity, I start to wonder if I can
do it. So I decided that I would uh do
this experiment, which is actually something that I've had in

(01:12):
mind for a while. The impetus for the idea has
to do with um with global climate change and how
it's affecting a transportation system, and I had already made
some um, pretty major adjustments in the way that I travel.
Instead of doing the usual major markets, a couple of

(01:34):
minor markets, major market, driving the whole way, we started
playing multiple nights in major markets and kind of encouraging
people from the minor markets to travel, and I would
travel less. As a matter of fact, we travel maximum
under that schedule, probably two days a week, but it

(01:55):
involves flying instead of driving. And I was finding myself, um,
evermore often on panic mode with my travel agent because
a flight got canceled or or fatally delayed or something
like that. And that would usually be due to an

(02:17):
airport being shut down because of a weather event. And
that's when I started to think, Um, this is going
to happen more often. How, what's the backup? You know,
how can you deliver a show? Uh if the physical
world won't allow you to do that? Uh? And that's

(02:37):
when I first started thinking about it. But I had
not at the time considered the possibility that the audience
wouldn't be able to make it to the show. So
that's how we wound up with this full virtual tour.
The fact that nobody can actually come come out and
so instead of me, um, hitting uh the places that

(03:03):
I would have played, but maybe presenting it in a
way that's still resembled a live show. In other words,
do it in a club or a theater that has
video projection. Now the audience can't go to that club
or that video theater. The whole thing has to be
home delivered. And so that's what we're doing. We're doing shows,

(03:25):
each localized to a market that we would have played,
and uh allowing well pretty much allowing anyone to go
to any of those shows, but for the markets that
are locked out because prior agreements, and each show will
have the flavor of the place that we would have played. Wait. Wait,

(03:45):
just so I understand. So the shows are geo fenced,
is what the original publicity say? Are you saying if
the show is in San Francisco, someone from New York
can go? Uh? Yes, the geo in sing We had
the paradigm a little upside down at first. Um we thought, okay,

(04:07):
geo fencing will involve determining all of the you know,
the IP addresses that fall within a certain municipality, let's say,
and then only allow people who had corresponding IP address.
Is to buy a ticket to those particular markets. As

(04:30):
it turns out, you know, there are a lot of
people who might be just on the other line of
the other side of the fence, and it's a hard fence,
you know, it's not like uh not like a fence
that you can see through. Put it that way, you
either get it or you don't get the show. And
a lot of people who might have driven to a

(04:51):
show in a particular town suddenly couldn't get to the
show via the geo fencing. And we realized the only
use of it at this particular point is to protect
those markets that I've made prior agreements not to play in.
So uh, you can be in one of those markets

(05:13):
that I didn't agree to play in, and then pick
any city that you would like to be in, with
the caveat that we will be as performers. We will
be pretending we're in that city. Okay, certainly fans are
they just want to hear they can go into any
market and watch the show. In many cases, fans would

(05:35):
watch multiple shows. Let's go back to something you said earlier.
You said, well, you don't know if you still can
do it. Is that emotionally is that physically is that
musical ability. Well, you know, there is a controversy about
mask wearing and social distancing and all that, and we're

(05:58):
kind of on the side of playing its safe. We're
creating our own bubble when we go um to actually
do this show, and we fortunately, because we're doing it
this way, don't have to get into the controversy about
wearing or not wearing a mask at a certain gig.

(06:21):
The I think the thing is that in most cities
they have relatively stricter gathering policies as opposed to rural
areas that may have much more relaxed gathering policies. So,
for instance, we were operating on the assumption, because we're

(06:43):
we'll be doing the shows in Chicago, we're operating on
the assumption originally that we could have up to people
live people in an audience, and of course they would
all have to be masked and isolated and that sort
of thing or distance not necessarily isolated, but six ft

(07:05):
apart at least. And then there was a surge and
that got reduced to like ten people. Uh So we
don't know actually, by the time we get to doing
the shows exactly how many live bodies will be allowed
to have in the space in our performance space. UH.

(07:30):
And that would be the same probably in any major city.
We would have no idea until you until the day
of the show exactly how many people would be allowed
in the venue. So there is that, and then there
is the fact that we are, uh, we are proactive
about about continuing to use suppressive strategies while we're still

(07:56):
in a pandemic, even though it will be a February
you are in March for us, We're not counting on
the fact that vaccines would be available to us or
the major part of the audience. Okay, but earlier you
said if you don't go out that regularly on tour,
irrelevant of COVID, you're not sure you can still do it.

(08:17):
What exactly did you mean by that? I don't go
out and just stand in front of a microphone with
acoustic guitar and strum and sing all the ballots. My
shows are even nowadays as much physical work as I've
ever done in a two hours span. Uh. If not

(08:39):
only requires um, the singing, and the movement. Uh. Some
shows require extracurricular above and beyond things like when I
do uh A wizard, A true Star, which was supposed
to be half of the show that we were going
to do this year. Uh. I go through how many

(09:06):
was it? It was twelve costume changes in an hour.
It was like every ten minutes, I had a different
costume change. Yeah, I've seen that show, right, and that's
the ship, you know, that's the show that hopefully next October,
half the show will be that and half the show
will be the Individualists tour, which uh, which I did

(09:26):
uh in Okay, So there's a lot of physical activity.
Do you like performing live or is it more for
the revenue or what what's driving these tours? I really
like it. I enjoy it. I always feel, you know,
worn out, a little bit beat up after a show,

(09:47):
but very satisfied. It's two hours of aerobics. You know,
it's all because you're singing the whole time. So it's
all about you know, you're how much wind you have,
you know, and utilizing uh, especially when you're singing and
run around the stage at the same time. I just
feel like more fit afterwards, and I enjoy I enjoy singing.

(10:11):
There was a time in my life where I was
terrified to sing, and as time has gone on, my
voice has actually kind of aged well and in some
ways gotten a little bit better, and my stamina has
gotten better. I understand my voice a little better, so
I can use it more effectively. So I really enjoy

(10:34):
the singing. I enjoy the singing. I enjoy the interactions
with the audience. And to what degree does the audience
affect that particular performance. Would you change anything, whether it
be song selection or delivery? Uh, as a result of
where the audiences at visa VU. Well, this is not

(10:56):
that kind of show in that um sort of a
review and it's got to flow to it. Uh. There
are shows that I've done where I will just call
the songs out to the band. You know, we won't
have a set list, and I'll see how I feel
and see what the audience response is like, and then

(11:16):
you know, figure out where to go from there. We
have a virtual audience as well. There will be a
number of these video panels with people's faces on them.
You may have seen such a thing at the NBA
Games or America's Got Talent, where the any TV show

(11:37):
where they think the audience is a significant part of
the of the process. So we'll have that. We'll be
able to see people's faces, and people can buy essentially
one of those seats, which will be the equivalent of
like the first three or four rows of the gig,
and that will be interspersed with any with the number

(12:00):
or of live bodies that we're allowed to have in
the venue at the time. Uh, you can figure that.
You can assume that in a in a multicast thing
like we're doing, there'll be a certain amount of round
trip time we do an event like I say, move,

(12:20):
and it takes some number of milliseconds to get to
the audience who are out there somewhere, and then any
response they have to that, we'll take some number of
milliseconds to get back, and it may not be the
same for everybody. So, uh, there's a little bit of
lag in the audience response, uh, in the virtual audience response,

(12:44):
which is why it's good to have live bodies there
because they respond instantaneously to whatever you're doing. And also
it's you know, in a certain sense maybe easier to
hear them because the people in the virtual audience, while
they have a screen to themselves, you know, with their
head on it, all the audio from the audience is

(13:06):
being mixed into one feet and so you know, we
couldn't pick out you know, if someone has yelling at
woo or something like that, we wouldn't be able to
actually pick out who it is. UM. And so you know,
it's great always to have some at least some live
bodies in the audience. I mean, we we enjoy playing

(13:27):
a sound check and having the people who worked the
bar applaud for us. That's good. Okay, you live in
Hawaii and when this was set up, your manager said, Okay,
it's two hours behind or ahead, depending on how you
want to look at it. And Todd doesn't start until noon.
Are you a late night person? Is that basically your schedule? Um?

(13:51):
It is. Uh. The daytime can be full of various
activities and interactions and the coming in and out of
the house all the time, and it's often not until
very late at night that UM when all of the
external distractions subside, I get a chance to really think

(14:14):
hard about all of the things that I've involved in
what it involves from me uh boring down into the
further details of of things like UH like me just
realizing the other night that I needed a musical director

(14:35):
because the one who usually UH is in the band
is not able to travel with us. And that's a
significant thing to slip my mind, because I have so
many things to worry about, so many details in terms
of the show. I can't be attending to everyone's issues
regarding their own particular part. That's just one of the

(14:57):
things that occurs to me when everything gets a little quieter.
Let's say hypothetically everybody in your house was out of town,
you had no assistance whatever, and you had to start
you during the day, would you be as productive or
is there something about later in the day and the
darkness that loosens things up it maybe, uh, it may

(15:20):
be the darkness. We have a rare moment of quiet here,
as you may be able to detect because living out
here in the in the countryside as I do, it
seems to be NonStop landscaping. Somebody is running a lawnmower
or a weed whacker somewhere, and and the noise doesn't

(15:41):
abate until like until sundown, you know, until it is
actually dark. So even if the house was empty, there's
likely some sort of droning noise or something that disturbs
the quiet. As a matter of fact, it isn't even
that quiet at night because like TOAs and frogs in
the pond out here. They'll go off, but eventually I

(16:05):
can tune them out, you know, and just kind of
think about the things that I need to think about. Okay,
why Hawaii. I live on the island of Kauai. And
I started coming here and like the mid seventies just
to get some peace and quiet for myself, and all

(16:27):
through the seventies and eighties kept coming here. And in
the early nineties, I had a video animation studio that
I was running, and we had a big deliverable and
I took everyone two out here to Kauai after that
deliverable was made, and it was about eight months after

(16:49):
Hurricane Hurricane called Hurricane and Nikki, which was like a
hundred and eighty mile and our winds and the I
went right over the island and completely flattened it. And
we were out are staying in a condo because none
of the hotels were open. And I thought, well, I
had always fantasized about living out here. If if there's

(17:09):
gonna be any affordable real estate opportunities, this would be
the time, you know, because everyone's been blown off the island.
So looked around and looked around and was about to
give up, and then found the property that I'm living
on now. And it took uh moving mountains essentially to

(17:31):
get it. A couple of things had to coincide, and
did finally get it, but didn't build on it. And
then it was the mid nineties and we were living
in Saucelito and we're pondering on it because life and
sauce Lito is getting less idyllic. For one thing, Silicon Valley,

(17:58):
which you know, I moved out in the mid eighties
and it was still like huge fund the whole hacker
scene and stuff like you would I would go to hackers,
hackers conventions and hacking. It meant, you know, just doing
the most you know, balls out uh computer coding and
stuff like that. It wasn't necessarily about breaking into other

(18:21):
people's systems. As a matter of fact, there was no
Internet yet so or at least nobody was using it.
So it was a lot of fun. And then you know,
it became a gold mine and all of those engineers,
all those fun people got replaced by investment bankers, and
all the musicians and artists and stuff. They used to

(18:43):
live in Mill Valley, they all got pushed out by
investment bankers, you know, who would you know, be on
their cell phones driving ninety miles an hour through the
Waldh Grade and so. And at the same time, this
is when some series is gangster wrap is happening, uh,

(19:03):
the kind where people get get killed. Right next to
Saucelito is a town called uh Marine City. Not a town,
it's a development actually, and that's where Tupac Shakur came from.
And we're living in Saucelito right next door, and my uh,
my adolescent son, you know, my fourteen year old son

(19:27):
is telling everyone that he's in Tupacs Posse, you know,
and there we hear about gang shooting and stuff in
Oakland is happening all the time, his gang rivalries. But
we fortunately find out at the same time that my
oldest son is something of a baseball prodigy, and we say, okay,

(19:50):
what we're gonna do. We're gonna find a baseball school
and Honolulu for him to go to and get him
out of this gangster scene, you know, and we'll moved
to Kauaii and get away from essentially, you know, the
investment bankers and the gangsters and and start again. And

(20:10):
that's essentially what we did. Okay, I'm sure your kids
weren't happy about that, while somewhere and somewheren't. Um younger
kids weren't so old as you know, as to be
as bothered by it. Okay, So do you ever get
island fever? Up until now, never like, I've never spent

(20:32):
a lot of time like dreaming about going to other places.
But uh, yeah, I spent so much time on the road.
I mean in the past couple of years, especially since
about two thousand and ten, when I started touring with
the All Star Band, and that became like half of
my touring life, and then my own thing was the

(20:53):
other half of my touring life. And then other sorts
of events like appearing with the Metropole Orchestra and Amsterdam
or other a little one off things, I might find
myself on the road as long as ten months a year.
And at that point, when I realized I had been
on the road ten months a year, I said, this

(21:14):
has got to stop. We have to sort of, you know,
reverse this. Eventually, my stint with the All Star Band ended,
so that gave me back more time. But through all
of that, I, you know, I was always pining to
be home. You know, it's like I don't get enough
time at home. I don't get enough time to forget

(21:34):
that I've got another flight to take off island again.
So when I got back home in February from a
rock cruise that we did, sounds scary, doesn't it. It
was in the Caribbean, so I hadn't hit there yet.
But I got home and was expecting to be back

(22:01):
in uh, back on the mainland in April, rehearsing for
my show that would have started in May and gone
through June. And suddenly that wasn't happening. That got moved,
and then I realized, Okay, I'll be home until July
at least. And then I realized I'll be home until
the fall. And then I realized I'll be home until

(22:23):
next year. So that's when I started getting more serious
about this virtual tourt thing. You know. Yeah, now I
have like in my head a whole list of places
where I'd like to go as soon as I can,
as soon as I can go there, and as they'll
soon as they'll allow. Americans, they're okay, are you the

(22:44):
type of person who's been around the world and see
nothing other than hotel rooms or stages or when you
go to places, do you seek out the cultural elements
you know, food, friends. That's the reason why we're localizing
all of these shows. Uh. We the traveling is the

(23:05):
worst part, you know, that's trying to get there is
the worst part. Being there is usually pretty great, whether aside.
You know, but you know all of these places that
were about to play virtually we you know, we know
them in a sense. We know fans and those cities
who show up to every show. Uh. There are walks

(23:28):
that you like to take, landmarks that you know, restaurants
you like to eat at. It's great at being in
some of these cities. It's great having a day off
in some of these cities. And uh that's part of
why we're you know, working on this self hypnosis exercise
so that we actually believe when we do the show

(23:49):
that we're in that city, that we're in Buffalo or
Baltimore or wherever it is that we're playing. I don't
have all the dates in my ahead. Okay. Now, as
you say you were working on the road up to
ten months a year, you're someone has had a lot
of recording success. Not only is yourself as an act

(24:12):
but producing other records at this point, if I told
you you couldn't go on the road ever again, economically,
does it work for you or do you need to
work to you know, pay the bills? Probably at some
point I'd have to work. But I'm not in relative
to like me, which is like, I have this weird

(24:34):
thing about money, and so I never and never have
known how much I have unless it's all in my pocket,
you know, and I can count it. But I have
had since the time I had any money at all,
I've had an accountant or a or a business manager
who worries about all that, And I said, don't tell
me how much money I have. Just tell me how

(24:54):
hard I have to work, or tell me that I
can take some time off, you know, whatever that's I
need to know. And there have been points in which
I've been well underwater because of various circumstances, like after
the um, after the mortgage collapse in this house that

(25:18):
I'm living in, we finished it in and then suddenly
all of the equity and it disappeared, and I was
holding a mortgage and in a world of collapsed finances
that was like three times the actual value of the house.
At that point. So I've had you know, I've had

(25:42):
ups and downs. At this particular point in my life,
I'm actually doing pretty well, ironically enough. And a lot
of that has to do with um, uh, with regression
of rights. Um. You know there's some found in the background. Yeah,

(26:02):
the freaking frog, and I will shoot him. It's a frog,
then we can leave. It's part of living in Hawaii. Okay. Yeah,
it's a frog in my not in my throat, in
my pond over here. Okay, tell us about your situational
reversion of rights by some act of Congress or multiple
acts of Congress. It used to be that, um, if

(26:24):
you recorded for a record label, the masters would belong
to them in perpetuity. You know, you would have them
for infinity. Uh. Same thing with certain publishing rights and
things like that, and oft an artists. If they didn't
feel like those rights were being handled properly or they

(26:45):
felt that they should rightfully own them, they would have
to sue whoever owned them. It was a big ongoing mess.
So by an act of Congress, uh, they made a
statutory that after a certain number of years, like thirty
thirty five years or something like that. Uh, the masters
could revert to you, and all you have to do

(27:07):
is make a request to the master owner, uh and
tell them, like in a like a year before, say
I am going to get I'd like to get my
masters back. And what often happens, especially if you have
a big catalog like me, a deep catalog, is they
will say, well, we'd rather not um give up those rights.

(27:30):
We'd rather keep those rights. We think there's value in
them that we can realize, and so we will advance you.
An I've seen amount of money to retain the master
rights or retain the publishing rights or whatever. And a
bunch of those deals because I started in the sixties,

(27:50):
you know a lot of that stuff UH came do
and continues do we come do with every year? Because
I continue to make records every year? So uh, these
things would have been minor annuities or me off setting
advances that I had previously taken. And now they are
all giant. Now it's my retirement. You know. Now I

(28:15):
have more money in the bank than I've ever had
all because of these uh reversions did I say regressions? Reversions?
You know, things reverting back in the deals that you
make around them. So I would not be in dire
straight right away, but I still feel the need to

(28:37):
remain involved in uh, in making records for myself and
for others, in the sense that I haven't learned everything
there is, and as long as there's still something for
me to learn, I am going to continue to UM
to explore the medium. Okay, now, you've produced a lot
of very successful records, the biggest being Out of Hell

(29:00):
is one of the most successful records of all time.
But you sold your producer royalties, right, so ay, why
did you do that? And be do you regret it?
And see if you sold your other producer royalties. That's
the only instance when in which I, you know, had
someone buy me out. Uh. When sometime around when when

(29:22):
Columbia became Sony, Sony brought out Columbia Records, Uh, Bad
out of Hell was on a subsidiary of Epic, which
was a part of the Columbia Records umbrella. UM, there
was a lot of people talking fast and loose about
how many Bad Out of Hell records have been sold,

(29:45):
and uh, Meatloaf and Stimon and their management or their
accountants or whatever thought, well, these brags don't equal, you know,
the amount of money that we've got and paid, so
we want to audit the label. Auditing is a thing
that um. Auditing is a thing that artists do when

(30:10):
they think that they hadn't been paid all the money
that they wrote from a label, and it involves lawyers
and accountants, and you have to spend money to make money,
and you don't know whether you actually will because maybe
the audit turns out that, yeah, you have been paid
all the royalties you wrote. But um. They wanted to
meet Loaf and Stemon and their management wanted to have

(30:34):
Sony audited and asked if I wanted to participate in it,
which meant that I would be also be playing lawyer's fees,
et cetera. You know, for however long that dragged out,
and quite obviously we'll be talking about a lot of money.
So I said, I don't want to be involved in
this UM. So I offered meat Loaf, uh my points

(30:56):
on the record, I said, do you want to buy
me out? And he demurred, And so then I went
to Sony and said, do you want to buy me out?
Because they'd have to pay me the the producer's royalties,
and they said, sure, we'll buy you out, and what
did I do with that money? I bought the property
I'm living on today. Do I regret that? Not for

(31:19):
a second. Okay, all your other records usually a producers
paid from record one. Do you think you're being accounted
to properly? Um? I got to the point because after

(31:40):
after something anything, I always had a studio of my own.
Verson was Secret Sound in New York, and then I
had a studio when I moved up state. So I
always had access to a studio, or I could get
a studio UM for a pretty good rate, and a

(32:00):
lot of the costs for making a record would go
and go into studio costs, the hourly cost of of
renting a studio, and the longer that an artist will
work on the record, the more the cost might soar.
So the deal that I would make is it with
the label would be give me all the money for

(32:20):
the record, all the money the budget for the record,
including my producers advance, and it would be the six
figure lump sum of money, and so whatever I didn't
spend on making the record was my producer's advance. But
all of that would be you know, would be uh

(32:45):
taken off the tip that all of that had to
be amortized before anybody would see further royalties. The only
way you get royalties from record one is if is
if you never took an advance on anything. You know,
at first have to defray the advance and then you
start making royalties. And because I had this kind of
control over the process, it turned out to be uh,

(33:08):
very desirable for a lot of labels, especially if they
thought the artist was going to go into the studio
and start ditthering away, you know and running up the
tab you know, because nobody was actually you know, keeping
a firm hand on the tiller. And I always had
impetus to do that because I knew it was coming
out of whatever would be my producer's advance. So it

(33:31):
kind of worked out for everybody in that sense. Um.
But that that was in the old days. That's the
old record label days. That doesn't exist anymore that much. Yeah,
But as I see some of these records, you did
obviously earned out. We're an American man. We can go
on and not do you get paid on those records today?

(33:53):
Only if they ever sold anything? Uh well, some of
these records sold a lot. Yeah, so probably no, I
did not get paid, But that was. That was the
very first. That was the first time that I found
a band and produced their records for bears Will Records.
And yes, quite obviously it uh, it didn't sell a lot.

(34:15):
Wait wait, wait what what what record? What record? Are
we talking about? American Dream? I'm sorry, the American Dream
record that was the first got my Americans mixed up.
My manager was Albert Grossman and it was Albert Grossman's label, Bearsville,
So I had no idea what I was getting paid. It's,
you know, my manager negotiating with the label and they're

(34:35):
both the same person. So I had no idea what,
you know, what I would be paid for it, no
idea what the budget for it was, what they spent
for it. But we did it the old fashioned way.
We went into into a commercial studio and paid the
hourly rate, came up with a record, and didn't take
awful long. Then you didn't spend months making records in

(34:57):
those days unless you were the bands. But eventually I
began to figure out, you know, when I have my
own studio that you know, I could take over you
know a greater part of the process. Relieve everybody of
worrying about how much time we were spending in the studio. Indeed,

(35:17):
once I moved to act into the studio, we more
or less owned it. No one else could come in.
And that was a rarity as well, you know, to
have your own studio and to completely occupy it twenty
four hours a day. So tell us about Albert Grossman
thumbs upper, thumbs down, and what was his personality like that?
You saw the legend in the business. Albert um did

(35:42):
a lot for me. I mean he sort of made me,
made me what I am in some ways, and then
in the end he screwed me. And that's Albert Grossman,
you know, I mean asked Bob Dylan. So tell us
how he screwed you in the end. It was it
says he was notorious for this kind of stuff. He
really valued more than anything publishing, uh, ownership or control

(36:06):
of the songs, even more than the actual recordings themselves.
And uh it was my last contractual album for bears
Full Records, and he only participated the publishing as long
as I was making records for Bearsville. So if my

(36:27):
relationship with bears Will ended, it also ended my publishing relationship.
And so I did the last contractual album it was
called Acapella, and delivered it to Bearsville and I heard
nothing back. And then eventually I started to say, what's
going on? Have you have you set a release date
for this record? And then no, we haven't said a

(36:49):
release date, and Albert said, well, I'm not going to
release this record, and I thought, what's what in particular
is wrong with this record? Uh? And then he eyed
to me and said Warner Brothers didn't want to release it.
And it took me a couple of weeks to get
ahold of MO Austin, and then I finally got him
on the phone. He said, I've never heard this record.

(37:09):
I didn't even know you had a record, you know,
so uh And so the jig was up at that point.
And realized that, you know, he was sticking it to
me to get uh more publishing. So we did is
he negotiated a three album deal with Warner Brothers, and
he got a publishing for those three albums, and then

(37:32):
he agreed to release Acapella. And I never spoke to
him again after that. Do you think you would have
been successful as you are if you hadn't met Albert Grossman?
Possibly not. I was just living at that at the time,
I was living with cloth Ears in the East Village,
and I was making no music at all. I was

(37:56):
designing lights in a in a little disc get tech.
I was doing anything I could to make any kind
of money or or just stay alive. And I was
living off the kindness of others. And I was hanging
out as Steve Paul's the scene, hoping something musical might happen.

(38:17):
I would go all all the jam sessions, you know,
maybe a band would happen, something like that. And then
I got contacted by the partner of the of the
guy who managed the NAZ. He was he and the
guy John Curland who managed the NAZ. They sort of

(38:40):
discovered us. But before the NAZ broke up, he quit,
you know, he split up with with our manager and
went to work for Albert Grossman. And Albert Grossman said, my, uh,
my roster here is pretty gray. They're all like artists

(39:03):
who you know, they're like folk artists, and here it
is like, so I need somebody, We need some young
blood in here, and you know, any young blood. And
he had watched me sort of take over the production
of the NAZ albums and thought, well, that's pretty impressive
for a young guy. Let's see what he can do.

(39:26):
So I was invited to start working for the Grossman organization,
and at first I was just doing engineering and a
little production, and I was very successful at it. And
then after I had done a few projects, I asked

(39:46):
for a budget to do a vanity record on my
own because I was still writing music. And that turned
out to be run, the first solo record that I did,
and it accidentally had a hit record on it. Okay,
why are there multiple iteration of that record? Uh? We
did a test pressing and it became apparent that the

(40:08):
sound was much louder on one side than the other,
because the volume of of an LP had to do
with how much content was actually on it, which is
why I like led Zeppelin records only lasted minutes. You know,
they'd have three songs on the side and the whole

(40:30):
side would last, you know, sixteen minutes or something like that.
So if you wanted your records to sound loud, you
had to put less music on them. But I had
put too much music on the B side, and so
we realized I had to edit it, and we took
three songs and edited them down to a Medley and

(40:52):
then remassed the record, but some confusion in there UH
caused them to press a run of like about five
thousand of the rejected masters, the ones that sounded louder
on one side than the other, And so there are
a few of those out there still extent, but most

(41:14):
of the records, any of the re issues, are all
of the one with the Medley instead of the three
full songs. Okay, now, those initial records were via Ampex
before they we uh went to Warner Brothers, and then
the market was flooded with cutouts. Was that something you
were aware of on your end? No, I didn't pay

(41:38):
much attention to that, but it seems logical. Uh. The
deal with Ampex was kind of weird. UM. When Albert
decided he wanted his own label, Theresbul Records, instead of
going to another you know label for distribution or real
record label, he went to Ampex, who only ever did

(41:58):
tapes up until that point. They would do real to
real versions of LPs and in which case the volume
was uniformed throughout. But and hired a guy I don't
know whether he worked at Ampex or whether it was
just another guy, but made essentially a tape company, record
distribution company, and they didn't realize what the difference was,

(42:20):
you know. So that relationship only lasted about a year,
and they took Bearsville and made a sensible deal with
Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers distributed them until the label folded. Essentially. Okay, now,
the first record has a hit with shitty distribution. In
terms of the album itself, the second album, in my mind,

(42:43):
is a masterpiece. I prefer that to something anything, To
put your heart and soul into that album and have
limited commercial success and to not fly above the radar.
Was that something you felt and you were disappointed about? Well,
you know, not for myself. I'm always disappointed, you know

(43:04):
when radio gets conservative and just starts playing the same
music over and over. Um. But this is in the
midst of me being one of the most successful producers
in the world at this point, and I don't have
to worry about the economics of my own records. That
was the point, the realization that I had during something anything, Uh,

(43:27):
when people were comparing me to Carol King, is it
always the madle Carol King. And as much as I
was a Carol King fan, I didn't want to be
compared to anybody, and I started to realize, what's the
point of doing music that other people are doing. I
have to do music that only I would do. And
that's when I built a studio for the purposes of
doing the music that only I would do. And you know,

(43:51):
the the market be deiled. You know how how commercial
it was never even occurred to me. But the irony is, uh, well,
there are a couple of irony. Is One irony is
that it completely bifurcated my audience. Anyone who was like
you know, a fan up until something anything uh and

(44:17):
didn't make that leap, never bought another record again, and
for some reason think I retired from the music business
and never record another song after that. And they come
to the shows and on they want to hear is solo.
It's me and I saw the light. And then there
are those fans who endured a wizit, a true star
and realized there was something in there, something unique in there,

(44:42):
and and continued on the journey, realizing that the unexpected
was part of the reward. You know that most audience
members want more of the same. My audience wants wants
to know what weird hairs up my bum at this point,

(45:03):
you know, so uh, and that's lasted mostly to this day,
and it became a generational thing. About ten years ago
or so ago, a whole generation of younger artists started
to discover, in particular A Wizard a True Star. The
first instance of that was Taman Palea. Kevin Parker asked

(45:26):
me to do a remix and said that, you know,
it was one of the most influential albums. You know
that his album that he was putting out was his
version of A Wizard a True Star. I did a
remix for Trent Resider and he said that he listened
to A Wizard a True Star once a month. So

(45:48):
it opened up posthumously. It opened up all this whole
window to a younger generation of artists who got tired
of doing the same music that everybody does nowadays and
do the same thing that I do, which is go
back and see what has been done, uh, even like
prior to your generation. Uh, and see if there's anything

(46:11):
to learn in it. See if there's something something that
will inspire you to to change what you're doing or
somehow give you license to do something that's out of
the ordinary. And what have you gone back and been
inspired by Oh. I have several instances of that. Maybe

(46:32):
the most obvious is UH with a Twist, where I
was approached to to do new versions of my old
classics or standards or whatever you want to call them,
and Uh, most people would just get out an acoustic
guitar and you know, do a new version. And I

(46:55):
had been listening to Bossanova music of the of the
of the early sixties, like pre Beatles. You know, we're
talking before the Beatles. There was a whole era m
in the late eighties and early nineties when everyone was well,
when not everyone but certain people were transitioning from vinyl

(47:20):
to c ds, and the Japanese in particular just got
really mental about it and they started going back and
finding any obscure vinyl they could find and doing CD
re re releases. And we were touring Japan a lot
in those days, and we would go to this record
store called Wave was just a multi story place with

(47:41):
they had had LPs once floor, but most all of
it was CDs, a lot of special releases and weird
packaging and stuff like that. But one of the things
that they started started rereleasing where for instance, UH, Frank Sinatra,
the Capitol years, uh uh, and this whole genre that

(48:08):
they called bachelor pad music or cocktail music, you know,
which included Boston Nova, included uh all kinds of like
freaky like esquivel, you know, Martin Denny, exoticam music, that
sort of thing. And I got way into that. And

(48:32):
so when they asked me to do a new album
of of my standards, I said, I'm gonna make a
Bossonova album. So we did a whole Bossonova album, and
then we went out and did a tour in which
the stage was a small like tiki club tiki bar.
Every night that, you know, wherever we were, we were

(48:54):
in the same tiki bar. And we did three acts.
You know. We started out with the Boston Nova act,
and then we do a sort of a more exotic act,
and then we do an after hours act. And we
had tables and a bar and a bouncer, and we
would invite people from the audience to come sit in
like they were on a tour bus and came to
our little Honolulu club to watch us play a set.

(49:15):
We would turn them out everyone to bring in a
new audience for each set, and by the time we
got to the very end of the set, there would
be nothing but one girl and one drunk at the
bar and he would hit on the girl. We would
tell them what they were supposed to do, and he
would hit on the girl on the bouncer would kick
him out and that would be the end of the show. Okay. Now,

(49:38):
since you put out a lot of records and not
all of them were expected by the labels, you ever
deliver one and they said, we don't want to put
it out, or it's gonna be different. There was an
instance where I made it an actually beautiful, magnificent record, uh,

(50:00):
with a girl named Julie. Oh gosh, she's gonna hate
me because I can't remember her name, but really a
really terrific record. She was had long been a background
singer for Leonard Cohen, but she had an incredible voice,
an incredible material, and great arrangements. It was a terrific

(50:22):
record that has never seen the light of day because, um,
I don't want to grind any access here but a
certain person. But it was for Mercury Records, and a
certain person came in and took over the presidency of
Mercury Records and said any project that was started before
I got here is in the dumpster and it didn't

(50:43):
matter what the quality of it was. And historically you could,
if you do the math, you can probably figure out
who this prick was, but uh, I'm not gonna name him.
I think I do know who it is, but that's okay.
And uh, yeah, that was that was a heartbreaking, you know,
because I had nothing to do with the quality of
the record. You know, it was a completely political decision

(51:07):
and uh, and I think that discouraged her so much
that she never went to find another label to pick
up the record, so that I really regret because I
thought it was a beautiful piece of work. Julie Christensen,
Julie Christensen, thank you, thank you. How did you end

(51:28):
up as the engineer on stage? Right? Well, that was
kind of what they brought me in for, uh, to
take these older acts and uh and sort of update them.
And I don't remember what the very very first session
I did was. It might they might have put me
on some demo sections or something like that. See if

(51:49):
you can, you know, just come up with a song
out of this artist. Um, then uh, I guess they decided, okay,
if we're gonna hired this guy. We got to give
him some kind of definitive test. So they hired me
to um engineer Jesse Winchester's first album. Robbie Robertson was

(52:13):
producing it, and the and the backup was essentially the band,
and I was was the producer in other words, the producer.
And that we had to record it in Toronto because, uh,
Jesse Winchester was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War

(52:38):
and then he was living in Montreal, so we had
a studio in Toronto. Kicked the engineer out of the studio,
maybe kept a tape off or something like that. And
it was the first time I had a big, serious,
you know session, and I just winged it. I winged
it through the whole thing. I winged it through. I

(52:58):
knew a little bit about Mike play been his stuff
from doing the NAS records. Uh yeah, winged my way
through the session. And in the end they were happy
with how I did it and what it sounded like,
and so they said, Okay, you're doing stage fright now.
That was pretty much the very next thing that happened

(53:20):
the Jesse Winchester record was Robbie in the studio were
you the de facto producer. No, No, Robbie. Robbie was
the producer. Okay, And now on that record there was
a song that came part of he became legendary, but
never was he hit Yankee Lady? Did you know that
that would be? You know, when you're in the studio
and you're hearing these tracks, that would be the first

(53:41):
of them. Do you wait? There's something about this one
and this one is gonna go No. Actually, Albert, before
I went up to do the project, played it for me.
He played Yankee Lady. He didn't play any other song.
He said, this is the song that has sold this
record to me. So so he was. He was really
high on it and played it for me. He played

(54:03):
it for anybody who would listen to it. As a
matter of fact, he thought there was something especially in Trigue,
not just about the song and the way that he's
saying it, but something intriguing about the story because it
was Jesse Winchester's story, going from Arkansas or wherever he

(54:25):
grew up to as far north as he could get.
So even beyond Yankee he went canok So, what was
the first project that bb beyond the stage Right record?
That was outside of the Beersville stable. Um. Well, as

(54:47):
I said, the first project, the first band I managed
to get signed was the American Dream and and that
was on that was on Bearsville. But I think the uh,
the first significant one I was doing stuff for the
Bearsville stable. It wasn't always on Bearsville records. Like I

(55:08):
went to Nashville and did an Ian and Sylvia record,
you know, or two UH went back to l A
and did a James Cotton record, but they would have
been for their own labels, whatever those labels were. Um.
I think the first big, you know, the big signature

(55:30):
project outside of the immediate stable was Bad Finger was
straight up. Now that was a whole troubled project. Never
mind the ultimate credit and trouble till I got there. Well,
I mean, you know, these records have been released with
your additions and the other people's mixes and productions, and

(55:50):
it's black and white. You can see what yours were
relevantive emotional things. Yours were the the ones that were
the successful artistically an commercial way. Well, when I got there,
of course they had been through to producers already. Jeff Emrick,
who was had been the Beatles engineer. I had done

(56:12):
a whole record and for some reason it got rejected
and I read later that the American label didn't hear
a hit song on it, so they said, no, we're
not gonna put this out. It might have been fined
by Apple in England, but apparently the American distributors said no.
So then George got involved. But he hadn't gotten halfway

(56:34):
through the record before he got distracted by the concert
for Bangladesh and just didn't have the time. But the
other issues with George's thing was that they were sonic
in that he was kind of in the thrall of
Phil Specter at the time. And Phil Specter doesn't think

(56:55):
about a band, you know. A matter of fact, when
Phil Specter produced the beat was the first thing he
did was slap an orchestra on it, you know, so
he didn't think in terms of bands, you know. But
Bad Finger was a band and they needed to sound
like a band. And uh so a lot of the
stuff that I got from George I just had too

(57:17):
much on it. You know. It had like triple track
acoustic guitars, the drums were back in the soup, you know,
all Phil Specter um and it sounded nothing like the
Jeff Emricks stuff. Uh. I didn't tackle it right away.
The first thing I did was, like, let's pretend we're

(57:38):
doing a new record, you know, before I get into
like recovering any of the old stuff. Let's let's start
over and pretend we're doing a new record. So we
went into the studio and I think the very first
thing we did was baby Blue. Uh. And we did
a few more things, and gradually in the process we
started looking back at the old material and thinking what

(57:59):
should we try and keep here. And we knew that
day after day should be a keeper. But it didn't
sound right. Um. So I rerecorded the drums, uh rerecord
a lot of stuff throughout some of the sounds so
that it sounded more like a band, that the drums
were less soupy. Uh. And on any of the George

(58:23):
Harrison tracks that we used. That was more or less
the process get get it out of the specter zone
a little more into the bad finger zone that Jeff
Emrick stuff was. That was the opposite almost too bare,
you know, it was almost a little too raw, and
there wasn't any effort to to, you know, sort of

(58:43):
dress up the details. Um, so a combination of those
three things eventually went into the record, and you know,
I had to somehow try and mix it like it
sounded like it all happened at the same time instead
of over the course of like a year and a
half or something. Now, two members of that being committed suicide.

(59:10):
The story is over a lack of royalties, lack of payment.
Was that something you saw in those two band members
while making this record, that maybe they were on the
line or frustrated where they just upbeat when you dealt
with them. No, it didn't get into any of that stuff.
As a matter of fact, I was supposed to produce
the second record, the record after that, and came in

(59:34):
and did uh. We were We moved into Apple Studios,
which had been completed and vacated and UH and set
up on the first night and did a little bit
of I think we tried to lay down a track
the first night, and I came in the second night
and they fired me without explanation. They just said, we

(59:54):
don't want you to work on the record anymore. See you.
And so from that point on, I knew there was
something going on the bay, but I had no idea
what it was, and they didn't inform me, and I
had to make the assumption that, you know, the the
reason why I was kind of like on the outside
was that I didn't go out drinking at the pub

(01:00:16):
with them or something like that. You know, I didn't
pal around with them. I just wanted to get their
damn records done, so uh, and so I think that
they just felt that there was something that wasn't meshing
between us or whatever, or that I was too dictatorial
because of what had happened on the last record, and

(01:00:38):
I didn't want this one to start drifting like the
last one had. So that was it. And I didn't
hear anything from anybody in the band four years, years,
years and years until almost more recently, Uh, when we
did you know a beat one of them Beatle tribute shows,

(01:00:59):
and me and Joey Mullins were on stage together for
the whole thing, and we were we were fine with
each other, probably because we both rather forget that that episode. Okay,
but your reputation, I don't know the reality. That's why
I'm asking you. Only you were there was that you
were kind of dictatorial in general as a producer. Would

(01:01:21):
that be? Is that how you saw it well. I
was never into the idea of someone come into the
studio unprepared, just on the assumption that they're gonna make
a record or get something done. As I mentioned, I
this we're in the seventies now, but I came up
in that kind of like mid late sixties are my

(01:01:44):
first studio experiences. And you didn't waste time in the studio,
you know, when uh, we were trying to get signed,
when the NASA is trying to get signed, and you
would get some demo time and uh uh and probably
a studio that the that the label owned, and they
say you get a half an hour an hour, play

(01:02:05):
as many songs as you can, you know, and that
was it. And you know overdubbing. We don't have the
time for overdubbing, you know, just keep let's play songs
and until you get you know, and of course you
wouldn't get the first take. You would play until you
got takes that you wanted them to listen to. And
but before you knew it, you've got two or three
songs and a half hour is gone. So going into

(01:02:26):
the studio without being prepared as kind of an athema
to me. You know, you go into your row. You
know what you're gonna do. Um and uh, sometimes it
will be projects in which the reputation of the band
might be on the line. I never had any friction

(01:02:50):
with Grand Funk Railroad, but it was pretty much understood
that this was a reinvention and that I was more
or less in charge of it, so uh or I
was more or less uh in charge of making sure
that it succeeded. You know, they already knew what they
wanted to do, but everything was brand new for them.
They had new management, new record producer me um, and

(01:03:16):
they did a you know, pretty spectacular job of adapting
to all that and to reinventing themselves in a way.
Let's say with Grand Funk raill Roads, didn't you like
people to be prepared and they were American band? Album?
Did they come in with all those songs? Exactly? As
a matter of fact, you know, they before we did
the album, I went out to their you know, I

(01:03:38):
went out to Flint and sat with the band and
listen to them and do their rehearsals. And they were
tight when they came in. I mean, they were a
live band. Their whole thing was you know that their
biggest problem in the studio was they kept trying to
be a live band in the studio, so they do

(01:03:59):
these long jams. You know, it's not that might be
entertaining live, but they weren't cream so they weren't so
much entertaining on record. And so they managed to reinvent
themselves as a songwriting unit. You know, you write songs,
you don't write wrong jams, You write songs with versuscorus, bridges,
all that stuff. And they set themselves to that and

(01:04:22):
did a good job of it. And they came in
and it was all rehearsed. I mean, the story of
of the single were American Band, not just the album
is is truly phenomenal because they had the entire project
timed from the first moment we went into the studio

(01:04:46):
until the release of the record. The first thing we
did the first day we recorded the track to We're
an American Band. The next the first thing next day,
we finished the vocals and overdubs, mixed it, and went
right into mastering on the second day and mastered the single.
We didn't even have a B side yet because we

(01:05:08):
hadn't recorded anything else yet, and essentially mastered it, sent
it out to be pressed. And in those days, you
could uh charter record not based on actual sales, but
based on pre orders and and and also based on

(01:05:35):
ads on radio ads. You know how many people add
the record? A week after we master the record is
when it's scheduled to be released, So they goes, it
goes immediately that plant they're pressing uh singles like mad
and sending them out to all the radio stations. The

(01:05:56):
next week, the record charts in the top forty. Week
after we recorded it, it's charted in the top forty,
and it's on the radio in a week. Okay, Grand
Funk was a reviled band. You work with them. They
have this monstrous single which everyone liked. So two things.

(01:06:20):
Did you understand it would be such a monstrous single?
And after this success, either you're or Albert's phone must
have been ringing off the hook? Uh Part B yes,
Part B exactly. Um. I had no idea what to
expect when I was going into it except what had

(01:06:41):
happened previously with Grand Funk Railroad. And they had, you know,
two issues. So previously mentioned issue was that they were
too jam oriented and not song oriented enough. And I
think they were aware of that had to do that.
But they were also you know, the issues with their
management were was also an issue with their production because

(01:07:01):
their manager was also their producer and he was a
terrible producer, right, Terry Knight. Yeah, that records didn't sound
good and he let all this flab go by. You know,
it's just you know, they were there, just not good records. Okay.
The only thing about it from the outside, it looks

(01:07:21):
like you were the genies that made it happen. You're
telling the story like you were like just the mason
putting the ship together. No, they had the whole They
had a whole plan, a whole scheme for their reinvent
complete scheme for their reinvention when I got involved with them.
But if they had a different producer, since the song
was already written, were it was there must have been demos.

(01:07:44):
Was your version similar to the demo or was it
your spin that put it over the top? Possibly my spin.
I got a lot of complaints in the Keyboard Player
because I said do this, think think think, think, think, think, think, think,
think Think In the cores, he said, but I sound
like as I sounds stupid, But I dink think, think, think, think,
I said, just do it, all right. It's a little

(01:08:06):
subliminal thing in there, you know, have you paid too
much attention to It doesn't work, but it's just a
little thing in there that gives a chorus a little
I know that sound absolutely, and I don't know that
another producer would have suggested that or forced the keyboard
player to do that. Okay, so now Albert's fielding all
these offers. How do you decide who to work with?

(01:08:28):
And what is Since they're looking to you, what are
you saying back? What are your requirements? I'm not talking
about cash, Like how much time would I need? Does
do the songs have to be done? Well? I think
that a a signature production that came sometime after that
that actually sort of characterized my production style and changed

(01:08:49):
my whole approach. And that was the New York Dolls.
They were, you know, they were kind of like half
the problem I had. I had other issues which I
incorporated into my slout, but it all came down to
the mixing for the on that record in a way,
you know, because uh, capturing the performances was kind of

(01:09:12):
like uh wild life, like if you're a wildlife photographer,
you know, and you're just trying to get that perfect moment,
because it's only a moment. There's so much chaos going
on all the time that you're never sure when that
moment is gonna be there. There are all kinds of

(01:09:33):
people hanging around the studio all the time, groupies and
journalists and stuff, and the band isn't the most disciplined
band in the world. In other words, it's you get
a couple of takes done and then somebody or a
couple of people just won't wander off. They're probably consuming
something somewhere in the shadows. It's uh a bit of

(01:09:55):
a carnival atmosphere for the whole thing. But then it
comes down to the mix, integrating everything you've got into
something that sounds like a record. And there were two
issues with that. One is the band all wanted to
be there while I was mixing. And I've had this
experience before where the band is all there when you're

(01:10:17):
mixing stage right, hands all there and you're mixing. It
takes forever, you know, and sometimes it's a completely futile
exercise because everybody only hears themselves when you're building a mix.
The guitar player only hears the guitar. You know, I
think you only here's his boys, the drummer. Only here's
the drums, and they're all whispering in my air. Could

(01:10:40):
you push me up a little bit please, you know,
push push the vocal up just a little bit more.
You know. After a couple of run throughs, you look
down at the console and all of the faders are
pinned at the top and you have to start all
over again. So I realized after that that, you know,
having the band in there, having the act at all

(01:11:00):
in the room while you're building a mix is a
mistake because they don't hear the whole mix. They only
hear like the little bits in the mix, and they
can't pull back far enough to hear the whole thing
and it, you know, and that didn't make the record
any better than all being there for the mixes, because
half the time they were in too much of a

(01:11:21):
hurry to really do it properly, Like they have a
gig somewhere in Long Island to get to and say, okay,
we gotta wrap session up. Let's you know, we gotta
go to Long Island. And then worst of all, uh,
they mastered it on what at the time was a
relatively antiquated lade uh a non uh. Well, you know,

(01:11:48):
I don't want to get this is a little bit
too technical, but it used to be when you cut
a record, the the what they call the pitch how
far into the into the lacquer, the the needle goes
was fixed, and it had to be fixed to not
create a groove that was so wide that it bumped

(01:12:10):
into the next group. So the loudest moment in your
whole record determined exactly where everything would be, you know,
and and you couldn't compress any more sound than that.
After a while, they got smart and they developed what
they call a variable pitch blade, which means you've got
as the tape is running through, you've got what you

(01:12:33):
would call look ahead. You've got ahead that's reading the
sound that's about to come and measuring the volume in it.
And so if there's not a lot of volume, then
you don't have to dig so deep with the blade.
Then you can pack more sound into a record by
doing that. So essentially the record could have been could

(01:12:53):
have had a much better sound if they had done
it like a sterling sound, but instead they did it
in on the lay that was in the next room
to the mixer. That was like that some label had
essentially sold to them because it was obsolete. So the
very first releases of the record, the sound it wasn't
what it could have been. Probably later releases sounded better.

(01:13:17):
So why do you call this a signature production? Because
that's when I learned never allowed the artists in the
room while you're setting the mix up. You set up
the mix, and then you vide them and say what
do you think of this? And they say, okay, fix this,
this and this. I say, okay, go away, I'll fix this,
this and this. Then come back and listen to it,

(01:13:37):
because it's hard enough for me to retain my objectivity
listening to this dozens of times. You're not going to
do a better job than I. It's like when you
know this is a minor version, when Tom says I
need you to hear this record, and they want to
sit there while you listen to it, It's like, no,
I gotta listen to it alone, you know, on my
own time. Well, it's partly that, you know, I don't
want people, you know, yelling, chattering and it back to

(01:14:00):
me about what's going on while I'm trying to focus
on the sound. Yeah, you gotta get in the zone.
But did you also mean that that record open more
production doors? Oh? Not really, yeah, because I mean that
record I have the early version I saw the band
because there was a lot of hype on the record.

(01:14:21):
You know, I might say, and you might disagree, that
a lot of your records are known for a lot
of high end, which you know, more of an am
record sound that as opposed to the stereo UH sound,
more of a compressed sound. Is that something that rings
a bell or you say, no fucking way. I don't

(01:14:41):
know that it's it's the same for all records, but
I do like to make records that are full spectrum. UH.
There's also the question of what are people actually listening
to the music on UH? And nowadays it's like there

(01:15:08):
is no target. You know, there's no actual target anymore.
People be listening on the crappiest earbuds they can find,
or they might be listening with you know, new five
fifty dollar Apple phones, which mystifies me. But the audience

(01:15:29):
doesn't care about the sound for the most part. I
mean maybe some audiophiles and the audience might care about
the sound. But you know, ever since beats by Dr
Dre you know, uh, branded distortion as a product. You know,
you completely blow out the low end and suddenly, you know,

(01:15:52):
people are like, wow, you know, I'm hearing something that
I've never heard before, that's not supposed to be there,
you know. And so there is no actual target anymore
for sound. You know, it's whatever you're mixing on to
make it sound as good as it can on the
on the stuff that you've depended on all this time.

(01:16:13):
But you know, as far as the high or low end,
it probably has to do with the equipment that I
prefer to mix on, but also that I like to
hear those sounds, you know, I like to I like
to hear that really high ting on the bells, you know,
if there are bells in there, you know. Uh, I

(01:16:34):
like to hear the low end as well. And the
biggest problem with my records historically has been when we
go to master them, they're too long, and that means
that the very low end has to get rolled off,
and that's why they sound more toppy than a lot
of records. It has mostly to do with you know,
the LP raw when we had to get them onto

(01:16:54):
vinyl and the things that we had to do in
order to fit them. So we usually have to add
comp scian during the mastering to keep peaks from uh uh,
essentially determining you know, the maximum top end and then
everything I'm gonna be lower than that, and that, you know,

(01:17:17):
in terms of that variable pitch thing, if you know
what I mean. Yeah, absolutely. Now are you a fan
of digital or you more of an analog guy? And
you talk about equipment, what type of equipment do you
like to use? Well, I'm you know, I'm not a
fan either way. I just have to say that everything
has becomes so much easier, and we have so many
more possibilities in the digital realm than we ever did

(01:17:39):
in the analog realm. Uh. Just a very simple process
of making a backup of something, you know, which was
a rare thing. You know, not many studios actually made
backups of the tapes that you made, particularly full twenty
four track backups. Um, It's expensive and time consuming, and

(01:18:00):
so people didn't do it that often. And then you
have some accident that's completely ruined your master you know,
because it's analog, you know, uh, anything that was mastered
on a certain kind of tape previous to a certain
date suffers from this disease called sticky shed, which is
if you went back to the original tapes, all of

(01:18:22):
the oxide starts falling off of them, you know. Whereas digitally, whatever,
you know, whatever Neil Young finds wrong with it, at
least you can make a carbon copy of whatever you've got.
You know, you can make infinite carbon copies, and they
don't take a fraction of the time that it takes

(01:18:42):
to make an analog copy. So in terms of the convenience,
you know, this laptop that I'm talking to you on now,
that's my studio, and everything that I've ever needed is
inside is inside it right now. And there's a MacBook Pro,
yes it is. Oh okay. How did you get so
into computers when I was very young? Well, I guess

(01:19:05):
there's two reasons. One is I grew up in a
household that was my dad was an engineer at DuPont,
and so I was tech comfy. Uh. My dad knew
how to do all those things, so I expected that
that was a realm of knowledge that I should eventually inherit.
You know. He had the big tool bench and the

(01:19:28):
craftsman LAIDs, you know, and all the tools and he
knew how to do schematic circuits and that sort of thing,
So there was a comfort level with technology. Uh. And
also I had, you know, a particular interest, and it
kind of started and might have started when I saw

(01:19:49):
Forbidden Planet and Robbie the robot, and I thought, I
want one of those. Kids are bullying me all the time,
and I want one of those. Yeah, and so uh,
I realized eventually, well, if you build one of those,
who's got to have a brain, some kind of a brain,

(01:20:10):
and computers are electronic brains. And so about at the
age of nine or ten, I'm started studying uh digital
electronics or you know, uh logic essentially logic gates and
things like that. I don't know if you know about this,

(01:20:30):
but they've got hands and oars and all the stuff.
Things at the bit left, things at the one bit level.
And I started studying at them when I was really young.
Realized that a lot of it ran on alternate number systems.
So I began to all understand, you know, base eight,
you know, Base sixteen, based twelve, whatever the odd you know,

(01:20:55):
different number systems might be. So when I got to
the new math in high school, I was a Senate.
You know, none of the other kids knew what they
were talking about when they said, okay, eight nine A, B, C,
D E F. Wait a minute with how does that work?
I totally rocked it. So when I got to high school,

(01:21:15):
I was either going to be I was either going
to go to tech school and learn to be a
computer programmer, or go to no school at all and
be a musician. Unfortunately for me, I got into a
band and became a musician, and that later in life
afforded me the time to learn how to program computers. Okay,

(01:21:36):
when do you know the personal computer era really starts turning?
The decade leaksa these early eighties. When did you get
a personal computer? I got every personal computer that was
ever offered, got very little out of most of them,
but I got everyone. I got an out I got
an outre kit, an Alter E O eight kit, which

(01:22:00):
you had to build, you know, side of the board
and everything. The only way you could communicate with it
was through a teletype with a tape reader, the paper
tape reader on it, paper tape with a bunch of
little holes. To program it, you had to boot it up,
you powered it, and then you went through this hole,

(01:22:21):
little sequence of switching these micro switches on and off
in a very particular sequence, which was the bootstrap, and
that would make it able to read the tape reader,
the paper tape reader, which would then reading a whole
program which would allow you to have a really blocky

(01:22:42):
picture of what looks like liquid going into a Martini
glass and super low risk, and that whole process to
take you like fift twenty minutes to do that. Then
I got, you know, I remember I got a pet computer,
which was a thing that looked like you know it,
It looked like kind of like almost like an Apple

(01:23:05):
two on the bottom. But then I had a head
on it, like a little head, and I imagined teaching
it to roll around, you know, programming, so we could
roll around on wheels. I never quite got that far,
and things never got really productive until the Apple two plus,
because then you had a real programming language. All you

(01:23:27):
had did was turn it on and it came up
ready to take your commands. Uh. It had color of
a sort. It was a really bizarre way to put
color on the screen. Um. And when I got it,
I took a year off from touring and learned how
to program and then the end of it, I knew

(01:23:47):
how to program what they call a simpler language, which
is talking to the computer. And the only language is
understands two fifty six commands and that's it. Okay, the
number two fifty six is that based on the chip.
And then they became more commands. That's sixteen six team

(01:24:07):
bit number. Each number with be like this number might
you know, might be oh one or something like that,
and it means put the next eight bits into the accumulator.
The next one would be add these eight bits to
the accumulator. The next one would be put the accumulator

(01:24:28):
into the address specified by the next two bits. It's
the lowest level that you can possibly get to, well
practically get to. Then you became yeah, you became a
big Amiga guy with a toaster, right. Ah. Yeah. I
was never into the Amigo much until I got into
the video toaster. And that was really not a relationship

(01:24:52):
with the machine. It was a relationship with the company
that made the video toaster. And uh, there's a uh.
I was always into the video graphics, always wanted to
do a video that was all computer graphics, but it
was not practical financially for me. At the time. And

(01:25:12):
then I went to the biggest computer graphics show in
the world. It's called cigarette Special Interest Group for Graphics
of the International Engineering whatever it is Society, and I
saw the video toaster for the first time, running inside
and Amiga, and I thought, wow, I could afford that.

(01:25:33):
So I bought three, thinking, you know, it would be
enough for me to do my computer video. And I
realized that, you know, once I got a start event,
it's gonna take me a year to do with three computers.
So I sent what I had to new Tech, the
company that made the video toaster, and they said, wow,
this is good. If you can make it finish, the

(01:25:53):
whole thing would be a great demo for the video toaster.
So they sent me thirty video toasters and I rented
it off the space and saw Celito and send them
all up and set them to work, and sneaker netted
them because there was no networking at the time for them.
Sneaker net in other words, put a big fat hard
drive connected up to the computer, fill it up, take

(01:26:18):
it off, and put another computer hard drive on there.
Take the hard drive that you filled up, and write
all those frames out to a video disc recorder. Then
wiped the drive and start all over again. And then
it only took me a month to do Well, a
month is better than a year. But you said you
you said you had an actual business. What did that
business look like with deliverables, etcetera. Well, it never turned

(01:26:41):
into a real business. Who was a partnership with new Tech.
Once I've finished, Once I've finished, changed myself, which was
the song that I did the video for. They flew
me out to which I saw Kansas, which is where
they were centered at the time, no longer and uh
showed me around the place everything, and they and the

(01:27:03):
next morning I was gonna fly home, they took me
out to a dinner for breakfast and said, would you
like to start a studio and we'll bankroll the studio,
and what you'll do with the studio is help us
develop the software, you know, help us push it along
and create demos for the software, and hopefully ultimately become
a business. So we did a lot of the former,

(01:27:24):
button it was never able to do the latter because
we were in Sausalito. We were not in l A
or New York, you know, and most people were doing
their business in those hubs. Okay, So you talk about,
you know, leaving Saucelito for Hawaii, and about all the
investment bankers as opposed to the engineers. Did you also

(01:27:45):
burn out on the scene. I mean, for those of
us who lived through it, the Beatles and what came
after was a huge left turner right, depending on which
direction you want to view it from. What had come
before the computer revolution which started for people like you
and around, you know, just before nine eighty and then
the average person caught on in or six with a
O L the Internet, And then it ended like five

(01:28:08):
or seven years ago. Do you are you still as
addicted or at one point you say, I'm not as
excited about it anymore. Well, it certainly has morphed into
a different thing. Uh. For one thing, in those days,
connectivity was almost always point to point. You know. It's

(01:28:31):
like you had a modem and someone else had a
modem and somehow you could manage to get them connected
and to send some sort of sort of data. I
don't know, but it was way before the world of
like user interface philosophy, and uh, there certainly was no

(01:28:52):
social media as we know it now. It was a
O L kind of you know, pretty tame by comparison. Uh,
the Internet was not really a thing yet, um, and
I kind of went through the whole evolution of all
those things. And I recall going to some of the

(01:29:16):
very first conferences about monetizing the Internet, and it's where
I came up with the idea for Patronet. I was
at a conference and they're thinking about all the possible
ways that we could do commerce, uh using internet technology,

(01:29:38):
and I had proposed the idea of eliminating the middleman
that the record label represented. In other words, traditionally, you
would get money from the label to make your records,
but the label expects to get the money from the
people who buy your records. And the people who buy
your records don't feel they have a relationship with the label.

(01:30:00):
They feel they have a relationship with you. So the
label is the middleman, and the Internet would allow you
to eliminate the middleman, go directly to your fans and
have them underwrite the production of your records by getting
involved in a subscription service. It all seems so obvious now,
but no one had thought of that in the old

(01:30:23):
days of the nineties. And so uh, that was when
I said about to you know, create this thing to
be able to uh build something that was a combination
service delivery and social media sort of platform all in one,

(01:30:47):
and ran it for a while and again went up
and down. Turned out to be technologically just almost too
much to deal with because of lack of standards. Apple
and Microsoft we're still battling it out, you know, who's
gonna dominate here, Like one would wipe out the other,
you know, And so there was always you had to

(01:31:07):
do things twice. Everything had to be done at least twice,
one for Microsoft and one for Apple. But worse than that,
you only had to do it once for Apple, but
you'd probably have to do it a dozen times for Microsoft.
Because Microsoft didn't make the machines. People built their own machines,
and people didn't half the time even on how to
work their damn machines. You wind up doing Microsoft's customer service.

(01:31:33):
It was just it was a nightmare. And then you
had to say social media component on top of it,
and you know, knowing what we know now about people
and what they'll say when you can't poke them in
the face after saying it, you know, it's just eventually
I sort of like gave it up. That doesn't mean
that it couldn't work, but you'd have to you don't

(01:31:57):
have to know what you're dealing with upfront and to have,
you know, real solutions for them. They can't turn into
the cess pool that Facebook has become. Okay, you talk
about that, Tess. Well, you've actually the last few years
have evidence, uh some political views. What is your political
view in the country at this point in time and

(01:32:17):
what responsibility or action do you want to take or
not take. Well, I never make an assumptions that I'm
a celebrity. I know that I have my fan base,
and I've been dealing with these issues amongst my fan base.
My feeling is that anyone who does anyone who gets
upset listening to Tinfoil Hat not really fan anyway. I mean,

(01:32:40):
they don't understand the greater move of what I'm doing.
They just came to hear, Hello, it's me. So if
I lose those people, I always lose them. I always
lose them if they don't show up for thirty years
and I realize I'm not gonna do Hello it's me,
And then they said, I'll never buy to take it
to this guy again. It's you know, it's just part
of you know, it's part of life. I make up

(01:33:03):
for it, as I say, by like gaining younger audience,
which you have to do anyway. You know, your old
audience is checking out in so many ways, so you
always have to refresh your audience. How how do you
do that? You do it by showing interest, you know,
and the things that the younger audience is interested in,
and being involved with artists at the younger audience is

(01:33:25):
interested in. That's why my last record and the record
that I'm working now are aggressive collaborations. It's me introducing
myself to new audience with the full realization that my
own audience, my own audience is bound to thin out
just by natural attrition. So um yeah, just you know,

(01:33:48):
I've been self consciously sort of taking every opportunity I
can to work with younger artists and inherit in some
small way. They're audience. And you never know nowadays how
how these things spread. You know that how a meme
gets spread in you know, in any particular way. That's

(01:34:11):
kind of the science of a promotion nowadays. You know,
That's why there are Facebook promotion departments trying to figure
out how your meme gets spread, What the things that
you have to do, you know, to maximize that. Okay.
In terms of younger audience, you can work with younger acts.

(01:34:32):
Is there a specific type of sound that you would
employ to reach a younger audience? M No, not really no, okay, No,
you just want to work with someone who has an audience,
whatever sound might be, you know, or someone who could
potentially have an audience. You know, I'm not necessarily picky

(01:34:53):
about the size of the of the audience. They could
be just starting out. Um, that's fine with me. Okay.
So you had a very active production career then it
slowed down. What can you tell us about that? And
do you have any offers at this date or those
dried up? Well? The the production thing, you know is,

(01:35:16):
I don't know whether it's I could say that's like cyclical,
whether the kind of producer that I am would ever
come back, because it's often reflective of the greater music
scene and what's happening out there. When we started being
able to certainly when we started being able to pass
files around file sharing, you could entertain the possibility of

(01:35:40):
working with people that you wouldn't be able to work
with for it simply because of the physical distance. And
whatever restrictions that might impose, and so that probably gives
people ideas in a well in a way, music has
changed a lot, especially in terms of the artists who

(01:36:02):
are uh noteworthy for it. And it isn't necessarily because
they are selling records. Records as some are are becoming
a somewhat obsolete form, uh, because music isn't just for musicians.
There are a lot of people who want to be

(01:36:22):
a personality. My brand is me, you know. It isn't
any particular thing that I do. I'm the brand, and
the brand needs a theme song, So I'm gonna record
my own theme song. But the music doesn't mean a
whole lot more to me than designing a pair of
shoes perhaps, or showing up dressed really crazy at a

(01:36:44):
red carpet event or something like that. The I'm gonna
make my money off a merchandise, I'm gonna make my
money off of a commercial. I'm gonna make my money
possibly off of a licensing deal for this song. But
I'm likely not going to make my money trying to
sell records because that time has kind of passed. Well,

(01:37:06):
there are certainly collectors who will buy the vinyl thing,
you know, but most of the royalties, such as they
are that are being tracked, are being tracked electronically, you know, Spotify, YouTube,
all of the big what are now Apple, all of
the big music delivery services. That's where the royalties are
coming from. But they're not the kind of royalties that

(01:37:28):
you would get if you were, you know, selling records
the old fashioned way, because the music is so easy
to share. It's an advertisement for yourself. It's an advertisement
for your concert tickets where you will where you have
always made way more money than you did with a
recorded artifact. Okay, we grew up in an era where

(01:37:51):
music drove the culture was everything, great burst of creativity
and explosive market share, just like they're subsequently was with
computers in the internet directly. What do you think of
today's music? Not much, not a lot. You know, it's

(01:38:11):
I don't It's like I don't listen to the radio,
and I don't listen to you know, popular streams and
things like that. I'd like to be a little bit
more targeted and what I listened to. But in terms
of gauging what is successful in the music business, I mean,
there's probably no better gauge than who they allowed to

(01:38:33):
be musical guests on Saturday Night Live. And I have
to say, seventy of the time I have to mute it.
I can't listen to it. It's just it's just exactly
what I say, is somebody's theme song, you know, And
it's just as much as soundtrack because they're shaking their
giant ass and the camera as it is listenable music.

(01:38:54):
And so I don't have a lot of hopes at
this point for the kind of movement that let's say,
even something like grunge represented, you know, where it was
more or less a wholesale um rebuke of a way

(01:39:16):
of making records, in a way of writing songs and
and that sort of thing. Uh, there was I guess
the E D M movement that came in the in
the twenties and and in to the early tens, but uh,

(01:39:38):
that was something that was kind of always there. That
kind of music is always lurking around and dance clubs
and things like that. And it became big when festivals
became the thing to do, the place to play. Rather
than doing your own long, laborious tours, you play summer
festivals for hundreds of thousands of people. So and in

(01:40:01):
the end, it's still just marketing, probably for something else
besides the music. You get paid an obscene amount of
money to play, you know, a big festival, and uh
so you don't care so much about making music on
individual sales of the song. Okay, In the time you
have left, which could be one minute or twenty five
years or so, you always say you're learning what would

(01:40:24):
you like to accomplish in this time you have left?
Knowing that you always keep the target a little further
than achievements. You much have on your mind, things you
would like to do. Well, I've filled my plate up
pretty well at this particular moment. You know, I don't
really have the time to speculate on what I might

(01:40:45):
do after. I know what I'm doing in one I'm
getting this, um, I'm getting this virtual show done. I
am still working on recording projects. I've got a recording
project of my own new collaborations was hopefully will be

(01:41:06):
finished and released sometime this year. We're releasing singles in
the meantime. Uh, I've got I'm actually involved in some
production as well. I'm involved in a fairly major production
as we speak, which is driving me a little crazy.
But uh, because of all the other things that I

(01:41:27):
have to do, And I don't know exactly what the
timeline but of that will be, but that's a large
thing on my plate as well. So I'm my free
time next year, if I have any and I'm allowed to,
I'm going to travel to some of those places I
like to go to, and then by the fall, by

(01:41:50):
the end of the year, I'll be out on tour
again and then home again by next Christmas. Okay, a
couple of quick questions. Do you play music like we're
talking now, but if we weren't, would you be playing
music in the background or generally speaking not? And now
I'd be working on music in the background. And how
much in a day are you working on music every day?

(01:42:11):
I do work on music every day, but you'd be
surprised how much of it just goes on up here
He's pointing to his head. Since we don't have video.
I preview, pre visualize almost everything that I do. I
don't just like start doing it. I imagine it in
as much detail as I can muster before I start
to do it. Uh So, like let's say I'm working

(01:42:34):
on a song, I will work on it very intensely
for an hour, and then, depending on how I feel,
I may take a break and come back to it,
or I may move on to something else, Like my
brain is too full of that for the moment, and
I have to clear it out. Uh. It doesn't take
a lot of time actually in front of the computer

(01:42:55):
for me to get a lot done. I have all
of the tools that I need immediately accessible to me. UM,
and I tend to make the decisions fairly quickly. UM.
I tend to you know, if something works for me,
I I kind of know it, and if it doesn't work,
I will change it right away. So I don't have

(01:43:18):
to spend hours and hours and hours pouring my ears
with sound. I think about what I'm gonna do. The
music is in my head, and so when I get
actually in front of the computer, I'm as productive as
I can possibly be. And what musical artists are you
a fan of? I've been fans over the years of
a lot of musical artists. I'm trying to think of

(01:43:38):
someone you know more recent Vinta. No, I don't need
I don't need something to while my audience to show
that you're young and hip. But like, what do you
what would be your go to records, go to records
who well, you know, then it sounds like I'm being
too hip, you know, because I might go back and
listen to some revel again. You know. Okay, well that's reasonable.
You know. It's that he, you know, Maurice Orrell was

(01:44:00):
such a big influence on the way I hear things harmonically,
and you know, I'm still marvel at, you know, the
sensibility and the skill behind it. And it's kind of
a reminder of what real musicianship is for me. We
get so distracted by the personality aspects of what we

(01:44:22):
do because most often, if people know your song, you're
somehow going to get in front of their face, you know.
And in the old days, you know, people might never
know who the genius behind that magnificent performance of of
La Valse was, you know. And that's uh something that

(01:44:46):
I you know, it's not that I long not to
be in the public eye. I can handle it. I'm
used to it. But just the idea of thinking of
yourself as a musician, not as a personality, and trying
to just get into that head, not think about how
the audience is going to respond to it, but think
solely about what you want to create, the moment that,

(01:45:07):
the atmosphere, the feeling that you want to create. You
dig into yourself, find something that's real in yourself and
try and objectivise that and not worry about what the
reaction is going to be. And are you doing music
all day or are you also a reader streaming TV?
I do all kinds of things all day. The reason

(01:45:28):
why I don't take interviews early is because I've I
go through a morning exercise, morning brain exercises. I will
do as many crossword puzzles as I can find, jigsaw puzzles, sadocus,
all kinds of stuff just to work my brain out

(01:45:48):
for up to two hours before I do anything serious
during the day. Every day, every day. What do you
what's the best crossword puzzle for you? Well, I mean
the most challenging, the best. I guess it would be
like Saturday New York Times. And I actually actually have
fans and friends who are cruciverbalists, so I am somewhat

(01:46:12):
into that world. Okay. And then the rest of the day,
once you're you know, up and running or do you
watch streaming TV? Do you read books? If it's time
to do something like this, I'll do this, I'll be
reading books, I'll be learning something. I have to do graphics,
I have to do video. I did six hour long
episodes of a video kind of lifestyle show, and each

(01:46:34):
episode of that took me probably at least four days
to put together. So I'd be doing video. I you know,
I am learning things. I spent in the first six
months almost every day doing computer code, so it could
be anything. You know, It's not not any particular thing.
And if it's like a Saturday, we have big family

(01:46:57):
meals and I'm ex spent half the day just wow.
You good cook? Yes, I am. And when your go
to dish or cuisine would be well, I have several
dishes that I can do. I can cook you a
mean duck with nice crispy skin. Crab risotto is a
good one. Uh yeah, I can cook. On that note, Todd,

(01:47:21):
thanks so much. We've delved into a lot of topics.
You're really a thinker and you're analytical. Uh. Your analysis
of certain things is the most interesting. Thanks for taking
this time my pleasure, Bob, and I'm sure we'll be
doing this again sometime. Okay, I look forward to it.
If you're up to it, you know, It's funny because
I feel some of this stuff you've been asked so
many times. I'm wary of asking it because you know

(01:47:44):
a lot of people say, oh, you know, it's like
play your hit. They don't want to do it. But
you know, there's always new things to be uncovered. If
you're not tired of talking about these subjects, well, you
know there is a whole lot new, but you know
there is what's happening now, and certainly the background helps
to inform it. So I don't mind doing it. Okay,

(01:48:05):
till next time. This is Bob left six

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Bob Lefsetz

Popular Podcasts

United States of Kennedy

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Todd Rundgren