In Todd We Trust
A rare interview with guitarist/producer Todd Rundgren
by Christopher Scapelliti
Like any genius, Todd Rundgren can be frustrating to those who work closest to his magic. Last October, in San Raphael, California, with only five days left before the opening night of the tour for With A Twist--his latest album, on which he contorts some of his best-known pop material into lounge music--Rundgren halted rehearsals so he could scour the local music stores for a Dr. Rhythm drum machine. Two hours later, beatbox in hand, Rundgren and his percussionist of several years, former Tubes drummer Prairie Prince, set about programming the device. As the afternoon slipped away, band members and technicians milled aimlessly around the studio, some taking advantage of the time off, others grumbling that it was getting too late in the day to be screwing with the works. Jesse Gress, Rundgren's guitarist on the album and tour, said what seemed to be on everyone's mind: "Sometimes it's hard to know what he wants."
What Todd Rundgren wants has been a matter of question for the 30-some years of his career. A songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist (guitar, piano, sax--you name it), and a producer of such monster records as Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell and Grand Funk Railroad's We're An American Band, Rundgren has been all over the pop-music map, making him one of the most difficult artists to label within strict definitions. Even if you've never owned one of his records, chances are you've heard his music: on FM oldies stations, where his 1972 hits "I Saw The Light" and "Hello, It's Me" remain staples; on TV programs (Pee Wee's Playhouse) and movie soundtracks (Dumb & Dumber); and on the albums of numerous artists who have recorded his songs. As a composer, he's covered miles of territory, creating brilliant psychedelic pop with legendary 1960s group the Nazz, writing flawless commercial rock in the early 1970s, and delving headlong into synthesizer excess on his own and with his 1970s prog-rock band, Utopia. He has been just as frustratingly diverse on guitar, first as a dedicated follower of British rock icons Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, and later, in the mid 1970s, as a disciple of the sonic overload perfected by John McLaughlin with the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
He's also been one of the industry's most forward-thinking artists. Well before MTV began infiltrating living rooms, Rundgren was dabbling in digital technology, making videos, performing the first live concert broadcast by microwave, producing RCA's first demo for the videodisc format, and, in 1993, creating the first interactive audio-only CD-ROM, No World Order.
Rundgren is a rarity among musicians--a specialist in generalities. In an industry that requires its stars be wholly consumable one-dimensional commodities, Rundgren can only baffle the masses with the sheer breadth of his talent. Indeed, who knows what he wants? It's hard enough just to figure out what he is.
Rundgren, for his part, seems to have it well in hand. "I consider myself part of a lineage of a rare kind of pop musician," he says, sitting in an office adjoining his band's rehearsal studio, a building on the low-rent end of picturesque San Raphael. "I belong, I guess, to a lineage that takes the musical aspect of it really seriously--that you believe not euphemistically in the power of music but you actually use it as a tool to do things with: to influence people, to get in their minds, to get them on your wavelength."
For Rundgren, this is more a calling than an attitude--an imperative, perhaps. It's the basis behind what he defines as "the classical musician's attitude."
"You think, yeah, it's great to get paid for it, terrific if you don't have to accept a day job. But it's also something you're so naturally disposed to and so dependent upon as a way of defining yourself, your ideas, and your world, that you do it regardless of the financial remuneration involved.
"That's the reason why I've taken so many other jobs [as a producer]--because I don't want my attitude about making music ever to be dependent on the economic return involved. And, fortunately for me, it never has been. You know, I've never been in a position where I was forced to make music that I didn't necessarily want to make."
If Rundgren has achieved one thing in his career, it is creative autonomy. By diversifying his talents as a songwriter, musician, producer, and multimedia innovator, he's been in a unique position to take chances, and he has taken his share. As if following the edict not to outstay his welcome, Rundgren has regularly flitted from one music realm to another, changing styles and, just as often, instruments along the way.
He began his career simply enough, as a guitar player. "My very first influence was the guy who lived up the street, older brother of a friend of mine. His name was Bobby Hummel." He laughs. "I don't know if he plays guitar anymore, but he was, like, a teenage guy, and he actually had a professional guitar-playing gig. And he was the first one to give me any kind of real useful guitar tips. First guy I knew with an electric guitar. And so that was my initial influence that got me really into it. He was a pretty kind of cool, pompadoured, Ricky Nelson kind of guy."
When the British Invasion reached America's shores, in 1964, Rundgren found a new crop of players to learn from. "The first guitar player that I probably ever really concentrated on in rock, I guess, would have to be George Harrison. He was not that much of an influence, but he was the first guitar player who got noticed as a guitar player, 'cause he got regular solos. But I quickly became more fascinated with Jeff Beck--maybe the first guitar player that I really took seriously. And that was because of the guitar solo on [The Yardbirds'] 'Shapes Of Things.' It didn't even sound like a guitar. It freaked me out when I heard that. It gave me the creeps, like, 'Whoa, where did that come from?'"
By 1967, Rundgren was making a name for himself as the guitarist and main songwriter behind Philadelphia's legendary Fab Four wannabes, the Nazz. The band saw a small level of success but broke up after only a few years. Rundgren went solo and, in the process, largely abandoned the incendiary riffing for which he was known, picking up instead the unsexiest and least rocklike of instruments: the piano.
"To be a really good guitar player is like religious discipline," he explains. "It's not something that you can do well without doing a certain amount of woodshedding, without having a certain sort of mental commitment to it. You have a fixation about the instrument, and for me that fixation is gone. There was a time when I had it. It was a suicidal fixation, you know, like nothing else mattered. That ended probably when I started getting more seriously into songwriting and singing and stuff like that, and I realized the limitations of what I could express with the guitar. There are some songs that just couldn't be written on the guitar, so from a compositional standpoint I started writing more and more material on piano."
By the time he released his landmark double album, Something/Anything?, in 1972, Rundgren had become a wunderkid of sorts, producing, writing, and performing nearly every instrument on the album. If he wanted pop fame, Something/Anything? provided it: The album not only cemented his reputation as a balladeer par excellence. It gave him his greatest taste of rock success.
So it was both shocking and confusing when, the following year, he abandoned the radio-friendly strains of that album to release A Wizard/A True Star, a dense sonic collage of songs, sketches, and assorted noise that led many listeners to wonder seriously if Rundgren was dabbling in LSD. Reflecting on the album today, he recalls, "That's the level of my lack of awareness--my lack of career-orientedness. Everyone expected the next Something/Anything? and I was thinking, How can I get as far away from that as possible?"
One way was to lose himself producing albums for others. Among his earliest credits were albums for the Band, Badfinger, and Foghat. As his reputation as a hit-maker grew, so did the stories that Rundgren was difficult in the studio--a control freak bent on making his clients' records sound like Todd Rundgren records.
Rundgren rolls his eyes at this, then concedes the point. "It's a funny thing," he says nodding, "because often success comes at a price of, let's say, a relationship that doesn't survive the production. Often it doesn't have to do necessarily with the parties, per se. I tend to work quickly and simply in the studio. If people have come to expect me to be some kind of production 'miracle worker,' they can be disappointed when they see me in action. Sometimes you can make it look too easy."
Look is the operative word here. Probably nothing is truly easy where Todd Rundgren is concerned. Just ask the musicians standing around while he programs his drum machine. By the time the With A Twist tour made its way to New York's Irving Plaza late last November, no one in the audience could tell if Dr. Rhythm was in the house or left behind in San Raphael. As Gress said, it's hard to know what the man wants. But as Rundgren has shown, he almost always gets it.