FTV: Todd Rundgren

 

     “The Nazz Are Blue,” Lee said in reference to nothing in particular.  “Who are they and why are they blue?” I asked.  Lee was the bass player in my second band, Knockdown, and this discussion took place when I was dropping him by the IGA grocery store at the Marquette Mall.  Lee’s wife worked there and he needed to pick up their car after one of our rare rehearsals.  We were so busy gigging, that the second year I was drumming in that band, we were lucky to find a night to learn some new tunes.  Lee continued:  “Greatest song Todd Rundgren ever recorded before they broke up.”  I confessed that I was unfamiliar with his work.  “Surely you have heard Hello, It’s Me?”  It hit me that I had indeed heard it many times, especially at the Alibi Rock Theater on Wright Street.  “You know, he also produced Grand Funk’s We’re An American Band,” (which we had recently learned) and no, I was not aware of this bit of music news. 

     I was reminded of this 1973 conversation when I stumbled upon an interview Rundgren did with Classic Rock Magazine back in 2009.  It popped up when I was looking to see how long he had been touring with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.  Rundgren was not with Ringo when the WOAS FM West Coast Bureau in Eugene, Oregon treated me to his show in June of 2023.  Press accounts about that tour briefly mentioned Todd’s absence but never really spelled out why he was MIA.  I love mysteries, so I started snooping around and found the 2009 piece from CRM.  I had no idea how involved Todd Rundgren was in constructing the soundtrack of our lives beginning in the early 1970s.  His influences on the music scene and work with other artists extends right up to the present.  Perhaps we should go back and start at the beginning.

     Todd Rundgren was born in Philadelphia, PA on June 22, 1948.  He learned guitar on his own at an early age and was fascinated by his parent’s record collection of show tunes, operettas, and symphonic music.  He later became infatuated with the British Invasion bands (Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc) as well as The Ventures and the soul sounds coming out of Philadelphia.  Todd’s first high school band, Money, was formed with his best friend, Randy Reed, and Reed’s younger brother.  After graduating, he joined a Paul Butterfield inspired band in Philadelphia called Woody’s Truck Stop.  After eight months, Rundgren grew tired of the blues and left with bassist Carson Van Osten to found the psychedelic band The Nazz with the aim of writing original music in the style of The Who and the newer Beatles songs.

     In 1968, their demo disc got them a record deal with Atlantic Records.  Rundgren’s writing and arranging skills took shape as The Nazz entered ID Sound Studios in Los Angeles to record their first album.  After producer Bill Traut only took two days to fly through the mixing process, the band decided they wanted to try to remix it on their own.  With help from the session’s recording engineer, Todd and the band experimented with techniques such as varispeed and flanging.  With no formal experience, Rundgren also scored music for horns and strings. Engineer James Lowe later said that Todd had become the de facto leader of The Nazz and really should have been credited as the producer for the album.  Their debut single Open My Eyes (backed by an early version of Hello, It’s Me) was released in July of 1968.  They would release three albums during their short lifetime;  Nazz (October 1968), Nazz Nazz (April 1969), and Nazz III (1971). 

      When Todd heard Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession album (March 1968), he was exposed to another level of songwriting.  He told CRM. “I heard all the major seventh chords and variations on augmented and suspended chords.  I know for a fact that her influences were the more sophisticated side of R&B, like Jerry Ragovoy and Mann & Weil and Carole King.  Those chords she got from other people but I always thought it was the way she played her own material that really sold it.  I met her right after Eli and I actually had arranged the meeting, just because I was so infatuated with her.”  The encounter with Nyro and her music had a profound impact on his songwriting as Todd began to compose more on piano.  Rundgren’s changing tastes created interband tension which accelerated the end of The Nazz and Todd’s departure.

     Once Rundgren struck out on his own, he was free to explore anything he wished to explore.  He definitely marched to his own drummer.  If one catches a YouTube video of him performing Hello, It’s Me on the early 70s TV show The Midnight Special, one can’t help but notice that he has feathers stuck on his forehead where his eyebrows should be.  Odd, yes, but totally in keeping with Todd’s world:  Different is always better.  He had the talent to pump out radio friendly songs but why be stuck in a rut when there was so much musical territory to explore?

     Rundgren’s solo work and escalating work producing other musicians began to accelerate his influence on the music culture.  Classic rock radio still spin his 1970 hits like the aforementioned Hello, It’s Me, I Saw the Light (1972), Can We Still Be Friends (1978), and his 1983 single Bang the Drum All Day which has found a new life in sports arenas (like Lambeau Field), commercials, and movie trailers.  Power pop artists gravitate toward Couldn’t I Just Tell You (1973), and CRM points to the album A Wizard (1973) which they said, ”remains an influence on later generations of bedroom musicians.”  

     If holding sway over other genres wasn’t enough, Rundgren is also considered a pioneer in the field of electronic music, progressive rock, music videos, computer software, and internet music delivery.  His pioneering work extended to organizing the first interactive television concert in 1978, designing the first color graphics tablet in 1980, and creating the first interactive album (No World Order) in 1994.  In a field where artists who hit the big time sometimes become complacent and stick to recreating the same albums over and over, Todd was truly a rolling stone who gathered no moss in his quest to expand the musical landscape as a songwriter and recording artist.

     As a producer, Rundgren also branched out in many directions.  Interestingly, he first toyed with the idea of working as a computer programmer when he left The Nazz.  In the summer of 1969, the 21 year-old decided that he would pursue work as a producer, he moved to New York.  Todd got involved with the NYC club scene in Greenwich Village where he met many musicians and fashion designers.  Michael Friedman, The Nazz’s former assistant manager, offered him a job as staff engineer and producer at Ampex Records, a label newly founded by Albert Grossman.  Set up at Grossman’s newly constructed Bearsville Studios near Woodstock, NY, his tenure began with him working with, “various old folk artists that they had (on the label) who needed an upgrade:  people like Ian & Sylvia, James Cotton and other artists already in Grossman’s stable.”

     Rundgren was promoted to be the house engineer at Bearsville and was soon dispatched to Canada to record Jesse Winchester’s eponymous 1970 debut album.  Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm went with him to play on Winchester’s record and they liked what they saw in the young engineer.  The Band enlisted his services for their Stage Fright sessions which were released in August of 1970 and reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart.  More work with Winchester and Cotton would follow and it set Rundgren on a path to produce Janis Joplin’s third and final LP, Pearl (1971).  It never happened as the two artists could not get along with each other.

     During this period, Todd had thought he would not return to working as a performing musician.  Something led him to approach Grossman about recording a solo record on the Bearsville imprint.  The subsequent album, Runt (1970) was done without him asking for any advance money:  “I just asked for a recording budget to pay the studio costs…I had no idea how much money I even had in the bank.  If I needed cash, I would show up at the accountants and they would just give me hundreds or thousands of dollars.”  Rundgren’s anxiety about starting a solo career led to the curious decision to originally release the album as Runt without specifically giving himself credit.  Tony and Hunt Sales (bassist and drummer brothers who were 17 and 14 years-old at the time) were brought into the project.  They handled Todd’s sophisticated material with ease, abilities which would later get them work backing David Bowie during his Tin Machine days.

     A second Runt album was in the works when Todd hooked up with another set of brothers, Ron and Russell Mael.  Originally known as Halfnelson (also the eponymous title of their debut album), the brothers are better known by their second band name, Sparks.  By June of 1971, the second Runt album was released (titled Runt – The Ballad of Todd Rundgren) to mixed reviews. It has since become regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums from that time.  When George Harrison dropped out of working with Badfinger on their third LP (he was too busy organizing the Concert for Bangladesh), Rundgren took the reins.  Straight Up produced the hit Day After Day mostly due to Todd’s input:  “It didn’t sound much like what George had done,” yet Harrison got the credit and the production royalties for the track.

     When he returned to Los Angeles after the Badfinger sessions,   Rundgren began working on his third solo record.  A few things had changed since he returned to his own solo career.  He had been dabbling in recreational drugs (starting with marijuana) and now turned to Ritalin to help him focus.  He said, “My songwriting process had become almost too second-nature.  I was writing songs formulaically, almost without thinking, knocking [them out] relatively fast, in about 20 minutes.”  He installed an eight-track recorder, mixer, and synthesizers in his living room and for the first time, experimented with recording all of the parts (including bass, drums, and vocals) himself.  When the album stretched to become a double LP, he then brought in other musicians to track songs live in the studio.

     The album Something/Anything (February 1972), is now regarded as a landmark release of the decade and produced two hit singles.  The lead single, I Saw the Light, made it to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 while his reworking of Hello, It’s Me climbed to No. 5.  This was the version I was familiar with when Lee first educated me about all things Todd Rundgren.  In 2003, Rolling Stone Magazine rated Something/Anything at 173 on its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The success of the album would haunt Rundgren in a different way:  people began referring to him as the ‘male Carole King’ which made him uncomfortable.  When Todd became uncomfortable, change would soon follow.

     Back in New York and experimenting further with psychedelic drugs, his solo work became, in his words,” even more eclectic and experimental,” leaning more toward the progressive rock being produced by Frank Zappa, Yes, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.  During a commencement speech given at the Berklee College of Music graduation in 2017, he explained this period:  “My act of tyranny after having achieved commercial success…I threw out all the rules of record making and decided I would try to imprint the chaos in my head onto a record without trying to clean it up for everyone else’s benefit.  The result was a complete loss of about half my audience at that point…This became the model for my life after that.”  

    A side band project called Utopia (a reunion with the Sales brothers) and his subsequent solo albums were either loved or hated by Todd’s remaining fan base.  None of this seemed to hinder his producing cred as he continued to churn out hit records with Grand Funk (We’re an American Band and The New York Dolls debut album.  While American Band reached No. 2 on the charts, the Dolls album opened the door for the genre soon to to be known as ‘punk rock’.  Keyboardist Roger Powell recalled that the Bearsville label, “wished Utopia would have ‘just gone away’, however, Todd’s contract called for a certain number of albums over a certain number of years.  He decided that every other album would be a solo album and the next one a Utopia album.”  The highest charting Utopia LP (Todd Rundgren’s Utopia) reached No. 34 on the charts.

     Rundgren and John Lennon had a minor dust up in print in 1974 when Todd made comments to Rolling Stone about The ex-Beatle’s encounter with a waitress at The Troubadour in Hollywood.  This would have been the often repeated story of Lennon’s ‘lost weekend’ period when the highly inebriated John had stuck a feminine hygiene product on his forehead while sitting at a table in the club.  When he asked the waitress if she knew who he was, she replied, “Yeah, some (expletive deleted) with a Kotex stuck on your head.”  Lennon’s printed response in RS referred to him as ‘Turd Runtgreen’ followed by, “I have never claimed to be a revolutionary.  But I am allowed to sing about anything I want!  Right?” Kind of cryptic but typical Lennon.

     Todd told CRM, “John and I realized we were both being used [to sell magazines] and I got a phone call from him one day and we just said, ‘Let’s drop this right now’.”  Rundgren said the only time they had met face to face was at the Rainbow Club in L.A. sometime before the war of words began.  At that time, he said Lennon was, “Drunk and inanimate,” to the point where they did not engage in conversation.  He further described Paul McCartney as having an ‘unusually dour personality’ when compared to the ‘happy-go-lucky’ Paul the public usually sees.  Ringo and Todd met while working on a Jerry Lewis telethon.  Even though the Ringed One was still drinking, Ringo was always the ‘most approachable’ of the Fab Four.  Once he sobered up and started the All-Starr Band thing, he invited Todd to join (which he did for many years).

     I have yet to find any published reason why Rundgren has not toured with Ringo the last couple of years.  The fact that Todd is doing his own tour in Australia and Japan beginning in March of 2025 explains it all.

Top Piece Video:  Todd may not have been touring with Ringo in 2023 but he was out on his own in 2024.  This is I Saw the Light live.