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