Todd Rundgren, His Music and “Psychonautics"

produced and played almost every instrument on the album. It landed him a top ten hit with Hello, It's Me and features this track I Saw the Light. Something Anything brought Rundgren such commercial success that in its wake, he abandoned conventional pop music to push the boundaries of his creativity. The resulting album, A Wizard a True Star, was influenced by soul, jazz, funk, and various psychedelics. The album established Rundgren as a pioneer of prog rock and electronic music.

Todd Rundgren continued to explore musical styles in his numerous solo releases and with his band Utopia. He was also innovative behind the scenes with computer technology and as a prominent producer for bands like XTC, The New York Dolls, and Meatloaf. I sort of backed into producing. It was an unusual situation, and I started very and I had a band in Philadelphia and we got signed when I was like nineteen years old. I was very much into like what goes into making records, and we thought that

English producers were better than American producers. We really didn't know what a producer did, and we thought he was responsible mostly for the sound, misunderstanding that the engineer is responsible for the sound. The producer, well American producer, particularly in those days, was not necessarily a creative contributor to the process. He was there to make sure that the

session didn't go over budget, you know. And in the old days, pre Beatles, let's say, people didn't always write their own material and they didn't arrange their own materials. So the producer's job was to hire a songwriter, and hire an arranger, and hire a contractor to get all the musicians in there, and then to make sure that the session didn't run long. That was his biggest responsibility. And as it turned out, that's completely different from the

role that George Martin played. For instance, in the making of the Beatles records. He was a musical contributor. He had an opinion about what they did. Sometimes he even played on their records. So it was first of all kind of like a readjustment in my head about what a producer was. And we hired a guy who we thought made good sounding records for our first records, and

we didn't like the mix he made. So that was the first time I put my hands on a mixing console to remix our first record with this Money or NAS. This was NAS Now Money was my high school band. We never got a contract or anything, but NAS. The NAS was supposed to be like the next Monkeys, or at least in the minds of the people who signed us. You know, we were supposed to be a manufactured product.

We were on the cover of sixteen magazine before we had ever made a record, so there was so much hype involved, and that was one reason why the bandily lasted like eighteen months. And then I found myself on the street and the only skill that I had at that point, aside from playing and writing music, was that I had put my hands on a mixing console. And ironically, the partner of the manager of the Naz who had

departed and gone to work for Albert Grossman. Albert Grossman is not a household name nowadays, but back in those days he was the world's most pre eminent manager. He managed Bob Dylan, he managed the band, He managed Janis Joplin, and they needed somebody to take his old roster of folk ax and modernize them. Some such as while such

as Ian and Sold the Uh and James Cotton. But the first project that I got put on was an artist called Jesse Winchester, and he was a conscientious objector who lived in Canada from whence the band came and so I got as the engineer that record, and Robbie Robertson was the producer of the record, and they liked what I did so much that they hired me for what was the band's arguably their biggest album, Stage right. And that's where I really cut my teeth, learning to

engineer serious records. Not really a producer at that point, I was more of an engineer, but that became my forte. I didn't need an engineer to do a recording project. I can sit behind the desk and worked the knobs and dials and all that stuff and also contribute musically to what was going on. Did someone teach you? Did you have a mentor this your self taught? No, I have no fear of technology. Put it that way, you know.

So when I was sitting in for to this sea of knobs and buttons, I thought, Okay, I'll touch this one and I'll touch that one, and I'm gonna touch every one of them. What does this do? Yeah? What does this do? And then you turn it around and you hear, oh, it changes to sound this way. And then there are some other things you have to learn,

like mike placement. That's a different skill, and that evolved a little bit more over time, figuring out exactly especially drums and things like that, where do you put a mike to get the best snare drum sound? That sort of thing. And I eventually learned that and Stage Fright was something of a breakthrough. And then I did Bad Finger and Graham Funk Railroad, and that's what really broke

me as a producer. Now, while you're producing other people and you're heavily involved in that, you're making your own, your own music. Is it a question of when someone calls you? I mean, were you more of a purist and you sat there and go, yeah, that's not my bag, that music I don't really want to be a part of that. Were you for hire, you want to come in, and you weren't too fussy, like what was the metric? By what you decided who you would and wouldn't work with.

As a producer and as a mixer, well, it's kind of um the same as my choices as an artist. I want to do the things that nobody else will do or that nobody else can do as an artist. Because I was a producer, I never had to worry about my own music paying the rent, and so my

own music doesn't follow any particular path. I get an idea. Yeah, I have complete freedom to do what I want as an artist because I was leveraging those skills to produce other people's records, and some of them were hysterically successful, you know, So I really didn't have to worry about the money when I went into do my own stuff. But then I eventually gained a reputation as a trouble shooter, someone who would go into the studio, no nonsense, let's

get a record done here. That was one aspect of it. The other aspect is that I would do artists that nobody would touch like Meat Loaf. Remind people as to why nobody would touch him back then because the songs were all too long. None of them were that seemed like singles to a record person. They were all very long. He was a giant, fat, sweaty guy. He wasn't a handsome you know. He wasn't John bon Jovi. No, he was not a bon Jovie or any of those other

pretty boys and things like that. And the subject matter had a certain kind of retro thing about it. It was Brett in a w well. To my mind, there was a weird combination of things. Jim Stimon, who wrote all the material for Meat Loaf, he likened himself to Richard Wagner. He thought he was the Wagner of rock and roll. And I'm more characterized him as a Stephen Foster of rock and roll because because he just keep

using these plain sevenths and things like that. You know, there are lots and lots of course, but all of them are just playing triads and things like that, and nothing harmonically super challenging about the kind of music that Jim Stimon wrote. But it was grandiose. From a lyrical standpoint, I'm gonna tell his story of the first time that I saw the band and they have been turned down by every producer. The band essentially was Jim Stimon on

the piano and meat Loaf and two background singers. They performed the record for me, all of the music that had been turned down by everybody else. And I'm thinking, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why I have to do it right. This essentially is taking Bruce Springsteen's whole retro thing. I mean, he was on the cover of Time magazine Savior of rock and Roll

and everything is about motorcycles and leather jack. As the Switch plays, you know, it's rebel without a cause, and I thought, you're saving rock and roll by going back twenty years. And then when I saw a meat Load performed that, I thought, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. And That's how I'm going to approach it. I'm gonna take it totally seriously, but it's going to be way

more than Bruce ever attempted to do. You know, As it turned out, that was the only way to think about it, because otherwise the record never would have gotten made. It was not my kind of music naturally. You know, well, I didn't identify first of all with the rebel without a cause thing, you know they called leather jacket, But these are the guys who beat me up in school. So I didn't no sympathy for that kind of that

kind of music. But also I'm an acolyte of the Beatles and the arc of their career in which they started out very simple imitation of their influences. Yeah, they were covering their influences and stuff like that, and then they kind of got pushed into the corner where they had to write their own material. But they didn't stop there. They started inventing genre, whole genres that other bands built their careers on, and then it would abandoned them as

like eleanor Rigby classical rock. There was no such genre before that, and then the whole bands would decide that they were classical rock bands and orchestral backing for everything they did, or you know, psychedelic rock. They invented that with like Tomorrow Never Knows, and then whole bands like

Pink Floyd made a career out of it. But exactly, and I want to get to that in your life, the kind of I'm not going to say the transcendental, but I don't want to lose line of this, the line of this track, which is that when you leave Naz, if you stopped working, you didn't want to work in the musician, you wanted to be going too. Computer programming, well, I was always into computers when I was very young. As I say, I was a weedy child and I

tended to get picked on a lot. And when I saw the movie Forbidden Planet with Robbie the robot, he had special powers and he could produce anything you wanted. And I needed like a best friend, robot protector. And so when I was very young, I started trying to figure out how I could build a robot. And once you like figure out the mechanics of a robot, you realize that that has to have a brain. And that's

when I started to learn about computers. This was always like a sideline through my whole career because personal computers didn't exist. Then you could learn about them, but you couldn't have one, you know. Well, all through the seventies that's when personal computers started coming in. There was a Commodore pet, which actually looked like a cash register, and the first apples that were like they look like little

TV sets. Yeah. I had one of the first computer kids ever made, which was called an Outre, and the only way you could communicate with it was through a teletype machine that had a tape a paper tape reader on the side of it. So I got into it very early. And then Apple, the Apple Personal computer came out, and that was kind of a real breakthrough because it had a language built in. You turned it on and

it was ready to take commands from you. Uh. It had waste easy ways to load software programs into it. So I learned to program the computer, and eventually I developed a program that Apple marketed in like the early eighties because they had a piece of hardware called a graphic tablet, fairly commonplace nowadays, but it's a big square thing with a pen on a wire and you draw on that thing and whatever you draw up here is

on the computer screen. And I first saw that at a place called the New York Institute to Technology, where all the people who eventually built Pixar and I l M. That's where they were before then. It was ed Catmoll and Alvi Ray Smith we're all working at New York Institute of Technology, and their big new development was a paint box program, you know, And so I got inspired by that and I became serious programmer, and Apple marketed the first program that I ever wrote, which was for

this graphics tablet that Apple was going to market. Unfortunately, it failed it's FCC emissions tests, so the hardware never came out. So nobody ever bought SUFFER because it was no hardware to run it on. But in any case, I got me into that realm. But right on top of this, because you're so young, then, I mean, you come out with something anything in two and this is right on the heels of you going into computers and you leave NAS and everything like did all of a

sudden success. Obviously success will be aligns a lot of things. But you're considered a very very purest artist. You got that whole vibe. You're a guy that had hit records, and then you went and said, well I'm gonna go over here, you know, I mean, you took off into another direction, and you didn't necessarily kind of cardal your audience or the industry like a lot of people do. But when this happened, what changed for you when you

had success, big success and making music? Did anything change? Well? My biggest success was after Something Anything came out, the double album that was never intended to be a double album. I just I got into this songwriting groove and they were just coming out day and night. I was recording and writing like sixteen hours a day, and I had fallen into sort of a formula, a certain kind of combination of things that you write about, you know, which

is usually like the Girl who Broke your Heart. And after it was done, it was highly lauded and people started referring to me as the male Carol King, which is a high compliment. But also, I don't want to be compared to other people. I don't want to be anything. Yeah, I want to be you know, eventually people who would be compared to me, but I don't want to be

compared to anything before. So the next record, which was a Wizard of True Star, was not like any record I had made, and maybe not like any record anybody had ever made before, because I completely deconstructed the process. And again, the only reason why I could do that was because I was still producing records for other people. When I didn't follow up something anything with another batch of easily consumable pop songs. There was a complete freak out at the record label. They say, how do we

sell this record compared to Life's record? The expectations are in a completely other place, and I had no care for that. I was still producing a lot of artists for Bears Full Records, so they couldn't exactly kick me off the label, you know, if they were forced to indulge me. And that just turned out to be the whole modus operandi. You know. I was the fly in the ointment in some ways because I wouldn't stop making records, and yet they couldn't figure out how to market them.

And eventually they got into a such a mindset that they completely overlooked hits on some of my records. Musician Todd Rundgren. If you love conversations with legendary singers, be sure to check out my talk with another musical icon, Darryl Hall. I'm zy man. I'm much busier now than I was. In fact, I don't have time to make a record. I've been trying to make a record, and I have to do it in little dribs and drabs and starts and stops to try and get into a

flow is really really hard. Was there a spot in your career where you southern when you go this is it man, we we this is the top. There was a period of time where we did we are the world. I reopened the Apollo Theater with the Temptations live aid all within a month and a half, and I remember thinking to myself, Okay, I I feel like I'm here here the rest of my conversation with Darryl Hall at Here's the Thing dot org and find Darryl Hall and

Todd Rundgren on tour together this spring. After the Break, Todd Rundgren demonstrates why he's one of the most insightful and prescient artists in all of music, and discusses his career as a psycho. Not m I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing? Okay, Okay? This is Bang the Drum All Day, one of Todd Rundgren's biggest hits. It's the seventh of nine tracks on album The ever popular Tortured Artist Effect. The song was all but overlooked

by his record label. Bang the Drum All Day was never released as a single, never occurred to him that it was just one of my other another nutty thing that I was doing. But the record promoted itself and made itself. DJ started playing it every Friday during drive time, and then somehow fans adopted it at sporting events anytime somebody wanted to create a party atmosphere, you know, even

if it was like a movie like Ants. The song was never in the movie, but they used it for the trailer because it made the movie seem more fun. I guess. I think first ice hockey games, and then it became like the Green Bay Packers touchdown song, and then it eventually became the Carnival Cruise Lines theme song, for which I got paid handsomely until they started sinking all those boats. And I have no idea where the song came from. I mean, it's not like I sat

down and said I'm going to write this song. No, I actually dreamed the song. Sometimes when you start working, you know, and you get really embedded in the work, it permeates your subconscious at the point you never get away from it. And I was writing songs in my sleep and this song just came to me. And wondering for you when you were young because you go off on a different path and only with utopian in terms

of the style of music. What was your rishikesh? I mean, did you have a moment of drug experimentation and enlightenment and whatever it was that when you were very young? Okay, I'm trying to trying to tread lightly here, I'm tread lightly. I gained a reputation of something of a psychonaut at

one point. I guess a Wizard of True Star helped with that, and it was definitely there was some psychedelic experiences that made me rethink music and what I wanted to do, and a wizard or truth Star was a result. But some time after that, somebody sent me a shoe box full of peyote buttons and I was high for a month. I would get up in the morning, I would clean three pyote buttons and I have one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I was not straight for an entire month.

And I did rehearsals and gigs and wiring my studio. While I was doing that, I know it was one of the most amazing periods of my life. Does it stop me? Do you stop for if someone else stops him? Button? I ate all the payote. I ate all the peyote and it was done. You know, he ate the Whitman sampler of peyote that you were given. Yeah, take me through if you can, you go into utopia. When I was originally just a guitar player, I didn't have any confidence.

I didn't have the confidence to sing or front a band. And you know, when I quit the band, and I didn't want to put an out of the band together. I didn't understand the politics of it, you know, And so I just went into production and I my first album was a vanity project. I didn't plan to do anything with it, and then accidentally had a hit single. It was called we Gotta Get You a Woman. It was off of my very first record, so I had

to rethink the idea of going out and performing. It got top forty, I think, and that's when I had to learn to perform. You know. I had you gotta hit sing? Oh yeah, I go out and play and I couldn't sing twenty minutes without blowing my voice out. Really yeah, and you never and you never thought about getting trained for that at all. Well, it started out as a mental thing. I never thought of myself as a frontman, a gut person who would stand in front

of the band and sing. I was singing background vocals, and I'd be happy with that. There was some things I knew about singing. A lot I didn't know about singing, most importantly the diaphram, and it took me a while to sort of figure it out. And I think the best education I ever got was from listening to a

Stevie Wonder record sign seal delivered. What they used to do is compress his voice so much that you could hear every breath he was taking, and you could hear before he would sing a phrase, how we would do this, you know, how his diaphragm would punch up into his lungs to create the necessary pressure in order to sing the song. The thing that never occurred to me. A lot of people don't realize that it isn't about your throat.

It's about your diaphragm, your breath, how much breath you can put behind it, trying to sing just with your throat, and you know you'll get twenty minutes out of it and then it will die. And it took me a long time to learn how to do that. I remember, I think it was right around something anything because of what that was also about when I first started driving a car and I was in l A and I

would drive around the freeways screaming my ass off. I would just scream for twenty thirty minutes at a time while driving my car around. It missed to look pretty weird. But eventually, through doing that constantly and applying that when I was singing live, I built up my diaphragm to the point now that it's like ridiculous. You know, if you get that muscle in shape, you can sing forever.

I can sing for three hours a night if I have to at the you know, at the very top of my range, as long as I have the wind for it. Now, when you form utopia and you decide to go in that direction, is it an idea of a direction you want to go in? Do you see to yourself, here's a kind of music I want to play now, and this is where my head is at now in my writing, do you meet people that influence

How does utopia congio? How does that come together? As I was progressing as a songwriter, I started losing touch with the guitar because it's not as flexible a songwriting too. As a piano was because the piano you have all the notes and you've got ten fingers. You know, guitar has only got six strings. You were trained piano player, No, I was never trained, But I began to write on

the piano, and it's a great songwriting tool. And I started to think that I was losing all of the effort I had put into trying to learn how to play the guitar and be, you know, an effective guitar player. I was losing that. So I thought, I have to start a band just so I can play guitar more. You know, I still have my own thing, which is my song to my stuff, but I want to start a group where where my principal role is playing guitar and a lot of the guys that eventually became part

of Utopia. And also this is Utopia too, because there was an original Utopia with me and Hunt and Tony Sales, SUPI Sales Kids that lasted for like, got to a couple of months or something like that, and it was really high concept, so high concept that we failed to pull it off and that unit broke up. But then decided I still needed to have a guitar oriented outlet, and that's when we started Utopian and was a lot

of the people who have played on my records. A lot of this revolves around the studio that we built in New York called Secret Sound, which was that was in It was like twenty six Street and maybe seventh then it was right near the Grammercy Park Hotel. The friend of mine, Moogie Klingman, he bought aloft and we said, let's build a studio in it. It was like a

very unusual thing because most studios were commercial enterprises. You know, it was expensive to build a studio, but I just kept taking any money that I got and plowing it back into you know, my projects and tools for my projects. And so we built our own studio and that's the very first thing to recorded there was a Wizard True Star, and then it became our playpen. We would go in there and just fiddle around right music, record little bits

of it, splice it together. Later there was nobody to tell us what not to do, so we would do anything that we could think of. And the first um Utopia album we just sat around the studio throwing ideas out on the floor and trying to turn them into songs. And part of what makes it so interesting musically is all it represents all the influences of each person, kind

of collected under a pro rock banner. But for me that that time, if I thought about it, I could come up with probably a lot of speculation about why people were craving that music. I mean, music to me either is or is not related to the culture and the political spectrum. And you know, Kennedy is killed, and I mean a lot of people obviously think that the Beatles ascension is linked to that. We need something happy, we need something sweet, we need those ballads. You know,

well before we get to expert texpert choking smokers. You know, all of the kind of poetry and insanity of Lennon and McCartney as they get older, wonderful insanity by the way. But you know, in the beginning with like Love Me Do and all those there's things. There's there's something about people, what people need, and at that time in the seventies, people really needed music to take them somewhere. They really needed to have music. You mentioned before, Roger Waters and

those guys, I mean, you know they're being Floyd. I mean, man, when I went to college. Everybody was laying on the floor with the biggest joint in their mouths you could possibly imagine, and with the headphones on, and they just had to listen to that music to transport them. Did you feel when you were making the music with Utopia your audience wanted you to transport them somewhere? Well, you know, I try to think of myself as an artist and

as a true artist. We've talked about me as a producer, and as a producer, I have to be aware of the way that the audience may respond to the project that I'm responsible for. But when I'm making my own music, you know, and when I feel like I'm in my most artistic head, I'm not trying to manipulate people. I'm not thinking about them. I'm thinking about me, you know. I'm trying to think, how can I make music that

will satisfy me? How can I make music that won't be just simply a repetition of something someone else has done already, Which is two challenges right there. To satisfy yourself, you know, it's difficult enough. And that did not replicate something that's already been done. And I guess when you're talking about that my mind is going to a different place. My mind is going to that place where music is

meant for that individual experience. It's like you say, you may be in a dorm room where a bunch of guys getting high, but the music doesn't have an effect until you feel like you're alone with it. And the problem with music nowadays is it's like nobody's fault, you know, like human evolution is not really any individual's fault. It's part of our evolution. Part of it is the simple hardware evolution. The fact that the way we listen to music is not the way we used to listen to music.

If you wanted a quality time music experience, it used to be you had to go home to do it, you know, and listen to your own little Hi fi and and and that's what we did. A record that you were anticipating came out, and you sat in a sweet spot between the speakers, and you put that record on. You listed it from beginning to end. You unplug the phone. You didn't let anybody just house. Back then, I had one in my kids. It was a phone on the

kitchen wall, and that was in Yeah. But I mean the dynamic was that it was you and the music, and for you to really get your money's worth out of it, you and the music had to get down there alone and experience it together in a certain way. And eventually we came up with portable music systems like the Walkman and things like that. Suddenly it was not a quality time experience anymore. But things have evolved so far to the point that so called musicians aren't actually musicians.

Music is the wedge you use to get yourself into the public consciousness. So you start out calling yourself a musician, but essentially you're just a merchandizer. You're selling shoes, hats, shirts and things like that. You know, it's actually become a little bit more real in the sense that you're not pretending that the music is anything more than self promotion. There is no pretense about the music being actually more

important than people simply remembering your name. You know, It's it's not like the oldest axiom of advertising todd run. If you're enjoying this episode, don't keep it to yourself. Tell a friend, and be sure to follow us on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to all of the music from this episode and more in a curated playlist of my favorite pieces from Todd Rundgren. You'll find a link to the playlist in the show notes of

this episode. When we return, Todd Rundgren tells us how anthropology factors into his songwriting. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing? Do you read the least time? See five? Lie? I'd rather think of that instead, and maybe this is It wouldn't have made any difference from Todd Rundgren's album Something Anything. Consumers have come to expect the ease and accessibility that today's stream platforms give us

to an infinite musical catalog. Incredibly, Todd Rundgren had the foresight to see where music technology was taking us, but he was slightly ahead of his time. I am a technologist and a theorist in some kind, and in the early late eighties early nineties I started to gain some awareness that technology was going to take music to other places.

I started thinking about other ways that music could be delivered, and I came up with this concept called no World Order, in which you could, as a listener, describe some parameters about the music you want to hear, and then this system would go out and find the music that satisfied your criterion. So I did a demonstration of that. It

was called No World Order. It was released as a record, and there were various computer versions as well, and you could actually navigate the music if you had the right hardware. And I got approached by Warner Full Service Network, which was attempting to establish an interactive TV community in Orlando, Florida, as a test thing, and we wanted to see whether people wanted to have on demand music services. This is when you still have to buy music on a CD.

So we went to all the major labels and said, we're just experimenting with a community in or Lands in Florida to see whether there is demand for music that's delivered by some kind of criteria something like that designed the whole system. Then went to the five major labels at that point see whether they would put their music on servers so we could just experiment with it. All

five refused. They said, we can't even imagine this putting music on servers just because beyond our comprehension, let alone explaining it to all our artists and the retailers that we have to deal with and stuff like that, and every single one of them with refused two years later Napster, and that was the beginning of the end because they didn't see that music had to be on servers, and that essentially collapsed what was the music business. And the

end result is now you don't sell music. Music is as I mentioned before, music is advertising for something else that you're selling that people seem to perceive as more valuable than the music, like a T shirt, like a big puffy jacket like some sneakers, or something like that. I mean, Kanye is bragging about the fact not that he sold so much music, that he sold two million dollars worth of his players that the music will be

on He's bragging about selling hardware, not music. And that's kind of where music has outen to at this particular point. It's just part of putting forward a personal brand, and then once you have that brand, you sell anything and it doesn't have to be music. Do world events ever shape your music? Do they ever influence your music? I write my music about human nature. My whole music is anthropological.

I'm trying to figure out why people think the way they think and why they do the things that they do, and that covers everything. That pretty much covers it all. How would you say that the shoe box full of yeah, the big baggy full the peyonte buttons, that was a while ago. What do you do now to raise your consciousness? Are you into meditation? Like? What do you do now to achieve a state where you feel comfortable? I moved twenty five years ago to the Island of c and

I live in heaven. You know, I hear you well listen. I am a great, great admirer of your music and your career and I don't know what it is, but like I went back and listened to so much, so much of your music, and it's that Utopia phase of your career. I love that music. I love utopiae which we know. It's beautiful music. It's it's, it's, it's it was beautiful music then and it still is. You are one of the great artists. You say you like to

call yourself an artist. Well, everybody I know when they think about you, they think about what a great artist you are, on the diversity of your sound and the music you made. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I appreciate it. Thank you. My thanks to producer, songwriter and musician Todd Rundgren. I'll leave you with Love is the answer from Utopia's album Oops, Wrong Planet. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought

to you by my Heart Radio. I can't stay and more Ell, I've been from shore to short to shore. Defends a short time to found it. But this a easy way around day world shaming. Love is shut up, so said scream Loving Lose. Why so we are all us time, We're a poising girl away it's at work. People turn their heads to work on time. Tell it, listen, try tur