By: David Klein

[Author’s Note: Due to a preposterous lack of any sort of note taking on my part, all quotes are from memory and paraphrased only when absolutely necessary. Happily all libelous material has been provided by Mr. Rundgren himself.]

Rundgren

Being an honor student is pretty cool sometimes. Sometime last week—I don’t remember what day, exactly, swimming as I was in one of my usual brain fogs—an e-mail popped up in my inbox asking inquiring members of the Hutton Honors College whether they wanted to have pizza with “musician, singer-songwriter and producer Todd Rundgren.” Clearly, I just don’t deserve some of the ridiculous things that happen to me.

I vaguely remembered that Todd Rundgren was a respected figure from a time when there existed in the public imagination mythical people called rock stars, but didn’t know much more than that. The fruits of my five-minute All Music Guide history lesson: Rundgren started out in the sixties fronting garage rockers The Nazz, then struck out as a solo artist. He briefly flirted with Big Time Rock Star Fame with the release of  Something, Anything and its hit singles “I Saw the Light” and “Hello, It’s Me” (a reworked Nazz number) but Rundgren steered clear of the pop game, continuing to make idiosyncratic and personal music both on his own and with progressive rock band Utopia. His most famous composition these days is the goofy and eternal eighties hit “Bang the Drum All Day,” familiar to yours truly as the soundtrack to commercials for Six Flags and Carnival cruises (Sorry Todd. Please don’t hurt me.)

However, it’s Rundgren’s work as a producer that’s made him legendary in the eyes of many a rock dweeb, with his list of collaborators a virtual parade of the hip, the weird, and the underrated: The Band. Meat Loaf. XTC. Hall and Oates. Badfinger. Grand Funk Railroad. Patti Smith. Cheap Trick. The New York Dolls. It’s just ridiculous to keep going (Alice Cooper. Janis Joplin. Psychedelic Furs…) so suffice it to say the man has an all-day pass to Cool World stamped on his wrist in indelible ink. He probably also gets to cut in line at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but I wouldn’t know.

Full of desire to hear some pearl of music industry wisdom or perhaps just absorb Rundgren’s cool by osmosis, I signed up for the dinner and come a grey last Wednesday hoofed it over to the new Honors College building, where forty or so other students smiled and chatted in anticipation. It didn’t take long for Rundgren himself to emerge, affable and amused, sporting shoulder-length multi-colored hair and a Brave New World T-shirt for good measure. Plates laden with pizza, all in attendance filed into the Great Room—at the risk of beating a dead horse, think the Great Hall from Harry Potter—and took their seats at the waiting round tables. After a quick but fitting introduction repeating most of the superlatives and credits mentioned above, the discussion began.

The first question of the evening: What would Rundgren say were the “absolute best” and “absolute worst” experiences he’s ever had in the studio?

Rundgren, cautioning that “I don’t like to think in absolutes,” instead offered his general take on the songwriting and recording process. Rundgren explained that while “some people are more poetically inclined, and they’ll write down lyrics and then come up with the music,” he himself works the opposite way: he writes music which then inspires the words to go with it. Rundgren noted that “the best experiences I have in the studio come when the musicians come in with material that they know is really great,” with that quality material inspiring committed performances and a good working atmosphere. Conversely, songs that are “not great” tend to produce “performances which are…not great.”(One sensed that despite Rundgren’s rhetorical stance on absolutes, perhaps he had a band or two in mind on the “worst” end of the spectrum after all.)

The discussion took a personal turn early on when one student asked Rundgren what had inspired him to make a career out of music. “It was my hatred for my father,” came Rundgren’s candid response. At eighteen, Rundgren “swore to himself” that he would leave home and become self-reliant, “to prove to him that I was talented at something.” After a period of personal and professional doubt, during which Rundgren briefly lived with clothiers and dabbled in lighting design, he was “lucky to have opportunities” that coalesced into a successful music career. Looking back, Rundgren believes that many people he knew were unable to go where they wanted in life because of unresolved family issues. In contrast, when Rundgren returned to his parents a successful musician following his self-imposed exile, “I had nothing over them, and they had nothing over me. We became friends,” said Rundgren with a wry smile.

The questions people asked that didn’t touch on any grand themes tended to provide an outlet for Rundgren’s sense of humor: asked by one student if he did anything to protect his ears, Rundgren, er, waxed scientific about cochlea and tiny hairs, explaining that the ear is “basically dependent on goo.” On the phenomena of producers becoming envious of the attention received by performers, Rundgren cited the story of Alan Parsons—producer of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and later frontman of the aptly named Alan Parsons Project— as an example of ambition gone terribly wrong: “He looked like Chewbacca…I used to call him the Abominable Showman. He would just stand up there on stage like a zombie…it’s like, what’s the point?”

Having just come off a serious Hall and Oates bender –“Private Eyes” is my ringtone!—I asked Rundgren about his experience working with the blue-eyed soul men. Always honest, Rundgren promptly replied, “Well, I almost ruined their career…Up until that point their only hit was ‘She’s Gone.’ At that time they still considered themselves to be making music in that experimental mode [of their first two albums.] So what happened, we made this album called War Babies and the problem was there was no ‘She’s Gone’ on it.” Rundgren explained that the failure of that collaboration spurred the duo to focus their sound solely on the R&B flavor of their only hit, leading them to perfect the blue-eyed soul that eventually made Hall and Oates the most commercially successful pop duo of all time.

But success had its frustrations: “One of the things I know that Daryl [Hall] especially didn’t like was that afterwards he was never really able to get out of that box,” said Rundgren, referring to the commercial failure of Hall’s solo albums, which were experimental efforts in the vein of the group’s early work. For Rundgren the story of Hall and Oates illustrates the “Hobbesian” nature of the music industry, in which artists are forced to choose between pursuing a personal vision or making their work more palatable to the mainstream in hopes of a shot at success.

Still interested in learning more about Rundgren’s rogue’s gallery of collaborators, I asked what drew Rundgren to work with Meat Loaf, whose over-the-top aesthetic is seemingly the exact opposite of the tight songcraft of Hall and Oates. “That comes from Jim Steinman,” explained Rundgren. “Everyone knows Meat Loaf, but nobody knows Jim Steinman. Steinman wrote the songs and Meat Loaf sang them. It was Broadway—a number of those songs were actually from musicals [of Steinman’s] that had never been successfully mounted.”

Rundgren agreed to produce the odd couple’s album after the two had been turned down by every record company major and minor, although his motives weren’t completely pure. ‘When I heard Meat Loaf I thought: This is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen!” (Much laughter.) “Springsteen was on the cover of Time magazine: ‘The Savior of Rock and Roll!’ It was disgusting. So I thought, ‘Here’s my opportunity to take the piss out of Springsteen!’” But there was some unintentional comedy as well: “Of course,” continued Rundgren, “half the band [on Meat Loaf’s record] was the E Street Band”—referring to the presence of Max Weinberg on drums and Roy Bittan on piano. Whether Springsteen’s bandmates caught on to Rundgren’s piss-taking efforts he didn’t say, although “they were probably chuckling in the back of their heads like you are.”

The result of Rundgren, Steinman and Meat Loaf’s labors, Bat Out of Hell, succeeded on a scale that flabbergasted all involved, eventually becoming the fifth-best-selling album of all time. Rundgren credits Meat Loaf’s persistence in promoting the album despite the music industry’s constant incredulity. “It was, ‘This’ll never work.’ ‘These songs are too long.’ ‘This guy is too fat.’… Now nobody will stop talking about Meat Loaf. In Britain, Bat Out of Hell stayed on the charts for twelve years…No one ever thought that this big fat guy could be a rock star.” Rundgren paused and smiled:  “I thought it was all a gag!”

As the evening’s discussion drew to a close, Rundgren addressed the state of modern music. A girl who talked about how she had been raised on classic bands like The Beatles and The Clash asked Rundgren what he listened to nowadays, wondering rhetorically whether our generation would leave behind music that was similarly innovative and meaningful—although she conceded that “The Smashing Pumpkins might be somewhat honorable.” (First: the band of our generation is The Smashing Pumpkins? Second: Oh God, what if she’s right?)

Rundgren’s response was decidedly negative—“You could leave your grandkids ‘My Humps.’”(More general laughter.) Rundgren proceeded to reflect on the declining cultural relevance of rock music. “I remember when Revolver came out,” said Rundgren, reminiscing about listening to  the classic Beatles album with friends. “We would all sit down in front of the record player and listen to it three times straight. People don’t do that anymore.” Rundgren noted that the wide availability of music has largely erased the mystique albums used to carry with them, astutely observing that songs no longer function as the medium of subversive communication they once were: ‘Back then if you wrote a song about psychedelic drugs and put it on your record it was shocking. Not anymore…now you’re being retro,” said Rundgren, chuckling as he dated himself yet again.  All in all, Rundgren didn’t seem too hopeful about the prospect of a rock renaissance “in an age of Lady Gagas.” (Rundgren and the girl ignored my muted protest in defense of Lady Gaga, whom I find to be both generally awesome and sometimes even legitimately subversive, although “Alejandro” should make any sane human being want to jump out of a window by the millionth chorus.)

The evening’s talk finished after another question or two—no, I’m not leaving anything good out—and Rundgren said his goodbyes to gracious applause, sticking around to sign a few autographs and take pictures. I promptly made an ass of myself babbling about how I write for the student radio station and we have a blog and would it be all right if I did a write up of the evening and did he have an e-mail address?

Bemused, Rundgren asked, “So, you write for radio? That’s interesting.”

Okay, point for you, Todd.  But I still have your place card, dammit.

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