I think alot of people will dig it. I like when artists talk about meaningful things rather than hock a book filled with airbrush photos and tell you how great reading bible scriptures are. That Robert Johnson thing is weird. What kind of publishing deal is that Todd?

source link:

http://www.list.co.uk/art...t/comments




What follows is a transcript of an interview I did with the great American musician and record producer Todd Rundgren on Tuesday 21 October. He spoke to me down the line from his Hawaii home, it was 8.30pm UK time and 12.30pm Pacific Mean Time when we started and it was almost 10pm UK time when we finished. I have long been fascinated in Rundgren and believe that the multi-generic fusion music he made in the 1970s influenced American pop, rock and electronica in fundamental, often untold ways. So speaking to him was a rare privilege. I was speaking to him shortly after the release of his fantastic new album Arena and before his UK tour. I hope you enjoy this unedited transcript.

Arena is an absolutely fantastic album; I have been listening to it all day and for the last couple of weeks, its just great, are you happy with the album yourself?

I never know right when I finish the record because I make them in kind of an insular process, so I have to take other people's word for it. I listen to it and I have my hopes for it, but I guess I don't really know until I go out and actually play it for people. In this particular instance we had an opportunity to play it before the record itself was released, because of the fortunate circumstance that we got an international distribution deal which means its coming out in Scotland as well as the rest the of the world at the same time. But it delayed the release by about two months, so we wound up out on the road playing the record for people who had never heard any of it before and didn't really have an opportunity to buy it yet. I think it was their response that gave me a bit more confidence in the whole thing.

I've read that you wanted it to be a return to riff-orientated-guitar rock with this record and that you wanted it to sound like Utopia, was there a game plan?

Yeah, but I didn't devise this whole thing altogether on my own. There was a circumstance that put me in the position of being the 'guitar-playing front man' again, and it was the way that people reacted to it that steered me in a direction of sticking with the guitar for a while. I think more in terms usually when planning a record -- 'what is the subject matter?' 'What it's going to be about?' I don't have any fear that I'll have trouble coming up with the musical aspect of it. The hardest part is always what the hell are you singing about, especially when you are up in your 25th album, what's left to sing about? The biggest challenge for me is trying to figure out what the record will be about, once I've accomplished that, I think I have a bit of confidence that the musical part of it will come to me somehow.

It's be four years since Liars, is the process of trying things out on audiences something you do regularly?

Well no, as a matter of fact I wrote and recorded the whole album pretty much all myself out in Kihei [Rundgren's home in Hawaii] and had no feedback of any kind. But when it came time to go on the road, I thought I would rather be playing new stuff than old stuff, I mean the old stuff is fine, but as time goes on you cant simply be doing things because you assume that the audience enjoys them. You have to do things for yourself sometimes and have the audience react to that, react to the level of your commitment to the music, as opposed to your simple willingness to play anything that they request.

Actually making the album, were you working by yourself or were you using other musicians?

No, I would have used other musicians, it was a great opportunity to take advantage of some of the players I know, but living in Hawaii its difficult to just say 'Hey, come on over, I got this song I want to record'. It becomes a big ordeal with scheduling and transporting people and it goes a little bit antithetical to the whole spontaneity that I'm trying to achieve.

When you were putting the tour together, and you were getting a band together to play, were they not giving you feedback saying 'this album is great'?

Oh yeah, I was getting good feedback from the players and also they were as much in the dark as everyone about exactly what the music would be like. So when they got it, I imagine that they don't receive it in the same way that everyone else does because they realise 'oh, I also have to play this!' Its not just about what they think about it from a listening stand point, they have to wrap their heads around it in a different way than a typical listener. So I think when they realise its also intended to be fun to play, then we didn't really have much problems in rehearsal apart from the usual things which is details, very rarely capturing the feel of it, its mostly trying to remember the little parts and stuff.

Is it a new touring band you are using different members?

Its pretty much the Liars band with minor modifications. I've marginalised pretty much the keyboards because it is supposed to be a guitar record and the live presentation follows upon that so we have four of the same guys who were in Liars. There's me, Jesse Gress on guitar, there's Prairie Prince on drums and there's Kasim Sulton who was playing bass but is now the third guitar player and does some incidental keyboard parts and Rachel Haden is now handling the bass.

You tend to record a lot of concert films of many of your tours, will you be making a film of your new tour?

Well we have already done a high-definition videotaping one of the first gigs we did, which in some ways was unfortunate because we learned to play much better after that, but that is just being wrapped up now that will be broadcast on HDNet here in the US. I don't know about worldwide, but it will also be made into a DVD. So we do have something in the can, but I'm hoping at some particular point that we'll get a chance to do something else now that the band has become more seasoned and a little more expert at the material.

And that's something that appeals to you, using as many different formats and genres as possible to your technological side I suppose...

Yeah, it's partly that and it's partly that my audience is maybe a little more technologically orientated than I am. I get involved in these technologies because I don't have a fear of new things, but I am not necessarily prepossessed with all technology. I don't own a cell phone and I don't really like to be in an automobile. All for various reasons that seem to me rational, and maybe irrational to other people, but in the end, equate to eschewing certain technologies, the fact that something is new or flashy doesn't necessarily make it a good thing.

There is a certain trend at the moment, bands like the White Stripes and the Ting Tings are taking technology back and using old analogue stuff just to get a certain sound, do you have that temptation to recreate sounds you had in '74, '75, is that something that appeals to you?

I don't think about it that much, but again it's all about trying to stay open to the possibilities. This latest record, even though it sounds like a big band, was done entirely on my laptop and that was just a matter of circumstance. I could have done it other ways but I was too wrapped up in the creative aspects to worry about the technical aspects. 'Whatever works' is the attitude I took, if my ProTool system won't start up, I'm not going to wait around for that, I'm going to find another way to get it done. So, even in practice the record has a certain guerrilla nature to it, you got to make do with whatever is available and that's going to be the world that we will be facing in the future. It's going to be a world where there is less stuff, where we have to make more creative use of what we do have available.

Is there an environmental agenda here also?

Its implicit not explicit in there, is the idea that we will have to change our habits and change assumptions, and essentially change is where it is at. The whole idea that we could suddenly stabilise everything and live in a world of predictability, I don't see things trending that way. Thank God we have the internet that we have this extemporaneous communication system that allows smaller groups of people to try and accomplish things that sometimes the mass can't develop the political will to do.

Is that an idea that you hope carries through the album?

To be specific, the message is towards the men of the world, in that we have had terrible examples of leadership and that men will think all by the same deviousness, cowardice and fecklessness that's how you gain power nowadays. I'm thinking that we need to hark back to saying something more heroic where men's responsibilities were to bear the unbearable burdens and to brave the storm and to protect the weak and to find the lost lamb and to seek the truth as opposed to looking at power as an end in itself.

Hints of religious belief in there?

Very little...

The cover of the album is a visual quote from the movie 300 and there's elements of that movie in, part of my subject material was from the movie 300, partly because it was visual but also because the story which was about a small band of men realising what their responsibility was, knowing how slim their hopes were, but they stood at the gates of Thermopylae anyway, even when the reinforcements didn't come, they didn't run away they just stood there because they know this is our responsibility, this is our example to our children, all of those things that nowadays seem to be in today's political climate, quaint.

Who are you voting for in the election?

I don't see any way I can vote for John McCain, put it that way, and I vote religiously by a matter of induction I guess you could figure out how I am voting. People get so possessed with the presidential thing that they don't think of all the so-called 'down ticket 'stuff, which is what affects people more directly. Presidents can do certain things, but if you have got yourself an idiot congressman you are in big trouble.

Do you have yourself an 'idiot congressman' in Hawaii?

They can be clownish at times but Hawaii is an extremely liberal state, very polyglot, many different races of people and have pretty much figured out how to get along with each other, so it's an inherently liberal environment.

On Arena is the track Gun your homage to AC/DC?

[Laughs] I actually didn't know at the time that AC/DC was about to come out with a record as well, so I'm a flea spec compared to them.

Seriously, you really rock out on this album in a way you haven't done for a while....

I know, but just in terms of where the votes will be, no one has been waiting in bated breath for my record to come out, everybody has been waiting 10 years for an AC/DC record.

I don't know about that, I think you have still got a big band of followers...

Well we are certainly going to prove or disprove that hypothesis in the near future.

These things are very relative I think... talking about the album, there are so many different genres and feeling, its so energetic, do you ever just think, oh I just want to sit down and just keep to one thing and have an afternoon nap...

As the saying goes, 'sleep when you are dead', take that long dirt nap, but for now, I don't know, I suppose its just a vanity in me that thinks that if you have any sort of talent you simultaneously have purpose, that you are supposed to apply that to something and in that sense people can get really annoyed with me 'you are just a pop musician, why are you taking it so seriously'. Before I was a pop musician, before I was a performer, I wanted to be a musician, I knew this was the way I would to express myself and whatever else goes on, that prevails for me and the way that musicians have always proven themselves is by playing its not by releasing records, records are documents of how you play. If Thomas Edison had not come up with the process we would still be making music and in that sense, no matter what reputation I have made for myself as a record producer or a recording artist, I always remember that it starts with a good piece of music and then you have to figure out how to play it in a convincing manner and what is recording once you have done that? You are just pushing a button. So the most important part is to feel like this is still what you are supposed to be doing it is at least to me what I am supposed to be doing instead of some other thing.

And in terms of the tour, is it the first time you have been to Scotland?

I think we were there with Liars and I think I was there even more recently with Joe Jackson and I recall having a lovely time because he is quite an authority on single malt whiskies, Edinburgh is a lovely place to go out exploring single malt whisky.

Do you find Scottish audiences different to anywhere else?

I have found they are hugely enthusiastic from the first concerts I can remember, they go out to the show intending on making their contribution to the show. You contrast with places like Japan where everything is really staid and they maybe look at the shows in some ways like a product and you deliver it in precisely this amount of time with this amount of brio, they are satisfied but the Scottish audience always seem to be egging you on, get it a little crazier, push it a little further.

There is possibly a little bit of machismo in the culture as well?

Yeah, and partly that and partly being inebriated always helps! But I'm likely to be a little bit inebriated at the time also so...

There's nothing wrong with that, right culture for it, it's absolutely freezing up here at the moment so...

Oh, now you are bumming me out...

You will need some whisky or something to keep you warm...

Yeah I will, I will get my hip flask out

What do you listen to at the moment, is there anything that is really ticking your box at the moment?

I have actually been listening up on Robert Johnson, there's a clause in my contract which means I have to cover a certain amount of Robert Johnson songs within the next six months or so, its an odd thing, but it has something to do with publishing and there's a quid pro quo to it, so if I do some Robert Johnson songs, someone else will be encouraged to do versions of my songs so it's a way in the struggling music business to maximize things all around.

So is the idea like a trade-off when you play tunes...

Well I do an EP of Robert Johnson covers which they will market in some way which is still mysterious to me and the whole point is that they control the publishing of Robert Johnson so my recording it adds value to the catalogue and the quid pro quo essentially is that they own the publishing for this record from Arena, and they will be encouraging other people to cover some songs from this record, thereby giving me some writers royalties in the future.

I heard about a Todd Rundgren homage album, where other artists record your songs

There have been a few of those and they are always quite intriguing. Some of them are actually musically challenging to me. Steve Lukather did a version of Tiny Demons which I found mystifying; there is no way that I would have been able to do what he did with it...

Mystifying good or mystifying bad?

No, great, amazing, he turned the guitar into something more concrete whereas all I was doing was making noises.

Does it make you feel proud that you've got this legacy?

Oh yeah, to have other musicians play your music is really the goal, being a solo guitar player or wondering vagabond, that's great and you get all the satisfaction from the people you play for, but its a whole other quality getting the satisfaction from the people you play with because they understand it at a completely different level.

Is the New Cars project over with now?

Its pretty much done for now, we may occasionally do what they call a corporate, where you play a private event and those are always good because a band like the Cars has a catalogue that is familiar to a lot of people who didn't have to be Cars fans, the so permeated the radio that any random group of people will be able to sing along to a bunch of Cars songs, so it works in that context but trying to rebuild an audience, especially from my stand point when I am eventually going to go back and start doing my own thing again, its hard to make that open-ended investment and because we had an accident very early on in the touring schedule, Eliot the guitar player broke his collar bone and that took the wind out of our sails very quickly because by the time we had got out on the road and he had healed we had expected we would be in phase two and not picking up the pieces of phase one.

The tour you were doing with Joe Jackson was brilliant, I actually saw you two on tour, absolutely fantastic, is there anyone else you would consider working with in that way again?

Well its a good way to tour, especially in this day and age, the expenses of touring are so onerous, the price of full and the cost of hotels everything has started to cost more, so cutting down the musicians is the quickest way to save money, but in some instances it isn't appropriate, I couldn't go out and do an acoustic version of Arena I have got to take a band out, there is always a possibility I could go back to that, but I think in the future I will not play the piano, I am just not that good at it, I am particularly not going to play piano on stage with a real piano player like Joe Jackson

I suppose it must depends on whether you like the person to go on tour with them...

You don't necessarily have to love them, but it would be good to have some sort of musical parody, you had mutual respect for each other that's probably the more important thing.

The people that I would like to work with frighten me, in the sense that if you go on stage with them, then you will get compared to them, the more formidable artist that you would like to be with the more of a challenge it is for you to perform, you set your own bar higher

Well they may be frightened of you.

Yes, that's true.

So what's next for you?

Well we get back from tour at the end of November and we start another tour in December, I may be doing production early in the year and then we will go back out on tour again after the record, I think the promotion has only just started, its only been in about three weeks

So this is the European leg of the tour, so is it American leg next?

Yeah, we will be going back to do more of the American leg and some of the territories that I haven't been to before. We will just have to see how the reaction to the record mounts up.

Are you thinking of going back into the studio after that?

I'm not going to rush back, these days it takes me a little while to come up with a ripe enough concept to go back in the studio, principally because I have done quite a few records and it gets to be a more of a challenge to find a new territory to work on.
[Edited 11/13/08 8:30am]

He always had some great hair,

Todd is cool and no bullshit.

Todd is being real humble about his piano and guitar playing. I always thought he brought the goods. Cool interview.

It's an absolute crime that Todd Rundgren isn't in the RRHOF.

Way ahead of the curve on a whole lotta shit:
http://prince.org/msg/8/246930?pr


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Trickology said:

Actually the track Strike sounds more like AC/DC to me.
And the track Bardo has a very Robin Trower vibe.




tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431
[Edited 11/13/08 16:53pm]

An interview on Todd on recording.

http://www.soundonsound.c...?print=yes

Was Todd a member of Labelle?


[Edited 11/21/08 10:22am]

Here is another kewl article on Todd with a small amount of Prince content.

Prince and Todd are both Geminis so it might be fun to read between the lines to see if they think alike.

http://beatpatrol.wordpre...e-me-1998/

Specific Prince Context:

“Todd could have been the biggest and most important artist of the era,” Paul Fishkin, former general manager of Rundgren’s ’70s label Bearsville, will tell me a few days later. “If he had taken a little more time to work with me and whoever else saw that potential in him, there’s no question in my mind that we could have had it all. Prince is the Todd that made it because Prince learned from the mistakes and understood what it would take on the commercial and marketing levels. Todd’s whole thing was, he was who he was at any given moment and everyone else be damned. The egomaniacal part of that is that he expected everyone to go along with it. I think he got fooled by the cult, the people who told him they’d follow him no matter what he did. The Toddists.”

“He’s always been the Davey Crockett of rock’n’roll,” says Bebe Buell. “He thinks of all these things before everyone else, beats the door down and then gets none of the money or credit. All of the big stars come along during a movement, whereas Todd created a movement. The pioneers are always the people who either have to die or take the flak. Has Prince ever uttered Todd’s name? I met Prince when he was sixteen, when Todd played Minneapolis in 1974 - this tiny little person with huge hair standing backstage who wanted to meet Todd. And Todd did his usual
‘Oh, hi, kid’ number, and Prince was like, ‘I play everything and I’m real talented…’

Speculative Todd/Prince simalarties:

“My family was not close-knit,” he says. “Everyone was sort of competing with each other. We never said ‘I love you’, we never hugged each other. My dad got into a thing with me that was nearly abusive, not physically but psychologically. As a result everyone in my family [dad Harry, mom Ruth, sisters June and Lynette, and baby brother Robin] turned out to have some psychological problem.”

“Todd was completely different from everyone else,” says Paul Fishkin, who’d assumed managerial duties for the group. “First of all, everyone else was taking drugs, and he took nothing. People just couldn’t believe it. Also, he was very ambitious - all he wanted to do was play. At these very straight fraternity parties, while the rest of the band took breaks, Todd would play right through, just jamming and soloing. At one gig, he saved the day by blowing the minds of these angry drunk frat guys who wanted to beat up on the band. And I remember he was always frantically cleaning up the gear. One time he was cleaning the guitar cords, and one of the other guys asked him why in the hell he was doing that. He said, in case we go on tour!”

Fishkin maintains that Rundgren was actually fired from Woody’s Truck Stop for not taking drugs. Rundgren himself says it was simply a difference of emphasis that led to his departure: “Influenced by the San Francisco scene, the band decided they wanted to take acid and get it together in the country. I had the draw the line when the lifestyle became more important than the music.”

More important, The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren led seamlessly to the breathtaking Something/Anything?, in the estimation of many Todd Rundgren’s finest achievement. Recorded again in L.A., Something was never meant to be a double album - a record that now sounds like the missing link between the White Album and Sign O’ The Times. “Something was pretty much gonna follow along the lines of Ballad,” says Rundgren. “But it just went and went and went, fuelled by pot and Ritalin [a speedlike prescription drug once used by addicts in conjunction with methadone]. I’d record for eight hours during the day, but I’d also rented an 8-track machine and some synths for other ideas I didn’t wanna burn studio time on. So at night I’d take Ritalin and finish writing a couple of songs, then go over to record some more till four or five in the morning. The first three sides of the album were done in three weeks. I was, like, Mr. Music.”Bearsville Records. “I’m sure Albert was as perturbed as anyone else by the way I followed up Something/ Anything?” says Rundgren. “But when I was listening to Something six months after I’d made it, I realised there were songs on there that had taken me twenty minutes to write, and I thought, Are you just going to be writing to these same formulas I’d essentially come up with in high school?”

There was an added complication when the new version of ‘Hello, It’s Me’ mysteriously took off on radio and started making fast for the Top 10. When this relatively straightforward rock’n’soul ballad hit #5, A Wizard, A True Star started, in comparison, to sound even more wildly offbeat. “There was bad luck with timing,” says Paul Fishkin, by now in charge of Bearsville. “We didn’t put out ‘Hello’ right away, which was my mistake. Meanwhile Todd was off on his psychedelic adventure, and then a year later ‘Hello’ becomes a hit. At which point we’re up against Todd in a completely different mindspace. With five more potential hits on Something, he says, No fucking way am I releasing anything else off that album. And the culmination of all the madness is the Midnight Special appearance where he gets on the piano singing ‘Hello, It’s Me’ and looking like a fucking drag queen.”

With the intermittently brilliant double album Todd (1974), and then with Initiation (1975), Rundgren’s music increasingly began to reflect the arcane ideas and theories he was picking up from books on mysticism and Eastern philosophy. “I hadn’t done much dabbling around in the mystical at all,” he says, “but I was looking at these books and they were explaining some of the phenomena I was experiencing. I started devouring these Eastern philosophies, never buying any of them whole but following the thread of anything that was consonant with what I was experiencing. I got very much into Theosophical writers like C.W. Ledbetter, who applied scientific methods to Hindu philosophy and came up with a new synthesis. These were concepts that found their way into my personal cosmology and into my music. I mean, I never read the actual Treatise On Cosmic Fire [inspiration behind the long sequence that concludes Initiation] because it was just too damn opaque, but I figured it made a good concept to hang the music on.”

“Todd’s lack of communication skills became a real problem,” says Chris Andersen. “I mean, you can make records by yourself, and write a computer graphics programme by yourself, but when you try to do video it requires clear communication of the idea and of what all the jobs are. That was something he never successfully did. He kept all the concepts in his own head and only told people what they needed to know.”

The minor hoopla surrounding his interactive No World Order CD (1992) obscured the fact that it contained some charged techno-rap diatribes; the same goes for 1994’s The Individualist. Yet it was difficult not to feel that, for all the vaunted Rundgren rhetoric about “aggressive personal evolution”, he had become a desperately marginalised figure, of interest only to the legion of Todd obsessives with whom he communicated via his websites. The culmination of the whole process was his decision to give up on record companies and sell his music directly to his fans through the Internet - hardly radical now, but (as always with Rundgren) too far ahead of its time.
“He’s his own worst enemy, commercially,” says Sally Grossman. “By doing this to himself, he cannot fulfil the visions he has because he has to do everything on the cheap. It steadily gets more myopic. And I have another very strong opinion, which is that the fan clubs are disastrous. In the last few years of going to shows he hasn’t got a new audience, partially because if you went to a show it was so fucking insular. It’s not good for him or the music.”

“I started changing when I realised that, when you get to my age, there’s no way to make a comeback,” he says to me as we wind up a four-hour conversation in his San Francisco loft. “Especially if you haven’t gone that far away to start with. I could still make a healthy living just off my musical output if I was a little looser about producing people I don’t really want to produce. There are any amount of compromises I could take on, and even if I don’t my family can live fairly comfortably - except the IRS isn’t happy with that. [A reference to Rundgren’s recent declaration of bankruptcy.] I’m not particularly smart about money, and when I get a big chunk of it from Meat Loaf, what do I do? Blow it all on a video studio.
“At certain points you have to make decisions: to continue on your current path or make necessary changes. I made personal changes that are nobody’s business but mine, but I also assessed my position in the scheme of musical things and came up with what to me were completely logical conclusions but to everyone else seemed to me the equivalent of having found some new drug, i.e. this computer thing. The problem was, I had to redefine myself one way or another. I could have decided to redefine musically, take the Neil Young route and redeem myself with the kids and squeeze I don’t know how many more years out of my career. But I realised it wasn’t just about the style of music, it was about deconstructing the whole musical process including the delivery medium.”

“Todd should never be under financial duress. A lot of multi-platinum artists were born from the little eclectic buddha called Todd Rundgren, and not one of them has admitted it. Todd is somebody we should all be taking care of and protecting. Now I just think of him as the lonely wayward genius. He doesn’t realise how many people still love him. There’s a kindness and goodness inside of him. Bless his heart, no matter how many ups and downs he had, my daughter always went to private school, always had a new wardrobe for school every fall. He’s like a wounded creature who’s been hurt so much that outsiders probably don’t notice these gestures of his as much as I do.”

“He has always been a very kind and personable friend,” says Patti Smith. “He’s very supportive, and he’s a good father. He was very kind to my children after my husband passed away. See, stardom and fame are fleeting things, they’re totally relative. The fact that Todd did exactly what he wanted to and didn’t bend to trends is admirable to me. When you look back on your life, wouldn’t you rather have been a pioneer than a rich person who cashed in? And he’s not just rebellious, because he has a very strong, articulate philosophy and he backs it up with action. He’s always had very revolutionary ideas, and I think that the ideas he has now about work presentation will be ground-breaking. The way he’s going will probably the way of the future. ”



An uplifting song and a awesome stage setup.


[Edited 12/4/08 13:21pm]