By Don Bedell
Originally published in The Centre County Gazette, May 17, 2012
Rock and Roll legend Todd Rundgren, who is best known for
hit songs like “Hello It’s Me,” “I Saw The Light,” “Can We Still Be Friends,”
and “Love Is The Answer,” will make a tour stop in State College this month for
a Memorial Day weekend performance at The State Theatre.
 |
| Todd Rundgren |
Rundgren hails from Upper Darby, a Philadelphia suburb. Inspired by groups like The Beatles, he
started playing in bands in high school.
After graduation, while still in his late teens, Rundgren started the
band The Nazz. They gained some
regional success and recorded the original version of Rundgren’s “Hello It’s
Me.” In 1969, he left the band to pursue
a solo career. Starting with 1970’s Runt,
he released a succession of albums throughout the 1970s generating much radio
airplay. The name of his 1973 album, A
Wizard, A True Star, soon became a moniker of the man himself. As a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter,
computer software developer, video music pioneer and record producer, Rundgren
soon became known in the industry as a Rock ‘Wunderkind.”
Never one to get too settled in any one style, in 1974,
Rundgren started the progressive rock band Utopia, much to the surprise of many
fans and others in the industry. By
1977, Utopia became a four-piece band with Rundgren sharing the lead vocals and
songwriting with the other members.
In addition to his solo and group work, Rundgren also became
a well-known record producer working with artists such as Grand Funk Railroad,
Patti Smith, Cheap Trick, Meatloaf, Hall and Oates, and XTC.
In the late 70s, Rundgren had already begun experimenting
with the emerging genre of music video.
In 1981, the video for his song “Time Heals” became the second ever
video played on MTV, immediately following “Video Killed The Radio Star.”
Rundgren now resides in Kilauea, Hawaii where he spoke by
phone this week about the upcoming show in State College, his summer tour with
a Beatle and his future plans.
CCG: It’s great to
have you playing here in State College.
I read on a message board that the last time you played State College
was on Utopia’s Deface The Music tour (1980). Do you remember the last time you played here?
TR: It's been quite awhile as far as I can remember. I couldn't give you an exact date but it's
been at least that long I think.
CCG: Maybe you played at Rec Hall?
TR: I think we
did. And as I recall we had a bomb
threat that night. A fraternity was
having a party and thought that we were competing with them. So, in order to get people to their kegger,
somebody phoned in a bomb threat.
(laughs)
CCG: You’ve had different themes with some of your past
tours. I read a review of a previous
show on this tour that mentioned you referring to it as ‘a collection of songs
that you would play if you took requests.’
What can we expect with the show here in State College?
TR: It's what we call the 'Performing Arts Center'
show. A Performing Arts Center usually
has season ticket holders and what that means is that some percentage of the
audience may have come to the show because they have a season ticket and not
because they are your biggest fan. So,
some segment will be there out of curiosity, I guess and you have play a
somewhat broader range of material instead of focusing, as I often do, on one
or two most recent records. And, of
course, we have to do include what some people euphemistically refer to as my
'hits.' (laughs) Of which, there are
probably two or three. We play some of
the more familiar material so that those people who may not be up on whatever's
been happening in recent years will find some entertainment, I think.
CCG: One of your original Utopia bandmates, Moogy Klingman,
lost his battle with cancer in November of last year. You did a Utopia reunion in January of 2011 in New York City as a
benefit for Moogy. Is that what
inspired the reunion tour that happened last November?
TR: We hadn't really planned to do a tour the first
time. We were all sort of pleasantly
surprised to the two shows we did in New York.
And that was sort of the basis for thinking about doing a tour. At first, I wasn't really keen on the idea
because nature didn't give us enough time to rehearse. I had two flights in a row snowed out so I
couldn't get from California to New York for rehearsals. As it turned out, we had like one hurried,
three or four-hour rehearsal the night before we played the benefit. I didn't really want to go out and cobble
something together half-heartedly and not commit enough rehearsal so that we
could play at least in a manner that somewhat approached how we played back in
the day. So, it took us that long to
find a window where we could accomplish those things. By the time we did find that window in November, Moogy had become
ill to the point that he couldn't travel anymore. So, while we had originally planned to have the entire original
membership, sans Roger Powell who has retired from touring, unfortunately
Moogy's health deteriorated and he died before we got to the end of the
tour. But, he was sort of the catalyst
for the band getting back together. I
don't know that the band would have performed just because somebody got it into
their head.
CCG: In June, you’ll be a part of Ringo Starr’s All Star
Band again for the first time in about 15 years. Since you site The Beatles as a major influence on you and your
career, what is it like for you to be alongside a Beatle when you tour with
Ringo?
TR: I've always
said, 'If a Beatle calls, you must answer' (laughs) because of the debt that so
many of us owe (to them). A lot of us
would not be in the music business, were it not for the formula that the
Beatles perfected - this self-contained unit that wrote their own stuff and
played all their own instruments. Prior
to that things were more focused on the lead singer and everyone else was kind
of in the back up band and more or less replaceable. That whole formula caused
thousands upon thousands of young teenage boys to imagine being in a band. Fortunately for me, I had some aptitude at
music and managed to stay in the business.
Me and probably everyone else standing on the stage with Ringo are
realizing, 'Hey, I'd be a used car salesman right now were it not for the
success of the Beatles.' (laughs) Ringo doesn't treat you any differently
because you're not a Beatle. He treats
everyone with a great deal of respect and good humor. He's alot of fun to be around.
He's always cracking jokes. It's
really a band for the brief period that we'll be touring. We all travel together. It's a real band.
CCG: Fans will get a chance to be up close and personal with
you and other musicians at your “Todd Rundgren’s Musical Revival Camp” this
summer at the Full Moon Resort in New York’s Catskills Mountains. Can you share a little insight on what
campers might experience if they attend?
TR: Last year, we did a really serious, educational
clinic. We had two sessions in the
morning lead by experts in various fields like how to make a video for yourself
and get it on YouTube, making costumes for the stage and seminars about songwriting. While everyone had a good time, it was a
little too 'egg-headed,’ I guess. (laughs)
We were spending too much time sitting in rooms listening to each other
talk and not enough time in the great outdoors. So, we've changed our format this year to focus more on camp
activities and instead of having a whole cavalcade of experts come in, we will
have one friend of mine who will be the guest of the day on each of the
consecutive days. For instance, Peter Buck
of R.E.M. will be our special guest one day.
We'll do a little Q&A with him, but otherwise he'll just be hanging
around like the rest of the campers and anyone can ask him a question or jam
with him (laughs) if they so desire.
CCG: Something that
many might not know about you is that your son Rex is a professional baseball
player, originally signed by the Florida Marlins organization in 2001. He’s now a member of the Somerset Patriots
of the Atlantic League. Do you get to
see some of his games when you’re on the road?
TR: I usually make
time to see him. I'm heading out in two
weeks to the East Coast in order to do a number of things including the gig in
State College and I'll see a couple of games then. Then, when I finish my tour at the end of July, I'll see a few
more games.
CCG: You’ve always been out in front when it comes to
technology when it comes to making music.
Nowadays, people can record an album on a laptop and upload the music to
the internet. How do you think that
technology has helped, or even hurt, the art of making music?
TR: This is where the question starts...people think that
technology as applied to making music is the more significant question. But, personally, I think that the way that
technology has enable people to experience and to collect music has changed
more even than the ways that we make the music. People have been making little records for themselves since the
late 70s and early 80s with primitive sequencers and drum machines and that
sort of thing, so we're pretty well down the line now with that. But what is more significant is that since
music started being delivered online and particularly into handheld or personal
devices, people have for instance, stopped buying albums for the most part and
have gone back to buying single songs.
That's a factor of the costs of downloading the whole album. People have data plans and things like that
so they don't think 'I'm gonna download this album and I'm gonna download that
album.' They're thinking more 'I like
this song, I'll download that' and it won't affect my monthly data plan. That seems to have a bigger effect, I think,
than even technology in the process of making the music. Although, the social networking that's come
out of these devices an the internet is often how people find out about the
music as opposed to from the radio or seeing the act on television. That's the more significant thing. And, that affects what kind of music gets
made because people are thinking more that they have to have the 'song' not so
much that they have to have the album.
And that's affected my business, for instance, as a producer. It used to be that you and the artist had a
somewhat close relationship for the duration of the entire album project and
you were helping them develop a larger piece of work. Nowadays, if you look at the credits on a lot of the songs that
are popular, you'll see that they have 3 or 4 producers on each one of them and
a different bunch of producers on every song on a album. So, the whole objective, in some ways, of
making music has gone back to like the 50s, when people bought more singles
than they did LPs. It's not something
that means anything to today's audience since they never lived through the 50s.
(laughs) They never experienced that
original transition when suddenly everyone started buying albums particularly
around The Beatles. The Beatles had
such, what we all considered, a uniform quality of performance that you would
buy the albums because, first of all, you liked all the songs on the album and
second of all, The Beatles eventually evolved into a band that put out albums
with no singles on them such as 'Sgt. Pepper' and would still be hugely
popular. So, when I was first getting
into the business that was the objective.
You wanted to come up with your own 'Sgt. Pepper." Nowadays, you just want to come up with a
single that creates and online buzz. In
that sense, the concepts have become somewhat smaller, musically.
CCG: What's next?
Are you working on new material?
TR: I am working
on a new record although I haven't gotten down to the actual writing part of
it. But, I'm conceptualizing how I want
to make it and what it's essentially about.
As the year goes on and some of this touring is completed, I'm going to
be investing more and more time on getting that completed because I have to
deliver it by the end of the year which is sort of unusual. I don't usually have a record label that's
expecting my work nowadays. I usually
come up with the record and then we go out and shop it to find someone to
distribute it. But we have a label that
has enough enthusiasm and enough money (laughs) that they want to pay me up
front for a record just like the good old days. I'll deliver it by the end of this year and it will be out in
early 2013.
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