The Todd Rundgren thread.*

I have to get back to work, but here are a few things about being a Todd fan:

He tours constantly.

You have no idea how much this matters. My other favorite artist is Kate Bush, and if you're not familiar with her...I've been a fan since December of 1978, and in all of the years since then, I have had the opportunity to see her exactly once.​

He changes it up.

Not everyone is going to enjoy every tour, but he is always trying to come up with new concepts to keep it interesting. Touring Acapella with only a choir. Touring With A Twist performing on a stage set for a tiny audience. Touring No World Order in the "Todd Podd" as a sort of mobile rave.
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He's brilliant.

The word "genius" is one of the most over-used terms in music. But Todd is one of the few who would be considered a genius even if he had never composed a note of music (Frank Zappa is another.) He delves into his hobbies like computer graphics to such a level that he has the respect of people in the field who are unaware that he's a musician. He predicted digital music storage and streaming and actually worked with Time-Warner to build it.
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He gives a great interview.

 

Todd saved their career... which is something Andy has never been able forgive, for reasons surpassing understanding. Todd's explanation of the faults in their previous albums, was that by not touring, Andy would keep fiddling with the mix, adding more stuff until it had no air - that if you looked at a track on a spectrograph, all frequencies will be at roughly the same volume.

Todd requested all their demos, picked the songs, and arranged it all into a concept. And recorded it in order.

He also served as arranger. Andy asked him to turn his guitar and voice demo of The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul into something "John Barry/Exotica". Todd left, and wrote all the arrangements overnight. Andy grumpily admitted "He has the people skills of a Dalek, but is a God among arrangers."

 

Maybe too much for Andy's ego to admit?

 

Andy described the experience as "Two Hitlers in one bunker."

 

Guess I’m the only one not in love with Liars. Yes it’s true it’s probably his best in a long time but that’s saying more about the quality of the other albums, which in my opinion are pretty crappy. Liars has this Casio instrumentation that turns me off and having two awful songs like Soul Brother and Happy Anniversary back to back kills it for me.

 

I've been a Todd-head since I was 14 ('75)

Been to more Todd shows than any other artist I can think of. So happy he's still out there touring and creating new music even as he approaches 70.

If I have to rank my Top 5:

Nearly Human
Liars
Todd
Healer
AWATS

 

Hi, my own story is, I got into Rundgren in the late 80s circa the Nearly Human release and the accompanying promotional appearances he was doing on David Sanborn’s Night Music and David Letterman shows at the time. This led to me go out and purchase that release on CD. It was packaged in those old rectangular boxed formats the record companies were trying at the time - a really long rectangular box with the CD artwork on it and at the very top the CD.

After that I wound up getting a copy of book called “The Producers” from a used book store. It’s a book accompanying a BBC show in the early 80s and in it is a full chapter on Rundgren. The book is from the early 80s and covers a lot of Rundgren’s own music, his work with Utopia and other artists productions he did in the 70s to early 80s including Grand Funk Railroad, Meatloaf, Phelix Chevallier and others. From that book I wound up learning a lot about Rundgren and his background as a musical artist.

Then around the early 90s during big recession in Canada, A&A stores went bankrupt and dumped their entire inventory on sale in their stores for dirt cheap. I went around all the stores picking up whatever I could find and through that period I pretty much picked up the all the Rundgren & Utopia Bearsville catalog that Rhino had re-released in the early 90s. I would say from that point onwards I became a “hard core” fan of Rundgren. I saw him live three times so far. So I don’t think I am the biggest fan on this site as there are much more hard core fans than me.

As far as, what is it about his music that is so great? I think it’s a mixture of various styles of music that I am familiar with but it’s been packaged together into Rundgrens own unique vision. It’s a bit of rock, hard rock, Philly soul, R&B, pop, Brill building era singer/songwriter stuff, in more recent decades EDM and so on. It’s just all sort of put together by Rundgren in his own way. A little but like Prince in some ways, and I am a huge fan of his music. The correct term for it is “pastiche” I think. A mixture of different types of artistic forms a person is familiar with but presented in a different way.

My own personal favorite Rundgren records are the more off beat ones such as Healing, Hermit of Mink Hollow, Faithful, The Ballad of Todd Rundgren.

If I were to recommend records for someone to start off with getting into Rundgren, I would suggest Something/Anything, No World Order, Nearly Human

Good luck in your travels of Rundgren-land.

 

i recently got the box set with the first 10 albums. i was pleasantly surprised with the albums ... i would want to listen a lot more before i attempted to put my two cents in

 

In the 2 disc set of Skylarking, Andy gives Todd serious props for Man who Sailed. He seems at least to have accepted that Todd deserves almost all the credit for the song.

Being English, I think Andy can't get over Todd's 'rude' (for lack of a better word) way he behaves when he produces. Or as I heard it once, "Todd just isn't a people person."

 

At the risk of trying to be an amateur psychoanalyst, Todd's personality is a mix of several things: incredibly intelligent, introverted, sarcastic and very likely ADD or ADHD, Couple that with his being a huge nerd/computer geek (what kind of kid memorizes entire Gilbert & Sullivan musicals and dreams of building a robot friend?) and you have the makings of a social misfit...dressed as a rock star. On the other hand, he is a devoted father and husband and nobody who has listened to his albums and read the lyrics can doubt his essential empathy.

The conflict between Andy and Todd was partly because he didn't have the patience to sit around and pretend to be interested while a bunch of talented musicians, who had already recorded eight albums at that point, sat around figuring out what they were going to do on a particular track. Todd would either read a magazine or head home, telling them to call when they were ready to record.

 

Exactly. I believe both had unrealistic expectations. Todd could have tried to see that these guys could never work quickly and Andy needed to understand who was in charge.
Obviously, Dave was so in love with Todd he would have shoveled the snow off Todd's sidewalk for the chance to work with him, but Andy should have looked into what Todd's 'people skills' were.

 

Rundgren's discography is very good and peculiar at the same time.

I am a huge Rundgren fan but I am also at the same time a huge 70s music fan. There was a lot of great quality music made in the 70s and IMO people of the likes of Lenny Woronker and Ted Templeman and many others made a number of records that were much better than Rundgren's if you were to compare them to recording technique, recording quality, musicanship and overall songwriting -- but none the less, Rundgrens work still holds up well and holds a special place in 70s American rock music of the era ing and holds up well on its own. He did some very interesting and special sounding records when he was working out of Woodstock, NY.

 

I read somewhere that although Todd has produced many albums, no-one's ever allowed him to produce more than one album for them. I'm not sure if this is true but I suspect it is. However when I listen to Todd's music I don't think that he probably doesn't have great interpersonal skills, I just think he's a great songwriter & musician. No-one's perfect.

 

Some bands did only work with Todd on one album but Grand Funk had him produce two.

 

...as did The Tubes (Remote Control and Love Bomb) and The Pursuit of Happiness (Love Junk and One Sided Story)...and The New York Dolls (self-titled and Cause I Sez So.) That's a big pile of albums to ignore.

It's a myth. Also, members of both those bands have worked with him afterwards. If Todd were half the jerk Andy claims he was, he'd have a lot more burned bridges in his wake. Instead, his most recent album White Knight features people he's produced - Daryl Hall, Moe Berg - as well as his peers - Trent Reznor, Donald Fagen, Joe Satriani.

Todd has said that he's not particularly interested in working with the same people over and over. If the myth were true, that would sound like a wounded ego speaking, but to some extent, he's the production equivalent of a corporate "turnaround artist" - an executive brought in to repair a company. Once it's fixed (they have the hit record, in this case) it's no longer interesting to him.

 

andy partridge? ... if that's the andy we're talking about, i imagine that may have been an andy issue and not a todd issue. i like xtc but partridge is an odd sausage

 

My take is that Andy Partridge was offended that Todd was better at sarcasm than he was.

 

and more than likely music .... whoops, i've said too much

 

huh?? how are those artists "peers"? maybe Fagan but the other two are totally different generation and genres.

 

i think there is also the story that Rundgren produced artists who went on to become much bigger artists afteron -- except for MeatLoaf.

There is a cool hard ot find CD called "an LP's worth of tunes" which is basically a compilation of Rundgren productions. My fav TR production is Psychadalic Furs and XTC

 

Having just worked on an album with a producer, it would have been a lot more enjoyable had I just done it with an engineer (as I am doing with the two extea tracks I decided to add).

Production can unfortunately turn into an adversarial situation when an artist has a clear vision and a producer wants to impose theirs. But I do believe my end product is better for it even if the process was hell.

But next time, just an engineer please - unless somehow this one turns into a hit, which I will have to accept could not have happened without the input of a more seasoned producer.

 

Glad to be corrected.

 

I meant peers as fellow musicians. Isn't Trent a peer - someone in the same field, a songwriter and musician?

 

In the case of the Tubes, that is true, and The Pursuit of Happiness never had that hit they deserved. But We're An American Band was a huge hit for Grand Funk, Love My Way redefined the Psychedelic Furs (that's Todd on marimba.)

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01M...X236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=todd+runddans. I'm having trouble posting the link to this great album. My review is featured on the first page. Highly recommend this album.