Lennon in response to Todd Rundgren

He did.
It was posthumously released. You need to look for "Skywriting By Word of Mouth".

It's not as good as either "A Spaniard in the Works" or "In His Own Write" though.

 

Interesting - thanks

 

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Eh. I take everything John says with a grain of salt. He was also back under the thumb of Yoko when he made those "it was horrible" comments...what else was he supposed to say? I don't want to turn this into a Yoko-bashing thread so I'm not gonna go further with this, but I don't think it's wise to cherry-pick which things John said can be taken at face value and which can't. The guy was a true wildcard!

 

Lennon definitely was *****-whipped because of Yoko. That cannot be denied, but the dude was a flake before he even met her. That silly letter affirms it.

 

Many gifted musicians are equally adept at being dickheads.

 

If only he had been more worried about his image….perhaps he would have written a more thoughtful, perfectly stated letter for the ages. One that could be dissected 40 years later and admired. After all, such an important rock icon like TR deserves it. We can only speculate what historians will think of this important letter in the next 50 years…..and how they will analyze it.

 

That was such an arrogant (and may I say, ignorant?) statement that I had to laugh in disbelief. I mean, really? Oh sorry, I forgot: nobody dares to even think of attacking or offending HIM ever so slightly! That's unthinkable! Now Todd's not even worthy of being in the same band with Maestro Ringo Starr himself. Oh wait, maybe it's a good idea after all, to fire everyone from the band and leave Ringo alone - that way we might be able to see what he could come up with on his own - Todd Rundgren-style.

Speaking of Todd, I was listening to his new album Global the other day, and hey, the man is still churning out some good stuff. It may not be up to par to his previous work but still is light years ahead of Ringo's last effort imo.

 

Ouch. So unfair! Ok, Todd may have a bit of a stomach but the dude can still rock with the best of them. His 70's album run is pretty darned impression and even his work with Nazz.

Anyhow, this isn't a competiton (the third time I've had to use that phrase in two days....mmmm).

Both titanic sized talents with flaws that could sink them. Feet of clay, feet of clay (or we could say what the Roman slaves you to whisper into victorious Casear's ear as he traveled down the main strip in Rome ack in the day--all glory is fleeting)

 

Or he could've also just chosen to ignore what he felt was a snub. Of course, he was never at a loss for words and was prone to overreaction.

 

On Todd's ill-fated "Waking Dreams" web site he included an excerpt from the autobiography he was working on. That excerpt described an incident where Todd went with Brian Wilson to the Troubadour in Hollywood to see Larry Coryell, and Brian freaked out from the intensity of it all. Is that the bit you're thinking of? I don't remember him discussing the Lennon escapade there, though he's talked about it many times since.

"Waking Dreams" had some good potential and I'm sorry it never panned out. I saved a copy of the whole site before it disappeared. I think archive.org may still have it, too.

 

Oh, I'm sure he ignored quite a bit of things back then.

Words? Yeah, one of the best lyric writers of the 60's. Also think it's great that at times he gave it to people when they deserved it, instead of being a putz protecting an image.

 

There was a part on Waking Dreams, but there were also three "chapters" on the Interocitor, I believe. As Todd wrote the while misbegotten thing in Director, there was no way to save it.

I had forgotten WakingDreams, and looked through the Archive, but wasn't able to pull up anything other than scattered content. If you can find your backup, I'd be happy to host it somewhere.

 

What is wild to me is that John Lennon was doing his insensitive imitation of "spastics" and disabled persons in 1964 when that was unfortunately more accepted in society while Paul McCartney apparently raised not a single note of protest in November 2014 when Chelsea Handler made a joke on Heather Mills' disability at a tribute to his daughter Stella at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan and as recently as the 2015 Esquire interview, Macca was documented doing his "comedy Yoko accent" and if I can guess that imitation of her "accent" probably resembled the not so comedic imitation of Japanese done by Westerner actors and comedians throughout WW II.

I guess it was more than songwriting that tied those two together!

 

He is 67 years old, after all. I too prefer "skinny Todd" of the 70s, but people do change as they get older.

 

Yeah, I'm 54, and count myself lucky that I didn't have ever see my grandparents as rock stars.

Between tours, the life of a musician is a fairly sedentary one, sitting on your butt in a studio (or hunched over a laptop in Todd's case.) It's worse in his case, because his primary means of recreation is computer programming, so when he's not at the laptop making music, he's at the laptop doing other stuff.

But yeah, short of plastic surgery, most people in their mid-sixties are going to go a bit slack in places. I suppose the problem is that Todd was skinny in his heyday, and still dresses like a skinny dude, and it's not particularly flattering.

 

I don't get it. This is a decades old slightly manufactured conflict. Both parties dropped it years ago but people are getting in an uproar about it now.

I enjoy the work of both artists and I know both of them could be egotistical jerks. That seems to be evident from this whole childish exchange.

John Lennon's influence and legacy in popular music is larger than Todd's. Todd himself has participated in many musical tributes to the Beatles. Notwithstanding all that Todd is a huge talent and has an admirable musical legacy himself. This silly incident doesn't diminish Todd's body of work in any way.

 

During the first A Walk Down Abbey Road show I saw in Chicago, Todd said that these songs "...are now encoded in the human DNA" (a particularly Todd thing to say)

 

Then your words don't count so much being a die hard, LOLOL. Usually that disqualifies one from being fair and neutral rather than gives their words weight.

 

never read that before...I enjoyed it very music. I am not a big fan of Todd...

 

Humor takes many forms: sometimes cerebral, sometimes physical, sometimes witty, sometimes silly, sometimes appreciated, sometimes offensive.

Enough of the PC rhetoric already. How about trying to lighten up?



Me thinks Lennon was simply releasing nervous energy on stage.

 

No, I've given every one of Todd's albums a fair listen. I'm not a raving fan-boy, and have no use for some of his later albums like Todd Rundgren's Johnson and dislike some of his earlier albums. I can fairly say that I rank 2004's Liars above 1972's Something/Anything. It really is exceptional.

I don't think I've ever met a Todd fan who likes everything Todd has done, because he has such a vast range of musical styles. But those of us who have stuck with him, and given each album a fair chance, have had our musical horizons expanded. State and Global are in the EDM sphere, and the tours for both were very entertaining.

By the way, using the phrase "LOLOL" in a post never helps your position.

 

The LOLOL is just a way to make my point to be not taken very seriously.

 

Sorry, but it just looks childish.

Anyway, Todd is an immensely talented songwriter, performer and producer - not just my opinion, but one shared by a lot of critics. But like many of his peers, he has a difficult time getting heard by radio programmers who have slotted him neatly into the "nostalgia" slot, and he was never popular enough in the first place that the record company can heavily market it to those programmers. Couple that with his lack of desire to keep mining the same musical seam over and over, and you have someone whose new albums tend to only be heard by the same 100,000 people every time.

Which is a shame.