February 1997Todd Rundgren
By Brett Milano
If Todd Rundgren didn't get bored so easily, he might have a catalog filled with nothing but pop hits. He proved early in his career that he could write them with the best, and he's returned to the pop-song format often enough to produce some memorable ones over the years. But he's always claimed the right to try whatever musical approach interests him, whether or not it's what fans are expecting. This maverick streak has stalled his commercial momentum more than once, but it's made him one of rock's definitive cult artists.
For that reason, anyone putting together an album called The Very Best Of Todd Rundgren is asking for trouble -- any two fans can argue for days over what that is, and Rundgren himself says that "My own 'very best' might be a completely different list, and the idea of a permanent list doesn't hold a lot of weight for me -- I'd rather put all the songs up on a server somewhere." Still, contained here is his best-known and most enduring work within a more or less pop format.
After playing in a couple of Philadelphia garage bands and just missing pop stardom with his late '60s band Nazz, Rundgren made his solo debut with the boppy "We Gotta Get You A Woman." Playfully sexist in an American Graffiti sort of way, the song ruffled a few feathers due to an oft-misinterpreted lyric: "Talking 'bout things about that special one/They may be stupid but they sure are fun" (in other words, the things you say when you're in love -- not women -- are stupid). "There may be some objectification of women in there, but it harks back to a more innocent era -- like Frankie Avalon saying, 'Hey, Venus, just send me a girl, put sunlight in her hair,'" he notes. "But people did take it the wrong way."
As if to make amends, he showed his most sensitive side on the next single, "Be Nice To Me," among the first in a long string of lush ballads. "Yeah, it's just a fluffy little pop song. A song like that is really more about the arrangement -- the chorale at the end, the little soft-shoe thing. I was starting to pay more attention to the structure of the track."
The experimentation reached an early peak on his third solo album, the two-disc epic Something/Anything? Dispensing with the outside rhythm sections (and the halfhearted band name "Runt") on his first two efforts, Rundgren played every instrument on three of the four sides, before efficient drum machines and digital mixing were even invented. Instead of even using a click track, he laid the basics simply by sitting down at the drum kit and humming the song to himself. "I'd get in there with the song in my head and just play the damn thing. That's why some of the songs begin and end in a completely different tempo." Still, the album's one-man show aspect was enough to spawn his reputation for technical wizardry. "I don't think it was particularly earthshaking," he says. "A couple of people had done the same thing -- people who could afford it, like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. I suppose that what people found curious was the level of production and maybe the variation between styles."
Besides the quintessential power pop of "I Saw The Light" and "Couldn't I Just Tell You," the album made swings to hard guitar rock, lush balladry, and proto-progressive rock. But its biggest hit came off the fourth side, recorded live-in-studio with a large band making up the arrangements on the spot. "Hello It's Me" was his second stab at the tune, which was the A-side of Nazz's first single. "The original version was very dirgelike, so I don't think it had been done as well as it could have. My style had evolved a little bit, so why not give it a try; it's one less song to write. And damned if it didn't become a hit." And a mixed blessing, since "Hello It's Me" started getting airplay just as Rundgren was pursuing a more avant-rock direction with the first Utopia lineup; for years he ignored requests for what was then his greatest hit. "I played it for awhile, then got sick of doing it. Regardless of how many people wanted to hear it, I had to get some enjoyment out of it as well."
Songs were coming fast and furious during the Something/Anything? sessions; he reckons that "I Saw The Light" took all of 20 minutes to write. "That album took so little time that it wasn't as much fun to write anymore. You learn something new and then you master it; for me, working from a state of complete mastery isn't that rewarding. A significant part was drawing on the two or three heartbreaking relationships I'd had in my life and just beating them to death -- it was time to get over it, to move on and write about something else. And psychedelic drugs also had something to do with it."
All of which explains the radical departure that was A Wizard, A True Star, the kaleidoscopic 1973 album that replaced self-contained songs with a dreamlike segue of bits and snippets. "If you want to see these albums as reflections of my mental condition, then I'm evolving through a greater expansion of possibilities. On A Wizard, A True Star I'm seeing possibilities in everything -- the idea of breaking down song structure and making a continuous flow of music; starting to throw in more instrumental stuff. A Wizard, A True Star represented how broad the possibilities were."
The anthemlike finale, "Just One Victory," was one of the first songs recorded, and hence one of the album's more straightforward moments. Begun in a live-band session and finished through a mass of overdubs, "Victory" owes its less-than-ideal sound quality to a studio engineer's error: running the tape at a too-slow rate of 7 1/2 ips. "It became one of those scary tapes that you carry around under your arm; in the end you've got this pig with wings that has to be tamed into listenability. The song certainly struck a chord with the audience; I liked it most from the standpoint of writing in a new genre." Drawn from the following year's equally ambitious album, Todd, "A Dream Goes On Forever" marked a brief and gorgeous return to the pop-ballad format. While the song could have easily fit on Something/Anything?, the synth-driven production was miles ahead.
Pulling another about-face, Rundgren proceeded to get metaphysical on 1975's Initiation. Easily his most challenging album, it ran an unprecedented 67 1/2 minutes on one vinyl disc, devoting one side to an instrumental suite and the other to spiritually inclined songs performed in a fusionesque style. After cultivating an androgynous glitter-rock image, Rundgren was now becoming a "Real Man" -- though he meant that in a spiritually evolved, not a Charles Atlas, sense.
"I was interested in applying music to the idea of understanding yourself," he explains. "And understanding all the transcendent underpinnings of the situations you find yourself in. Realizing, for example, that sex is a natural born compulsion, not a choice you ever had. Or that you're part of a legacy and a system that compels you to do certain things; and how do you escape that? So 'Real Man' was the theme song of that round of realization. I knew I wasn't going to be writing typical boy-girl songs anymore, or I was going to lose interest. Or worse, to not feel completely honest about what I was doing."
For his next solo album, 1976's Faithful, he chose a more down-to-earth but equally ambitious concept: To celebrate his ten-year anniversary making music (or at least since graduating high school), he coupled a side of late '60s covers -- arranged and produced to sound just like the original versions -- with a side of his most straight-ahead material in years. "The first side was a tribute to the music that had influenced me in my seminal years; and the other was what it had evolved to," he explains. His carbon-copy cover of The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" got some novelty airplay, but the standouts were on the flip side -- notably "Love Of The Common Man," which has turned up regularly in his live shows ever since. "Well, it's easy to play and the kids like it. The song is so cryptic that even I don't know what it means literally; the idea was to write something that allowed people to infer a meaning that was especially poignant to them."
Meanwhile, Rundgren had a parallel career going with the band Utopia. Originally an outlet for his experimental art rock side, the first lineup had three synthesizer players and a stack of 15-minute songs. By 1977 Utopia had become a more accessible rock band with all four members -- Rundgren, bassist Kasim Sulton, keyboardist Roger Powell, and drummer John "Willie" Wilcox -- sharing in the writing, vocals, and production; the lineup would remain stable for another decade.
The second Utopia album released in 1977, Oops! Wrong Planet, scored a conceptual coup by working some '60s-inspired, universal-love sentiments into a gritty, rock context -- check out the mix of tough and tender on "Love In Action," which arrived just in time for the Summer of Punk. "We didn't know that punk was going to happen, but we always liked making our own goofy commentary on things. If you look at the album cover, we're making a little comment on punk attitude by using the ugliest personal photos we could possibly come up with."
Putting the same sentiments into a gentler form, "Love Is The Answer" was the album's hit single, but not for Utopia: Instead a soundalike version by soft-rockers England Dan & John Ford Coley hit the charts a couple of years later. "You assume that any time someone does a cover of your song, it's because someone says, 'This could be a big hit single.' So they essentially skim it to make it more radio friendly -- it's like making skim milk."
Likewise, "Can We Still Be Friends" (from 1978's Hermit Of Mink Hollow, again with Rundgren on every instrument) became something of a standard, spawning covers by Robert Palmer and Rod Stewart. "It wasn't a particularly challenging song to come up with; the words are actually kind of dippy," he says. "Sometimes you get on a roll and start writing these dippy kinds of lyrics and you say, 'What the hell.' Sometimes those songs mean so much to people because of their simplicity. But that's what makes them less fun to play 19 years later."
Utopia was at its toughest for "The Very Last Time," a chunky rocker that could have been inspired by a personal relationship on the skids or by the band's worsening relationship with its label, Bearsville. "That's the downside of having a hit record -- if you show a boneheaded attitude or write something in a fit of pique, it's out there for the rest of your life. Sometimes writing a song is like writing an e-mail late at night, and then firing it off before you think better of it." Of course, nasty e-mails don't have chorus hooks like this one.
In a lighter vein, "Bang The Drum All Day" is the best known of Rundgren's novelty songs. It's also a change of pace from 1983's generally somber The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect, an album he isn't much keen on. "I was pretty sick of my relationship with Bearsville at that point, and I didn't feel like working hard on that record, so it's not one I'm proud of. 'Bang The Drum' was just a song I dreamed; I woke up with the chorus and put it down on tape, so I had to write something just as stupid for the verses." Profound or not, the song's been a recurring favorite and an audience-participation tune at gigs; it was also an appropriate choice when he toured with Ringo Starr in the early '90s.
The production wizardry came back into play for 1985's A Cappella, an all-solo effort using nothing but vocals. Sometimes they were sung in traditional a cappella style; more often the voices were fed into an emulator and used to create the sound of a full band -- notably on "Something To Fall Back On," a large-scale Motownish production.
Coming up to the post-Bearsville and post-Utopia era, the 1989 release Nearly Human found Rundgren again performing live-in-studio with a large band and reconnecting with his soul roots by duetting with Bobby Womack on "The Want Of A Nail." His knack for hooks hasn't let up, but this song has an emotional depth that was barely hinted at in the "We Gotta Get You A Woman" days. "I'd considered different people for the duet; at one point I tried Peter Gabriel, but it didn't work out timing-wise. But of course it was very cool when Bobby Womack became available. 'Want Of A Nail' isn't that romantic but it can be construed that way; it's another one of those tunes that can be interpreted in a broader context."
Rundgren's been just as prolific in recent years, though much of his creativity has been channeled into the computer medium, under the new guise of TR-I (for Todd Rundgren Interactive). And his maverick attitude is firmly intact. "I assume that people buy my records not just because they're entertaining -- you get some challenges, some things to figure out. To be able to produce music that other people can take seriously, I had to take it that seriously myself. And I'm aware of the fact that music is essentially a plagiaristic art form: it's nearly impossible for someone to be wholly original, so the only kind of music that exists is derivative music." Of course, as this collection points out, some peoples' music is less derivative than others.
-- Brett Milano February 1997