Word has filtered down to Allen Klein's New York office that George Harrison wants to get in touch with Todd Rundgren, the all-around rock and roll whiz kid. One can almost see George's piercing, Piscean eye-beams glowering like searchlights across the Atlantic... S.O.S... Badfinger needs a producer... Todd, whose recent credentials include two solo albums and a third in the works; producer of the Band's Stage Fright and the Jesse Winchester album; producer of albums for Paul Butterfield, James Cotton, the American Dream. Who is he?

In a cubicle of the New York branch of Apple (or "ABKCo," as the switchboard operators announce, as though it were a car-rental firm) this Beefeater-type Englishman is sitting behind a desk that looks about three sizes too small, tapping his fingers on a green desk blotter, staring straight ahead. He has a great flaming corned-beef of a beer-soaked head, sort of like Richard Burton, like a man who has dragged himself through all the steam baths of Hell, keeping a stiff upper lip. Good show! He's sitting there in this tiny prefab office with a view of the traffic and chaos below if one cares to look, but frankly, he doesn't - has no idea what he's doing in this godforsaken country anyway ... feels like a missionary in some barbaric outpost.

Surrounding him are all the kinky, bizarre mementos and artifacts that hint at a rich life and an intimate connection with the Exalted Ones; Apple insignias, Apple logos, an Apple wristwatch, that painting of three nude bodies skewered on a sword like shish kabob that Ringo's wife or somebody thought too weird for an album cover, a frisbee, a soccer ball, photos of Yoko, stacks of memos from John "in his own write," and, on the wall directly over his desk, two cute, chubby, button-faced English children, posing on a tailored lawn, staring out unsmiling from the grey English light of a snapshot ... Jonathan, six ... and Cynthia, eight ... those two little strangers... Come, Come, old boy, stiff upper lip.

Apple employees are dashing around trying to look busy, shouting into telephones in rooms where press releases and LPs waterfall onto the acrylic pile carpets, radiating an ambience of hype and ulcers - a far cry from the plans that John Lennon and Paul McCartney flew to New York to announce to the press amid much anticipation back in 1968. Back then Apple sounded like a sort of Magical Mystery Foundation to assist deserving young artists. ("We want to set up a situation so people can make a film without getting down on their knees in somebody's office - probably yours," John told a reporter who had never, as far as he could recall, seen anyone on their knees in his office. Except to look for a contact lens.)

* * * * * *

Way downtown in the bowels of the funky 14th Street area - that notorious corner of 13th Street and Third Avenue on the outskirts of the psychedelic Bowery - Hudson's Army & Navy Store is having a sale on wide-brimmed two-toned pimp fedoras for $3.99. A black one, trimmed in red, sits incongruously there in the window, looking like a customized hotrod in a motorpool of Jeeps among the overalls, workshirts, and heavy duty Goodyear galoshes; it just sits there intended to seduce the neighborhood trade … The neighborhood trade! It makes one's adrenaline flow just to think about it! Look at that group of them standing around Todd Rundgren's house right now.

There's an old blond-wigged hooker with sores all over her legs, drunk and staggering, cursing out her aging junkie pimp; there's Spanish Eddie, who's some kind of wino-revolutionary in his dirty fatigues, beret and scraggly Che-beard - a mean, mucho macho motherfucker! - and there's this hulking red-faced halfwit who looks like an S. Clay Wilson cartoon pirate; and a few others, too gruesome to describe, standing around sort of blocking the entranceway to Todd Rundgren's narrow little brownstone sandwiched between a rotten-toothed tenement that the local junkies use as a shooting gallery and a flea-bitten flophouse where the neighborhood whores ply their trade.

But once Todd Rundgren's massive fortress-like front door is pulled closed behind you, the grim reality of the street ceases to exist, and the street noises and traffic are muffled behind eons of gauze. You find yourself standing in a chilly, inhospitable vestibule with only the faintest trace of daylight coming through a thick frosted glass panel, being scrutinized by the moist, almost rabbity eyes of your host, who is unbelievably scrawny and dressed in a tight Forties poorboy sweater decorated with large stylized musical notes and a pair of midnight-blue pants out of whose billowing bells protrude bare Bugs Bunny feet.

While he was in London shopping for new clothes to add to his phenomenal rock 'n' roll wardrobe, Todd got bored with the mousy brown color of his hair and decided he'd be the first American musician to pick up on the new fad of multicolored hair streaking just starting now among the extremely avant garde fashion leaders of farout English foppery, who are always at lest a decade ahead of American fops and freaks, what with their long history of drawing room decadence to fall back upon. Characteristically, Todd Rundgren is now the only American musician with a lunatic fringe of fluorescent hair, a bright shank of day-glo red and green feathers hanging like a psychedelic dog-ear from one side of his English shag-cut head.

So the immediate impression one gets upon meeting Todd Rundgren for the first time is of a very opinionated half-hatched chicken. You almost expect to see bits of yolk, glistening on the colorful fluorescent earlap feathers, which are, of course, the first thing you notice. The second thing you notice is that his head seems incredibly narrow, almost giving the impression of a frontal profile, if one can even begin to imagine such a thing! Although he is 23, Todd Rundgren could easily be mistaken for an adolescent.

"Follow me," he says and hip-hops up the carpeted steps on his bare bunny feet, gangly arms and legs akimbo, through his looking glass. Clutching a smooth mahogany banister that has not been dusted recently, he leads the way up the winding stairs that lead to a dark hall of gothic dank and shadows, beyond which yawns an large cavernous room with a very high ceiling.

"Watch your step, lots of shit on the floor," he warns, leading you into the room whose floor is a veritable junk-heap of socks, newspapers, magazines, aluminum pie plates with plastic forks stuck in a hardened mucus of sticky crumbs, and an endless variety of carelessly strewn silk and crushed velvet custom-made rock and roll costumes of all kinds, making the room look like the site of some incredible fop-apocalypse.

The heavy draperies that cover the narrow wall-length windows are drawn tightly shot. I was later to learn that they are always kept that way, except for when a visitor uses the novel method of pitching a penny up at the window to let Todd know he has arrived (there is no bell) and Todd will part them momentarily to tap back on the pane to let the visitor know that he'll be down to open the door.

Suddenly a shapely lump under a blanket in a far corner of the room moves. "That's Marlene," Todd says.

Some Clairol feathers stick out from under the blanket and Marlene, the beautiful, willowy Marlene, emits a sleepy groan and turns over, pulling the blanket back over her head. She will remain sleeping during the entire conversation the is to follow. Noticing that you're just sort of wading around in the clutter, Todd motions to the couch, which looks as if it's doubling as a display space at a Salvation Army rummage sale.

Forced into an uneasy proximity for two absolute strangers by the claustrophobic clutter of the room, we both sit there with legs bunched up behind a low coffee table, staring straight ahead as though watching an instructional film about V.D. The coffee table, too, is piled high with an amazing amount of crap: empty chocolate milk containers, a disemboweled Sunday Times, a couple of half-full bottles of Jack Daniels, test pressings of Todd's third solo LP Something/Anything, and an ounce of grass in the usual supermarket baggie.

Todd does a strange thing for a musician beginning an interview - the usual pose being inscrutable cool - and says he is very concerned that the story will turn out well. He has been plagued, he says, by a lot of confusing publicity and there are a lot of misconceptions about who he is and what he has done that he would like to straighten out once an for all. Take the nickname "Runt" that appeared on his last two albums, for example.

"Everyone thought it was the name of a group, like the Runts or the Runt Brothers Band or something like that." Todd is saying as he rolls a joint on an album cover he's balancing on his knees. "So, finally, just to clear up all the confusion, I decided I would name my new band Runt. But now people come up to me on the street and say 'Hiya, Runt!,' so I guess they've got it wrong again. But at least, with the band using the name, now I can go back to being just Todd Rundgren."

Then, of course, there was the whole mix-up about Todd's old group, the Nazz. Everyone thought the Nazz was an English bubble-gum band, even while a small hard-core following revered them with a passion that can only be compared to the almost patriotic fervor roused in the breasts of some denizens of Max's Kansas City with the mere mention of the Velvet Underground.

"My fans are my favorite people." Todd says, deadpan, passing the joint. "I'm really serious, though. I mean, the people who have been following my career - most of them dating back to the Nazz days - send me letters that really freak me out. I mean, they are extremely helpful to me and they present me with some really great insights into myself and my work. I mean, someone who has memorized you songs and can quote them top you - how can you not love someone like that!"

But getting back to the Nazz, part of the confusion had to do with the image, the way the band looked. At a time when most American bands were emulating the funky shitkicker boots-and-denims look of the Grateful Dead, the image of the Nazz evolved from the fact that Todd was (and still is) an almost fanatical Anglophile. You might even say he makes a fetish of it. Ever since Todd first surfaced in downtown Philadelphia's artsy-fartsy coffee house and sandal shop folky scene with a blues-oriented rock group called Woody's Truck Stop when he was 17, he has been displaying an unprecedented amount of a quality that the hip British call "Flash," being one of the first American musicians to get into the whole bizarre English fop trip: the neo-Edwardian frock coats, the crushed velvet codpiece flared-bottom trousers, the elevator-heeled Jose Greco boots with the inlaid silver musical note, stars, and exclamation points running amok all over them, the kinky little chestless-wonder sweaters with snowflake designs and reindeer on them, the printed cartoon and nursery motif Jiminy Cricket waistcoats, the brocade T-shirts, the sequined vests, the snakeskin bikini underwear….

Incredibly skinny, even by unhealthy, indoorsy English standards, Todd was almost a living caricature of the chestless-wonder look so fashionable in male physiques since the British invaded Marlboro country and rendered muscles obsolete, Todd saw in the English fop style a way of transforming himself from the shy awkward kid regarded as weird looking and homely by his classmates all through his childhood in Philadelphia into … something else! He influenced the other members of the group to follow suit.

"I had this whole concept, this whole image figured out. We were going to be really very big - the American Beatles, a really great American group with British flash. We were living in this weird fantasy where we thought it was A Hard Day's Night. We were living as though we had already made it. Our manager had got us this $100,000 contract and we were living off that, not earning any money or playing anywhere because he only wanted to give us what he called 'proper exposure,' and doing things like going to England to record and then finding out that we hadn't registered with the union there so we couldn't get permits to work, but spending a week running around buying clothes and spending money like crazy … taking limousines everywhere. We went through incredible sums thinking that by just living as though we had already made it, somehow the fantasy would come true and we really would." He rolls his eyeballs ceilingward and laughs. "Great reasoning, right? Of course, the fantasy never came true."

The Nazz had one near-hit with a tune called "Hello It's Me," which kept popping up on the charts in out-of-the-way places like Biloxi and Hoboken, and they were even beginning to make some pre-pubescent bosoms palpitate through exposure in the pages of Datebook and Sixteen magazines, but personality clashes and temperamental outbursts developed and things began to deteriorate.

"For one thing the lead singer had this almost demented hoodlum side to his mentality that would just keep surfacing unexpectedly and at weird times. He really couldn't control himself about anything, and had no sense of moderation about anything and would overdo anything he did. He was the main reason I didn't want anybody in the band to take any kind of dope, even to smoke. He was such an excessive character that I thought once he got started on anything at all the whole group would go downhill, and eventually that's what did happen. In fact, when he finally did get heavy into drugs, our manager would use it to control him. He'd take him into a room and turn him on and for a while he could get him to cooperate, do anything as long as he kept him high.

"The drummer was also an interesting case study. It got to the point where he'd just come to sessions and sit there and sulk. God forbid I should ask that he play a specific type of thing that I had in mind. He just wanted to pound away at this one standard rock and roll riff and if I asked him to do something else he'd scream and curse me out, call me names, just refuse outright. It got to the point where I would consider it a victory to just get him to run through a song once. Mistakes and all, I'd use it because it just wasn't worth the hassle to ask him to do anything over.

"Sometimes I would even revise an entire arrangement in order to work in his mistakes and make them seem purposeful. What it came down to was an ego conflict. I was writing all the music and doing most of the work for the band, and they knew it and I knew it. But there are certain delicate types that can't stand being told what to do, and it got to the point where we were four people pulling stubbornly in four different directions. I knew by then that it wasn't going to work so I decided to pull out. I guess I should have known from the beginning, because half the group didn't care about improving our music or working on it at all. All they wanted to do was go out on the road and fuck groupies."

At the time he split from the Nazz, Todd was steadily gaining confidence in himself, and the group's failure only served to reinforce one lesson that he ad been learning and re-learning all his life: people can not be depended upon. This idea escalated to gigantic proportions in his head like a big dope mushroom of paranoia, until he knew that he wanted to learn how to do everything himself. He wanted to master the entire recording process, from start to finish, with the ultimate result being that he would no longer have to rely on others to realize his musical ambitions. While starting his solo recording career, Todd decided that he would also get into production and engineering in order to extend the scope of his possibilities toward these aims.

It wasn't easy. The first three albums Todd engineered (for James Cotton, Libby Titus, and Ian & Sylvia) were never released due to various contract hassles. The album he did for Libby Titus (who happens to be Levon Helm's wife) did bring him into contact with Albert Grossman, however, and he has been associated with Grossman ever since. Finally Todd produced and engineered an album on Ampex called The American Dream, by a group of fellow Philadelphians, which, although it did not sell very well, met with a favorable critical reaction.

Then came a second album for Ian and Sylvia and finally he engineered Jesse Winchester's album which was produced by Robbie Robertson, who in turn introduced him to the Band. Somewhere in there he also released his first solo album, on Ampex, an effort that was all buy obscured by what critics were to regard as his major contribution to the music thus far: engineering Stage Fright, the Band's third album, with all the awe-inflated over-reaction such an accomplishment would inevitably inspire, given the heavy mystique surrounding that group and the simple fact of Todd's prodigious youth…

For awhile, he says, that was all reporters (or anyone else, for that matter) wanted to hear about: what was it like to work with the Band?

"Actually," Todd says, "it was lousy. The Band has this image of being real natural and easy about their music - expert musicianship and all that. They're really just the opposite: real slow and unconfident about everything and you should see them before a gig - they're nervous as hell, running around biting their nails and all - just like they say on the record Stage Fright. I like to work real fast, so it was impossible for me to enjoy working with them."

They would be up there in those primitive makeshift studios of the Woodstock Playhouse that they were using back then, all these rustic types like Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson lounging around in their beards and shitkicker boots, with Albert Grossman overseeing it all like landed gentry with his Ben Franklin pony tail, his red flannel shirt, his suspenders, his workboots, his dog…

There in the middle of this perfect Woodstock woodcut would be the zany cartoon figure of Todd Rundgren, dashing about in his spastic, wizardly fashion, mugging, doing his gross gorilla impersonation, doing anything at all to try and speed all these slowpoke hicks up … to no avail …

Robbie Robertson merely looks up sleepily from his whittling and says "Todd, if you don't simmer down and behave, boy, we're not gonna let you join the Band."

"I couldn't join your band anyway," Todd tells him. "I couldn't grow a beard."

Todd was going bananas hanging around watching the tapes go around while the band fiddled around trying to decide who should play which instrument or else deciding on some riff and then discovering that nobody knew how to play it. Finally it got so bad that Todd had to hire someone else just to come in and watch the tapes for him, and then come back later to do the mixes.

But something that was really satisfying - working on his latest solo album Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren - at Albert Grossman's Bearsville studios up in Woodstock - now, that that was a gas! Things were so busy up there with all of Albert's country cousins and rustic troubadours recording that the only time he could get studio time was at 2 AM. So there he was in the middle of the night driving through these pitch black woods, through the damnable blizzard, five-foot snow drifts, no moon at all, into the darkest unknown to … Bearsville! Just him alone in the middle of the spooky moonless Woodstock night, out there by himself in this fully equipped studio that was practically a log cabin out in the middle of nowhere … he loved it! He was like a kid with his own spaceship, alone and adrift in an infinite universe of possible sound. Outside the wind howled like a motherfucker and stupid bears stumbled around like drunks in the pitch black woods … but inside Todd Rundgren was at the controls, experimenting with his wide range of simulated voices as he laid down the vocal tracks.

"I'm probably the whitest singer in the world," he says, "there's absolutely no ethnic blues sound in my voice. I have no 'soul' in the usual sense - but I can do this great feminine falsetto that sounds just like the way spade chicks sing."

There they were, hanging In there at the mikes, singing harmony as Todd laid down the lead vocal tracks in his lilywhite English sounding tenor - a whole chorus of simulated Merry Claytons wailing away! All alone in the studio, Todd was free to experiment and try new things with his voice, things that just wouldn't have been possible with a whole audience of recording studio groupies getting underfoot. Earlier he had secluded himself in a studio in L.A. to work on the instrumental tracks. He played most of the instruments on the second album himself: guitar, Wurlitzer electric piano, electric clavinet, vibes, tenor and baritone saxes, Putney, chimes, mandolin, pump organ, cowbells, swiss hand bells, sandblocks, triangles, maracas, 7-up cans, beer bottles … How nice not to have to attempt to explain what one wants in the way of some subtle musical nuance to some high school dropout of a bass player who's gazing over your shoulder at some groupie undulating on the control room floor. Todd would prefer to be a side-man on many instruments than a virtuoso on one, simply because it provides him with a wider range for realizing his total sound. He just picked up each instrument as he needed it and taught himself to play well enough to cover whatever sound he needed, but never enough to become very proficient, never enough to say that he could really play the instrument.

"But you do happen to be a very proficient guitarist, don't you?"

He shrugs mock-modestly and says, "I'm afraid so. But I got bored with it for it's own sake. I got so facile on the guitar that there was nowhere left for me to go and it just began to bore me. I guess Leslie West would have to be the premiere American guitarist, but I can play guitar better than Leslie, so I could have challenged him for the role if I had wanted to, but I didn't. Making a reputation as a heavy guitarist is too much of a hassle, like being a gunfighter in the Old West, everybody always trying to cut you. I envision myself developing into … something else."

"What is that?"

"I suppose I've never been able to settle for being less than absolutely the best at anything I do. I can't stand to think that there's anybody anywhere getting more attention than me for doing the same thing I do. I guess what I want more than anything else is to have an … impact. I suppose I envision myself becoming the Elvis Presley of the Seventies!"

Todd has set up two small speakers amid the clutter there on the coffee table to play some cuts from his latest solo album. The first track that he plays has a syncopated Chiquita Banana craziness about it, with all kinds of bright shimmering percussive effects jangling on the surface like nuggets seen through a clear rushing stream, crescendoing (as the third joint begins to take hold) into all kinds of wild rickytick rhumba polyrhythms running randomly amok like the musical backgrounds of Farmer Brown cartoons in a rock and roll parody of … Xavier Cugat!

You can't help remarking that he has an almost comic understanding of the possibilities of his medium and Todd knows exactly what you mean. He smiles broadly, knowing that he does indeed have an incredible comprehension of recording techniques that makes it possible for him to indulge any whim, almost immediately, almost at will …

This eclecticism and ability to transform and use other people's music has caused some critics to assail Todd as a mere flash-in-the-pan Putney wonder, a junior schlockmeister and bubblegum manufacturer. Indeed the bubblegum stigma that sticks to the seat of Todd Rundgren's reputation is not without it's basis in truth, if one is to judge Todd by the shaky and mistaken standards of the ignorant intelligentsia that only embraced rock when the New York Times embraced Sgt. Pepper, failing to grasp in their desperate attempts to attach high art pretensions to rock and roll music (in order that they might claim its energy as their own) - that such an attitude is, in fact, antithetical to the very nature of rock and roll itself, which is after all … popular music by popular definition … music to listen to on your car radio as you cruise around drinking beer … music to make out to …

"Nothing pleases me more," Todd says, "Than to write a love song. I think love songs are the easiest type of song for people to relate to, and I guess I'm kind of a romanticist anyway. I mean, even when I was on the road with the Nazz, I was never really into that whole groupie scene. At least, of I couldn't have a nice groupie, I didn't want any groupie at all. I'd never settle for a dog to have someone to fuck, and I'd never waste some girl's time if I didn't care for her, because I don't like to waste my own. For me there has to be a certain amount of love, or at least … respect. Take my relationship with Marlene, for example. She's only 17, but she's very smart, knows a lot about people. She's always been the prettiest one in her crowd, so she's the one that got asked out, and she's been around quite a bit for someone her age. Before she met me she dated mostly older guys, guys who were confident of themselves and probably a lot better looking than I am, but they really didn't know how to treat her. She said she's never met anyone like me before. I mean, in certain ways I'm not so confident or anything … but IO have a lot to offer a girl" - and here from the way he lowers the tone of his voice confidentially and leans forward, you must almost expect him to jab you in the ribs - "If there's one thing I know, man, it's how to treat a woman!"

Suddenly it's as though you're fraternity brothers having a bull session in someplace like the Whiffenpoof Pub - the only things missing are the steins of beer. Now, almost on cue, a song called "Marlene" starts to come out of the speakers there on the cluttered coffee table, an unabashed love song with the lines like, "Marlene, you're the prettiest girl I've ever seen." When it's over you tell him it was a nice song and he says:

"Yeah, and what's really the nicest thing of all about it is - you can substitute any name you want … right?"

He explains that he has this "common denominator" that he applies to all of his lyrics that determines whether he develops a song past the first germinal idea: the listener must be able to identify emotionally if the song is to be successful.

"I wrote 'Hello It's Me' that way. I analyzed a lot of successful popular songs and figured out what it was that made them successful, the emotional ingredients, you might say. I was writing a song that I knew would have a certain success because I was composing according to a proven formula." Then, almost as an afterthought he adds: "I don't think that writing that way means that I have to compromise my intentions, because my intentions are to write successful songs."

The cut that issues from the speakers next stops Todd short. He cocks his head like the RCA Victor dog and listens. The cut somehow reminds you of the large collage of a guitar that Todd's mother made from cut-up magazine photos, which hangs somewhat in the shadows high on the wall opposite the couch. The playing is very dramatically evocative and flash: it makes you think of the image of a guitar more than anything else - perhaps some surrealistic vision of a Daliesque melting guitar, smoking and undulating in a hall of mirrors. Todd tells you that he played the cut for Mike Bloomfield up in Woodstock and the guitarist jumped up and down saying "That's the ultimate guitar riff! The ultimate guitar riff!"

Of course this knocked Todd out because Bloomfield has always been one of his favorite guitarists in the whole world. He can remember going to hear the Blues Project at the Au Go Go and sitting so close to the amps for two consecutive sets that he almost blew his brains out.

"Mike sure is crazy," he says, shaking his feathers appreciatively. The perfect host, he lights another joint and you mention that one of his friends had told you that a lot of his energy came from a desire to "get even" - although he would not be specific about whom or what Todd was trying to get even with.

"Well, I think that's probably true to a certain extent. At least it used to be. There was a point at which I suppose I was motivated partially by a desire to get even with some of the people who were saying I wasn't going to make it. I guess I used to be kind of bitter, you might say … but I haven't felt that way for quite a while …"

And then he merely smiles because - well, it's self-evident. Bright expensive colors flash like jewels from the yawning closet whose door has been left ajar. No reason to be bitter anymore at all.

Continued in Part 2 ...