ZIG ZAG INTERVIEW - volume 6 issue 5 august 1975.
A ZigZag interview with Todd Rundgren could get well out of hand if we
weren't too careful. Not only has he been around long enough to be in a
group that made three albums and then gone on to produce seven albums of his
own, but each one of those albums deserves more consideration than I'm
afraid we've got time or space for. In my eyes Todd Rundgren is one of the
most important figures to emerge in rock music in the 1970's. Although it's
sometimes hard to perceive, his roots are mainly in early 60's British pop
and American Blues, and the rest is just product of his own, fervent
imagination and 70's technology. His music is more demanding and complex
than most, the musicians he surrounds himself with are as good as you'll
find anywhere, and his stage show and performance is more elaborate and
visually exciting than the average American rock 'n' roll band. (He's also a
fucking ace producer.)
Todd Rundgren has a reputation for being pretentious eccentric, as
technically precise in his speech as he is in his music, absurd, bombastic,
and just plain weird. His critics say that. And I must admit that as time
goes by there seem to be more of them....disappointed with every further
release and unable (or unwilling) to come to terms with Todd's philosophies
and musical ambitions. Reaction to his most recent album, Initiation, has
been mixed to say the least, but I like it a great deal. But there again I
like all his albums for one reason or another, and if by chance you've yet
to lend your ears to anything he's done, try the two double albums
Something/Anything? and Todd for a fairly balanced indication of his ability.
The interview that follows took place during Rundgren's recent visit to this
country when he finalized dates for a British tour to commence sometime in
October. Interjections by me are left to the minimum to avoid sending you to
sleep, and my usual astoundingly perceptive powers of analysis have been
mercifully curbed so there is no heavy intellectual toffee apple job done on
his albums...just the man himself talking.
PRE-NAZZ
I had a band called Woody's truck stop when 'underground music' was
recognized as an entity in 1966 - about the time the first FM stations
appeared in the States. I had just graduated from High School and I had no
salable skill except to play guitar, so I joined this local band - a band
that played the blues in a very white manner - it was hip to do so in those
days. I became second guitar player in this band - I didn't deserve lead
guitar player status yet. That was where I essentially learned how to play
guitar...my nine months or so with that band, after which I left and started
The Nazz.
ZZ: Paul Fishkin was the manager of Woody's Truck Stop wasn't he?
He was, yeah. He wasn't a manager in the sense that a manager is today
because in those days we were all hippies and he just happened to be the one
with the money so he paid for our equipment and stuff.
The Personnel of Woody's truck stop changed about three million times during
it's undistinguished career, but while Todd was in the band, the line-up was
mostly Alan Miller (Lead Guitar), Bobby Radeloff (Vocals), Kenny Radeloff,
Carsen Van Osten, and Todd. Who were all these people?
No-one memorable. Alan Miller played guitar and his claim to fame was that
he was in Time magazine - this is how the band got famous. He was in Time
magazine because he had grown his hair and refused to cut it, and the state
said he had the right to have long hair but the school authorities wouldn't
let him in school. So they had him go to school by telephone. They had a
picture of him at home with a little speaker listening to the teacher at
school. At any rate he didn't even go to college after that - he went right
into this rock 'n' roll band. There were two brothers - Bobby and Kenny
Radeloff. Bobby was the dig stud lead singer that all the girls went for and
the last I heard he was working in a studio in Florida - the studio that
Steve Alaimo does a lot of work at. Betty Wright cut 'clean up woman' there.
Kenny Radeloff - I have no idea what happened to him. There were
in-numerable personnel changes. In fact I think during the life of the band
they had some twenty-two members. The final band didn't have one original
member but the name kept going.
ZZ: So did you actually join them and leave?
I joined them and left and the band kept going. I left because they became
subject to the psychedelic craze and decided they wanted to 'go country and
get their heads together'. You could tell psychedelic music because it
didn't have a steady rhythm - it would speed up and slow down and get loud
and quiet. And that was their music. After that I started The Nazz.
THE NAZZ
I started the Nazz using local musicians. I stole the bass player from
Woody's Truck Stop - Carsen Van Osten, and the last I heard of him he was in
LA working for Walt Disney drawing Mickey Mouse comic books for European
distribution. In fact I think they're even letting him make up his own
stories... you go to school and they teach you to draw Mickey Mouse exactly
the same as everybody else. I stole members from other local bands. At any
rate we formed the Nazz and The Nazz was our concept band - we were going to
take the world by storm. We had this way we dressed, and we acted in this
whole affected manner, like English mods I suppose. anyway after about 1.5
years that all disintegrated into personnel hassles and management hassles,
and just dissatisfaction all around. I think I was the second member to
split, the first was the bass player. The last I heard of Stewkey he was
working in Philidelphia. He had a band called The Sad Old Men Of Europe
(sic) or something like that - I think I heard a demo that they did. As far
as I know no-one in that band has made any inroads as a professional
musician. After I left the band they tried to keep it going for a while. I
left the band and I didn't have any money and the were doing gigs because
they needed the money so I did a few gigs with them, and every time I showed
up there would be a different bass player there. Eventually I just got tired
of that.
PRODUCING
Rundgren then signed to Albert Grossman's management company as an
engineer/producer.
Initially I didn't think of myself as a solo artists, I wanted to produce at
that time. And I'd got a certain amount of encouragement from a few people
so I started producing. First I started producing a local band in
Philidelphia who were signed to Bearsville Records called The American
Dream,. They were also managed by Paul Fishkin - that was they we signed
them - and by this time Paul was becoming more professional as opposed to
being a hippie businessman, and ultimately he became president of Bearsville
records. My production and engineering credits include albums by Jesse
Winchester, Halfnelson (later to become Sparks), Moogy Klingman, American
Dream, Ian and Sylvia's Great Speckled Bird, James Cotton, The Band, Paul
Butterfield, Badfinger, Grand Funk, Felix Cavaliere, New York dolls, Hello
People, Daryl Hall and John Oates. I never engineer an album that I'm not
producing because engineering is a non-creative job for the most part - your
supposed to take instructions and the blame if anything goes wrong.
RUNT
I hadn't really planned on a solo career, but at a certain point I had some
time and some songs that I'd been fooling around with and I thought I'd give
it a try. So I went out and recorded the album Runt,a nd as it turned out it
shocked everybody because they didn't think I was capable of doing it in
terms of an album with that much individuality to it. For me it was a very
experimental album. I'd never done a solo thing before and I didn't know
what I was supposed to do or what I could do. So I just did a whole variety
of things.
And then I did an album called The Ballad of Todd Rundgren which everybody
who heard it loved the crap out of it but it didn't sell anything - it sold
the least of all my albums, because it had no hit single on it or whatever.
It also came out at a time when Ampex Records were folding and we were in
the process of transferring to Warner Bros. So it really didn't get the
promotion that it deserved. Ultimately, that and the first album are going
to be re-released probably within the next year as a double package.
The making of the two albums mentioned above go hand in hand with the
existence of an informal band simply called Runt which consisted of Todd,
and two brothers, Hunt and Tony Sales;Hunt played the drums and was later to
be replaced by N.D.Smart II from Mountain for a while and Tony played Bass.
Various other people helped out on the albums.
Tony and Hunt Sales were local characters on the scene in New York. There's
a club in New York called Steve Paul's The Scene and all the English acts
used to open there when they first came to the states. It's like the
Marquee, something like that. That was where they would play and everybody
used to come down to jam. Jimi Hendrix was always down there, and Buddy
Miles and everybody, and so I met Hunt and Tony during one of the
innumerable jams that went on there. At any rate they had a house uptown and
they had amplifiers and stuff set up. They wanted to be The Cream but they
didn't have a guitar player and I was a great Eric Clapton imitator - I knew
how to play all that stuff, so we would like completely blast our ears out
for hours. But when it came to doing the albums my eclectic attitude always
too over so I never did those kind of albums I never did like a totally
heavy guitar oriented album,. As a result of that, Tony and Hunt lost
interest after a while - they didn't want to play ballads and things like
that. I think nowadays they're playing with Ray Manzarek.
SOLO
There was a transition between record companies and they weren't really
together. But eventually I did Something/Anything? That was the last album I
did in LA. I was living there at the time and did some of it in the studio
and some of it in my house, and them I recorded one 'live' side in New York
which I did in a succession of days. In a sense there were two unique things
about that album for me; on three sides it was all me which I'd never
before, and on the other side it was all 'live' which I'd never done before.
It was good experience, I enjoyed it but at the same time I'd got into a
very pat style of writing, and so by the time I was ready to do the next
album, A Wizard a True Star, I decided to abandon that style and try to
develop something that was more uniquely my own. I thought seriously about
the record and I realized that I don't make singles and that most albums are
simply a compilation of singles, so I thought that when I make albums I
should make them by the sides as opposed to by the four minute cut, and the
Wizard album was the first one that was done like that.
UTOPIA
The first prototype Utopia was around about the time of the Wizard album.
Hunt and Tony Sales were in that band also. We tried to make a second crack
at it and it was a very high concept bad. It had the total Cocteau concept
of futuristic rock bands, it was total black and white...black and white
costumes, and no equipment of any kind visible on the stage except the
drums. We had this special geodesic dome for the synthesizer player to sit
in with special constructions that made it look like a lunar excursion
module with the drummer sitting on top of it, either feet of the ground. Me
and the bass player both had double necked guitars, but the show was so
ambitious technically that it never came off. So anyway that folded and I
shelved the concept temporarily and went back to producing again. And then I
did the Todd album. I'd been working with some musicians at the time who
were highly sympathetic to what I was doing. I formed a band out of mostly
these people. It was all the people who were on the next album, Utopia. That
was the original personnel and since then there's been two personnel
changes. There's a new synthesizer player and a new drummer. The synthesizer
player we got last year after we finished recording the album, and the
drummer we got just a moth ago. So we've been rehearsing him for the past
month.
This band doesn't have the same concept as the original prototype but the
second prototype concept is still fairly intact, being a communal music
situation as opposed to a shock value situation which was the original
concept. This one is much more spiritually balanced, and subsequently it's
much more successful in concert. In fact I would say that it's an
unqualified success because we play the entire show - 2.5 hours - without an
opening act, and we probably haven't played more than five gigs where we
haven't done three encores. It's an incredible response, and the response is
unique also in the way that the audience reacts; they don't go crazy during
the show, they sit and listen and then go nuts at the end of the show. We're
coming to play over here in October and we'll probably be doing the exact
show we do in the States; we'll be doing the whole thing ourselves. We won't
have a support band, it wouldn't be good for us or them. Besides we perform
such a diversity of material, and there are six people so extremely talented
that we need that much time to extend ourselves. Everybody in the band is
just an incredible musician - some are the best at their instruments that
there are. Like the synthesizer player, roger Powell, is probably the best
synthesizer player in the world only because he's Moog's personal
synthesizer player, and if they make something new they ask him what to do.
He comes to Europe all the time to demonstrate new synthesizer. He started
out as a jazz pianist so he has all that keyboard technique but he is also
much more aware of the possibilities of the synthesizer than most keyboard
players. And our bass player John Siegler is acknowledged as one of the best.
If you've got any or all of Todd's last four albums especially, you'll be
only too aware of the quite astonishing complexity of not only the
compositions, but also of the arrangements and the actual execution. The
mind veritably boggles at the difficulties that any band would encounter
when trying to perform such material on-stage.
With this particular band it's no difficulty. This band has such a density
and range of sounds - like we have three keyboard players and two of the
keyboard players have four keyboards each, all with different sound. And the
synthesizer player has the biggest portable synthesizer in the world. We
have a great range of sounds and at the same time we're very self-conscious
about that. We're conscious of exploring as many sounds as possible.
On-stage I used to play keyboards but I don't any longer. I don't play
anywhere near as well as the keyboard players we've got so it's just
embarrassing for me. No, it's not embarrassing, it's silly.
ZZ: You've been quoted as saying that you don't consider your music as an
end unto itself, but as a means towards some other end.
Well I distinguish myself, possibly with some degree of pretension, I don't
know, but I distinguish myself as an artist as opposed to somebody who makes
a living in music. So being an artist, music is just my means of expression.
An artist is someone who has a vision that supposedly the normal person does
not have or has not been conditioned to see. And the artist renders this
vision in a certain technique that he's good at - sculpture, painting,
poetry, music, whatever it happens to be. But the important thing is his
vision, his concept that he actually exercises his technique on,. And that
to me is always the most important thing. It's not whether I come up with a
record or not, it's whether I have something to say. And if for some reason
I should be prevented from making records, it won't be the end of my
artistic vision, I'll just find another technique or another outlet. In fact
right now I'm moving into the video aspect of things as a means of more
complete expression.