Todd Rundgren: 'What I'm doing isn't even really music'
It's 40 years since Todd Rundgren released A Wizard, A True Star. We visit Rock's Backpages to relive the making of it, through this 1973 piece for Phonograph Record
NOO YAWK, NU YORK — Beneath the red fluorescence of Max's Kansas City, where the boys wear lipstick and the girls have nails, Alice Cooper, Todd Rundgren and the jellybean rockers Hunt & Tony Sales (Soupy's offspring) watch the kids prove that everybody is a star.
In the back room, the sick neon glow bathes regulars coolly awaiting the arrival of a superstar like Bianca Jagger or David Bowie, who will make it a point not to acknowledge their validity even as mutants, like a dowager in an emergency ward. Despite the faintly jealous sensation prompted by Hunt's black and white skunk coif and Tony's pink and blond rinse, they, like Alice and Todd, have become strap-hangers after several nights amidst this droning boredom so remote from the exotic debauchery of, say, Turner's town house.
Cigarette smoke hangs smog-like over the room, but Alice and Todd – each in his own way a component of a new American Dream, the Horatio Alger ideal revised, are not smokers – hold their liquor discreetly and tell each other jokes. Sometimes, but rarely, they come as their images, but mostly they use Max's to decompress from the strain of being a professional rock and roller in New York, to relax from their latest projects in this bar where everybody is an out-of-towner and where hardly anyone is a pro.
Todd Rundgren has seen all this before, at Steve Paul's Scene, at the Whisky, but out beyond the occasional Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs and leopard-skin top that are part of his style, far from the clique, his mind is wrapped around his latest Attitude: Utopia, a band and a state of mind, the whole ball of wax from the kid who never wanted anything more than to be the biggest, the best, the flashiest, and the hardest to dislike. What some might call The Nazz.
This post-election, après Vietnam spring, Todd Rundgren is 24-years-old, roughly one year older than John Lennon at the time of his Ed Sullivan debut. Todd is one of the hottest and most innovative producers in what even Time has called the world's biggest entertainment industry and star complex, a lurex and satin version of the fabled "independent" producer like Jimmy Miller or Richard Perry, his toothy grin and red-tipped shag belying his status as one of the best rock and roll executives to emerge from what we suppose in our decadent glee is a dying art.
Rundgren has helped bring to our attention such previously unknown talents as Jesse Winchester, Sparks (Halfnelson), Mark "Moogy" Klingman, and the American Dream. He has helped save James Cotton, the Band, Fanny, Paul Butterfield, and Badfinger from their own worst tendencies by administering tactful doses of technique and taste.
Since the break-up of his first punkoid super-stock quartet the Nazz, when he was forced to accept that he was more than possibly America's greatest lead guitarist but a producer, composer, and arranger by default as well, Todd has released four "solo" albums, two hit singles, We Gotta Get You a Woman and I Saw the Light, and undertaken two ambitious tours with his own act. The question is: are you going to hold it against Todd R that he can do everything but actually sell his own records, that he considers running for president (in 1984) a likelihood, and that even though he has played almost every possible instrument on his last two albums, he still maintains that "I'm not into music per se"? May we suggest, dear reader, that since it is impossible to ignore Todd Rundgren, you should trust the tale and not the teller; we will strive to make the kid's aspirations to something "more" as clear as I Want to Hold Your Hand. Just keep your hands off the knobs.
UTOPIA IN WOODSTOCK
At nine in the morning, our driver walks to the back of his bus and asks with an irritated wrinkle of his nose, "Somebody burning incense back here?" The tone is set for a day in Woodstock, where New York's rarely seen but influential pop powers relax and do business in a bizarrely congruous organic affluence. Only two hours from the Apple, Woodstock is rural to a fault yet real estate is expensive and the town expresses in its comfortable if kitschy way the resort mentality of many another village that lives for the summers and weekends. Bearsville is a suburb of Woodstock, and the only landmarks seem to be Grossman's restaurant, the Bear, and his Bearsville studio in which construction for the new Todd Rundgren road show is proceeding apace.
In a low-beamed living room, filled by a Hammond organ, Hunt's Italian-made pearl green Hollywood drums, and various amps plugged into Todd and Tony Sales, the kid sits cross-legged on a reasonably large television (off), his only concession to Woodstock's woodsiness being low-heeled boots (Utopia issue) and an open top button on his turquoise pants. Upon his knee is a genuine 1967 artifact, a Gibson that Eric Clapton had illustrated by the Fool for his first Cream tour. The shoe fits.
Todd, Tony, Hunt, David Mason, and Jean-Yves Labat are Todd Rundgren's Utopia, a new band and the first real group Todd's been in since the Nazz. Dave is a facile organist who played with a number of R&B bands in Florida before future funk called him north. Jean-Yves is mad with ideas for synthesiser, sound mutation, and aural space. A Bearsville artist in his own right with a soon to be released LP, Jean Yves played flute in several groups in England before devoting himself full-time to plans for synthesising Utopia's music, adapting it and coloring it, before sending it back to Jim Lowe who will be responsible for mixing the sound on the tour.
Before breakfast, the band run through a number of tunes without vocals, starting with blues jams and working up to Broke Down And Busted and Couldn't I Just Tell You. Freed from playing keyboards on stage, Todd's guitar work is faster and surer than ever, truly the easiest way for him to be a star if that were all he had in mind. He looks down on this instrument with the same preoccupation so impressive when we first saw it in Clapton, but periodically Todd will glance up smiling, his teeth on his bottom lip and a Cheeseburger pin on his jacket, and the effect is modified rather than destroyed.
Tony and Hunt are flexible fluent musicians, as is Dave, who has just started to play with them. They work well within the tentative improvised arrangements, moving from groove to tightly-wound intensity with a smiling sense that they are happening. Jean-Yves listens carefully, asks questions, and makes requests, because until his equipment is fully collected and assembled, there is little he can do but learn the material in all its nuances; ultimately he will influence and blend virtually every note the band play.
At the studio, construction on the Utopia Landing Module, a geodesic dome to be covered completely in silver mylar, is underway. All of Jean-Yves' synthesizers will be contained within the module, as will Jean Yves himself, while Hunt will play atop the dome several feet above the other Utopians, supremely skunkie. Each of the Utopians instruments will plug into the module and headsets will keep them in communication with Jean-Yves. A large art deco Theremin will hang behind the band, which they can play at will by intercepting the space between its two globes. Todd will play a double-neck Flying W lead guitar, with six- and twelve-string necks, while Tony's guitar is unique in having six-string guitar and four-string bass. The Electronic Music Studio, an English synthesizer manufacturer and designer, has devised a new "sound" for Todd's guitar, the "Popeye Mutilator". Like fuzz tone or wah-wah it is completely at its master's control, one more step toward the guitar's evolution as the most useful sexual tool since KY jelly.
Back in Jean Yves' living room, Todd talks about his new album, A Wizard, A True Star, on which the Utopian ideal he is advancing first becomes manifest. "For a while I was into vocals," he understates, "but now I'm getting away from a standard vocal approach. I'm less into singing words and more into maximizing the instrumental, because once people think they know where you're at, they're sure that's where you should be. As soon as people start to expect something from me, I feel compelled to do something else. I could put out singles like I Saw the Light and milk them. Some people put out a hit single and all of a sudden that's their 'style'. I could have a lucrative career doing that, but as soon as I have a hit, I can never do the same thing again."
Todd revealed a higher purpose to Ben Edmonds last summer: "It's hard for me to say that what I'm doing isn't even really music, because deep inside of me, what I want to do is much greater than music. Music is the way I understand how to communicate now, the way that I've learned how to communicate … but it will eventually have to go beyond that. You see I've realised that music is not what keeps people involved – it's the attitude behind the music."
And even more specifically, he told Rock Magazine's Anne Marie Mildo, "there's a certain level of communication that people just aren't using, and the place I'm going involves turning that on. Once I do it'll be easy for everybody to understand it, it'll be easy for every one else to get to that place, too. That's what I'm doing musically … Two or three albums from now people will realize it. They'll realise that my music is like a map to get to that place."
So Todd, Tony, Hunt, Dave, and Jean-Yves have become the first Utopians, the first expression of the, kind of optimistic democratic idealism that enfranchised the great deodorized middle-class into nasty ol' rock 'n' roll in 1963, the year we lost the Sixties' biggest star. Once a Beatlemaniac, seeing A Hard Day's Night for the first time in a Philadelphia bijou jammed with screaming teens, Todd is now a President-watcher.
"All it takes to become President is money and a certain kind of power. Being President is the first thing I can shoot for, not the highest. It may come to a point where people take rock and roll musicians more seriously than they take politicians. It may eventually turn out that musicians have more credibility." And piles of Beatles records burned in the Bible Belt the day after John Lennon spoke. Christ, you know it ain't easy.
The concept of Utopia is a beginning, a model if you will of the individual working harmoniously and positively within the whole and becoming more entertaining as a result. "Utopia as a group is to convince people of the potential reality of the concept. Utopia isn't even the greatest potential reality, it's just what we can afford now. We're the Disneyland of rock and roll bands. Anyone can get into it with a little bit of effort. Well, it's not all that easy or else nobody would want to be in it – that's why we all got the weird hair. We can present to people an actual realistic way of life, like the Beatles, a microcosm of something that will be all over the place eventually."
NOT JUST HAIR
"Our hair, for instance, is not a selling point like Madison Avenue trying to figure out what people want and then giving it to them … it's an irresistible influence; when you see it, it becomes so personal, you have a right to it, nobody could sell it to you. Somebody has to show people there's something hip about it. We intend to put over a whole different kind of credibility. We'll do what we do to signify unity of purpose instead of just trying to attract attention. Kids don't want to dye their whole head another color; that's what their mothers do. We don't want people to feel less of a man or unhappy if they don't do it; we want to start people aspiring to a certain kind of vision …"
A Technicolor by-way to Never Never Land that's Reality not Fantasy, where Dorothy would smile most all the time, a world that arrives with the first synthesized bleep to issue from the Utopian Landing Module. And their anthem is the theme from the concept side of A Wizard, A True Star, International Feel: "You hear and you see, yet you do not believe/ That there's always more." The kids are alright.
At 24, in the same amount of time it took Lennon and McCartney to become selfishly middle-class, Todd Rundgren is out the other side of the soloist's dilemma. He's had the microwave open experience of being a teen sensation, then created more personally and "classifically," and he's come to appreciate that his only audience must be the largest, most involved audience; and so looking years into the future, A Wizard, A True Star should stand as a final testament to the powerful musical and emotional emancipations of the 60s. Perhaps the longest single rock album ever, Wizard's 'International Feel' side runs over twenty six minutes, while the sweetly searingly Rundgren-esque verso sings for almost half an hour.
Todd really does believe that this is more than just another concept album without spirals; he feels that it's the first not to use the idea of "complete songs" to determine the feel, pacing, length, or mood. There are 12 tracks on side one and seven on the second, including a soul auteur medley so smooth it melts in your mouth. Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson, Thom Bell, and the cool jerkin' Olympics from Detroit take a stroll down your sentimental spine, oohing, aahing, and swaying with the feeling.
As fine as the singing Is It My Name?, the achey I Don't Want to Tie You Down and the exultant Just One Victory on Side Two would have been on any other Rundgren album, International Feel takes the runt's music and sound into a white light region where energy is the only thing that isn't constantly changing. After kicking us through a jet stream to Never Never Land (ya'll remember Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Julie Styne), Todd lays bare the pop star's indulgence in cheap thrills (alas), asking the moozical question, "Will you get your nails dirty or are you just a rock and roil pussy?" That is to say, "Don't you ever think about anything but sex?"
Moving on to glam rock, Todd, who's as kooky as they come when he wants to be, decides "You're allowed to try it and I point no fingers … but … stow the mincey lisping, you don't have to camp around." The last 16 minutes of the album blend five cuts into a kind of rock and roll state of the union address, though at first listening, politics hardly seem the issue.
Flamingo is a synthesized instrumental that sounds like the music for a ride in a World's Fair of an indeterminate era. Zen Archer is Todd's most gorgeous single achievement yet, taking the overwhelming determinism of love and death out of the hands of swishy fatalists with an arbitrary five years to make it, and putting that awesome power into the impartial eye of a silver arrowed archer, striking dead a pretty bird as a lady calls for her "pink and midnight lovers". "Rivers of blood, oceans of tears, life without death, and death without reason."
Just Another Onionhead and Da Da Dali tip the kid's hat to the surreal 30s: "Just tell them Groucho said 'Da da Dali, you're just another onionihead!'" C'est vrai Combining the parodic feel of Back in the USSR with Van Dyke Parks' and Brian Wilson's way with environmental sound, When the Shit Hits the Fan – Sunset Blvd sums up Todd's impressions of transcontinental lifestyles and leads into a reprise of the theme, when we learn that "Everyone is music, no one left behind and there's always more/Wait another year, Utopia is here, and there's always more".
