This story is featured in CityBeat's April 3 print edition.
Few people have had a career like Todd Rundgren’s and even fewer have been as fiercely independent while navigating it.
Rundgren is equal parts legendary and rebellious musician/artist, career-defining producer and industry visionary.
Rundgren spoke with CityBeat ahead of the start of his “Me/We 2024 Tour” that includes a stop at the Andrew J Brady Music Center on April 24.
Rundgren’s career began with Nazz, the late ‘60s psych-pop band he formed in his native Philadelphia, but he quickly tired of the “whirlwind of showbiz.”
“The Nazz was on the cover of 16 Magazine before our first album ever came out, so it was all hype versus what we wanted,” Rundgren tells CityBeat. “That became, to me, a signature aspect of the failing of the old model of the music business. I just wanted to make records.”
After a short hiatus, he was hired by music business power player and former Bob Dylan manager, Albert Grossman, to work on his Bearsville label to update the sound of the label’s folk acts.
Still writing songs, Rundgren recorded what became his first solo record, Runt, that featured the 1970 hit “We Gotta Get You a Woman.”
Rundgren touches on an early influence and, more importantly, something that would inform a major part of his own legacy.
Though Rundgren recalls, the first record he bought “with any purpose” was The Beatles’ Second Album with the aim of learning all of George Harrison’s solos, he tells CityBeat of another side of the band’s influence. “On The Beatles’ first American release…it lists all the instruments they played on the record, even down to maracas,” he says with a laugh. “But, it was like, ‘Wow, they played Arabian drum.’ It was all the things they played on the entire record — organ, piano. I thought, ‘This is what a musician is supposed to do,’ not just play one instrument but because you’re a musician you can adapt to other instruments."
“Even on the very first Nazz record, when we had the opportunity to get in the studio, the first thing we did was go to studio instrument rentals and I had a yellow legal pad and I would just point at things, ‘Send the kettle drums Tuesday, send the tubular bells on Saturday,’” he recalls, laughing. “That continued when I started doing my solo records and by the time I got to my second record (Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren), I wasn’t playing the bass and drums, but I was doing pretty much all the other instruments with few exceptions.”
By 1972, Rundgren had made the now classic and influential Something/Anything?, ranked among all three iterations of Rolling Stone's “500 Greatest Albums,” this time playing nearly every instrument on the album. The record produced the hits “I Saw the Light” and “Hello, It’s Me,” officially making Rundgren a solo star.
His do-it-yourself approach has since become a gold standard for generations of musicians.
“After the success of that, I did something that was considered career suicide, which was to ignore everything that had made Something/Anything? successful and make a record that nobody would make. At that point I realized, ‘Well, I still have my production career and regardless of how successful I am as a solo artist, I don’t see the point in repeating what other people are doing,’” Rundgren tells CityBeat of his decision-making process behind the making of the experimental and now cult favorite, A Wizard, a True Star (1973). “So, that has kind of characterized my musical decisions ever since.”
A bold-sounding Rundgren predicted his future success during an August 1973 interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer. “I produce records because I have to eat and my own albums aren’t commercial enough to pay anything. I think they will gain a commercial value in the very near future, as soon as people start to realize how bored they are with all this Muzak everyone is producing,” Rundgren told the Cincinnati Enquirer at the time.
Rundgren laughed after being reminded of the quote. “There’s no point in half-committing to something; you need to be all in if you expect to get the most out of it.”
The ever-changing musician took yet another turn in 1973, introducing his prog-rock project, Utopia, which would last off and on into the next decade between his various productions and solo work.
Hermit of Mink Hollow (1978) was another career high that produced the hit “Can We Still Be Friends,” with Rundgren again solely responsible for nearly every aspect of recording, and then achieved yet another career high with the 1982 hit, “Bang the Drum All Day.”
Rundgren has had a hit-filled and influential run as an artist working in several genres, including on 2004’s critically acclaimed electro-pop social critique on the bending of truth, Liars, and on collaborative albums like Space Force (2022).
Rundgren’s production credits should be reason enough to solidify his place in history.
By the age of 22 he was the house engineer at Bearsville and working with The Band on 1970’s Stage Fright. “Right as you’re beginning your career, they put you together with what is arguably the hottest band in the whole world at the time,” Rundgren says.
In 1971, he took over production for George Harrison on Badfinger’s now classic album, Straight Up, when Harrison refocused his attention to work on The Concert for Bangladesh.
Rundgren recalls sessions for the self-titled landmark album by protopunk luminaries, The New York Dolls. “It was a circus making that record. It was constantly groupies and journalists and people in the studio all the time. It was not [a typical] band-producer relationship; I was more ringmaster than anything, just trying to get all of the guys in the studio at the same time, sober enough to get a couple of takes.”
By the time he was producing Grand Funk Railroad’s We’re An American Band (1973) and Shinin’ On (1974), Rundgren was one of the most successful and highest-paid producers in the world.
He went on to produce and often play on records by Hall & Oates, Patti Smith, Cheap Trick, The Psychedelic Furs, XTC and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, to name a few.
Throughout his multifaceted career, Rundgren has stayed uncommonly ahead of the curve. He founded Utopia Video Studios in 1978, and his video for “Time Heals” off his 1981 concept album, Healing, was one of the first 10 videos played on MTV. His interactive 1993 release, No World Order, became the first interactive album, allowing listeners to alter the playback of a song from different versions of production and more. In the late ‘90s, he was involved in an early online music distribution service called PatroNet where fans subscribed to artists’ music, cutting out record labels. Rundgren says the idea is currently being revived as GlobalNation.
When asked about his seeming expertise in the cutting edge, Rundgren says, “Well, it isn’t necessarily about loving the technology, it’s about not fearing it. A lot of people, if it’s something new, they fear it.” Rundgren adds, “But, technology isn’t everything. We are reaching the event horizon with AI and everything here, and what’s on the other side of that horizon, live music. There’s no way to synthesize that.”
Rundgren will be performing with longtime collaborators Kasim Sulton and Prairie Prince among the five-person backing band for his “Me/We 2024 Tour.” He tells CityBeat the show will feature a lot of “deep cuts” and “party songs.”
“We’re hoping to create a very theatrical kind of atmosphere where we can get really intimate in some moments and really big in other moments.”
Todd Rundgren and his band play the Andrew J Brady Music Center on April 24 at 8 p.m. Info: bradymusiccenter.com.
