Todd Rundgren interview from Toddstock 2008
Michele Rundgren: Will you please give the man something he doesn’t hear when he goes on the air every week a big applause for Doug of Rundgren Radio.
Doug: You’d think I could play guitar or something. Woah, woah, woah! All right, there we go. Welcome to another edition of Rundgren Radio. We’re here live at Toddstock 2008 … Yeah, here we go. We got lots of fans here. This show’s only been on for about 10 months, and I thought, maybe one day we would be able to get Todd home for a little Q&A. I wasn’t sure, I knew we could get a lot of people on but I wasn’t sure about Todd, but I never, in a million years, would’ve imagined that it would be behind this house, on this property, with his family and his extended family, his fans.
This is quite a night. We’re going to be doing a Q&A with Todd right now. His fans are going to ask questions. This could be quite a treat for you at home. We wish you were here, but you’re not so you’re going to get to find out what’s going on with us, and here from Todd and I on rundgrenradio.com, but before I get in to that, I wanted to make sure that I recognize the heart and the brain of this whole event. A special host for everyone here, Michele Rundgren has done a fantastic job. Let’s hear it for Michelle.
Michele: Check's in the mail, Doug. Check's in the mail.
Doug: All right. I want to thank Robert Frazza too, and Promise Now for helping out with the sound and light for tonight’s show. Let’s get started with this Q&A with Todd Rundgren.
Veggie Girl: I'm right here.
Todd: I’ll go ahead and start it. Is there somebody out there that’s wants to ask a question already?
Veggie Girl: I'm right here and my phone is ringing. Great timing.
Todd: Okay.
Veggie Girl: It’s Veggie Girl up here.
Todd: Veggie Girl, how are you doing?
Veggie Girl: I'm doing great.
Todd: Cool, getting enough tofu?
Veggie Girl: I am.
Todd: Good.
Veggie Girl: Thank you very much and I'm really just making a comment to thank you so much for having us here.
Todd: Thank you. Thank you, we put you all to work and you made the place look really tight.
Veggie Girl: It’s just been an amazing …
Todd: It all worked out.
Veggie Girl: It’s been an amazing opportunity. You’ve allowed us into your home, and the Rundgren’s and the Grey’s have been awesome. I just want to thank you for music that has changed my life and I just want to thank you more than ask you a question. Thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Jeff: Hello Todd, this is Jeff Raverman from San Diego.
Todd What’s up Jeff? How are you?
Jeff: Good. I want to say thank you also, but I do have a question, and it is a song that is on a bootleg called Cowboy Monkey. I don’t believe it’s you, but a lot of people think it is.
Todd: That’s soundly a great song though from the title … like a monkey in a cowboy suit maybe?
Jeff: Cowboy Monkey, and it’s yippee-ei-o-ki-yay cowboy monkey something.
Todd: I did write a song about a monkey but it was called King Kong Reggae.
Jeff: Okay, it is not you?
Todd: I'm not pandering here. That’s not necessary.
Jeff: Can I ask one more question?
Todd: While you’re there, why not?
Jeff: At the time you were doing Bad Finger, you were producing that album. Did you have any relationship with George Harrison because I have read in the past that he was a little upset at the whole situation you taking over? True or False?
Todd: That particular interpretation is false. George … here’s the actual story of Straight Up, The Album. We started working with Geoff Emerick, who was the Beatles engineer for Sergeant Pepper and stuff like that. They completed an entire album in the record company and the Beatles and whoever was involved in decision making, was not especially happy with the result. George decided to take a crack at it. The problem with that is that George had developed this particularly kind of sound that everyone is familiar with now, with that Phil Spector had some influence on.
He recorded some tracks, I think they recorded about four tracks or whatever, and they had this completely other sound. Then he got too busy with the Concert for Bangladesh Record. They had already recorded … done the event, recorded it, but he just caught up in mixing it and stuff like that, and he had no more time to work with Bad Finger, that’s when I got called in and from the time they started until the time I got called and probably a year had elapsed. We went in, we recorded some new songs, probably six, I don’t remember exactly, some new songs. We took some of the Geoff Emerick songs and charted them up, and took some of the George Harrison songs and charted them up in particular.
Re-recording the drums or adding another drum track because from my standpoint, the problem with the George Harrison tracks was, they were used in that sound of … the sound that they got, that the Beatles got like the end of their recording career, in which the snare used to be live, but now they were putting towels on everything. It had this really fuddy sound, not very live. I didn’t particularly like the sound so I had most of the drums re-recorded. We would add other parts and things like that, and then I took the George Harrison songs and the Geoff Emerick songs, and the new songs that we recorded and then I mixed them all and it went out on the record.
The problem was not with George, it was with me, because George Harrison got production credit on Day After Day after I had … he had defensively … I did meet George Harrison. It was a listening party for the album for Bangladesh. I actually saw the drums that they recorded … that Ringo recorded on. It’s had towels all over them, and he said he just didn’t have the time, he was done and I should do whatever I want. Use the tracks or not, use the tracks. I was a little miffed when he wound up with this whole production credit for Day After Day.
Jeff: Thank you very much.
Todd: There you go.
Sienna: Hi, Todd. It’s Sienna Rowley. Howdy.
Todd: That’s my name, don’t wear it out.
Sienna: Okay. We’re from Arizona, Colorado. I took my husband to see The New Cars and we were wondering … I wanted to show him who you were, but you showed us who The New Cars were. Can you explain that?
Todd: I certainly can. This proposal came to me first indirectly and then directly from Elliot Easton. I’ve worked with Elliot before on an album by Jules Shear called Watch Dog, and also, we had played on the same stage together in the late 70s, early 80s a couple of times. I knew Elliot, and they wanted to reform The New Cars but … reform the original cars, sorry, and Rick was just not into the idea. Apparently, he never did like touring, and since he wrote all the songs, he had all the publishing, got all the money and didn’t have to tour. He was not into it, and they started looking for other people [inaudible 00:10:29] demand and the eventually, my name came up and I was at a particular point career-wise, I think immediately, prior to doing The New Cars, and I was on that tour at that time.
I was at the tour with Joe Jackson, and I was starting to feel as if these … my solo one-man shows were getting pretty stale. I wasn’t writing music that I could incorporate into those shows so I had to stop doing those shows because it was just the same songs over and over again. I wasn’t learning to play them any better either. Anyway, I thought it would be good to … I’ve done this kind of thing before. In a way, I was going out with Ringo, I’ve done the Walk Down Abbey Road, where I become more or less incorporated in some other musical situation. That wasn’t a problem for me, playing somebody else’s music, and we got together and had a little rehearsal to see if it had a plausible sound. We played through a few of the songs and we decided, “Yeah, it was plausible.”
Set about, actually trying to learn all the material, and go out as The New Cars. From that point on, from the time we decided to do it, everything became completely upside down and chaotic. The first thing that happened was that the record label decided that we had to make a live album before we had every played a gig anywhere. They said, “We need products for the tour.” Stuff like that. We had to learn all of the music that appeared on that New Cars album in five days or something like that, and then we did, I think five nights of recording, four or five nights of recording, and called the best out of it and made a record, but this is the most bassackwardest thing I’ve ever been involved in. You do a live record before you’ve ever played live.
That was the first weird thing that happened. The next weird thing that happened was when we actually started playing live. About three weeks into the tour, Elliot was in the carter of the bus, and some car pulled in front of the bus, and the bus driver had to swerve and it through Elliot against the bulkhead door and broke his collarbone. I had to say, he was especially brave because it … fortunately, he’s a left-handed guy and it broke his left collarbone, which means his guitar strap was on his right shoulder and he was a real troop, he went through a couple more gigs, but it essentially was poking up out of it. It hadn’t broken his skin, but it was well-separated. He went to the doctor and I said, “Cut it out. You got to go under the knife and get this fixed.” Our summer tour just ended like that, but the debts didn’t end.
All the money that we owed people for getting this whole thing on the road, that didn’t end. Ever since that happened, every gig we’ve been doing has been like playing financial catch up. Sometimes, we almost didn’t get paid. We were doing the gig for somebody else, somebody else could get their money. After a while, no matter how much you like the music, it’s just impractical. My mom wasn’t getting her $500 check. At a certain point, we just had to say, “This is just not practical.” For one thing, Rick was so obstinate about letting us call the band The Cars, because he might have got a whim in his head that he would actually go out, and it would be The Cars, minus Ben because Ben can’t show up, but otherwise, he will be legitimately called The Cars.
He refused to ever let us use the name The Cars. We were called The New Cars, and most people say, “What the hell is that?” You know, is that the Cars playing their materials of the old Cars with different people, and promoters and stuff like that. The reason why … that was the reason why we did it, and that’s also the reason why we’re not doing it anymore. We had our shot and things just didn’t fall into place. That’s it, fun time was had by all, but …
Sienna: Thank you for that, because my husband really could see the talent that you weren’t despite that it wasn’t truly you.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Also, apparently though, you’re going to be reunited with Greg Hawkes for the Sergeant Pepper programs. Can you tell us a little about what those are all about?
Todd: Yeah. That will be three out of the five New Cars members because it will be me and Prairie, and Greg Hawkes at least. Who knows? We can bust into Just What I Needed and A Moment’s Notice.
Jane: Hi Todd, this is Jane from Maryland.
Todd: Hi Jane.
Jane: Hi, vie Cleveland, which as you know, and I'm sure everybody here knows, you were, and are, huge there. I’ve heard explanations on why Springsteen was so big there, and David Bowie, and the DJs at WMMS who were responsible. I’ve never heard an explanation for who broke you and who got you out there on Cleveland.
Todd: It started with The Nazz as a matter of fact.
Jane: Really?
Todd: Yeah, it went as far back as that. The Nazz was an unknown factor, we weren’t getting a whole lot of radio airplay early on, and we toured a bunch of towns in response with this, that, or whatever, but when we went to Cleveland, suddenly we had this relatively gigantic … I think it was something in a gore or something like that, which would have held 300, 400 people, but a big, enthusiastic wow of crowd, and what people maybe understand or maybe don’t understand is a lot of the quality of a performance has to do with how the audience responds to it, and you can play the notes and give a mechanical performance just to get through the gig and get paid for it, or you can turn it into … with the cooperation of course to the audience, into some sort of other experience, that’s the whole idea.
That’s why people pay ridiculous concert ticket prices, because they’re not expecting that they’re going to get each note worth one penny, and then when they’re all played, you will have your ticket price. It’s a gamble. You’re rolling the dice that you’re going to get something much greater than the amount of money that you spent for the ticket. That was the great thing about Cleveland just from the very beginning, the way they responded, even to the Nazz when I was nothing but a guitar player.
Jane: Excellent, thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Chuck: Hi, this is Chuck, wow, and there’s an echo. I'm from the other side of Ohio, Cincinnati, and have caught you there a few times, never at Bogart’s.
Todd: The bottom side of Ohio.
Chuck: Exactly, that works. That works, too.
Todd: Yeah, and you didn’t miss anything at Bogarts.
Chuck: Oh, I know.
Todd: Miserable for everybody.
Chuck: We heard you on your 51st birthday and you said, “Isn’t it great to not be at Bogart?” On that form, I don’t remember. I’ve listened to your music since early 70s, and I’ve been an instrumental-focused person, but you are the few people whose lyrics I listen to and pay attention to, probably one of two or three actually, and a lot of them had a lot of impact for me at various stages on the life of just some of the directions you go. I'm curious who, like some books and authors might have been, that have influenced you overtime and maybe what’s on your reading stand now, if anything, or …?
Todd: Books are not necessarily or particularly an influence on my lyrics. Of course, the subject matter may have come from a book or something I read, but lyric-writing to me, and I never really thought it would turn out to be that way, but it is poetry and I had to learn the rules of poetry in order to become qualitatively, whatever kind of lyricist I am, to be able to express things the way that I wanted to, and in that sense, my influences are other song writers, are not authors. It goes as far back as my seminal influences to this like Gilbert and Sullivan, and the way that unusual words are woven into the lyrics, and Sondheim, or even classic song writers of the 30s and 40s, and song writers of today like Elvis Costello, who understand what you can do with words besides simply having some vowels to pronounce over a melody.
In that sense, at a certain point, I would have maybe take a little umbridge at being called a poet because that’s gay, but I do take a certain amount of pride in my lyrics and that I don’t just dash stuff off in the end, that I really tried to … as well as try and get the meaning across, try and select exactly the right word. The word that sounds right when you sing it, but also the word that completes the meaning. In that sense, yeah, a lot of people don’t understand, even song writers don’t understand that to be the complete song writer, you have to be a poet as well.
Chuck: Okay, thanks. I remember Laura Nyro was one person you mentioned as well. [cross talk 00:21:21].
Todd: Quite obviously, she had a big influence on me with the way that she would sometimes invent words, and somehow, even an invented word had a meaning to it. You take the other extreme, like Cocteau Twins, which is just all babbling, but somehow you think it means something when you get to the end of the song.
Sue: Hi Todd.
Todd: Hi.
Sue: My name is Sue, and I'm from Chicago Land. First off, I just really have to thank you for what a great thing that you’re doing for all of us.
Todd: Isn’t this fun?
Sue: It is one, and I can’t believe you’re all here.
Todd: Worn the black and I need another cocktail.
Sue: I thank you and your family for just hosting such a great time for all of us.
Todd: Thank you.
Sue: I do have a question and I wanted to know, when we look at this new album or listen to the new album, what do you want us to get out of this?
Todd: That’s never the point. I have said this before and I’ll say it again. I do the music sometimes, and oftentimes for myself to give myself something to listen to. What other people get out of it is out of my control, really. I'm trying to make something that articulates thoughts in my head, thoughts that I have that are pretty un-poetic, like I want a [front side 00:23:02] prick in the face or something like that, and you got to find a more sophisticated way of expressing that idea, but it’s something that I feel.
Sue: What was your general thought on this?
Todd: You mean on this particular record?
Sue: Yes.
Todd: That would be like divulging too much since I hadn’t played it yet and you haven’t heard it yet.
Sue: May I ask you one more?
Todd: Sure.
Sue: All right. I always have wondered what your thoughts were when people say Todd is God?
Todd: It’s an easy rhyme is what is thought.
Sue: That works.
Todd: Thanks.
Sue: Thank you.
Todd: Not a lot of imagination is what I think.
Ralph: Hi Todd, this is Ralph Garcia from New Jersey.
Todd: Ralph.
Ralph: Good evening.
Todd: Hi, Ralph, how have you been?
Ralph: All right. Thanks very much for giving me the best vacation of my life.
Todd: Oh, I have to make an announcement. We’re about to run out of beer, while you’re out tomorrow, everybody pick up a case.
Ralph: All right.
Todd: All right, we’ll have plenty of beer for Sunday, but can’t get any more kegs, and we’ve been going through it pretty good. I don’t know why I said that while you were up, Ralph, but [inaudible 00:24:27].
Ralph: No idea whatsoever.
Todd: Okay.
Ralph: I’ve heard a couple of different versions of this story of how the Gibson SG Fool Guitar made its way from Eric Clapton into your hands, and I know that you don’t have the guitar anymore. Can you take us through the whole process of how it went from Eric to George, and eventually to you?
Todd: You blew the beginning of it already.
Ralph: Oh! [cross talk 00:24:56].
Todd: Anyway, Eric Clapton, as everyone knows, during the salad days of The Cream, or were they just called Cream? I can’t remember, but in any case, Eric had this guitar that was painted by a graphic … you can’t say company, not with everybody was just a hippie consortium in those days, and they painted this very colorful guitar with the little cherub on it and stuff like that. Everyone recognizes it when they see it, and Eric played that guitar in the first American tour, a subsequent when I saw the very first gigs Cream played in the US, I saw them first at the no longer existent RKO Theater where Murray the K, put on one of his shows and there were eight or ten acts, and each act would play two songs at the top of The Headliner, who might play three or four, something like that.
The Headliners on altered at nights were Wilson Pickett, and Mitch Ryder, and the Detroit Wheels, and then on the bill was Blues Project and Blues Magoos, by the way. Quite a few other smaller acts, Murray the K’s wife was a choreographer, so called, and so the weird part about is that in-between the set changes and acts, sometimes it would show a Tom and Jerry Cartoon, and sometimes Jackie the K would come out with six or eight dancers, and do the whole Las Vegas thing around and everybody in the audience is looking at each other like, “What kind of weird hybrid is this?” Anyway, the climax of the show for most of us, and the reason why we came to the show, my buds and I, Woodeast Truck Stop, we drove up from Philadelphia, specifically to see Cream and The Who.
The Who, every show, they did like, I don’t know, four shows a day or something like that, smashed a guitar every show. They went through so many guitars, I can’t believe it, and they only played like two or three songs. They played substitute in my generation, and then Cream came out, and Eric either had a perm or had a wig. Had had that giant freaking afro, and that guitar, that painted guitar which everyone was so completely … it was part of a, “This is God’s hammer, this guitar.” Because Clapton was God to all other guitar players, and during that stint, right after they finished that, they played at a little club called The Café Agogo in New York, and I sat about eight feet from his double stack Marshall Amplifier. It had my brains blown out every single show.
That guitar was, to me, it was like a religious icon. Anyway, years and year later, I'm in Woodstock, and Jackie Lomax is also living in Woodstock and I get invited over Jackie’s house because he wants to sell me something. I go over to the house and it’s The Guitar. God’s hammer is there in his house, it’s in terrible shape. He’s been using it as a lap guitar, it’s got a wooden bridge on it, and the action is this high, and all the paint is chipped off of it and everything, and then he says, “I’ll sell it to you for $500 and maybe I’ll buy it back from you.” I think it was about 12 years later, he tried to buy it back from me but that was a no go at that point.
In any case, the specific lineage was that Eric gave the guitar to George, and I think, if you want to delve a little deeper, it probably had a lot to do by the fact that they were screwing with each other’s wives and stuff, and maybe it was like a piece offering or something. Then apparently, it was given to Paul Kossoff, the guitar player from Free.
Speaker 2: [inaudible 00:29:29].
Todd: What’s that?
Ralph: Cocktail.
Todd: Oh. Oh, I'm in love. Paul Kossoff, the guitar player from Free, who died at a very inopportune time. Also, Free went away but Paul Rodgers continued with Bad Company, stuff like that. Anyway, he had it for a brief time and I think it was from him, or maybe it was the other way around, maybe Paul Kossoff got it and then George got it, and then Jackie Lomax got it because George produced Jackie. I don’t know because that was before my time, in any case, $500 for the hammer of God, what would you do?
I had the paint job restored. Eric had played it so much that all the paint had been worn off the back and the neck, and so much sweat had permeated the neck that the wood had rotted away with balls of wood, and I played it for a while and eventually, the headstock just snapped off. I had to have a new one built, restored the paintjob as much as I could, and then played it lovingly for many years. A little anecdotal side bar for you people who are tech freaks or whatever, there was not a stock SG, they took windings off of the bridge pickups to make the sound more sharp, to make it a slightly more ... it had to have more attack than a normal SG would have, and that’s the story.
Ralph: Thank you brother.
Todd: You’re quite welcome.
David: Hey Todd.
Todd: Yes?
David: David from Redondo Beach, California.
Todd: Hmm, [cross talk 00:31:20].
David: When it comes to technology … thank you. When it comes to technology, it seems that you’ve been on the cutting edge, and you’ve embraced it all whether it’s synthesizers of video, or the internet, or the web, whatever you want to call it. What’s exciting to you now? What’s on the horizon? What juices you love when it comes to technology whether it’s guitar or sound processing or [cross talk 00:31:44]?
Todd: I'm over the technology thing.
David: Oh yeah?
Todd: Can’t you tell? The kind of stuff that I'm into now, again, you’re right, I'm still a little bit ahead of the curb, a lot of the lighting in the house, which we have yet to get working because it is so complicated and cutting edge. There’s this new all-digital LED lighting that can be any color and each one of these units consumes one watt of electricity and they last for 20 years if you run them 24 hours a day. In that sense, with building the house and getting involved in the house project introduced me to a lot of technologies old and new, and I'm still trying to thrash some of it out. We have yet to get into our full alternative energy thing. When we built the house, because of the roof line, we’re not going to put giant solar panels up there because it’s just going to look plain ugly, but until they make copper-colored curvable solar panels or whatever.
We’ve been thinking about wind, our problem there is that we are in the flight path of migratory birds, and I think there may be a problem with getting the wind thing together, but we are going to discover one way or another how to get the energy part of it as well. We’re trying to keep the consumption part down as much as possible, with the light, with all low-voltage lighting and things like that, but we want to get the electricity production part of it involved as well so we don’t have to pay that stupid electric bill, which is mostly the pump in the pond at this point.
David: Thanks Todd, my pleasure.
Todd: Thank you.
Doug: Let’s shift gear for a second, we’ve had some history and technical questions. I’ve got an email question here from somebody I know, Rockwell O’Gale from Chicago. She would like to know if you ever get stage fright and if so, how do you handle it?
Todd: I don’t get literally stage fright anymore. I’d pretty much know what’s going to happen when I get out there, which is my voice is going to work or it’s not, and I have fallbacks, I suppose, when it doesn’t work, but it’s not fright, it’s just the apprehension that’s going to be a lot more work than it usually is. If my voice isn’t working, it’s just twice as hard as if it is working. To deal with that, I try to establish to the president that I don’t do more than two gigs in a row, that I have a day off to rest, and I, much to the chagrin of every publicist I’ve ever had, I'm not getting up at 8:00 in the morning, go to somebody’s radio station to answer questions or do acoustic versions of my songs, because it would pretty much sound like death clock at that hour in the morning.
Even with that stricture, I still wind up doing three in a row, and sometimes a three in a row can be a little rough. It isn’t stage fright necessarily, but I may spend a whole day long thinking, “My voice is never going to open up. It’s going to be one of those nights.” Stage fright, no. I think that maybe because I have so much confidence in my audience because they’ve heard me at my worst. Maybe a new low, I don’t know this tonight, but I think I’ve already established that low bar. It was in Santa Rosa one night when I had no voice and I got to freaking drunk that I made up about every third word, but I think everyone was so amused that … and I'm not doing that again soon, all right?
Doug: She had another question. All fans I'm sure want to know, speaking of your voice, do you sing in the shower?
Todd: Yeah, one of the things about this new house is that my space, my room is up, it’s the last thing to get finished, like dad gets the last big piece of chicken or whatever, and everything has … nothing has gone wrong in there, but things that were supposed to happen have never happened, and I had my dream shower up there. It’s this big [cole 00:36:39] tower, the waterfall on the top, and you can get the light option, too, I guess, but who needs that? Like about 10 jets that pound the crap out of you from the back, and it needs its own little reservoir of water because it pushes so much water at you.
Now, they’re looking for some little tube or something like that. This is the most confusing thing any plumber’s ever seen, and when I get that started, I’ll let you know if I sing in it, but I imagine it’s going to sound like this, [drums on his chest].
Michele: Okay, we got another one.
Speaker 3: I’ve soiled myself.
Todd: What?
Chris: Good evening Todd, this is Chris.
Todd: That’s great.
Chris: I'm here from Washington, DC, and I wanted to first add my thanks to all of the expressions of gratitude that you’ve already gotten for, what I can only characterize as a once in a lifetime opportunity, so …
Todd: You’re right, because I am not doing this for you.
Chris: I can’t imagine you do it the first time. Thank you, thanks to you and to Michele, and [cross talk 00:37:54].
Todd: You got it [cross talk 0:37:54] take the torch on her from here.
Chris: Thank you. My question, I guess, broadens or follows up on some of the things you’ve said tonight about where you were in terms of your solo performances and performing with the Cars, and I guess I wanted to ask you, when it comes to recording and touring in general, as you look back on who you were, I don’t know, 20 years ago, is it something that you still envisioned you’d be doing at this point, and then looking forward, is it something that you still enjoy enough to want to do it as long as you’re physically able or do you have some goals or ideas on how long you’re going to be continuing to express yourself that way?
Todd: I’ll tell you quite frankly, I would love to have a few more annuities, because the mortgage on this place is unbelievable, I’ll tell you, but the people that I admire, the musicians that I admire the most are the ones who are lifetime musicians, Tony Bennett and BB King, and people like that, who are not only willing but able to continue to play until they drop. I don’t know of any other thing that I’d do that gives me the kind of pleasure that other people get from hard drugs, and at the same time, I don’t think there’s anything else that I would be so good at at this point in my life, that I should just take a total detour and commit myself to that.
Chris: [cross talk 00:39:52] maybe?
Todd: What’s that?
Chris: Hosting parties, maybe?
Todd: It could be that. I’ve tried to tell Michele, “This is a business.” There are other possibilities as well. I’ve always thought it would be fun to work in films, but if you ever go on a film set, that myth is gone, but it’s another way that you could do something and maybe create more options. After all, it’s got to be a lot more easier to just walk on and say one line than to play for an hour and a half. It’s not as if I don’t consider other things. I don’t consider that other things I might have to do as time goes on, but at this particular point in time, I figure I … in the performance context, I feel as good as I ever felt. I don’t feel like …
Chris: You still enjoy it as much as you’ve always have?
Todd: What’s that?
Chris: Do you still enjoy it as much as you always have? I think some people thought [cross talk 00:41:01].
Todd: I thought I’d compared it to hard drugs, which mostly one joy. I think I’ve said that already.
Chris: Okay, thank you.
Todd: Yeah, you know, if you’re talking about the future, yeah, for the foreseeable future, this is what I got.
Kelly: Hi Todd, I'm Kelly from North Carolina.
Todd: Hi, Kelly.
Kelly: I look up at the sky and I see the stars, and I think of A. Watts, and you, my dear sir, are a true star and a genuinely benevolent human being and I thank you very much for that.
Todd: Thank you. Take it home with you.
Kelly: I tried to come up with probably the corniest question I probably could come up with, and there’ve been some wonderful questions and this one, you might have to reflect back on perhaps to your childhood. It could even be something recent, but is there a movie that you have watched or seen that pulls at your heartstrings, maybe a scene at a movie that makes you tear up?
Todd: I know it’s hard probably to comprehend, but I can be a cynical person, and as I say, I’ve been on movie sets and I’ve seen movies made. My problem is that when I'm watching a movie or a TV show, I can almost transparently be a fly on the wall that the screenwriting session. People who make movies nowadays … I think Frank Capra made tear-jerking movies that was supposed to play at people’s heartstrings and a lot of the purpose of that was to make them forget about other things. Steven Spielberg is my least favorite director because all he’s interested in is pushing your emotional buttons, and he’ll create any peculiar situation in the world, no matter how unlikely in order to do that. I'm not interested in looking at a movie that wants to push my buttons.
If a filmmaker wants to show me something that he truly believes and feels, and has invested himself in, then I would like to see that. If some guy is just interested in treating me as a ticket-buyer, then I'm not interested in that. I tell you, I have this much interest in the new Indiana Jones movie. That’s a big zero you crazy old listeners.
Kelly: Thanks Todd.
Todd: I don’t go to movies to have my buttons pushed, and yes, there are films. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the film that made me weep when I was about probably 12 or 13. I took my little brother to the movies with me and we went to go see Gigot starring Jackie Gleason. This is the most Pathodic, if that’s a real word because I was talking about Pathos. It’s a movie about an old, somewhat dim French war veteran who lives in a little basement like a rat, and he’s mute and deaf, and all the people in the town make fun of him all the time. I remember, there were so many scenes in the movie and Jackie Gleason wrote the music, which is really tear-jerking, and there were so many themes in the movie, which I'm watching, then my brother is fidgeting, I'm punching him in the arm because I want to get all misty about Gigot’s pitiful situation. Yeah, if you really want to get busted up, go see Gigot and count your blessings. We were going to show you Old Yeller one night here.
Kelly: Thanks, Todd.
Todd: No problem.
Kelly: Doug, thanks for Rundgren Radio too.
Doug: Speaking of movies, there's a rumor that maybe you were in one in 1972, it’s called Intersection. Do you remember anything about this?
Todd: I know of it, yes.
Doug: Tell us a little bit more about it.
Todd: I really can’t actually, I never knew what it was about. It’s some peculiar idea that the film maker had but it was just a bizarre opportunity. I got invited out to go to LA. First time I had stayed in the Chateau Marmont. First time I met Nicky Nichols who became my costumer and feather applier in later years and did this weird little film in the studio they did most of my records in. I got filming there. They filmed Wolfman Jack in another location. He’s in it as well. There’s some other people and it’s some weird thing where I look like I got fired from David Bowie’s band but they let me keep the costume.
It was Nicky’s first assault on my body. Probably not in the way that he imagines but he was applying all these rhinestones to me all down the choker points, run out of eyelash glue and said, “Get me some glue.” They went and found some Krazy Glue and applied the rhinestones and big blisters formed under the rhinestones after the shoot. I got on the airplane and they were still stuck to me. I couldn’t get them off. I had scars everywhere. One of the Krazy Glue, little rhinestones went. No, I can’t tell you what it’s about. I can only tell you my personal recollection.
Doug: What did you do, acting in it or just music?
Todd: I was just supposed to sing Wolfman Jack, I was singing Wolfman Jack in a silver Lamay suit. It was the weirdest thing. Wolfman Jack is kind of a Motown kind of thing. Maybe if I been wearing red satin or something like that but it was like a silver Lamay jumpsuit with all of the glam make up and so I would have something to do while I was singing. They have me hold the remote from the tape machine that started and stopped which I’m dangling in my hand like a purse. That’s all I remember.
John: Hi Todd, my name’s John Badiato.
Todd: Hi John.
John: Your music has always had influence on my life and a silly question. Is lock jaw actually your invention?
Todd: My invention?
John: The story of lock jaw. Did you invent it?
Todd: Oh, yeah. That’s my invention. I don’t think the Germans have such a horrible story. The Germans are a cheery, light hearted people.
John: That’s cool. Thank you, Todd.
Bill: Man, you’re sick for having all these people here.
Todd: Yeah, you should hear the conversations we have when you’re not around.
Doug: Yeah, you’ve been cooking those as a food.
Bill: I’m Bill Jack. I’m from South Mississippi if you can’t tell from my voice.
Todd: I love it.
Bill: I think me and my wife Joanna, we might be the only people here from Mississippi but I just want to thank you for rekindling the flame in me to go to hear live music. I’ve sell you if the house in New Orleans when you did the acoustic fit, you had band in the box and my questions is what happens to you when you go to the Piano Zone?
Todd: I’m not going there anymore. I am not going to the Zone. It doesn’t mean I will never touch a piano again but I have come to realize my limitations as a piano player and most has to do with the fact that I could probably be a serviceable piano player if I didn’t have to sing but what happens is I start singing and I just go off to this place and I forget that my hands were supposed to be doing something and that’s when it all goes to hell. I had to confront the fact that, yeah, if I really worked hard, I could be Billy Joel or something like that, that’s not me.
I much more enjoy the slop and all of the accidental notes and the crap of playing a guitar. It’s just more fun to me no matter how much it screws up my finger tips.
Bill: My wife isn’t here. She has a DMA in piano. She might be able to help you.
Todd: I just don’t have the time. I’m sorry.
Bill: Thank you, Todd.
Todd: If I did have the time, I’d learn to touch type. That would be a more useful skill for me at this point.
Tom: Howdy Todd. Tom from West Virginia, how are you?
Todd: West Virginia in the house. Okay.
Tom: Got it man. Hey listen, I noticed that on some of the later stuff you start to stretch your solos out a little more. Is this indicative of where we’re going with this new project? Because the solo seemed to get longer and longer on Fascist Christ and you’re really playing it at high level.
Todd: They’re longer than the recorded versions but that is point. We’re trying to find grooves that we can stretch out on. I’m not going to divulge exactly what the set list is and things like … There is new material and there is some noodling in it but I think part of the arena rock thing which is … the new album’s called Arena, you know that and you know that I’m making a contemporary attempt to recapture some of what that is, whenever that is but one thing it isn’t is endless long jamming. It’s big, you don’t want to lose the audiences’ interests. You want them pumping their fists and waving their lighters and flashing their tartans, whatever it is in whatever part of the world. That’s the whole point, is of this particular record, is that the solos is supposed to be concise and melodic and then you get on with the song.
Tom: I’m really looking forward to it. I think I speak for everybody there. We’re just all stoked up for it, man. It’d be great.
Todd: Cool. All righty. We’re all [inaudible 00:52:03]. Just a dress rehearsal. Don’t take it seriously or anything.
Becky: Hello Todd. This is Becky [inaudible 00:52:11] from Dallas, Texas.
Todd: Hi, Becky.
Becky: Long time concert goer. I wanted to ask you … let me paraphrase it by saying this. Those of us who really enjoy how you treat the vocal and expression aspect in your music, sometimes find ourselves listening to other songs by other people and I think some people here would agree, we sometimes secretly wish you would do a cover album of songs that frankly, would be much better done by you.
Todd: I certainly wouldn’t try to approach it from that [inaudible 00:53:10]. Oh you guys don’t even know how to record your own songs. Let me show you how it’s done. [cross talk 00:53:21]. No. I have a lot of sympathy for that idea because sometimes I just don’t feel like writing anything. That would take care of that part of the problem. I don’t necessarily imagine I could do a song better than somebody else.
Becky: But give it your styling.
Todd: I just imagine I could do a different or I just imagine I would like to do, for whatever reason, do little Hitlers. I never thought I could do it better than Elvis did. I just like the song and the message of the song and I thought if I needed something like that and the context of the record I was making, and you do something with that kind of feeling, have something of my own. You can do worse than nicking a song from Elvis Costello, but in that sense, I don’t believe I did it better than he did. I just did it different.
Becky: I’m saying that we have yet to hear some songs.
Todd: Name a song.
Becky: One? Okay.
Todd: Give me a song that’s going to get this project started, all right?
Becky: Could I provide you a list and hand it to you tomorrow?
Doug: Just call in one hour, all right? We’re on a radio show. Who want to hear Todd do his own music versus covers?
Becky: Let’s start a list.
Doug: Yeah, okay.
Becky: Okay, enough of that, thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Lisa: Hi Todd, this is Lisa Strada from Redondo Beach.
Todd: Oh, seen your name a lot.
Lisa: Thanks for the name. You’re mostly that dude my mom digs until I heard you were working with Bad Religion and then I started paying attention. I was just wondering if you’re paying attention to upcoming artists, what you see happening in the music industry now, do any of the niche genres really appeal to you?
Todd: I get production opportunities all the time of various kinds and some of them represent contemporary music. Some of them represent young bands who are playing music that has been around for a long time. I got approached to do what essentially would’ve been like heavy metal album which would have been a lot of fun, the singer was great but time didn’t work out.
The whole thing about production and the whole thing about working with other people is it’s a difficult thing to put together because first of all, I’ve done so many records and I’ve gotten a little bit picky about what I do and the criterion for what I do I had set pretty high.
The first thing I had to do is respond to the material, like the songs had to be songs that I like to hear more than once or that I wouldn’t regret having heard at all, things like that. That’s the most difficult thing is coming up with songs that sound new and original in some way. Once you come up with a great song, anybody can play it, it sounds pretty good. You’d be surprised that production isn’t about stuff that goes on in the studio. It’s mostly, at least, from my standpoint, about hectoring the songwriters to just work a little harder. That’s too easy a rhyme, like I said before or that doesn’t make any sense or that’s grammatically incorrect or whatever.
A lot of it is just picking at the material before you ever get in the studio because once you get in the studio, you just want to play. You don’t want to be talking about should it be “is” or “are” or other kinds of things that have nothing to do with delivering a performance and the whole idea of the performance in the studio is that you want to forget you’re in the studio and imagine yourself actually playing it for people.
My criterion in terms of production, in terms of what I’d be interested in producing has a lot to do with them. There are a whole lot of bands that I would really have a sleepless night over to produce. I have to say that it’s more like the bands I could’ve produced but never did produce are more of a concern for me than what the next one might be.
I had an opportunity to produce Talking Heads but I was already doing a project that time and I couldn’t do it so they got Eno to do the records. That would’ve been … if it hadn’t done anything for the career, it would’ve been fun for me. There other people in the music business whom I admire and who also has some admiration for me where my name has come up at maybe it just seemed like it’d be too creepy or something like that. I heard from P. Thomas that my name came up and contacts are producing an Attractions album, Elvis Costello and the Attractions and I would’ve killed to do that.
For whatever reason, it went a different direction. Those are things probably that I would have been more concerned about and whether I can find a new band to do. Eventually, some really talent and act with really good material is going to show up and then I’ll do a record with them.
Lisa: Thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Michele: Got a couple more up here, Doug, is that okay?
Todd: How long is the line anyway? Yeah, just thank God it hasn’t rain.
Michele: Two more.
Bill G: Hey Todd, my name is Bill Godby. I’m living here over in the islands over in Hilo. I’ve been here a while. I come from Flint, Michigan. What I’m wondering is how has living over here for 12, 15 years affected you as a human being and what you write and also a secondary question here. How do you think this is going to affect you in the big picture of your life, in the next 10 years?
Todd: This event, you mean? Or living here.
Bill G: The theory of there’s a relationship between the angst you experience in your everyday life and struggles, paying bills and so forth in terms of your creative output and being comfy [cross talks 01:00:31].
Todd: I get your drift. All right, all right. I get your drift. [cross talks 01:00:35]. Don’t rub it in.
Bill G: Expound on that and I’ll be happy and man, mucho Mahalos to this event. This is tremendous, there’s nothing to compare this to. This is just awesome.
Todd: Thank you, thank you very much.
Doug: Thank you very much.
Todd: I didn’t suddenly get thrown a dart a globe or something, so I’m moving there. I’ve been coming to Hawaii since the ‘70s. Someone suggest that I need to get away for a little while. Someone suggested, “Why don’t you go to Hawaii?” I never thought about the Hawaiian Islands at all. This is kind of out of the way, really pretty, stuff like that. It wasn’t a giant tourist spot at the time.
I came over here and I developed a little flirtation with the island and then I just kept coming here over the years and it became like a place I came, a place that I would spend time in especially to just get away and be alone and deflate and stuff like that, to just clear my head. We came over on a trip. I had some people who were working with me on video projects. I had studio for a while that was funded by a company called New Tech. I did a video called Change Myself and it was the first video that had been done all on desktop computers, computer generated video.
After I’d done it, they were so impressed with the result that they asked me to set up a studio out in San Francisco where we would bang on their software and hardware and try and create as much cutting edge stuff as we could. Change Myself turned into a whole business in a way. Did I forget the question?
Speaker 6: Actually, he wants to know why you don’t play Hawaii very much.
Doug: No that was his secondary question.
Todd: Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve been to an elaborate digression. I’m sorry. I know where I am. I know where I’m in. Don’t help me. Come on. Anyway, there’s this event called SIGGRAPH, a yearly symposium of computer graphics and back in the late ‘80’s, early ‘90s, computer graphics is relatively new. Now, they have hundred photo realistic people battling Neo in the matrix, stuff like that. In those days, just to get something, anything that looked believable, it was a feat. These events were big showcases for whatever it is you could do.
We would pull this two week, 24 hours a day, kind of, we got to get this done, blah, blah, blah, everyone’s flying in, haven’t had any sleep, everything is last minute, you’re still in the hotel room rendering the last frames, trying to get this all done so you can showcase your work. We’d gone through one of these things and then I thought, let’s just take everybody out to Hawaii, not a lot of people actually. About five, six people but let’s all go out to Hawaii and relax after this big push. It happened to be about eight months after Iniki flattened this island, the eye of a hurricane went right over this island and you wouldn’t believe, looking at it now, what it looked like right after that happened. It’s like someone took a hedge clipper and went right over the whole island.
That’s why there are chickens everywhere. All of the domestic chickens got blown up in the air and wound up in other places and now they’re all feral again. If you catch one, don’t eat it, it’s not worth it. In any case, we came here about eight months after that and every time I’d come here, I thought when I retire, when I get old, this is where I like to live maybe and so, I would always look for a place that it might be worth the trouble to buy or something like that and never ever made the commitment.
Anyway, we were here right after the hurricane. I thought, real estate is never going to be cheaper than it is now, that a hurricane come through here. We started looking for property in maybe over three days. We looked at various things. We looked at a place where Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys owns. That was right up on the beach past Hanalei but not too far. They bought when they thought they were going to live in Hawaii. Sylvester Stallone over here had built a polo field because he thought he was going to live here. There are so many people who have been through here thinking they’re going to live here and I probably was like one of those people until on the last day that we were looking, whatever, we came through the driveway here and looked at this view.
Suddenly, I’m in love. We knew that this was the place. If there was any way possible that I could get this place, I was going to do it. Over the last 10, 12 years, we had really been through he fires of hell to get and keep this place. First, the original guy that owned it was … he was a prick. He was a freaking prick. He tortured us over this. First time we looked at it, we said, oh, here’s the price, where it’s two lots actually in Hawaii. That’s so we could build a studio over where you’re camping because you’re going to [inaudible 01:06:52] a certain sized building on any lot here. We were going to build over there a studio and we needed to have, ideally, have two lots next to each other so we can have the house and studio. Anyway, it was all perfect and [inaudible 01:07:09] asking price but the first time we came, he wanted all cash. No paper. He wanted all cash for it.
We just couldn’t make it. It just wasn’t happening. A year or so later, came into something of a boon, of a cash book that had to do with Meat Loaf and I cashed out of my original production thing with Meat Loaf and got a big chunk of cash and so we said, now, we can do this. We thought, “This won’t be here anymore. He would’ve sold it.” We went online, we checked it out, “Oh, it’s still available.” We called the realtor, it’s still available and it was at a bargain price because he hadn’t sold it over the last year.
As soon as he found out it was us, it was two lots, and two separate lost for a certain price if you bought them both, you could have them for a bargain price. As soon as he found out it was us, he said, “Oh, one lot is sold. If you want to buy the lot, you’re going to pay full price on both of them.” Then he started acting like we weren’t good enough to be Hawaiians. This guy’s from New York, made his fortune making hangers for clothes. From the garment district, the guy is.
He’s this freaking nebbish that moved to a New Hampshire ashram because he had a quintuple bypass. He’s trying to bring his stress down and he’s freaking with us, trying to get every last dime out of us and telling us we’re not good enough to live here. The final thing that we had to go through is we had breakfast with him in Woodstock, Woodstock Café. Michele had to weep for him which she will do. She’s an actress. She will weep on queue so she wept for him and I had to escort him around the grounds of Woodstock 1990 whatever it was. The second Woodstock because we were playing there.
We had our own installation and I had to escort him around the grounds before he would sell us the property at the ridiculously extorted price that he came up with. That was the first thing we had to go through, all right? Since I took every cent I had and put it into this property, IRS came after me the next year, saying, “Where’s our money?”
I said, I don’t got it. I bought property with it. At that point, it became a battle with them and that’s an ongoing battle, of course. We’re all even, don’t worry about it. Please, don’t come pressing a $5 bill on my hand after we’re through. We’re at a whole other level with them. In any case, it’s been pretty much a freaking battle all the way. We finally, like three years ago, we think we can do this. If I work my ass off, we think we can build this house finally. I’ve had the plans for 10 years.
We started building the house. Just as we’re finished with the house, what happens? Mortgage crisis. Nobody can get a mortgage. We got our first. Anyone here mortgage agent? Can you get the second mortgage, somebody? Please, anybody? All right.
Anyway, at this particular moment, we’re working our way through that mortgage crisis just like everybody else who owns a home or has build a home or something like that. Staying here, living here is not easy in the sense that trying to create a home and keep a home is hard all over. It’s not any easier here. I just feel like the one thing I did right is I got the spot. We got the spot, I have the house that I want. All I have to do is figure out a way to keep it.
The way to keep it is you people buying concert tickets, right?
Bill G: Right and a new album of course.
Ronnie: Hello Todd. My name is Ronnie and I’m from London.
Todd: Welcome. You must be terribly jetlagged.
Ronnie: Not at all. I’ve been here for a week, been absolutely the best week in my life so far. Since I first fell in love with your music in the early ‘70s, you’ve covered topics as diverse as cremation and making coffee. I wondered perhaps rather predictable final question for the Q&A session, what has been your most favorite song and why?
Todd: Oh I suppose the most predictable answer would be, “They’re like my children and I love them all.” I don’t swell a lot on material that I have done. I’ve got 13 new songs that I’m trying to remember the lyrics for and I’m so totally possessed with that at this point that it’s just hard to focus on other music. It’s hard to remember other songs right now.
You could say that I have might have a favorite of the new songs. I’m not sure whether I should divulge what it is at this particular point because that would be like giving something away.
Ronnie: We won’t tell anyone.
Todd: I would say my favorite song is likely to be one of the new ones you’ll hear on Sunday.
Doug: There you go.
Todd: Okay?
Ronnie: And why?
Todd: Pardon me?
Ronnie: And why?
Todd: And why? It will be the one that gets the best reaction.
Ronnie: Okay. Thanks from everyone [inaudible 01:13:16].
Todd: Thank you and say hi to all my London friends when you get back.
Ronnie: Will do. Thank you very much, Todd. Love you. Bye.
Todd: Thank you. Bye bye.
Michele: That’s what we got up here, Doug.
Doug: Michele, do you have a question for Todd?
Michele: Of course I have a question. It’s not very intelligent after all of these great questions tonight but I have to ask because this is my one opportunity to do so. Mr. Rundgren, when you are traveling on tour, how do you do your laundry?
Todd: I don’t.
Michele: There you go.
Todd: I wear the socks for four, five days and I throw them out, buy new ones. Otherwise, if I’m not onstage, I wear the same damn clothes, every damn day, that’s why they call me Pig Pen.
Michele: Thank you, Pig Pen.
Todd: Thank you.
Doug: Has anyone here seen that this goes to 11 t-shirts by chance?
Michele: [inaudible 01:14:35]
Doug: A couple of times.
Michele: That’s all we got up here.
Todd: All right everybody.
Doug: Very nice.
Todd: Are we going to have movies tonight?
Doug: Perhaps.
Todd: Okay. Old Yeller, okay.
Doug: Intersection.
Todd: You got Gigot on there? I feel wailing and gnashing up to you. All righty, have a good evening, everybody. Tiggy Bar’s open.
Doug: Can everybody stick around …
Todd: The … I forgot, the other bar’s open as well. Yolani Bar, right okay. I’m in trouble. The other thing that if you want to witness the traditional interring …
Michele: Wait, veggie girls, get out of the room.
Todd: What’s that? Oh, sorry.
Michele: Let veggie girl leave the room.
Todd: The interring of the traditional meal, that’s going to happen very early tomorrow morning, maybe seven or eight o’clock, something like that.
Michele: They said they’re going to try and make it nine so that they can see …
Todd: [inaudible 01:15:32] is cooked [inaudible 01:15:35]
Michele: I know but they’re going to pull it out at six pm.
Todd: In any case, you can watch the preparation and the interring, on other words, this hole over here maybe somebody’s fallen into and they’re drunk and stupor. That’s called the emo. That’s where we bury the pig and all the other contents of the evening’s meal and they will go through a whole preparation thing and they will put rocks inside of the pig, hot rocks that they will make it stuff like that. It’s a whole little procedure, very interesting for you and culturally enlightening. Even if you are a vegetarian, you may just want to see it because …
Michele: No, they’re not going to want to see it, no.
Todd: Oh, I feel a sprinkle!
Michele: Also Sunday night’s concert will be earlier than you think. Todd, what time you think you’re going to go on?
Todd: We are going to try to time it to be approximately an hour before sun down. IN other words, we need some daylight.
Michele: Like 6:15, 6:30 something like that.
Todd: Somewhere between I think 6:30 and seven tomorrow night.
Michele: Okay. Dinner will be before that.
Todd: No not tomorrow night. Sunday night. Sorry.
Michele: Also you probably haven’t heard from us but we’ve had a really …
Todd: You’re talking to me?
Michele: No, both of us have said we’re having a really good time too. Everybody’s been really great and we’re very happy.
Doug: Yey!
Todd:` Yeah! You have been far less trouble than our friends.
Michele: Sssh, don’t tell them that.
Todd: You’ve been terrific, thank you very much.
Doug: Show’s over.
Todd: Okay, hit the bar! Now, we’re done. Thank you!
Transcript completed by Rev.com - fast transcription services.
Doug: You’d think I could play guitar or something. Woah, woah, woah! All right, there we go. Welcome to another edition of Rundgren Radio. We’re here live at Toddstock 2008 … Yeah, here we go. We got lots of fans here. This show’s only been on for about 10 months, and I thought, maybe one day we would be able to get Todd home for a little Q&A. I wasn’t sure, I knew we could get a lot of people on but I wasn’t sure about Todd, but I never, in a million years, would’ve imagined that it would be behind this house, on this property, with his family and his extended family, his fans.
This is quite a night. We’re going to be doing a Q&A with Todd right now. His fans are going to ask questions. This could be quite a treat for you at home. We wish you were here, but you’re not so you’re going to get to find out what’s going on with us, and here from Todd and I on rundgrenradio.com, but before I get in to that, I wanted to make sure that I recognize the heart and the brain of this whole event. A special host for everyone here, Michele Rundgren has done a fantastic job. Let’s hear it for Michelle.
Michele: Check's in the mail, Doug. Check's in the mail.
Doug: All right. I want to thank Robert Frazza too, and Promise Now for helping out with the sound and light for tonight’s show. Let’s get started with this Q&A with Todd Rundgren.
Veggie Girl: I'm right here.
Todd: I’ll go ahead and start it. Is there somebody out there that’s wants to ask a question already?
Veggie Girl: I'm right here and my phone is ringing. Great timing.
Todd: Okay.
Veggie Girl: It’s Veggie Girl up here.
Todd: Veggie Girl, how are you doing?
Veggie Girl: I'm doing great.
Todd: Cool, getting enough tofu?
Veggie Girl: I am.
Todd: Good.
Veggie Girl: Thank you very much and I'm really just making a comment to thank you so much for having us here.
Todd: Thank you. Thank you, we put you all to work and you made the place look really tight.
Veggie Girl: It’s just been an amazing …
Todd: It all worked out.
Veggie Girl: It’s been an amazing opportunity. You’ve allowed us into your home, and the Rundgren’s and the Grey’s have been awesome. I just want to thank you for music that has changed my life and I just want to thank you more than ask you a question. Thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Jeff: Hello Todd, this is Jeff Raverman from San Diego.
Todd What’s up Jeff? How are you?
Jeff: Good. I want to say thank you also, but I do have a question, and it is a song that is on a bootleg called Cowboy Monkey. I don’t believe it’s you, but a lot of people think it is.
Todd: That’s soundly a great song though from the title … like a monkey in a cowboy suit maybe?
Jeff: Cowboy Monkey, and it’s yippee-ei-o-ki-yay cowboy monkey something.
Todd: I did write a song about a monkey but it was called King Kong Reggae.
Jeff: Okay, it is not you?
Todd: I'm not pandering here. That’s not necessary.
Jeff: Can I ask one more question?
Todd: While you’re there, why not?
Jeff: At the time you were doing Bad Finger, you were producing that album. Did you have any relationship with George Harrison because I have read in the past that he was a little upset at the whole situation you taking over? True or False?
Todd: That particular interpretation is false. George … here’s the actual story of Straight Up, The Album. We started working with Geoff Emerick, who was the Beatles engineer for Sergeant Pepper and stuff like that. They completed an entire album in the record company and the Beatles and whoever was involved in decision making, was not especially happy with the result. George decided to take a crack at it. The problem with that is that George had developed this particularly kind of sound that everyone is familiar with now, with that Phil Spector had some influence on.
He recorded some tracks, I think they recorded about four tracks or whatever, and they had this completely other sound. Then he got too busy with the Concert for Bangladesh Record. They had already recorded … done the event, recorded it, but he just caught up in mixing it and stuff like that, and he had no more time to work with Bad Finger, that’s when I got called in and from the time they started until the time I got called and probably a year had elapsed. We went in, we recorded some new songs, probably six, I don’t remember exactly, some new songs. We took some of the Geoff Emerick songs and charted them up, and took some of the George Harrison songs and charted them up in particular.
Re-recording the drums or adding another drum track because from my standpoint, the problem with the George Harrison tracks was, they were used in that sound of … the sound that they got, that the Beatles got like the end of their recording career, in which the snare used to be live, but now they were putting towels on everything. It had this really fuddy sound, not very live. I didn’t particularly like the sound so I had most of the drums re-recorded. We would add other parts and things like that, and then I took the George Harrison songs and the Geoff Emerick songs, and the new songs that we recorded and then I mixed them all and it went out on the record.
The problem was not with George, it was with me, because George Harrison got production credit on Day After Day after I had … he had defensively … I did meet George Harrison. It was a listening party for the album for Bangladesh. I actually saw the drums that they recorded … that Ringo recorded on. It’s had towels all over them, and he said he just didn’t have the time, he was done and I should do whatever I want. Use the tracks or not, use the tracks. I was a little miffed when he wound up with this whole production credit for Day After Day.
Jeff: Thank you very much.
Todd: There you go.
Sienna: Hi, Todd. It’s Sienna Rowley. Howdy.
Todd: That’s my name, don’t wear it out.
Sienna: Okay. We’re from Arizona, Colorado. I took my husband to see The New Cars and we were wondering … I wanted to show him who you were, but you showed us who The New Cars were. Can you explain that?
Todd: I certainly can. This proposal came to me first indirectly and then directly from Elliot Easton. I’ve worked with Elliot before on an album by Jules Shear called Watch Dog, and also, we had played on the same stage together in the late 70s, early 80s a couple of times. I knew Elliot, and they wanted to reform The New Cars but … reform the original cars, sorry, and Rick was just not into the idea. Apparently, he never did like touring, and since he wrote all the songs, he had all the publishing, got all the money and didn’t have to tour. He was not into it, and they started looking for other people [inaudible 00:10:29] demand and the eventually, my name came up and I was at a particular point career-wise, I think immediately, prior to doing The New Cars, and I was on that tour at that time.
I was at the tour with Joe Jackson, and I was starting to feel as if these … my solo one-man shows were getting pretty stale. I wasn’t writing music that I could incorporate into those shows so I had to stop doing those shows because it was just the same songs over and over again. I wasn’t learning to play them any better either. Anyway, I thought it would be good to … I’ve done this kind of thing before. In a way, I was going out with Ringo, I’ve done the Walk Down Abbey Road, where I become more or less incorporated in some other musical situation. That wasn’t a problem for me, playing somebody else’s music, and we got together and had a little rehearsal to see if it had a plausible sound. We played through a few of the songs and we decided, “Yeah, it was plausible.”
Set about, actually trying to learn all the material, and go out as The New Cars. From that point on, from the time we decided to do it, everything became completely upside down and chaotic. The first thing that happened was that the record label decided that we had to make a live album before we had every played a gig anywhere. They said, “We need products for the tour.” Stuff like that. We had to learn all of the music that appeared on that New Cars album in five days or something like that, and then we did, I think five nights of recording, four or five nights of recording, and called the best out of it and made a record, but this is the most bassackwardest thing I’ve ever been involved in. You do a live record before you’ve ever played live.
That was the first weird thing that happened. The next weird thing that happened was when we actually started playing live. About three weeks into the tour, Elliot was in the carter of the bus, and some car pulled in front of the bus, and the bus driver had to swerve and it through Elliot against the bulkhead door and broke his collarbone. I had to say, he was especially brave because it … fortunately, he’s a left-handed guy and it broke his left collarbone, which means his guitar strap was on his right shoulder and he was a real troop, he went through a couple more gigs, but it essentially was poking up out of it. It hadn’t broken his skin, but it was well-separated. He went to the doctor and I said, “Cut it out. You got to go under the knife and get this fixed.” Our summer tour just ended like that, but the debts didn’t end.
All the money that we owed people for getting this whole thing on the road, that didn’t end. Ever since that happened, every gig we’ve been doing has been like playing financial catch up. Sometimes, we almost didn’t get paid. We were doing the gig for somebody else, somebody else could get their money. After a while, no matter how much you like the music, it’s just impractical. My mom wasn’t getting her $500 check. At a certain point, we just had to say, “This is just not practical.” For one thing, Rick was so obstinate about letting us call the band The Cars, because he might have got a whim in his head that he would actually go out, and it would be The Cars, minus Ben because Ben can’t show up, but otherwise, he will be legitimately called The Cars.
He refused to ever let us use the name The Cars. We were called The New Cars, and most people say, “What the hell is that?” You know, is that the Cars playing their materials of the old Cars with different people, and promoters and stuff like that. The reason why … that was the reason why we did it, and that’s also the reason why we’re not doing it anymore. We had our shot and things just didn’t fall into place. That’s it, fun time was had by all, but …
Sienna: Thank you for that, because my husband really could see the talent that you weren’t despite that it wasn’t truly you.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Also, apparently though, you’re going to be reunited with Greg Hawkes for the Sergeant Pepper programs. Can you tell us a little about what those are all about?
Todd: Yeah. That will be three out of the five New Cars members because it will be me and Prairie, and Greg Hawkes at least. Who knows? We can bust into Just What I Needed and A Moment’s Notice.
Jane: Hi Todd, this is Jane from Maryland.
Todd: Hi Jane.
Jane: Hi, vie Cleveland, which as you know, and I'm sure everybody here knows, you were, and are, huge there. I’ve heard explanations on why Springsteen was so big there, and David Bowie, and the DJs at WMMS who were responsible. I’ve never heard an explanation for who broke you and who got you out there on Cleveland.
Todd: It started with The Nazz as a matter of fact.
Jane: Really?
Todd: Yeah, it went as far back as that. The Nazz was an unknown factor, we weren’t getting a whole lot of radio airplay early on, and we toured a bunch of towns in response with this, that, or whatever, but when we went to Cleveland, suddenly we had this relatively gigantic … I think it was something in a gore or something like that, which would have held 300, 400 people, but a big, enthusiastic wow of crowd, and what people maybe understand or maybe don’t understand is a lot of the quality of a performance has to do with how the audience responds to it, and you can play the notes and give a mechanical performance just to get through the gig and get paid for it, or you can turn it into … with the cooperation of course to the audience, into some sort of other experience, that’s the whole idea.
That’s why people pay ridiculous concert ticket prices, because they’re not expecting that they’re going to get each note worth one penny, and then when they’re all played, you will have your ticket price. It’s a gamble. You’re rolling the dice that you’re going to get something much greater than the amount of money that you spent for the ticket. That was the great thing about Cleveland just from the very beginning, the way they responded, even to the Nazz when I was nothing but a guitar player.
Jane: Excellent, thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Chuck: Hi, this is Chuck, wow, and there’s an echo. I'm from the other side of Ohio, Cincinnati, and have caught you there a few times, never at Bogart’s.
Todd: The bottom side of Ohio.
Chuck: Exactly, that works. That works, too.
Todd: Yeah, and you didn’t miss anything at Bogarts.
Chuck: Oh, I know.
Todd: Miserable for everybody.
Chuck: We heard you on your 51st birthday and you said, “Isn’t it great to not be at Bogart?” On that form, I don’t remember. I’ve listened to your music since early 70s, and I’ve been an instrumental-focused person, but you are the few people whose lyrics I listen to and pay attention to, probably one of two or three actually, and a lot of them had a lot of impact for me at various stages on the life of just some of the directions you go. I'm curious who, like some books and authors might have been, that have influenced you overtime and maybe what’s on your reading stand now, if anything, or …?
Todd: Books are not necessarily or particularly an influence on my lyrics. Of course, the subject matter may have come from a book or something I read, but lyric-writing to me, and I never really thought it would turn out to be that way, but it is poetry and I had to learn the rules of poetry in order to become qualitatively, whatever kind of lyricist I am, to be able to express things the way that I wanted to, and in that sense, my influences are other song writers, are not authors. It goes as far back as my seminal influences to this like Gilbert and Sullivan, and the way that unusual words are woven into the lyrics, and Sondheim, or even classic song writers of the 30s and 40s, and song writers of today like Elvis Costello, who understand what you can do with words besides simply having some vowels to pronounce over a melody.
In that sense, at a certain point, I would have maybe take a little umbridge at being called a poet because that’s gay, but I do take a certain amount of pride in my lyrics and that I don’t just dash stuff off in the end, that I really tried to … as well as try and get the meaning across, try and select exactly the right word. The word that sounds right when you sing it, but also the word that completes the meaning. In that sense, yeah, a lot of people don’t understand, even song writers don’t understand that to be the complete song writer, you have to be a poet as well.
Chuck: Okay, thanks. I remember Laura Nyro was one person you mentioned as well. [cross talk 00:21:21].
Todd: Quite obviously, she had a big influence on me with the way that she would sometimes invent words, and somehow, even an invented word had a meaning to it. You take the other extreme, like Cocteau Twins, which is just all babbling, but somehow you think it means something when you get to the end of the song.
Sue: Hi Todd.
Todd: Hi.
Sue: My name is Sue, and I'm from Chicago Land. First off, I just really have to thank you for what a great thing that you’re doing for all of us.
Todd: Isn’t this fun?
Sue: It is one, and I can’t believe you’re all here.
Todd: Worn the black and I need another cocktail.
Sue: I thank you and your family for just hosting such a great time for all of us.
Todd: Thank you.
Sue: I do have a question and I wanted to know, when we look at this new album or listen to the new album, what do you want us to get out of this?
Todd: That’s never the point. I have said this before and I’ll say it again. I do the music sometimes, and oftentimes for myself to give myself something to listen to. What other people get out of it is out of my control, really. I'm trying to make something that articulates thoughts in my head, thoughts that I have that are pretty un-poetic, like I want a [front side 00:23:02] prick in the face or something like that, and you got to find a more sophisticated way of expressing that idea, but it’s something that I feel.
Sue: What was your general thought on this?
Todd: You mean on this particular record?
Sue: Yes.
Todd: That would be like divulging too much since I hadn’t played it yet and you haven’t heard it yet.
Sue: May I ask you one more?
Todd: Sure.
Sue: All right. I always have wondered what your thoughts were when people say Todd is God?
Todd: It’s an easy rhyme is what is thought.
Sue: That works.
Todd: Thanks.
Sue: Thank you.
Todd: Not a lot of imagination is what I think.
Ralph: Hi Todd, this is Ralph Garcia from New Jersey.
Todd: Ralph.
Ralph: Good evening.
Todd: Hi, Ralph, how have you been?
Ralph: All right. Thanks very much for giving me the best vacation of my life.
Todd: Oh, I have to make an announcement. We’re about to run out of beer, while you’re out tomorrow, everybody pick up a case.
Ralph: All right.
Todd: All right, we’ll have plenty of beer for Sunday, but can’t get any more kegs, and we’ve been going through it pretty good. I don’t know why I said that while you were up, Ralph, but [inaudible 00:24:27].
Ralph: No idea whatsoever.
Todd: Okay.
Ralph: I’ve heard a couple of different versions of this story of how the Gibson SG Fool Guitar made its way from Eric Clapton into your hands, and I know that you don’t have the guitar anymore. Can you take us through the whole process of how it went from Eric to George, and eventually to you?
Todd: You blew the beginning of it already.
Ralph: Oh! [cross talk 00:24:56].
Todd: Anyway, Eric Clapton, as everyone knows, during the salad days of The Cream, or were they just called Cream? I can’t remember, but in any case, Eric had this guitar that was painted by a graphic … you can’t say company, not with everybody was just a hippie consortium in those days, and they painted this very colorful guitar with the little cherub on it and stuff like that. Everyone recognizes it when they see it, and Eric played that guitar in the first American tour, a subsequent when I saw the very first gigs Cream played in the US, I saw them first at the no longer existent RKO Theater where Murray the K, put on one of his shows and there were eight or ten acts, and each act would play two songs at the top of The Headliner, who might play three or four, something like that.
The Headliners on altered at nights were Wilson Pickett, and Mitch Ryder, and the Detroit Wheels, and then on the bill was Blues Project and Blues Magoos, by the way. Quite a few other smaller acts, Murray the K’s wife was a choreographer, so called, and so the weird part about is that in-between the set changes and acts, sometimes it would show a Tom and Jerry Cartoon, and sometimes Jackie the K would come out with six or eight dancers, and do the whole Las Vegas thing around and everybody in the audience is looking at each other like, “What kind of weird hybrid is this?” Anyway, the climax of the show for most of us, and the reason why we came to the show, my buds and I, Woodeast Truck Stop, we drove up from Philadelphia, specifically to see Cream and The Who.
The Who, every show, they did like, I don’t know, four shows a day or something like that, smashed a guitar every show. They went through so many guitars, I can’t believe it, and they only played like two or three songs. They played substitute in my generation, and then Cream came out, and Eric either had a perm or had a wig. Had had that giant freaking afro, and that guitar, that painted guitar which everyone was so completely … it was part of a, “This is God’s hammer, this guitar.” Because Clapton was God to all other guitar players, and during that stint, right after they finished that, they played at a little club called The Café Agogo in New York, and I sat about eight feet from his double stack Marshall Amplifier. It had my brains blown out every single show.
That guitar was, to me, it was like a religious icon. Anyway, years and year later, I'm in Woodstock, and Jackie Lomax is also living in Woodstock and I get invited over Jackie’s house because he wants to sell me something. I go over to the house and it’s The Guitar. God’s hammer is there in his house, it’s in terrible shape. He’s been using it as a lap guitar, it’s got a wooden bridge on it, and the action is this high, and all the paint is chipped off of it and everything, and then he says, “I’ll sell it to you for $500 and maybe I’ll buy it back from you.” I think it was about 12 years later, he tried to buy it back from me but that was a no go at that point.
In any case, the specific lineage was that Eric gave the guitar to George, and I think, if you want to delve a little deeper, it probably had a lot to do by the fact that they were screwing with each other’s wives and stuff, and maybe it was like a piece offering or something. Then apparently, it was given to Paul Kossoff, the guitar player from Free.
Speaker 2: [inaudible 00:29:29].
Todd: What’s that?
Ralph: Cocktail.
Todd: Oh. Oh, I'm in love. Paul Kossoff, the guitar player from Free, who died at a very inopportune time. Also, Free went away but Paul Rodgers continued with Bad Company, stuff like that. Anyway, he had it for a brief time and I think it was from him, or maybe it was the other way around, maybe Paul Kossoff got it and then George got it, and then Jackie Lomax got it because George produced Jackie. I don’t know because that was before my time, in any case, $500 for the hammer of God, what would you do?
I had the paint job restored. Eric had played it so much that all the paint had been worn off the back and the neck, and so much sweat had permeated the neck that the wood had rotted away with balls of wood, and I played it for a while and eventually, the headstock just snapped off. I had to have a new one built, restored the paintjob as much as I could, and then played it lovingly for many years. A little anecdotal side bar for you people who are tech freaks or whatever, there was not a stock SG, they took windings off of the bridge pickups to make the sound more sharp, to make it a slightly more ... it had to have more attack than a normal SG would have, and that’s the story.
Ralph: Thank you brother.
Todd: You’re quite welcome.
David: Hey Todd.
Todd: Yes?
David: David from Redondo Beach, California.
Todd: Hmm, [cross talk 00:31:20].
David: When it comes to technology … thank you. When it comes to technology, it seems that you’ve been on the cutting edge, and you’ve embraced it all whether it’s synthesizers of video, or the internet, or the web, whatever you want to call it. What’s exciting to you now? What’s on the horizon? What juices you love when it comes to technology whether it’s guitar or sound processing or [cross talk 00:31:44]?
Todd: I'm over the technology thing.
David: Oh yeah?
Todd: Can’t you tell? The kind of stuff that I'm into now, again, you’re right, I'm still a little bit ahead of the curb, a lot of the lighting in the house, which we have yet to get working because it is so complicated and cutting edge. There’s this new all-digital LED lighting that can be any color and each one of these units consumes one watt of electricity and they last for 20 years if you run them 24 hours a day. In that sense, with building the house and getting involved in the house project introduced me to a lot of technologies old and new, and I'm still trying to thrash some of it out. We have yet to get into our full alternative energy thing. When we built the house, because of the roof line, we’re not going to put giant solar panels up there because it’s just going to look plain ugly, but until they make copper-colored curvable solar panels or whatever.
We’ve been thinking about wind, our problem there is that we are in the flight path of migratory birds, and I think there may be a problem with getting the wind thing together, but we are going to discover one way or another how to get the energy part of it as well. We’re trying to keep the consumption part down as much as possible, with the light, with all low-voltage lighting and things like that, but we want to get the electricity production part of it involved as well so we don’t have to pay that stupid electric bill, which is mostly the pump in the pond at this point.
David: Thanks Todd, my pleasure.
Todd: Thank you.
Doug: Let’s shift gear for a second, we’ve had some history and technical questions. I’ve got an email question here from somebody I know, Rockwell O’Gale from Chicago. She would like to know if you ever get stage fright and if so, how do you handle it?
Todd: I don’t get literally stage fright anymore. I’d pretty much know what’s going to happen when I get out there, which is my voice is going to work or it’s not, and I have fallbacks, I suppose, when it doesn’t work, but it’s not fright, it’s just the apprehension that’s going to be a lot more work than it usually is. If my voice isn’t working, it’s just twice as hard as if it is working. To deal with that, I try to establish to the president that I don’t do more than two gigs in a row, that I have a day off to rest, and I, much to the chagrin of every publicist I’ve ever had, I'm not getting up at 8:00 in the morning, go to somebody’s radio station to answer questions or do acoustic versions of my songs, because it would pretty much sound like death clock at that hour in the morning.
Even with that stricture, I still wind up doing three in a row, and sometimes a three in a row can be a little rough. It isn’t stage fright necessarily, but I may spend a whole day long thinking, “My voice is never going to open up. It’s going to be one of those nights.” Stage fright, no. I think that maybe because I have so much confidence in my audience because they’ve heard me at my worst. Maybe a new low, I don’t know this tonight, but I think I’ve already established that low bar. It was in Santa Rosa one night when I had no voice and I got to freaking drunk that I made up about every third word, but I think everyone was so amused that … and I'm not doing that again soon, all right?
Doug: She had another question. All fans I'm sure want to know, speaking of your voice, do you sing in the shower?
Todd: Yeah, one of the things about this new house is that my space, my room is up, it’s the last thing to get finished, like dad gets the last big piece of chicken or whatever, and everything has … nothing has gone wrong in there, but things that were supposed to happen have never happened, and I had my dream shower up there. It’s this big [cole 00:36:39] tower, the waterfall on the top, and you can get the light option, too, I guess, but who needs that? Like about 10 jets that pound the crap out of you from the back, and it needs its own little reservoir of water because it pushes so much water at you.
Now, they’re looking for some little tube or something like that. This is the most confusing thing any plumber’s ever seen, and when I get that started, I’ll let you know if I sing in it, but I imagine it’s going to sound like this, [drums on his chest].
Michele: Okay, we got another one.
Speaker 3: I’ve soiled myself.
Todd: What?
Chris: Good evening Todd, this is Chris.
Todd: That’s great.
Chris: I'm here from Washington, DC, and I wanted to first add my thanks to all of the expressions of gratitude that you’ve already gotten for, what I can only characterize as a once in a lifetime opportunity, so …
Todd: You’re right, because I am not doing this for you.
Chris: I can’t imagine you do it the first time. Thank you, thanks to you and to Michele, and [cross talk 00:37:54].
Todd: You got it [cross talk 0:37:54] take the torch on her from here.
Chris: Thank you. My question, I guess, broadens or follows up on some of the things you’ve said tonight about where you were in terms of your solo performances and performing with the Cars, and I guess I wanted to ask you, when it comes to recording and touring in general, as you look back on who you were, I don’t know, 20 years ago, is it something that you still envisioned you’d be doing at this point, and then looking forward, is it something that you still enjoy enough to want to do it as long as you’re physically able or do you have some goals or ideas on how long you’re going to be continuing to express yourself that way?
Todd: I’ll tell you quite frankly, I would love to have a few more annuities, because the mortgage on this place is unbelievable, I’ll tell you, but the people that I admire, the musicians that I admire the most are the ones who are lifetime musicians, Tony Bennett and BB King, and people like that, who are not only willing but able to continue to play until they drop. I don’t know of any other thing that I’d do that gives me the kind of pleasure that other people get from hard drugs, and at the same time, I don’t think there’s anything else that I would be so good at at this point in my life, that I should just take a total detour and commit myself to that.
Chris: [cross talk 00:39:52] maybe?
Todd: What’s that?
Chris: Hosting parties, maybe?
Todd: It could be that. I’ve tried to tell Michele, “This is a business.” There are other possibilities as well. I’ve always thought it would be fun to work in films, but if you ever go on a film set, that myth is gone, but it’s another way that you could do something and maybe create more options. After all, it’s got to be a lot more easier to just walk on and say one line than to play for an hour and a half. It’s not as if I don’t consider other things. I don’t consider that other things I might have to do as time goes on, but at this particular point in time, I figure I … in the performance context, I feel as good as I ever felt. I don’t feel like …
Chris: You still enjoy it as much as you’ve always have?
Todd: What’s that?
Chris: Do you still enjoy it as much as you always have? I think some people thought [cross talk 00:41:01].
Todd: I thought I’d compared it to hard drugs, which mostly one joy. I think I’ve said that already.
Chris: Okay, thank you.
Todd: Yeah, you know, if you’re talking about the future, yeah, for the foreseeable future, this is what I got.
Kelly: Hi Todd, I'm Kelly from North Carolina.
Todd: Hi, Kelly.
Kelly: I look up at the sky and I see the stars, and I think of A. Watts, and you, my dear sir, are a true star and a genuinely benevolent human being and I thank you very much for that.
Todd: Thank you. Take it home with you.
Kelly: I tried to come up with probably the corniest question I probably could come up with, and there’ve been some wonderful questions and this one, you might have to reflect back on perhaps to your childhood. It could even be something recent, but is there a movie that you have watched or seen that pulls at your heartstrings, maybe a scene at a movie that makes you tear up?
Todd: I know it’s hard probably to comprehend, but I can be a cynical person, and as I say, I’ve been on movie sets and I’ve seen movies made. My problem is that when I'm watching a movie or a TV show, I can almost transparently be a fly on the wall that the screenwriting session. People who make movies nowadays … I think Frank Capra made tear-jerking movies that was supposed to play at people’s heartstrings and a lot of the purpose of that was to make them forget about other things. Steven Spielberg is my least favorite director because all he’s interested in is pushing your emotional buttons, and he’ll create any peculiar situation in the world, no matter how unlikely in order to do that. I'm not interested in looking at a movie that wants to push my buttons.
If a filmmaker wants to show me something that he truly believes and feels, and has invested himself in, then I would like to see that. If some guy is just interested in treating me as a ticket-buyer, then I'm not interested in that. I tell you, I have this much interest in the new Indiana Jones movie. That’s a big zero you crazy old listeners.
Kelly: Thanks Todd.
Todd: I don’t go to movies to have my buttons pushed, and yes, there are films. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the film that made me weep when I was about probably 12 or 13. I took my little brother to the movies with me and we went to go see Gigot starring Jackie Gleason. This is the most Pathodic, if that’s a real word because I was talking about Pathos. It’s a movie about an old, somewhat dim French war veteran who lives in a little basement like a rat, and he’s mute and deaf, and all the people in the town make fun of him all the time. I remember, there were so many scenes in the movie and Jackie Gleason wrote the music, which is really tear-jerking, and there were so many themes in the movie, which I'm watching, then my brother is fidgeting, I'm punching him in the arm because I want to get all misty about Gigot’s pitiful situation. Yeah, if you really want to get busted up, go see Gigot and count your blessings. We were going to show you Old Yeller one night here.
Kelly: Thanks, Todd.
Todd: No problem.
Kelly: Doug, thanks for Rundgren Radio too.
Doug: Speaking of movies, there's a rumor that maybe you were in one in 1972, it’s called Intersection. Do you remember anything about this?
Todd: I know of it, yes.
Doug: Tell us a little bit more about it.
Todd: I really can’t actually, I never knew what it was about. It’s some peculiar idea that the film maker had but it was just a bizarre opportunity. I got invited out to go to LA. First time I had stayed in the Chateau Marmont. First time I met Nicky Nichols who became my costumer and feather applier in later years and did this weird little film in the studio they did most of my records in. I got filming there. They filmed Wolfman Jack in another location. He’s in it as well. There’s some other people and it’s some weird thing where I look like I got fired from David Bowie’s band but they let me keep the costume.
It was Nicky’s first assault on my body. Probably not in the way that he imagines but he was applying all these rhinestones to me all down the choker points, run out of eyelash glue and said, “Get me some glue.” They went and found some Krazy Glue and applied the rhinestones and big blisters formed under the rhinestones after the shoot. I got on the airplane and they were still stuck to me. I couldn’t get them off. I had scars everywhere. One of the Krazy Glue, little rhinestones went. No, I can’t tell you what it’s about. I can only tell you my personal recollection.
Doug: What did you do, acting in it or just music?
Todd: I was just supposed to sing Wolfman Jack, I was singing Wolfman Jack in a silver Lamay suit. It was the weirdest thing. Wolfman Jack is kind of a Motown kind of thing. Maybe if I been wearing red satin or something like that but it was like a silver Lamay jumpsuit with all of the glam make up and so I would have something to do while I was singing. They have me hold the remote from the tape machine that started and stopped which I’m dangling in my hand like a purse. That’s all I remember.
John: Hi Todd, my name’s John Badiato.
Todd: Hi John.
John: Your music has always had influence on my life and a silly question. Is lock jaw actually your invention?
Todd: My invention?
John: The story of lock jaw. Did you invent it?
Todd: Oh, yeah. That’s my invention. I don’t think the Germans have such a horrible story. The Germans are a cheery, light hearted people.
John: That’s cool. Thank you, Todd.
Bill: Man, you’re sick for having all these people here.
Todd: Yeah, you should hear the conversations we have when you’re not around.
Doug: Yeah, you’ve been cooking those as a food.
Bill: I’m Bill Jack. I’m from South Mississippi if you can’t tell from my voice.
Todd: I love it.
Bill: I think me and my wife Joanna, we might be the only people here from Mississippi but I just want to thank you for rekindling the flame in me to go to hear live music. I’ve sell you if the house in New Orleans when you did the acoustic fit, you had band in the box and my questions is what happens to you when you go to the Piano Zone?
Todd: I’m not going there anymore. I am not going to the Zone. It doesn’t mean I will never touch a piano again but I have come to realize my limitations as a piano player and most has to do with the fact that I could probably be a serviceable piano player if I didn’t have to sing but what happens is I start singing and I just go off to this place and I forget that my hands were supposed to be doing something and that’s when it all goes to hell. I had to confront the fact that, yeah, if I really worked hard, I could be Billy Joel or something like that, that’s not me.
I much more enjoy the slop and all of the accidental notes and the crap of playing a guitar. It’s just more fun to me no matter how much it screws up my finger tips.
Bill: My wife isn’t here. She has a DMA in piano. She might be able to help you.
Todd: I just don’t have the time. I’m sorry.
Bill: Thank you, Todd.
Todd: If I did have the time, I’d learn to touch type. That would be a more useful skill for me at this point.
Tom: Howdy Todd. Tom from West Virginia, how are you?
Todd: West Virginia in the house. Okay.
Tom: Got it man. Hey listen, I noticed that on some of the later stuff you start to stretch your solos out a little more. Is this indicative of where we’re going with this new project? Because the solo seemed to get longer and longer on Fascist Christ and you’re really playing it at high level.
Todd: They’re longer than the recorded versions but that is point. We’re trying to find grooves that we can stretch out on. I’m not going to divulge exactly what the set list is and things like … There is new material and there is some noodling in it but I think part of the arena rock thing which is … the new album’s called Arena, you know that and you know that I’m making a contemporary attempt to recapture some of what that is, whenever that is but one thing it isn’t is endless long jamming. It’s big, you don’t want to lose the audiences’ interests. You want them pumping their fists and waving their lighters and flashing their tartans, whatever it is in whatever part of the world. That’s the whole point, is of this particular record, is that the solos is supposed to be concise and melodic and then you get on with the song.
Tom: I’m really looking forward to it. I think I speak for everybody there. We’re just all stoked up for it, man. It’d be great.
Todd: Cool. All righty. We’re all [inaudible 00:52:03]. Just a dress rehearsal. Don’t take it seriously or anything.
Becky: Hello Todd. This is Becky [inaudible 00:52:11] from Dallas, Texas.
Todd: Hi, Becky.
Becky: Long time concert goer. I wanted to ask you … let me paraphrase it by saying this. Those of us who really enjoy how you treat the vocal and expression aspect in your music, sometimes find ourselves listening to other songs by other people and I think some people here would agree, we sometimes secretly wish you would do a cover album of songs that frankly, would be much better done by you.
Todd: I certainly wouldn’t try to approach it from that [inaudible 00:53:10]. Oh you guys don’t even know how to record your own songs. Let me show you how it’s done. [cross talk 00:53:21]. No. I have a lot of sympathy for that idea because sometimes I just don’t feel like writing anything. That would take care of that part of the problem. I don’t necessarily imagine I could do a song better than somebody else.
Becky: But give it your styling.
Todd: I just imagine I could do a different or I just imagine I would like to do, for whatever reason, do little Hitlers. I never thought I could do it better than Elvis did. I just like the song and the message of the song and I thought if I needed something like that and the context of the record I was making, and you do something with that kind of feeling, have something of my own. You can do worse than nicking a song from Elvis Costello, but in that sense, I don’t believe I did it better than he did. I just did it different.
Becky: I’m saying that we have yet to hear some songs.
Todd: Name a song.
Becky: One? Okay.
Todd: Give me a song that’s going to get this project started, all right?
Becky: Could I provide you a list and hand it to you tomorrow?
Doug: Just call in one hour, all right? We’re on a radio show. Who want to hear Todd do his own music versus covers?
Becky: Let’s start a list.
Doug: Yeah, okay.
Becky: Okay, enough of that, thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Lisa: Hi Todd, this is Lisa Strada from Redondo Beach.
Todd: Oh, seen your name a lot.
Lisa: Thanks for the name. You’re mostly that dude my mom digs until I heard you were working with Bad Religion and then I started paying attention. I was just wondering if you’re paying attention to upcoming artists, what you see happening in the music industry now, do any of the niche genres really appeal to you?
Todd: I get production opportunities all the time of various kinds and some of them represent contemporary music. Some of them represent young bands who are playing music that has been around for a long time. I got approached to do what essentially would’ve been like heavy metal album which would have been a lot of fun, the singer was great but time didn’t work out.
The whole thing about production and the whole thing about working with other people is it’s a difficult thing to put together because first of all, I’ve done so many records and I’ve gotten a little bit picky about what I do and the criterion for what I do I had set pretty high.
The first thing I had to do is respond to the material, like the songs had to be songs that I like to hear more than once or that I wouldn’t regret having heard at all, things like that. That’s the most difficult thing is coming up with songs that sound new and original in some way. Once you come up with a great song, anybody can play it, it sounds pretty good. You’d be surprised that production isn’t about stuff that goes on in the studio. It’s mostly, at least, from my standpoint, about hectoring the songwriters to just work a little harder. That’s too easy a rhyme, like I said before or that doesn’t make any sense or that’s grammatically incorrect or whatever.
A lot of it is just picking at the material before you ever get in the studio because once you get in the studio, you just want to play. You don’t want to be talking about should it be “is” or “are” or other kinds of things that have nothing to do with delivering a performance and the whole idea of the performance in the studio is that you want to forget you’re in the studio and imagine yourself actually playing it for people.
My criterion in terms of production, in terms of what I’d be interested in producing has a lot to do with them. There are a whole lot of bands that I would really have a sleepless night over to produce. I have to say that it’s more like the bands I could’ve produced but never did produce are more of a concern for me than what the next one might be.
I had an opportunity to produce Talking Heads but I was already doing a project that time and I couldn’t do it so they got Eno to do the records. That would’ve been … if it hadn’t done anything for the career, it would’ve been fun for me. There other people in the music business whom I admire and who also has some admiration for me where my name has come up at maybe it just seemed like it’d be too creepy or something like that. I heard from P. Thomas that my name came up and contacts are producing an Attractions album, Elvis Costello and the Attractions and I would’ve killed to do that.
For whatever reason, it went a different direction. Those are things probably that I would have been more concerned about and whether I can find a new band to do. Eventually, some really talent and act with really good material is going to show up and then I’ll do a record with them.
Lisa: Thank you.
Todd: Thank you.
Michele: Got a couple more up here, Doug, is that okay?
Todd: How long is the line anyway? Yeah, just thank God it hasn’t rain.
Michele: Two more.
Bill G: Hey Todd, my name is Bill Godby. I’m living here over in the islands over in Hilo. I’ve been here a while. I come from Flint, Michigan. What I’m wondering is how has living over here for 12, 15 years affected you as a human being and what you write and also a secondary question here. How do you think this is going to affect you in the big picture of your life, in the next 10 years?
Todd: This event, you mean? Or living here.
Bill G: The theory of there’s a relationship between the angst you experience in your everyday life and struggles, paying bills and so forth in terms of your creative output and being comfy [cross talks 01:00:31].
Todd: I get your drift. All right, all right. I get your drift. [cross talks 01:00:35]. Don’t rub it in.
Bill G: Expound on that and I’ll be happy and man, mucho Mahalos to this event. This is tremendous, there’s nothing to compare this to. This is just awesome.
Todd: Thank you, thank you very much.
Doug: Thank you very much.
Todd: I didn’t suddenly get thrown a dart a globe or something, so I’m moving there. I’ve been coming to Hawaii since the ‘70s. Someone suggest that I need to get away for a little while. Someone suggested, “Why don’t you go to Hawaii?” I never thought about the Hawaiian Islands at all. This is kind of out of the way, really pretty, stuff like that. It wasn’t a giant tourist spot at the time.
I came over here and I developed a little flirtation with the island and then I just kept coming here over the years and it became like a place I came, a place that I would spend time in especially to just get away and be alone and deflate and stuff like that, to just clear my head. We came over on a trip. I had some people who were working with me on video projects. I had studio for a while that was funded by a company called New Tech. I did a video called Change Myself and it was the first video that had been done all on desktop computers, computer generated video.
After I’d done it, they were so impressed with the result that they asked me to set up a studio out in San Francisco where we would bang on their software and hardware and try and create as much cutting edge stuff as we could. Change Myself turned into a whole business in a way. Did I forget the question?
Speaker 6: Actually, he wants to know why you don’t play Hawaii very much.
Doug: No that was his secondary question.
Todd: Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve been to an elaborate digression. I’m sorry. I know where I am. I know where I’m in. Don’t help me. Come on. Anyway, there’s this event called SIGGRAPH, a yearly symposium of computer graphics and back in the late ‘80’s, early ‘90s, computer graphics is relatively new. Now, they have hundred photo realistic people battling Neo in the matrix, stuff like that. In those days, just to get something, anything that looked believable, it was a feat. These events were big showcases for whatever it is you could do.
We would pull this two week, 24 hours a day, kind of, we got to get this done, blah, blah, blah, everyone’s flying in, haven’t had any sleep, everything is last minute, you’re still in the hotel room rendering the last frames, trying to get this all done so you can showcase your work. We’d gone through one of these things and then I thought, let’s just take everybody out to Hawaii, not a lot of people actually. About five, six people but let’s all go out to Hawaii and relax after this big push. It happened to be about eight months after Iniki flattened this island, the eye of a hurricane went right over this island and you wouldn’t believe, looking at it now, what it looked like right after that happened. It’s like someone took a hedge clipper and went right over the whole island.
That’s why there are chickens everywhere. All of the domestic chickens got blown up in the air and wound up in other places and now they’re all feral again. If you catch one, don’t eat it, it’s not worth it. In any case, we came here about eight months after that and every time I’d come here, I thought when I retire, when I get old, this is where I like to live maybe and so, I would always look for a place that it might be worth the trouble to buy or something like that and never ever made the commitment.
Anyway, we were here right after the hurricane. I thought, real estate is never going to be cheaper than it is now, that a hurricane come through here. We started looking for property in maybe over three days. We looked at various things. We looked at a place where Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys owns. That was right up on the beach past Hanalei but not too far. They bought when they thought they were going to live in Hawaii. Sylvester Stallone over here had built a polo field because he thought he was going to live here. There are so many people who have been through here thinking they’re going to live here and I probably was like one of those people until on the last day that we were looking, whatever, we came through the driveway here and looked at this view.
Suddenly, I’m in love. We knew that this was the place. If there was any way possible that I could get this place, I was going to do it. Over the last 10, 12 years, we had really been through he fires of hell to get and keep this place. First, the original guy that owned it was … he was a prick. He was a freaking prick. He tortured us over this. First time we looked at it, we said, oh, here’s the price, where it’s two lots actually in Hawaii. That’s so we could build a studio over where you’re camping because you’re going to [inaudible 01:06:52] a certain sized building on any lot here. We were going to build over there a studio and we needed to have, ideally, have two lots next to each other so we can have the house and studio. Anyway, it was all perfect and [inaudible 01:07:09] asking price but the first time we came, he wanted all cash. No paper. He wanted all cash for it.
We just couldn’t make it. It just wasn’t happening. A year or so later, came into something of a boon, of a cash book that had to do with Meat Loaf and I cashed out of my original production thing with Meat Loaf and got a big chunk of cash and so we said, now, we can do this. We thought, “This won’t be here anymore. He would’ve sold it.” We went online, we checked it out, “Oh, it’s still available.” We called the realtor, it’s still available and it was at a bargain price because he hadn’t sold it over the last year.
As soon as he found out it was us, it was two lots, and two separate lost for a certain price if you bought them both, you could have them for a bargain price. As soon as he found out it was us, he said, “Oh, one lot is sold. If you want to buy the lot, you’re going to pay full price on both of them.” Then he started acting like we weren’t good enough to be Hawaiians. This guy’s from New York, made his fortune making hangers for clothes. From the garment district, the guy is.
He’s this freaking nebbish that moved to a New Hampshire ashram because he had a quintuple bypass. He’s trying to bring his stress down and he’s freaking with us, trying to get every last dime out of us and telling us we’re not good enough to live here. The final thing that we had to go through is we had breakfast with him in Woodstock, Woodstock Café. Michele had to weep for him which she will do. She’s an actress. She will weep on queue so she wept for him and I had to escort him around the grounds of Woodstock 1990 whatever it was. The second Woodstock because we were playing there.
We had our own installation and I had to escort him around the grounds before he would sell us the property at the ridiculously extorted price that he came up with. That was the first thing we had to go through, all right? Since I took every cent I had and put it into this property, IRS came after me the next year, saying, “Where’s our money?”
I said, I don’t got it. I bought property with it. At that point, it became a battle with them and that’s an ongoing battle, of course. We’re all even, don’t worry about it. Please, don’t come pressing a $5 bill on my hand after we’re through. We’re at a whole other level with them. In any case, it’s been pretty much a freaking battle all the way. We finally, like three years ago, we think we can do this. If I work my ass off, we think we can build this house finally. I’ve had the plans for 10 years.
We started building the house. Just as we’re finished with the house, what happens? Mortgage crisis. Nobody can get a mortgage. We got our first. Anyone here mortgage agent? Can you get the second mortgage, somebody? Please, anybody? All right.
Anyway, at this particular moment, we’re working our way through that mortgage crisis just like everybody else who owns a home or has build a home or something like that. Staying here, living here is not easy in the sense that trying to create a home and keep a home is hard all over. It’s not any easier here. I just feel like the one thing I did right is I got the spot. We got the spot, I have the house that I want. All I have to do is figure out a way to keep it.
The way to keep it is you people buying concert tickets, right?
Bill G: Right and a new album of course.
Ronnie: Hello Todd. My name is Ronnie and I’m from London.
Todd: Welcome. You must be terribly jetlagged.
Ronnie: Not at all. I’ve been here for a week, been absolutely the best week in my life so far. Since I first fell in love with your music in the early ‘70s, you’ve covered topics as diverse as cremation and making coffee. I wondered perhaps rather predictable final question for the Q&A session, what has been your most favorite song and why?
Todd: Oh I suppose the most predictable answer would be, “They’re like my children and I love them all.” I don’t swell a lot on material that I have done. I’ve got 13 new songs that I’m trying to remember the lyrics for and I’m so totally possessed with that at this point that it’s just hard to focus on other music. It’s hard to remember other songs right now.
You could say that I have might have a favorite of the new songs. I’m not sure whether I should divulge what it is at this particular point because that would be like giving something away.
Ronnie: We won’t tell anyone.
Todd: I would say my favorite song is likely to be one of the new ones you’ll hear on Sunday.
Doug: There you go.
Todd: Okay?
Ronnie: And why?
Todd: Pardon me?
Ronnie: And why?
Todd: And why? It will be the one that gets the best reaction.
Ronnie: Okay. Thanks from everyone [inaudible 01:13:16].
Todd: Thank you and say hi to all my London friends when you get back.
Ronnie: Will do. Thank you very much, Todd. Love you. Bye.
Todd: Thank you. Bye bye.
Michele: That’s what we got up here, Doug.
Doug: Michele, do you have a question for Todd?
Michele: Of course I have a question. It’s not very intelligent after all of these great questions tonight but I have to ask because this is my one opportunity to do so. Mr. Rundgren, when you are traveling on tour, how do you do your laundry?
Todd: I don’t.
Michele: There you go.
Todd: I wear the socks for four, five days and I throw them out, buy new ones. Otherwise, if I’m not onstage, I wear the same damn clothes, every damn day, that’s why they call me Pig Pen.
Michele: Thank you, Pig Pen.
Todd: Thank you.
Doug: Has anyone here seen that this goes to 11 t-shirts by chance?
Michele: [inaudible 01:14:35]
Doug: A couple of times.
Michele: That’s all we got up here.
Todd: All right everybody.
Doug: Very nice.
Todd: Are we going to have movies tonight?
Doug: Perhaps.
Todd: Okay. Old Yeller, okay.
Doug: Intersection.
Todd: You got Gigot on there? I feel wailing and gnashing up to you. All righty, have a good evening, everybody. Tiggy Bar’s open.
Doug: Can everybody stick around …
Todd: The … I forgot, the other bar’s open as well. Yolani Bar, right okay. I’m in trouble. The other thing that if you want to witness the traditional interring …
Michele: Wait, veggie girls, get out of the room.
Todd: What’s that? Oh, sorry.
Michele: Let veggie girl leave the room.
Todd: The interring of the traditional meal, that’s going to happen very early tomorrow morning, maybe seven or eight o’clock, something like that.
Michele: They said they’re going to try and make it nine so that they can see …
Todd: [inaudible 01:15:32] is cooked [inaudible 01:15:35]
Michele: I know but they’re going to pull it out at six pm.
Todd: In any case, you can watch the preparation and the interring, on other words, this hole over here maybe somebody’s fallen into and they’re drunk and stupor. That’s called the emo. That’s where we bury the pig and all the other contents of the evening’s meal and they will go through a whole preparation thing and they will put rocks inside of the pig, hot rocks that they will make it stuff like that. It’s a whole little procedure, very interesting for you and culturally enlightening. Even if you are a vegetarian, you may just want to see it because …
Michele: No, they’re not going to want to see it, no.
Todd: Oh, I feel a sprinkle!
Michele: Also Sunday night’s concert will be earlier than you think. Todd, what time you think you’re going to go on?
Todd: We are going to try to time it to be approximately an hour before sun down. IN other words, we need some daylight.
Michele: Like 6:15, 6:30 something like that.
Todd: Somewhere between I think 6:30 and seven tomorrow night.
Michele: Okay. Dinner will be before that.
Todd: No not tomorrow night. Sunday night. Sorry.
Michele: Also you probably haven’t heard from us but we’ve had a really …
Todd: You’re talking to me?
Michele: No, both of us have said we’re having a really good time too. Everybody’s been really great and we’re very happy.
Doug: Yey!
Todd:` Yeah! You have been far less trouble than our friends.
Michele: Sssh, don’t tell them that.
Todd: You’ve been terrific, thank you very much.
Doug: Show’s over.
Todd: Okay, hit the bar! Now, we’re done. Thank you!
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