Todd Rundgren

Photo: Danny O'Conner

As a musician, engineer, producer and multimedia artist, Todd Rundgren has been a pioneering figure in rock music since the late 1960s. His first album of new material for 10 years was, like many of its predecessors, almost entirely played, produced and recorded by Rundgren alone.

Todd Rundgren in more familiar guitar-hero pose.Photo: Danny O'ConnerMore than three decades ago a lanky youth with eccentric, gaunt features and large eyes sprang onto the international music stage with a remarkable double album called Something/Anything? The young man had written and produced all the songs, and on three of the four vinyl sides, had played all the instruments and sung all the vocals. The 1972 double album contained such a richness of top-drawer songs, nifty arrangements, and virtuoso playing and singing that it's still regarded as a timeless classic. The youth's next album, released in 1973, was called A Wizard, A True Star, and contained a brilliant sonic collage full of studio trickery, which was not only produced but also engineered by the man himself. His name was, of course, Todd Rundgren.

Utopian Legend

It took 10 more years for Rundgren to acquire a status close to that of living legend. In addition to his thriving solo career, he formed, in 1974, a band called Utopia, which recorded an array of albums during the 1970s and 1980s while moving stylistically from lengthy synth-driven instrumentals, via progressive metal rock, to power pop. In addition, Rundgren applied his knowledge of the recording process as a wildly successful producer for others. Often also functioning as engineer and player he oversaw the creation of classic albums like Grand Funk Railroad's We're An American Band (1973), the New York Dolls' self-titled 1973 debut, the Tubes' Remote Control (1976), Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell (1977), Patti Smith's Wave (1979), and XTC's Skylarking (1986).

...in 1980 he created the first colour graphics tablet, which was licensed to Apple as the Utopia Graphics Tablet...

However, the Philadelphia-born American refused to be a 'true star' in the traditional sense. Instead, he frequently took bizarre leftfield musical directions, dressed in weird camp clothing and make-up, and wrote lyrics that addressed much deeper issues than boy-meets-girl. He also became a pioneer of multimedia and computer technology. For instance, Rundgren organised the world's first interactive television concert in 1978, during which home audiences could chose what songs would be played; in 1980 he created the first colour graphics tablet, which was licensed to Apple as the Utopia Graphics Tablet; and in 1982 he made the first music videos to be commercially released, one of which was nominated for a Grammy. He founded Secret Sound Studios in 1972 and opened Utopia Video Studios in 1978, exemplifying a keen interest in audio-visual art.

Todd Rundgren created the world's first colour graphics tablet in 1980, and is still exploring the possibilities today, thanks to the Tablet PC. Photo: Danny O'ConnerHis 1992 solo album No World Order was not only issued as a standard audio CD, but also on CD-I as the world's first interactive album, with the songs chopped up in four-bar segments, allowing the listener to construct his or her own song structures. In 1994, The Individualist was the world's first full-length enhanced CD, and by the late 1990s most of Rundgren's creative energies were focused on pioneering the use of the Internet as a vehicle for music delivery. Among other things, Rundgren founded two web sites, www.tr-i.com, and www.patronet.com [long before Patreon existed], through which listeners can act as patrons of the arts by paying the artist upfront to have music delivered directly to them. Since 1998 Rundgren issued his music song by song via Patronet, and some of this material, including some reworkings of older songs, was compiled on One Long Year, released as a traditional CD in 2000.

In several recent interviews, Rundgren has argued that CDs and record companies are outmoded routes for getting music from artist to audience. In his view, younger music lovers especially prefer to search the Internet, download what they like, and make their own MP3, MD or CD compilations. Rundgren's solution is to treat music delivery as the equivalent of cable television, with users paying a monthly fee of, say, $20, to gain access to all the music they want. Presumably, the proceeds are then divided between all those who supply music, according to some unspecified formula that may prove to be the tricky part to work out.

Shapes And Sounds

Much of what Rundgren has done since the late 1980s has pushed the boundaries of the artist-audience relationship, in the search for greater interactivity. It therefore comes as a bit of a surprise to find that this April a traditional CD by him was released, called Liars, without interactive components, and put in traditional record shops by a traditional record company (Sanctuary). What's more, the synth-dominated work is hyped as a major event, because it's Rundgren's first CD release of all-new material for 10 years.

"Many people think of a record as a certain collection of songs put onto a disc-shaped object," begins Rundgren. "But in the past few years we've begun to realise that it isn't the shape of the object that matters. Instead sound can be virtualised in any number of forms. It may at one point be a link on your computer screen, and then it's a thing that appears in the window of your MP3 player, and it never takes physical form. At that point the experience of the music is more and more defined by the listener."

No problem here, one would say, but according to Rundgren, this does make it harder for musicians to realise their intentions. "You used to make a record and would say, 'OK, this record is 12 songs in this specific order and in this package with this cover and with these lyrics, blah, blah, blah. But now, at a certain point it gets completely redefined. Someone takes one song off this record and one song off that record, and burns themselves a CD, and this may be like nothing you imagined. That makes it very hard to say whether you're satisfying the original goals you set yourself. You have to be aware that you may have a concept about your songs appearing in a specific order, and that you may have to do something tricky to enforce that. Like on Liars, I had the songs overlap. I'm thinking here in terms of 'OK, I made a distribution deal with the record label, how do they hold on to the value of that format as long as possible?' You do that by trying to make the format unique in some sense. That's why all the songs flow together. No-one is going to download an entire album as one giant MP3 file. If you want the real experience of Liars, you're more or less forced to buy the CD.

"In addition to this, I'm delivering unlocked MP3s, with fade-outs in them, to my on-line subscribers, for them to do with what they want. What I know, and what I believe the record company knows, is that those listeners are going to buy both the CD and the MP3 files. They're going to buy everything there is. That's the whole idea of patronage, to get the most dedicated listeners, the ones who make a point of supporting you, and they will get a certain amount of attention and levity and special things that other people find difficult to get. And in that sense they give you the kind of support you used to get from the record label, like underwriting making records and financing your tours."

Todd Rundgren's Utopia, 1980: Todd Rundgren, Willie Wilcox, Kasim Sulton and Roger Powell.Photo: Danny O'Conner

A Certain Sound

Todd Rundgren has something of a reputation as a guitar hero, but he has always explored other instruments, and on Liars, synths and other keyboard sounds take the spotlight. Once again, Rundgren plays all the instruments (barring a couple of solo spots by others). "I was going for a certain sound, " he explains. "I gravitated toward a B3 and Fender Rhodes for the central element. To me it's old-fashioned, and I wanted it to resemble all my influences... some Mose Allison, Beatle-esque things. And there's always a bit of Marvin Gaye in there somewhere."

Much of Liars therefore has a retro feel to it, dominated by influences of 1970s soul, and, rather surprisingly, four-to-the-floor 1980s house. According to Rundgren, this musical approach was shaped by the subject matter of the album. "It's a challenge to do an album called Liars, and not put yourself in a compromised position," explained Rundgren, quite understandably, and apparently not referring to the cover image of himself as a crazed Easter Bunny. "The album isn't about finger-pointing. It's about the phenomenon of dishonesty and non-reality and the many flavours there are, from the most innocent to the most venal. Not one of us is truly honest, and therefore the album is left open to accusations of fakery, which is why I'm, like always, reluctant to do any kind of breakdown of exactly how the album was constructed."

This kind of reluctance usually spells trouble for interviews of a technical nature, but luckily it was possible to persuade Rundgren to elaborate on the nuts and bolts of Liars. "Part of the reason there are so many keyboards on this album is compositional," he reveals. "I can do a lot more on a keyboard than on a guitar. There are just some things you can convey with keyboards that can't be done with guitars. The other reason is that certain keyboard sounds take me to a certain time. Like the Wurlitzer piano, which nobody plays any more because they're too much of a maintenance problem. They were a giant pain in the ass, but they had a characteristic sound. When you hear the Wurlitzer on 'Get Back', it takes you immediately back to the late 1960s. The same goes for the sound of the Fender Rhodes, and the B3, and some of the old, mono, analogue synths."