Todd Rundgren:
Hello, It’s TR-I
Todd
Rundgren has always pushed the envelope of recording, from both musical and technological
aspects. During the course of his career, he has stretched the boundaries of
invention time and time again, not only with his own albums, but as a producer
of more than fifty albums by other artists. Rundgren’s work with Meat Loaf (Bat
Out of Hell), The Band (Stage Fright), The New York Dolls (The
New York Dolls), and XTC (Skylarking) are but a few examples of the
diversity of Rundgren’s abilities.
1993 heralds
the release of No World Order, Rundgren’s latest solo album──and the very first interactive format CD. While the
interactive format allows the listener to, in effect, customize the music in
more than a million different ways (via a CD-interactive player), the non-interactive
version is a cause for wonderment in itself. The waterfall of musical invention
cascades out of the speakers, carrying the listener along at an almost
break-neck pace. It’s an exhilarating ride, though. Rundgren has managed to
capture his new musical vision with utter clarity; to listen is to see.
I spoke with
Todd Rundgren (or TR-I, as he prefers for the moment), who shared some thoughts
on the album, his career, and the state of music in general.
Roy
Abrams: No World
Order incorporates so many different musical elements, with intricate
layers of sound. Was there an overall blueprint you worked from regarding
arrangements and song structure?
Todd
Rundgren: It’s been
a while since I’ve used sequencing at all. On most all of my records, I might
have used a drum program occasionally and then played everything else more or
less live. It was overall much more of a serious sequencing job than I had ever
undertaken before.
RA: I was especially intrigued by your
integration of rap. It sounds as if you had a lot of fun exploring the element.
TR: It was fun, actually. At first, I
was pretty apprehensive. I thought, am I gonna sound like Vanilla Ice or something?
It’s one of those things where I thought for a long time, this is not really my
thing. I’m not really that much into rap, mostly because of the subject matter
and the essential prerequisites for being taken seriously in that area. It’s a
very groin-based approach. I started to become aware of some artists moving it
a little bit toward the head, and that’s when I got the idea that perhaps I
might take a crack at it and see what I could do with it in terms of appropriating
it to my own style.
RA: Which artists are you referring to?
TR: Well, there was PM Dawn and
Arrested Development, KLF, and various other people where the subject matter would
get off the usual street rap kind of gun-packin’, ho-beatin’ biggest penis in
the land kind of approach. And then there’s the dance factory, quasi-industrial
music machine approach, where rap essentially had to do with exhortation to
boogie and that wasn’t really my thing either. So, putting a social conscience
into the form made it seem like there was a little more freedom for me to do my
own thing, which isn’t necessarily any of the above!
RA: You mentioned in the past that at times
you felt that your lyrics could get a bit obtuse. Lyrically, the ideas on No
World Order come through in a vividly direct way. Did rap’s influence cause
you to approach your lyrics differently?
TR: The essential freedom that rap brings
you … well, there are two things. One, certain words when spoken don’t sound as
goofy as when you try and sing ‘em. Some words just don’t sing well, so if you’re
speaking, you have the latitude to use certain words and phrases that just wouldn’t
translate into melodic context. In addition, there’s a rhythmic freedom that
comes with it. Melody implies a certain motif of rhythm in order for the melody
to be recognized. At least, in pop music, it’s by implication a repetitious theme.
The advantage in rap is that you’re not always stuck in the same rhythmic mode;
you can do a lot of things that make it much more interesting from phrase to
phrase. I’m not looking to completely deconstruct the elements of repetition or
form; at the same time, I’m trying to take advantage of whatever freedom is
there.
RA: The new album possesses a certain
link with 1973’s A Wizard, A True Star in the way that both albums
seethe with invention. No World Order sounds like a rediscovery of the
fun you had making the former album.
TR: I had a lot of fun, actually, once
I had really gotten the concept down of what I wanted to do. There were musical
goals, there were technological challenges, and between the two of them, I had
an opportunity to rethink my approach to music. In other words, with the final version
of the album that came out, I really didn’t know what it would be, even after I
had recorded all of the music and gotten it all cut up into this sort of database
of musical ideas. When I finally got down and said, “okay, it’s time to put
together fifty-plus minutes of music that’s gonna make up this first pass of
the record,” I didn’t have a lot of rules. I could really experiment with the
order of the musical ideas, even with how the lyrics were set up and framed.
The ability to, for instance, push them to the front by taking various instruments
out. I had three or four different versions of every part of the songs that
would have various combinations of instruments and voices. As I went along, I could
emphasize and de-emphasize various aspects of the performance, kind of in a cut-and-paste
way. It wasn’t like this long, seething, and evolving concept that could only
come out one way, like (XTC’s) Skylarking was. A Wizard, A True Star,
even though it has this stream of consciousness quality about it, I didn’t have
the freedom afterward to rearrange things; as the recording progressed, I know
how the sequence of events was gonna come out. In the case of No World Order,
I finished the recording process, but I had no idea exactly what order the
songs would come in or whether they would come out as whole songs. In the final
product, songs come in as fragments; they’re split up in two or three different
places throughout the record. It was a whole chance to reassess how I wanted
the album to sound.
RA: You mentioned Skylarking. As
a producer, the number of artists you’ve worked with over the years is quite
large and the musical diversity of these projects underscores your own. Which of
these experiences provided the most challenge and satisfaction?
TR: The challenging albums usually are
by nature──if I know what the challenge is before I go in──the more satisfying ones. You can get a lot
of satisfaction out of an album that seems to be really easy to complete, but
often the particularly challenging albums hold out a reward that’s kind of
uncommon, like panning for gold or something. You don’t always go into it with
the total confidence of achieving that goal, sometimes not even with a 100% clear
vision of what the goal is, just a great belief in the potential. In the case
of Skylarking, there was always a great belief in the potential; the hardest
part about getting there was really [laughs] the politics of getting the final performance,
because there was such a rich vein of musical ideas to tap into. I actually had
pretty much the concept of the album, even the running order of the tunes,
settled before we even started recording. I was fairly confident that I would
be satisfied with the final product. The hard part was whether we would ever
get it finished!
RA: A quick production question: What’s the
secret behind the Todd Rundgren drum sound?
TR: [Chuckles] I don’t know! When I first got
into recording, it was the instrument that I invested the most time in, trying
to get the sounds that I wanted out of the drums. At this point, it’s really
just second nature. It doesn’t take me a long time. It’s more unusual to not be
able to get a good drum sound nowadays than it is to be able to get one. In
other words, it has to be a peculiar combination of a strange drums and a bad
microphone or something like that. Usually, given somebody’s raw tapes──unless
they’ve done a really bad job of recording──I can get the sound I want out of
must about any recording situation.
RA: Given the exponential pace of change in
recording technology and your fascination with it, as a songwriter and a
musician, can you paint a picture of what you perceive the musical environment
may look like in ten or twenty years’ time?
TR: Ten or twenty years’ time! Well, I imagine
just about the time I get into this more technical, contemporary approach to
music, everyone will decide that they just want to hear folk music. [Laughs]
Plain old, you know, troubadours just strumming, simple ensembles and things
like that. I’m expecting at some point there’ll be a reactionary phase if, in
the long haul, things are evolutionary. It used to be that music was──before
there was recording──always an event. Any kind of ensemble music was an event
because it required you to be there listening to it in real time; there was no
way to capture the music for later replay. Recording has changed a lot of the
ground rules of music to the point that people don’t see music as being a
singular event, something where you actually have to be in the presence of a musician
to enjoy it, and so people apply music to all other circumstances in their lives.
They listen to it while they drive the car, do their aerobics to it, they dance
to it, do chores while it’s on, they expect to see video with it, they hear it
behind advertisements for products. I remember in the ‘60s when a Beatles album
would come out, it was like “shutter the windows, lock the doors, and turn off all
outside stimuli, sit down and listen to the Beatles record five times through …
and people don’t do that anymore. Music is an adjunct to other things. So, if
there’s a reaction, or even an evolution, it may get to the point where music
again becomes an event where you may go out to hear music that you’re completely
unfamiliar with, a unique circumstance. The same way, one hundred years ago,
the way a composer would debut a piece of new music, and there would be one
performance on which so much would hinge. Like Ravel’s first performance of Bolero,
which most people didn’t even hear the end of because there was so much racket
going on in the audience──so much reaction to the newness of the music. Things
may evolve to where music is the singular focus and the actual notes, the
performance of the music, will become an event, not necessarily the antics of
the performer.
RA: Speaking of performances, what about
yourself?
TR: I’ll be going out this fall to do an interactive
live show; it’ll be different every night, and there will be some degree of
audience participation in the direction of the concerts, although I’m not sure
what that’s gonna be yet!
We’ll find out
soon enough: Todd Rundgren is bringing his interactive show to town on December
4th at the Roseland in New York City.
© Roy Abrams 2021
Originally published in The
Island-Ear, December 5, 1993
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