Todd Rundgren is communing with Robert Johnson’s ghost.
Without selecting it, the accomplished singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer was placed in the infamous Room 414 at the Gunter Hotel ahead of his show this Friday at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts. Music fans may recognize that room as the place Don Law recorded the blues legend’s first session, which included his most notable works, including “Crossroads Blues” and “Dust My Broom.”
The hotel staff probably just wanted to treat the famous musical guest. Though, Art Garfunkel apparently stayed in the hotel the previous night but for whatever reason didn’t want Room 414, according to Rundgren.
“Maybe he’s superstitious,” Rundgren said.
But there’s also a sense of destiny about it — as if an heir apparent to the musical legacy of the blues, which later morphed into rock ‘n’ roll, was knighted by Johnson himself. A renowned producer lays his head in a room where one of the most famous recordings of all time was captured.
Rundgren took time before the San Antonio show of his Damned If I Do tour to chat with the Current about how recording has changed, not just since Johnson’s days, but the switch he witnessed from analog to digital. And never mind the uncharted world of AI and the new “payola” of hiring bot armies to game the algorithm.
As Rundgren said, it was ever thus. But Rundgren has been a wizard, a true star of the cutting edge throughout his career. He’s facing his 78th birthday in three days, as always, unafraid of what’s next.
I am a big fan of Utopia and The Nazz. How do you see those early projects in the context of your larger career?
Well, I was 18 when we formed The Nazz, I’m 77 now, I’ll be 78 in three days. And we were only really active for about 18 months. But we got a lot done during that time.
You also dressed very flamboyantly and very glam at the time, and you even wore an amulet of yourself. How did your physical presentation and style align with your sound, and how has it changed over the years?
Well, we did some fairly foolhardy things in the four-piece Utopia days. After we finally got down to a four piece, we put out an album called Ra. And it was kind of a whole Egyptian thing, Egyptian theme. So our stage presentation was a 22-foot tall pyramid with a sphinx behind it with smoke coming out of his nostrils and a laser beam out of his forehead.
And we would climax the show with this electrified fairy tale thing. And everyone would do a solo. But along with the solo, we would have some sort of theatrical effect going. So everything was earth, wind, fire and water. This was before Earth, Wind and Fire went all Egyptian. Roger Powell would represent fire and he had a laser coming out of the end of his Powell Probe, which was his portable keyboard that he invented. And he would fight a big Chinese dragon that the crew would inhabit on this stage. Kasim [Sulton] was wind. And so we would turn on these giant fans and blow him across the stage with lots of smoke and lots of mist so you could see the wind. Willie [John “Willie” Wilcox] was water. And so we built kind of like dancing water fountains around the drum riser. So when he did his solo, there was water splashing all over the stage. I was supposed to be earth, and earth was represented by the actual pyramid, which was supposed to be a mountain that I climbed up.
So I would walk up one leg of the pyramid on these foot plates that were just the size of my feet and walk up the 22 feet to the top of the pyramid and then play a noisy guitar solo. And then there was a winch at the top of the pyramid and I would reach between my legs, stick my hand through a hand strap on the winch, flip off of the top of the pyramid and then get lowered down to the stage.
And fortunately, I never fell off.
There was one, one or two times when somebody had misadjusted things at the top that I would have to walk down again. And that was even more dangerous than walking up. Because when I’m walking up, I can look up to the next step, but when you’re walking down, you have to look down, and then that’s a little bit more dangerous, actually.
But we tended to do a lot of theatrics in our show, and that was probably one of the most theatrical ones that we ever did. Other shows involved other kinds of costumery and sets and other gimmickry. By the time we got to our last tour, we had stripped down to something where we had almost nothing on the stage because we were on tour opening for the Tubes. And so the stage was completely bare except for us. And Willie, our drummer, was on a kit that we built on top of a motorcycle frame that sat on a spindle and spun around. So when he was playing his guitar, his drum solos, the drum set, which was built on a motorcycle frame, would be spinning around at the same time. A lot of it had nothing to do with music, but it did give the audience something exciting to look at.
Some of the earliest records you were exposed to in your parents’ collection were show tunes. I think that’s interesting when you consider your theatricality and especially your work with Meat Loaf, who is obviously very theatrical. How much did that early exposure to show tunes inform your visual identity as an artist as well as your sonic identity?
That probably started with The Who. The first time I saw The Who live, I thought, this is where rock ‘n’ roll needs to go. Not just people standing up there playing, but everyone in the band was like, you couldn’t take your eyes off them, because each guy in the band was doing something different but equally crazy, you know? Keith Moon was like an octopus on the drums, hitting every possible drum all the time. And Pete Townsend, of course, windmilling and then eventually trashing his guitar. Roger Daltrey was spinning the microphone around 20 feet over the heads of the audience, and they’re waiting for him to just whack somebody in the head, and somehow he never does it. And even John Entwistle, who’s just standing there, side-eyeing everybody else in the band, his fingers are flying like, a mile a minute.
The first time I saw them, I thought, “Wow, you can’t just play the songs. You have to do something else as well, to engage the audience.” And so from that point on, it was always, “Oh, I’ll just find some cheap guitar and break it and add that to the show for no damn reason at all.” But it gave the audience this sort of moment of excitement and theatricality that wasn’t common until rock shows started filling arenas. And then when the stages got that big, everybody had to start doing pillars of fire and smoke machines and everything like that. So, it was more about the way that rock music was evolving and the fact that it was filling bigger and bigger venues and needed to do something appropriate to those venues.
You have always been known as a pioneer of technology, and not just in music, including the Flowfazer, a kaleidoscopic screen saver, essentially, and the first color graphics tablet, which was later licensed to Apple. How have you always managed to be on the cutting edge of technology?
It’s not that I adopt all technologies. I’m talking to you now on the hotel phone because I don’t carry a cell phone. Actually, I do carry a cell phone, but I only have a data plan because I just use it to call an Uber. I don’t talk on the phone that much. And I also know, being as old as I am, have witnessed the evolution of the cell phone and how it’s affected people, their behavior. And I made a decision fairly early on that I did not want to, for instance, be available 24/7 to anybody who wanted to call me. And I also didn’t want to develop the attitude that other people should be available to me 24/7.
I think for a little while in the early days of cell phones, when they were still bricks, I had one, but I didn’t have enough excuse to use it. So I just returned it to whoever gave it to me, and I’ve never bought a cell phone since. Except I think I bought an iPhone 12 for the camera. I would buy it for the camera and for the apps that run on it, but I would never take calls on it. So, I’m very circumspect about the technology that I get involved with and how I get involved with it.
But I think a lot of it comes from the fact that my dad was an engineer. He knew about electronics and other sorts of technological things. And he had a big, like, workbench, and he built his own phonograph. It wasn’t stereo, though. It was mono. We built radio kits together and things like that. So I think a lot of people, they have a sort of fear of technology. They assume there’s a big learning curve involved and they’re out of school, so they don’t want to have to learn anything like that. But I have no fear of it. And so sometimes I have a curiosity about it, but some things I will get to much later than other people.
I didn’t start digital recording until much later. That was principally because I was waiting for the price to come down. Initially, it was very expensive, and I didn’t see that it made enough difference in the final product that I had to bear that expense. But eventually, I mean now the outliers are analog recorders. Everybody mostly does digital recording now.
So, anything that I’ve been involved in, I was always interested in computers because I was interested in robots when I was really young and realized that a robot needed a brain. And so I was always interested in computers. And truth be told, when I’m at home and to some degree when I’m on the road, I spend hours and hours computer programming, mostly because I have an online service as well. And so, I have to program for that. But again, I don’t have a cell phone. So, I’m ahead in some things, and in some things I’m behind and perhaps permanently behind. For instance, AI … I use it for things like graphics and to help me write computer code. But I would never use it to write music with, mostly because I don’t think it would be able to imitate me.
What do you think of AI?
Well, I think that it is a tool, and in some cases, you know, the tools are so new that the artists have an adjustment period to figure out how they can best use them. But as I said, there was a time when I would try and do the graphics for my own album covers. And if it involved any sort of actually drawing or painting or anything like that, it would be pretty crude if I had to depend on my own skills. And so especially lately, I’ve been using AI to create graphics for various things. I was doing a little seminar for something, and I needed to create a slideshow. So I used AI to essentially create the slides for it, which saved me a lot of time. And essentially, if I had attempted to do it, it wouldn’t have come out any better. I was fine with AI doing that.
But as I say, AI is not as good with music because the language model is so full of mediocrity. You ask it to write a song, and if you didn’t give it a lot of prompting, it would probably come out with something that sounded like Taylor Swift. And the reason why is because that’s what everybody on the internet is listening to. And it only knows what we know, and it tries to follow where our interests go and absorb the information that’s relevant to that. And so it’s the reason why most music programs, the best they can do is just some kind of background music. But trying to write a song that seems real and holds your attention, it doesn’t know the difference. All it’s doing is trying to figure out “what are people listening to?” And it will just kind of rebuild that.
On Something, Anything you impressively played every instrument. You seem to have a real DIY attitude. Do you think that AI can coexist with a DIY ethos?
Well, you know, I figure that what they should start doing is teaching kids in school how to prompt. It’s going to be an essential skill. It’s going to be just as important as reading, eventually, knowing how to prompt, knowing how to tell AI, which is everywhere now, what it is that you want in order to get back what you expect. So, it’s kind of an art form. I haven’t fully mastered it yet.
But one of the biggest problems with education, in my opinion, is there’s not enough music in schools. That’s why I have a foundation to try and get music back into schools. But there’s too much math in school, because almost everybody forgets the math that they were taught in school immediately after they graduate, unless it’s part of their further education or their job. But any kind of complicated math, you’re going to get out your phone and bring up the calculator app. So, you know, and everybody’s got one. So why do they teach everybody so much math now? It’s kind of pointless. And they should substitute all of those classes with music classes, because at least people would learn how to express themselves. They wouldn’t just learn how to add numbers together. And it would also be a good way to differentiate between what AI can do and what people should be doing.
You’ve also had quite the illustrious career as a producer. Do you prefer the producer role or making your own music?
Well, it used to be that I did both. I had this kind of balance between the two of them through the ’70s and ’80s. But production, especially since the ’90s, the whole thing has changed. When music went digital and people started getting more of their music online than going to record stores, the way that records got made changed as well. Because the previous ideal was that people would eventually buy a physical artifact. They would go into the store and they buy a disc inside a cardboard sleeve. And so the whole idea was to encourage people to buy that big disc. As time went on, the singles started. People started not buying singles so much, but they started buying albums. The thing that happened when everything went online is that listeners started listening to individual songs instead of whole albums.
And so the economics completely changed in terms of where you want to put the emphasis. And so a lot of modern artists, if you look at the credits for their songs, there might be seven songwriters and three producers on one song, you know, because they just front load everything, put all the investment into one song, hoping they create a meme that will drive up the hits that the artists get. Because the charts don’t mean the same thing that they used to. The charts are a measure of actual sort of sales.
And in an environment, you know, where people are going to discover the music in a number of different ways, it gets harder to measure the success of a song, how well it’s penetrated the audience and what kind of financial return you get on it. So, everything has changed and especially has changed for producers. And I’m not interested in being one of three producers on one song. My whole thing has always been, you know, an artist has a long form work that they need to get done, and they need someone to help them do that. And that’s what my traditional role has been, is to just fill in whatever is missing in the process of getting those songs recorded and into the public ear.
Who were some of your favorite artists to work with?
TR: I was friends with Cheap Trick before I started working with them, so it was just a lot of fun for us to work together finally on Next Position, Please. And they make it really easy. They know the songs when they come into the studio and they perform so often that they know exactly how to do it, so it’s not like pulling teeth. It just kind of happens the way it’s supposed to happen.
I always thought the ideal, what you would love for all of your projects to be is something like Frank Sinatra in the Capitol years, where he would come in and do every song in one take, the album’s done in a day, [but] then, as things evolved, by the time we got to the late ’80s, records were being made one player at a time. You know, you would overdub each player and so you wouldn’t know what you had until the last player had put their finishing touches on it. And people were taking like a year to make a record. Like the Cars first record took them a year because the production was so anal. And I don’t like to get involved in projects like that.
There’s inspiration and there’s perspiration, and there’s no amount of perspiration that will make up for a lack of inspiration. So, yeah, things have changed a lot. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t artists who still have a larger message than can be fit into one song and that might need help with the process, but those opportunities are very rare, and I haven’t really produced an album for anyone in literally decades.
Who are some newer artists who are on your radar right now?
Well, it gets more difficult to find people because of the noise level of what’s out there. There’s always the micro talent of the month is getting all of the light and every once in a while, I’m relieved to see something, for instance, on Saturday Night Live that isn’t a girl singer with dancers, which seems to be just the laziest kind of programming. Who’s hot this week? We’ll just put them on. Saturday Night Live used to be the venue where you saw people that you’ve never seen before, like Captain Beefheart or something like that. But, there I saw a band. Let me see. I think the band is called Geese. And they were different and a real band, and they’re kind of like an evolution of Radiohead.
Yeah, absolutely.
But, you know, they, at least it wasn’t all freaking dancers. The music was different and interesting and the band played it with enthusiasm — and that’s all you need.
Actually, speaking of Geese, I don’t know if you paid attention to that whole controversy about the bot army that they enlisted. People were characterizing it as manufacturing hype, and a lot of comparisons were made to the payola days. I wonder what your thoughts are on gaming the algorithm to generate fake hype?
Well, I mean, the proof is in the pudding. For me, Geese was like a little oasis in a constant stream of micro talents. I sat up and was interested in what they were playing, and they didn’t try and fake it by adding some element that wasn’t really part of the band just to try and keep you entertained, you know, like dancers or some highly extreme set design or being inside a box with projectors on all six sides of it or whatever. They just played the damn music. I found the music interesting. So I don’t care how they got there. I’m glad that they did get there.
But what about using that same technique for someone who doesn’t have the talent to back it up? Do you think it just won’t catch on if they’re just the flavor of the month?
Well, as you say, it was ever thus, but the audience doesn’t stick with them. That’s why they’re the flavor of the month. Are they going to be into you next year? They just moved on to somebody else. It’s because it’s only inches deep, and almost anybody could duplicate it.
I want to talk about “Bang the Drum All Day.” That song has been so ubiquitous through the ages, ever since 1983. How did things change for you after that, and was it overnight?
It was actually never released as a single. The label never released it as a single. It might have been on a B side, I think. I’m not sure how it found its way into. I think it was initially into hockey games and, you know, hockey players. Hockey audiences are especially rowdy, and so, you know, a rowdy song like that is just what they’re looking for. And then it became kind of the Green Bay Packers’ scoring anthem. And then other teams started using it as well. When the Rams were still in St. Louis, that was their scoring anthem.
And so most people don’t even know that it’s a song of mine. They just think it’s some sports anthem and they learned it or they heard it somewhere, you know, not exactly sure where, but they learned it and started singing it at a game someplace. And I’m really happy about that, first of all, because I’m not burdened in the same way that I’m burdened with “hello, It’s Me” by “Bang the Drum All Day.” I can do a show and not play it, and people won’t be as upset. It’s like, don’t play “hello, It’s Me.” There are very few things that, you know, kind of penetrate the cultural consciousness in a way that everybody knows it, but they don’t know where they first heard it, and they don’t know who created it.
Right.
Like, Happy Birthday, you know, so I’m very satisfied with that. It actually was the most financially rewarding song that I ever recorded. It was a song that I dreamed. It’s not something that I sat down and said, “Oh, I got to write a song about playing drums.” It’s a song that I dreamed when I was in the course of making a record. And then I just rushed down and recorded it, since I was afraid I would forget it. But, it was never released as a single. It just found its own way. And eventually, commercial enterprises like Carnival Cruise Lines would pay me six figures twice a year to use the song in their commercials. So, it was the most financially rewarding song and also the most anonymous song that I’ve ever made.
Yeah, that’s a good point, because I do think a lot of people don’t necessarily associate it with you, but absolutely know it. So it’s kind of like the best of both worlds, honestly.
Yeah, it’s great because I’m not obligated to play it, even though it is part of my current show. But I’ve figured out a way to do. It’s not good for my hands, playing the drums at my age, so we ran a little contest, and at every show, a contest winner gets to come up and play the drums during the song.
Speaking of, good luck with the show tonight. And also, happy birthday.
Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Say hi to Robert Johnson’s ghost for me.
Alright, boo.
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
