Todd Rundgren, currently in Australia, has certainly lived up to the title of his fourth solo album A Wizard, A True Star, released in 1973.
First, he was a wizard as a producer in his early days – initially for Bearseville Records – working with Jesse Winchester, The Band, James Cotton, Badfinger, Grand Funk Railroad, the New York Dolls’ New York Dolls, The Tubes, the Pursuit of Happiness, XTC – and even on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell.
As a musician he has been prolific, beginning his recording career with the band Nazz. After 3 albums he then pursued a solo career, kicking off with the albums Runt and The Ballad of Todd Rundgren in 1970 and 1971. These were soon followed by two much-loved classic Something/Anything? (1972) and A Wizard A True Star (1973). Renowned manager Albert Grossman, also the founder of Bearsville Records, was so disgusted that the single ‘I Saw The Light’, from the former album, didn’t make the Top 10 that he claimed that he was going to re-release it every year until it became a No.1 hit.
Since then, he has released more than 20 solos albums as well as ten albums with the band Utopia. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. Todd’s biggest album in Australia was The Hermit of Mink Hollow and the single ‘Can We Still Be Friends’.
We’re looking forward to seeing you back here.
I’m looking forward to coming back. It’s always fun to be in Australia, but Melbourne especially, and I’ll get some time to a little break in there, after Port Fairy.
Davey Lane, of course is supporting you. You’ve known Davey for a long while.
Yeah, he’s not just supporting me. He’s backing me up. He’s got a new record coming out, so I imagine he’ll be playing some new music of his own as well. It’s the band Davy’s putting together.
So, you must be fairly confident in this combo because you’ve worked with Davey obviously before and you were here not that long ago. So, does it work well for you, that situation?
It makes it possible for me to actually tour music and somewhat the way I would tour it here in the States or any place else that I could afford to take my own band. They invest a lot of practice and a lot of work in mastering the material and is not the same as just hiring a bunch of players. They have a certain commitment to the way that they perform it. So, I’m lucky in that regard and it’s the next best thing to having in my own band.
You’re doing some club gigs, but you’re also appearing at the Port Fairy Folk Festival as you mentioned, which will be interesting to see there.
Yeah, I haven’t done a whole lot of festivals in general. There was the heyday in the seventies when I was playing the Knebworth Festival. I played the Knebworth Festival five times throughout the seventies and early 80’s but haven’t done a whole lot of festivals. So, it’s always great to get in front of people who didn’t necessarily come to see me. They came to see whoever was there that day over that weekend. So, it’ll be fun to play for some fresh ears and see what the response is.
What will the repertoire consist of? I mean, how will you hone that down because you have a rather massive catalogue?
It’s a subset of the set that I did last year with my own band. It was about a two hour show and we’re down to 90 minutes and we’re going to make a couple of substitutions. But for the most part it was what you might call a deep dive and some fan favourites. I don’t have a whole string of hits to draw on, so I acknowledge those. But for the most part, I’m drawing from all different eras in my career – things that I like to play and things that I have some confidence the audience like to hear.
Are there any songs that you have to do, have to perform in the set that you think people expect you to perform?
Well, you could say that. I think it’s something that might apply to the Australian market that doesn’t as strictly apply in the US market because I’ve done a lot of tours where I don’t sing ‘Hello, It’s Me’, the most requested song in my repertoire. So, there’ve been a lot of tours where it just didn’t fit in or I didn’t feel like doing it. So, my audience over here is kind of used to it and if I do do it, they’re grateful. So, I know that it’s different in Australia because I haven’t been there enough times to have everyone get the experience of the one song that they remember me by. So, I do have to touch base at least on some of the songs that people might have remembered. But for the most part, the music will probably be unfamiliar to anyone who hasn’t invested some time in listening to my music past something, anything.
But there are a few different facets of your career, aren’t there, apart from your own solo work? Of course there’s a whole Utopia thing, the Guitar Hero type thing as well. And not to the least of which also there’s a production side of things, but in that musical side of things, you’ve gotten very many different facets, haven’t you?
Yeah, well it all was sort of rooted in the late 60’s and 70’s when I got seriously into the music business. Although I was in a band that was relatively short lived, and when I was done with that, I was done with that. So, I felt fortunate to be able to get back into the studio as a producer and that kept me in the music business. And the 70’s was just a different time for me. I had no family, I had no other responsibilities and I was so happy with my situation that I just made music all the time. In any particular year I might do two solo records, a Utopia record and three productions and still have time to go out on the road and tour. So, that kind of publicity couldn’t last, couldn’t continue. Nowadays everything has kind of changed a lot. The whole production situation and the way records are made and where records fit into the whole economics is completely different nowadays. So, I don’t do as much production work, and I have supplanted it with being on the road constantly.
Unfortunately, a lot of people these days think that they can do without a producer, which I think is a really wrongheaded thing to do.
Well, any one person’s musical experience will be limited in some sense or another. There’s music that people prefer to listen to or prefer to emulate, and sometimes as much as they like other music, they don’t get out of that box. It works for some people. The economics of that works. You build up an audience and you play to the audience expectations and that’s all you need. My expertise in production has always been with the problem acts, the people who’ve had trouble in the studio in one sense or another, or they’re very new to the process and they need a little guidance because they’re so inexperienced at it.
Nowadays anybody with a computer can make a record. So, the expense of the producer sharing your royalties with a producer doesn’t have the same sort of appeal that it used to have but it also means that you don’t get the benefit of that other set of ears and the experience that other set of ears has.
But the whole role of music has changed so much. People don’t often don’t get into music because they intend to be a musician for the rest of their lives. They’re just trying to brand themselves. So, they’ll learn how to rap. They’ll wear a scanty costume until they get a commercial and then they’ll start marketing products of their own shoes and makeup and stuff like that and they’ll kind of forget about making music in a way because it was only just a steppingstone to personal branding. It’s just really easy to get into. Music is just an easy thing to get into, and it’s usually the entry level thing for personal branding.
Some of us would argue that too many people are getting into it and too many people are making records but that could be a whole other argument.
Yeah, well, this isn’t certainly not the golden age of music. The audience lets artists get away with almost anything. It seems like even outlets that used to be places for discovery, like Saturday Night Live, they used to put on some really daring stuff. Probably they would have Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and people like that on, nobody else would put on the TV. Now they just put on the flavour of the week. These micro talents like Sabrina. You wonder what the heck is going on here. Isn’t there some really interesting new music going on somewhere? They don’t seem interested using their platform to expose what needs to be exposed. They’re just showing us the stuff that’s already popular.
I noticed that Cleopatra records are releasing the Arena Tour, a live double album recorded back in 2008 for Record Store Day.
Well, I usually have at least one release for record store day, and sometimes it’s on Rhino and sometimes it’s Cleopatra. They have most of the master license rights to whatever I’ve done. With Cleopatra, my involvement has only been since around Arena, around the mid aughts and stuff like that. My relationship with Rhino goes way, way back. Then there is anything that I did on a one-off deal on, for instance, the Liars album. So, in terms of actual physical records, I almost always have something out there for Record Store Day.
I particularly like the Johnson album that you released – it’s got to be 15 years ago now. I think some of the songs that go down pretty well in Australia.
Well, I did do a brief tour, rather small tour with pickup musicians from New Zealand. As a matter of fact, it started in Auckland and it was fun, but it wasn’t my stuff. It was kind of a weird marriage. We had to do that stuff. Then there’s me, there’s my stuff. I am not a very old blues musician by trade! So, it was a lot of fun to play, and it was maybe one of the first times that I was out on a tour of my own. I had been to Australia several times with Ringo, and that’s how I got to Melbourne for the very first time. I was on a tour with Ringo, I think. So, I’m very chuffed to be able to start building a regular touring base of my own down there.
Speaking of Ringo, I know you’re a bit fan of the Beatles and it goes back a long way, and I particularly like theFaithfull album of 1976 where you did a fantastic version of ‘Rain’. Isn’t it amazing to see Ringo with a new album out and doing a tour and also Bob Dylan – you did a version of ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way’ – still touring all these years later, but amazing to see Ringo there.
He takes really good care of himself. He went through a period of his life where he did not take good care of himself, and it was life-threatening at a certain point. The big reason was because after The Beatles, he didn’t play anymore – his whole musical life ended. He would make records in the studio, but he just didn’t have it together to go out touring. So, when he put the All-Star band together, it was part of his overall rehabilitation. He has actually transformed himself from kind of a friendly ne’er do well and someone who was actually a little bit scarred by the Beatle experience and fully become himself. Yet through his constant touring with his band and his relating to the audience – just him and the audience – he’s kind of transformed himself into a different person. Part of it is his longevity is that he takes such good care of himself that he can continue to tour in his eighties.
And Dylan out there as well.
Yeah, I have no idea what his regime is, so I don’t know what’s keeping him standing, but
I think you were one of the very first musicians to understand and harness the power of the internet from very early on, weren’t you?
Well, I was involved with computers since the seventies in one sense or another. I actually wrote software that Apple Computer released, and so I was always kind of up to date on what was happening in the computer world.
Then by the 90’s, this internet thing starts happening and I was at one of the very first conferences where they’re trying to figure out how to monetize it because up until then it was just colleges and corporate communications and stuff like that. Nobody knew how to make money off of it. Now it’s where all the money is but this was the very kind of the birth of the internet, and everyone was talking about how do we make money off of this?
It popped into my head that as a recording artist, I was just constantly borrowing money from the label that they recovered from my audience later. So, why not cut out the middleman? Then I started offering a service so that fans could underwrite me directly and it was called Patron. Now, there are a lot of different kinds of services like Spotify and Patreon that have taken that over. I didn’t have the wherewithal to maintain it because I had to make music and I’m computer programming, doing customer support and stuff like that. So, it all collapsed. But when Covid happened, I thought maybe there’s still a need for that. So, I am in the midst of relaunching that original idea but under the new name of Global Nation. Essentially the whole purpose of it was always for artists of any kind to be able to go to the internet, create a space that they have complete control over and to build an audience who would support them. In that sense, there’s no advertising. A lot of artists, they get their support from YouTube and Facebook and stuff, but they have to have ads in order to get paid. So, we’re trying to do an ad free thing, so you have complete control over it.
Finally, Todd, I noticed that after the tour of Australia, you’re going back to the States and you are doing the Burt Bacharach Songbook tour, which is going to be interesting. It’s quite a big tour as well.
Well, there are a lot of singers on it. I’m not the only singer, thankfully, and I had sworn I wasn’t going to do any more of these tribute tours. I’ve done The Beatles over and over and I did David Bowie about two years ago, and it wore me out. I said I wasn’t going to do any more of those things. But when somebody approached me about Burt Bacharach – he’d been such an influence on me even before I was writing songs. So, he became a subliminal part of my songwriting because I listened to Dionne Warwick’s albums and Burt Bacharach music so intently. So, I thought, well, I kind of have to do it, and it’s going to be pretty interesting. This is our first round and we’ll see whether it goes any further than that.
What are some of his songs that are your favorites?
Well, I get to sing a lot of the heartbreak R&B songs. He was also a very successful R&B writer before ‘Walk On By’ when everybody kind of became aware of Burt Bacharach. But I’m doing like ‘Any Day Now’, an old Chuck Jackson song and ‘Baby It’s You’, which was The Shirelles, I believe. I get to do some fun stuff too. I get to do ‘What’s New Pussycat’ and ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. So, it’s not all heartbreak.
A lot of those obscure songs are terrific. I particularly like ‘Mexican Divorce’, which Ry Cooder did a version of which, a lot of people wouldn’t think that Bacharach co-wrote it.
Well, yeah. I think that’s part of the object of this tour. The musical director was actually Burt’s musical director and so he knows the entire catalog and has arrangements for just about everything. So, we’re going to be throwing in a lot of the stuff like music that he might’ve done for a credit roll in a movie, things like that. A lot of his stuff that you didn’t know he wrote because you weren’t paying attention to the credits, that sort of thing. So, it’ll be fun. It’s just that I was always into the heartbreak songs just because I was such a heartbroken kid. I never had a girlfriend. When I had a girlfriend. It lasted two weeks and the scars last forever.
TODD RUNDGREN 2025 AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES:
Thurs March 6 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Friday March 7 – Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
Saturday March 8 – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
Sunday March 9 – Port Fairy Folk Festival
Thursday March 13 – The Triffid, Brisbane
Friday March 14 – Factory Theatre, Sydney
Saturday March 15 – The Lounge, Chatswood, Sydney