From the Archives: Todd Rundgren

Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Todd Rundgren is in a class all his own. Whether scoring Top 40 hits, playing all of the instruments on his albums or wildly experimenting with musical genres, Rundgren is continuously pushing the boundaries of creativity. That ethos and ingenuity can be found in his numerous solo albums from the 70s to present day, with his band Utopia and as a record producer for musicians like Patti Smith, The Psychedelic Furs and MeatLoaf. The trailblazing Rundgren is also a pioneer in computer technology and multimedia – creating the first color graphics tablet, first interactive album and first interactive concert tour. Todd Rundgren tells Alec how he pulls off making the music he wants to make, how he almost changed careers to become a computer programmer and how psychedelics helped him rethink music completely. You can listen to all of the music from this episode and other selections from Todd Rundgren in a curated playlist here https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7Go33qEy2ldi6CY1yjFMH3?si=a871980a0b924a62&nd=1&utm_medium=organic&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAA7WNSwrCMBRFV5MO%2B0lKP0IRUasTF%2BBInmlrY59JzGeQ3ZsKLkG4g8u9HM7snLabLLNaOTGFFLROUcgl22qjBs9dp%2FQoE0LLySPevMFuXhHCdoT2Meud%2FmiuXnHSCAGFdbHWJ8XY%2BxgoDqLaX4vw7C9nRlhvBWEHaOqibXLI7y0toaJfDSDegS9%2FVhFaySHuRTKN4LwZO2UeIAX%2FAAboxcURAQAA&product=open&%24full_url=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Fplaylist%2F7Go33qEy2ldi6CY1yjFMH3%3Fsi%3Da871980a0b924a62&feature=organic&_branch_match_id=306473021444063971. Originally released May 23rd, 2022. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 2:08Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.

• 2:32Alec Baldwin?

  Few artists come close to the prolific accomplishments and influence on future generations, as my guest today, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Todd Rundgren. Following his work in the band Nas, Rundgren went solo and received widespread acclaim with his 1972 double album, Something Anything. Rundgren wrote, produced, and played almost every instrument on the album. It landed him a top 10 hit with Hello, It's Me and features this track, I Saw the Light.

• 3:12Alec Baldwin?

  Something Anything brought Rundgren such commercial success that in its wake, he abandoned conventional pop music to push the boundaries of his creativity. The resulting album, A Wizard, A True Star, was influenced by soul, jazz, funk, and various psychedelics. The album established Rundgren as a pioneer of prog rock and electronic music. Todd Rundgren continued to explore musical styles in his numerous solo releases and with his band Utopia. He was also innovative behind the scenes with computer technology and as a prominent producer

• 3:54Alec Baldwin?

  for bands like XTC, The New York Dolls, and Meatloaf.

• 3:59Speaker 07

  I'd sort of backed into producing. It was an unusual situation, and I'd started very young, and I had a band in Philadelphia. And we got signed when I was like 19 years old. I was very much into like what goes into making records, and we thought that English producers were better than American producers. We really didn't know what a producer did. And we thought he was responsible mostly for the sound, misunderstanding that the engineer is responsible for the sound. The producer, well, American producer, particularly in those days, was not necessarily a creative contributor to the process.

• 4:44Speaker 07

  He was there to make sure that the session didn't go over budget. You know, and in the old days, pre-Beatles, let's say, people didn't always write their own material, and they didn't arrange their own material. So the producer's job was to hire a songwriter, and hire an arranger, and hire a contractor to get all the musicians in there, and then to make sure that the session didn't run long. That was his biggest responsibility. And as it turned out, that's completely different from the role that George Martin played, for instance, in the making of the Beatles' records. He was a musical contributor. He had an opinion about what they did, sometimes even played on their records.

• 5:28Speaker 07

  So it was, first of all, kind of like a readjustment in my head about what a producer was. And we hired a guy who we thought made good sounding records for our first records, and we didn't like the mix he made. So that was the first time I put my hands on a mixing console to remix our first record.

• 5:48Alec Baldwin?

  Was this Money or Nas?

• 5:49Speaker 07

  This was Nas. Now, Money was my high school band. We never got a contract or anything. But Nas, the Nas was supposed to be like the next Monkees, or at least in the minds of the people who signed us. You know, we were supposed to be a manufactured product. We were on the cover of 16 Magazine before we had ever made a record. So there was so much hype involved, and that was one reason why the band only lasted like 18 months. And then I found myself on the street, and the only skill that I had at that point, aside from playing and writing music, was that I had put my hands on a mixing console.

• 6:33Speaker 07

  And ironically, the partner of the manager of the Nas, who had departed and gone to work for Albert Grossman. Now, Albert Grossman is not a household name nowadays, but back in those days, he was the world's most preeminent manager. He managed Bob Dylan, he managed the band, he managed Janis Joplin. And they needed somebody to take his old roster of folk acts and modernize them somehow.

• 7:02Alec Baldwin?

  Such as?

• 7:04Speaker 07

  Well, such as Ian and Sylvia and James Cotton. But the first project that I got put on was an artist called Jesse Winchester. And he was a conscientious objector who lived in Canada, from whence the band came. And so I got asked to engineer that record, and Robbie Robertson was the producer of the record. And they liked what I did so much that they hired me for what was the band's arguably their biggest album, Stage Fright. And that's where I really cut my teeth, learning to engineer serious records. Not really a producer at that point, I was more of an engineer, but that became my forte. I didn't need an engineer to do a recording project.

• 7:48Speaker 07

  I can sit behind the desk and work the knobs and dials and all that stuff, and also contribute musically to what was going on.

• 7:56Alec Baldwin?

  Did someone teach you? Did you have a mentor, or this was you were self-taught?

• 8:00Speaker 07

  No, I had no fear of technology, put it that way. You know, so when I was sitting in front of this sea of knobs and buttons, I thought, okay, I'll touch this one, and I'll touch that one, and I'm gonna touch every one of them.

• 8:12Alec Baldwin?

  What does this do?

• 8:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, what does this do? And then you turn it around, and you hear, oh, it changes the sound this way. And then there are some other things you have to learn, like mic placement. That's a different skill, and that evolved a little bit more over time, figuring out exactly, especially drums and things like that, where do you put a mic to get the best snare drum sound? That sort of thing. And I eventually learned that. And Stage Fright was something of a breakthrough. And then I did Bad Finger and Grand Funk Railroad, and that's what really broke me as a producer.

• 8:48Alec Baldwin?

  Now, while you're producing other people, and you're heavily involved in that, you're making your own, your own music, is it a question of when someone calls you? I mean, were you more of a purist, and you sat there and go, yeah, that's not my bag, that music, I don't really want to be a part of it? Were you for hire? You wanted to come in, and you weren't too fussy? Like, what was the metric by which you decided who you would and wouldn't work with as a producer and as a mixer?

• 9:15Speaker 07

  Well, it's kind of the same as my choices as an artist. I want to do the things that nobody else will do, or that nobody else can do. As an artist, because I was a producer, I never had to worry about my own music paying the rent. And so my own music doesn't follow any particular path. I get an idea.

• 9:37Alec Baldwin?

  Your freedom.

• 9:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I have complete freedom to do what I want as an artist, because I was leveraging those skills to produce other people's records, and some of them were hysterically successful. You know, so I really didn't have to worry about the money when I went in to do my own stuff. But then I eventually gained a reputation as a trouble shooter, someone who would go into the studio, no nonsense, let's get a record done here. That was one aspect of it. The other aspect is that I would do artists that nobody would touch, like Meatloaf.

• 10:14Alec Baldwin?

  Remind people as to why nobody would touch him back then.

• 10:18Speaker 07

  Because the songs were all too long. None of them seemed like singles to a record person. They were all very long. He was a giant fat sweaty guy. He wasn't a handsome, you know?

• 10:30Alec Baldwin?

  He wasn't Jon Bon Jovi.

• 10:32Speaker 07

  No, he was not a Bon Jovi or any of those other pretty boys, things like that. And the subject matter had a certain kind of retro thing about it.

• 10:43Alec Baldwin?

  Almost Brechtian in a way.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  Well, to my mind, it was a weird combination of things. Jim Steinman, who wrote all the material for Meatloaf, he likened himself to Richard Wagner. He thought he was the Wagner of rock and roll.

• 10:58Alec Baldwin?

  The rock and roll Wagner.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. I more characterized him as a Stephen Foster of rock and roll.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  Because he just keep using these plain sevens and things like that, you know, there are lots and lots of chords, but all of them are just plain triads and things like that. There's nothing harmonically super challenging about the kind of music that Jim Steiman wrote. But it was grandiose from a lyrical standpoint. I'm gonna tell the story of the first time that I saw the band, and they had been turned down by every producer. The band essentially was Jim Steiman on the piano and Meatloaf and two background singers. They performed the record for me, all of the music that had been turned down

• 11:46Speaker 07

  by everybody else. And I'm thinking, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why I have to do it. This essentially is taking Bruce Springsteen's whole retro thing. I mean, he was on the cover of Time Magazine, savior of rock and roll, and everything is about motorcycles and leather jackets, switchblades, you know, as Rebel Without a Cause. And I thought, you're saving rock and roll by going back 20 years. And then when I saw Meatloaf perform that, I thought, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. And that's how I'm gonna approach it. I'm gonna take it totally seriously, but it's going to be way more than Bruce ever attempted to do, you know. As it turned out, that was

• 12:31Speaker 07

  the only way to think about it, because otherwise, the record never would have gotten made. It was not my kind of music, naturally, you know.

• 12:40Alec Baldwin?

  How so?

• 12:41Speaker 07

  Well, I didn't identify, first of all, with the Rebel Without a Cause thing, you know, the whole leather jacket, switchblade. These were the guys that beat me up in school. So I had no sympathy for that kind of, that kind of music. But also, I'm an acolyte of the Beatles and the arc of their career, in which they started out very simple, imitative, you know, of their influences. Yeah, they were covering their influences and stuff like that. And then they kind of got pushed into a corner where they had to write their own material, but they didn't stop there. They started inventing genre, whole genres that other bands built their careers on, and then they would abandon them. It's like

• 13:23Speaker 07

  Eleanor Rigby classical rock. There was no such genre before that. And then whole bands would decide that they were classical rock bands and have orchestral backing for everything they did. Or, you know, psychedelic rock. They invented that with, like, Tomorrow Never Knows, and then whole bands like Pink Floyd made a career out of it.

• 13:44Alec Baldwin?

  Exactly. And I want to get to that in your life, the kind of, I'm not gonna say the transcendental, but I don't want to lose line of this, the line of this track, which is that when you leave NAS, you stopped working, you didn't want to work as a musician, you wanted to be going to computer programming?

• 14:00Speaker 07

  Well, I was always into computers when I was very young. As I say, I was a weedy child, and I tended to get picked on a lot. And when I saw the movie Forbidden Planet with Robbie the Robot, he had special powers and he could produce anything you wanted. And I needed, like, a best friend robot protector. And so, when I was very young, I started trying to figure out how I could build a robot. And once you'd, like, figure out the mechanics of a robot, you realize that it has to have a brain. And that's when I started to learn about computers. This was always like a sideline through my whole career,

• 14:42Speaker 07

  because personal computers didn't exist then. You could learn about them, but you couldn't have one, you know.

• 14:48Alec Baldwin?

  So where do you get one?

• 14:50Speaker 07

  Well, all through the 70s, that's when personal computers started coming in. There was the Commodore PET, which actually looked like a cash register, and...

• 15:00Alec Baldwin?

  The first Apple that were like, big, looked like little TV sets.

• 15:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I had one of the first computer kits ever made, which was called an Out Air, and the only way you could communicate with it was through a teletype machine that had a tape, a paper tape reader on the side of it. So I got into it very early, and then Apple, the Apple Personal Computer came out, and that was kind of a real breakthrough, because it had a language built in. You turned it on and it was ready to take commands from you. It had ways, easy ways to load software programs into it. So I learned to program the computer, and eventually I developed a program that Apple marketed in, like, the

• 15:46Speaker 07

  early 80s, because they had a piece of hardware called a graphic tablet, fairly commonplace nowadays. But it's a big square thing with a pen on a wire, and you draw on that thing, and whatever you draw appears on the computer screen. And I first saw that at a place called the New York Institute of Technology, where all the people who eventually built Pixar and ILM, that's where they were before then. It was Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, were all working at New York Institute of Technology, and their big new development was a paintbox program, you know. And so I got inspired by that, and I became a serious programmer.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  And Apple marketed the first program that I ever wrote, which was for this graphics tablet that Apple was going to market. Unfortunately, it failed its FCC emissions test, so the hardware never came out. So nobody ever bought the software, because there was no hardware to run it on. But in any case, that got me into that realm.

• 16:52Alec Baldwin?

  But right on top of this, because you're so young then, I mean, you come out with Something Anything in 1972, and this is right on the heels of you going into computers and you leave NAS and everything, like, did all of a sudden, success, obviously, success realigns a lot of things, but you're considered a very, very purist artist. You got that whole vibe. You're a guy that had hit records, and then you went and said, well, I'm gonna go over here. You know what I mean? You took off into another direction, and you didn't necessarily kind of coddle your audience or the industry like a lot of people do. But when this happened, what changed for you when you had success, big success in making music? Did anything change?

• 17:37Speaker 07

  Well, my biggest success was after Something Anything came out, the double album. It was never intended to be a double album. I just, I got into this songwriting groove, and they were just coming out day and night. I was recording and writing like 16 hours a day. And I had fallen into sort of a formula, you know, a certain kind of combination of things that you write about, you know, which is usually like the girl who broke your heart. And after it was done, it was highly lauded, and people started referring to me as the male Carole King, which is a high compliment, but also, I don't want to be compared to other people.

• 18:22Alec Baldwin?

  I don't want to be the next anything.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I want to be, you know, eventually people will be compared to me, but I don't want to be compared to anything before. So the next record, which was A Wizard of True Star, was not like any record I had made, and maybe not like any record anybody had ever made before, because I completely deconstructed the process. And again, the only reason why I could do that was because I was still producing records for other people. When I didn't follow up Something Anything with another batch of easily consumable pop songs, there was a complete freakout at the record label. They say, how do we sell this record

• 19:05Speaker 07

  compared to the last record? Expectations are in a completely other place. And I had no care for that. I was still producing a lot of artists' forbearful records, so they couldn't exactly kick me off the label, you know. They were forced to indulge me, and that just turned out to be the whole modus operandi, you know. I was the fly in the ointment in some ways, because I wouldn't stop making records. And yet, they couldn't figure out how to market them. And eventually, they got into such a mindset that they completely overlooked hits on some of my records.

• 19:54Alec Baldwin?

  Musician Todd Rundgren, if you love conversations with legendary singers, be sure to check out my talk with another musical icon, Darryl Hall. I'm busy, man. I'm much busier now than I was. In fact, I don't have time to make a record. I've been trying to make a record, and I have to do it in little dribs and drabs, and starts and stops, to try and get into a flow is really, really hard. Was there a spot in your career where you sat there and you go, this is it, man? This is the top? There was a period of time in 1985 where we did We Are the World, I reopened the Apollo Theater with The Temptations, Live Aid, all within a month and a half. And I remember thinking to myself, okay, I feel like I'm here.

• 20:40Alec Baldwin?

  Here are the rest of my conversation with Darryl Hall at here's the thing.org. And find Darryl Hall and Todd Rundgren on tour together this spring. After the break, Todd Rundgren demonstrates why he's one of the most insightful and prescient artists in all of music and discusses his career as a psychonaut.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. How does music actually enter your mind?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me, but I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music. Like, we have listened to so much music, we've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Sometimes I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing and I go, oh, that could be this.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  You know, you just have to be ready for when the inspiration hits.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  It comes. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:20Speaker 01

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• 23:03Speaker 01

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened

• 23:07Alec Baldwin?

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• 23:50Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

• 24:22Alec Baldwin?

  This is Bang the Drum All Day, one of Todd Rundgren's biggest hits. It's the seventh of nine tracks on his 1982 album, the ever-popular Tortured Artist Effect. The song was all but overlooked by his record label.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  Bang the Drum All Day was never released as a single, never occurred to him. It was just one of my other, another nutty thing that I was doing, but the record promoted itself, made itself. DJs started playing it every Friday during drive time, and then somehow fans adopted it at sporting events. Anytime somebody wanted to create a party atmosphere, you know, even if it was like a movie like Ants, the song was never in the movie, but they used it for the trailer because it made the movie seem more fun, I guess.

• 25:18Speaker 07

  I think first at ice hockey games, and then it became like the Green Bay Packers touchdown song, and then it eventually became the Carnival Cruise Lines theme song, for which I got paid handsomely until they started sinking all those boats. And I have no idea where the song came from. I mean, it's not like I sat down and said, I'm gonna write this song. No, I actually dreamed the song. Sometimes when you start working, you know, and you get really embedded in the work, it permeates your subconscious to the point you never get away from it. And I was writing songs in my sleep, and this song just came to me.

• 25:59Alec Baldwin?

  I'm wondering for you, when you were young, because you go off on a different path, and certainly with Utopia in terms of the style of music, what was your Rishi Kesh? I mean, did you have a moment of drug experimentation, enlightenment, and whatever it was that you were very young? Okay, I'm trying to tread lightly here. I'm trying to tread lightly.

• 26:20Speaker 07

  I gained a reputation of something of a psychonaut at one point. I guess A Wizard of True Star helped with that, and it was definitely, there was some psychedelic experiences that made me rethink music and what I wanted to do, and A Wizard of True Star was a result. But sometime after that, somebody sent me a shoebox full of peyote buttons, and I was high for a month. I would get up in the morning, I would clean three peyote buttons, and I had one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I was not straight for an entire month, and I did rehearsals and gigs and wiring my studio while I was doing that.

• 27:02Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, you were blazing.

• 27:04Speaker 07

  I know, it was one of the most amazing periods of my life.

• 27:08Alec Baldwin?

  How does it stop? I mean, do you stop or does someone else stops it? Who pulls the plug?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  I ran out of peyote buttons.

• 27:15Alec Baldwin?

  I ate all the peyote.

• 27:17Speaker 07

  I ate all the peyote and I was done, you know?

• 27:19Alec Baldwin?

  You ate the Whitman sampler of peyote that you were given.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:23Alec Baldwin?

  Take me through, if you can, you go into Utopia when?

• 27:27Speaker 07

  I was originally just a guitar player. I didn't have any confidence, I didn't have the confidence to sing or front a band. And, you know, when I quit the band, and I didn't want to put another band together, I didn't understand the politics of it, you know? And so I just went into production and I, my first album was a vanity project. I didn't plan to do anything with it, and then accidentally had a hit single. It was called We Gotta Get You a Woman. It was off of my very first record, so I had to rethink the idea of going out and performing. It got top 40, I think, and that's when I had to learn to perform. You know, I had, you got a hit single, you gotta go out and play, and I couldn't sing 20 minutes without blowing my voice out.

• 28:11Alec Baldwin?

  Really?

• 28:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 28:12Alec Baldwin?

  And you never, and you never thought about getting trained for that at all?

• 28:15Speaker 07

  Well, it started out as a mental thing. I never thought of myself as a front man, a person who would stand in front of the band and sing. I would sing background vocals and I'd be happy with that. There were some things I knew about singing, a lot I didn't know about singing, most importantly, the diaphragm. And it took me a while to sort of figure it out, and I think the best education I ever got was from listening to a Stevie Wonder record, signed, sealed, delivered. What they used to do is compress his voice so much that you could hear every breath he was taking, and you could hear before he would sing a phrase, how he would do this, huh, you know, how his diaphragm would punch up into his lungs to create the necessary

• 29:00Speaker 07

  pressure in order to sing the song, the thing that never occurred to me. A lot of people don't realize that it isn't about your throat, it's about your diaphragm, your breath, how much breath you can put behind it. Trying to sing just with your throat and, you know, you'll get 20 minutes out of it and then it'll die.

• 29:20Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 07

  And it took me a long time to learn how to do that. I remember, I think it was right around Something Anything, because that was also about when I first started driving a car, and I was in LA, and I would drive around the freeways screaming my ass off. I would just scream for 20, 30 minutes at a time while driving my car around, and must have looked pretty weird.

• 29:46Speaker 07

  But eventually, through doing that constantly and applying that when I was singing live, I built up my diaphragm to the point now that it's like ridiculous.

• 29:55Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 29:56Speaker 07

  You know, if you get that muscle and shape, you can sing forever. I can sing for three hours a night if I have to at the, you know, at the very top of my range, as long as I have the wind for it.

• 30:08Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when you form Utopia and you decide to go in that direction, is it an idea of a direction you want to go in? Do you say to yourself, here's a kind of music I want to play now, and this is where my head is at now in my writing? Do you meet people that influence? How does Utopia congeal? How does that come together?

• 30:27Speaker 07

  As I was progressing as a songwriter, I started losing touch with the guitar because it's not as flexible a songwriting tool as a piano is. Because the piano, you have all the notes there, and you've got 10 fingers, you know? Guitar's only got six strings.

• 30:45Alec Baldwin?

  Were you a trained piano player?

• 30:47Speaker 07

  No, I was never trained. But I began to write on the piano, and it's a great songwriting tool. And I started to think that I was losing all of the effort I had put into trying to learn how to play the guitar and be, you know, an effective guitar player. I was losing that, so I thought, I have to start a band just so I can play guitar more. You know, I still have my own thing, which is my song to my stuff, but I want to start a group where, where my principal role is playing guitar. And a lot of the guys that eventually became part of Utopia, and also this is Utopia 2,

• 31:28Speaker 07

  because there was an original Utopia with me and Hunt and Tony Sales, Soupy Sales kids.

• 31:35Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 31:36Speaker 07

  That lasted for like, God, just a couple of months, something like that. And it was really high concept, so high concept, that we failed to pull it off. And that unit broke up, but then decided I still needed to have a guitar-oriented outlet. And that's when we started Utopia, and it was a lot of the people who had played on my records. A lot of this revolves around the studio that we built in New York called Secret Sound.

• 32:04Alec Baldwin?

  Where was that?

• 32:05Speaker 07

  Which was, that was in, you know, it was like 26th Street and maybe 7th Avenue. It was right near the Gramercy Park Hotel. A friend of mine, Muggie Klingman, he bought a loft, and we said, let's build a studio in it. It was like a very unusual thing, because most studios were commercial enterprises. You know, it was expensive to build a studio, but I just kept taking any money that I got and plowing it back into, you know, my projects and, and tools for my projects. And so we built our own studio, and that's the very first thing we recorded in there was A Wizard of True Star. And then it became our playpen.

• 32:50Speaker 07

  We would go in there and just fiddle around, write music, record little bits of it, splice it together later. There was nobody to tell us what not to do, so we would do anything that we could think of. And the first Utopia album, we just sat around the studio, throwing ideas out on the floor and trying to turn them into songs. And part of what makes it so interesting musically is all, it represents all the influences of each person, kind of collected under a prog rock banner.

• 33:25Alec Baldwin?

  Well, but for me, that, that time, if I thought about it, I could come up with probably a lot of speculation about why people were craving that music. I mean, music to me either is or is not related to the culture and the political spectrum and, you know, Kennedy is killed, and, I mean, a lot of people obviously think that The Beatles' ascension is linked to that. We need something happy. We need something sweet. We need those ballads, you know, well before we get to expert, text expert, choking smokers, you know, all of the kind of poetry and insanity of Lennon and McCartney as they get older.

• 34:08Alec Baldwin?

  Wonderful insanity, by the way, but, you know, in the beginning with like Love Me Do and all those, those things. There's, there's something about people, what people need. And at that time in the 70s, people really needed music to take them somewhere. They really needed to have music. You mentioned before Roger Waters and those guys. I mean, you know, they're

• 34:29Speaker 07

  Pink Floyd, yeah.

• 34:30Alec Baldwin?

  Pink Floyd. I mean, man, when I went to college, everybody was laying on the floor with the biggest joint in their mouth you could possibly imagine, and with the headphones on, and they just had to listen to that music to transport them. Did you feel, when you were making the music with Utopia, your audience wanted you to transport them somewhere?

• 34:50Speaker 07

  Well, you know, I try to think of myself as an artist, as a true artist. We've talked about me as a producer, and as a producer, I have to be aware of the way that the audience may respond to the project that I'm responsible for. But when I'm making my own music, you know, and when I feel like I'm in my most artistic head, I'm not trying to manipulate people. I'm not thinking about them, I'm thinking about me, you know? I'm trying to think, how can I make music that will satisfy me? How can I make music that won't be just simply a repetition of something someone else has done already?

• 35:32Speaker 07

  Which is two challenges right there, to satisfy yourself, you know, which is difficult enough, and that to not replicate something that's already been done. And I guess when you're talking about that, my mind is going to a different place. My mind is going to that place where music is meant for that individual experience. It's like you say, you may be in a dorm room with a bunch of guys getting high, but the music doesn't have an effect until you feel like you're alone with it. And the problem with music nowadays is, it's like nobody's fault, you know, like human evolution is not really any individual's fault.

• 36:16Speaker 07

  It's part of our evolution. Part of it is the simple hardware evolution. The fact that the way we listen to music is not the way we used to listen to music. If you wanted a quality time music experience, it used to be, you had to go home to do it, you know, and listen to your own little hi-fi, and that's what we did. A record that you were anticipating came out, and you sat in a sweet spot between the speakers, and you put that record on, you listed it from beginning to end, you unplugged the phone, you didn't let anybody disturb you.

• 36:51Alec Baldwin?

  You only had one phone in your house back then. I had one in my kitchen.

• 36:54Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 36:55Alec Baldwin?

  It was a phone on the kitchen wall, and that was it.

• 36:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I mean, the dynamic was that it was you and the music, and for you to really get your money's worth out of it, you and the music had to get down there alone and experience it together in a certain way. And eventually, we came up with portable music systems like the Walkman and things like that. Suddenly, it was not a quality time experience anymore. But things have evolved so far to the point that so-called musicians aren't actually musicians. Music is the wedge you use to get yourself into the public consciousness. So you start out calling yourself a musician, but essentially, you're just a merchandiser.

• 37:41Speaker 07

  You're selling shoes, hats, shirts, things like that, you know? It's actually become a little bit more real in the sense that you're not pretending that the music is anything more than self-promotion. There is no pretense about the music being actually more important than people simply remembering your name. You know, it's, it's like the oldest axiom of advertising.

• 38:10Alec Baldwin?

  Todd Rundgren. If you're enjoying this episode, don't keep it to yourself. Tell a friend, and be sure to follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to all of the music from this episode and more in a curated playlist of my favorite pieces from Todd Rundgren. You'll find a link to the playlist in the show notes of this episode. When we return, Todd Rundgren tells us how anthropology factors into his songwriting.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren. I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music, and I'm constantly asking questions, you know? Whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign, you know, that's every night you play a show, and, and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio, or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album, so, and you, you obviously

• 39:33Speaker 03

  are an expert here. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 41:01Alec Baldwin?

  Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 41:17Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

• 41:49Alec Baldwin?

  This is It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference from Todd Rundgren's album Something Anything. Consumers have come to expect the ease and accessibility that today's streaming platforms give us to an infinite musical catalog. Incredibly, Todd Rundgren had the foresight to see where music technology was taking us, but he was slightly ahead of his time.

• 42:15Speaker 07

  I am a technologist and a theorist in some kind. And in the early, late eighties, early nineties, I started to gain some awareness that technology was going to take music to other places. I started thinking about other ways that music could be delivered. And I came up with this concept called No World Order, in which you could, as a listener, describe some parameters about the music you want to hear. And then this system would go out and find the music that satisfied your criterion. So I did a demonstration of that. It was called No World Order. It was released as a record, and there were various computer versions as well. And you could actually navigate the music if you

• 42:59Speaker 07

  had the right hardware. And I got approached by Water Full Service Network, which was attempting to establish an interactive TV community in Orlando, Florida as a test thing. And we wanted to see whether people wanted to have on demand music services. This is when you still had to buy music on a CD. So we went to all the major labels and said, we're just experimenting with a community in Orlando, in Florida, to see whether there is demand for music that's delivered by some kind of criteria, something

• 43:41Speaker 07

  like that. Designed the whole system, then went to the five major labels at that point, see whether they would put their music on servers. So we could just experiment with it. All five refused. They said, we can't even imagine this, putting music on servers. Just it's beyond our comprehension, let alone explaining it to all our artists and the retailers that we have to deal with and stuff like that. And every single one of them refused. Two years later, Napster. And that was the beginning of the end, because they didn't see that music had to be on servers. And that essentially collapsed what was

• 44:21Speaker 07

  the music business. And the end result is now you don't sell music. Music is, as I mentioned before, music is advertising for something else that you're selling, that people seem to perceive as more valuable than the music. Like a T-shirt, like a big puffy jacket, like some sneakers, something like that. I mean, Kanye is bragging about the fact, not that he sold so much music, that he sold $2 million worth of his players that the music will be on. He's bragging about selling hardware, not music. And that's kind of where music has gotten to at this particular point. It's just part of putting

• 45:06Speaker 07

  forward a personal brand. And then once you have that brand, you sell anything, and it doesn't have to be music.

• 45:12Alec Baldwin?

  Do world events ever shape your music? Do they ever influence your music?

• 45:16Speaker 07

  I write my music about human nature. My whole music is anthropological. I'm trying to figure out why people think the way they think, and why they do the things that they do. And that covers everything. That pretty much covers it all.

• 45:33Alec Baldwin?

  Now, how would you say that the shoebox full of

• 45:36Speaker 07

  Peyote buttons.

• 45:38Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, the big baggie full of peyote buttons. That was a while ago. Well, what do you do now to raise your consciousness? Are you into meditation? Like, what do you do now to achieve a state where you feel comfortable?

• 45:50Speaker 07

  I moved 25 years ago to the island of Kauai. And I live in heaven, you know, there.

• 45:57Alec Baldwin?

  I hear you. Well, listen, I am a great, great admirer of your music and your career. And I don't know what it is, but like, I went back and listened to so much, so much of your music. And it's that Utopia phase of your career. I love that music. I love Utopia.

• 46:12Speaker 07

  It takes you back to college, right?

• 46:14Alec Baldwin?

  Which really, no, it's beautiful music. It's beautiful. It was beautiful music then, and it still is. You are one of the great artists. You say you like to call yourself an artist. Well, everybody I know, when they think about you, they think about what a great artist you are, and the diversity of your sound and the music you made. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I appreciate it.

• 46:33Speaker 07

  Thank you, Alec.

• 46:36Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to producer, songwriter, and musician Todd Rundgren. I'll leave you with Love is the Answer from Utopia's album Oops, Wrong Planet. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

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  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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