Todd Rundgren: Video-Tripping With The Perfect Master

Todd Rundgren: Video-Tripping With The Perfect Master

by Toby Goldstein

The Trail ways bus to Woodstock takes about 2½ hours from New York City, gradually trading the clatter of urban motorways for the static peace of outer suburbia and beyond, into farmland. What it also trades is the frantic pursuits of megalopolis for the good-old-days of craftism and bucolic chitchat. The fairhaired guy in long hair and sandals who meets the coach in his honestly aging, standard transmission Volkswagen reinforces my suspicions that time has indeed stopped in the most famous small town of the East Coast. All the scene lacks is a barefoot chorus harmonizing “Alice’s Restaurant Massa-cree” “with feeeeling.”

We leave what passes for civilization and wind through a torturous maze of bush and dirt road, slowly enough to count several indeterminate creatures being turned into mincemeat by the wheels of progress. In less than a quarter hour, the VW pulls into the Bearsville Studios parking lot, a small gravelly opening. The building is made of wood planks, weatherbeaten from a decade of frigid New Yprk winters and sticky summers. Inside though, the joint is jumping, its center activity moving parallel with the wiry whirlwind called Todd Rundgren.

Bearsville Studio has become a second home t6 Rundgren in recent years, after he gave up his downtown Manhattan apartment and relocated to the Woodstock region. Eventually, he’ll be running his myriad of activities from an all-new Utopia , Studio, but while it’s under construction, Albert Grossman’s habitat is housing Rundgren’s latest projects. We slide past one studio, where Rick Derringer is on break frorrf recording his next album (naturally a Rundgren production), to a second room— an enormous airy space crammed with technology better suited to a> space launch thar) an LP. Todd Rundgren is directing (producing somehow doesn’t seem adequately awe-inspiring) The world’s first g major video disc. He reluctantly sets down a bit of gadgetry and shuts us into an editing | room. ,

Outwardly tall, lean and languid, Rundgren has a rapid-fire delivery so abruptly intense he appears professorial—like the guy whose class notes could make up a volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. I marvel at the ease with which he can cut his own discs with Utopia, produce for everyone from Meatloaf to the Tubes, play the odd gig, and work six months straight on the video. Rundgren is blase about it.

“It comes natural to me. I’d love to say it was some scientific method or new age practice that you can run out and purchase and make your life much more efficient. I do a lot of things, but my life isn’t’any easier to manage than any other person’s. It’s just that I set myself a priority and don’t get emotionally torn between what I’m sup-, posed to be doing and what I think I’m supposed to be dbing. Probably I’rh able to do that because I always test my intentions in everything I’m involved, with for their purity. Y’know, if I’m doing something for purely financial reasons I have to keep that in the forefront of my mind. I always am perfectly honest with all the bands 1 work for, on the level I’m involved with them.”

Ndw maybe you or I wouldn’t set one foot in a studio with Meatloaf’s imposing presence lurking across the board, but perhaps Rundgren’s greatest feat of recent years was helping to turn that long-time loser into the world’s most unlikely romantic hero. Discretion prevents my grilling Rundgren about whether the Meatloaf enterprise was taken on for the bucks.

“There are some things I do because of the hopeless challenge aspects of them and at the time, .that’s the reason I got involved in it. And the longer I worked at it, the more hopeless it seemed! Not even\the musical aspects of it—there are personalities involved that make the act successful and also make it hard for them to communicate to the general audience. It was a real challenge. I had no hope of becoming rich ,off it...Well, that’s why producers like to get a good advance, because you never know if the record company’s gonna perform after you’ve made the record.

“Patti [Smith] I got involved in because Patti’s an old friend of mine and she asked me to help her on this record. And it was not the most professional relationship I’ve had in making a record because we are friends. It’s impossible to act like a producer with somebody you know real well.

“Tom Robinson was just something that came out of the blue. He’s one of those hopeless artists, I guess! Hopelessness has nothing to do with his artistry, it has to do with the musical, or in his case, social attitude you take that may make it hard for you to fit into the record market. Yet you’re still doing something that’s worthwhile and valid so you need help from somebody in a more or less legitimate position. Obviously, in Tom Robinson’s case, with the English press that didn’t help him at all.” I sense a turn to dangerous ground, as Rundgren could not help but resent the UK press’ dismissal of TRB 2 as a too-slickly-polished follow-up to Power In The Darkness.

In fact, Tom Robinson accepted the press slagging with a lot more equanimity than Todd.

“I don’t talk to the rock press,” he informed me after the tape machine was turned off. When I gently broke it to him that I’d never thought life as a rock critic was a particularly dirty job, he looked genuinely horrified, and quickly returned to study the color wheels in the video room.

“Rock criticism is the easiest to write because it requires no skill at all! I mean, people who could not hope to survive in any other field of writing can be well-salaried [huh?] in rock criticism, and they don’t have to know anything about music, they only have to know about their own lifestyle.

“The whole phenomenon is a strange thing. There are probably many more rock critics, per capita, than any other kind of critic. Every newspaper supports one or two film critics, but so many magazines got all these names you never heard of, y’know, Robot A. Hull and all these other weird fictitious rock critics—the Christgau record report, which is like the cornflakes of record reviews. How can you really take the whole thing seriously?

“I might speak to writers that I have some human relationship with, but people that come in with a dry list of questions, I can’t stand ’em, and I especially can’t stand ’em in England. The way they come in and are very sort of detached, then go back and write this really intricate thing about what pants you were wearing and all these totally irrelevant observations, as if they had actually become involved with you, as if they had some human interrelationship with you, which they never had/Were never interested in having/WERE AFRAID TO HAVE!” Did I mention that Todd is dressed in well-worn cords and a sleeveless scoop-neck shirt?

“What’s the point, they come in and label me any one thing, depending on what they happen to observe in any particular moment. And nobody understands himself that well, that he can absolutely categorize and have down pat where another person is at. Nobody is so sure that his own perceptive equipment is that faultless. You mentioned movie and TV critics—I think the whole range of criticism is irrelevant. Criticism on any level is just bullshit! I don’t care how legitimate it appears to have made itself. How can anybody else’s opinion supplant your own? If something is important enough for you to know about, just go out and find it for yourself.”

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What draws Rundgren’s hard-earned respect are the efforts of people (like himself) who put projects together without regard for the goodwill of an industry. Embarrassed and proud at the same time, he. mentions a fanzine that had reprinted an old 16 Magazine questionnaire he’d done while still in The Nazz. “I’d never have reprinted that,” he exclaims, disdaining the idea of subsidizing a fan club or industrycentered publication about his activities.

Similarly, he appreciates British punks, not for the originality of their music, which he holds was influenced by the New York Dolls, but for their anti-politics. “They wanna show everybody who’s trying to figure that if they vote for some party it’ll all be better, that they’re ail just running around dressed up in their usual English costumes, playing their usual English games, and that they’re never gonna see the light unless they actually get down to face themselves.”

Todd Rundgren might seem to be a man with an ivory tower existence, luring choice subjects to the isolation of, Bearsville to record, npt putting touring on his “things to do” list, and settling for the cult following who buy the records he makes with Utopia (but never in sufficient quantity to place them high on the charts). His own product, while satisfying an obvious ego need, hasn’t done nearly as well as many, of his productions, which only serves to pull him farther away from the industry 100 miles to the south.

“Some people may say ‘Oh, he’s isolated, doesn’t that make his work less .effective?’ I have been involved in the business level and social level of this industry, as involved as anybody gets in it. And 1 don’t like it, in the main. And 1 don’t believe I should be doing things that cause a continuation of it.

“Some people want to be very selective about it—well, I have a very comprehensive view about life in general, and I don’t believe that anybody is exempt. I don’t believe that just because somebody plays rock ’n’ roll that they’re less violent or if they had the opportunity to have their finger over the atom bomb they wouldn’t use it because of some pet peeve...

“My whole thing has been liberating different areas for the benefit of artists, liberating technology for artists, forging new musical areas, producing them so they’ll be more able to be artistic. And ultimately, I don’t know where it’ll go. I may try to artify the whole social structure and run for some political office under the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ ticket.

“But even art is a label. There’s an undefinable process that we’re all involved in, that we ignore for the sake of a lot of things that we always complain about, we don’t want to think about or talk about. Still, they make up the bulk of our everyday existence. So I think it’s about time we actually Went around and weren’t afraid to say to each other, you’re full of bullshit and I probably am full of bullshit too, and why don’t we figure out what the bullshit is and what the real stuff is.

“If you’ve got a problem you’re not gonna resolve it by joining the National Front and I’m sorry, but you’re not gonna solve it by joining Rock Against Racism either. You’re gonna solve it by realizing that you’re not better than anybody else and you’re not smarter than anybody else and you don’t know how to fix the world better than anybody else, becaqse if somebody dropped you into the woods you’d probably turn into a pile of blubbering whatever. Wolves would eat you.” So there.

Webster’s dictionary offers some insight into the word around which Todd Rundgren has built his physical existence and moral philosophy. On the one hand, Utopia is defined as “a place of ideal perfection, especially in laws, government and social conditions.” That optimistic formula is tampered by an alternate, small-u definition of utopia as “an imprac1 tical scheme for social improvement.” However, Todd Rundgren’s vision of utopia owes . a far greater debt to the individual than to any imposed organization, except of course his own. Utopia as a benevolent dictatorship? His employees swear by him more than they swear at him, I am told.

“To me, it’s very important to feel that you have a purpose and an existence and 1 don’t care how grandiose it is: You can have any Napoleonic complex that you want as long as you believe your existence has a real purpose and a positive purpose. Even if you believe it has a negative purpose, as long as you can state what that is, so that we can get it all out front! But the biggest problem is people with no purpose, no direction, who have not confirmed for themselves what they want to do.

“My purpose extends maybe to the ends of the universe [my mouth is starting -to drop open], I don’t believe that anything can stop me, ’cause I don’t believe that death can stop me. [Todd notices,my glassy stare.] OK, I believe that death changes my priorities. But I don’t believe that people can say, well I’m going toplan for my retirement. Why lower your priorities to that level?

“It’s all the forms of self-imposed retardation that people put on themselves, ’cause you can scare yourself. But retrograde action can only be maintained for a certain amount of tirhe. The rest of the universe is all moving in a certain direction and you can only stop yourself for so l6ng, aftef which you’ll just be dragged forward with the rush of evolution. The idea is, fit least be flowing along with the general rate and hopefully,, be/flowing ahead of it.” Now, do you understand all the byways of Todd’s last few Utopia albums?

It’s not exactly the kind of party behavior that lends itself to the road, which is why Rundgren tersely comments, “We believe in the obsolescence of 'touring and the touring way ojf.life.’’ Without tQtally cutting themselves off from live shows, Utopia has confined its performances to occasional dates around New York, a brief visit to the Far East and an appearance at England’s Knebworth Festival in August, as one of Led Zeppelin’s opening acts.

In his role of omniscient observer, Rundgren is well aware that the concert audience has become easily distracted, which is why the past half year has been centered around the cluttered TV studio across the corridor. An artist is trying to calculate how small she must cut her model to fit it on camera. Psychedelic pinwheels are reflecting patterns on a Screen, and everywhere there’s expensive, state-of-theart machinery. Surely this is not a backdrop toy he Gong Show.

“I’d like to make some use of the attention that people are putting on Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk find make it another avenue for artists of all kinds, who for the most part are excluded or disenfranchised from the system, which is based mainly in Burbank, and ypu have to go to Burbank to do it their way, union style.

“None of ’em, not the engineer, not the director, not the producer, looks at the comprehensive cause-apd-effect of television in the way that film people are involved in film. We wanted to approach this in a totally artistic, liberated manner, as if it was on film, but using video techniques. Taking as long as we want to achieve a vision, rather than have some cheapo story line that lasts a half hour.

“To clarify, this is a visualization to go with Tomita’s rendition of Holst’s The Planets. Why should you' do the first important video disc with a crappy piece of music? So you take a good piece of music and a really unique and superbly executed performance of it. And now we’re putting visuals to it. It’s totally scripted out, all the imagery is original, designed by the artist and myself. The whole thing is so involved that this first 25 minutes’ worth of music has 131 separate scenes in it, which is why it’s taken six months.”

According to Rundgren, the videodisc is in a similar state to where stereo records were 20 years ago. And it’s just a matter of time before you can hit your corner video-stand and bring home some real-life action news. Rundgren would be perfectly content to devote his next ten years toward expanding the limits of this new medium. It’s a suitable undertaking for , someone who’s either the last renaissance humanist or the first 21st century schizoid man.

“On the lowest level, organic beings procreate, create another piece of them-' selves. On the highest level, they, create visions that change the entire mental structure of the planet.”

Glass dismissed.