Todd Rundgren: Rock & Roll's Harbinger of Hip

I don't know that I've ever objectified it that way. From a technical standpoint, I've only recently gotten involved in innovating things, as applied to music. Most of my computer work has previously been graphics. And I'd written computer-graphics software and things, some of which were actually marketed. So I imagine they could be considered a contribution. But I'm trying to think of what the technical thing is that I've done that has contributed, and I suppose so far it could be considered sort of a D-I-Y attitude about these technologies. For instance, recording technologies -- now it's commonplace for people to do all their recording themselves and have a little home studio where they make their demos and sometimes make their final products. I guess I started doing that so early and have done it so consistently that maybe it's somehow helped develop the attitude that this was a productive way to do things.

Well, there are direct-marketing avenues already. Anyone can send a tape to a pressing plant and get a final product back. It's not a question of creating the product, it's how do you reach your ultimate audience. And I know that in magazines such as Guitar Player and Musician and various other music-oriented magazines, there are certain cult artists who are known to the readers of a particular publication, and they direct-market just to the readers of that particular magazine. I used to live at Woodstock, and Happy and Artie Traum were notorious for this sort of direct marketing that they would do with their tapes -- and they made a substantial living at it. So there are already avenues to direct-market things without having to go through what most people consider to be the standard operating procedure, which is to get signed to a label and then they take care of all the marketing problems.

You could conceive that people are already direct-marketing things like software and music-related software and sound-related software through bulletin-board services -- things like that. Like if you come up with a little MIDI tool or something like that, you can market it as shareware on CompuServe®. And that again is going around the standard publishing avenues that are the way most artists expect to get widespread success, high name recognition. Most of them stick with the traditional method, which is to get a standard publisher, get a standard record contract -- do everything more or less above ground rather than underground. So I think it's highly feasible, and from my standpoint it's an exciting prospect, because the biggest problem I have is this network of middlemen between me and the ultimate listener: the record labels themselves and what priorities they set, what efforts they are willing to put behind the record; the promotional people that they hire and the people that they have to promote to, which are people who own record-store chains and people who program radio stations, people who program MTV; the manufacturers themselves. Each of these people is going to take a little piece; they slow the process down and ultimately create stumbling blocks between you and the audience. So the idea of being able to get directly into people's homes is exciting to me, because then I don't have to worry about the performance of all these middlemen.

Yeah. Well, they are already building these "information superhighways" in various parts of the country. So the potential is there already. The thing that isn't up to speed yet is the software mechanisms that allow you to get the information you want into your home. There are a lot of experiments going on in terms of this interface and a methodology of categorizing all of the information so that you can find what you want. In other words, anything that goes into a computer database has to be described in some terms. If it's a movie, of course, it's the title and the stars and the director and possibly some category that it would belong to, like action or drama or comedy or something like that. This allows people to hierarchically locate something that they want. Those systems are in their infancy, but it'll potentially be so easy that you can come home and your television set, which will contain your computer, will be so used to watching you ask for things, it'll be able to sense your preferences and alert you to things that may be really new that you might not even be familiar with yet but conform to your history of listening and viewing.

So if you keep ordering up jazz of a particular kind, then when something new goes into the system, you can ask your television what's new and it'll tell you, give you a list of artists and recordings. And suddenly I don't have to worry about buying ads and things like that to make people aware of it, because it's just popping up on their screens. It'll be a way that people who have a taste for the kind of music that I make can be made aware of it without having to spend a lot of money doing things that are essentially shatter-shot. Like if you buy an ad in Wired magazine or Rolling Stone magazine -- people who buy Rolling Stone listen to all different kinds of music, so people who have no interest in your music are seeing the ad. And at the same time, you may be making a particular kind of music that people who are interested in that music don't necessarily buy Rolling Stone because there's not enough about jazz in it, let's say. So it's a way of getting suppliers and consumers together really efficiently. And the people who suffer in that process are the middlemen, the people who are in this sort of Byzantine promotion and merchandising structure.

Yeah. Well, everyone will be moving into these other areas. There's this anecdote:

Out here, where everyone works in computers, people always have this bravado claim they make whenever they have to change jobs. They say, "Well, I'm not too crazy about this job, but I've got a job waiting for me in multimedia." There's always this out, where you get bumped up to the next hip thing. So people that are into merchandising and marketing and promotion and stuff like that will just bump themselves up into, you know, "information superhighway agent," who will offer different and better services. In other words, "I can sell you the agent that will give you much hipper alternatives than the one you're using now." So you start marketing little artificial people, or little artificial tastemakers will go out:

"Ninety-nine point nine of our customer bases say they are highly satisfied with our product. Why don't you join?" Same way they advertise phone companies and stuff like that -- bells and whistles.

Well, I'm not a practicing Zen Buddhist. I would say that my personal beliefs have a lot more in common with that than with the more personality-based religions. Particularly -- we say Judeo-Christian, but Christianity is something that grew out of Judaism, and I think Jews don't feel that they have a whole lot in common with Christian belief -- in particular, Christianity is a very personality-based religion, and there are a lot of religions like that, including Buddhism. But in Buddhism, there is the personality of Buddha, and then there's supposed to be the so-called Buddhic state, which is a state of mind that the believers are supposed to attain to. And in Christianity, things are much more based on the singular grace of a particular personality. In other words, Buddhism doesn't require you to surrender to the personality of Buddha in order to become a practicing Buddhist, whereas Christianity requires that you surrender to the personality of Christ. And in that sense, I don't ascribe to that.

My actual belief system I would characterize as individualist. And that's not even "ist" in the sense of Buddhist or something like that -- it's not the kind of "ist" where it is a philosophy. What it is, is my life is characterized by the study of an individual, and that individual happens to be me. In other words, I've decided that the thing that I have to devote my life to understanding is the thing that is omnipresent in my life, and that happens to be me, and that answers to any questions I have about divinity and about relationships and ultimate meaning and things like that ultimately will grow out of an understanding of myself and what makes me what I am. That sounds like the exact opposite of what most people would consider religion. Most people consider religion to be an objectification and an externalization of a so-called Creative Principle, what people call God and things like that. In most religions, it's always considered to be something out there that you are trying to get to. And I consider all of those things, all of those creative impulses or ultimate volitional force or anything that causes manifestation to come about is inside me somewhere -- it's buried inside my consciousness. That, I believe, is what characterizes my spiritual beliefs to be more like, let's say, Zen Buddhism than like Western-style religions that are based on externalizing and concentration on another personality aside from your own.

Yeah, I'm anti-alignment. I don't tend to join groups or become part of a club or a political party or essentially any kind of conglomeration of human beings outside the anthropologically ordained. In other words, I consider myself part of a family, but that's a bottom line. If you reproduce, you acquiesce to the family -- if you reproduce responsibly, that is. I mean, you can have sex and leave. But I've chosen to have my children, so I have chosen to make the compromises that being in a family entails. But beyond that, people politicize voluntarily -- they do it to enhance their personal power. And that, to me, is an illusion that people constantly get sucked into, in which they see themselves as being inextricably a part of this group. And it balloons all the way up into nationalism and racism and things that cause the horrors of Bosnia and Somalia and things like that. The far end of that is the mob. Another far fringe of that is Jonestown, where people have completely given up their own powers of discrimination and volition, and faith is taken to this extreme where it's what we call blind faith -- it's faith based on no input from the individual at all, but something that can be considered equivalent to a drug that has destroyed your consciousness.

Yeah. I have particular beliefs which are not at odds with anyone's religion, I don't think. "Fascist Christ" and the whole uproar that surrounds that -- it's really about what I think is dangerous manifestation that happens as people accept solutions too easily. In other words, you buy the program whole without questioning any part of it. It happens when people despair and want a solution to their desperation but don't want to pay the ultimate price for that solution, which nine times out of ten is painful self-examination. The hardest thing for people to do is shake their own beliefs. It's much easier for them to accept something whole and not question any part of it. For instance, the kind of fear that people like Randall Terry and people of the extreme religious right play on is a result of people being unwilling to face the hard questions. A question like abortion, no one has the answers to and it's so hard to think about, that when anyone comes along and says "I have the answer" -- regardless of whether they really do or not -- there's going to be a lot of people who will rush to that just to avoid thinking about something that's very difficult to deal with. And so much of religious fervor and fanaticism plays on that fear or that unwillingness to continue thinking about difficult problems. Most of the condemnation that comes out of the religious right and the vitriol that goes with it is really just trying to provide simple solutions to people that are tired of torturing themselves over complicated questions.

The reason why I remain unaligned is because I continue to torture myself over these things, figuring that it's the only way that I can go through life and act guiltlessly. If I have bought something whole without being able to fully explain it to myself let alone to somebody else, then what I'm doing is trying to find absolution for my actions. It's something that essentially I know nothing about, in the same way that people want to be saved on their deathbed, where that final blessing that will get you conditionally into heaven really sustains a lot of people and allows them to go through their lives, however morally corrupt they might be. And for me, unless I feel that I know why I am motivated to do a certain thing, then I feel like I'm in this trap where I could be doing things based on the "conventional wisdom" or the temporary rules that some group allows me. And later, I will be made to pay for it. It's, I suppose, like taking heroin for the first time. It seems like such a little thing, but you never know what the price is going to be at the end. And every time you do it, you think, Oh, it didn't seem like much. I can quit. I can give it up anytime I want. And then the price comes, the price of actually giving it up, the price of facing up to the decisions that you've made. And I'm trying to keep that price as low as possible all the time. So these difficult questions, I always grill myself about constantly. I never say, Okay, now I've got the solution, because I feel that if I hadn't questioned myself, I couldn't confidently go about my actions and feel that I'm doing the best thing or behaving as good as I possibly can.

Exactly. My feeling is that an artist is someone who makes a public act of self- examination. Of course, there are commercial artists whose agendas are controlled by the audience, what they think the audience wants to hear. But the art that has an impact on me is art that I feel is revelatory in some way. In other words, I can see the artist not necessarily trying to manipulate me or tell me something that they know with great certitude, but exploring gray areas and doing it with a certain amount of grace -- that's what makes an artist. In other words, it's not simply somebody with schizophrenia standing on a street corner and screaming. I mean, they're involved in self-examination, as well, but it's not done with the grace that causes to people stop and focus on it.

You're reading it in terms of if I was that calculating about it, maybe-if I was calculating the palatability factor of the audience. But I continue to make records according to some internal agenda that may include contemporary influences, it may include influences that I've had for as long as I've been making music. And I think that whatever I do, there is a certain tether to it that I don't feel comfortable loosing. In other words, there have been points in my career where I have done things completely without reference to anything else. And they could be considered highly experimental. But almost everything in every period that I've worked in has contained a substantial influence that probably was there since I first started listening to music. I've always been attracted to certain kinds of music for whatever reason, and those primal influences are there throughout -- the use of voices and things like that. I think about this a lot, because I listen to contemporary music and I realize people don't use harmonies so much in the kind of music that I listen to. Also, I seem to have drifted away from the heavy emphasis on guitars and stuff that Utopia was into, to something that is a little bit more orchestral, at a time when popular music seems to be refocusing on the guitar again. So if I was calculating, I probably wouldn't have made the record exactly the way it is.

But a lot of it is the result not only of me trying to stretch the tether a little bit and incorporate a lot of contemporary things, but also a result of rules that I've set out for this interactive-music thing and what the structure of the music has to be in order to fit into that context. And that makes it sound a certain way. In other words, the highly rhythmic nature of it is what makes it easier to cut it up into pieces and reassemble it, which is not to say that it couldn't be done other ways, but there are technical limitations in interactive media right now that force you to do things a certain way. For instance, CD-ROMs all spin at a certain speed that limits the amount of information you can get off of it at any particular time. I could do things like mix music on the fly if I could get enough of it off the disc to keep, let's say, four, six tracks of sounds in memory. But there isn't enough speed in the hardware to either get that much sound off or to mix together with enough fidelity to play it back -- right now. But as time goes on and people start putting DSPs and special chips inside multimedia CD players, and new compression schemes are standardized, then it will be possible to do things like crossfade between two pieces of music rather than just splice, or mix various things on top of each other rather than simply being able to just play one set of stereo tracks at a time. And when that happens, that will remove some of the limitations that are applied to the compositional aspects. In other words, it won't be so necessary to have a beat going all the time.

Well, there's no recognizable representational imagery. There are six possible things you can see on the screen: There's a kind of a splash screen that comes up when the thing first starts, and that's just a picture of the album cover, more or less. And what happens is, if you don't do anything beyond that, then the thing plays just as if it was the CD that you have -- sounds just like that. Then there's an editor screen that allows you to change things about the performance of the music. Then there's another screen that's kind of an exit screen / credit screen that allows you to save what you've done and leave the program. And then while you are listening to music, you can also bring up on the screen nothing -- in other words, you can black the screen out. Or you can bring up this little graphic hack that looks like billboards flying by; it's just sort of square shapes that whiz by like you're flying down a highway with a lot of billboards on it. And another one that's kind of a little chaos simulation that looks like a swarm of insects flying around the cursor wherever you move the cursor. They're just little eye ticklers to have something to look at besides the editor screen when you're listening to the music.

But again, because of the limitation in bandwidth and because we've filled up the disc mostly with musical alternatives, we never get graphics off the disc. So there aren't other kinds of pictures or animations that come up during the performance. And the reason is twofold: one is that technical limitation, and the other reason is that this is supposed to be more like a record than a game or something like that. You're supposed to put it on, put some settings into it, and just let it go. And do whatever you would do normally, which is either listen to it or do the dishes or have dinner or whatever people do with music. The idea is that you can have the music conform to a greater number of moods or situations. If you're having a party; maybe you want it to be up-tempo for a long time so people get into a dance groove. So you can tell it just to play fast music and it will only play music that's up-tempo, or conversely, slow music, if you want it to be a slow mood. You can examine parts of the music more carefully. In other words, you can bring it to a certain musical event and have it just play that event over and over and move up and down through the available mixes, eliminate various combinations of instruments or eliminate the lead vocal. Or you can listen to the whole album Karaoke -- just take the voice out. There are four other versions of the record done by four other producers, and you can listen to those or manipulate those, as well.

There's no mixing involved. You're describing the kind of experience you'd like. In other words, you start with a particular version of the record and then you say: Using this as a guideline, listen to these other preferences of mine. Like, for instance, I want the mixes to be sparse and I want the mood to be thoughtful and I'd like you to be kind of creative with the arrangement -- in other words, make things change a lot. And then it will go and, using those pointers, invent a new record for you.

Oh, you can jump about in real time, yeah -- while it's playing. While it plays, whatever you tell it to do, it will do and continue to play. It does it more or less seamlessly -- the music never stops.

Everything is essentially centrally controlled. In other words, there's no lighting man, there's no sound mixer. Once the show starts -- and if everything is working properly -- I more or less control everything that happens. And I do it by making musical decisions most of the time. I can take direct control of any of these systems, but mostly what's happening is, I have this fairly large computer program that's running that is listening to input from the keyboard controller. And the way I use the keyboard controller is, I don't actually play musical things with it -- although I could. But what I do nominally is, I assign ranges of the keyboard to various functions that the computer responds to. Let's say the lower twenty keys are twenty different themes that I can play. And maybe the next eight keys are various sections of the song. And then the next several octaves will be variations on that particular section of the song. Then I might have arranged keys that set up a mode to play -- in other words, play from a script -- or let me improvise or loop on this particular section, so that while the performance is going on, I can extemporaneously play a song and have it play from a script and go from a predetermined thing. Or I can jump around from theme to theme and section to section and more or less random- access any section of any song. Or I can put it into a loop mode, let's say, during a guitar solo or vamp section and solo the guitar for as long as I want -- until I tell it to stop looping, and then it will proceed with the rest of the song. And essentially, based on those musical decisions that I make, the computer makes decisions about what the lighting should be, it sets up the mixers and the effects for what's appropriate for that particular theme, it will determine what's on the video screens. If I happen to be doing something lyrically relevant, like if it's a rap secti6n or something, there are these numeric message boards around, and then it will put up the appropriate text for what's going on. At the same time, there are other more manual gags that I do that aren't computer-controlled.

There's a lot of concentration involved. At the same time I'm doing this, I'm triggering other things, like the fog machine. I'm running the fog machine like a demon, various other aspects of the lights. There are cues that I give the audience based on these colored beacons that are like traffic signals. In other words, if the beacon is red, there's a certain area of the stage they can't get on; if the beacon is yellow, then the dancers that travel with me are supposed to occupy this certain space; if the beacon is green, then anyone in the audience can occupy the space until it's full. I can control strobe lights and other lighting effects. And then we have some low-tech things that we were going to make high-tech but still remain low-tech. And we have these "fishing poles" that come out from the top of the structure, and we lower things down into the audience, like little inflatable things they can bat around, like tether balls; a couple of cameras that can come down into the audience and the audience becomes the cameramen -- they pass the camera around, put each other on the big screens.

On different levels but to different degrees. There is a certain experimental aspect to this that's helping to answer some questions about what's feasible in interactive performance. That's not to say I've tried everything that's possible, but we're starting to learn some things about human nature in these situations, not just how well these things work from night to night in actual practice, but what you can expect from the audience.

Well, it brings out the good and the bad and the ugly in people -- in some ways, it's just an amplifier. And maybe this is the point of it: the point of this interactive thing is to really objectify what people are likely to do in these communal situations. And they range from outright thievery, potential thuggery, which at this point has become something that I've had to pre-lecture the audience on, because it became a problem where people were stealing stuff off of the podium that would make it difficult for me to conduct a show at some points. Like if there was an audience-participation thing for a song, where they would be hitting triggers that were around the perimeter of the stage, and I would have like a dozen timbale sticks that I would pass out to people to do this, before I would even get to that section, someone would have stolen the entire box of sticks. And so I had to lecture the audience beforehand to say, "You know, we know that everybody wants a souvenir, but don't take anything."

And sometimes it would be effective and then there would be times where people would just be too desperate for a souvenir of the situation and steal something anyway.

I've been involved in discussions about what might go into an interactive performance. Some people say, "Well, we're going to pass out to everyone in the audience these remote-control devices." I don't know how much these are supposed to cost, but you can count on ten percent of them being lost every night -- and maybe more through thievery and vandalism. And I have an extremely well-behaved audience by most standards.

Oh, it varies from probably about 800 up to close to 2000; it's about the size of the places we're playing. New York might have been one of the bigger audiences. At New York they were good, they didn't steal anything -- I had to mention it first -- they didn't steal anything and there was no overt vandalism. But there was unbridled enthusiasm that can be equally dangerous, because there is this smaller area that I occupy that I can bring one or two people up onto, but sometimes people just get too enthusiastic and eight or nine people will cram up onto this thing that isn't meant to hold that much weight. And there are three ways to get up there, so while I'm trying to shoo people off of one entrance, they're sneaking up the other entrance. And this being an interactive show, you don't want security to be controlling what goes on all the time, you know -- it has to be more or less just see what happens.

So there are all these things. That's something that's hard to figure, because it's only enthusiasm, it's people just getting sucked up into it. So there's that aspect, there are aspects of thievery and/or vandalism. Like the inflatables: sometimes people would take out a pocketknife and just cut the tether, deflate the thing, and stick it in their pocket so that they could get it home. So you have to consider the fact that people want souvenirs, and if you let them participate physically in any way, some portion of the audience is going to try and take pieces of it. Some people just want to show off. There was this one guy who got up on the podium and I almost got in a fistfight with him because he kept hitting me with a drumstick. He didn't really care about me, it was his show then. Suddenly it became his show, like he was king of the hill.

Yeah.