Show Technology Magazine, Spring 1994

The Todd Rundgren interactive concert is definitely something to behold. Rundgren's latest release, No World Order, is one of only a few titles available in the Philips CD-i interactive format. So why shouldn't the live gigs be just as interactive? Performed in the round on a tiered pagoda Todd refers to as "Bill" (obviously an allusion to the cost of the set), the show is a two hour visual and musical assault that challenges the conventions of the last thirty years of rock performance. The traditional barriers between musician and audience have been largely stripped away. At certain times during the evening audience members are allowed (make that encouraged) to join Todd on the set, playing electronic drum triggers on Bang the Drum or dancing within the performance circle on Chant. The small set itself is filled with electronic gear of every sort - synthesizers, samplers, triggers, Apple computers, as well as a host of paraphernalia unique to Todd's World. A trio of female dancers augment the one man band, a circular Phillips video wall sits atop the contraption, a message board displays song lyrics and topical humor, beacon lights beckon or inhibit the audience's participation, and with the many gadgets that the host is able to lower into the crowd (inflatable toys, video cameras, etc.), there is an air of free form experimentation buzzing through the whole venue.

In the middle of all this is Todd Rundgren. Musician, vocalist supreme, producer, interactive artist; all these monikers apply, but don't seem to clarify the essence of what Todd is all about. Active in the music business since the late 60's, Rundgren has weaved in and out of the public eye and seems to have no compulsion to play the record company game. Despite this, he has been (as a solo artist and with his band, Utopia) lifted to cult status by his fans. Early album releases such as Something/Anything and Hermit of Mink Hollow pioneered the "one man band" approach to making records. Never pigeonholed, Rundgren regularly changes his approach to recording every few years. He has also been a major pioneer the realm of the "rock music video." Finally, as a producer Rundgren has sonically shaped some of the most successful records of the last twenty-five years.

Todd Rundgren is no stranger to solo gigs; he's been doing them for years. Whereas previous solo excursions have relied on guitar, piano, and the occasional backing tape, the current tour is more than just one artist doing their thing. The TR-i tour is the culmination of all technology available to Todd. One of the most interesting points about this tour is the absence of dedicated sound and lighting engineers. Todd uses a core of three people to make TR-i happen. Just as the lighting designer wishes to use one console to personally control all lighting fixtures, or a soundman utilizes automation in his mixes, it was very much Todd's wish to be in total control. From the tour's conception, all, sound, lighting, video, and other equipment was to be interfaced to do just that.

When looking for a company to support the tour, Rundgren turned to Peavey for both his MIDI systems and PA. Due to the nature of the set and the close performance quarters, there were specific audio requirements to be met. According to Todd's right hand audio expert Larry Toomey, "It was originally thought that we were going to get subs and stacks in each city, but we were able to get enough stuff from Peavey." The heart of Rundgren's show control system is his Peavey DPM C8 controller. The DPM's MIDI control capabilities proved indispensable, as Todd uses the keyboard to change musical settings, add or delete live sections, call up song cues, etc. The all-digital Peavey sound reinforcement system employs 12 DJS 1000 Satellite Speakers, 8 Subcompact 118s, 4 DTH-4s and DTH Subwoofers, used in conjunction with DPC 1000 power amplifiers, the PC4-XL crossover, and PLM 8128 digital programmable line mixers. Other Peavey audio gear includes the Midi Master II, the PC 1600 MIDI controller, the Autograph II, and the DPM SP, DPM SXII, and Spectrum Bass modules.

Toomey continues - 'We needed something really loud, but really tiny and video isolated, because it sat right under the TV's. I remembered this little three way system, two little boxes that will fit inside the subwoofer - we just used twelve of the top boxes and two for monitors,; And it was loud enough to work with the first twenty or thirty feet away from the stage, Then there's 18" subwoofers underneath the stage. But those things, you can only get them up so loud, because Todd is right on top of them, and it makes it hard to keep pitch and tone happening with all this rumbling going on underneath. The idea was not to fill the whole room but to fill the area around the stage to draw people in."

"Basically presets were just being recalled on the 8128 mixers -each song was premixed. Todd would do a couple different versions of the mix; he'd do it on the rig in a rehearsal hall empty, and went home and did it at home on a little set of speakers, and then came up with an area somewhere between the two. With the three 8128s, there's 24 channels, and all the sound modules have discreet outputs sent to the mixers. When he changes songs on the Mac, it's done from the keyboard; pushing a different note on the keyboard recalls a different song or a part, and this recalls another mix."

Although he does not accompany Rundgren on tour, John Rossi (Beach Boys, Duran Duran) is the TR-i Tour lighting designer. He was also Rundgren's first advisor on the subject of interactive lighting. "Last summer we got together, and Todd had some questions regarding lighting. He wanted to do this very specific interactive tour, and it had a specific budget and logistic problems that had to be dealt with. Because he is the best authority on all the equipment and the way it all interfaces, he had to be very involved with the technical aspects of it. We wanted to have a few moving lights, and what ended up being the most efficient light was the Trackspot, and the reason was that the environment that he performs in is small, and there's a lot of stuff attached to his rig."

Rossi had to take a radically different approach to the tour's lighting design. "I had to come up with modular looks, where you could take any cue and put it anywhere - here's a moody cue, here's an upbeat cue - and any moody cue has to fit any moody song, any upbeat cue has to fit any upbeat sequence." Interfacing the intelligent and conventional lighting into a MIDI controllable package led to a Leprecon LM850 being pushed into service. Rossi explains "We didn't really have time to look at or develop a specific MIDI interface, and the Leprecon console already had MIDI protocol in it, which proved to be very helpful to us. We had Trackspots, PAR cans with and without color changers, Dataflash strobes, and some beacon lights - and the Leprecon could handle all of these things; it was very important that only one controller be involved."

Lighting preproduction for the TR-i shows began at Nova Productions, who supplied the Trackspots and Dataflash to Rossi. Nova's Greg Cunningham described the steps leading up to Rundgren's lighting choices. "John Rossi visited Nova and brought a Trackspot to Todd, who played around with it for a while, and they decided that they liked the system. The next step was to design some sort of interfacing system between the lighting instruments and his MIDI computer. Once we had established that the Leprecon board could communicate with the Trackspots and that it would receive Todd's MIDI signal, then it was just a matter of coming up with a working system for the fixed lighting and talking to the color changers."

"John was able to program just about the entire show in our warehouse. Although it wasn't so much programming as it was setting up basic looks and basic moving chases. John wrote the looks, but Todd is actually putting them into the show. Everything is done on stage - there is no house mixer and no lighting operator. The lighting board goes underneath his platform and doesn't get touched during the show."

Philips Interactive Media supplied the video wall that serves as crown to the unorthodox Rundgren centerpiece. As interactive video is a major player in Todd's bag of tricks, his Production Manager Greg Guzzetta also served as Todd's video accomplice. Rounding out the crew is Jolly Rogers on set construction and lighting installation. To control the circular video wall, Guzzetta uses five Amiga 4000s loaded with Video Toasters 4000s. All units feature the Kitchen Sync, a time base corrector. Four Philips CD-I players and four camera inputs are run into these machines. The screens show a variety of video clips from past and present, live footage from the cameras (the most exciting of which are from the audience-held models), shots of classic artwork, and even a bit of Naked Gun 2 and a 1/2. Guzzetta eschewed external MIDI control of the camera footage, so a Panasonic switcher was brought in. Toomey is quick to point out that this manual control offers a different show every night.

Stagecraft Design & Fabrication of Carson City constructed "Bill" to Rundgren's specifications for the TR-i tour. Bill was built with incremental leg inserts to accommodate a variety of trim heights from 17 feet on down in two foot sections. According to Richard Wights of Stagecraft, "Originally, Todd designed the set and put it into a computer graphic video. He sent the video to us to have a look at, and then we figured what he wanted and how to build it. We needed a lot of information from him on all his equipment that he wanted to incorporate into the set. Todd had total control of the project and made most of the decisions on the different types of materials used on the exterior finish of the set. He really knew what he wanted and made sure that he got what he wanted."

Although production responsibilities will keep him busy for a while, Todd soon hopes to once again hit the road with "Bill," Larry Toomey, Greg Guzzetta, and Jolly Rogers for another episode in TR-i "interactivity." While many of his contemporaries have burned out, Rundgren's fire is still blazing, and quite possibly burning brighter than ever. In an age of newcomers, it is refreshing to see a musical veteran like Todd Rundgren still pushing the envelope. He has a rich history of interesting performance scenarios and musical projects as well as an enormous catalog of engaging and influential records. Todd is the kind of artist that makes the listener impatient for what will come next.

Online with Todd Rundgren

I have a schedule at this point that involves a lot of outside projects - things that aren't necessarily under my own name. So those projects tend to be less interactive, because clients are usually more traditional recording artists, or in another case, a film company. The very next things that I'm doing will not be interactive, although interspersed in that time I'm going to be adding to my musical database with some new and old material, so at some point in the future there will be an update on the interactive end as well.

I have two productions that I'm supposed to do, and also songs and soundtrack for a film. One of the artists is Boy George in April. I will be providing a lot of the musical structure at least; I don't know that I'll be performing that much.

When I started out, there seemed to be a very distant set of goals. I wasn't exactly clear what they were, and I wasn't clear how much effort would go into achieving them. And having it go from that to something that is concrete, and has actually achieved some of those goals, has been really satisfying - in contrast to having labored really hard over an album and having it come out, and if the radio doesn't jump on it right away, it's a failed effort, and then you start all over. This new way of working, because of the incorporation of these other technologies, has kept everything more alive; and even at this point there's enough vitality in the various components of the interactive project that it's still creating opportunities for me. People are still discovering it. It can't be considered something that even has a predictable retirement to it. You can continue to go back to it and get more.

It was something that I had not done before; you could say it was a radical extension of basic tape editing. When you're mixing a record or assembling a traditional record for release, it's not uncommon to edit things out of the music or to patch up mistakes by cutting pieces of tape out and gluing the tape back together. The difference is that this is all done in the electronic medium; it's the equivalent of taking every song and cutting it into pieces at every fourth bar or so. And then you have to keep track of all those pieces! Ultimately it's like 933 pieces of music.

It does seem like we have some people that are interested that may not have been interested before. The format of the album has made it a little difficult to get it played on the radio, because it doesn't have any breaks - it's like 53 minutes of continuous music. So it's gotten around mainly by word of mouth, and by me going on the road and playing it. But that's not an unusual thing nowadays. Radio is becoming less and less of a determining factor because it's so reactive -nobody takes any chances in radio. We're trying to remedy that. Part of the nature of interactive music is the ability to conform to the situation, if necessary. We're releasing another version of the record, which is called No World Order Light, and essentially it's all of the same themes, but it's assembled in a way that resembles a more conventional CD structure with songs and silences. Hopefully that'll be out within a month. There are some songs that aren't substantially changed, but the mixes are different. They're not in any respect identical to the versions on No World Order.

I did the recording in my studio in Woodstock, New York. From a recording standpoint it was not extraordinarily different from any other album where I orchestrated all the instruments myself, rather than use other players. There was art impact on the writing, but not so much on most of the performance. I guess there were some aspects of the performance that I had to be more conscious of.

It's probable that at some point the entire hardware metaphor that goes into recording will be reduced to a software metaphor. I wouldn't doubt that it already exists in some research facility. As far as it becoming affordable and accessible to anyone but professionals, I don't know whether something like that is even on the horizon. Some of these things can dramatically affect economic structures. If suddenly you take what used to cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and make it cost only a few thousand dollars, you've given people in some sense a creative advantage, but you've also completely disrupted an entire economic structure. All these studios that heavily invested will suddenly go bankrupt.

There ore two samplers for the acoustic sounds. One essentially handles background vocals and the other one sampled sounds. Both samplers were completely max'd out at 32 megabytes, and one also had a forty meg hard drive hooked up to it. The vocals were lifted right from the original performance -I recorded all the vocals and other things that were to be sampled onto DAT, and they were all digitized and sent over to the Peavey samplers.

For software I used Cubase, running on a Macintosh Centris 650. I used most of the same synthesizers - a Roland JD800 was the principal keyboard, and I had several modules including a Roland U-l10. Another instrument that I got a lot of good sounds from was the Kawai PH-50, but it was too difficult to make roadworthy.

The Powerbook is only doing the message board; the 650 actually decides what the lighting cues will be. There's a PCI 600, a MIDI slider board, that can be dynamically assigned to filter or create MIDI messages, and from there it's passed on to the Leprecon controller. So it was possible to gain direct control of various things by programming one of the sliders to send certain messages to the lighting instruments… and in the case that you're talking about, to control the mirrors. We did do a little bit of noodling around at Nova Productions to prove that such a concept was possible. The problem for me is that it's not like a joystick, where you have control over two axis at once. It's a little fader, so one fader is controlling the X axis and another fader is controlling the Y axis. Essentially, it's too much of a mind melt to try and truly control the mirrors using those faders. I didn't actually program the lighting, John Rossi did that. We devised a scheme whereby we could have categories of cues (that the computer could access) that would be appropriate to whatever music was going on. So he laid out all the scenes and everything, and I built a structure that would decide what cues would be called up - that's how the lights worked. The function of the Dataflash is simply to give me a gag. The strobes were never programmed - they're connected to sliders in the PCI 600 controller box, so I can just go over and turn them on whenever I feel like it. Actually there are four sliders, and depending upon the combinations of slider levels, you have potentially 16 different effects with the strobes... sometimes all going at once, sometimes chasing, sometimes going at different rates. It wasn't an effect I've made excessive use of; it just happens a couple times a night. If you consider me like a CPU, then I have to multitask these things together, and most of my load is on performing the songs, Then every once in a while, I have enough cycles left that I can go over and mess with something like the lights or the fog machine, or add some sampled sounds in, or any of the other gags that go on. I can't say that we've fully exploited everything that was possible, but part of the purpose of the tour was to get comfortable with the concept. It is altogether conceivable that we'll add other effects and other kinds of lighting into it as we refine the concept.

I think that's essential to the concept, because that element of interactivity is having a greater range of options. And from such you have to give up the idea that you're going to catch everything. There is a certain sort of substructure of things, of associated actions to guarantee that if I'm singing a certain song then certain lyrics will appear on the message board, certain images may appear on the screen, and a certain quality of lighting will happen. But the combination of things is never exactly the same from night to night, and so it's hopeless to think that you'll ever see the ultimate performance of this show. I don't know if hopeless is too dark a way to put it, but part of the effect is supposed to be subconscious - things that are around you that you can't actually focus on, but are going into your brain anyway. Enough of it will be regurgitated over time so that the effect of the concert doesn't end at the very end.

Well, if I can switch into a philosophical mode - my feeling is that we're peaking at this phase of factoids and available data and all this other stuff. We concentrate too much on the delivery mechanism. I'm starting to feel that every important thing that humanity can produce has already been produced, and the problem now is that we have to find new meaning for it. In other words, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is actually "Louie, Louie." So we're only destined to repeat ourselves, and the only thing that changes is that we can give new meaning or deeper meaning to the things we've already done. People, and artists in particular, want to get into this whole interactive thing. It's a way to exploit all of their old content. And I don't think there's anything patently wrong with that, but it has to be done in a manner that continues to support the artist's responsibility, which is to create something that means something. And the idea of me cutting my songs into little pieces, or categorizing it all on the basis of various subjective criteria, it's only my way of trying to make it more vital, and to make it mean something.

Todd Rundgren

by Bruce Jordahl

Online with Todd Rundgren