KD: Ken Dashow here on Q104.3 and it is a pleasure and a delight to welcome back long-time friends and music fans into this area. Todd, welcome to the Q. Hi!
TR: Thank you very much, Ken.
KD: So where you been? Gees, we missed you.
TR: I've been hither and thither, as it were. Actually, lately I've been taking a somewhat stripped down show out on the road only for about a month or five weeks at a time, as opposed to doing the, you know, the grueling, endless type of thing. Of course the rest of the time I spend in Hawaii.
KD: Really? Where? Which island?
TR: I live on the north shore of Hawaii.
KD: Oh! Oooh! Could you take me with you please? I could be a houseboy, really.
TR: Maybe some excess baggage, you know, or some...
KD: Jimmy the houseboy. I'll clean the pool, I'll set up the dish, please, anything. You must need somebody to watch the house on there. I love it so much over there.
TR: Yes, it's, it is nice, yes. I have no complaint with that, but of course you do have to go out and make the doughnuts.
KD: Yes. But touring was never really a big part for you, was it? I mean you toured somewhat with Utopia, and I know you toured as Todd, but when I think of you, I think of you -- and, please, I hate the moniker -- but you're the creative genius. You're the guy, you're the tech-wizard, you're the guy who creates all the fun toys. But you were never the guy who went out there every summer and did the tours.
TR: Not usually. Usually tried to stick to a certain comfort level and leave myself time for other projects, which usually included record productions. I often did a lot of record producing throughout the seventies and eighties, and as the style of music changed, I sort of saw less and less work. I don't do a lot of, you know, Spice Girls or Spice Boys, and things like that.
KD: And good reason -- just a partial list of just some names, folks, for those who are not familiar: Patti Smith, Cheap Trick, Psychedelic Furs, The Tubes, XTC, Grand Funk, Hall & Oates, and that's just skimming the surface. There's one guy you worked with, though, and one album that you produced. This little baby right here, Meatloaf: Bat Out Of Hell.
TR: Yes, Mr. Loaf.
KD: It sold a couple of copies. I'm told that it did well.
TR: It did fairly well, yes.
KD: You realize this never leaves. This never leaves the airwaves anywhere.
TR: Yeah, it's one of things where somewhere on the planet, someone's listening to...
KD: At every second.
TR: ..."Paradise By The Dashboard Light". Every second of every day.
KD: And all the rock critics came out, this bombastic twaddle, this ridiculous sophomoric poetry of Jim Steinman, who the hell did these people think they are?
TR: Well, I think we all agreed with them!
KD: But nobody argued that, though.
TR: No, we didn't argue that, we just never expected it to be so big, it was just... they just wanted to get a record done, and get it out and take their chances. Nobody expected thirty million copies later that, ah...
KD: That was my question, Todd. Do you know, do you get a sense when you're in the studio that, wow, we've got something here that is Led Zeppelin 4, or do you really never know, project to project, what it's gonna be?
TR: You can have an inkling about how good a record is, but, you know, there's a whole segment that doesn't consider anything but what happens commercially. So if it sells a lot, then it's considered successful, even if, and even if it sells a little, even if it's musically great, you know, it's not considered successful. But, I mean, something like Meatloaf, when we were listening to it, it was successful in the terms that were set out, which is, this is, you know, bombastic twaddle, whatever, you know, it was just supposed to be so over the top and so hammy, because Steinman, you know, he's done most of his writing, or previous that, had done most of his writing for Broadway, for showtunes, and things like that.
KD: And when you finished it, did you say this, this is fun, this is a joke, or did you realize that this was gonna be a staple of rock radio for time to come?
TR: No, no, no, never thought that. We got a quick start on it and a kinda slow finish, actually. The tracks and everything, the basic tracks went fairly quickly, but as we got towards the end, Steinman and Meat founds themselves with a lot of time on their hands, because in the middle of the record, or at the very beginning of the record, Meatloaf decided he didn't want to be on the label he was on, so the record was recorded without a label. I essentially got the underwriting to get the record finished, and then they spent the next I don't know how many months just trying to find somebody to put it out. So at that point everyone was thinking, gees, maybe it really is not meant to be, you know, because it was so difficult to find someone to release it. But of course when he released it, that was Steve Popovich at an Epic subsidiary called Cleveland International. And he had -- Ian Hunter was the other act that he had on the label. And he just kept putting out singles, just kept putting them without any regard as to the, you know, the response that they got, and finally by -- I think it might've been the second time they released "Paradise By The Dashboard Light". And that's when it started to take on. It also gave the audience time enough time to catch up, because Meatloaf was out, like, playing everywhere. And the video got released, and things like that. So it got to be more of a, you know, must-see thing, must-hear eventually.
KD: And it's lasted this long. I remember when from the first moment Scott Muni and me played it that afternoon, it has never left, and one way or another. Or, like in your own career, in the early seventies, of all the great things you've done, the ones that stay forever, "I Saw The Light", "Hello It's Me" -- are those fun nuggets, or do you think sometimes, oh God, I have to do it, I'm stuck with it, they want to hear it.
TR: Well, for a long time I didn't perform "Hello It's Me", because by the time I had a hit with it, it had already been a hit for the Nazz, - a minor hit, to be sure, but it had already been out once, so it wasn't like this song was new when I came out with it -- it was already four years old, three, four years old. And after performing it the obligatory number of times, I just kinda slacked off, despite the fact that people would scream out at every show, no matter what kind of show it was. You know, like a four-hour Utopia fusion jam, and then they're screaming out "Hello It's Me" at the end -- and so, so, yeah, for a long time I didn't perform it, and then I'd taken sometimes to performing the music in a slightly different manner. For a while we were performing it, but doing it more like a jazz standard with a swing beat in it, and stuff like that, and really hamming it up, you know, really going like Frank in Las Vegas with it for a while. And that was fun. And then in the case of "I Saw The Light" I put out an album a couple years ago called With A Twist where I did bossa nova versions of all my personal standards. And that was a whole lotta fun, especially the tour that came with it. Because we took a whole Tikki Lounge wherever we went, like tables on the stage, our stage was a little stage within the stage, and we had a bar, we served real liquor, we got patrons drunk and everything.
KD: That's great.
TR: And we got drunk, it was great!
KD: Excellent. Now I must take offense, though. I have to tell you as a radio DJ in that last generation of people who play albums -- I speak for all radio DJs -- when you put "Piss Aaron" right before "Hello It's Me" on the album...
TR: Ha-ha!
KD: You know how many times that it's happened to all of us at some point where we queued it up, and missed it, and played "Piss Aaron" by mistake. That was really cruel, Todd, that was really cruel, you don't know how many people got in trouble or yelled at to wake the hell up and pay attention.
TR: Well, I wish I had known about it at the time so I could've relished it.
KD: I know you would've!
TR: I'm only hearing about this now.
KD: To everybody who's ever on the air had to queue up an album with "damn, ah, nuts!"
TR: Of course you don't let the song play till the end.
KD: No, you had to get out of it real quick.
TR: Yeah, I know, it's a little too puerile.
KD: You're the guy who covered it all, who went from albums, you were the first guy to embrace digital technology, not to be a luddite, but to embrace it, go into it. You're fluent in all the programming languages, right, as far as building programs and computer things?
TR: Well, you can say I understand how to program, but not that I would -- y'know, there's some programming languages that nobody knows, like LISP, you know, "dot ampersand", whatever, all this other stuff -- toll code, you know, that really doesn't look like human language. But very early on, when I was actually still a young child I guess, I became interested in sort of new technologies, mostly 'cause I was fascinated with robots and rocket ships and things like that. I'd always wanted to build a rocket ship in the backyard and build a robot, and then you eventually come to realize that a robot has to have a brain. And that was when I started to learn what was then just a very... you know, they had barely invented transistors at that point, and the whole idea of binary numbers and computer logic and things like that was totally foreign to most people. I bought a little book, and I studied up on it, and when I got to the "new math" in high school, I had it all over everyone else. They said, what, base 12? What's that? You know, or all these other sort of number bases, what they called the "new math" -- which was supposed to prepare them for jobs in the computer industry. And so I was interested in it from then -- all the way out. I used to go to the telephone office and watch them do data processing.
KD: What a great story, you grew up in Philadelphia, right?
TR: I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and if I hadn't become a musician, if I hadn't had any success, likely I would have gone back to school and learned how to be a computer programmer. So I got both by being a musician.
KD: And that's what makes you such a great producer, because you have the soul of what the music is, and you've got the tech-head to be able to diddle with the knobs and get the sound that you're working at. To me that's what makes you, you know, Todd is Godd for whatever that's worth, but that's why you're...
TR: Well, it has a very practical effect -- when you get a band in there, a lot of bands they get self-conscious in the studio. They start thinking about all kinds of things like the spotlight is on really hot, you know. Cause you have to play whatever you do perfect, you know, it's gotta be captured for posterity. So they've got so many distractions when they're in the studio. It just became easier to learn enough of the technology so that, so that you could just make it all happen really fast and get them to concentrate on the music. And that's kind of the way I, you know, I approach it: the fine qualities of sound and things like that are to me the last priority. You've got to have a great song, and then once you find a great song, then you have to perform it with brio, you know. It doesn't have to be great, you know, because one of the greatest songs ever recorded is "Louie Louie", and it's missing, you know...
KD: ...Everything!
TR: It's missing the spectacular performance -- I mean, the guy's singing the wrong words, hey everybody, you know, and it's missing the hi-fidelity sound. But it just, you know, they perform it with great gusto, and there's something about the song that has found a thread through so many records since then, you know, through -- all the way up till "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
KD: Right, you can trace its roots all the way back.
TR: Almost to that, you know, there are so many "Hello I love you, let me jump in your game", you know -- same thing.
KD: Sure. Quick side story that I just heard from Mark Lindsey just about a month ago that I had never known before, where they had gone to cut "Louie Louie" and did a real professional job...
TR: Right.
KD: ...And he said so...
TR: I remember hearing that, yeah.
KD: Right. And the Kingsmen come in a month later. And what I never knew -- the engineer had just bought a new Neumann for the studio, and which, folks, is the mike still to this day.
TR: Well it sounds like he just took that one mike and put it up and told them to play.
KD: Jack the lead singer had braces. And when he saw the braces, the engineer said you're not spitting all over my microphone, and put it up ten feet in the air. And they said, well, what just -- then he said, yell, but you're not gonna spit on this microphone. And he said, well, that's not -- he says, you have five minutes, do you wanna do it or not? And gave them a hit.
TR: "Do you wanna make history or not?"
KD: There must be a book somewhere, Todd, "Rock and Roll Accidents" -- tape running at the wrong speed, guys who didn't show up.
TR: Well, that's the reason why I've never been comfortable with the rock and roll Hall of Fame--cause it's thinking about it too much. You know, the real rock and roll Hall of Fame should be in some falling down warehouse somewhere.
KD: Absolutely.
TR: You know, where crap falls out of the ceiling on ya...
KD: Cigarette butts on the floor.
TR: ...and things like that, because most of us remember, you know, a lot of the gigs and some of the best gigs were in the most broken down places, and the most unpredictable things happened. And that's what makes the music -- the possibility of something unpredictable happening is what defines rock music as opposed to all other kinds of music.
KD: Absolutely. Great definition for it. Tough question to end with: You've been on the leading edge of digital technology, you've got the heart and soul of great music. Is there a solution to online piracy, to digital downloading? If you were king of music for a day, what would you do?
TR: King of Music for a Day... well, you know, it's not gonna make the labels very happy, but they've never been too happy with what I have to say. Years and years ago, after I did a thing called No World Order, which I started actively applying digital technology to the way -- not only that the music was recorded, but to how it was experienced afterwards. Got asked to demonstrate the concept for a interactive television experiment that was being built in Orlando, Florida -- it was called the Time Warner Full Service Network. And what they wanted to do was deliver on-demand music services to people who've had these interactive television setups in this test community. And this was Warner Brothers Full Service Network -- we went around to every single label, and we said, you know, what you're gonna need to do in order for us to try this experiment out is, you have put your music on servers, and then it'll be electronically downloaded, you know, people will listen, pick a song then listen to it as if it was a jukebox, except it's coming off a server somewhere. Not a single one of 'em would hear of it. Not a single one of 'em could imagine it, or hear of it, and they were determined to do anything they could to slow it down or prevent it. But what happened, like some five years later -- Napster just did it for 'em. And the thing you have to face up to now is that the audience has already decided how they want to experience music. You know, you can try and vilify the entire audience, but, you know, the technology just came in, and you guys didn't want to take advantage of it, so they did.
KD: The freeway bypassed the road to your store.
TR: Essentially that's what happened. And the only hope I think nowadays is that people now want to think of music in the same way they think of cable television. You know, I think people would be perfectly happy to pay some aggregator $20 a month so that they could listen to any music that they felt like. And just like your cable television, you don't sit there, 'am I getting my moneys worth out of this HBO show?' You pay your cable bill every month.
KD: Right.
TR: Whether you're too busy to watch TV, or whether you're bedridden and watching TV 24 hours a day.
KD: Yup.
TR: But there seems to be enough money to create new programs that get everybody rich in the cable business. It can work for the music business, too, you know. What if you have a hundred million people paying you twenty bucks a month? That's two billion dollars a month, 240 billion dollars a year.
KD: It's a lot of dough.
TR: It's a lot of frickin, dough, you know? And they should just give up on this commoditized model of music, you know, where music is actually something that only exists on a disc.
KD: You buy software from a store. A friend who's thirteen years old -- my neighbor and I came back from one of the stores, and I had just bought a lot of jazz and latin stuff -- and he's looking at it, and he looked at me, and said, you still, you buy music? And I just realized the concept of going to a store like we did when we were kids to buy music is such an alien thing to him, I don't know if he'll ever do it. It means nothing.
TR: It's not a thrill anymore. And for a lot of acts, you know, the internet is indispensable. I mean, nobody was playing Linkin Park.
KD: Right
TR: And suddenly they come out with an album, they're selling 400,000 copies a week. Where did these, all these kids find out about them? Well, first of all, they found out about them on the internet, second of all, they went out and bought the CD anyway, even though they'd heard all the songs already, you know? All they wanted was the artifact--and good for Linkin Park, they're gonna have thousands and thousands and thousands of people show up at their shows. Now -- and the record business, you know, it's the tail wagging the dog now.
KD: Right. Sometimes you feel like you're the man holding the candle against the darkness. Years and years, how many people have to be fired, how many record companies have to crumble under their own weight, before somebody says there's gotta be another way.
TR: Yeah, well, all the components are there, and like I said, the audience has pretty much demonstrated the way that they'd like to experience music, which is, they like to go searching around in a giant sea of music, where the things that they like to hear, and they'll certainly search around for things that they have heard in other media, should radio be vital enough to play something besides the top 20 acts, you know.
So they'll go out there and search around for stuff, and they'll listen to it, and maybe they'll like it, and keep it, or maybe they won't like it, and will give it away. But obviously they still have a great thirst for music, and will consume it, and I'm totally convinced that they don't like being called thieves, or thinking like thieves, or anything like that. They would gladly pay a monthly fee, you know, to have the privilege of doing that. It's just the record companies are too hooked on these old antediluvian models -- the commoditized model, where they try and sell things a song at a time. You know, they wanna sell -- Sony wants to sell you a song for $2. Well, by the time you bought ten songs, it costs more than the frickin' CD!. That's their way of trying to discourage you from doing it at all.
KD: Right, it's still -- they'll have to go into Chapter 11 before they realize there's another way around it.
TR: Not long now.
KD: Todd Rundgren. At Town Hall Wednesday night. Hey, thank you so much for stopping by. And don't be a stranger, eh? I know you're in New York more often.
TR: I was in the neighborhood.
KD: Stop by, we'll have cake, we'll have coffee, don't be a stranger.
TR: We'll twalk!
KD: We'll twalk!
TR: Dogs and daughters.
KD: Todd, thanks so much for stopping by.
TR: My pleasure, thank you.