Todd Rundgren, Renaissance Rocker

Todd Rundgren, the record producer, sound engineer, songwriter, and recording artist, has had such a strange career in the music business that it somehow does not seem strange that, at seventy-four, he has been performing in a David Bowie tribute band. This on the heels of a few Beatles-tribute tours. A giant covering giants.

“I’ve already determined that I’m not doing any more Beatles,” he said the other day. “I’m Beatled out. At this point, I’m kind of tributed out.”

He was in a bar in Chelsea, on a day off from the Bowie tour (twelve gigs in thirteen nights), sipping what he called a Ukrainian Mule. Known in his youth as Runt, he’s sturdier now, with long two-tone hair and a vibe that manages to be both beatific and bearish. He arranges his own travel, to avoid the tour bus and the COVID risk. He doesn’t own a cell phone. “I actually have my wife’s spare in case I need an Uber,” he said. They live on the island of Kauai; his wife owns a tiki bar.

The bar in Chelsea was on the ground floor of the building where, fifty years ago, he set up his first recording studio, Secret Sound, with Moogy Klingman. “He had the loft space and was living there,” Rundgren said. “And I had the wherewithal to equip it. By then, I was getting a budget to make my next record.” His previous album—the one with the hit “Hello It’s Me”—had done well, so he spent the budget on equipment instead of studio time. “I built the console. We wired it all up ourselves, did our own soldering.” Someone had given him a shoebox of peyote buttons. “I’d have one for breakfast, one for lunch, and one for dinner. I was high for a month.”

Rundgren, originally from the Philadelphia area, came to New York in late 1967 with his band, Nazz. “We were a dress-up band, a glam band,” he said. “I recall our excursions starting in Brooklyn, looking for an affordable place, and by the time we found something it was in Great Neck, on Long Island.” He left Nazz after a year and a half. “I was spending my days in the Village with clothing designers. There was a boutique down on Christopher Street called Stone the Crows. Crushed velvet was very popular. You would take velvet and ball it up, tie it up in twine, and boil it until it got permanently wrinkled.” He went on, “I was designing lights for a discothèque, doing anything I could to survive, because I didn’t know what I’m doing next. I knew I didn’t want to be in a band.”

With Nazz, he’d got some experience at the engineering console. Albert Grossman, manager of Dylan, hired Rundgren to make some of his old folk acts sound more modern. Grossman told Rundgren that he would make him the highest-paid producer in the world. This soon came to pass. Rundgren produced big albums for the Band, Grand Funk Railroad, Badfinger, Hall & Oates, and the New York Dolls, plus Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” which Rundgren treated as a spoof of Springsteen.

Meanwhile, at Secret Sound, and then in a home studio upstate (“New York to me is a monkey house”), Rundgren, eschewing earlier pop success, made experimental records of his own. “For most artists, it would always be in the back of their minds that if they didn’t sell records it would be the end of their career,” he said. “But I was producing records and making hundreds of thousands of dollars at it, so it never crossed my mind when I was making my own records that I had to be economically successful at it, and that’s what inspired me to get so crazy. I’m still making records now, and the people who were worried about the economics of it, well, they never found a day job.”

There have been other income streams. “My most licensed song is ‘Bang the Drum All Day,’ and it used to be I could almost live off of it,” he said. “It was in the trailer for ‘Antz.’ Just the trailer. Carnival Cruise Line was using it for all their ads, but they decided to change their image, and that’s where that gravy train ended.” He added, “I always wondered why the phone company never used ‘Hello It’s Me.’ ”

Rundgren, earlier in his career, was hard-core sober, a scolder of stoned collaborators. The first time he ever drank was in his early twenties, while he was staying in Soupy Sales’s pool house, in Los Angeles. Sales’s sons were helping Rundgren record his first album, and their mother decided to get him drunk. Later, a Philly friend, a med student, introduced him to marijuana. “It got me to step back and look at the process more,” he said. “Suddenly, I could see that things weren’t happening to me—they were happening around me.”

Does he still smoke? He took out a vape pen and drew on it. “As a matter of fact, I have a vanity line of cannabis coming out. It’s called Hello It’s Weed.” ♦