Todd Rundgren on Bat Out of Hell, Janis Joplin and staging the ‘first national lockdown tour’
This weekend, Todd Rundgren kicks off the world’s first national lockdown tour. Over five weeks, the legendary artist and producer is performing online concerts geo-targeted to 25 North American cities from a single Chicago venue. But wherever you beam in from, whatever your timezone, if the rock legend plays just a corner of his back catalogue and tells only a handful of his stories it might be the best night out you’ve had in a year.
The 72-year-old is a true musical zelig. His achievements range from making one of the biggest albums ever (Bat Out of Hell) to getting Janis Joplin in the zone for her final album Pearl, to producing The Band and New York Dolls and XTC. Into that credit column we might also insert raising actress Liv Tyler as his own, despite knowing the “secret” truth of her paternity (Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, with whom Rundgren’s then-girlfriend Bebe Buell had had a brief liaison).
Now, 52 years since the teenage guitar wunderkind’s first band, The Nazz, released their debut album and his prodigious musical talents quickly made him the go-to producer of Seventies rock, he isn’t letting up. The Pennsylvania native is busy collaborating with Weezer and Sparks on new music and this month’s Clearly Human Virtual Tour, where he’ll be showcasing material from more than 20 solo albums and various collaborations, demonstrates that he’s still travelling as best he can. The now-familiar one-off livestream held no appeal.
“You do one show, you’re done, then you go back into isolation. That’s no fun!” he laughs. Affable, garrulous and rocking the locks and demeanour of an authentic Seventies long-hair, he’s talking to me from the house he built in Hawaii. “This is it!” he beams, dressed in a robe on his open-air lounge, lifting and rotating his laptop to give a view of the verdant hills along the north shore of the island of Kauai. As if on cue, the cockerel that has been repeatedly crowing during our interview is joined by the paradisiacal sound of tropical birdlife. Still, he is determined to go “on the road” – even if, at the time of our interview, he’s $1 million deep in unrecouped costs.
“I wanted to preserve as much as possible from the live experience in virtualising everything,” he explains. The aim is to perform to each city at roughly 8pm their time – Chicago is a handy midway place to do this from. “If we want to do a virtual show at eight o’clock in New York, that’s seven in Chicago,” he reasons. “So we set all the clocks in our venue to New York time, pretending it’s an hour later.” (Don’t worry: international fans will be able to access tickets to individual shows.)
“Then we festoon the entire backstage area with memorabilia from the town we’re supposed to be in – posters of local landmarks, sports teams [branding], local newspapers lying around. We’ll get catering shipped in from that town so we’re eating the same food the locals are eating. And we will self-hypnotise so that every night we believe that we are in your town in the continental United States at eight o’clock.” So the band can authentically say “Hello Cleveland!” even though they’re in Chicago? “Yes! At least for the time we’re onstage.”
If it sounds like a decent simulation of being all over the place, five decades ago Rundgren literally was, working with everyone in rock. In 1970, barely 22, he had been dispatched to San Francisco to work with Janis Joplin on the recording sessions that would, ultimately, end with her death, aged 27, that October.
“Janis hated making records,” he recalls. “She loved playing live. That was her life – to get up in front of an audience, freak out and do her thing. And also she in some ways was like a crazy teenager. She’d suddenly go off on a whim of some kind. I recall being in her house and a bunch of people are coming in with songs for her and then I get a call in from Janis: ‘I’m gonna be late, I’m at the police station!’
"Five minutes later I walk past her bedroom and the door’s open and she’s in there with some guy! She’s calling from her own bedroom, making excuses for not showing up because she doesn’t want to get out of bed with some guy she’s picked up the night before!”
The following year, firefighting on another troubled project: the American was hired by George Harrison to take over from him the Abbey Road production of Badfinger’s 1971 album Straight Up. Then the Fab Four’s Quiet One failed to fully credit Rundgren on the finished LP. “They were not very scrupulous at Apple Records,” Rundgren alleges of The Beatles’ label. “But I don’t know if George personally did that to me,” he allows.
And then there was John Lennon. “I did this interview with NME and this was the time of Lennon’s Lost Weekend, when Yoko had kicked him out of the house,” he says of the Beatle’s 1973-75 wilderness period. “He was in LA with Harry Nilsson, getting ridiculously drunk and going to the Troubador club, harassing the waitresses and wearing a Kotex [a feminine napkin] on his head.
“So he’s generally making a boor out of himself. And my whole argument was, if you’re gonna raise everybody’s expectations, saying ‘We’re gonna fix the world, love, love love, you say you want a revolution, blah blah blah’ then you don’t go harassing waitresses with a Kotex on your head. And that became the front page headline of the interview. Nothing else I said mattered.”
By the time Lennon read the story, Rundgren thinks he had “sobered up again. He was back with Yoko and they were doing this Janovian thing of screaming at your mom and dad – ‘Mama don’t go, Daddy come home…’ And so he wrote a letter to NME essentially psychoanalysing me in Janovian terms, saying that I had a bad relationship with my father, and that’s why I had dissed John Lennon! That’s hysterical!”
Finally, there was Ringo Starr, in whose All-Starr Band Rundgren performed in its 1992, 1999 and 2012‑17 iterations. The first time he joined him onstage was in 1979 at a Las Vegas telethon fundraiser. “Ringo hadn’t played in years, he didn’t have a band, he was just goofing off, getting in trouble,” admits Rundgren. Much later, though, having completed AA and therapy, the drummer asked the guitarist to play again. “And that’s when I got to know the real Ringo. Because the first Ringo was probably still pretty tipsy most of the time when I met him in the Seventies!”
It’s the proceeds from Bat Out of Hell, though, which paid for his Hawaii pad. Released in 1977, it went on to sell 43 million copies. If Rundgren made a fortune from it, it’s because he not only produced the project, he also underwrote it. “That meant I was not just the guy who literally oversaw the making of the record – I was the guy who paid for it.” Rundgren got a greater percentage of sales revenue than the singer, Meat Loaf, and the songwriter, Jim Steinman, combined.
“And that’s what paid for the land that this house is on,” this married father of three sons beams expansively. Glancing again at his lushly forested backyard, Rundgren admits that he’s thankful to have ended up here. He had spent a lot of the last decade on the road – then Covid struck.
“So in this period now, I’ve had to remind myself of that. So I’m enjoying it while I can!” he concludes with his gravelly chuckle, the siren call of another rock’n’roll tour drowned out, just for a moment longer, by that cockerel.
For tickets and full details of the tour, visit toddrundgren.nocapshows.com
