To me, you know, in the strictest sense, you know, a song has a story to it. You're such a distinctive artist in your own right, and you have really unique production style, but always in service to the artist. For me, it was music with all the matter. That was just music, music all the time. The myth, the legend, you see. When I started making my own music, I never had to worry about whether it would sell or not. That record was the first time I personally registered like, wow, this guy did all this on his own. I loved being a part of it and it never left me. But do you have a foundational songwriting ethos? Throw it all against the wall, you know? See whatt, he was big. Todd Rungren, thank you for being here today. Um, I want to start with Albert Grossman. I thought that was a good place to dive in. Whoa. If you don't mind, now you can start there. Sure. You seem to have a good relationship with him overall. Is that, is that fair? Well, it was, it was Albert was a very strange kind of guy. He could be really great sometimes, really great for you. And then I think I don't know whether most people are familiar with his, his, you know, Odyssey with Bob Dylan. But he managed Bob Dylan for a while and then Bob left the Grossman organization, whatever. And then for years and years and years after Albert would take Bob to court to try and win back more publishing money. And that was kind of the way he was. He could be a great supporter of you. But if he thought your relationship with him was over, then the gloves came off. And I recall that I was at the end of my contractual obligation to bear so old records. And the last record that I delivered under that contract was called Acapella. And it was only just your voice, right? Yeah, everything was all the sound. I got that record when it came out. Vocal sounds, yeah. And I delivered the record, you know, and I was prepared to move on, find another record deal or something like that. And Albert refused to release it. And he gave me this excuse that Warner Brothers didn't like the record because Warner was the distributor. And this went on for months and months and months, you know, I think what's going on with this. Finally, I recall the moment I was driving up the new Jersey through way. The Palisade I think it was. And I was so frustrated, I pulled over to a foam booth and I called Mo Austin. And I said, what's the problem with the record? You know, who is the record is the record He said you got a record I've not heard this record, you know, yeah It's just one of Albert's ruses I'm like that in order to get more out of me Even though it was time for me to leave because my publishing was tied to the record contract I see and so what he did was he essentially got me over a barrel and said, all right, I will free you. And you can sign with Warner Brothers. I'll negotiate a three album deal with Warner Brothers and I'll get the publishing for the three album deal with Warner Brothers. So yeah, he was, he could be great. He, for instance, when I put out this album called The Wizard of True Star, which was just crazy thing that I, you know, from a career standpoint, shouldn't have done, but he was just incredibly supportive. It was a weird record and he's sometimes like weird things, you know. He's sometimes like to tweak people. And I think he saw that record,

it's just in some ways musically legitimate, but also it was just a big tweak at everybody, you know.

Yeah, so you kind of enter his world as an engineer, they brought you to Barisville.

Yeah, it was an interesting transition for me because my first band, The Nas, that only lasts about 18 months and it was like this whirlwind of showbiz kind of bullshit and stuff like that. In other words, we got, first of all, we were just a local band in Philadelphia. And I put together like what was a local supergroup because I stole people from all the other popular bands in downtown Philly. And the guys who owned a local record store wanted to manage us and they gave us a house to live in, stuff like that. One day, the who comes to play in town, and we hear that they're staying at the holiday in downtown. We figured, maybe we could meet somebody because the who was one of our models. I used to do this all the time. We went to the holiday in downtown and there was Roger Daltry in the bar and nobody was talking to him at all. Nobody knew who was yet. They were actually opening for the mamas and poppas. Wow. And there's a bill. And so we're talking to Roger adultery. And we made a point of always dressing like we were in a band. You know, we want to people know we were in a band. If you're going to call yourself the NAS. Yeah. It's something I think it's like a while I come up with the name too. But in any case, a guy approaches us and says, are you guys in a band? Maybe they, of course, We in a band, you know? And, you know, he liked the way we looked. And he said, well, can I hear you play? And the next day, he auditioned the band, you know, in the law space where we rehearsed it over the record store. And he said, okay, I want to take you, like the look and he liked what little material we had. We hadn't written enough for a whole album yet. But he said, okay, I want to manage you guys. And his name was John Curlin, and he had been a publicist up until then. I never managed anyone, but he was well connected. He knew everybody in the business. And so he whisked us away from Philadelphia. We think we're going to New York City. But he said, well, it's too expensive in New York City. Let's start looking at Long Island. And we started in Brooklyn, eventually wound up in Great Neck by the time we got a house to stay in. And it was just, as I say, was this whirlwind experience. First, we started doing auditions for all the labels. And then those days, most labels had their own studios. So you go in, they say, you got a half an hour laid out. Everything you count on a half an hour. And then they send the tapes upstairs to be refuted. and then maybe somebody will sign you. So we did the rounds of all of those things and what we're doing and we're not yet signed yet. John Curland has all these great publicist connections and he knows Gloria Stavre is the editor of 16 magazine. So we wind up being on like 16 magazine, and Tiger Beat magazine, before we've ever released a record. You know, we're suddenly teen idols with all these stupid questionnaires, you know, what do you like in girls and what's your favorite food, you know, and you know, the sort of same thing they did with the Beatles when they came out. And everywhere we went, we would go on a limousine, we would go to like events just to be seen, you know, and we come out limousine and everyone say, who are those guys, you know? So we were living the life of, of like rock stars and we hadn't even had a record out yet. Finally we did get signed and made a record and they released the record. But our manager's philosophy was, well, I don't want you to go out and tour that much because I want the price to come up. I want to raise the bar in terms of how much money we can ask for. The band just kind of founded at that point. We didn't do what other bands had to do. We could go out on the road and fail every once in a while and get better and refine your performance and things like that. We never did that. We went on to our second record. We went to England to record our second record and got one song done and then our manager and neglected to do some paperwork because in those days they had an exchange program. Any American band that went to England, an English band had they come to America. And for some reason they didn't match this up with anyone so we did one song in a studio and then the assistant's union said you can't do anything else now. You can't record in the studio, you can't play any live gigs. We did one showcase, I think, at Ronnie Scott's and the general reaction was too loud. And then we went back to LA and recorded the second album and in the midst of that, the band just fell apart. And before the record was eventually released, me and the bass player had both quit the band. Right. And there's about 18 months into the life of the band. Very auspicious start. Yeah. And then I'm on the street at that point. I have a place to stay because I'm signed to

Screen gems as a songwriter

Wow, which was part of the deal, you know when you get signed. Wow, that's interesting

They signed the band and they signed me as a songwriter because I didn't have a publishing deal before that and

So I was staying in a apartment that they kept for songwriters. I had a place to stay, but I spent almost all my days down in the West Village with clotheers that I had met when we were in the NAS. Because we only, I only dress in English clothes or clothes made by English people at that point. You know, I didn't like American fashion. And I would, in years after that, I would go to England for like two weeks and stay with clothes years. And they would take me around to all the warehouses and then I would come back home with like six pairs of crutch velvet pants, three suits. You know, patchwork, platform boots and everything, you know, I'm wear that for a year and then go back and shop again. So, um, so I'm living in the village most of the time and I take a gig, doing lights for a disco. I'm not, I don't even know if I have a guitar at this point, you know, it's a, and I don't know exactly what I'm going to do in terms of music. And then, uh, the partner of John Kerlin's partner, named as Michael Friedman, had gone to work for Albert Grossman. And he looked me up, you know, he said, well, I watched you when you were doing the NAS stuff because, uh, we hired a producer for the first record. And then when the producer started producing, we realized that he didn't do anything we needed. He was like an old-style American producer, where he's just watching the budget, just making sure you don't spend too much money. That was what American producer did. We thought everybody was George Martin. You know. He would help us really get our shite again. Now this guy just read the trades and said, well, that was a sour note there or something. Any case, I wound up remixing the first album and then producing the second album from beginning to mixes. And so he had watched me and he said, he came to me, he said, you know, Albert's looking for somebody to sort of modernize his, at least the recording part of it, modernize the stable of artists because most of his artists had been signed during the folk era and now it's like the late 60s. And their records are not being played on the radio and things like that. So, sort of pairing me up with all these people like Ian and Sylvia and James Cotton and people like that. And so I got a lot of experience real quick. But the thing that really kind of busted it all wide open was they had me first go to Toronto to engineer the Jesse Winchester record, which was produced by Robbie Robertson. And a lot of the guys from the band participated in making the record. And I was so efficient at it that they decided they wanted me to be the engineer on stage fright. They never, they don't have producers, they kind of co-produce everything, you know, everybody's got an opinion. So suddenly here I am working with the biggest band in the world. On their long awaited third album, whatever. And they were pretty hot coming off the first stage. And this is the beginning of a whole production career for me that eventually became my living. that it was just after I had secured that, that I asked for a budget to do a vanity project. And that's when I did my first solo right? So that's how you got signed to Barrisville, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's how I got signed as an artist. I guess as a recording artist. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was originally just there as a producer engineer. And then when I asked to do the vanity project, of course it was going to come out on Beardsville. And the loan behold, we had accidentally had something of a hit record on it. There I was back. I suddenly had to be an artist again. Yeah. And I had kind of given a lot of that up. I couldn't sing 20 minutes without blowing my voice out because I had never been a front man. You know, I was always a guitar player. I do occasional background vocals things like that. So it was horrible. You know, I was doing what but I should have done when I was like much younger. I see. Because most people, if they decide to be a singer, they start when they're really young. Yeah. And I suddenly took this on in my 20s to try and learn how to be a real singer. And it took quite a while. It was quite uncomfortable. I didn't enjoy performing very much. I enjoyed the guitar playing, but the singing and I didn't have the stamina to get through a 30 minute show. It was really weird. I didn't know that. Yeah, but eventually over time. I had good influences. I knew what a good singer was, and I used to listen to, for instance, Stevie Wonder all the time, especially at Album Science Heal Delivery. Incredible record. Every song is great. His performances are unbelievable. But the thing about it, the way they produced it, so much compression on his voice, you can hear everything he's doing with his breath. And I suddenly realize, and I've that realization, you know, that you don't sing with your throat, you sing with your diaphragm. Because you could hear him pump, pump in the air, you know, before you would sing, you could hear this little huff, sort of thing, you know, if him like tightening up his diaphragm and if there I realized that, I would go out into the car and I drive around and scream at the top of my lungs for like, you know, hours on end, just as loud as I could get, you know, over and over and over again. And eventually that, you know, by dribs and drabs expanded my stamina, my ability to sing better and just learning that basic lesson really kind of changed everything. Yeah. There's one interesting thing that connects us. I did not know this until today. I saw that your early stuff was engineered by James Lowe from the Electric Prunes. Exactly. Jim Lowe. I knew Jim, and I probably recorded the last two songs Jim ever saying. Well, I wrote two songs for the Electric Prunes because I was friends with the bass player. And Jim is still out there. No, he's passed away.

He did?

He did. He did? He did. Yeah, he passed away, I think last year. Oh, gosh. Nobody told me. But I thought, wow, I didn't even know he was an engineer. He never talked about having any engineer background and anything like that. Yeah, no. He was a engineer. The second nas album, the first album was engineered by a guy named Chris Anderson.

No, not Chris Anderson.

He's a later guy. The second nas album, the first album was engineered by a guy named Chris Anderson.

No, not Chris Anderson. He's a later guy. I'm trying to remember, but he was a, he was in a British band called The Undertakers. I don't know that band. And they dressed like Undertakers. It was funny. But then he moved to America, became an engineer. I think, if you want to know his name, he eventually became the producer of Note for War, Bill Eric Birdon's group, but after Eric Birdon left, I don't know if he did the Eric Birdon phase, but he was the producer of most of their records. So, you know, when I prepare for an interview like this, you know,

like I just interviewed Peter Asher, who in a similar situation had successes and artists,

but also had big...

But your story is so intertwined where it's like, you know, it's not like you were an artist

and then you became a producer.

You were producer became an artist.

You were kind of like, they almost kind of went together. I know it's not that perfect, but, but I mean, did you, how did you balance in your mind the idea of like, okay, I'm a professional producer? This is, this is a gig. And then over here, I have my own personal pursuits. Well, I work for the artist when I'm a producer. Can I give you a compliment? Can I give you a compliment? No, I think it's interesting as you're such a distinctive artist in your own right. And you have really unique production style, but always in service to the artist. I rarely feel that you're being heavy-handed with the artist. That was kind of, as I say, kind of my point, growing up with the Beatles. I took it as, you know, I just made the assumption that musical evolution was part of what you did. You know, the Beatles started out the first record like half covers and stuff like that. They hadn't even really started evolving as songwriters. But by the time they got the rubber sold and revolver on Sargent Pepper, in Benning genres, the other artists would make a career out of. Like Ele, like Eleanor Rigby suddenly becomes the left bank, you know, things like that. So it's, um, I just thought that's what you do. You know, you constantly absorb new influences and try and synthesize them into things. So, and also I, I didn't grow up as like a rock and roll fan because my dad didn't like that kind of music in the house. My dad like, kind of like contemporary classics, anything from like Revell and Debussy onward and show tunes and stuff like that, you know, musicals. So that's what got played in the house. And I got exposed to just, I'm maybe a more, a greater range of music, of kinds of music, because of that, because of that, that's what my dad wanted to listen to. Yeah. But all around the neighborhood, you know, was the other stuff, you know, early rock and roll and things like that. Yeah. I didn't get into Elvis. Elvis was like the greasers who beat me up in school. So I didn't identify with that particular kind of music. I did though, when first time I heard walked on run by the ventures, I knew guitar. I knew that's what I want to do. And so I pestered my parents until I eventually got a guitar and that became my instrument until much, much later when I was able to afford a piano. But when it came to production, I had the same sort of philosophy, you know, which is it doesn't, first of all, kind of figure out the style that they're working in. The first, you know, like one of the first things I did that I said was Ian and Sylvia, which is essentially kind of a country act. They sent me to Nashville, the Charlie Talent Studio, which is like out in, out in some suburbs, somewhere it was, you know, I hardly saw anything of Nashville and that was a long time ago too. That was more natural was the hip place that is now. But here I am in the studio. I'm barely over 20 years old and there's session players who played with Elvis like that that. And some of the Amos Garrett, just like musicians who I'd never heard of, but just like amazing in their capacity, in their performance capacity. And so I kind of like in some ways, I have to surrender to it. I don't know that much about country music, you know, and these guys certainly do. So I just kind of have to surrender to it and bring in what I know how to do to sort of modernize it. Right. So in some ways it might be the sound, might be like update the sound so it sounds a little bit more

radio-friendly or whatever, a little bit more contemporary. Sometimes help with the material, but again it was always like, what does the artist need because I work for the artist? I've never made a record with the assurance that it was going to be a hit or anything like that. And so often, you know, I would be cast as an album producer. You know, not necessarily singles producer. People who specialize in making following along with what the meme is, you know, and making records that sound like they belong on the radio. And that was not my thing. I always thought in like larger terms. How does it? And that was the old days when people used to listen to albums. Yeah. What is the impression you have of these people once you've gone through all their music? That seems to be the more important thing than just like go for the hit. Just trying to think like a DJ instead of a record producer. So I never did that. And also because I had a collectic interest in music, I was very interested in the music that people were making and what could I take out of it? I see. Eventually for whatever it is that I was doing or for future reference if I had to do another project. So I always looked at it as something for me to learn from as well. Yeah. Because I've always liked you as a producer. I was always attracted to your productions. You know, you you know as you do you pick up a record and say who produced this record and I'd see your name again And again and a lot of records that I like yeah, it used to be that way yeah But I mean I until today and knowing I was gonna talk to I never put together the idea Like I you know my mind. Yeah, I have a favorable idea of you as an artist and a favorable idea as you as a producer but until today I never put together the pieces like that you didn't really have a heavy hand in the people that you produce. Well, try not to. There were some exceptions and I really had to discipline myself over it. Sometimes if there was a period and I kind of like at a certain point I said, I won't be involved in this anymore. But there was a period where you could, you know, if someone had something of a track or you say, okay, we'll schedule a recording so we'll go in there and even if you don't have the whole album's worth of material, we'll start the project and maybe the rest of it will come during the project. And I discovered sometimes that doesn't happen. And that's terrible when that doesn't happen.

Because then everybody's sitting in the studio staring at each other. And when that happens, the things that have nothing to do with music start to happen. All of the issues that the band had before they got in the studio, that's what they're thinking about now. about now. So my philosophy essentially from the standpoint of how the work is supposed

to go is write all the stuff outside the studio and we'll review it all and make sure that we got enough of it. Because we don't want to hit that point where everybody's like talking at each other in the studio. If it gets a high point, I say session over. Everybody, with The studio is for making music in. And the priorities eventually became singularly the songs. Nobody wants to listen to a great performance of a crappy song or an extravagant arrangement of a crappy song. You want to, first of all, have confidence in the material. Second of all, you want the band to be able to play it with some kind of commitment and enthusiasm. And that's another problem with just writing in the studio because you still haven't really figured out how to best deliver the idea. And that's the thing you usually do figure out when you're in front of an audience. I do it over and over a couple of times. And then the last thing that the audience cares about, the band maybe, terrifically concerned, but the last thing the audience cares about is the actual sound of the record. Because the first time they hear it, they think that's exactly what it's supposed to sound like.

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