Todd Rundgren is a multi-talented musician who has made a name for himself both as a solo artist and a visionary music producer. Rundgren’s crowning achievement though was producing Meatloaf’s album Bat Out Of Hell, which is to this day one of the highest-selling albums of all time. In addition to recently being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Rundgren has been busy working on a new album of collaborations called Space Force with artists like Sparks, Rivers Cuomo, and Ben Folds that’ll be out later this year.
On today’s episode we’ll hear a conversation Rick Rubin had with Rundgren just weeks before the start of the pandemic. They talk about why he was the only producer who would work on the debut album for Meat Loaf, who just recently passed away. Todd also talks about engineering the third album for The Band when the group was in the midst of turmoil, and why he always turns off Taylor Swift’s music.
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Pushkin. Todd Rundgren is a multi talented musician who has made a name for himself both as a solo artist and a visionary music producers. Rundgren's career started in Philly in the mid sixties as part of the garage rock band The Naz. After playing lead guitar in the band for two years, Rundgren left to pursue a solo career, and over the next two decades worked as a producer for bands like Grand Funk, Railroad, Bad Finger, and The New York Dolls. But Rundegren's crowning achievement was producing Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell album, which is to this day one of the highest selling albums of all time. But now Rundgren is far away from the spotlight. In Hawaii, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Famous past October, but skipped out on the ceremony to play a local club down the street instead. He also spent many months recording vocals for Kanye's Donda, but eventually bowed out of that as well. He is busy working on an album of his own, however, a collaborative project called Space Force with artists like Sparks, Rivers, Cuomo, and Ben Folds that'll be out later this year. On today's episode, we'll hear a conversation Rick Rubin had with run Gren just weeks before the start of the pandemic. They talk about why he was the only producer who would work on the debut album for Meatloaf, who just recently passed away. Todd also talks about engineering the third album for the band when the group was in the midst of turmoil, and why he always turns off Taylor Swift's music. This is broken record line of notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Todd Rundergren. I've been going on. I'm in the middle of doing another collab record. So just in the last two weeks, I got stuff from Sparks Cool, Adrian Blue's new band that I've done a little work with called Lemon Twigs. Ben Folds sent me like ten things and I gotta pick one to focus on. How long have you been doing collaborations like this? Well, my last album was pretty much you know, it was mostly all collaborations, some songs by myself. But I made a conscious decision because I've been making all my records out here, I make them by myself, you know, in my own echo chamber. So I thought, I'm get some more influence in here, do some audience expansion. Does it always start by them sending you something? It was all different, at least the last time. It was different, different methods, Like, for instance, Robin, I thought, you know, maybe I can get Robin to do this song. I think she writes, but I just sent her the song, said you're interested in She said, yeah, I like the song, I'll do the song. So in that particular interstance, it was simply like I did the whole recording and she did the vocals on it. And there were ones in which somebody would send me something like Joe Walsh sent me a track that It's almost always like something that they were working on that went more abund you know. So you get excited at the beginning, and then somewhere in the middle of the process you kind of need to move on to something else or you lose interest in it. So a lot of people have these half finished things laying around, and those are actually the most fun for me because it's their idea. But it's still room for me to do something with it because it's not completely finished. Even that can take different sort of turns. Like Ben Fold sent me about a dozen very of a song that he does live, which turns out to be different every single night. It's called like rock this Bitch or something like that. It just turned out to be a gag that he does in all of his shows. And then he makes a song up on the spot but somewhere and they say, we're going to rock this Bitch in Norfolk tonight, you know, something like that. So they said, all I got to do is like find one get rid of the rock this Bitch part, figure out something else about you know what it's about, and we'll have a song somehow. But it's you know, it's not the same as doing your own record because I have control over the timeline. When you start involving other artists, it's harder to make demands and say finished this now because my record label wants to release it. Only certain artists are first of all willing to collaborate, and then sometimes there are conflicting schedules, like I think I'm doing something with Thomas Dolbium. Before he couldn't do it as he was too busy doing something else. But now he's got a window. So he didn't do anything for the first record, but we may get something done for this one. That's actually an interesting idea instead of them always being different artists really having a distant band you and one other artist. Yeah, it's hard to find artists that are fully comfortable with this process. Even a lot of the people that I assume you know, have the technical wherewithal to do things like runoff stems and stuff like that, you often find that they depend on an engineer to do, you know, to keep track of where stuff is and to run stuff off. That's an extra layer that you have to go through. So ideally you find an artist who is as experienced with the stuff as you are and it just like take what you give him, turn it around, send it back. In that sense, I can clear up any issues on my end ye by myself, because I can engineer. But maybe someone you can cast in that role who you really like, you know, someone whose music you love, would feel like fun to do that all, Well, it's funny. They're like, you know that there's a lot of music out there, Like for instance, Trent Resner on the last record he sent me a whole album's worth of stuff because he and Atticus Ross do a lot of film and TV soundtrack work, and so they just archive stuff. They come up with an idea, something that would be a mood for a film, and then the archive it. So when I asked him if he had anything, he sent me like almost two dozen of these various themes, you know, and said pick one. None of them had any lyrics or anything on him. So, yeah, it's funny. The last record, there was only one what you would consider traditional collaboration, and that was just a coincidence. I was pretty much done the record and I had this one orphan track and I didn't know what to do with it, and I was just going to leave it. And Donald Fagan was on the island and we were out at dinner and I said, oh, I got this orphan track. You know, I'm about to deliver my records. You want to listen to it? He said sure, And I thought it was a steely Danish kind of thing anyway, a little bit jazzy. So I sent it to him and the next day he starts sending back titles, you know, song titles. Some of them are just like out of the blue and ridiculous, but we sent back when it said tinfoil hat, and then we suddenly knew that's what we have to do. I had the track pretty much all recorded, but we wrote the song together in the way that you would think Paul McCartney and John Lennon would moon spooneeah tune. So that was the only time that I was physically in the same place as my collaborator, which was fun. But I've had episodes where I was supposed to like write with someone, and I'm not usually not very good at just, you know, sitting down and writing with someone. I had known Donald for a long time, so I think we were a little bit more sympatico than if I was meeting someone for the first time and supposed to write with them. But I remember, you know, an episode with like Rick Springfield, who came to my house when I was living in sas Alito wanting to write something, and all we did was just kind of sit there and look at each other, you know, Because for me, in some ways writing is it just a very personal thing. I usually try and find solitude when I have to write, so that I'm not distracted by anything and I can eventually hear what I'm thinking in the back of my head. Making music is the way I learn about myself and make changes in myself because I objectivize ideas, and once they're out there, you can say, oh, that was stupid or Okay, that's not so bad. Stick with that. Where do you think the ideas come from. Well, sometimes they just come from the process. Like the most financially rewarding song I ever recorded was banging the drum all day, But that was a song I dreams because I was in the middle of making a record. When it was time to make a I would go back to my house in Lake Hill, where I'd be completely alone with no distractions, and two weeks later I'd have a record, you know, because you remove all the distractions and suddenly you're thinking about music all the time, and the process just starts to set in. My brain starts writing songs when I'm asleep, but it doesn't write the songs that I would write. If I was conscious, I would never have thought of, let alone written a song so dumb as buying the drum all day. Yea. In that sense, it was a gift from my subconscious saying you won't understand why you're doing this now, but years from now you will understand why you're doing this. Years from now is when we started getting carnival cruise line deals. You know, how's your relationship to music changed over the course of your life. Everybody's relationship to music has changed. You know, my story is not any different than anyone else's. It's just I had the advantage of seeing it common in the way that many artists didn't because of other interests, my interest in computer technology and media in general, and I sort of knew that at one point music was no longer going to be a commodity, that it was going to go back to being a service, because it always was a service, and that we went through this entire illusory period when we figured out how to capture sounds, we started selling the artifacts that held the sound on them, and sorry to think that was music. You know, music is measured by the number of these things that you sell. But for the entire history of music, up until that point, the only way you got paid as a musician you performed, unless you had the talent of a transcriptionist. A lot of the famous composers actually didn't make money off of writing the music they made. They made money off of writing it down wow, making copies of it. This is the roots of music publishing. All of our recorded music publishing paradigms came from printed music. And before there was printed music, because there were not always printers to print the music, there were people who manually transcribe the music and that was how they made a living. And then they wrote symphonies. Unless you're a vinyl freak or something, you don't think about music as this thing anymore. You don't even think about albums anymore, unless you just think about songs and playlists and podcasts and that sort of thing. What we call the quality time listening experience is no longer part of the average person's life. When I was growing up, there was no such thing as portable music. There was the music that you heard on the radio, but the DJ decided what that was. If you wanted a personal listening experience, you had to go home and sit in the sweet spot. And once you made the trouble for that, well, the Beatles just released Revolver, Locked a Door, Unplug the phone, do not interrupt me. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to listen to it. Probably three times in a row. The Sony Walkman essentially blew all that away, because now the music becomes the soundtrack to your life, and you have the option of deciding what it is wherever you happen to be. And while it now services you in all of these other ways that it didn't before, like when you're jogging, when you're in the subway, reading your newspaper and stuff like that, you're not in the music anymore. Don't pretend you're listening to the music and the way you would if you like, shut down all your other senses. A little bit of a sidetrack, but it's based on what you just said. And I'm just picturing you as a kid. And one of the Beatles albums comes out, it's a big deal and the experience of listening to them those first times. Can you remember how different it was each time? I do remember that eventually you got to realize that the Beatles were an evolutionary phenomenon, that it wasn't going to be loved me to for ten years or something like that. And I think that started to dawn on me at least around Rubber Soult, because then they started incorporating other instruments, but more than just other instruments, other sorts of moods and textures. It was their most acoustic record up until that point, and yet it didn't flag in terms of the songwriting. The songwriting was evolving and getting into areas that weren't just about relationships with girls and things like that. Yeah, you realize that that you could grow to expect that there would be something different every record. Did they ever disappoint you? There are always little disappointments. They're always throwaway songs. And I'm pretty sure the Beatles knew they were throwaway songs in their catalogs. I know that when the Beatles first came out, I had to know every song. I had to know the guitar solo to every song. But I did not get Sergeant Pepper. Yeah, when it first came out, didn't come around for you eventually or no, not in the way that most people did. Because one of the reasons why I didn't get it was I was like Squeaky Clean didn't take any drugs of any kind. I didn't drink, and the word was that you had to be on acid to fully appreciate this record. And I said, well, then I guess I'm just not getting this record because I'm not going to take the acid to appreciate the record. If I can't appreciate the record without the acid, you know, then there must be something wrong with the record. Later, I actually got into it more for the sound of it, because it was a different sound than their previous records. The previous records all mostly were pretty dry, and they didn't use a lot of ambience or anything like that. Certainly didn't use a full symphony orchestra or anything. And so it was more the sound and a certain way that the voices were placed that gave them that separation that your psychedelic mind would have given it. In other words, I think the Beatles were influencing George Martin in some ways, you know, in terms of how they wanted the record to sound. We'll be back after this quick break with more from Todd Rundgren. We're back with Rick's conversation with Todd Rundegren. How did you connect with Albert Grossman? The choices that I made later in life were affected by what happened to me very early on when I formed my first band. I got out of high school and I got into a local blues band, which made me something of a celebrity in downtown Philadelphia. So when that band decided that they wanted to be the Grateful Dead and go to the country and drop acid and that sort of thing, I said, Okay, I'm done with that. I'm going to start my own band. And I had enough of a name at that point that I could just steal people from any other band. We had a quartet called the Naz We did cover songs like everybody did at first, because I had yet to write any material. I started writing songs. On the first song I ever wrote, Washi Hello, It's Me. I got whist away from Philadelphia to New York. Our manager was originally a publicist, so he knew everyone who edited the teen magazines. So before we were even signed, we were on the cover of sixteen magazine as some new discovery. We were experiencing it as if we had already done it, but we hadn't done anything yet. We hadn't even gotten signed yet. But our manager knew how to publicize it. Anytime there was a big event in New York City that everyone had to be at, he would get us invited and get us a limousine and we would show up at that event and everyone would say, who are those guys? Yeah, And so eventually we got signed to a really big contract. Two albums later. Band is done, It's all done. And after that I started to learn about out what the engineer does, because after mixing the second NAZ record and having a free run of the console, I'm just starting to absorb all of the basic engineering concepts. And after the second record, the band blew up and I'm on the street and the partner of the guy who managed the NAZ about six months later finds me spending my days doing lights in a discotheque, designing lights for a disco, doing nothing at all to do with music, hanging out with clothiers in the West village and he says, I'm working for Albert Grossman now and he's tasked me with finding new young talent. I saw how you worked on the last two records. We need someone to come in and modernize a lot of the old legacy artists. Because Albert Grossman he was no longer managing Bob Dylan, but that was how he got famous Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary. He was managing James Cotton and then eventually he did Janis Joplin, so he was like, you know, the world's most high powered manager at that point. One of the very first things they did was put me on a Jesse Winchester project. They asked me if I would engineer, thinking that I had more experience as an engineer than I actually had, but they liked what I did. I was really quick. I had learned a lot of things about mike placement during the second Naz album, and so after that was done, they asked me to engineer Stage Fright, which was the first, you know, really big, high profile gig that I had, and there were no producers on Stage Fright. It was like anybody who showed up was a producer. Is that the band's third album? It was the third one. Yeah, there was Big Pink, and then there was the Brown one that had Crippled Creak on it, and then there was Stage Fright. And that was a real trial by fire, not simply because it was the first major product that I did, but the band was in this state of I don't know whether to characterize it is turmoil. But they still working with Bob at the timer no more, they weren't working with Bob No, but there were issues they were starting a fester. Some of them had to do with the band's sudden success. This is a bunch of musicians who for years and years and years, you know, all they were was a backup band for Ronnie Hawks, a Canadian who rarely toured in the United States, you know, And then suddenly they're thrust into the spotlight by playing with Bob Dylan, and then their first album comes out and it's a big phenomenon. Second album comes out. By the time Stage Fright comes out, they're probably the biggest band in the world at this point. Yeah, and maybe most influential as well as popular. Yeah, because I mean it's like Elton John puts out a song called lev On. You know, how obvious can that be? You know, and it sounds just you know, it's got all of those sort of earmarks of what the band is. Essentially, I'd like to say fabricating, you know, because you listen to the band's record you think, oh, these guys are all from Arkansas. No, they're all from Canada. Only from Arkansas is leve On and everything else is fabricated. You know. Robbie who's writing all the material is essentially pretending to be Levon and in some ways that might even make it better. You know, sometimes sometimes the distance the fantasy makes it more thrilling for the writer. They're not just being themselves. They've an idealized version of this thing. But here's the reason why the band is in turmoil, because Robbie's writing all the material and not sharing the publishing with anyone else in the band, and they're getting they're starting to realize this by the third album. I mean, they haven't put out albums on their own before, so they don't know what publishing is. And then they get the third album, they realize that he's becoming a millionaire and they're not sharing in any of that because not only are their songs appearing on their records, people are ring the songs and having hit records with those songs, and so turmoil is starting to happen in the band. There's that. There's there's also the fact that after years and years and years and just being a band and you know, out of the limelight and doing this, suddenly these guys are in the limelight, publishing a side that more money than they've ever had before, and making some of the guys a little crazy. They are doing things that they never did before. They are taking drugs and quantities that they've never had available before, and drinking more than they ever had before, and that sort of thing. And so getting through the record with something of an exercise as well, because they're all dealing with critical personal issues while the whole record is going on. Then the complicate things even further. They have promised Glynn Johnson he will have a chance to make the mix the record. So so they realize, you know, they can't ask me to engineer the whole thing and then not mix it. So they send me to England with all the master tapes. We split them in half. Glint takes them somewhere and mixes them, and then they put me in at They've just booked me in a studio that you know, because I don't know many studios in England at this point. Where was I you're up to mixing the album. Oh yeah, we're mixing the album. Oh yeah. You can go back a little further though. You talk about making the album. Tell me a little bit about the what it was like to be in the studio with the band at that time. I understand that were there were internal problems going on, but we weren't in the studio. We recorded most all of the album, the basic tracks we recorded on the stage of the Woodstock Theater. Was that, by their choice, there was no bearzable studios yet, and I was somewhat by their choice because they didn't want to record in a New York studio. I guess that's where they had done. I don't know what studio they had used before, but there were no studios comparable in Woodstock, in the Woodstock area. So, but the studio was under construction, it was not built yet, not fully built yet, but they had bought a remote truck, and so we took all of the equipment out of the remote truck and put it in the prop tent behind the Woodstock Theater. It's an outdoor theater at summer Stock Theater. It was indoors but not heated or anything like that, so it would be sweltering hot in the daytime and the prop tent and freezing cold at night. And the sessions were just kind of had something of a stream of consciousness quality about them, with the songs written before before the songs are written and rehearsed before the sessions. You know, I had worked on the Jesse Winchester record, and various people had made contributions to that, but it wasn't like the whole band doing band material anything like that. They were kind of subjugated to whatever was good for Jesse Winchester. But you know, they are very different guys, and you know, there were five very different guys, and each with a certain kind of you know, personality. Robbie was squeaky clean, quite obviously in charge of everything and running, you know, running the show, writing everything, sober as a monk, you know, that kind of thing. There was Garth. Garth never, as far as I know, you know, did any kind of drugs. He was not. I don't think I ever saw him drinking anything. But Garth had narc ellipsey. You know, he would just drop off in the middle of the session, and I didn't know this. Nobody told me this, you know, so kind of like what's going on here, you know, and making wise cracks, and they're getting angry with me because I don't know that he has narc ellipsey. Rick was pretty dependable. Rick during the sessions would you know, would be pretty dependable. But Rick had his own issues that might take over another context, and ultimately did. Richard had a drinking issue, and I don't think it affected too much the sessions. But I say that the session would be hours and hours of getting ready and then maybe two takes, and then a bunch of needling around, and then maybe another another two takes. I'm not sure that any song went beyond eight takes, just because the amount of fuxing around in between takes. It like getting in the mood to do another take, which is not that unusual. I mean a lot of bands are like that, you know. I remember going to a Rolling Stones rehearsal which they call at around midnight and nobody makes a sound till four am, so, you know, not that unusual. But sometimes it would be like, Okay, were an hour into the session and Richard hasn't shown up yet. What do you think's going on? Finally we got a call somebody found Richard with his car nose down in a culvert and he's been there all night. You know, Okay, we're ready to do a take. We saw Levan was here, but where's Levan? We can't find it. Spent an hour looking for Levan. Levan has passed out under a pile of curtains because he has, you know, done a little bit too much of something during the session, you know, and just fell right asleep. So it was, you know, a kind of a thing like a celestial alignment. You know, you have to get all the planets to line up for everything to come together. And that for me, young whipper snapper, who ultimately like makes records in a matter of days, not weeks and months, you know, it was a little bit much for me, and every once in a while I had to be slapped down. How long did the recording take tracking, Well, there were you know, there were the sessions, which I don't think we took much more than two weeks to do the basic sessions. But that wasn't the end of it. We had one or two other songs to do, which we had to do in a studio in New York because they had finally finished the control room of studio be at Bearsville and they were removing all the equipment into there. So we did like WS Walcott Medicine Show, I think it was in a session in New York City. And those sessions turned out to be actually very productive, you know, because people weren't at home. They were away from home. They were in New York City. Sometimes in order to get that authentically kind of old timey sounds, you know, they would well, for instance, I played the baritone horn on that song, and I had never played baritone horn in my life. All I had to do is squeak out enough notes, you know, to make it sound like a thing, authentic, rinky dinky, weird band kind of thing. It was by lack of experience with the instrument that was necessary for this sound authentic. And so you know, they'd be the like moments of that, you know, where it's like, if you could do it too well, it doesn't work. You know. It has to have that sort of authentically kind of creaky, slightly sloppy aspect about it. Then there was the whole mixing episodes, you know, with Glynn doing some and then me doing some, and ultimately I came back with the mixes his and mine, and they weren't fully satisfied with either. So we started all over again in Studio B, a brand new Studio B, which nobody really knew what it sounded like, but we put our faith in John Stork and and then it was just you know, the the worst kind of experience for me, which I have you know, which I have resolved ever since. You know, in any sort of production, don't have the whole band in the room when you're building a mix, because people only hear themselves, you know, the drumming only hears the drums, the guitar from only hears the guitar, you know, especially when you're building a mix, you know. And one of the worst was when I was mixing the New York Dolls first album. It was compounded by the fact that they were in a hurry because they had to go to a gig. But it's one of these things really just like, no nobody hears the whole mix. They only hear themselves, and all the faders are pinned at the top, and you have to start all over again, you know. And so you know, my modus operandi now is like, go away, I will build a mix. Then you come back and tell me what you want different about it, you know, but don't allow them there for the process. Unfortunately, they'd be there for the whole mix and it would just take four ever, you know, and everyone would have an opinion, you know, so it wouldn't make it better, and it wouldn't necessarily make it better now, it might take weeks, you know, and often that kind of like dwelling on it makes it worse. Which is why Andy Partridge hated XTC when it was first completed, because I wouldn't allow that to happen. I wouldn't allow that anal business to ruin the record. You know. It was the first thing I did. I said, you're not listening to the mix. I'm going to build a mix. Then you can come over and listen to the mix. By the time I was done the third one, they said we're going home, either because they hated that aspect of the process even though they liked the mixes, or because they trusted me. Yeah, I didn't one or the other. But Andy was already determined to hate the record by the time he went home and made a point of telling everybody how much he hated the record before it came out. And then it turned out to be the most successful record they were released. So wow, it's amazing. Who would have been your contemporaries at that point in time. This was late nineteen sixty six, early nineteen sixty seven. What would be on the radio at that time. Well, if you wanted to know I'll be on the radio, you listen to my album Faithful the First Side, because what I tried to do on that was that record I did in nineteen seventy six, ten years after I first got into the so called music business, and it was all covers, and I said, I want people to remember what it was like listening to the radio in nineteen sixty six. There was Yardbirds happening ten years time ago, Bob Dylan. Mostly you go your way and I go mine, Rain, the Beatles, Good Vibrations, Beach Boys. I just did dead on covers of all those songs if six was nine, Jimmy Andris. You know, that was just like to me, the golden Age of radio. What's happening in music is just more than anybody can keep up with. And so suddenly the cuffs are off for DJs. They can play anything they want because nobody can figure it out anyway, you know how it all goes together. And suddenly radio was such an exciting thing to listen to because you hear like a rock maybe Beatles song, then you hear Judy Collins after that. Then you might hear Bill Evans after that they would just it was wide open, you know, it was just terrific. It was the inception of what they called album oriented radio when people started playing not the singles, but you know, the cuts from the albums as well. That has all gone away and with it that sort of monolithic view of what audiences want to hear. And that's how I do research for records. I can't, you know, listen to radio. I'm afraid I'll hear something I don't want to hear stuck in there. So so instead I go to YouTube. You know, I asked, I'll I asked one of my kids, what should I listen to? Yeah, and it'll give me maybe a couple of names, and I'll go to YouTube. I'll look it up and then on the sidebar and then maybe I'll start clicking the sidebar and say, well, who's that? And so just by following these threads is how I learn about what's happening in music. And there's a lot of music out there that you don't hear about unless you go looking for it. But that's different from an era when that music would never get made, when that music would never get recorded in the first place. So to me, this is in some sense as a golden age of music, in that whatever you can imagine there is, it's out there. And if it isn't out there, and you can imagine how to make it, then you can put it out there. The entry level is really low now, the entry level is freaking zero. Put it that way. Yeah, you can get for ninety nine cents an app on your phone. It's got four tracks of recording on it, and another app that will allow you to post it to wherever you want it, and another app that'll allow you to tell all your friends where it is and how to find it. Yeah, there's really no excuse if you want to get into the so called music business. Do it. But in the end, you won't make any money until you go out and start playing it in front of people. Sometimes we'll hear something and it will resonate with us and we won't know why. Do you know what I'm saying. It's like sometimes like can't put your finger on why something's good. Yeah, And well it isn't even why it's good, it's why it sticks. Yeah, because sometimes it's something you want out of your head. That's why I hit the mute button anytime I see Taylor Swift. I'm going to hit that mute button right now. The same thing goes for like when Donald Trump comes on the TV. Though I don't want any of that in my head. I hit the mute button. You know, do you like curate stuff that comes in I kind of do you? Oh? Yeah. There are things that you latch onto if you think that you could learn something from it, And sometimes they are really illogical things. But every once in a while you hear a song and you realize that that was the perfect pop song. We'll be right back with more from Todd Rundgren after this break. We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Todd Rudegren. Have you always made music either a commercial thing or an art project? Do you know what I'm saying, Like, when you're starting a project, do you decide, Okay, this one is for me and it's going to be artie, or this one's going to be I'm gonna try to get something on the radio and I'm gonna go in that direction. Well, I don't. I tend to think that way. When I'm producing for other people. I want to understand what their goals are so that I can try and guide things in that direction, and it isn't always necessarily commercial success. That's like when I did Grand Funk Railroad, they wanted critical acclaim, you know, because the critics just hated them. What stage were they at in that career when you came up with them, Well, they were a jam band, you know, essentially a jam band. They were like, we're like cream, you know, We're a trio based guitar and drums, and we go out and we have flimsy little song structures and then we jam a lot, you know. And albums were kind of the same way. They would just be kind of flabby, long songs occasionally something you know, concise and songwriterly. Their issue was that their manager Terry Knight from Terry and the Pack. I don't know if you remember them, but as one of these Michigan bands from the scene that produced Bob Seger and Ted Nugent that produced Grand Funk Railroad as well. But their manager was Terry Knight, and he was great from the standpoint of, you know, hyping the bands. Everybody knew who Graham Funk Railroad was. He bought the biggest billboard that had ever been purchased on Broadway in Times Square. This was a big thing that only made their reputation more controversial because music critics said, what are they doing up there? You know, they're not the fricking Beatles, you know, they're just a jam band. And they made the decision at a certain point to break away from Terry Knight. The other thing Terry Knight did was produce their records, and he was a terrible record producer. You know, they sounded bad, and he didn't editorialize at anything. You know, I just let them jam away. So they had kind of the success and an audience, and the one thing they didn't have was credibility. That's one reason why they came to me because my reputation at that point was taking projects that had, like for instance, Bad Finger, where like they were on their third try at making a record. If it required me to just go in and completely take over the process, I would do that. But I figured I'm not going to be the third producer to fail to get an album out of Bad Finger. So, for better or worse, they got what they needed out of it. They got a record that had two hit singles off of it, and they got the success out of it. They fired me after the next record and never had another hit. So and so the thing with Grand Funk was, we, you know, we need credibility somehow. We need somebody who knows how to make records to get involved in our next record. And they had everything all planned out beforehand. They had already written We're an American band because they knew, okay, we need a single, and I helped him arrange it, you know, so that just sounded more singly, So it sounded less like a jam band more like, you know, a single. They had hired a keyboard player, made their sound a little bit bigger and more well rounded. But I remember he was very indignant about the fact that I made him do this. Dink think think think think think we're kink think think think Think. He said, wait a minute, I'm a keyboard anybody can do that. You know, that's as much what makes it a hit record as anything. It's just that little dink think think coming into the chorus. You know, when you heard the song for the first time, did you know that it had potential. I knew they'd have had potential, but I never depend on the market, you know, I know that's a single. But then someone so puts out a single the same week and everyone forgets about your single. It's that kind of business there. It's still a lot of chance. Even in those days, there was a lot of crooked stuff that went on. This was even before Clyde Davis got busted. You can't guarantee anything, but they were so confident about it, and then the label was totally behind the plan. So the very first thing we did is we went to Criterion Studios and we recorded We're an American Band the track the first day. We got all the sounds. The first day we recorded the track. I don't mess around with the sounds all day long. Sound is the most subjective part of the process. People think when they hear a record for the first time that you intended for it to sound that way, and that's the only way that it possibly could have sounded. Of course, when you're making the record, you have all the range of possibilities and you can analyze it to death, you know, as has happened in some projects. But in any case, very early in the next day's session we finished it and then when right into the mastering room because they had announced the release a week later. A week after we went in to record the song. That was supposed to be the official release date of the song, and lo and behold. Because of the way the industry was in those days, if you had enough radio as and enough pre orders on the single, you charted. A week later, the single comes out and it charts in the twenties. Wow, a week later, after a week after we recorded it. You know, nobody's even heard it yet. Didn't take that much longer for us to get the album done than what, you know, the album's you know, a big giant hit. Now that doesn't happen a whole lot, but it's just not the kind of thing that you can depend on, you know. I mean there's a complete opposite end of the spectrum, which was meat Loaf, the opposite of like that confidence and knowing what you're gonna doing. You had to have a master plan, you know, to accomplish it. Meat Loaf, on the other hand, was just a crapshoot through the entire thing, even though by that album, because any time an anomaly breaks through, it's really interesting to me. Yeah, and that there's nothing else like that. Whatever that is, it's very unique. It's unlike other music going on at the time. Well, it was not completely unlike other music that was going on at the time, because when I went to see meat Loaf, I knew who meat Loaf was. I had seen him on the Rocky Horror Show. I knew who he was. I didn't know who Stimon was. Stimon actually the genius behind the whole thing. But they did a live audition for me, Stimon on the piano, meat Loaf and two background singers and essentially did the entire record with piano accompaniment, but did all of the highlights of the record, acted out with everything, with the historionics, paradise and dashboard light and all that stuff. And while I'm watching it, you know, and they're giving me the sob story. They said, no producer wants to touch this, the concept is too big. No producer really wanted to deal with it. And so they're doing this for me. And in my head, I'm thinking this is a of Bruce Springsteen. It's all the same, you know, Airstat's fifties stuff, you know, with motorcycles, switch blaze, leather jackets, all that rebel without a cause iconography, and I'm thinking this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen and that's how I'm going to approach it. And he had a label at the time. I wouldn't have taken it on unless he had a label. But the day before we went into the studio and we had rehearsed the band for two weeks already, you know, we were ready to just go in there and do it live, which the record was mostly live, not the singing, but all of them playing on It was mostly all live. Meet Loof says, I want to go off my label. They don't understand me, and he said, whatever it says. I said, well, I'm not your manager. I can't you know, tell you what to do. But you know we're going into the studio tomorrow, and he says, well, I got to get off my label, you know, So I go to it was either Paul Fishkin or Albert Krossman, you know, was running Bearsville at the time. And I said, well, if you put this, it's too late. Now we're already rehearsed. We actually got members of Springsteen's band, We got Roy Bitten and Max Weinberg are in the bands. You know, this is how much of a spoof it is to me? And I say, well, put this on my tab, you know, underwrite the expenses like you would a regular record, and we'll give you right a first refusal on the record. We finished the record and Bearsville turns it down, as does Warner Brothers, who's distributing Bearsville, And it takes six months to find somebody to take the record. They shop it around everybody and everyone said, what is this, you know, a spoof of Bruce Briestein. And finally they find a you know, a small subsidiary of Epic Records called Cleveland International, and they have one act on the label. Ian Hunter is the only act they have on the label. Great guy, a great player. I should call him for a collab. You were the first person I ever heard talk about the revolution in the way music is consumed, maybe as far back as the late seventies to how it is today. If you look back at the things that allowed you to understand what was possible, were there any forks in the road where it went either a different way than you thought it was going to go, or had a potential to do something better than it did. I put out a thing called No World Order. It came out in the late eighties, and it came out in the number of different formats, and it was the first example if you had the right device of actual interactive music, music that you, as a listener could get some control over. I came up with the concept through a number of things, but it was not driven at first by the technology. It was driven by the realization that, first of all, music is ultimately going to be repeated, That music is too limited a language that for us to be like completely original all the time, you know, so it's just bound to be repeated. The audience no longer is attached to a particular form of it. And there were two phenomenon that caused me to realize that. One was Frankie goes to Hollywood Relax. It didn't happen in this country. It never became like the giant hit in this country that it was, for instance, in England. But suddenly, you know, innovation had moved back to England and Europe and stuff at its particular point in the mid to late eighties, and they released a new version of Relax like every two weeks, a new remix of Relax every two weeks, and everyone they released would go to the top of the charts. And I suddenly realized now the audiences is accepting the mutability of music, that it doesn't have to be this way and that's sacred, and you know it can't be any other way. Now that we realize this, how can we accelerate this process? How can we actually define it and make tools to do it and put them in people's hands. And that's when I came up with the idea of an album that didn't have a specific running order, and that was no world order, and it required a certain technology for it to be ultimately realized, but also it could be realized in non interactive technologies, but in a number of ways. But I wrote the songs and with a certain discipline. There had to be a clean break every four to eight bars, or maybe every two bars. But there had to be clean breaks in the music everywhere, you know, so there are not a lot of songs with like syncopation, with a lot of upbeats, you know, a lot of it's got lots of downbeats and stuff like that. And essentially record it like you usually would, but in the compositional part, you make sure you've got these breaks, then come up with the technology by which you can string them together in real time and found Philips CDI had just come out and the technology was in it to enable to do that. So I got together with a programmer that I was working with, and we came up with the no World Order concept, the whole engine that ran it. That allowed people to essentially go in and specify how they'd like to experience the music, and even like stop and loop on one piece of the music and change the parameters and that one piece of music. So say, I never did understand what the words were there, Let's take out some of the instruments. And so it allowed you to experience it in that way. It allowed you to utilize it or filter it so that let's say you want to use it for your aerobics, you said it, so it never goes below a certain tempo. As you asked me about the fork in the road. Yes, After I did this, I got approached by Time Warner Cable Network, which was doing an interactive TV experiment in Orlando, Florida, in a neighborhood. But they had fiber optic to the curve in the entire optic neighborhood, which is not unusual anymore, but in those days a big deal in the neighborhood had a prototype set top box that was supposed to be an interactive box, and since they were still prototyping the box, everyone got an SGI Indigo computer. And if you're not into computer graphs, you may not know what that is, but it's about the size of a carry on suitcase. And they're trying to figure out, okay, what kind of services do people want pre Internet? It's just pre Internet now people don't have Internet in their homes yet. So they figured, okay, we'll develop a pizza pie application. You know, you can go on your television, pick out your toppings, you know, and a piece of will be delivered with your toppings. But they had reasonable query what kind of interactive music services would people like in their homes. So they hired me to come up with a prototype so that they could make it part of this experiment. So we came up with an outline for it, impossible technological solution for it. But of course you can't do it unless you got some music on servers. So we went to what was then the Five Majors. So we set up meetings with all the special products divisions of the labels, and we went in and say we're just experimenting here. We want to see what kind of demand there is. So what you got to do is you got to put some music that people would be interested in, some name artists or something, some artists of some kind, and put their music on a server so that we can connect to it and deliver it to this particular audience, this experimental audience. Not a single label would hear of it. They say, we know, we don't even don't la la la, don't talk about this two years later, napster later. So I had gone in with the hope that somehow the labels would see the light and ease everything into this new area instead of it just collapsing into chaos, which is essentially what has done. And they're only now figuring out how do we recover from this? What is the role of the record label now in all of this, given that artists can do everything themselves. The thing that surprised me about the streaming revolution when it happened, I was really excited about it, and I just imagined as a real fanatical fan of music and going to the record store every day and walking around the record stores and just wanting to hear everything. The idea of living in the record store where everything was always available on demand when you want. It seemed like just the greatest thing that could ever happen. And I thought I would want a DJ all day. And what I've come to learn now that it's here is that actually, I really like being DJ two, and I spend much more time listening to curated music than picking what I want to listen to. I like the surprise of what comes next. You already know what you want to listen to. Yeah, such things that you didn't know were there, that you didn't know you wanted to listen to, you know, And yeah, those are the things that I try and find if I'm doing any research for where to move my own music. Well, thank you for doing this. Oh well done? Okay cool. Thanks the tot Runagren for chatting with Rick about his past and present work. You can turn out his new song with Sparks called Your Fandango, along with all of our favorite Runagren songs at Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record, broken Record It's produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ben Holiday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Melabell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app Our theme mus expect Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond, h