Todd Rundgren

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quess Love Supreme is a production of I Heart Radio.
Ladies and gentlemen, Uh, it's another beautiful week upon us.
My name is Quess Love and this is music We Paradise,
otherwise known as Quess Love Supreme. UM. Joined here by Fantacolo.

(00:20):
Where's up? Man? Yeah? What's going on? Man? This is
I never thought we would get this interview. I'm being real,
this is real. This is a major league. I know.
My ear is this as well. Just get giddy when
y'all get giddy and Steve gets guiney, Steve, we did it.
We did it. We did it. Uh, Ladies and gentlemen.

(00:40):
Nothing excites me more than when I get to pick
the brains of a fellow Philadelphia UM, Like, what what
can I say about our yesterday? He's an absolutely He's
an unsung creative maniac. That's what I say. He's an
unsung creative maniac. Uh, excelling in songwriting UH and production

(01:05):
and engineering, especially engineering with with techniques and ideas that
were planet seated and planet over fifty years ago that
we're just starting to referral even to this day. I mean,
I don't think it's it's hyperbolic for me, to say that,
you know, Todd probably crawled so that artists like Radiohead

(01:26):
and Princes and thunder Cat and all stops in between
can fly. Uh. He pushes the artist to envelope that,
to me is a major understatement. His achievements are. It's
it's just beyond description. Ladies and gentlemen, stop laughing at me, Steve,
I'm very excited for this episode. Please welcome the endless

(01:49):
flow of creation and human form known to us mirror
mortals as Todd. Shut up, Steve. Alright, alright, you have
to say it now, you know, Steve, it's all it's
all downhill from here, you know. Let me tell you
something about sugar, Steve. He will remain silent on everything

(02:13):
except for the proper mispronunciation of your name. He will. Yeah,
there there, there are receipts tickets to anyone that's ever
butchered your name. No, that's run green like he's let
not right, he got he got it right on time

(02:34):
of there, No, Steven corrected me. Like ten years ago,
I used to say run run like do run run
no un And there was a period where I say
it run green, but it's run gren. So there was
a period. Yeah, just right, how how how are you?

(02:58):
And uh, where where are you? Right now? I'm at
home in Kauai and I'm doing quite well. We haven't
had a case here in like six eight weeks of
the deadly coronavirus, so we're just waiting for the rest
of the world to clean up. And I'm back on
the road again. I see, so you're you're kind of

(03:20):
enjoying your well, I don't get on I never get
this kind of time at home, and so I'm feeling
a little bit guilty about having all the time. But
then again, so much stuff has piled up in my
life that I don't get to properly addressed that I'm
actually enjoying this, uh this freedom for the time being.
It's most of your time sp is in um on

(03:44):
the road or like how much of the time has
spent between like traveling and studio recording. Well, a while ago,
I would say within the last five years, I would
be out as much as ten months on the road
because I'd be doing the thing. I would be playing
Fringo Star and then there's all the other little odd
things that get thrown there, and and you know, sometimes

(04:06):
I'll go out on a tour to tribute an artist
like I've been out on tours a tribute um David Bowie,
and I'll be doing that again. Um. I think in November,
if everything goes well with the various things that I do,
I would get maybe ten days at home at a
time and then be gone for a month and a half,

(04:28):
another ten days at home and then so yeah, I'm
I'm settling in. Can I assume that, okay, that this
is probably the longest extended time that you've taken off
from working, and if so, are you sort of recharging
your your creative juices? Because I'm often curious as to how,

(04:51):
like serious creatives that I know, how are they using
this time off, Like are they using this time to
absolutely do nothing? Are they in this time so that
they can get more inspiration too create things? Because oftentimes
it's like once you put out your first record, then
you're in a cyclone of you got to promote the

(05:11):
tourt and whatever free time you have, that's where you
document the new ideas, and then you make your second record,
repeat rents, repeat rents, repeat rents, and then once you
have eight albums under your belt, then you're just in
a constant touring swoops, so there's really not time to
just sit in silence and and create. Like, how are
you getting your creative creative juices off? Well, it's I

(05:35):
have an unusual creative process and that I don't do
what looks externally like a whole lot of work. Most
of the work that I do is internally just you know,
hashing through a little musical ideas. Um U in the
midst of doing another collaboration record. As a matter of fact,
there's going to be a song with the Roots on it.

(05:58):
Uh yeah, Uh. I actually premiered it already. I did
a radio show for somebody and I played to dive
a girl, And but I'm doing collaborations and I was
you know, I was supposed to sort of deliver earlier
in the year, but the problem is that everyone's kind
of stuck at home, so nobody can get in the

(06:18):
studio to finish up a lot of the stuff that
um I've been working on so lately, you know, from
a creative standpoint, I've been doing these collaborations, which allow
me to work more with other people's ideas than just
always coming up with something myself. It doesn't mean I
won't go back to that. But this kind of solitude

(06:38):
and silence is like what I need to be able
to write because of the fact that it's such an
insular and mental process for me. It's like I'll be
thinking about what I'm gonna do, and then when I
finally get down to finishing a song, I'll come up
with like the melody and lyrics in twenty minutes, almost
like automatic writing, Like my handle just start writing out

(07:00):
lyrics and I won't even have to hardly think about it. So,
uh yeah, it's just kind of I let my subconscious
take over a lot of the work, and then when
it's time to actually create, uh, I just kind of
spills out. What would you say is your primary instrument?
Because I know you pretty much play everything, but what's
your primary instrument did you use to compose on when

(07:23):
you get those ideas? Well? Keyboard is a is the
principal I guess idea of musical idea creation tool because
you've got like all the notes laid out linearly in
front of you. But that doesn't mean that you know
the limitations of like the guitar aren't also something that's
sort of inspirational. There are sounds and and sort of

(07:45):
tonalities that the guitar creates that you know, work with
certain sort of vocal themes and stuff like that. And
of course, you know, Norwegian death metal would be nothing
if you had to play nothing but piano on it.
So um. But from a compositional standpoint, I actually sort

(08:06):
of I have always considered the studio itself sort of
a composition tool because I very early on built one
for myself, um in the belief that the ideas could
happen any time, and you don't want to, you know,
have to wait to get into the studio. And conversely,
if you're in the studio and you're making good progress,

(08:27):
you don't want to have to get out and make
room for somebody else. So the studio itself sort of
became the creative tool because you lay down something, you
get to hear it back right away and decide whether
it works or not. And what's the don't skip over
the most important thing that he basically just that engineers
make the best artists of studio. You know what I'm saying, Yes,

(08:53):
I know what is the That's why I kicked out
the engineer that I had when I first got into
the studio. I did my first production never never mind,
never mind, I think it was well, it was the
first time I engineered was a band from Philadelphia called
the American Dream. It was a brand new record plant

(09:14):
studio and they had a custom board and nobody in
the studio actually knew how to use it. So I
just got frustrated watching one of the engineers fumble around
on it. I said, well, I don't want to just
watch him learn how to do it. I'll just learn
how to do it myself. And subsequently it changed the
way the whole way that I approached production because I

(09:37):
could assume that the sound was there because I knew
enough about the engineering that I you know, if you
put the mics in the right place and that sort
of thing, you don't have to do a whole lot
of messing around, and then you can assume the sound
is there and then focus on the musical part of it,
on the performance and whatever, you know, kind of details
that you want to put into the music. So it

(09:59):
made the experien variants, you know, for the most part
of working with a band a lot different, because you know,
productions in the old days, you get in the studio
and you spend the first entire day just getting drawn sounds,
you know, or something like that, you know, and then
the next day guitar sounds. You know. What's the percentage

(10:19):
of or at least like from from from zero to
one of the idea that's inside of your head being
perfectly executed once you put it on tape. Um very rarely,
but that's because I don't often have that intention. I

(10:39):
don't have the intention necessarily to completely craft something in
my head and then try and imprint it onto the tape.
I'm really, as I say, I'm like, I'm exploring in
a way, I'm fumbling around. I often when I'm starting
a new record, I'll go out and do a lot
of musical research, Like I'll ask my kids, you know,

(11:00):
what are you listening to? Or what do you think
I should listen to? Then go on YouTube and start
poking around, and then there's the sidebar. You start out
one place and before you know you're in a whole
other place. Yeah, but that's you know, I mean that,
I really enjoy that because you discover things that aren't
in the mainstream, which to me was is the whole

(11:23):
point of the Internet, is that everyone gets a platform.
Of course, not everyone, not everyone deserves it, you know,
and you know some people are easier to find. But
it essentially took the music business and flattened it, you know.
In other words, there's no or very little price of
admission to participate anymore. All you gotta do is get

(11:45):
yourself a laptop, you know, at a website in the
world's your oyster? What part? What part of Upper Derby
did you grow up in? I grew up in the
very western part of Upper Derby and a brand new
post war row housing development, a familiar kind of housing
in the Philadelphia area and Delaware and stuff like that

(12:08):
Row Houses, which is essentially like an apartment building that
fell down. Every house looked exactly the same. It was
like one of these Levitt Town situations. But it was
very lower middle class, so you know, I had to
share for my entire life that I lived at home
in bedroom with my brother and my two sisters shared
a bedroom. And how many how many siblings? Again, I

(12:30):
have a brother and two sisters. Where did they have
musical interested as well? Or was it just you none?
Not really know. When I was um in elementary school,
we used to have a program where you could run
an instrument and every week or so, Uh, somebody would
come and give you a lesson. It wasn't like a
band or anything, but I, for some reason, thought I

(12:53):
wanted to play the flute when I like, when I
was like eight or nine something like at you know,
I just like the sound of it. But when I
actually got it, I didn't realize what a non linear
instrument it was. You know, it's um very difficult to learn,
and plus when you're young, it's difficult to get your

(13:13):
mouth to the umber sure, to get your mouth to
do the right thing. So my sister she got a clarinet,
and I actually learned to play that way better than
I learned to play the flute, and she never learned
to play it at all. So, you know, I learned
how to play Too Strange on the Shore by Mr
acker Bilk, and that thrilled my dad, you know, because

(13:34):
he wasn't to that kind of easy listening stuff. But
when I first heard um, I think it was Walk
Don't Run by the Ventures. That's when I knew guitar
was what I wanted to play. Was that the first
album that you purchased or like, do you remember the
first album you ever? Yeah, the first song that. Well.

(13:54):
The first album that I ever purchased was like a
cut out of a cutout ben and it was probably
like sixty nine cents and it was called Bopping and
a bunch of artists that you've never heard of. Um. Actually,
years later I did find run across a few of
the artists, like if you go on YouTube, you can

(14:16):
actually find performances by Dick Watson and the Brown Dots.
It was just an odd collection of weird fifties rock
and roll, um proto rock and roll, a lot of it.
And it was still before the Beatles, so I didn't
have a whole lot of discrimination. I just knew that
I was not into Elvis Presley because he was a

(14:38):
greaser and the greaser's like to beat me up, So
had no interest in Elvis Presley whatever. Oh, the Troubled
Owner definitely, the troubled loner um. Yeah, it was one
of those things. I had terrible a d D whatever
it is. They didn't know what that was in those days.
It was just an unruly child. And you know, no

(14:59):
matter where I started out in the classroom in the
beginning of the year, by you know, the end of
the first semester, I'm in the very back row because
I'm creating distraction and stuff like that. And uh, and
I just was. I was never meant for that kind
of um, that kind of discipline that school required. So

(15:20):
everything I ever learned, I learned after I left school.
So what was the what was the moment where you
decided that this is this is my destiny, this is
my my my moment in music, Well, I had a
high school band, and um, as previously cited, I did
so terribly in high school that there was no possibility

(15:42):
of me going to college. It would only have been
possible if I had landed some kind of scholarship anyway,
because my dad didn't make that much money. And so
after high school graduation, which was just around my eighteenth birthday.
On my eighteenth birthday, I packed all my worldly goods
into a typewriter case. At that point, I didn't even

(16:04):
have a guitar anymore. And I left home and went
to meet a friend of mine who was a drummer
and we were going to start a band. And he
wasn't supposedly in Ocean City, so I got on a bus.
It was my eighteenth birthday, So the first thing I
did is I went to sixty nine Street, right across
in the sixty nine Street station and registered for the
draft and yikes, yeah, yikes. And then I got on

(16:30):
a bus to Ocean City and met up with this guy. Well,
I didn't meet up with him right away because apparently
he and he was hanging out with some guys who
were stealing park benches and hiding them in their garage
in Ocean City. And so I had to find a
place to stay overnight until he had his court date
the next day. And then wait, why would they still

(16:52):
park benches in Ocean City? This is in nineteen sixty
six anything, okay, yeah, yeah, And so you know, I
went to his house with him and his parents. A
couple of days later, we went to see um, The
Birds and the Shadows of Night at a summerstock tent
little concert thing. So it was the Birds, they were

(17:13):
big on the radio, The Shadows of Night they had
a hit, and a local band called Woody's Truck Stop. Okay.
We were kind of excited to see them because I
knew about them through seeing a picture of one of
the guitar player, one of the guitar players in it
might have been Time magazine or something. Because he grew

(17:36):
his hair long and beat the system because I was
having trouble all the time. I was always growing my
hair and they're always sending me home and my dad
would send me to the barber. And this was just
an endless cycle. And he essentially beat the system. He
was a straight a student, and so a judge said,
you can't not educate them, so they made him. They

(17:56):
made the school provide them with uh private telephone line.
And there was a picture of him at a desk
with his long hair and a little speaker phone. And
I thought, man, he beat the system, you know. And
the way he beat it was he said, I'm in
a band, you know, I have to have my hair long.
I'm in a band, and so and so I you know.

(18:17):
I was excited to see them, although I had never
heard them. I had no idea what kind of music
they did. But they really like they kind of like
kicked everybody's ass. I had so much energy, and they
were basically a blues band, blues and R and B.
They they did like I think they did a Salmon
Dave song, and they did a couple of blue songs
and so, god, that's that's great. Let's go see them

(18:41):
when they play at the Artist Hunt in Philadelphia, which
is no longer there. It's a little it was a
little basement club on Walnut Street, I'm just a block
past Writtenhouse Square, and held maybe eighty people something like that,
hundred people if you cram them in there. And we

(19:02):
went to see the band then, as it turned out,
their drummer was just to stand in, you know. They
could not seem to find a drummer they could keep.
As a matter of fact, the drummer on the gig
was Tim if I don't remember the name he was.
Became a famous songwriter and he wrote uh Seventh Avenue.
I think it was a hit song for art Guard
Uncle Um. But anyway, he you know, they were looking

(19:26):
for a drummer and Joe, the guy that I was with,
he was just, you know, amazing trained drummer, you know.
So he just sat down on the drum started doing
all his Buddy Rich stuff, and they said, okay, join
our band. And he was loyal enough to me for
some dumb reason, and he said, okay, but you've got
to hire him. My friend here the guitar player as well,

(19:46):
and they decided, okay, well we can go for that
because that allowed the so called rhythm guitar player they
come up front and play harp, and then the band
looked exactly like the Butterfield band. And so that was
my real gig, first time I ever got paid real money.
And it lasted for him maybe six months or something

(20:08):
like that, and then I then I formed an ass
you you mentioned, um upper Darby, I have to ask
you if you've spent any time in val Seedley's record store,
which is still open and up and running to this day. Now,
where was that, um, just in relationship to where you

(20:29):
catch the l I would say it's like two or
three blocks away. I mean technically around that's around the
sixth to ninth Street area. Yeah, around the sixty Night
Street area. I mean technically, I would say that he's
the number one distributor. And while at least the sign
says in the East Coast, I'm certainly now in the
world of the East Coast. Well, yeah, I mean you

(20:53):
go there and his where did you say, Steve that
he has at least like six hundred thousand, Yeah, it's
it's it's still there. I'm still open. So once a
year I'll take a maybe a two day trek and
get lost in in his Uh, where's that in relationship
to the tower theater? Cross around the corner if you

(21:16):
go to if you go to a tower theater, I
would say it's just slightly slightly around the corner. It's
like walking distance. I remember there used to be a
place downtown on Chestnut Street that was one of those,
you know, one of those places that had like every single,
every obscure single that you're looking for. Right now, he's

(21:38):
managed to just stay open and and you know pretty
much people just take pilgrimage there and do like week
week long great diggers. Yes, exactly. You know he's okay
post Rhona. Yeah, now he he's he lives a lunar,
you know, nine records. He's like Harvey PEACR. Did you

(22:04):
know who he is? Harvey p. Car Now Harvey pea Car.
He used to he would be on the David Lemmerman
Show every once in a while, a guy from Cleveland, Ohio,
like very angry, but his life's um work was essentially
collecting vinyl and um. I went to his house once
and for an individual person, I don't know how he

(22:25):
found the time, you know, to collect the catalog, so
much stuff. But I guess it's because he yet, you know,
he worked at the post office. Okay, so you didn't
see you never know. So with the with the with
the NAZ that was yr When did you guys, you
guys got signed in sight? I think it was around

(22:47):
in the band sort of formed the band in the
summer of sixty seven, and it wasn't too long before
we got kind of discovered and whisked off to to
New York not New York City, actually Great Neck Long Island.
The guy who took over managing us, he he lived

(23:10):
in a really nice neighborhood. His name was John Curland
and he actually lived next door to Mary Travers of Peter,
Paul and Mary. And he was and he was, um
a publicist and um. One of the great things about
that was and when I would go to his office,
he was still at all of the latest releases, you know,

(23:31):
like who is this iron Butterfly? And what the hell
is a Buffalo Springfield? And you know that sort of thing.
You know, you get you know, we get the records
before they ever got into the stores because they were
promos and in that sense, you know, we were always
like slightly ahead of whatever was um was going on

(23:53):
in the public musically, but he really didn't know anything
about managing a band, you know, and he kind of
stuck us all together in a house in Great Neck
where and said, I don't want you guys to play
until you've got a record deal because I want to
be able to set you know, like a high ticket
price or something like that. And ultimately, you know, that

(24:13):
philosophy killed the band because you know, the only thing worse,
you know than being in a band and fighting on
the road, you know, is being in a band and
stuck in a house somewhere and fighting all the time,
you know, because you don't get to break it up
with any playing. So that to me was a big,

(24:35):
a big disappointment. And as a matter of fact that
my time and then NAS only lasted about eighteen months,
but we managed to get two records out. Was there
any I was those kids to know it? Was there
any crossover overlap between Naz and Utopia, another band you produced.
Were there any guys that were in NAZ that went
onto that band or No, there weren't, But ironically enough,

(24:59):
Rick Nielsen and Robin Sander of Cheap Trick eventually they
became members of the NAZ for a brief period of
time until the band changed its name to the Sick
Men of Europe. Then eventually they left that and and
started Cheap Trick. And then I did, years later produce

(25:19):
a Cheap Trick record. Which one did you produce? Next position? Please? Um?
I didn't have any big hit singles on it, but
they didn't have any big hit singles after that much anyway,
So um yeah, my band we uh actually sampled um
a song you produced off Utopia legally sample I might

(25:41):
we sampled Eternal Love off the Good Morning Sunshine off
the excellent Cool sample Away. I've never never bothered me,
you know, people sampling stuff. I always thought it was
sort of flattering, you know, when someone would, um would
accerpt your music. Keep that in mind, Well it should

(26:04):
be it should be noted that, you know, many people
think that Hello It's Me made its debut on something
anything when the actuality it appeared on the NAS record. Um. However,
for a lot of black people, I need one of them.
But Hello, Hello, Hello, okay, I would really show my age. Honestly,

(26:31):
through my first hearing of that version, it was groove
theory like straight up god like groove theory. They because
they covered it in like ninety five. I want to say,
that was the first time. You're telling me that you
never had a mom or grandma that cleaned the house
on the weekend, not to that song. No, I mean

(26:54):
we had live it out right, it's top five odds.
That was my first time. My Osley's was like because
my mother was younger. So Osley's was like between you
know what I mean, it was, I'll give you that. Yeah,
it was all up. So yeah when I heard, I
was like, oh, this is damn but did this Yeah,

(27:16):
that was my first time I heard it was making
me feel better that a fellow Philadelphia and so it's
even more full. That is hilarious. Wow, that's amazing. So
the one who got introduced to the song by the
actual song, well, like you pointed out there not the original.

(27:38):
The original was was on the NAS record, right, that's
a The original was like you likely wouldn't recognize it
because it was like a really dirgy tempo, really slow
and sappy. And I heard that version on the NAS
then even and I didn't play guitar on I played vibes,

(27:59):
no guitar than version. I guess you're the first person
that we interviewed that even put their footprints into psych
rock or what they call progressive I mean progressive at
least under that under that umbrother was it was the
basic mind state too, rebel against whatever the status quo was. Like,

(28:24):
what was your thoughts on Uh, I'm trying to think
of like commercial albums that push the envelope, like say, uh,
the First Couple of Love or the first couple of
Yes records, you know, with the um first couple of
Genesis records. We'll see there was a whole there was
a difference between like a so called American prague and

(28:47):
English progue rock, because English prog rock was inspired by
classical music and you know, and more classical forms and
old maybe something to some extent folk music, English type
type folk music, whereas American prog rock was more informed
by jazz and acts like Returned Forever and Weather Report

(29:11):
and so what we were doing by that time, you know,
with some weird combination of all of those influences, whether Report,
My Vision, New Orchestra, Yes, you know, Jenniss, General Giant,
you know, all of those, um, the English prog rock,
which was more you know, class classically inspired that classical themes,

(29:32):
and the American prog rock, which had more jazz, was
jazz inspired in jazzy or themes. So somewhere in the
middle it met because we had the way that we
would write was we would all just sit around in
the studio and everybody just throw ideas out and we'd
figure out how it glue them together. And everybody had,

(29:53):
you know, different things that they were listening to at
the time. John C. Glar base player, he'd probably be
listening to a lot of Return for ever and uh,
but we would you know, work other stuff in, like
American classics like Aaron Copeland. Yeah. So around that time,
like what were what were the artists or the albums

(30:15):
that were blowing your mind? Like were you anti Sergeant
Pepper's or anti Sergeant Pepper? Well, I was. I had
an interesting reaction to Sergeant Pepper because I was teetotaler
until I was twenty one. I did I didn't no drugs,
that never drank alcohol. I had no idea what people
were talking about when they were high. And when Sergeant

(30:39):
Pepper came out, I was kind of disappointed in it
because the album before which was Revolver. I thought was
an incredible record just from the standpoint of the songwriting
and the and the production innovations that went into it.
And it seemed like, you know, they were just reinventing
music all the time. And and Sergeant Pepper was just

(31:02):
very imitative of of English music hall kind of yeah
that that sort of stuff. Well, you know, it's where
it was, you know, circus music, that sort of thing,
and uh And people will say, like, you know, it's
a completely different album when you're on acid, you know,
And I thought, well and that I said, well, I

(31:23):
don't take acid, you know, so it's kind of like
I thought, I must be missing something here. And so
it never affected me the way that it did everyone else.
But years later I kind of, you know, I got
a little more into it, and mostly because of the
quality of the sound. There's a certain there's a space
that they created in there that I don't think existed

(31:45):
on a lot of records previous to that, of an
atmosphere or a sonic space. And I grew to appreciate that,
and I grew to be less offended by things like
within You and without you. M So what led to
uh you leaving uh NAS and starting your own what

(32:06):
was the process and starting your own solo work. Part
of it was, I guess the inevitability of me absorbing
absorbing broader influences than the ones that originally went into
the NAZ. We characterized and as as a combination of
The Who and the Beach Boys. In other words, we

(32:27):
wanted to do that. We wanted to perform like The
Who at Yeah and the Story Everything, but be able
to do harmonies like the Beach Boys. And it's not
that much of a stretch because the Beach Boys was
Keith Moon's favorite band, and that's why the The Who
did a cover version of Barbara. They would let him

(32:48):
sing that every night on stage. I got completely enthralled
with Laura Nero and Eli and The Thirteenth Confession when
that album that just been up the skies for me,
and I had never heard anyone sort of like be
so revelatory in their performance, really interesting and intricate in

(33:11):
the songwriting and very sophisticated in the harmonics. And of
course she sund great and I was so kind of
like taken with her that I asked my manager, John
Curland at the time if he could somehow get me
an audience with her, and so he called up David Geffen,
who was an accountant at Columbia Records at the time,

(33:35):
but it was kind of like the contact guy to
Laura Nero and managed to She allowed me to come
up to her apartment in the Dakota and she made
um Tuna Fish castrole, which is the only thing she
knew how to make, and that's why her publishing company
was called Tuna Fish Music. And she played the piano

(33:59):
and sang, you know, saying all decent. Played the piano
and wanted me to sing along, but I was just
too petrified. But the thing I remember from is she
let her fingernails grow so long that they curled over,
you know, like her fingernails were like at least three long,
and so and so when she was playing the piano,
when this clattering noise, you know, and I don't so
I don't remember hearing that on the record, you know. Um,

(34:21):
But she called me back. Like two weeks later, I
went up to visit her again. She asked if I
would be her band leader, and I, you know, so
I have to think about it, but I knew that
I couldn't go to The Vernaz had just signed a
record contract and our first album was about to come out.
But between the first and second albums, I started writing
like Laura Nero and none of that fit and this,

(34:44):
uh it caused a big debacle. During the recording of
the second album, which was originally a double album, but
half of it I was singing and it was all
Laura neuro songs, So essentially they cut the album in half,
and when they did, I quit the band and lived
on the street for a while until the partner of

(35:06):
the guy who was managing the Naz looked me up.
He had gone to work for Albert Grossman, and Albert said,
you know, I want you to go out and find
some young talent, because everybody I got his old, you know,
he you know, he had Bob Dylan, and he had
Peter paulm Mary, and then then he was getting into
some more contemporary X. But the only one that he

(35:27):
ever actually signed was Janis Joplin, and within a year
she was gone. Correct. I was supposed to producer, but
you know that all these things don't always work out,
you know, there's some in retrospect, I deduced that the
problem was that she didn't really like making records. Um,

(35:51):
she liked performing in from an audience, and records, you know,
there was no audience there and so which just like
she was lost in the studio wasn't for her. It
wasn't for her. She needed the response of an audience.
And I'm you know, I'm in the studio. I'm just
thinking about musical concerns and stuff like that. So eventually
she got Paul Rothschild to finish the record. And Paul

(36:11):
Rothschild is one of these producers who who knows almost
nothing about music, you know, but knows how to knows
how to pump an artist stuff. You know. It's like
that was great, you know, that was It doesn't matter
how terrible it was. That was just great. Can you
do another one? You know, like that? And eventually accidentally
you get the performance that you keep. But the whole thing,

(36:33):
you know, was more psychology than you know, actual musicology.
And at that time that was my extremely weak suit.
I was only in my very early twenties. And hey, Todd,
you briefly, you briefly went over to struggle, but we
do that kind of fast. Sometimes you said you were homeless.
I was, well, I wasn't literally homeless because I was

(36:56):
still signed to screen Gems as writer through the contract.
Through the nasive contract they had they had apartments, you know,
in various major cities in l a and in New
York where they would just put songwriters up for you know,
I don't know, songwriting sessions or whatever. They just happened

(37:16):
to have these places. So I was staying in one,
but you know, I didn't have a lease or anything
like that. And at that point I was spending most
of my time with clothing designers in the West Village.
I was designing and installing lights and a dance club,
was doing no music whatever and stuff like that. When

(37:38):
when this guy discovered me and brought me into the
Grossman organization and started pairing me up with everybody that
was on the roster because a lot of the artists,
we're not making the transition into the seventies. Some of
them hadn't fully made the transition into the sixties. But
I started doing like Ian and still Via and James

(38:00):
Cotton and ultimately the Butterfield Band. And the mandate most
of the time was make the record sound more modern,
you know, make the record sound contemporary somehow. Um so
I strove to do that, and I appreciated that. And
then my big biggest break probably came when I well

(38:21):
stage freight with the band, because the band was like
the biggest band in the world at that moment, and
so getting my name on stage fright kind of got
a whole bunch of other stuff right after that. Hall
of Notes was among them Graham Funk, Railroad Finger, you know,
and et cetera. Only only because of my affinity for

(38:48):
collecting like weird rock rock rock stuff for sampling purposes
or whatever. So there's a there's a group called Paris
that uh that's been sampled a lot and in the
hip hop community with a drummer uh named Hunt Sales
on the comedian Suppie Sales. Is it true he's on runt?

(39:09):
And if he's that's the case, he's he was a kid. Yes,
he was a kid. I first met drumming on your
album as what like fifteen something, that's fifteen sixteen something
like that. He was in his thirties when Bowie put
U Yeah, that's yeah, it's so he was that dope

(39:32):
at the age of fourteen fifteen, he was he was
getting drum lessons from well, people don't know this probably
if you know who SUPI Sales is, because people probably
don't know who Supper Sales on Motown, which people don't
know that you can do it in your house. Yeah,

(39:53):
do you guys know he was a comedian right he
was on He was a Saturday morning Uh, he was
like Saturday Morning Saturday afternoon kids show host. Um. That's
how he got famous because that his show went coast
to coast when he became the Super Sales Show. But

(40:14):
previous to that, he was a local late night host
in Cleveland, and he would have you know, he was
like Johnny Carson, and he would have all the great
all the jazz greats come in and play on his
show and talk on his talk show. And so he
knew everybody. I remember going with him in hunting Tony
to see like an eighty five year old Gene Crooper

(40:39):
play at the jazz club that was in the Um
in the Plaza Hotel, in the basement of the Plaza Hotel.
It's so funny. Jean krew but grinning like he always did,
but could barely lit the sticks off the drum. But
you know, he knew everybody in jazz and Hunt got
lessons from Louis Belson, you know, one of the great

(41:01):
technique drummers you know, of all time and one of
the and the first guy I think to do double
bass drumps. I met them at a place called um
Steve Paul's the scene there used to be in New
York City, and in a lot of cities there used
to be a lot of music clubs where they serve
no liquor. For instance, the the Cafe a Go Go

(41:22):
in New York City, which was a basement club, very
weird configuration. But I saw Cream's first gigs in the US.
There saw Butterfield Band probably four times there. I saw
John Mayll and you know all of these and and
Richie Havens before would stalk. You know, you know, all

(41:43):
of these greats would play in this tiny little club.
But but you know, I mean the admission was probably
ten bucks and the one drink minimum was like a
flower vase full of ice cream, you know, like a
giant milkshake. Because you know, these places were all opened
underage kids. And Steve Paul's the scene was the same

(42:04):
way was you know, all ages if your mom would
let you, because they serve no liquor, and it was
the same kind of place. You saw the very first
gigs of Sean On for instance, the very the very
some of the very first gigs of just some of
the strangest acts, like well the Nice, remember the Nice

(42:24):
that was um Keith Emerson's band before E L p Um.
I saw David Clayton Thomas in a Canadian band called
Raven before he joined Blood, Sweat and Tears. You know.
The house band was the McCoy's uh hang on sloopyri

(42:45):
Rick Derringer and as his little brother Randy. They were
the house band. And since it was all ages, and
since you never knew was going to play there, especially
the jam sessions which would happen after the billed acts
came on, they were amazing. You know. I was standing
on stage one time with I'm trying to remember, but
it was like Dwayne Almond and uh you know, the

(43:08):
drummer from led Zeppelin and the bass player from another band.
You know, just the jam sessions were amazing. I never
got the gym with Jimmie Hendrix because I walked right
by him as he was coming into the club because
I thought he was taller than he was, you know,
but his afron only came out to my nose, so
I thought he was actually kind of a short guy.

(43:30):
So uh so I walked right past him and everyone
got to watch him jam. So but anyway that you're
you're actually confirming the rumor that Hendricks was supposed to
be an e LP. I didn't hear that, but that's
an interesting it was. Yeah, there is a rumor that,
um the name of the group was supposed to be

(43:52):
called help Emerson Lake in Powell. It was Lake Palmer,
it was late Palmer Power. I'm something of cold Power
right now. I'm sorry cold Yeah, I know, right pal
he was the original drummer in Journey Trivia. So anyway

(44:20):
you should be all right, I'd say we'd grab Todd
to be our seventh member. Of course, so I'm skipping
over to something anything which, first of all, I know,
I know back then at least for for a double
album to get released was a big deal. I mean

(44:43):
now it's nothing, but um and normally I would think
that double albums were a thing for U. I mean
proven acts that are you know, multi platinum and all
those things. But I meant seventy two was just the
level of the level playing fleet field was clear and

(45:03):
things were being defined. But the risks that the artistic
risks that you took on that record, Like what was
your mind state during that period? I was in kind
of a great position and it's affected the way I'd
think about making records ever since, because I was producing
records for UM, for the Grossman organization, but I was

(45:27):
still writing songs and I have musical ideas, but I
had no inclination at all and becoming like an actual,
you know, bank double artists that had to go out
on the road and play and stuff like that. I
enjoyed being in the studio too much, so I wanted
to get these ideas out of my system. And I

(45:47):
asked Albert who or whoever I was dealing with. I said,
can you give me a budget to make a record
of my own? And I said, well, you've been doing
all this work for us, Sure we'll give you a budget.
And then I recorded Runt and they were kind of
surprised at the result, you know, they thought it was
going to be a piece of crap, and as it
turned out, there was a minor hit single on it,

(46:08):
so that kind of sealed my fate. I had to
continue making records because I had had a single then
the next um and the first record was just a
scatter brained effort because I had never made an album
of my own and I just wanted to capture all
of these various musical ideas and to work with musicians
that I really wanted to work with. Then I got

(46:33):
to my second album. Between the first and second album,
I discovered marijuana, and and ironic thing is it gave
me a much more ordered approach to songwriting, you know,
in other words, yeah, it was. It made me less
scatter brained when it came to songwriting. So the next
record that I made, which was called The Ballad, and

(46:55):
that one really fell through the cracks because Bearsville changed
their distribution from Ampex, which was a tape company, to
Warner Brothers right in the middle when that album got released.
So it just kind of so Bearsville was not your label.
I always always thought that was your indie label or whatever. No,

(47:15):
that's Albert Grossman's. Yeah, but you know, since I was
working for him, I was on it, and uh so
that was surprising. And then the second record was just
much more coherent and much more songwriter really record. And
then when I got to something anything. I moved to
l A for a year, got a house so that
I would be you know, I have nothing to do

(47:38):
but make music, and I would record in uh this
little studio called I D Sound where we did the
NAZ records during the day. Then I go home at
night and write and and do some other recording. I
read a rented an eight track machine and recorded some
of the more bizarre things from the record, like went
to the mirror, it sounds sounds of the studio and

(48:01):
that sort of thing. Why and how did you create
intro intro meeting the sounds of the studio? Is at it?
Or or the one on the very last side, which
is uh found tapes of for my high school band
and stuff. The one on the last side where you
introduced hissing reverb and yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that it

(48:23):
sounds of the studio. Well, it was, of course, you
know the analog days, you know, and analog had its
own sort of issues and responsibilities and stuff like that,
you know, which nobody nowadays much recalls. But before you
could do a session, someone would have to come in.

(48:43):
They would have to clean the heads on the machine.
They take a swab and swab down all of the
heads and rollers and stuff on the machine. They would
lay tone down on the tape reference tone. It's kind
of like a essen for tape ops, you know, because
which is a lost art. But in the analog days,

(49:04):
you had to do all of these little rituals like
cleaning the heads and the pinch rollers and and laying
tone down on the tape, and being the guy who
gets yelled at when you accidentally punching in the wrong place,
or and or the guy who gets yelled at because

(49:24):
the tape broke or something like that. So, you know,
analog recording there was this whole other range of issues
you had to be conscious of that. Of course the
music consumer never really considers. But since it was analog,
you know, in all the records I make, at least
at least somewhere there's an analog glitch in it, you know,

(49:48):
something where accidentally the tape got pinched or creased, but
it's in the middle of a performance and you can't
do anything about it, you know. And it's before digital
where you could drop in something from another place, you know,
and so it just goes onto the record um and
most people it goes by most people don't even notice it,

(50:08):
So no knowing knowing what you know now having dabbled
in both. Uh, you know the world of analog and digital.
What is your what is your preference? Do you prefer
the the beautiful imperfection of the analog world or are
you consistently still working for looking for the best experience

(50:33):
of sound that you can get in the digital world. Well,
I think a lot of people forget that, you know,
the analog world was an entire mel you. It wasn't
simply the fact that records were on vinyl. It was
the fact that portable music systems had not been invented yet,
and so if you wanted a personal listening experience, you

(50:55):
had to go to your own home and sit in
the sweet spot in your own system and listen to
the record. Ideally, nothing goes wrong in that situation. The
record does not skip where nobody dances across the room
and makes the tone arm hop around or you know,
or the base on the record does not interfere and

(51:17):
start to cause a rumble, and other sorts of you
know artifacts, or the fact that the plain fact that
the sound on a vinyl LP is worse than the
center than it is at the outside of the record
because you're trying to put the equal amount of sound
in smaller and smaller real estate, you know, as the

(51:38):
record proceeds, So people tend to forget about all this.
I'm sorry, I know that to most people that to
most of you guys, that just sounded like one plus
two equals three. But to me it just went, well, okay,
here's the deal in the vinyl world. In vinyl world,
it's probably to your best interests to keep your your

(52:00):
time under sixteen minutes because that way, the maximize side,
you get the best sound. So the reason why they
make twelve inch singles, the reason why they make twelve
singles is so that you can have one song on
that record, so the it's it's louder when it's just

(52:21):
maximum maximum, maximum volume. Yea. Now, for instance, side two
of Michael Jackson's Off the Wall record has six songs
on it, so the records are the grooves are really
smaller as opposed to side one, which is four songs
and louder. So if I were to play the title cliff,
I would play Off the Wall in the club from

(52:42):
that album. The volume would be very low, so that
I would yeah, as opposed to so yeah back in
the day. I mean the reason why we use computer
technology now the DJ is so that now I can
make it loud as ship. Wow. It used to be problematic,
like if you turn the volume up you would hear

(53:05):
like here low wind feedback and all those things. How
many people y'all just sent back to listen to like
their old vinyl Like that's that's what okay? Yeah, the
more the more it's it's problematic. Like probably one of
the worst records I know that has this system, no, no, god,
the worst mastered albums ever. I was gonna say, uh uh,

(53:31):
the def Jam's initial release of Public Enemy Sphere of
a Black Planet, where they actually try to cramp ten
songs on one side, like they didn't make it a
double album. They're just like ten songs on one side,
ten songs on the other side, and thus sounded like this.
The more music you squeeze on a record, the softer

(53:54):
it gets. Well, it's funny. I didn't discover that record
until I got it on a on a c D. Yeah,
I mean it was me. I mean, there's an amazing technology.
That's an amazing record though, that's the that's a Sergeant
Pepper of hip hop. That record, Yeah, that record, you know,
influenced a white guy like me. You know, it's really

(54:17):
you know that. Can you do that? Can you actually
do that legally? Yeah? Well we're doing it. We're not
doing it, So you just do until you get caught. Yeah,
you just know. I just you know, I love that record.
I go back to it with regularity. All right, Wait,
now you see damn. So I don't even want to

(54:39):
go go to ask him, ask him what this? Well, no,
I was gonna leap right to the hermit of Mink,
but I don't. I don't want to lose faithful and
all the other stuff. But all right, I know I
booked you the last time when I ask you about
them out of Pia. But that's just not normal. It's
not normal, not normal. It's not normal to be making

(55:01):
ship like that. Uh long did it take you to
make that song? And where did you? Did you just
have a sound effects record and be like, Okay, I'm
gonna figure out almost craft a song. Some OF's gonna
sound effects, some of it is sound effects, and then
that's you know, a lot of it is just me
making noises with my mouth and never you even bothered

(55:22):
me that you would actually make the sounds by yourself.
I thought like that, Yeah, I thought you were just
like one by one, like cutting pasting. Well, obviously some
of the sounds are not human derived, so they would
have to be sampled from something, probably from a sound
effects record or even me like making some foley for it.
But um, well, yeah, what I'm trying to lead to

(55:44):
is that, I mean, between you and Miles Davis well
and well you know what with TiO Marcia, uh Marcio's
this last name, see with how they crafted bit just brew.
I mean, these albums that you're making are just they're
they're readefining what you can do and can't do with technology.

(56:08):
So was it the fact that you just felt like,
I mean, were you ever just unsatisfied with the studio?
Like what studios were you looking for to give you
maximum creation? And did you everything of the day would
come that something like pro tools would come along, like

(56:29):
that would make your life easier. Well, um, I got
into the idea of having a studio of my own
on Wizard or True Star. Was I thought, if you're
going to go musical exploring, you know, if you're gonna
go to musical big game hunting or whatever. No, that's
that's Paul Simon. If you're gonna go musically exploring, you

(56:50):
need to be able to do things sometimes that they
won't allow you to do in a regular studio. Like
I said, if we own into a regular studio, let's say,
but it don't turn that now passed there, you know.
But if I had my own studio, well that's it's
because they have to, you know, turn the studio over

(57:12):
to somebody else. When you're equipment, it's like, you know,
it's not just yours to do anything you want with.
But when you have your own studio, that's exactly what
it is. So we would put the knobs wherever we wanted,
you know. In other words, we wouldn't even look at
the meters. We would just listen, you know, and turn
a knob until it sounded right, you know, and sometimes

(57:33):
you know, the meters are just pinned in the red.
But that's how you get that sound. And ever since,
feel off that album it sounds like that. I love
that song. Man. Oh yeah. A lot of it is
you know, just us, you know, not not being not
being like you would be in a normal studio like
in a in a normal studio, you would have somebody

(57:58):
make sure that the noise reduction was in the right
the switches on the noise reduction we're in the right
locations depending on whether you're recording or playing back, and
we would find ourselves doing things like putting noise reduction
on something and then bouncing it to another track forgetting

(58:18):
to put the noise reduction into the decode door of it,
you know. So essentially it would be like the most
squishy limitter that you ever heard, and the highs would
just be the highest highs because we were using dB
X desoline or compression and I won't explain what that
is now, but essentially, um, it's accidents. You know. Half

(58:41):
of what happened on that record was accidents. I was wiring.
I was on my back underneath the console wiring it
while the musicians are coming in for the first session,
you know, and we're just finding channels that work. You know,
let's mark that one. I'll fix that later, but we
just when we get enough channels to record everybody. Okay.

(59:04):
It was like that all the time. It was just
guerilla recording because you know, we had no studio manager.
Nobody ever paid anything to use the studio. Um, it
was just we would contribute to each other's projects and stuff.
It was a little musical collective. It was great. And
your your label, your label like Bearsville. How were they? Um?

(59:27):
Were they supportive? Because I mean because a lot of
stuff you were doing, I mean it was really unorthodox.
And you know, a song like I Saw the Light
or you know, Cold Morning, like you know just which
is some of my favorite songs about you. Um, but
like those are kind of just, you know, kind of
easier to digest. But then on the Wizard a True Star,
you went really kind of heavy. But have you ever

(59:50):
got John Lennon's reaction to rock and roll pussy? No,
not that particular thing, um uh. And that was about
It wasn't particularly about I don't think it was about
John Lennon, although I can't remember exactly when that press
manufactured feud was. But yeah, the um uh, some people

(01:00:11):
at the label really freaked out. My friend Paul Fishkin,
who later went on to found Modern Records, he was
running the label at the time, and after something anything
that had like three hit singles on it, I give
him Always a True Star, which doesn't, which doesn't even
have spaces between the songs. You know, you know that ship,

(01:00:36):
I know. But then you know he is freaking out.
You know, he's saying, how do I how do I
sell this? You know, this is the lost album. Now. Meanwhile,
Albert Grossman is just tickle pink about the whole thing.
You know, he says, Oh yeah, let's drop the bomb
on this one. We're gonna we're gonna make this a
double gatefuld die cut album cover. You know, we're gonna

(01:00:57):
do records in colored vine While we did limited run
of colored vinyl, is something anything, but we're gonna do
some colored vinyl in there. We're gonna get Patti Smith
to do a you know, a little poem on a
piece of paper and shove it in there at a
postcard so we can solicit addresses from people and put
their names in the next package. These these were all

(01:01:20):
his ideas. You know, I never had the guts to say,
give me a double you know, give me a gatefold
die cut record, you know, to hold only one record.
You know it wasn't a double album. But that record
also was the epitome of that problem with too much
program on your vinyl, and I think it's either on
that record or another record. I put something on it

(01:01:43):
and the company let it pass. But it was really
sort of in violation of general policy. I said, this record,
you know, there's a lot of music on here. I
advise that the very first time you play you record
it to tape and then listen to it from tape.
After that, we because you'll be lucky if you get
through once on the on the turntable. So with uh,

(01:02:08):
your your album afterwards, just based on the lyrical content
and whatnot. What was I mean by this point you
were an established you know, and and an established start,
Like how how was it handling the success that you
were gaining because I guess, you know, you said at
the top of the show that you really didn't have

(01:02:29):
any expectations to become, like, you know, uh, a big
star or those things, and now you're dealing with it,
Like what was it like to deal with it? And
too do these songs in concerts? And well, even with that,
like you're such a studio wizard, how were you able
to kind of execute these ideas on stage by this point? Well,

(01:02:53):
I had to learn how to sing in front of
an audience. I didn't. I was never a singer. I
always delegated the singing to somebody else. The first time
that I went out on the road was probably after
after Runt, after we got to Get You a Woman,
and I put a band together, uh, mostly of musicians
called the Hello People, who were a group of rock

(01:03:15):
and roll mimes. And uh, I couldn't make it twenty
minutes into a set, and in those days a set
was like thirty minutes. You know, I couldn't make it.
I couldn't sing for you know, more than fifteen twenty
minutes at a time. And it took me literally years
to develop my voice to the point that I could

(01:03:35):
sing a whole show. Um, the irony being now that
I can sing all night, it doesn't seem to affect me.
Were there any of your peers that you look to
the kind of did you do it in a way
like anybody else? Any other artists that you looked at
and like, okay, peers you mean the ones that are
still alive at the time. How to do it is
live things? What a fifteen minutes? That's what I meant, Like,

(01:03:59):
oh yeah, well, you know it's not an uncommon thing.
And what happens is most people see I always had
I guess I would write aspirationally. I would write to
the very ends of my range when I was in
the studio, because all I have to do is like
hit the note once and then we'll punch it in
to that, you know, just punch in every freaking note,

(01:04:19):
you know. But then you have to go out on
the road and sing all those notes in a row.
And you know, I was just wasn't prepared for that.
But what a lot of people will do, They'll just
simply they'll compensate, you know, they'll say, Okay, I'll just
lower the key, or I won't right into that range,
you know, I'll I won't, I won't strange, I won't

(01:04:42):
strain myself that way. But I was still always aspirational.
I just you know, there were singers that I admired
that I wanted to sound like, and so I just
kept trying to do that. You know, I was a
giant Stevie wonder fan. You know, I was always trying
to sing like Stevie wonder At, which is an impossible
thing to try and attempt in the first place. But

(01:05:05):
I got just so much inspiration from his singing, and
more importantly, you know, it was a weird artifact of
the way they recorded at Motown, and particularly the way
that he's his voice got recorded. They put so much
compression on his voice because probably because he's so loud,
you know that you could hear every breath he took.

(01:05:25):
You could hear every breath he was taking in between
the notes. And it taught me how to breathe when
you sing. It's more about having wind than it is about,
you know, your throat and trying to stretch it hard
enough to get to those high notes, you know. So
I just I learned a lot from listening to other

(01:05:46):
people saying. But that was, you know, a revelatory moment
when I suddenly realized I should just go and go
in my car, drive around for hours, screaming my head off,
just drive around screaming your head off. And after enough
of that, I started to gain stamina, you know, to
be able to actually hit those notes. Is it possible

(01:06:07):
for you to listen to music by other artists and
not get in, uh, sort of the analytical mode of
I wonder what might they used, or what tubing or
what the engineering was, and it's too much compression, and
I would have changed this, And like, can you just

(01:06:28):
are you able to listen to music without dissecting it
as you hear it as an engineer or as a producer, Well,
like all things, you know, it really depends on the
strength of the performance and the music. And this is
in line with my philosophy as a producer. The audience

(01:06:48):
at large doesn't give a damn about so called sound quality.
They think when they hear it the first time, they
think that's how it's supposed to sound. They never think
is too much reverb on this? Or you know that's
you know, I can't hear this quite. They may have
some they may have some subjective opinion about it overall,
but they don't know enough about the process to be

(01:07:11):
able to pinpoint what it is. So for the most part,
if it's a great song, and if it's you know,
a vivacious performance, you know, if it's a great performance
of that song, people don't care at all what it
sounds like, you know, which is why I just can
never get into these high fidelity arguments, you know, with

(01:07:31):
Neil Young or whoever you know that you need, you know,
two hundred and fifty six thousand bits of second you know,
probably here the sounds, Yeah, use use it much, you know,
I don't know. The most hysteric, most hysterical part about

(01:07:52):
it is that it's coming from Neil Young, you know
who who did an album of him standing in front
of a stack of marshals making feedback. You know. So
he's talking about, you know, the finer points of audio fidelity. Um.
But you know, I've always always maintained that that is
better too, you know, if an act comes in, which

(01:08:17):
is one of the reasons why I learned engineering, because
you don't want to waste a lot of time on that.
If an act is ready to make the music, that's
my you know, my number one priority. Before I go
into the studio with someone, I want to hear the material.
I want to know that we're not in there like
pulling our PUDs, you know, over something, or that we
suddenly got a call halt to the session because we

(01:08:38):
have to write a bridge, you know. Um. So I
always want to hear the material before we go into
the studio to have the confidence that we're going to
be making music in there and not talking about non
musical issues. That's the most important thing. Second most important
thing is, you know, is to get the artists in
a mood to deliver that song, you know, to actually

(01:09:01):
you know, which is another reason why I like them
to have written and ideally have performed the material before
you get into the studio to record it. It makes
such a difference because if somebody's reading the lyrics off
of a piece of paper while they're doing it, they're
not really thinking about what it means. They're just trying
to get the words right, you know. And what you

(01:09:24):
really want to do is convey the meaning of the
words with your singing. So number one, the same thing.
Good singing and good songs that really inspire the performers
get the performers to be inspired. Nobody really cares that
much about the sound of it unless you've made it
incredibly terrible. I had a question about about can we

(01:09:47):
Still be Friends? A lyric your lyrics? I don't know
if it was lyrics ad lib? Can we still get together? Sometimes?
That's like when my favorite part in song that was
heard like can we are we gonk and that's can
we do it? Can we do it? We look up
and we get some coffee. How did you mean? Well,

(01:10:10):
you know, it's it's kind of an open question. Uh,
you know, it's you know, the whole the whole tenor
of this song is you know, a lot of people
assume it's it's a romantic song. But I made a
a decision at a certain point that most people when
they use the word love in a song context, they're
more often talking about either sex or ownership. And I

(01:10:34):
at a certain point decide I wasn't going to use
the word at all. So for many albums, the word
love does not appear. Uh. Then I decided that it's
okay to use the word love, but try and do
it in a way that isn't doesn't make things so
specific that as all people always think it's romantic, that
everything is always about a boy and a girl. And

(01:10:54):
that's the same way about like can we still be friends?
It's assumed that it's a guy in a girl breaking up,
or a guy and a guy, or a girl and
a girl, whatever, But it isn't necessarily about that. It's like,
let's say you and a friend of yours worked really hard,
you know, to build a company up, and then you
realize you've got to leave the company. You know, we

(01:11:15):
can't do this anymore. I gotta move on to something else.
That's you know, it could be that you know, right, No, yeah,
I always uh, I saw it from the standpoint of
maybe you know, a plea for kind of like a

(01:11:36):
post amicable divorce situation or you know, kind of after
the fire has burnt out. Yeah, but it is a
very it is Yeah, can we be civil? It's more like,
you know, it's like more like the overriding messages, you know,
can can we go? Because there are because there are

(01:11:58):
situations that are exactly not the opposite, you know. It's
like there are people that you know you never want
to encounter again ever, you know. So, and I have
I don't know that I've written that song, but I
do have you know, a philosophical thing about it, you know,
which is, you know, certain people. It's if you'll excuse

(01:12:20):
the expression, I call it a tar baby syndrome, if
you recall from the Song of the South is saying,
you know, it's all it's all about Bret Rabbit and
bread Fox and bear Bear, and these are you know, antagonists.
They're always at each other, you know, messing with each
other all the time. And so Bret Rabbit finds this
big ball atar, and he says, I'm gonna play a

(01:12:41):
trick on Bear Fox and brear Bear, you know, because
I know that they were going to they mess with
strangers and stuff. So dresses it up and clothes and
sticks it on a log, and sure enough, breat Fox
and brear Bear come around start messing with it. And
what happens is that, you know, all has to happen
is you stick a finger in there and suddenly you

(01:13:01):
got it on you and you can't get it off,
and then it's suddenly and the next thing you know,
they're trying to get it off and they're just getting
more and more of it more, and to you know,
the lesson to me was, you know, there are certain
situations and certain people you should know beforehand. Don't even
touch it, you know, don't put a finger on it,

(01:13:22):
you know, because you will be paying for it for
a long time after that. And so there have been
people in my life which you know, they fall under
that category. It's they don't even you know, you can imagine, oh,
everything is gonna be fine, it won't be like it
was before, and then the next thing you know, it's
exactly like it what's before, because you changed what they didn't. Yes,

(01:13:44):
that is universal. That's a word, or at least a
day when when the cover album is made, usually it's
a period where like maybe people will run out of
ideas and you're running all the way up until uh
it's Faithful. And not to say that you weren't still
pushing the boundaries because we need to get started on

(01:14:06):
the acapella record. Yeah, but with Faithful, like, what was
the what was the idea uh behind covering those to
do those covers, because I mean the idea of doing
a cover album or conceptual cover half album, it wasn't
even a practically a thing yet. I mean, I know

(01:14:26):
that in the sixties to make records, people would, you know,
cover whatever, like a Beatles song or that sort of thing.
But what was your what was your whole ideology behind
making that record? It was actually to demonstrate how much
radio had changed in ten years. Uh. Faithful came out
in ninety six, and every song, pretty much every song

(01:14:50):
that I did um on the cover side of Faithful
was on the radio in nineteen sixty six, Okay, And
what I wanted to try and do is recreate what
it was like to listen to radio then where you
would go from like the Beatles to Bob Dylan to
you know, I didn't even cover the range of what

(01:15:11):
was happening. But growing up in Philadelphia, you know the
DJ's highlight and and um highlight. There was another DJ.
I can't remember who he was, but I mean the
sixties liberated them and they would play um, you know,
Judy Collins, and then they play the Beatles, and then
they play Bill Evans or some other jazz. And the

(01:15:34):
radio was just really interesting in those days and enable
you to discover a lot more music than they kind
of formatted radio that eventually happened. Um like by V six,
everything is syndicated radio. Everything's everybody's playing the same playlist.
So I just wanted to demonstrate, you know what, how

(01:15:57):
eclectic music could be on the radio. The other side
was just kind of a handful of songs. But it's
funny a lot of those songs on the original side
turned out to be standards that I do all the
time even to this day. So my my personal favorite

(01:16:18):
album of of your Cannon is uh Hermit A Big Hollow,
of which I well, I know that you literally did
everything by yourself. Correct. Yeah, yeah, how nerve wracking is
that process when you are your own engineer and your

(01:16:42):
own like, did you have a remote device for the
tape or did you like did you? Well, the thing
is how did you? I did not, unfortunately, did not
have a remote device or the tape. And my studio.
I was using my um, my personal studio, which was

(01:17:03):
up in Lake Hill, a little bit past Bearsville. Um.
I had a house, and then I had there was
a little barn on the property, and the barn had
a loft in it, and so I enclosed the loft
and made that the control room. But that meant that,
you know, every all the instruments of any size, drums
and such, would have to be downstairs. And so the

(01:17:26):
most nerve wracking part, of course is recording the drums,
because I would get, you know, like into it a
little ways and then screw up and I have to
run up the stairs. I was always very stingy with tape.
Um over no, no, no, I would I would just

(01:17:46):
you know, if I would mess up a take, I
would just go back and and a lot of people
they would buy many reels of tape and then would
go through make many takes of everything, and then eventually
maybe make a master reel or something. But I was
always making a master reel. I was always like going
for the one take. Then I would put a paper
leader in and start recording the rest of the real

(01:18:08):
you know. And so I was just very stingy with
tape and don't really never really made a lot of outtakes. Well,
I either got the drums right or r I didn't.
You know, It's like it wasn't the kind of thing eventually,
you know, if I got three quarters of the way
through a take, then I would might stop and pick
it up from there and then do a splice in

(01:18:30):
the tape. But I always felt that I had to
get as lead as halfway through it before um I
would consider a splice. Otherwise, you know, I would just
stop upstairs, rewind the tape, start putting record again, run
downstairs and count it in, start playing again. You know.
It's one of those things like I learned during something anything,

(01:18:52):
the first time I played the drums, the drums have
to be first. I you know, I started out thinking
I could play the piano part and that would give
me some guidance about where I was in the song.
But I could never lock into the piano, because the
piano wasn't actually, you know, in any particular strict tempo.
So I had to teach myself the song in my

(01:19:15):
head and singing in my head the whole song while
I'm playing the drums and click tracks. And because I
couldn't play that, I couldn't play the click track either.
You know, I couldn't lock to a click track. It
would just you know, it would be so obvious when
I was trying to catch up to it, you know.
But it also gives it more of a sort of natural,

(01:19:37):
natural feel. Um. You know, it's amazing. You know, a
drummer can sound like he's totally locked in time, but
then you put a click track and you find out
that it's kind of all over the place. You know,
it's feel You don't notice so much, you know, the
exact timing of of what the drums is doing. It's

(01:19:57):
more about the field as a little push and pull
happening all the time. Yeah, you know, I use a
click track, but oftentimes I have to force myself to
figure out how to purposely sound like I'm not playing
to a click treck. So, you know, even though I
consistently hear that pass in my head. I have to

(01:20:17):
now program myself to go behind it, go a little
bit ahead of it, Go behind it, go, you know,
just so that there's there's yeah that that yeah, that
there's a flow to it. Yeah. I discovered that when
I tried to make a tempo map to Dive and Girl.
Really yeah, I discovered when you know, when you actually

(01:20:38):
try and you know, the the tempo map essentially is
you change the actual speed of the recording as it
goes along to match up to some something that may
not be an you know, that might not be following
a click track. Even though the song is mostly all
the same tempo it it moves in and out and

(01:20:59):
subtle little ways which you don't discover until you try
and lock to it, right right, So okay, not knowing
the history of it because you know, well, it's no
excuse to say I was leaving when it came out,
but I purchased this record, uh, you know, in in

(01:21:23):
the last ten the fifteen years. But assuming that the
popular tortured popular ever popular tortured artist effect, um, can
I assume that, uh, your relationship with the labels sort
of went sour by that point because usually with the

(01:21:46):
album titles like that. Those those things happen. But what
also happens is I would assume that that is in
your mind whatever project, and then you mess around and
actually have because I know, being on the drum is

(01:22:07):
being the drum on day is on that record. And
so since that's your last record, am I am? I
correct in saying that the relationships soured with Bearsville by
that point, things were not great with UM with Bearsville Records.
UM it just Albert Grossman, UH was a peculiar personality

(01:22:32):
UM and tended to um go hot and cold in
some things. And even though he had a label called Bearsville,
he never really promoted anything on it. He expected Warner Brothers,
a distributor, to do everything, so he would be constantly
making deals for foreign distribution and then take all the

(01:22:54):
money and instead of promoting the records there, anything he
wouldn't build, he would build a rest strawant or something
with it, you know. So he was very much into
land ownership. So almost anything that you know that brought
an income, he would buy something and build something on it.
I felt that, you know, they first of all, weren't

(01:23:15):
taking the whole idea of of records seriously, but also
certainly not my records. It's not as if I thought that,
you know, there were a whole bunch of great hits
on on my records. You know, I've never never striven
to do that, So I don't force the label, you know, say,

(01:23:36):
to give me hits or anything like that. But at
the same time, I did expect that they would take
the record seriously because I did have an audience. And
in the end, you know, it was not as if
I was doing a spoof of a record. It was
just that I didn't bother to develop any concept behind it.

(01:23:57):
You know, most of the records that I do have
got to some overarching thing that helps me figure out
what fits in the overall picture. But history will saw
that artists that you know, this is the case with
Shout by the Asley brother, this is the case with Tequila,
is the case for even La Bamba. Like sometimes artists

(01:24:20):
will Well, what I'm trying to lead to is that
where you sacked it all at how a sports world
took to being on the trama day And it was
a funny, weird kind of thing that happened with that. Uh.
I think it started with the sports but I'm not
exactly sure, and I believe it was first like hockey

(01:24:43):
games that they started playing it. Then two football teams,
the Packers and what was then the St. Louis Rams,
started using it as their score celebration song because everybody
seemed to know it for some reason. But it was
never a hit single. Fact, it was never released as
a single. It was a B side I Think of Something,

(01:25:07):
And it was never in a technical sense written by me.
It was a song that I dreamed. I was like asleep,
I was totally asleep and the song is, you know,
playing in my sleep. I have no idea what it
means or why I should care, but I just immediately

(01:25:27):
went down to the studio and recorded everything that I
remembered from it and added words. But you know, the bang,
the drum thing was all there. It was all complete,
you know, you know, all I had to do was
was write it down. Sometimes it's not the first time
that's happened. I've had other songs that have just come
to me when I'm asleep, completely formed, and then I

(01:25:49):
have to go figure out how to remember and capture that.
But it was like some mystical being wrote that for
me and said you're not gonna understand now why you're
doing this, but years and years from now, it's gonna

(01:26:10):
make a whole lot more sense. And then and then
it actually happened. I mean, people started, aside from you know,
the public usage of the song, they started people started thinking, oh,
this is a great party theme to use for our
movie trailer, or a party theme to use for our
you know, advertising something. And that eventually peaked with Carnival

(01:26:34):
cruise lines. I'm getting six figures, big six figures a
year just for them to use that song. And I
would still be getting it except they started sinking all
those boats decided to change. Yeah, I was gonna say
that that song is the sound of a kid, a

(01:26:58):
kid's brain and he gets extra chicken fingers on his plate,
extra chicken fingers. That's the sound of a ten year
old just in this happy place. You made a record
called Arena, and um it has the song on it
called Courage that I just really love. I just think

(01:27:19):
it's just beautiful changes. Um, just a just a really
great song. I was curious to know was Arena Was
that you kind of mocking the arena rock kind of thing?
Was it like a parody or was it a sincere
tempt um because I just I mean, I love the record,
but I know, just from listen to your music kind

(01:27:40):
of your sense of humor stuff, So I was like,
is this him? Kind of it was pretty you know,
it was pretty serious about it. Um. It was the
record was um essentially me reacting to the fact that
I had not played enough guitar the last time, you know,
the first time I had that. The reaction was when

(01:28:01):
I was sometime around something anything, and I'm starting to
write all my songs on the piano less and less
on the guitar, and I'm playing less and less guitar,
and so I said, well, how can I compensate for this?
So I started Utopia specifically as a project for me
to play guitar. So I don't play any keyboards any

(01:28:21):
Utopia records. I play only guitar on Utopia records. Essentially,
around the period of Arena, I started to get the
same feeling. You know, I spent a lot of my
youth trying to learn how to play this thing, you know,
and now I'm just kind of I hardly pick it
up anymore. So I decided to decided to do something

(01:28:44):
that would basically be all guitar written. You know, everything
would be written on guitars, and it would be basically
mostly guitars, occasional keyboards and other sounds, and to really explore,
you know, what contemporary heavy guitar music could be like.
And when we found a distributor for it, they said, okay,

(01:29:06):
well you're so into playing the guitar. We just acquired
the Robert Johnson's publishing catalog and we want you to
do a cover record of Robert Johnson's song. So I
got like a double dose of guitar there. I um
did a record called Todd Rundgren's Johnson and Uh and
did nothing but Robert Johnson songs on it in the

(01:29:28):
sort of sixties white English band style, you know, where
you wouldn't recognize it as a Robert Johnson song, you know,
because it's really just there to play guitar. Soulo was
on That's that's when he first came on the show,
played with the roots for that to promote that record
Johnson the Johnson Yeah, right, Like literally, I gotta ask

(01:29:50):
about acapella because that is your I mean, there's a
bunch of creative scenes, but of of a career of
creative zenens you leave the label you make this album
in and you're basically using the tools that rappers will use.

(01:30:12):
I mean, were you one of the first people using
UH an EMU emulator, yeah, later EMU synthesizer and all
these things. First of all, going into the eighties, what
was your thought process. Did you feel as though, like, Wow,
the world's might oyster now or were you worried or

(01:30:34):
things are still pretty good? Um? For me, Utopia was
still by. We were still playing you know, arenas and
uh mostly on the strength of our shows and word
of mouth, not on kind of like huge record sales.
But we would do spectacular things, you know, flamethrowers and
falling off the pyramids and that sort of thing. So um,

(01:30:58):
so Utopia was still pretty successful and I was doing okay,
and there were still productions to be done. So you know,
it wasn't like what happened at the end of the
nineties and what has happened ever since. In that first
of all the majors have you know, kind of fallen apart.
So the kind of funding structure for records changed a lot.

(01:31:21):
Because I was making my living principally on advances for
producing other people's records, and so that all, yeah, that
all started to like fall apart throughout the nineties, and
then in the two thousand's, you know, and everything got different.
You know, everything got bifurcated. You either produce your own
records in your bedroom, or you have five producers on

(01:31:45):
one song, like Katy Berry or something like that. You know,
six songwriters and four producers, you know, because you want
it to be perfect, I guess. But um, so you know,
nowadays I do hardly any production at all. It's no
demand for it. But yeah, the the guitar, I miss it.

(01:32:08):
So but anyway, back to uh, back to uh acapella.
I had these I had these concepts that I carry
around sometimes, you know, every once in a while, get
to one and follow up on it. And the idea
of doing an acapella record or a record where all
the sound sources were from the voice or the body. Um,

(01:32:30):
what's a concept that I had had for a while.
It has certainly has its challenges, but there was, as
you mentioned, some new tools like samplers and things, so
I could do that beatbox stuff that eventually became so popular.
You know, in other ways, overblowing a microphone. You don't
want to make a snare drum or bass drum or
something like that. I would do the noise into the

(01:32:52):
sampler and then have there was no MIDI yet tying
everything together, so I'd have to sort of like manually
play the drum part, you know, on the keys, all
the way through the song. And that's why the time
is kind of like a little funny in some places,
because I'm really just playing the keyboard. There's no sequence
or anything. Um. And then you know that with that

(01:33:14):
sampling capability, I could do, you know, things like, you know,
make an instrument out of my voice and play chords
with it, something that you couldn't do before. Uh So
the technology was an enabler. The technology evolved to the
point that I could do more than just simply singing
with myself. I could create a broader Pelletti of sounds

(01:33:36):
and make the whole thing more interesting. Man, we gotta
talk about Bed out of Him about right, one of
the biggest selling albums like ever, Um, how did you
and meet? How did I look up? Well? There there
are two people involved in meat Low for there were
two people involved. That was Jim Steinman who essentially wrote

(01:33:58):
all the material, and meat Loaf, who was the the performer.
And when they approached me, they had audition for like
every producer in the business, and every producer in the
business has told him, I don't hear it or whatever,
which is you know, not that strange because the songs

(01:34:18):
were all really long. You know, they didn't have traditional forms.
You know, Stem intended to write backwards sometimes from certain things,
like he would leave big parts of the songs unfinished,
but say to me, okay, I would like a giant
choir to sing for the next thirty six bars, and

(01:34:39):
then I'd have to come up with something for it.
You know, he wouldn't write anything. I just have to
come up with some thing that played off the themes
that he had already done. So I go down to
a rehearsal studio in New York City to see them.
I knew who meat Loaf was, I didn't know who
Stimon was. I'd seen meat Loaf Rocky Harrs Show on Broadway,

(01:35:00):
so I was aware of the fact that, well, I
wasn't going to be surprised about how Fatty was put
it that way. Um, And they essentially performed for me
meat Loaf, stimon on the piano, and two background singers,
Rory Dodd and Ellen Foley, and they performed essentially all
about Out of Hell with just the four of them

(01:35:22):
the entire album in front of you. Well, not everything
on the album, but you know, like good percentage of
the album. You know. It's like a moment with Kanye
West and and uh, I'm listening to this, I'm saying,
I want to do this record. The reason why I
want to do it is because it's a spoof of
Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen was like the biggest thing. He

(01:35:44):
was on the cover of Time magazine, the Savior of
rock and roll, you know, and to me, it's just
retro music. He's you know, it's it's music out of
the fifties. He's singing about motorcycles and leather jackets and
that's when the junk, you know, and that's exactly what
meat Loaf the singing about, you know. So I thought,
this is great. I'm going to do a spoof of

(01:36:04):
Bruce Springsteen and this is going to be it. And
I never told them that that's what I was thinking.
So they took it. They took it totally seriously. The
whole time, you know, and and I was like, yes, yes,
this is so Springsteen. I kind of stop right here.

(01:36:25):
So there's actually members of the Street Band on that record.
So were they yes, there are you know they were
they in on the joker? You just called them up like, no,
they were not in on the joke. And Stem in
the whole time, would claim that Bruce Springsteen had no
influence on him at all, even though he wanted he
wanted Max and he wanted Roy from the eas Street

(01:36:48):
Band to play on the record, but otherwise, no influence whatever.
And so you know that's why it has all of that.
You know, It's got Springsteen's drummer and Springsteen's piano player
on it, so it sounds like Springsteen. And after the
record was finished, well, the first thing that happened was
when I agreed to do it, he had a label obviously,

(01:37:08):
because I'm not gonna going into the studio somebody who
can't pay for the studio I we're about to go into.
It's like the day before we're about to come in,
we've been rehearsing up in Bearsville. So because we want
to do the album live and uh, and most everything
on the album is live, not the vocals but all
the playing, and um meat Loave comes up to me

(01:37:30):
and he says, I want to get off my label.
I don't think they understand me and whatever. I said, Well,
I'm not your manager. I can't tell you what to do.
But you know that's gonna that's kind of a sticky situation.
We're going into the studio tomorrow. So essentially, I go
to Bearsville and say, well, you know, if you will
underwrite the cost of making this record and put it
on my tab, you'll have right a first refusal when

(01:37:52):
it's done. So we finished the record and Bearsville doesn't
want it, and neither does Warner Brothers, who's distributing Bearsville,
And they spend in that maybe four to six months
looking for somebody to release the record. Nobody wants this
freaking record. And they find a guy, a guy who
runs like a label all by himself. It's called Cleveland International,

(01:38:14):
subsidiary of like Epic Records. His name was Steve Popovic.
You have one other artist. For some reason, he believed
in the record, and so he took the record on.
They put out a single, Nothing Happened, put out another single,
nothing happened, put out third single, and finally something started
to happen, and that was because MTV came out the

(01:38:35):
same time. Paradise by the Dashboard Light got played like
once an hour because they didn't have enough music videos
to fill up, you know all the time when MTV,
So they're playing Paradise by the Dashboard Light once an hour,
just like a regular DJ would do, like put on
Dark Side of the Moon and go up to the
roof and get high. But uh, you know, it's like

(01:38:57):
seven and a half minutes long, um, and he's touring relentlessly,
meat Love, just touring his ass off. And the fact
that Steve Popovich just believed so much in the record,
you know, and wouldn't give up on it like a
typical record executive, that it finally broke, and once it broke,
it you know, went nuclear like a bad What was it?

(01:39:26):
What was it like to record Phil Rizutto? I didn't
you know, I didn't know much about Phil Rizzutto except
for the Money Store, But you know, I was not
a baseball fan at that point, and I had no
idea of his career accomplishments. You know, he's the guy
who's on by the dashboard life, who's doing the baseball? Well,
he would essentially be the Yankees color or commentator or

(01:39:49):
something like that. You know, so people who were in
the New York area and listen to, you know, Yankees
games would be familiar with him. But I was not.
But Stimond said, oh, hey, you know, we're gonna get
this guy to just read this thing, and we're gonna
give him five thousand dollars. And I'm like, what can't
anybody read it? Couldn't when somebody else read it, you know,

(01:40:09):
for like five hundred dollars. So he was from New York. Like,
how did Jim stay from New York? He had no
idea what this was about, you know, he just read
but he read it, read it into a microphone, and
took his money on the left. And I think years
later he found out the context of it and was
very upset from what I heard. Yeah, I was gonna say,
what happens when the cat was out the bag? And like,

(01:40:33):
at what point did they realize, oh, we've been had
or what about gotten? Man? Because it's also one of
the it's the one of the it's the third biggest
selling album of all time. So yeah, it's yeah, it's
up there around forty million copies or something like that,
and um, it's you know, what do they care? It
worked right? If I hadn't thought that they would have

(01:40:57):
no producer at all? How how long was it until
they caught on that? Oh wait a minute, Well I
probably I probably said it sometime, if you know, when
somebody interviewed me about it, I probably mentioned it. You know,
were you approached about producing that at of Hell Too?
I did produce Bad out of Hell Ship? I didn't

(01:41:19):
realize that, Yes we did. We made the whole recording,
and then we went into to get his vocals down,
and meet Love suddenly went and said, there's something wrong
with my voice. I can't say he'd been like singing.
He was a bat too hard and taking too much
cocaine or whatever something like that, and permanently screwed his
voice up, which you know, took lopped a couple of

(01:41:40):
notes off the top of his register and made them
sound really weird. And the way that Steinmon would write
was at least the way he wrote the first record
was what's the highest note you can hit? Meat Love? Okay?
All right? Everything from there down you know, in other words,
hit that note. You're gonna hit it a long time,

(01:42:01):
you know, And so he wrote. When he got to
the second Lime, he did the same thing. He assumed
meat Loaf get hit all those notes, and he wrote
all those notes into it, and then we get into
get meat Loaf to sing it, and he can't hit
those notes, and meat Loaf is like, so he nearly
suicidal at this point, and so I can't finish his record,
you know, I don't care what you do with it.
And so Steinman sang the record and it became Jim

(01:42:24):
Steimon's album. It was called Bad for Good and it
was It's Got Still Jim Steiman with um. I don't
know if you know who Corbin is, but he was
a comic book illustrator, airbrush artist, you know. And he
did the first cover, which was, you know, the demon
flying out of Hell on a motorcycle. He also did

(01:42:46):
the second comer cover, which was Jim Steimon's head on
top of looks like Cornald Schwarzenegger's body with uh with
the semi naked girl like hanging onto his leg, googling
in the hell. Yeah. Yeah, And that album went exactly
no place, even though it was, even though it was

(01:43:09):
all kind of like the same stuff, you know. Wow,
But um, I was always curious to know how you
and Dame Funk got together. Dame Funk is as buddy
of mine, and uh, he just always had nothing but
great things to say about working with you. How did
you hook up? I can't remember how I exactly found
out that he was a fan. That was when I

(01:43:31):
was doing my first collab, you know, and I thought, yeah,
let's get some funk in this thing. And uh so
I contacted him and we just kind of, you know,
struck up a relationship. And uh, whenever I'm in l A,
I try and get out to his DJ gigs and
uh yeah, and that's one of my favorite joints. Yeah,

(01:43:53):
that was you know, what's a fun song? He just
you know, he sent me what essentially is the chord
changes and stuff like that, uh, and built a song
around it. Um it was easy. You know, a lot
of these things can be really challenging, you know, to
figure out, you know, what will work for two artists
who are just coming together cold. Uh, it's uh, it

(01:44:16):
was pretty easy. I was gonna say, was that which
your collapse? Was that kind of the same thing with
you and tr Trent Resident. Well, I had actually done
a remix for Trent a couple of years ago, so
I had worked with Trent before that, and um, and
so I thought, this is, you know, a big, great
way to sort of balance things out, to get him

(01:44:37):
to contribute to my record. And it's amazing he you know,
he and his partner Atticus Ross, they do a lot
of film and TV work, and so he they'll just
go into the studio and catalog a bunch of ideas.
So he sent me like, you know, like twenty two
like musical ideas, you know, to pick one, you know,

(01:44:57):
and it was that was the biggest challenge, you know,
which one? Uh could I focus on? You know? Uh?
I actually was sort of for a while. I was
working on two of them at once and decided I
should probably just focus on on the one that we finished.
And uh not not much as is said about your
work also in like music video production, like what made

(01:45:20):
you even want to get involved in like forms of
media outside of recording music. Well, when I was um
living alone in New York City in the early seventies,
one of my principal forms of one of my favorite
shows that I watched TV. Because I didn't watch a
lot of TV. I would, you know, make music or

(01:45:41):
I would go out. But you know that's in the
old days when there were still principally just three or
four TV stations, and you know, a lot of it
is just to vanilla, you know. So, But there was
some a couple of shows on public television. One of
them was called UH Live from the and the Egg Factory,

(01:46:01):
and another one was a VT Videotape Review, And there
was a movement to use video in more artistic ways
at the time. It was started by a guy named
Nom June Pike, UH Korean guy, and he would do
things like hold magnets up to a TV and warp
the picture and things like that, and eventually they would

(01:46:24):
develop devices that would do that for shows like The
Electric Company in Sesame Street Um. But there were a
lot of experimentalists and video people doing experimental video, and
I was very much into that. I wanted to do that,
so I started buying video synthesizers and built myself a
little video studio and started taking music that I liked

(01:46:47):
and putting visualizations to it. And it wasn't pop songs.
It was like to Meet as the songs from Like
to Meet the Snowflakes are dancing, you know, or or
you know, classical music, you know, revel a song about
a clown. I can't remember the Spanish title of it,
but classical music and stuff like that, and just do

(01:47:10):
weird visualizations to it. And I thought this could be,
you know, legitimate art form and maybe someday, you know,
be a real form of entertainment. And so through the years,
I just kept accumulating video equipment until like I got
my check first check from meat Loaf after you know,
like almost a year of them wrangling trying to get

(01:47:31):
a label, uh, finally getting a label and then negotiating
you know, my participation and stuff. I remember being in
the office and getting handed at check for seven d
and thirty thousand dollars. Was the first check I got
for meat Loaf froyalties. You know, this was a project
that I thought was just going to be a laugh,

(01:47:52):
you know, and you know, maybe yeah, and when I
you know, and I didn't get my advance when I
had to get Bearsville to finance the record like I
usually would have done. So I've did the record almost
for nothing, and suddenly you know, it's the biggest paycheck
I ever got, probably the biggest paycheck I ever got
since because it had accumulated so much royalties without being disburst.

(01:48:17):
So I took that check and I bought video equipment
with it and built a real video studio, and we
started doing what it would be more recognizable as music videos,
you know, videos to pop songs and stuff. There's there's
one thing I forgot to ask um, and we're gonna
wrap this up, but could you please explain how you

(01:48:39):
got involved in producing the New York Dolls debut album. UM.
It was an interesting time in New York. Um. New
York was never known to have a sound. New York
City didn't have a sound. There was the Long Island Sound,
which was very R and B influenced UM, but New
York City wasn't know him to have a sound. And uh,

(01:49:02):
suddenly all of these bands started forming, mostly of people
who didn't know how to play that well. So it
was kind of almost like a Warhol Andy Warhol inspired,
you know, guerrilla art movement, and a lot of it
was some of it was good and energending. A lot
of it was just crap, you know. But I was

(01:49:25):
about to leave New York City and move upstate permanently.
I still kept a place in the city, but I
knew that I was leaving, and I thought, before I leave,
maybe I'll pick one of these bands from this new
scene and produce a record for them, you know, produced
the New York Sound, and uh, the band that seemed

(01:49:47):
to have the biggest following and have it the most together,
I guess, and in a euphemistic way of speaking, was
the New York Dolls. So it was pretty easy for
me to just approach them and say, you want me
to make a record with you. And they had by
then gotten a record deal with Mercury, and I was

(01:50:11):
probably as hot as I've ever been as a producer,
so they figured, yeah, you guys better do this. It
was like managing a carnival, you know. The band had
so many, so many hanger ons, and you know, groupies
and press guys. The press loved the band because they
played a level of music that rock writers could imagine

(01:50:33):
playing themselves, you know, because it required yeah yeah, because
they was so unchallenged, they could understand it really well.
So you know that then rock critics started forming their
own bands after that, But um, yeah, We somehow managed

(01:50:54):
to get through the record without anybody dying, because soon
after we finished the record, they started dying. And yeah,
it didn't really do anything when they released it. I
don't think there was any precedent for, you know, how
to sell this kind of sloppy and what was mostly
Rolling Stones inspired early Rolling Stones inspired. Um. Most people say,

(01:51:17):
oh that they're punk rock band, but they were really
emulating The Stones during their drag period, you know, Mother's
Little Helper and that sort of thing. That's why they
all dressed up and kind of like semi drag. The
lead singer, David thought he was Yeah, David Johansen kind
of thought he was Mick Jagger, you know, even though
he sounded like an angry Louis Prima. We are. One

(01:51:40):
of the weirdest moments in my career was we opened
for Reunited New York Gals at like one of those
music festivals. But here's the thing, though, when I saw
David backstage, I was like, oh, was ship It's bust
a pointext exactly. Had no clue, had no clue that

(01:52:06):
Buster Point Dexter was in the New York Dolls. And
then they opened up the show with you know, like
I'm I'm one of the biggest Kids in the Hall
fans of all time. So they opened up with that.
So I was like, wait, Like my whole mind was
I had new clue, just enlightened, dummy, that the New

(01:52:27):
York Dolls sang the same song for kids in the
Hall that okay, thank you, yes exactly. I just learned
that myself. I didn't yeah, the things of the Kids
in the Halls and New York Dolls. But you know
the thing is that I mostly knew of New York
Dolls via all the critical claim they were getting, you know,
Robert Christa gals, you know, you're enlist and all that

(01:52:48):
stuff and rolling Stones all times, you know, And I
know that people cite them for like at least uh
them as a group and how groundbreaking they were. I
just never heard them or anything or just knew the
members or any of that stuff. And so well, essentially
they were the um they were the inspiration for the
Sex Pistols, and that's why people referred to him as

(01:53:11):
a punk band, even though nobody used that term in
the era. When you know, when we did the The
New York Dolls record, it was you know, if it
was anything. It was the New York sound. But when
John Lyden heard the record, the accessibility of it, I
guess inspired him and the nasty attitude and everything about it,

(01:53:32):
and it was you know, it was the inspiration for
the Sex Pistols essentially, and that's how they got rolled
into the whole punk rock thing, kind of by backwards
inclusion into the Malcolm McLaren ever reached out to you
to ask you for tips or I don't know that.
I I may have run into him in London at

(01:53:53):
one point in like the in the earlier mid seventies,
but I not really had much con tech with him. Uh,
you know, his his attitude about this is kind of
you know, it is that punk rock thing. You know,
it's like, let's do something cattle that will just get
people all wound up, you know the thing. And you know,

(01:54:15):
as a record producer, had longer goals than that. Okay,
I see, so of all of all your outside productions,
not including your records or utopias records, but records that
you produced, like some We've mentioned some. We have an XTC,
bad Finger, Hall and Oates, Jules Sheer, Patti Smith Um
just to name a few, which of which of the

(01:54:38):
outside production projects do you think was the most rewarding
in the sense that you learned the most on that project,
whether it was technical, something you learned technically, or something
about how to be a great producer and effective producer. Well, I,
you know, I tend to cite uh skylarking as um
as something. You know, I'm not a person who feels

(01:54:59):
like a lot of pride, because that's you know, there's
not much to be gained out of it. You know,
I try and be sanguine about the things in the
past and concentrate on the future, and so I don't
think of things with pride except for my kids. It
was an incredible slog to finish the record because I

(01:55:22):
was getting so much resistance from certain band members. But
I also can say that, you know, they never appreciated
what was going on because Andy went home and before
I had even delivered the record, he was telling people
in the President was the worst record they ever made,
because because he was imprinting his his feelings about the experience,

(01:55:47):
and the reason why the experience was not pleasant for
him was because I took it over. You know, I
was a fan of the band. I was a big fan,
and so I knew about their records. I knew about
the evolution their records, and I knew about what was
happening in terms of the making of the records. UM.
And when the label approached me, you know, that they

(01:56:09):
had not the band was lost, and the label said,
you have to have a real producer now, you know,
we can't let Andy take over this project and turn
it into an Andy Vanity project again because the records
aren't selling like they used to. UM and so UM,
I guess the one of the a and our guys said,

(01:56:30):
you know, no, go with the horn and he's notorious
for taking control of these things, you know, and so
so they acquiesced, you know, to that, and they came
to record up in lake Hill where I was in
my studio, which they had never recorded outside of a
British studio before, and we did, you know, like the
basics in up in lake Hill, and then we went

(01:56:54):
to San Francisco later on drums and other instruments and
things like that, then finished up the vocals back in
and lake Hill. During the course of the record, the
bass player quit the band, uh and Andy threatened to
cleave my head into with an Axe, Uh, but after

(01:57:16):
a right experience. But the reason why I look at it,
as you know, as being maybe more rewarding than other records,
is that record saved their career, that they got a
hit record off of it, and they've continue to record,
you know, album after album with no hit records after that,

(01:57:36):
because they acknowledged that. Now they ultimately acknowledged it. Yes,
I want to let you in on something that that
record also saved someone else's career. Oh who is that?
All right? This this is the this is the weirdest,
is the weirdest twisted this story right here, Skylarking, Uh, Sonics,

(01:58:01):
sun Spot and Oranges and Lemons the three albums. Now,
you know, we we have The Roots had a hustle
because we were on Geffen Records as well, and we
were absolutely starving between and and an instant hustle would

(01:58:27):
be to go visit Geffen Records on a Thursday. Somehow
created the version or you know, you would ask the
receptionists to go like, oh, can we get orange juice
of apple juice or water? And in those twenty seconds
that she walks away from her desk to go to

(01:58:48):
the kitchen, three Roots with then Rand sat the entire
uh yeah, there was a CD closet right behind her,
of which we learned early that the only product that
used record stores were interested in buying these records from
from us was the Ecstasy records. You know. At first

(01:59:11):
we were like, all right, all these guns and Roses records,
all these Nirvana records or whatever, and we couldn't give
him away. But somehow every cool used record store in
the village only took the Ecstasy records. So it just
it became a weekly to them. No, but to make

(01:59:32):
a quick two hundred bucks, you take all the skylarkings,
all the Sunic sign spots, and all the oranges and
limons and just go to every record storehere to right, yes,
and then that's how I'd have money for the week.
So thank you. Hi. Can I ask before because I

(01:59:52):
know we're about to wrap up, but can you please
tell us about what a virtual talk show is? And
Todd's honest truth, like, what is the what are you doing?
Nobody in Hawaii? There's been a lot of talk you know,
people doing you know, virtual things, virtual tours and stuff
like that, and I would have I would be on
a virtual tour now if if our promoters had let me.

(02:00:13):
I was totally prepared two. You know, my tour was
supposed to start May one and run to the middle
of this month. Fact, it would be yeah, in other words,
we would rehearse the band and do the show production
and everything like we would normally do, but then find
a venue in in San Francisco where we would be

(02:00:34):
rehearsing and do a live broadcast to every city on
the night that we would have been there. So, in
other words, I would have done twenty eight shows, but
all from the same venue, going to you know, narrow
cast it to all the people who had bought tickets
to the show. We shall still be different too, well,
there would be different because would be a different show,

(02:00:54):
you know. I mean the show is the same show,
and in that well they are different because on alternating
nights we would do either Side A or Side be
Able Wizard a True Star as well as the rest
of the show. You know, I've been wondering what else
I can do besides podcasts and things like that, and
our merch company has, since they can't go out on

(02:01:16):
the road and sell merch anymore, set up this whole
sort of video broadcasting paradigm thing, pay per view things
so that fans can participate in live events, video events
with uh with various people. I think Melissa ether It
has done one. Most of the other ones I don't
recognize the names. There's a Fab four thing, not the

(02:01:40):
Fab Faux of course, but a Fab four Beatle tribute thing,
and they say those things sell like people are really
you know, tired of being at home, so they want
some kind of entertainment. So I had an idea for
something where I would just speel, you know, I would
just get in front of a camera and start talking
about something really commonplace but um easily misunderstood, like money

(02:02:04):
or something like that. But money is liquefied labor. That's
the that's the bottom line. Um. But in any case,
we pitched that idea and they said, okay, well, let's
do something a little bit more than that. So the
show is gonna be me hosting live, but most of
the show will be things that I recorded already so

(02:02:26):
that they can be so that I can make sure
that they're like high quality, because a lot of the
live events, you know, they're you know, they lack scripting.
They just they don't have energy to them, you know,
because you're not getting immediate feedback from the audience like
you usually do. So it's you know, a fine line
whether it's actually qualifies as entertainment. And uh so I

(02:02:50):
want to you know, hedge my bets and do a
lot of different sort of video productions that I will
then host and do Q and a's in between and
not you know, a him to play an hour's worth
of acousting material from my couch. You know it's too
much of that. You listen. Yeah, I'm taking notes. I

(02:03:11):
am taking notes. Okay, Um Todd, We thank you nice,
We did it. I love it. We thank you so
much for you it was a major motion picture. Now
we thank you for seeing your story with us. And
you know we're we're all massive fans, and you know

(02:03:32):
we've been trying to for I kind of miss you guys.
I would have been in New York and weeks ago
for for all for for about a week, so you
know it could have stopped by and willing this will
this mess will be oversea. Yeah, alright, we thank you

(02:03:56):
for us hearing your story with us, and we appreciate it.
On behalf of Layah and Sugar, Steve and Fonticcolo and
the great Todd run Gren. It proves tanking. Relax anyway, yo,
this Quest Love. When we thank you guys, We'll see
you in the next go round of Quest Love Supreme.

(02:04:17):
Thank you, m M M. Quest Love Supreme is a
production of my heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,

(02:04:41):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Hosts And Creators

Laiya St. Clair

Questlove

Popular Podcasts

The Breakfast Club

Dateline NBC

Decisions, Decisions

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Todd Rundgren