Todd Rundgren’s Johnson: The Interview

By: Brady Lavin

Todd Rundgren has gone through many musical phases in his long career. He started out with the blues, got into garage rock for a bit with the group Nazz, and then began his solo career, which had people hailing him as “the new pop-wunderkind” after the release of his 1972 gold-certified double LP Something/Anything?. Later on, Rundgren got more into psychedelia and progressive rock with his band Utopia.

After all these shifts in musical style, Rundgren is back on the blues with Todd Rundgren’s Johnson, an album of Robert Johnson covers. While the title is tongue-in-cheek and funny, the music is fresh and original, something that is difficult to achieve, especially when playing an album of all covers.

In a recent chat with Guitar International, Rundgren talked about the new album, how he composes music, and playing with Daryl Hall. Be sure to read to the end so you don’t miss Todd’s prophetic prediction about the direction of the music industry!

Todd Rundgren

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Brady Lavin: Your new album, Todd Rundgren’s Johnson, has you playing an album’s worth of tunes by blues legend Robert Johnson. Why did you choose his compositions as opposed to any of the other blues greats?

Todd Rundgren: Two, almost three years ago I completed an album called Arena, and we were looking for distribution. When we finally found somebody willing to distribute, they had an additional project they wanted me to take on. They had recently acquired the catalog for Robert Johnson, but they had no recorded masters even though the songs had been covered by many artists.

They wanted to have versions to offer for sync licensing, master licensing, that sort of thing. So I agreed to do it, and the reason is when I first got out of high school, my first gig was in a blues band. I was not a songwriter or a singer of any kind, at least not yet. I had been in bands all through high school and towards the end of my high school years I became fascinated with the blues. My first paying gig as a guitar player was in a blues band, so it was not that unusual a challenge, I suppose. That’s why I considered taking it on.

The first thing I discovered after agreeing to do that, well I can’t say I discovered it, I was somewhat aware of the fact that Eric Clapton had been tributing Robert Johnson. I just didn’t realize that he had made it a second career [Laughs] in a sense.

So I  knew that I wasn’t going to do literal versions of Robert Johnson songs like Eric did. I decided instead to tribute the bands that influenced me when I was first becoming a guitar player. And many of those bands were playing Robert Johnson songs, for instance Cream’s version of “Crossroads” and things like that. That became part of the standard guitarist lexicon at that point. So I decided I would make a record in the style of a 60’s Blues Breakers or Yardbirds, English-style, white blues record.

Brady: How many of your own blues tunes have you written?

Todd Rundgren: Well as a matter of fact, a surprising number. The strange tale of this record extends to my own, I guess, Robert Johnson-like experience in that I made and delivered the record and a release date was set for it. However, that release date came and passed, but I went on the road playing the record on the assumption that it was gonna be released. And kind of did this several times [Laughs] with the audience more and more puzzled as to why I was playing all this blues music. But,  in order to make a whole show out of it, I had to go back and examine my own material and see if I could find examples that were sufficiently bluesy.

As it turns out, probably in all of the phases of my music, there’s some bluesy thing in there. It was quite a revelation actually even to me that the music had stuck with me in a subliminal way. And even up until my most recent work. Even that album Arena has something that qualifies as a blues song on it.

Brady: Anybody can rip a decent blues solo with a little practice, but on this new record, you do some really cool and interesting stuff. How do you approach blues soloing to get an original sound like you do?

Todd Rundgren: Well, you approach it with the realization that most of these things have been played to death already. And so even though I was taking this particular stylistic approach, I didn’t go back and reference any of those things. I didn’t reference Cream’s versions, or the Yardbirds’ versions of anything. I went back to the original Robert Johnson recordings, and in a sense started from scratch and found signature elements in the guitar playing.

I went back and looked for things in his guitar playing in order to build the basic guitar theme, and then things in the singing that I could use to build melodies out of. One of the signature elements of the blues in its, let’s say, “primitive” state as Robert Johnson played it was that it’s improvisational. They never do the same thing twice.

Jazz is improvisational, but the jazz player knows the melody that he’s essentially springboarding off of for his improvisations. Blues is improvisational because the players don’t remember what they played the last time they played the song. [Laughs] And you can tell this is true because you listen to the alternative versions of some of the songs on the original recordings and even though they have the same title and some of the same words, they’re completely different from each other [Laughing] and they’re recorded in the same period of time, like the same day.

It’s just one of these things where they don’t know about transcription, they don’t write it down. They just try and remember it and half the time it’s only a vague remembrance. So the biggest challenge was trying to find signature melodic elements that were different from one tune to the next, so every song didn’t sound the same.

Brady: When you were looking back on those old Robert Johnson recordings, did you grab specific licks, or was it more like an overall sense?

Todd Rundgren: Well, you are trying to find that signature element. You got the fact that the Cream version of “Crossroads” has that line [Sings the music], and I don’t know that Robert Johnson ever played anything like that. He may have played something vaguely similar, but the whole idea that formalist electric blues approach is that you reduce the improvisation down to something that becomes actual themes that you repeat and play over and over again.

I took that same approach, but by the same token it may have been some fleeting that he just played once in the song. But it’s gotta be something that kind of sticks in your ear, it can’t just be any other thing.

Brady: On Johnson, the only other musician credited is Kasim Sulton on bass. Did you play the rest of the instruments?

Todd Rundgren: Yeah, I played all the rest but it’s mostly all guitars and drums so it’s not like it’s something I haven’t done before.

Brady: Why is it that you prefer to work that way?

Todd Rundgren: It actually would have been perhaps preferable to do a whole traditional session thing. But the problem is that I don’t always know where I’m going with the stuff. When I’m doing my own music, recording and competition are kind of hard to separate from each other. As soon as I start to get concrete musical ideas I begin to push them into their final format.

I have a very strange way of composing and writing in that sense in that I record everything, the whole entire track with most of the overdubs, before I finish writing and singing the song. And this, even though I wasn’t writing original music, had something of the same aspect to it in that I wasn’t sure song to song what part of it I was going to reduce down to essential melodic elements. And once I do know what that is, I like to get it captured right away. The problem is that I live all the way out here in Hawai’i, and all the people I play with live elsewhere. And usually when we’re not on the road they go out on other gigs.

This particular project was not heavily budgeted. [Laughs] There wasn’t a lot of money allotted to get the project done. In that sense it wasn’t financially practical for me to fly everybody I would use out here to Hawaii just so I could noodle around trying to figure out what to play. [Laughing]

Brady: Our readers are often curious about what instruments and amps different artists use. What gear did you use on this album?

Todd Rundgren: I have a friend named Kenny Emerson, who is one of the world’s great guitar players and especially one of the world’s great lap steel and Hawai’ian roots guitar players, and he built for me a Telecaster out of various parts. I hadn’t really played it on anything, it was just sitting around the house, but when I started working on this project, I thought “I wanna get that ’60s kind of sound,” and in the ’60s a lot of the guitar players played Telecasters. Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. It gave that particularly kind of piercing sound, a certain quality about a Tele.

So, I used that exclusively throughout the record, and the only thing I used for amplification was essentially my Line 6 plug-ins. I use a program called Record by Propellerhead, and built in to that is a Line 6 virtual amplifier. So that’s essentially what I did. I tuned up what I thought was a suitably retro sound on it and pretty much used the same sound throughout the record.

Brady: That lap steel player you mentioned…

Todd Rundgren: Ken Emerson.

Brady: Yeah, was he, by any chance, the same steel player I saw playing with you on the Internet series Live From Daryl’s House?

Todd Rundgren: Yes, he sat in with us.

Brady: How was that whole experience?

Todd Rundgren: It’s always a lot of fun particularly cause it’s so loose. An aspect of it is the informality. Sometimes you characterize a performer by the mistakes they make. There’s not really much rehearsal when we do that. We try and be familiar enough with the tunes before the session starts and they have the lyrics on teleprompters to help you remember if it’s a somewhat unfamiliar song. But, it’s pretty much seat of the pants. The band is pretty well-rehearsed but me myself, I’m never that rehearsed. I’d done the show before, I did it at Daryl’s house in Connecticut. That was my first crack at it, and it was so well-received that Daryl, when he was returning from Japan and did a gig in Honolulu, he figured it would be an ideal time to try to do an episode from my house. He’s done that before, he’s gone to other peoples’ houses to do his show. That’s how that all came about.

Then just a week ago in Atlantic City, Daryl essentially prototyped the live version, which I participated in. So now I’ve done three Live at Daryl’s House’s.

Brady: One of the things I really like about that show is that he has a wide variety of artists, established and up-and-coming. Would you ever consider working with newer, up and coming artists?

Todd Rundgren: That’s kind of one of the issues about music and the way commercial music is marketed and produced. Essentially the core audience is young. They’re usually under the age of 30 and sometimes under the age of 25. It depends on when they start to have families. When you’re just single and carefree, you spend all your income on your lifestyle, of which music is a part. As you get older, that disposable income becomes your kids’ allowance. And then they go out and buy music for their lifestyle. Part of that is people the same age making the music. As you get older, the focus moves away from you. It’s never about your willingness to work with younger artists, it’s the fact that the younger artists aren’t that aware of you. But every once in a while there will be trends in music that make it hip for kids to go back and explore and rediscover music of previous generations.

I have been the beneficiary of that every once in a while, particularly some of these European techno and dance-oriented acts. A Wizard, A True Star gets cited a lot, the Todd album gets cited a lot by some of them, like Daft Punk and Hot Chip and bands like that. So there is some connection but I don’t often get asked to produce artists of a younger generation. Maybe the assumption is that I don’t understand what the kids want to hear [Laughing] or something like that.

Brady: Over the years, you have had your hand in so many different aspects of the music business, including writing, performing, producing, software design, graphics…What drives you to be so prolific in such a variety of areas?

Todd Rundgren: I got used to early on in my career that artist was not my principle role, that my principle role was in making the product behind the scenes. My first experience with being in a band who released records was less-than-ideal from my standpoint. So I quickly moved into the production area. I continued to make records on my own but that was only because I had musical ideas I wanted to express and get out of my brain. I accidentally had hit records, [Laughs] and more or less got drawn back into being an artist.

But my attitude about it was substantially different than what it is for most artists, because I was making a fine living as a producer and therefore didn’t feel that I was constrained to be especially commercial in my own music. I had a lot of freedom to experiment with it. In addition, the living I was making as a producer allowed me to dabble in other things that interested me. I started out dabbling in video and then eventually personal computers came along and I started dabbling in those, and then dabbling in the convergence of those two things in terms of computer graphics and that sort of thing.

Later on, I started to realize how these things worked and how the audience would adapt these things and was able to previsualize certain trends in the audience. And then just after you’ve been in this business for 30 to 40 years you accumulate enough experience to make a pretty good guestimate about where things are going. So it all kind of came about organically. It wasn’t one of these things where I’m an academic in any sense of the word. [Laughs] It’s only by backing into the world of academia that I even managed to get on a college campus. It’s just me compensating for a short attention span, just constantly having to have something to keep my mind occupied.

Brady: You said you’re pretty good at guestimating where music is headed. Where is music going now?

Todd Rundgren: I’ve never been very good at predicting styles of music. That’s a very organic process and it has a lot to do with regionality, like grunge. It came out of Seattle. If you didn’t live in Seattle you might not know what was coming.

In terms of how the audience absorbs music or interacts with artists, I have a better track record with that. If my prognostication is correct, the biggest change is going to be in the model of how people pay for and receive music. I think the iTunes store thing is going to fade out and be replaced by something more like Rhapsody, which is subscription-based. I think that most people are used to paying a monthly fee for their phone and their cable and for their Internet connection and in turn are used to getting that unbounded media portal in a way. You know, you pay your cable bill and you get 700 channels. You can only watch one of them at time and probably 90% of those channels you’re never gonna watch anyway, but you’re happy to pay your monthly cable bill just to have the option.

The problem with the iTunes store is that it still operates under this commoditized model where every song is worth 99 cents and then they say “Oh whoopee, we’re gonna start offering some songs for 69 cents.” [Laughs] No, no, no that’s not how it works. You charge people ten bucks a month and they download all the music they want. And why does it work better? Because people don’t have to make the decision whether to pay 99 cents for this song or that song. That helps fringe artists and also ensures constant flow of income into the system.

People, as long as they’re gonna download music, they’re probably never gonna opt out. They’ll just continue to pay that, what will amount to 120 dollars a year, in guaranteed money to the record industry or to the artist collective or whatever it is out there that is about to replace the record industry.

Brady: Your Musical Survival camp is coming up soon, and it is something that I would definitely be interested in checking out if I had the time and it weren’t states away. Can you tell our readers a bit more about it?

Todd Rundgren: This is not a model that I thought up, certainly, but as the traditional record company way of doing things continues to break down further and further, there have been all these new models for creating income for artists. Since a lot of artists had been used to having multi-album contracts where you were guaranteed every year or so, whenever you decided to make an album, you were guaranteed a substantial chunk of money. That doesn’t exist any more for the most part. Some of the models involve fantasy camp type things. I participate in a couple rock n roll fantasy camps where people who have the money essentially go to be tutored by professional popular musicians. They get the whole experience compacted down into 5 days or something. Forming a band, writing a song, going into the studio, performing in a venue, and then they go back to their regular jobs.

And then I participated in a camp earlier this year, which was about making a record of mine, but essentially funded by and with performance contributions from fans, from campers I guess. So, they pay money to go to a four day series of auditions and recording sessions and later jam sessions in the evenings and that sort of thing. So that’s kind of like the rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp, but more specifically you’re just living a certain recording artist part of the dream. And in exchange for that I get the funding for a record, and that record hasn’t come out yet. It comes out in September, I think.

Then I was approached about this individual artist fantasy camp. There’s a resort in the Catskills called the Full Moon Resort, and I think they do most of their business in the winter when people come up to the Catskills to ski. In the summer they find the place empty a lot of the time, so they figured out this idea, let’s have artists come in and do camp, seminar types of things.

The first one they did I think was Dweezil Zappa. Dweezil’s camp was a guitar playing camp, guitar playing and drumming. You go there to get tips about playing, to learn what Dweezil knows and probably to hear stories about Frank. Other artists have done those kinds of camps, and some you have to audition for, so these are for hardcore players. I decided I didn’t want to do a camp like that cause it excludes too many of my fans.

I wanted to do something that was more interdisciplinary, more about what the state of the business is, other sorts of non-musical insider info from actual touring players and stuff like that. And also be available to give you guitar tips on a one-on-one basis if that’s what you really want. But, it’s gonna be more about what is the state of the business, how do you tell what good music is. How do you use Youtube and all this sort of modern digital video devices and things like that to get yourself exposed. How do you dress for success? [Laughs] We’re gonna teach people about hair and makeup and that kind of stuff as well.

Even if you’re not in a band, you can pretend to be in a band for an afternoon. We’re gonna have a tour bus taking everyone out on regular trips around the Catskills to see what it’s like to travel around in a bus with bunks in it. So people will get an insider’s look at what it’s like to be a musician nowadays and all the various disciplines that it entails.