TOTAL Todd

For over 50 years, Todd Rundgren has proven to be a true musical wunderkind, blessed with dazzling skills as a singer, instrumentalist, songwriter and arranger with his bands Nazz and Utopia and as a solo artist. He is rightly championed for his production/ engineering work with the likes of Grand Funk, New York Dolls, Badfinger, Meat Loaf, Rick Derringer, XTC, Cheap Trick and others. He’s an uncompromising musical maverick who follows his own unique and typically idiosyncratic path, a musical visionary who lives life by his own rules. After years of being inexplicably passed over by the powers that be at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they finally got it right and Rundgren is one of this year’s inductees.

GOLDMINE: In terms of predictability, as an artist you’ve always followed the road less traveled. Following up a huge success of Something/ Anything? with A Wizard, A True Star or Utopia’s Adventures in Utopia with Deface the Music, is this just the contrarian in you or simply the way you keep things creative and fresh?

TODD RUNDGREN: Well, for me personally it’s not just kind of ingrained in the way that I work. I started out in a band (Nazz), and that didn’t work out so well, so shortly after that I started working as a record producer and engineer and that (went) quite well for me. That became kind of lucrative. So when it came to making my own records, I never thought that I had to continue to satisfy a certain audience or do the same thing over and over again in order to build up an audience. I was perfectly satisfied to produce other people’s records and worry about those concerns for them. Then when I made my own records, I didn’t have to think about any of that. I could just think about what musical things I’d like to accomplish. So whether as a solo artist or working with Utopia, that’s been the way I’ve worked. It’s just become the way that I work now. I suppose that I could enact the same discipline on myself that I would on another act if they came to me and said, “Help us make a coherent and commercial record.” (laughs) But there’s a world full of people doing that, and as for me, half the time I’m trying to educate myself in a way by learning new things and learning new techniques or refine the techniques that I have. So that’s why I continue to produce records for other people and do remixes for other people, which leaves me free to choose my own direction.

GM: You’re very fond of the A Wizard, A True Star album. That’s the album you created experimenting with psychedelics. As a guy who was pretty much a teetotaler in the Nazz days, and then smoking pot and takingSomething/ Anything?,