Thinking man’s rocker releases
the guitar-oriented album Arena
By Jeff Eason
The casual radio listener knows Todd Rundgren from his
string of hits in the 1970s and 1980s including “Bang on
the Drum All Day,” “I Saw the Light,” “Hello,
It’s Me,” “Can We Still Be Friends” and “It
Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference.”
As a solo artist and with
the bands Nazz, Utopia and The New Cars, musician Todd
Rundgren has established himself as one of the leading
voices of American music over the past four decades. His
latest album, the guitar-oriented Arena, was released
this week. |
His longtime fans know that as good as those songs are, they barely
scratch the surface of Rundgren’s four decades worth of musical
creativity. A sonic chameleon who has recorded albums of soul,
psychedelic rock and even Caribbean music, Rundgren’s musical
interests are all over the map.
In the music business, Rundgren is also a well-respected producer
who has utilized the studio setting to get the best out of musicians
and their instruments. As a result he produced many career highpoint
albums such as Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, The Tubes’
Remote Control, The Band’s Stage Fright and XTC’s Skylarking,
to name but a few.
Rundgren is also a keen observer of politics and the national
culture, subjects that pop up repeatedly in his works. In the
eighties his band Utopia produced a scathing indictment of the
Reagan era titled Swing to the Right, and his 2004 album Liars
scolded the American public for not asking more questions before
we entered the War in Iraq.
Those observations are front and center in Rundgren’s latest
album Arena. A return to the musician’s guitar-oriented work
of the seventies, Arena is designed to inspire listeners to decide
on a course of action and take it.
The Mountain Times caught up with Todd Rundgren on the eve of
Arena’s release this week and his lengthy subsequent tour
(one that will bring him to Asheville on October 15).
Here is the first of a two-part interview with him:
The Mountain Times: Most fans would associate you with your Philadelphia
roots or with your studio in Bearsville, New York. How long have
you lived in Hawaii?
Todd Rundgren: We’ve been here for about 13 years.
MT: You have a new album out and a new tour of the states. Who
are you playing with?
TR: It’s a quorum of the regular guys along with a new bass
player. Jesse Gress is playing guitar, Prairie Prince is playing
drums, Kasim Sultan, who was playing bass, is moving over to play
guitar and some keyboards. And playing bass is Rachel Haden who
is not particularly well known but is becoming better known through
her work with the band.
MT: Is she related to jazz bassist Charlie Haden?
TR: Yes, she is. She is one of his triplet daughters. She has
two sisters who are also in show business. They just did a thing
in New York as part of a larger folk festival. The whole family
gets together and plays sometimes. I haven’t heard it in
person yet but I’ve heard it on record. It’s kind of
like American roots music with lots of mandolin and fiddle and
three-part vocal harmonies.
MT: How did the guitar-oriented album Arena come about?
TR: I was out on the road with the New Cars and we had a schedule
that was going to take us out for about a year-and-a-half. And
right at the beginning, Elliot Easton, our guitar player, broke
his collarbone. Suddenly there was no tour of any kind so I had
to quickly put something together so I wouldn’t be just sitting
around all summer. So I put together a guitar quartet and toured
across Canada. We did a ten-day tour, and the enthusiasm from
the fans was so great that we continued to do it through the states.
It was essentially me and Jesse and Prairie and Kasim playing
a lot of the material that people remember from the Utopia days
and around that era.
ia:Back then, even though we were never an arena rock band, we
often found ourselves in the arena context. So we know a little
something about the approach. But I’d never concentrated
on something that would work in an arena or that would resemble,
you know, that style of music. So I thought, what the hell. I’ve
got some new ground to plumb even though it’s an older genre.
Timeliness doesn’t necessarily stop me.
MT: Plenty of your older songs such as “Black and White,”
“Death of Rock and Roll” and “Heavy Metal Kids”
kind of fit into that electric guitar arena genre, don’t
you think?
TR: Yeah. I was a little bit surprised, pleasantly so, that the
fans seem to be longing more and more for the lead guitar playing
front man as opposed to me as a R&B singer or a rhythm guitar
player in another band like the New Cars. I think that may have
been the root of the response, and as time went on and as the
enthusiasm continued to wax, that was when I realized that the
next record that I was going to make would probably be very much
focused on the guitar.
MT: Do you consider Arena to be a concept album in the way all
the songs on Liars are connected?
TR: It is thematic, in the same way that Liars is thematic. And
it could be seen to have connections to current events. But as
with Liars, the approach that I take when I’m writing lyrics
is that you start inside and work your way outside. You don’t
start off by railing at the president before you’ve had a
good bit of self-examination first. In that particular instance,
people’s willingness to fool themselves was a lot of the
problem. It wasn’t the fact that the leadership was comprised
of such blatant liars, it was the fact that everyone else devalued
the truth so much that they were willing to just swallow whole
all of this preposterousness. And here we are down the line a
little bit and that’s not likely going to be the milieu in
the future. It would be a tough bar for other people to meet in
terms of dishonesty.
So the problem at this point is, and the subject matter of this
new record is, courage and cowardice. In that sense, it’s
more about action than rumination. In the sense of something like
Liars, you just determine that, “Oh wow, I’ve been thoughtlessly
dishonest in all these things.” And you stop doing something.
But the end result of the new message is for you to start doing
something. And that particular thing is directed mostly at men.
A lot of it is driven by the terrible examples we’ve had
by male behavior in the last eight years. I don’t want myself,
or people of my gender, to get the mistaken impression that the
evilness and dishonesty and cowardice is somebody else’s
fault. We got these guys into office in the first place. That’s
not the way we want to do business. It looks like a formula for
success: to just lie your ass off irresponsibly. But at this particular
point in time we’ve got problems that are so great and looming
that we need that more traditional leadership and self-sacrifice.
We need the stuff that we associate with our heroes, as opposed
to the lying and the cowardice and perversion and hypocrisy.
Editor’s note: Part two of The Mountain Times’ interview
with Todd Rundgren will run in the October 9th edition. Rundgren
and his band will perform at the Orange Peel in Asheville on
October 15.
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