I sometimes wonder how, when, where, and why my interest in certain bands and performers began. How did these people’s music come into my life? Via friends? Family members? Corporate radio programming? Independent radio programming? *College* radio programming? Internet streaming services and playlists? Some other vector too obtuse to recognize?
I can distinctly — viscerally — remember the first time I heard Blondie, for instance. I had been invited to a party at Carol Thompson’s house, which was a very big deal because Carol and her friends were very, very cool (and I was not, still am not). They would dress up and do live performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight on Fridays at the Uniondale Mini-Cinema. When I arrived, things were in full swing, and some very loud music was blasting inside. Carol opened the door to let me in, and I was physically knocked backward by the wall of sound flooding out the door — Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone.” Just an intense, literally life-altering moment, my introduction to what was then known as New Wave.
Likewise, my good friend, Clare Eidenweil, is responsible for *two* of the biggest musical influences in my life: Broken Arrow, whom I have already written about on this blog, and Todd Rundgren. It was Clare who suggested I come along one evening and see the band that she and her lifeguarding buddies were into that summer, which began my devotion to Broken Arrow.
And it was Clare who got me into Todd as well. In the summer of 1977, her older sister Susie bought the album Ra by Utopia. This was the stripped-down, 4-piece version of Todd’s progressive rock band with Kasim Sulton on bass, Roger Powell on keyboards, and Willie Wilcox on drums. Susie got Clare hooked, and then Clare brought me the record, saying, “You should listen to this. It will change your life.”
And it did: another other-worldly, transformative event, from the first notes of the first track, "Communion with the Sun" -- watch the video below -- through the 18-minute quest of “Singring and the Glass Guitar (An Electrified Fairytale).” Intelligent. Ambitious. Challenging every preconception I had about what rock music was and could do.
And from there I devoured everything Todd ever made. Fans say that “Todd is god." He clearly has super powers, in any event. On his albums, he has frequently been the entire operation, writing all the music and lyrics, playing all the instruments — and I mean all of them — singing all the vocals, engineering the recording, and producing the album. He made Something/Anything in this way, for instance, in his apartment, in *1971* for crying out loud! He is credited with inspiring “a generation of self-contained geniuses,” like Prince. His catalog demonstrates an endlessly inventive spirit, making music across an enormously wide landscape. And his production efforts, such as on Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell (the third biggest selling album of all time, with 43 million copies sold), are the stuff of studio legend. He did the motorcycle guitar solo on the song “Bat Out of Hell” in a single take, for instance.
I will end here by telling on myself. Here’s how much I loved Todd:
Long before the internet and GoogleMaps, Lisa Cornwall (my friend and fellow Todd devotee) took the name of Todd’s record company — Bearsville — and the name of one of his albums — The Hermit of Mink Hollow — and figured out where he lived. So one weekend we made the pilgrimage, camped at the foot of his driveway, and listened to him singing and playing piano, the sound drifting through the trees.