Todd Rundgren's Bons Mots

Owing to the recent arrival of Alexander, doing hands-free entertainment while hands-full of Alexander has become a regular part of my life. As such, I’ve been going through some of my archived, but unplayed backlog and I really enjoyed the interview between Alec and Todd Rundgren. I’ve never been a fan of Rundgren’s music and, honestly, this podcast really didn’t change my mind.

That said, through his years in the music business, Rundgren had some really funny observations about his career and the music business. You can basically play from the link below ’til about 2 minutes

Minutes 09:45 to 12:00 are the source for these anecdotes

On Meatloaf

The songs were all too long…none of them seemed like singles…he was a giant, fat, sweaty guy…and the subject matter had a certain kind of retro thing about it

On Jim Steinman

Steinman wrote most of Meatloaf’s iconic songs and was the principal writer behind the songs of Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire. Add in “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and you know what Steinmanesque means:

Jim Steinman, who wrote all the material for Meatloaf. He likened himself to Richard Wagner…the Wagner of rock n’ roll…I likened him to the Stephen Foster (author of “Camptown Races” and “O! Susanna;” that’s a dis) ‘cause he’d just keep using these plain 7^ths and things like that and there are lots and lots of chords, but they’re just plain triads and things like that…there’s nothing harmonically super-challenging about the kind of music Jim Steinman wrote, but it was grandiose from a lyrical standpoint

They later performed it for Rundgren:

I’m thinking: “This is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen”…and that’s why I have to do it.

On Springsteen Circa 1976

All…Rebel Without a Cause…You’re saving rock n’ roll by going back 20 years

On Becoming a Programmer

I was…a weedy child [implied: the kind that guys like Meatloaf used to beat up]. I tended to get picked on a lot….I had an Altair and the only way you could communicate with it was through a teletype machine that had a paper tape reader on the side of it

Rundgren later goes on to invent graphics drawing software that Apple marketed.

On the Discrete Charms of Peyote

At 26:35

Somebody sent me a shoebox of peyote buttons and I was high for a month.