Todd Rundgren, although you’d never know it from his easy manner, is a living legend. A genuine artist, thanks to his unparalleled skills as a producer, he has never had to compromise his vision in the name of commerce and has, over the course of a hugely successful career, released twenty-one albums under his own name, to say nothing of guest appearances, band work and production duties.
Famed for his proactive approach to technology, Todd has often been at the forefront of whatever revolution that might be sweeping the industry at any given time. As such, it should come as no surprise that, at a time when bands are scrambling to overcome the debilitating effects of a pandemic, Todd has already sought to repurpose a long-held concept of a Virtual Tour (as opposed to a simple live stream), in which he and his band perform for select audiences from a single venue in Chicago. With geofencing technology used to ensure the exclusivity of the event, multiple options for fans to engage with the show (ranging from choosing a camera option to a virtual meet-and-greet) and eye-watering attention to detail, Todd’s plans have the potential to become a new paradigm at a time when economic, environmental and health-related issues are conspiring to make live events a considerable challenge.
Of course, when conducting an interview regarding the usage of technology, irony is never too far away and, to our consternation, we simply cannot establish a working connection with Todd. Thankfully, after a few moments of panic (and the judicious use of the chat box to overcome the broken mic issues), Todd graciously offers to speak via phone and we begin, a little flustered, but delighted to be speaking with an artist who continues to expand the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of music performance and production.
Thank you so much for taking this time to speak to me. It’s a real honour.
My pleasure.
This is a mild digression, but one of the only rock records (actually I think the only rock record) my father owned, was Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell so, from a very young age I think, it was one of your productions that introduced me to the world of hard rock.
[Laughs] I depend a lot on this sort of generational thing at this point in my life!
…but at the same time, you’ve always been ahead of the curve in terms of technology. And, of course, the reason I’m speaking to you today is that you’re the first artist to undertake a virtual concert tour, so that’s an important part of keeping your approach to music fresh?
Well, you know, part of it is a desire to play music after having been benched for… going on a year now. And, obviously we do have the technology that enables this kind of thing to happen. But, it’s also more than just not being able to play.
The whole idea started germinating in my brain a couple of years ago when it became ever more difficult to arrive at a gig on time because of impacts to the travel system – mostly climate related. Flights were always being delayed because airports were being shut down by weather and things like that. We had the entire state of California on fire, so you couldn’t even drive through it…. Floods in Texas. The climate is having a serious effect on our ability to travel. So, the idea of a virtual tour occurred to me because of that. And, of course, more recent developments have added another twist to that, which is that it’s not just me who’s unable to get to the gig – the audience can’t go to the gig either! They’re all stuck at home!
So, the whole idea of a virtual tour became more or less imperative. It was no longer an experiment or even just like a one-off kind of demonstration of something. This is probably the first of what may be any number of virtual tours, crafted in the same manner.
The difference between this and doing, say, an internet special where you broadcast to the entire world, as probably most artists are thinking… that gets your music out there and it gets you exposed, but it doesn’t do it in the way that a tour does. This tour offers the whole specialness you get when you go to somebody’s town. Usually, it’s a town that you’ve been to before, so you’re familiar with people – you recognise fans from those particular towns, you have places where you’d like to go or walks that you would like to take; restaurants that you’d like to eat at. So, it’s more than simply doing the show, it’s getting a sense of the place that you’re in and the people in that place. So, that’s why we’re doing twenty-five shows, instead of just one show for everyone. It enables us to tailor the shows to have a more local feel to them. And it allows us to have that kind of experience where we improve or mutate as the tour goes on. The more times you play the show, the more familiar you become with it, the more possibilities open up.
So, coming up with this sort of formula, there was always (in my mind) as much emphasis on the experience that the performers are going through as for the audience. We’re doing as much as we can on the audience side to expand the experience and make it as, not only local, but also as participatory as possible. In other words, we’re offing an option where everyone can pick their camera view out of probably about a half a dozen views of the stage. Virtual meet and greets and that sort of stuff. So, we’re trying to maintain everything that you would normally expect to have on a tour, but for the travel.
One of the things that really stuck out to me was that you’re even going as far as serving local foods via in-house catering – that attention to detail is really important if you’re trying to instil in the band the idea that they’ve moved, even though you’re actually in the same place…
Yeah, it’s the difference between a tour and a residence. We don’t want to feel like we’re working in a Holiday Inn somewhere for two months, just playing in the same venue every night. So, we’re going to some lengths to kind of self-hypnotise to convince ourselves as much as possible that we’re in a certain place. So, we’ll keep all the clocks in the backstage area set to whatever the local time is in the venue that we’re playing. We’ll festoon everything with local artefacts like posters of landmarks and things like that – maybe, a sports team and local newspapers. And then, probably the most challenging, but the most convincing aspects is getting food from what would be a note-worthy local eatery. Most times there’ll be a famous restaurant or a restaurant that’s been around for years and has a specialty. So, we’re going to try and get the food prepared, packaged up and shipped to our venue in Chicago. And we’ll have that as catering and that will give us an additional layer of self-conviction. If we can’t get the actual food itself shipped in, then we have a fairly large industrial kitchen in the venue as well, so we’ll just get the recipes and cook up whatever the local specialty is and pretend we got it brought in from an eatery somewhere in the area.
I was watching “an evening with…” as part of the preparation for this interview and it reminded me that you’re a very physical performer and I was wondering how you think that kind of physicality will play out when all you have in front of you is cameras?
Well, actually we’ll have more than cameras in front of us. We will have a virtual audience. In other words, you can purchase a ticket to the first three or four virtual rows in the venue and there will be video panels for everyone who has bought one of those tickets, in seats! [Laughs]
And, we will intersperse that with… well, things change all the time, but there are local restrictions on how many actual live bodies can enter into our bubble, and as many of those as we’re allowed to get in there – maybe as many as twenty or twenty-five actual people – we’ll sell all of those exclusive tickets for people to actually be in the venue as well. So, through a combination of actual live bodies and technology that’s actually evolved over the past year – a lot of it because of the pandemic – we will actually be able to have audience faces looking at us while we’re playing. That should go a long way to help us get into it.
But, in reality, depending on the gig you’re at, it may be that you don’t see the audience at all. You’ve got lights in your face and it’s dark in the back of the hall, so you won’t be able to see more than the first couple of rows anyway. So, I think that just seeing faces will go a long way in helping us to get in to the proper mood and sort of forget that we’re remote. It’ll make us feel like we’re actually there.
The technology that you’re describing is, as you say, is really advanced. What sort of lead-in time have you had, or will you have, to make sure everything will run as smoothly as fate allows on the night?
Well, we get in to Chicago, which is the hub we’ll be doing the show out of, about ten days before we do the first show. One of the advantages of not having to travel, is that we don’t have to assemble and then disassemble the production every night. So, we can do some things that we wouldn’t normally take on the road because of the complexity and the expense of taking them. A lot of that is the reason why I picked this particular show to do, because I’ve got a band of like nine people. Under normal circumstances, that would put me in a precarious financial position, carrying around nine people and the necessary infrastructure to support the show. Once you eliminate the travel, then there’s a lot of the expense that’s gone and, again, since we aren’t travelling and deconstructing / reconstructing – we have a lot more freedom in terms of how we mount the show. We’ll be doing things that normally I probably wouldn’t do on the road ion terms of set design and, perhaps, a few other things as well.
I noticed that you’re using geofencing with the show, which is an interesting idea – what’s the purpose behind that?
With geofencing, it’s actually only to protect certain areas where I’ve agreed not to compete with my own tour that’s happening later in the year. So, we’ve got certain markets that we’re not allowed to play in. So, we don’t actually have virtual shows in those places. But people in those places can go to another show in another city. Just like you could drive to another city if you were dealing with a real, terrestrial tour.
It seems like there are huge opportunities to tailor your approach in numerous ways, with the technology you’re describing…
Well, I was actually (this past fall, back in November) I was supposed to do a production in Holland that was going to be broadcast in multiple formats – audio, video, VR and AR. And that would have been a venue that had to be specially outfitted, so I’d already had it in my mind – the hybridisation that’s necessary to take a general purpose performance space or event space and craft it into something that seems (and in some ways feels like) a presidium theatre and not, like, just a flat platform with walls around it. And, in that particular instance, as I say, there was going to be a virtualisation and augmented reality aspects to it as well. So, in that instance, everyone would have been green screen and there would have been nothing on the stage. Everything would have been created out of software and stuff like that.
So this is, kind of, it’s not that crazy. But it would seem to be possible, if you wanted to do something like that nowadays, to completely virtualise the space as well, and make it all green, and substitute whatever’s green for any number of backgrounds, then you’ve got a whole other range of possibilities which were not taking advantage of right now. But I can see in the future, in some special studio environment, or performance environment – being able to configure it not only literally by bringing in hardware and stuff; but by being able to configure it virtually, we might be able to make the stage to literally look like the venue that’s in your home time, rather than the venue that we’re able to construct. So, yeah, there are a lot of possibilities that are open to you when you stop travelling and you create a special space to perform in.
A lot of musicians, I guess, don’t really engage too much with the production side of things but, obviously, you’ve had a tremendously successful career as a producer – are there times when you find yourself stepping back from the music and looking at your work with a producer’s eye? Is that one of the reasons why you continue to innovate in this way?
Well, I’ve always had an appreciation for theatrical music. When I was growing up, one of the few family entertainments we had (I mean, we’d go to the movies occasionally), but my dad was very much into musical theatre, so in the summer we had a thing called Summer Stock in the US, and when the weather’s warm, these tent venues spring up all over the country and productions of the great musicals like Music Man, Kismet and even Gilbert and Sullivan and that sort of thing, that’ll happen in the summer and some of my fondest memories were going to these theatrical productions.
Then, of course, being in the music business in the seventies, suddenly theatricality became almost a necessity. Bands like Genesis with Peter Gabriel introducing all these theatrics into his performance, and getting into giant props and people like Alice Cooper, who also did that sort of thing. So, everything got more and more theatrical throughout the seventies and so did I and my bands.
We always designed a “show”. It was never just simply a concert; it was a show. And that stuck with me all through my career. I make clear distinctions between the types of shows that I do. I have a thing called an unpredictable evening, and that’s a show with almost no production whatsoever. We can show up in any venue of any size and it’s just a whole melange of material, mine and old songs you may be familiar with and some songs you may never have heard before. And so, that depends almost entirely on the music to represent the scope of the production. Then again, at the far other end of the scale, I would do a recreation of an album and do it all literally from beginning to the end. And those were all theatrical realisations. They’re not simply playing the songs. It’s a whole flow that goes to it, set and costume changes may be involved – for instance when I do [corrects himself]… when I did, and was supposed to be doing, A Wizard A true Star (and will be doing it by next Fall as part of the tour that I’m supposed to do then), I was doing twelve costume changes in an hour! [laughs] So, any number of not just technological, but theatrical possibilities are available given the nature of the show.
So, in this particular show, it’s centred around a particular album that is mostly R&B and kind of gospel tinged, and any other material of mine that sort of fits in that same general vein. So, the quality of the music in this particular show is, well it’s apropos to the large musical unit and it also has a certain amount of genre coherence, which does not always happen in my shows!!! So, almost all of the music in the show will be familiar, but almost all of it will be on the R&B side… a little bit on the prog side. Yeah, the idea sprung from an album that I made and a tour that I did behind it back in the late 80s. That was probably one of the most satisfying periods of my musical life and we’re just all trying to recreate it.
One of the most exciting things in making music is to continually challenge your own skills and abilities, because you can have an idea in your mind and then spend time painfully working towards making it a reality (and often getting it wrong in the process) and that kind of idea plays really nicely into the idea of the Unpredictable Evening – that idea of flying by the seat of your pants can make for very visceral and exciting performances…
It does. It’s actually, in some ways, my favourite kind of show to do. I’ll tell the band what the first song is and then, from then on, we have no idea where we’re going. There’s a great deal of liberation and freedom in that we play the songs well… we play them, often sometimes better than the originals, but there is a lot less pressure behind it, I guess, because every time we do one of these songs, it’s a little gift in a way. A song you haven’t heard in decades and then we’ll play it and it all comes back. You can see people, and the little wave of joy that goes across the audience when they suddenly remember the first time, they heard the song or whatever, So, yeah, there’s a lot of overall satisfaction in what is a very small investment in a way. It’s just us learning a couple of new songs every once in a while, (or a couple of new old songs ever once in a while) – making sure that I d enough of my own material that the audience doesn’t complain about it and generally we just have a really good time.
There’s very little tension in that sort of show.
Todd Rundgren’s 25-date “Clearly Human Virtual Tour” starts in Buffalo, New York on February 14th and finishes in Seattle on March 22nd. Visit the virtual box office at http://toddrundgren.nocapshows.com
Todd Rundgren Clearly Human Virtual Tour:
Feb 14: Buffalo, NY
Feb 16: Albany, NY
Feb 17: New York City, NY
Feb 19: Virginia Beach, VA
Feb 20: Pittsburgh, PA
Feb 22: Cleveland, OH
Feb 23: Detroit, MI
Feb 25: Indianapolis, IN
Feb 26: Chicago, IL
Feb 28: Madison/Milwaukee, WI
March 1: Minneapolis, MN
March 3: Kansas City, MO
March 4: St. Louis, MO
March 6: Nashville, TN
March 7: Dallas, TX
March 9: Houston, TX
March 10: Austin, TX
March 12: Denver, CO
March 13: Salt Lake City, UT
March 15: Phoenix AZ
March 16: San Diego, CA
March 18: Los Angeles, CA
March 19: San Francisco, CA
March 21: Portland, OR
March 22: Seattle, WA
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