Todd Rundgren: Interactive Music, Recording Adventures In Utopia

Probably best known as the producer of Meat Loaf's monster‑selling 'Bat Out Of Hell' album, Todd Rundgren's wide‑ranging career has continually encompassed cutting edge technology. Jimmy Phillips talks to him about his latest ventures: an interactive music CD and interactive stage show.

Virtuoso musician / songwriter / producer / engineer Todd Rundgren emerged on the scene in the late Sixties as the leader of the Philadelphia‑based rock quartet Nazz, whose self‑titled debut album yielded the hit, 'Hello It's Me'. Disenchanted with the lifestyle, he left the band in 1970 to seek creative asylum in the studio: "I looked at production as a way to remain in the recording business without having the responsibilities of 'pop stardom'. In fact, when I first started producing, I envisioned myself mostly working on other people's records and then occasionally doing something on my own. As it turned out, my early efforts gained more popularity than I expected, and I kind of got sucked into becoming a performer."

Rundgren's production discography (somewhere in the vicinity of 50 albums) is a testament to his astonishing versatility, and includes The Band's Stage Fright (1970), Butterfield Blues Band's Sometimes I Feel Like Smiling (1971), Badfinger's Straight Up (1972), Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell (1977), The Tubes' Remote Control (1979), the Patti Smith Group's Wave (1979), Psychedelic Furs' Forever Now (1982), XTC's Skylarking (1986), and Pursuit Of Happiness's One Sided Story (1990).

In January 1971, Rundgren released his first solo album, Runt, a youthful, exuberant collection of pop songs that spawned a Top 20 hit in the USA, 'We Gotta Get You A Woman'. His most commercially successful effort, Something / Anything?, appeared in the spring of 1972, rising to number 29 on Billboard's pop album charts and eventually achieving platinum status. Two singles off the album breached the Top 40, 'I Saw The Light' and 'Hello It's Me',the latter (a remake) climbing to number 5. Over the course of his next 12 solo albums, Rundgren experimented relentlessly, scoring hit singles with 'Good Vibrations' and 'Can We Still Be Friends?'. As an alternate vehicle of expression, he formed the pop‑rock group Utopia in 1974 with bassist Kasim Sulton, keyboardist Roger Powell, and drummer Willie Wilcox. Building its own recording studio near Woodstock, New York, Utopia recorded 10 albums, the most successful of which was Adventures In Utopia (1980), before disbanding in the mid‑Eighties.

Future‑Tech Guru

As the technological explosion began to intensify in the late Seventies, Rundgren established himself as one of the original future‑tech gurus — he was instrumental in producing the first interactive concert (the audience voted on the songs to be performed), the first music video incorporating both live action and computer graphics (his multi‑million‑dollar, state‑of‑the‑art Utopia Video Studios facility was nonpareil in 1979), the first live radio concert to be broadcast in stereo (in the US), and the first US national cablecast of a live rock concert.

In a non‑musical capacity, Rundgren was involved in the development of the first videodisc (a 1979 demo for RCA) and the first colour computer graphics tablet (Apple Computers' Utopia Graphics Tablet, for which he wrote the software in 1980).

In the Nineties, a continuously evolving Todd Rundgren designs cutting‑edge digital media with NUtopia, the California‑based video production firm he founded in conjunction with Newtek (manufacturer of the Video Toaster). And not surprisingly, he has reinvented himself as 'TR‑i' (Todd Rundgren–interactive). His latest project, No World Order, marked the first concurrent release of a conventional music CD and its interactive CD counterpart. In late June 1993, Atlantic‑distributed Forward Records (a division of Rhino) issued the linear edition, followed closely by Philips Interactive Media of America's release of the CD‑i (Compact Disc–interactive) version.

CD‑i is a multimedia format that allows users to interact via their TV with compact discs containing digitised audio, video, graphics, and text. Rundgren's version focuses primarily on audio, offering only minor interactive video that he characterises as "lava lamp"–like visuals and basic on‑screen menu instructions. He settled on the CD‑i medium "because it played sound better than any computer does or any video games machine does. It's a consumer item that sits in the home entertainment section of the house, where you normally listen to music."

To produce No World Order, Rundgren created a database of 933 four‑ to eight‑second, free‑standing, digitally recorded musical modules that he calls "clips". Each clip is unique but related to all others, so that clips can be arranged to play in literally millions of combinations. The artist explains his technique: "You simply take the music and cut it up into little pieces that are meant to be glued back together in any number of combinations. It's a fairly technical process, but essentially it's equivalent to using a razor blade and cutting tape into pieces of certain musical length, except it's all done electronically and the pieces are stored in files that reside on a hard disk."

To facilitate seamless transitions between clips, Rundgren had to temper his melodic sense in deference to a more hip‑hop, rap‑style approach. Next, the music was mixed to DAT, digitised into a computer using special hardware, and transferred to the CD‑i medium. Rundgren then gave copies of the database to four other respected record producers — Bob Clearmountain, Don Was, Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads), and Hal Wilner (music director/producer of Saturday Night Live) — and asked each to create his own sequence.

The CD‑i format enables the user to select Rundgren's original sequence, or one of the four guest sequences, and use a joystick to play with basic parameters called 'flavours', each of which offers several options called 'spices'. The flavours (and spices) include direction (forward, reverse, looping, fast‑forward, and very fast‑forward), form (standard, creative, and conservative), tempo (from 86 to 132 beats per minute), mood (bright, happy, thoughtful, sad, and dark), and mix (thick, natural, spacious, sparse, and Karaoke). Rundgren also developed a function that he calls "slack". By increasing the slack between spices or flavours (from 1% up to 100%), the user can generate a virtually unlimited amount of variations (one would have to play the CD‑i disc 24 hours a day, seven days a week, well into the next millennium before he/she would hear the same version of the song twice). In an abstract sense, the idea is to navigate around musical space: "You navigate through a musical space that's like an aquarium. You swim in a musical direction until you decide to change your vector. Or you can hang out in a part of the music if you like a verse. Or hear different lyrics and stay in the same musical space with more or less instruments, with or without vocals, and so on."

Interactive Concerts

In October, Rundgren began the world's first interactive concert tour. Presented in the round on a 16‑foot‑diameter stage supporting a 4‑foot‑high command centre, the interactive experience radiates outward from the artist and his Peavey DPM C8 keyboard controller. Above him is a 12‑foot‑diameter video pod supported on legs from the stage, which contains dual rings of 12 video monitors (in banks of four) and from which extend mechanical "fishing pole"–like structures that allow audience members to participate in the experience.

For sound reinforcement Rundgren uses an all‑digital Peavey system, consisting of DTH‑4s in a 4‑corner configuration, eight DTSubwoofers under the stage and 12 DJS 1000 Satellite Speakers flown beneath
the video monitors, in conjunction with seven DPC 750 and four DPC 1000 power amplifiers, four PLM 8128 programmable mixers, two Midi Master II routing and control modules, three PC 1600 MIDI controllers, four Autograph II graphic equalisers, an EQ 215 equaliser, and a PC4‑XL crossover. For synthesizer voice modules he employs two DPM SPs and a DPM V2.

I had an enlightening telephone conversation with Todd on 30 December 1993 at his home in Sausalito, California. He had just completed the first leg of his interactive concert tour.

Over the last 25 years, you have remained firmly entrenched in the technological vanguard of the music industry. What do you consider your most significant innovation or contribution?

"I don't know that I've ever objectified it that way. From a technical standpoint, I've only recently gotten involved in innovating things, as applied to music. Most of my computer work has previously been graphics. And I'd written computer graphics software and things, some of which were actually marketed. So I imagine they could be considered a contribution. But I'm trying to think of what the technical thing is that I've done that has contributed, and I suppose so far it could be considered sort of a DIY attitude about these technologies. For instance, recording technologies — now it's commonplace for people to do all their recording themselves and have a little home studio where they make their demos and sometimes their final products. I guess I started doing that so early on and have done it so consistently, that maybe it's somehow helped develop the attitude that this was a productive way to do things."

You recently made the statement: "In five years, musicians will be able to direct market to their audience without having to be signed to a label. There won't be record stores. Music won't need to be pressed to disc. You'll be able to buy space in a database and make your work available to be downloaded right into people's homes." Don't you think five years is a little optimistic?

"Well, there are direct marketing avenues already. Anyone can send a tape to a pressing plant and get a final product back. It's not a question of creating the product, but how you reach your ultimate audience. And I know that in various music‑orientated magazines, there are certain cult artists who are known to the readers of a particular publication, and they direct market just to the readers of that particular magazine. I used to live at Woodstock, and Happy and Artie Traum were notorious for this sort of direct marketing that they would do with their tapes — and they made a substantial living at it. So there are already avenues to direct market things without having to go through what most people consider to be the standard operating procedure, which is to get signed to a label and then they take care of all the marketing problems.

"People are already direct marketing things like software and sound‑related software through bulletin board services. If you come up with a little MIDI tool or something like that, you can market it as shareware on CompuServe [a US‑based electronic communications network]. And that again is going around the standard publishing avenues that are the way most artists expect to achieve widespread success, high name recognition. Most of them stick with the traditional method, which is to get a standard publisher, get a standard record contract — do everything more or less above ground rather than underground. So I think it's highly feasible, and from my standpoint it's an exciting prospect, because the biggest problem I have is this network of middlemen between me and the ultimate listener: the record labels themselves and what priorities they set, what efforts they are willing to put behind the record; the promotional people that they hire and the people that they have to promote to, which are people who own record store chains and people who programme radio stations, people who program MTV; the manufacturers themselves. Each of these people is going to take a little piece; they slow the process down and ultimately create stumbling blocks between you and the audience. So the idea of being able to get directly into people's homes is exciting to me, because then I don't have to worry about the performance of all these middlemen."

That would solve a mass of problems. But you say it will all eventually pass down a single fibre‑optic cable?

"Yeah. Well, they are already building these 'information superhighways' in various parts of the country, so the potential is there already. The thing that isn't up to speed yet is the software mechanisms that allow you to get the information you want into your home. There are a lot of experiments going on in terms of this interface and a methodology of categorising all of the information so that you can find what you want. In other words, anything that goes into a computer database has to be described in some terms. If it's a movie, of course, it's the title and the stars and the director and possibly some category that it would belong to, like action or drama or comedy or something like that. This allows people to hierarchically locate something that they want. Those systems are in their infancy, but it'll potentially be so easy that you can come home and your television set, which will contain your computer, will be so used to watching you ask for things, it'll be able to sense your preferences and alert you to things that may be really new that you might not even be familiar with yet but which conform to your history of listening and viewing.

"So if you keep ordering up jazz of a particular kind, then when something new goes into the system, you can ask your television what's new and it'll tell you, give you a list of artists and recordings. And suddenly I don't have to worry about buying ads and things like that to make people aware of my music, because it's just popping up on their TV screens. So it's a way of getting suppliers and consumers together really efficiently. And the people who suffer in that process are the middlemen, the people who are in this sort of Byzantine promotion and merchandising structure."

No World Order

Let's talk about No World Order. Interspersed between the hip‑hop is some engagingly melodic music. You seem to counterbalance the rhythmically repetitive, melodically circumscribed textures with sufficient doses of the signature Rundgren sound to make the disc palatable to a wider audience. Am I reading this correctly?

"You're reading it in terms of if I was calculating the palatability factor of the audience. But I continue to make records according to some internal agenda that may include contemporary influences, it may include influences that I've had for as long as I've been making music. And I think that whatever I do, there is a certain tether to it that I don't feel comfortable loosening. In other words, there have been points in my career where I have done things completely without reference to anything else, and they could be considered highly experimental. But almost everything in every period that I've worked in has contained a substantial influence that probably was there since I first started listening to music. I've always been attracted to certain kinds of music, for whatever reason, and those primal influences are there throughout — the use of voices and things like that. I think about this a lot, because I listen to contemporary music and I realise people don't use harmonies so much in the kind of music that I listen to. Also, I seem to have drifted away from the heavy emphasis on guitars and stuff that Utopia was into, towards something that is a little bit more orchestral, at a time when popular music seems to be refocusing on the guitar again! So if I was calculating, I probably wouldn't have made the record exactly the way it is.

"But a lot of it is the result not only of me trying to stretch the tether a little bit and incorporate a lot of contemporary things, but also a result of rules that I've set out for this interactive music thing and what the structure of the music has to be in order to fit into that context. And that makes it sound a certain way. In other words, the highly rhythmic nature of the music is what makes it easier to cut it up into pieces and reassemble it. That is not to say that it couldn't be done other ways, but there are technical limitations in interactive media right now that force you to do things a certain way. For instance, CD‑ROMs all spin at a certain speed that limits the amount of information you can get off it at any particular time. I could do things like mix music on‑the‑fly if I could get enough of it off the disc to keep, let's say, four or six tracks of sounds in memory. But right now there isn't enough speed in the hardware to either get that much sound off or to mix together with enough fidelity to play it back. As time goes on and people start putting DSPs and special chips inside multimedia CD players, and new data compression schemes are standardised, then it will be possible to do things like crossfade between two pieces of music rather than just splice, or mix various things on top of each other rather than simply being able to just play one set of stereo tracks at a time. And when that happens, that will remove some of the limitations that are applied to the compositional aspects. In other words, it won't be so necessary to have a beat going all the time."

As I understand it, the CD‑i version contains no computer graphics but does offer minor interactive video. To what degree can the user participate visually?

"Well, there's no recognisable representational imagery. There are six possible things you can see on the screen. There's a kind of a splash screen that comes up when the thing first starts, and that's just a picture of the album cover, more or less. And what happens is, if you don't do anything beyond that, then the thing plays just as if it were the CD. Then there's an editor screen that allows you to change things about the performance of the music. Then there's another screen that's kind of an exit screen/credit screen that allows you to save what you've done and leave the program. And then while you are listening to music, you can also black the screen out, or you can bring up this little graphic that looks like billboards flying by; it's just sort of square shapes that whiz by like you're flying down a highway with a lot of billboards on it. And another one that's kind of a little chaos simulation that looks like a swarm of insects flying around the cursor, wherever you move the cursor. They're just little eye‑ticklers to have something to look at besides the editor screen when you're listening to the music.

"But again, because of the limitation in bandwidth and because we've filled up the compact disc mostly with musical alternatives, we never get graphics off the disc. So there are no other kinds of pictures or animations that come up during the performance. And the reason is twofold: one is the technical limitation, and the other reason is that this CD‑i is supposed to be more like a record than a game or something like that. You're supposed to put it on, put some settings into it, and just let it go. And do whatever you would do normally, which is either listen to it or do the dishes or whatever else people do with music...

"The idea is that you can have the music conform to a greater number of moods or situations. If you're giving a party, maybe you want it to be up‑tempo for a long time so that people get into a dance groove. So you can tell it just to play fast music and it will only play music that's up‑tempo, or conversely, slow music, if you want it to be a slow mood. You can examine parts of the music more carefully. In other words, you can bring it to a certain musical event and have it just play that event over and over while moving up and down through the available mixes, or eliminate various combinations of instruments or the lead vocal. Or you can listen to the whole album Karaoke‑style — just take the voice out. The disc contains four other versions of the record done by four other producers, and you can listen to those or manipulate those, as well."

Can you cross‑mix them?

"There's no mixing involved. You're describing the kind of experience you'd like. In other words, you start with a particular version of the record and then you say: 'Using this as a guideline, listen to these other preferences of mine.' Like, for instance, 'I want the mixes to be sparse and I want the mood to be thoughtful and I'd like you to be kind of creative with the arrangement' — in other words, make things change a lot. And then it will go off and, using those pointers, invent a new record for you."

What I was trying to get at is, can you jump from Don Was's sequence and interact with Bob Clearmountain's sequence, or back to yours?

"Oh, you can jump about in real time, yeah — while it's playing. Whatever you tell it to do, it will do and continue to play. It does it more or less seamlessly — the music never stops."

The Video Dimension

How do you incorporate the video dimension into your live performance?

"Everything is essentially centrally controlled. In other words, there's no lighting man, there's no sound mixer. Once the show starts — and if everything is working properly — I more or less control everything that happens. And I do it by making musical decisions most of the time. I can take direct control of any of these systems, but mostly what's happening is, I have this fairly large computer program running that is listening to input from the keyboard controller. And the way I use the keyboard controller is, I don't actually play musical things with it — although I could. What I do is to assign ranges of the keyboard to various functions that the computer responds to. Let's say the lower 20 keys are 20 different themes that I can play. And maybe the next eight keys are various sections of the song. And then the next several octaves will be variations on that particular section of the song. Then I might have arranged keys that set up a mode to play — in other words, play from a script — or let me improvise or loop on this particular section, so that while the performance is going on I can extemporaneously play a song and have it play from a script and go from a predetermined thing. Or I can jump around from theme to theme and section to section, and more or less randomly access any section of any song. Or I can put it into loop mode during a guitar solo or vamp section, then play solo guitar for as long as I want — until I tell it to stop looping, and then it will proceed with the rest of the song.

"Based on those musical decisions that I make, the computer makes decisions about what the lighting should be; it automatically sets up the mixers and the effects for what's appropriate for that particular theme, and will determine what's on the video screens. If I happen to be doing something lyrically relevant, like if it's a rap section or something, there are these alphanumeric message boards around, and then it will put up the appropriate text for what's going on. At the same time, there are other more manual things that I do that aren't computer‑controlled."

So you have to remain quite alert at all times.

"There's a lot of concentration involved. At the same time I'm doing this, I'm triggering other things, like the fog machine. I'm running the fog machine like a demon, along with various other aspects of the lights. There are cues that I give the audience based on these coloured beacons that are like traffic signals. In other words, if the beacon is red, there's a certain area of the stage they can't get on; if the beacon is yellow, then the dancers that travel with me are supposed to occupy this certain space; if the beacon is green, then anyone in the audience can occupy the space until it's full. I can control strobe lights and other lighting effects. And we have these 'fishing poles' that come out from the top of the structure, and we lower things down into the audience, like little inflatable things they can bat around; a couple of cameras that can come down into the audience and the audience becomes the cameramen — they pass the camera around, put each other on the big screens."

So the concert is interactive on multiple levels...

"On different levels but to different degrees. There is a certain experimental aspect to this that's helping me answer some questions about what's feasible in interactive performance. That's not to say I've tried everything that's possible, but we're starting to learn some things about human nature in these situations, not just how well these things work from night to night in actual practice, but what you can expect from the audience."

Do you experience an entire spectrum of reactions?

"Well, it brings out the good, the bad, and the ugly in people — in some ways, it's just an amplifier. And maybe this is the point of it: the point of this interactive thing is to really objectify what people are likely to do in these communal situations. And that includes outright thievery, which at this point in the tour has become something that I've had to pre‑lecture the audience on, because it became a problem where people were stealing stuff off the podium that would make it difficult for me to conduct a show. Like if there was an audience‑participation thing for a song, where they would be hitting triggers that were around the perimeter of the stage, and I would have a dozen timbale sticks that I would pass out to people to do this. Well, before I would even get to that section in the song, someone would have stolen the entire box of sticks!"

How many people have been attending a typical concert?

"Oh, it varies from probably about 800 up to 2000 people. New York was probably one of the bigger audiences, and they were good; they didn't steal anything. But there was unbridled enthusiasm that can be equally dangerous, because there is this smaller stage area that I occupy that I can bring one or two people onto, but sometimes people just get too enthusiastic and eight or nine people will cram onto this platform that isn't meant to hold that much weight. And there are three ways to get up there, so while I'm trying to shoo people off one entrance, they're sneaking up the other entrance. And this being an interactive show, you don't want security staff to be controlling what goes on all the time, you know — you have to just see what happens.