The Questlove Show - Questlove Supreme: Todd Rundgren

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

In the words of Questlove, Todd Rundgren is " an unsung creative maniac excelling in songwriting, production and engineering, with techniques and ideas that were seeded and planted over 50 years ago of which we are still trying to unfurl to this day. He crawled so artists like Radiohead, Prince, Thunderkat and all stops in between can fly. He pushes the artistic envelope, which is a major understatement. " Listen as Quest and Team Supreme dive into the story of the innovator known as Tood Rundgren. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Questlove Supreme is a production of IHeart Radio. Ladies and gentlemen, it's another beautiful week upon us. My name is Questlove, and this is Music, We Paradise, otherwise known, as Questleaf Supreme. I'm joined here by Fon Ticillo. What's up, man? Yeah, what's going on, man?

I never thought we would get this interview. I'm being real. I know, right? I know. This is some real. This is some major league shit. I know. My ears with this as well.

Just get giddy when y'all get giddy and Steve gets giddy. Exactly. Steve, we did it. Yes. We did it. We did it. We did it. Ladies and gentlemen,

nothing excites me more than when I get to pick the brains of a fellow Philadelphia um yeah like what can I say about our guest today he's an absolutely he's he's an unsung creative maniac that's what I'll say

he's an unsung creative maniac excelling in songwriting in production and engineering especially engineering with techniques and ideas that were planted seated and planet over 50 years ago that we're just starting to unfurl even to this day.

I mean, I don't think it's, it's hyperbolic for me to say that, you know, Todd probably crawled so that artists like Radiohead and imprints and Thundercat and all stops in between can fly. He pushes the artistic envelope. That to me is a major understatement. His achievements are, it's just beyond description. Ladies and gentlemen, stop laughing at me, Steve. I'm very excited for this episode.

Please welcome the endless flow of creation in human form known to us mere mortals as Todd run grinned. Shut up, Steve. All right. Yes. All right. You ain't finished it. You got to say it.

Can I leave now? No, Steve. It's all downhill from here, you know. Let me tell you some about sugar, Steve. He will remain silent on everything except for. the proper mispronunciation of your name. He will, yeah, he, there, there are receipts from, he's given out tickets to anyone that's ever butchered your name.

No, that's run grinned. Like he's led classes. That's still not right. That's still not right. No, he got it. He got it. He's right on time, Amir. No.

He got it. No, he corrected me like 10 years ago. I used to say run, run, run. Grin, like do run, run. Grin. No, it's Run Grin. And there was a period where I say run, but it's run grinned. So there was a period.

Yeah. Let us have, Steve. All right. All right. All right. How are you? And where are you right now? I'm at home in Kauai and I'm doing quite well.

We haven't had a case here in like six, eight weeks of the deadly coronavirus. so we're just waiting for the rest of the world to clean up. And I'm back on the road again. I see. So you're kind of enjoying your... Well, I don't get on. I never get this kind of time at home. And so I'm feeling a little bit guilty about having all the time.

But then again, so much stuff has piled up in my life that I don't get to properly address that I'm actually enjoying this freedom for the time being. is most of your time spent is it in on the road or like how much of your time is spent between like traveling and studio recording well a while ago i would say within the last five years i would be out as much as 10 months on the road because i'd be doing my thing i would be playing with wringo star and then there's all the other little odd things that get thrown there and you know sometimes i'll go out on a tour to tribute an art like I've been out on tours of tribute, David Bowie, and I'll be doing that again, I think, in November if everything goes well. With the various things that I do, I would get maybe 10 days at home at a time, then be gone for a month and a half, another 10 days at home. So, yeah, I'm settling in. Can I assume that, okay, that this is probably the longest extended time that you, you've taken off from working.

And if so, are you sort of recharging your creative juices? Because I'm often curious as to how, like, serious creatives that I know, how are they using this time off? Like, are they using this time to absolutely do nothing? Are they using this time so that they can get more inspiration to create things? Because oftentimes it's like once you put out your first record, then you're in a cyclone of you got to promote the tour it and whatever free time you have, that's where you document the new ideas, and then you make your second record,

repeat rents, repeat rents, repeat rents, and then once you have eight albums under your belt, then you're just in a constant touring swoop. So there's really not time to just sit in silence and create. Like, how are you getting your creative juices off? Well, I have an unusual creative process. that I don't do what looks externally like a whole lot of work. Most of the work that I do is internally, just, you know, hashing through little musical ideas.

In the midst of doing another collaboration record, as a matter of fact, there's going to be a song with the roots on it. I've actually premiered it already. I did a radio show for somebody, and I played Godiva Girl. But I'm doing collaborations, and I was, you know, I was supposed to sort of deliver earlier in the year, but the problem is that everyone's kind of stuck at home. So nobody can get in the studio to finish up a lot of the stuff that I've been working on. So lately, you know, from a creative standpoint, I've been doing these collaborations,

which allow me to work more with other people's ideas than just always coming up with something myself. It doesn't mean I won't go back to that. this kind of solitude and silence is like what I need to be able to write because of the fact that it's such an insular and mental process for me. It's like I'll be thinking about what I'm going to do and then when I finally get down to finishing a song, I'll come up with like the melody and lyrics in 20 minutes, almost like automatic writing. Like my hand will just start writing out lyrics and I won't even have to hardly think about it. So, yeah, it's just kind of, I let my subconscious take over a lot of the work. And then when it's time to actually create, it just kind of spills out.

What would you say is your primary instrument? Because I know you pretty much play everything, but what's your primary instrument that you use to compose on when you get those ideas? Well, the keyboard is the principal, I guess, musical idea, musical idea creation tool because you've got like all the notes. laid out linearly in front of you. But that doesn't mean that, you know, the limitations of like the guitar aren't

also something that's sort of inspirational. There are sounds and sort of tonalities that the guitar creates that, you know, work with certain sort of vocal themes and stuff like that. And of course, you know, Norwegian death metal would be nothing if

he had to play nothing but piano on it. So. Right. But from a compositional standpoint, I actually sort of, I have always considered the studio itself sort of a composition tool because I very early on built one for myself in the belief that the ideas could happen any time and you don't want to, you know, have to wait to get into the studio. And conversely, if you're in the studio and you're making good progress, you don't want to have to get out

and make room for somebody else. So the studio itself sort of became, the creative tool because you lay down something you get to hear it back right away and decide whether it works or not and what's the whole don't don't skip over the most important thing that he basically just said engineers make the best artists oh we know the studio you know what is that's why I kicked out the the engineer that I had when I first got into the studio did my first production. Exactly. Never mind.

Never mind. Yeah. I think it was, the first time I engineered was a band from Philadelphia called the American Dream. It was a brand new record plant studio and they had a custom board and nobody in the studio actually knew how to use it. So I just got frustrated watching one of the engineers fumble around on it. I said, well, I don't want to just watch him learn how to do it.

I'll just learn how to do it myself. And subsequently, it changed the whole way that I approached production because I could assume that the sound was there. Because I knew enough about the engineering that I, you know, if you put the mics in the right place and that sort of thing, you don't have to do a whole lot of messing around. And then you can assume the sound is there and then focus on the musical part of it, on the performance and whatever, you know, kind of details that you want to put into the music. So it made the experience, you know, for the most part, of working with a band a lot different because, you know, productions in the old days, you get in the studio, and you spend the first entire day just getting drum sounds, you know,

or something like that, you know. And then the next day, guitar sounds, you know. What's the percentage of, or at least, like, from zero to 100, of the idea that's, inside of your head being perfectly executed once you put it on tape? Very rarely, but that's because I don't often have that intention. I don't have the intention necessarily to completely craft something in my head and then try and imprint it onto the tape.

Really, as I say, I'm exploring in a way. I'm fumbling around. I often, when I'm starting a new record, I'll go out and do a lot of musical research. Like I'll ask my kids, you know, what are you listening to or what do you think I should listen to? Then go on YouTube and start poking around and then there's the sidebar. You start out one place and before you know it, you're in a whole other place. You wrap it and hole yourself. Yeah.

But that's, you know, I mean, that I really enjoy that because you discover things that aren't in the mainstream, which to me is the whole point of the Internet is that everyone gets a platform. Of course, not everyone deserves it. Not everyone deserves it, you know, and, you know, some people are easier to find, but it essentially took the music business and flattened it. You know, in other words, there's no or very little price of admission to participate anymore. All you got to do is get yourself a laptop, you know, at a website. In the world's your oyster.

What part of Upper Darby did you grow up in? I grew up in the very western part of Upper Darby in a brand new post-war row housing development, a familiar kind of housing in the Philadelphia area and Delaware and stuff like that, row houses, which is essentially like an apartment building that fell down. Every house looked exactly the same. It was like one of these Levittown situations, but it was very lower middle class. So, you know, I had to share for my entire life that I lived at home, a bedroom with my bedroom with my brother and my two sisters shared a bedroom.

Okay. How many siblings again? I have a brother and two sisters. Did they have musical interests as well, or was it just you? Not really, no. When I was in elementary school, we used to have a program where you could rent an instrument and every week or so, somebody would come and give you a lesson. It wasn't like a band or anything, but I, for some reason, thought I wanted to play.

the flute when I was like when I was like eight or nine something like that you know I just like the sound of it but when I actually got it I didn't realize what a nonlinear instrument it was you know it's very difficult to learn and plus when you're young it's difficult to get your mouth to the umbisher to get your mouth to do the right thing so my sister she got a clarinet and I actually learned to play that way better than I like learned to play the flute and she never learned to play it at all so you know i learned how to play too strange on the shore by mr acerbilk and that thrilled my dad you know because he was into that kind of easy listening stuff but when i first heard um i think it was walk don't run by the ventures

that's when i knew guitar was what i wanted to play was that the first album that you purchased or like do you remember the first album you ever yeah the first album you ever or sing yeah the first album Well, the first album that I ever purchased was like a cut in, out of a cutout bin, and it was probably like 69 cents, and it was called Boppin, and it had a bunch of artists that you've never heard of. Actually, years later, I did find, run across a few of the artists. Like if you go on YouTube, you can actually find performances by Deke Watson and the Brown Dots. it was just an odd collection of weird 50s rock and roll, proto rock and roll, a lot of it.

And it was still before the Beatles, so I didn't have a whole lot of discrimination. I just knew that I was not into Elvis Presley because he was a greaser, and the greasers liked to beat me up. So I had no interest in Elvis Presley, whatever. So you weren't in the cool kids. You were like the loner. Oh, the troubled loner, definitely. the troubled loner. Yeah, it was one of those things.

I had terrible ADD, whatever it is. They didn't know what that was in those days. It was just an unruly child. And no matter where I started out in the classroom in the beginning of the year, by the end of the first semester, I'm in the very back row because I'm creating distraction

and stuff like that. And I just was never meant for that kind of, that kind of discipline, that school. required. So everything I ever learned, I learned after I left school. So what was the, what was the moment where you decided that this is, this is my destiny, this is my, my, my moment in music? Well, I had a high school band. And as previously cited, I did so terribly in high school that there was no possibility of me going to college. It would only have been possible if I had landed

some kind of scholarship anyway because my dad didn't make that much money. And so after high school graduation, which was just around my 18th birthday, on my 18th birthday, I packed all my worldly goods into a typewriter case. At that point, I didn't even have a guitar anymore. And I left home and went to meet a friend of mine who was a drummer. And we were going to start a band, and he was supposedly in Ocean City. so I got on a bus. It was my 18th birthday, so the first thing I did was I went to 69th Street,

right across from the 69th Street station and registered for the draft. Wow. Yikes. Yeah, yikes. And then I got on a bus to Ocean City and met up with this guy. Well, I didn't meet up with him right away because apparently he was hanging out with some guys who were stealing park benches and hiding them in their garage in Ocean City. And so I had to be.

to find a place to stay overnight until he had his court date the next day. Wait, why were they still parked finches? In Ocean City? This is in 1966. You just did anything. Okay, I get, I get it. Yeah. And so, you know, I went to his house with him and his parents.

A couple days later, we went to see the birds and the shadows of night at a summer stock tent, little concert thing. So it was the birds. They were big on radio. The Shadows of Night, they had a hit, and a local band called Woody's Truck Stop. Okay. We were kind of excited to see them

because I knew about them through seeing a picture of the guitar player, one of the guitar players in, it might have been Time Magazine or something, because he grew his hair long and beat the system. Because I was having trouble all the time. I was always growing my hair, and they were always sending me home,

and my dad would send me to the bar, and this was just an endless cycle. And he essentially beat the system. He was a straight-A student. And so a judge said, you can't not educate him. So they made him, they made the school, provide him with a private telephone line. And there was a picture of him at a desk

with his long hair and a little speakerphone. And I thought, man, he beat the system. And the way he beat it was, he said, I'm in a band. You know, I have to have my hair long. I'm in a band. And so I was excited to see them, although I had never heard them. I had no idea what kind of music they did. But they really like, they kind of like kicked everybody's ass.

I had so much energy. And they were basically a blues band, blues and R&B. They did like, I think they did a Sam and Dave song and they did a couple of blues songs. And so, God, that's great. Let's go see them when they play at the Artist Hut in Philadelphia, which is no longer there. It was a little basement club on Walnut Street, just a block past Writtenhouse Square

and held maybe 80 people or something like that, maybe 80, 100 people if you cram them in there. And we went to see the band, and as it turned out, their drummer was just a stand-in. They could not seem to find a drummer if they could keep. As a matter of fact, the drummer on the gig was Tim, if I just remember her name. He became a famous songwriter,

and he wrote 7th Avenue, I think was a hit song for Art Garfunkel. But anyway, they were looking for a drummer, and Joe, the guy that I was with, he was just amazing, trained drummer, you know?

So he just sat down on the drums, started doing all his buddy rich stuff, and they said, okay, join our band. And he was loyal enough to me for some dumb reason. And he said, okay, but you got to hire my friend here, the guitar player as well. And they decided, okay, well, we can go for that

because that allowed the so-called rhythm guitar player to come up front and play harp. And then the band looked exactly like the Butterfield Band. And so that was my first real gig. First time I ever got paid real money. And it lasted for maybe six months, eight months, something like that. Wow. And then I formed a NAS.

you mentioned upper derby i have to ask you uh if you've spent any time in vowshevely's uh record store which is still open and up and running to this day now where was that um just in relationship to where you catch the l i would say it's like two or three blocks away i mean technically oh you mean around that's around the 69th street area yeah around the 69 street area i mean technically, I would say that he's the number one 45 distributor in, well, at least the science says in the East Coast. I'm certain that now in the world. The whole of the East Coast.

Wow. Yeah. You go there and his, what would you say, Steve, that he has at least like 600,000? Yeah. So he's there. It's still there. Where's that? And still open.

So once a year, I'll take a maybe a two-day trek. get lost in his uh where's that in relationship to the tower theater uh cross around the corner if you go to if you go to a tower theater uh i would say it's just slightly slightly around the corner it's like walking distance yeah i remember there used to be a place downtown on chestnut street that was one of those you know one of those places that had like every single every obscure single that you were looking for that kind of place right now Now, he's managed to just stay open and, you know, pretty much people just take pilgrimages there and do like week, week long. Great diggers.

Yes, exactly. You know what time. I need to check on him. Sure. He's okay post rona. Yeah. No, he's by, he lives, he's a loner, you know, he lives with 900,000 records. Oh, he's like Harvey Pekar.

Did you know who he is? Harvey Pekar, no. I repeat car. He would be on the David Lemon-Earman show every once in a while. A guy from Cleveland, Ohio, like, very angry. But his life's work was essentially collecting vinyl. And I went to his house once. And for an individual person, I don't know how he found the time, you know,

to collect and catalog so much stuff. But I guess it's because, you know, he worked at the post office. Okay. So you never know. So with the NAS, that was your, when did you guys, you guys got signed in, what, 68? I think it was around then. The band sort of formed the band in the summer of 67. And it wasn't too long before we got kind of discovered and whisked off to New York,

not New York City, actually, Great Neck Long Island. the guy who took over managing us, he lived in a really nice neighborhood. His name was John Curland, and he actually lived next door to Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary. And he was a publicist, and one of the great things about that was, when I would go to his office, he was still like all of the latest releases. You know, like, who is this iron butterfly? and what the hell is a Buffalo Springfield

and that sort of thing. You know, we'd get the records before they ever got into the stores because they were promos. And in that sense, you know, we were always like slightly ahead of whatever was going on in the public musically. But he really didn't know anything about managing a band, you know, and he kind of stuck us all together

in a house in Great Neck and said, I don't want you guys to play. until you get a record deal because I want to be able to set, you know, like a high ticket price or something like that. And ultimately, you know, that philosophy killed the band because, you know, the only thing worse, you know, than being in a band and fighting on the road, you know, is being in a band and stuck in a house somewhere and fighting all the time, you know, because you don't get to break it up with any playing. So that to me was a big disappointment. And as a matter of fact, my time in the NAS only lasted about 18 months.

But we managed to get two records out. Was there any, I was always curious to know, was there any crossover or overlap between NAS and Utopia, another band you produced, were there any guys that were in NAS that went on to that band? No, there weren't. But ironically enough, Rick Nielsen, And Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, eventually they became members of NNAZ for a brief period of time.

Really? Until the band changed its name to the Sick Men of Europe. Then eventually they left that and started Cheap Trick. And then I did, years later, produce a Cheap Trick record. Which one did you produce? Next position, please. Okay. Didn't have any big hit singles on it.

But they didn't have any big hit singles. that much anyway. Right. Yeah, my band, we actually sampled a song you produced off Utopia. Legally sample, I might add, we sampled it legally. We sampled

eternal love off the rock album. Oh, shit. Okay. Yeah, we sampled that for Good Morning Sunshine off the, of the movie. Oh, excellent. Okay. Cool. Sample away. I've never, that's never bothered me, you know, people sampling stuff. I always thought it was sort of flattering, you know, when

someone would, um, would, excerpt your music. Keep that in mind. Well, it should be noted that, you know, many people think that hello to me, made its debut on something, anything when the actuality, it appeared on the NAS record.

However, for a lot of black people, the eyes to believe. Hello. Hello. I mean, I know. I mean, brothers.

Yeah. It might be one of them, but I'm very changed now. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Yeah.

Okay. I'm a really show my. age, honest be droop, my first hearing of that version, it was groove theory, like, straight up to that. Like, my God, Fonte. I got like, groove theory, because they covered it in like 95, I want to say. So that's the first time. That was the first time.

Wipersnese. You're telling me that you never had a mom, aunt, or grandma that cleaned the house on the weekend. Not to that song, no. I mean, we had. Live it up. Like top five, Isley, right? It's like top five, Isley.

That was my first time. my eyes leaves was like, because my mother was younger, so our eyes leaves was like between the sheets. You know what I mean? It was that. All right. All right. I'll give you that.

So yeah. Yeah. It was all that. So yeah. When I heard, I was like, oh, this was damn. I was the guy. I was supposed to do this.

Yeah. That was my first time hearing. It was group. And you were making me feel better, Fonte. I do. Well, that's a fellow Philadelphia. So it's even more full circle. Full circle.

That is hilarious, Fonte. Wow. That's amazing. So I'm the only one who got introduced to the song by the actual song. Well, like you pointed out, though, not the original. The original was on a NAS record, right? That's correct. And the original was like you likely wouldn't recognize it because it was like a really

dirgy tempo, really slow and sappy. I prefer that version on the NAS than even. And I didn't play guitar on it. I played vibes on it. There's no guitar on it. the NAS version. I guess you're the first person that we interviewed that even put their footprints into psych rock or what they call progressive, I mean progressive, at least under that, under that

umbrella. Was the basic mind state to rebel against whatever the status quo was? Like, what was your thoughts on, I'm trying to think of like commercial albums that push the envelope. Like say access bold as love or the first couple of yes records you know with the first couple of Genesis records. Well see there was a whole

there was a difference between like so-called American Prague and English Prague rock because English Prague rock was inspired by classical music and you know and more classical forms and old maybe to some extent folk music, English type folk music. Whereas American Prague rock was more informed by jazz

and acts like return to forever and Weather Report. And so what we were doing by that time, you know, with some weird combination of all of those influences, Weather Report, Mahavish New Orchestra, yes, you know, Genesis, gentle giant, you know, all of those, the English prog rock which was more you know classically inspired and had classical themes

and the American Prague rock which had more jazz inspired and jazzier themes so somewhere in the middle it met because we had the way that we would write was we would all just sit around in the studio and everybody would just throw ideas out and we'd figure out how to glue them together and everybody had you know different things that they were listening to at the time. John Siegel, our bass player, he'd probably be listening to a lot of return to forever,

and, uh, but we would, you know, work other stuff in like, uh, American classics like Aaron Copeland. Oh, wow. Yeah. So what around that time, like, what were, what were the artist or the albums that were blowing your mind? Like, were you anti-Sargeant Pepper's or? Anti-Sarge and Pepper? Well, I was, I had an interesting reaction to, Sergeant Pepper because I was a teetotaler until I was 21. I did no drugs that never drank alcohol. I had no idea what people were talking about when they were high. And when Sergeant Pepper came out, I was kind of disappointed in it because the album before, which was Revolver, I thought was an incredible record just from the standpoint of the songwriting and the production innovations that went into

it and it seemed like, you know, they were just reinventing music all the time. And then Sergeant Pepper was just very imitative of English music hall kind of... Timpan Alley. Yeah, that sort of stuff. Well, you know, it's where it was, you know, circus music, that sort of thing. Right. Yeah. And people say, like, you know, it's a completely different album when you're on acid, you know. And I said, well, I don't take acid, you know. So it kind of like I thought I must be missing something here. And so it never affected me the way that it did everyone else. But years later, I kind of, you know, I got a little more into it.

And mostly because of the quality of the sound, there's a certain, there's a space that they created in there that I don't think existed on a lot of records previous to that, an atmosphere or a sonic space. And I grew to appreciate that. and I grew to be less offended by things like within you and without you. So what led to you leaving NAS and starting your own? What was the process in starting your own solo work? Part of it was, I guess, the inevitability of me absorbing broader influences than the ones that originally went into the NAS. we characterized the Nase as a combination of the Who and the Beach Boys.

In other words, we wanted to do that. We wanted to perform like the Who. And destroy everything. Yeah, and destroy everything, but be able to do harmonies like the Beach Boys. And it's not that much of a stretch because the Beach Boys was Keith Moon's favorite band. And that's why the Who did a cover version of Barbrain.

They would let him sing that every night on stage. I got completely enthralled with Laura Niro and Eli and the 13th Confession when that album came. Yeah, that album. It just opened up the skies for me. And I had never heard anyone sort of like be so revelatory in their performance, really interesting and intricate in the songwriting and very sophisticated in the harmonics. And of course, she sang great. and I was so kind of like taken with her

that I asked my manager, John Curland at the time, if he could somehow get me an audience with her. And so he called up David Geffen, who was an accountant at Columbia Records at the time. Wow. But was kind of like the contact guy to Laura Niro and managed to, she allowed me to come up to her apartment in the Dakota.

and she made tuna fish casserole, which is the only thing she knew how to make, and that's why her publishing company was called Tuna Fish Music. And she played the piano and sang, you know, like sang oldies and played the piano and wanted me to sing along, but I was just too petrified. But the thing I remember from is she let her fingernails grow so long that they curled over, you know, like her fingernails were like at least three inches long.

And so when she was playing the piano, it would be this clattering noise, you know. And I don't remember hearing that on the record, you know. But she called me back like two weeks later and went up to visit her again, and she asked if I would be her band leader. And I, you know, so I have to think about it, but I knew that I couldn't because the NAS had just signed a record contract. And our first album was about to come out.

But between the first and second albums, I started writing like Laura Nero. And none of that fit. Oh, wow. It caused a big debacle during the recording of the second album, which was originally a double album, but half of it I was singing, and it was all Laurenero songs. So essentially they cut the album in half,

and when they did that, I quit the band and lived on the street for a while until the partner of the guy who was managing the NAS looked me up. He had gone to work for Albert Grossman. and Albert said, you know, I want you to go out and find some young talent because everybody I got his old. You know, he had Bob Dylan and he had Peter Paul and Mary and then he was getting into some more contemporary acts, but the only one that he ever actually signed was Janice Joplin and within a year she was gone.

You were supposed to produce her, correct? I was supposed to produce her, but, you know, all these things don't always. work out. In retrospect, I deduced that the problem was that she didn't really like making records. She liked performing in front of an audience. And records, you know, there was no audience there. And so it was just like she was lost in the studio.

The studio wasn't for her, yeah. It wasn't for her. She needed the response of an audience. And I'm, you know, I'm in the studio. I'm just thinking about musical concerns and stuff like that. So eventually she got Paul Rothschild to finish the record. and Paul Rothschild is one of these producers who knows almost nothing about music, you know,

but knows how to pump an artist up, you know. It's like, that was great, you know, that was, doesn't matter how terrible it was. That was just great. Can you do another one? You know, like that, and then eventually, accidentally you get the performance that you keep. But the whole thing, you know,

was more psychology than, you know, actual musicology. And at that time, that was my extreme, the weak suit. I was only in my very early 20s. Hey Todd, you briefly went over the struggle, but we do that kind of fast sometimes. You said you were homeless? I was, well, I wasn't

literally homeless because I was still signed to screen gems as a writer through the contract, through the NASA contract. They had apartments in various major cities in L.A. and in New York.

where they would just put songwriters up for, you know, I don't know, songwriting sessions or whatever. They just happened to have these places. So I was staying in one, but, you know, I didn't have a lease or anything like that. And at that point, I was spending most of my time with clothing designers in the West Village. I was designing and installing lights in a dance club.

I wasn't doing no music, whatever, stuff like that, when this guy discovered me and brought me into the Grossman organization and started pairing me up with everybody that was on the roster because a lot of the artists were not making the transition into the 70s. Some of them hadn't fully made the transition into the 60s, but I started doing like Ian and Sylvia and James Cotton and ultimately the Butterfield Band. And the mandate most of the time was make the record sound more modern, you know, make the record sound contemporary somehow. So I strove to do that and they appreciated that.

And then my biggest break probably came when I did. Well, stage fright with the band, because the band was like the biggest band in the world at that moment. And so getting my name on stage fright kind of got a whole bunch of other stuff right after that. Hall and Oates was among them, Graham Funk Railroad, Badfinger, you know, and et cetera. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th.

You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clivert Show isn't just a podcast. It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me, or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be.

to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft, and we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco,

joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make, to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else.

If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Only because of my affinity for collecting weird rock, prok rock stuff for sampling purposes or whatever. So there's a group called Paris that's been sampled a lot in the hip-hop community with a drummer. named Hunt Sales.

Oh, yeah. A comedian Soupy Sales. Is it true? He's on run. And if he's, that's the case, he was a kid. Yes,

he was a kid. I first met, he's drumming on your album as, what, like 15, something like that. It's 15, 16, something like that.

Because he was in his 30s when Bowie put tin machine together. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, so he was that dope

at the age. a 14-15? He was getting drum lessons from, well, people don't know this probably, if you know who Supi Sales is, because people probably don't know who Supi Sales is much anymore. He used to actually be on Motown, which people don't know that. I have, do the mouse, yeah. You can do it in your house, yeah. Yeah.

Do you guys know Super Sales? He was a comedian, right? Or comedian. He used to be on like, shan-na-na-na-da. He was a Saturday morning. He was like Saturday morning, Saturday. Saturday afternoon, a kid's show host. Yeah.

That's how he got famous because his show went coast to coast when he became the Soupy Sales show. Right. But previous to that, he was a local late-night host in Cleveland, and he would have, you know, he was like Johnny Carson, and he would have all the great, all the jazz greats come in and play on his show and talk on his talk show. And so he knew everybody. I remember going with him and Hunt and Tony. to see like an 85-year-old Gene Krupa play at the jazz club that was in the plaza hotel, in the basement of the Plaza Hotel.

It was so funny. Gene Krupa grinning like he always did, but could barely lift the sticks off the drum. But, you know, he knew everybody in jazz, and Hunt got lessons from Louis Belson, you know, one of the great technique drummers, of all time. Right. And the first guy, I think, to do double bass drums.

I met them at a place called Steve Paul's The Scene. There used to be in New York City and in a lot of cities, there used to be a lot of music clubs where they serve no liquor. For instance, the cafe a go-go in New York City, which was a basement club,

very weird configuration. But I saw Cream's first gigs in the U.S. there, saw a Butterfield band probably four times there. saw John Mayall and, you know, all of these, and Richie Havens before Woodstock, you know. Right. You know, all of these greats would play in this tiny little club, but, you know, I mean, the admission was probably $10, and the one drink minimum was like a flower vase full of ice cream. You know, like a giant milkshake.

Because, you know, these places were all open to underage kids. And Steve Paul's scene was the same way. It was, you know, all ages, if your mom would let you, because they served no liquor. And it was the same kind of place. You saw the very first gigs of Seanana, for instance. Right, yeah. Some of the very first gigs of just some of the strangest acts. Like, well, the nice.

Remember the nice? That was Keith Emerson's band before ELP. Okay. I saw David Clayton Thomas in a Canadian band called Raven before he joined Blood Sweat and Tears. The house band was the McCoys. Hang on, Sloopy, Rick Derringer, and his little brother, Randy, they were the house band. And since it was all ages, and since you never knew he was going to play there, especially the jam sessions, which would happen after the build acts came on,

they were amazing you know i was standing on stage on time with trying to remember but it was like dwayne allman right right uh you know the the drummer from led zeppelin and the bass player from another band you know just the jam sessions were amazing i never got to jam with jimmy hendricks because i walked right by him as he was coming into the club because i thought he was taller than he was, you know, but his afro only came up to my nose. So I thought, no, he was actually kind of a short guy. So I walked right past him and never even got to watch him jammed. So, but anyway, that's- Wait a minute. You're actually confirming the rumor that

Hendricks was supposed to be NELP? I didn't hear that, but that's an interesting thing. Yeah, there is a rumor that the name of the group was supposed to be called, Help. Hendricks. Emerson, Lake, and Powell. It was Lake Palmer. It was Lake Palmer. Um, Powell. I'm saying of Colin Powell right now. Sorry. Colum Powell? No, cozy pal. He's the man right on these streets. Yeah, I know, right. Cozy Powell. He was the original drummer in Journey. Trivia. Oh. We love our trivia. So anyway, they would... You should be... All right, I'd say we'd grab Todd to be our seventh member.

Of course. Of course, Love Supreme. So I'm skipping over to something anything, which, first of all, I know back then at least for a double album to get released was a big deal. I mean, now it's nothing. But... And normally, I'd,

I would think that double albums were a thing for, I mean, proven acts that are, you know, multi-platinum and all those things. But I mean, 72 was just the level, the level playing field was clear and things were being defined. But the risks that the artistic risks that you took on that record, like what was your mind state during that period? I was in kind of a great position and it's affected the way I think about making records ever since because I was producing records for the Grossman organization. But I was still writing songs and I had musical ideas, but I had no inclination at all

in becoming like an actual, you know, bankable artist that had to go out on the road and play and stuff like that. I enjoyed being in studio too much. So I wanted to get these ideas out of my system and I asked Albert, who or whoever I was dealing with, I said, can you give me a budget to make a record of my own? And I said, well, you've been doing all this work for us, sure, we'll give you a budget. And then I recorded Runt. And they were kind of surprised at the result. You know, they thought it was going to be a piece of crap. And as it turned out, there was a minor hit single on it. So that kind of sealed my fate. I had to continue making records because I'd had a single.

Then the next, and the first record was just a scatterbrained effort because I had never made an album of my own and I just wanted to capture all of these various musical ideas and to work with musicians that I really wanted to work with. Then I got to my second album, between the first and the second album, I discovered marijuana. And an ironic thing. Because it gave me a much more ordered approach to songwriting. Really?

In other words, yeah, it made me less scatterbrained when it came to songwriting. So the next record that I made, which was called The Ballad, and that one really fell through the cracks because Bairsville changed their distribution from Apex, which was a tape company, to Warner Brothers, right in the middle of when that album got released. So it just kind of... So Bersville was not your label. I always thought that was your indie label or whatever.

No, that's Albert Grossman's. It was Albert Grossman, okay. Yeah, you know, since I was working for him, I was on it. And so that was surprising. And then the second record was just much more coherent and much more songwriterly record. And then when I got to something anything, I moved to L.A. for a year, got a house

so that I would be, you know, have nothing to do but make music. and I would record in this little studio called ID Sound where we did the NAS Records during the day. Then I go home at night and write and do some other recording. I ran in an eight-track machine and recorded some of the more bizarre things from the record like went to the mirror.

Yeah. Sounds of the studio and that sort of thing. Why and how did you create intro? Intro meaning the sounds of the studio. it? Yes. Or the one on the very last side, which is found tapes of my high school band and stuff. Well, the one on the last side where you introduce hissing, reverb and... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the sounds of the studio. Well, it was, of course, you know, the analog days, you know, and analog had its own sort of issues and responsibilities and stuff like that,

you know, which nobody nowadays much recalls, but before you could do a session, someone would have to come in. They would have to clean the heads on the machine. They'd take a swab and swab down all of the heads and rollers and stuff on the machine. They would lay tone down on the tape, reference tone.

It's kind of like a lesson for tape ops, you know, which is a lost art, but in the analog days, you had to do all of these little rituals like cleaning the heads and the pinch rollers and laying tone down on the tape and being the guy who gets yelled at when you accidentally punch in in the wrong place

or the guy who gets yelled at because the tape broke or something like that. So, you know, an analog recording, there was this whole other range of issues he had to be conscious of. that, of course, the music consumer never really considers. But since it was analog, you know, in all the records I've made, at least somewhere there's an analog glitch in it.

You know, something where accidentally the tape got pinched or creased, but it's in the middle of a performance and you can't do anything about it. And it's before digital where you could drop in something from another place, you know. And so it just goes on to the record. And most people, it goes by, most people don't even notice it. Knowing what you know now, having dabbled in both, you know, the world of analog and digital, what is your preference? Do you prefer the beautiful imperfection of the analog world?

Or are you consistently still working for looking for the best? best experience of sound that you can get in the digital world? Well, I think a lot of people forget that, you know, the analog world was an entire milieu. It wasn't simply the fact that records were on vinyl. It was the fact that portable music systems had not been invented yet. And so if you wanted a personal listening experience, you had to go to your own home and sit in the sweet spot in your own system and listen to the record. Ideally, nothing goes wrong in that situation. The record does not skip or nobody dances across the room and makes the tone arm hop around or, you know, or the base on the record does not interfere and start to cause a rumble and other sorts of, you know,

artifacts or the fact that the plain fact that the sound on a vinyl LP is worse in the center, than it is at the outside of the record because you're trying to put the equal amount of sound in smaller and smaller real estate, you know, as the record proceeds. So people tend to forget about all this. I'm sorry. I know that to most people that, to most of you guys, I just sounded like one plus two equals three. But to me, I just went. Okay. Here's the deal.

That's so dumb. In vinyl world, in vinyl world, it's probably to your best interest to, keep your time under 16 minutes. Yeah, because that's when you can get to maximize on each side. You get the best sound. So the reason why they make 12-inch singles, the reason why they make 12-inch singles is so that you can have one song on that record.

So it's louder when it's just one song. Yeah, when DJs play it. Maximum, maximum volume, yeah. Now, for instance, side two of Michael Jackson's off-the-wall record has six songs on it. So the records are, the grooves are really smaller, as opposed to side one, which is four songs, and louder. So if I were to play the title clip,

if I would play off the wall in the club from that album, the volume would be very low. So thus I would have to do more. Yeah, as opposed to, so, yeah, back in the day, I mean, the reason why we use computer technology now to DJ is so that now I can make it last. as shit. Wow.

It used to be problematic. Like, if you'd turn the volume up, you would hear, like, you would hear low in feedback and all those things. Y'all don't know how many people y'all just sent back to listen to, like, their old vinyl. Like, that's, that's, what?

Okay. Yeah, the more, the more, it's problematic, like probably one of the worst records I know that has this system. Saturday times. No, no, God, the worst mastered albums ever. I was going to say, say

the Def Jam's initial release of Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet where they actually try to cram ten songs on one side like they didn't make it

a double album they just like fuck it 10 songs on one side 10 songs on the other side and thus all the music sounded like this

what? Yeah, the more music you squeeze on a record the softer it gets well it's funny I didn't discover that record until

I got it on a on a CD. Yeah, I mean, it was made, I mean, that's an amazing technology. That's an amazing record, though. That's the, that's the Sergeant Pepper of hip-pop, that record. Wow. Yeah. That record, you know, influenced a white guy like me, you know.

It's really, you know. No, no, that album, that album's heavily influential. Can you do that? Can you actually do that? Not legally. Not legally. Yeah, well, we're doing it. We're doing it.

You just do it until you get caught. Yeah. You just, no, I love that record. I go back to it with regularity. All right. Wait,

now you see, ah, damn. See, I don't even want to go, go to, was you going to ask him? Was you going to ask him with this?

Go ahead. Well, no, I was going to leap right to hermit of mink, but I don't, I don't want to lose faithful and all the other stuff. But, all right,

I know I booked you the last time when I asked you about Anamata Pia. But that's just not normal. It's not normal. Not normal. It's not normal to be making shit like that. How long did it take you to make that song? And where did you, did you just have a sound effect record and be like,

okay, I'm going to figure out a way to craft a song. Some of it. Some of it is sound effects. And a lot of it is just me making noises with my mouth. Oh, I never even bothered me that you would actually make the sounds by yourself. I thought like, like that.

Yeah, I thought you were just like one by one, like cutting and pasting. Well, obviously some of the sounds are not human derived, so they would have to be sampled from something, probably from a sound effects record or even me, like, making some folly for it. But, yeah, what I'm trying to lead to is that, I mean, between you and Miles Davis, well, you know, with Tio Marcia, Marceo is this last name, Steve? Tio Miserro. Tio Miserro.

with how they crafted bitches brew, I mean, these albums that you're making are just they're redefining what you can do and can't do with technology. So was it the fact that you just

felt like I mean, were you ever just unsatisfied with the studio? Like, what studios were you looking for to give you maximum creation? And did you everything of the day would come that something like

Pro Tools will come along, like, that would make your life easier? Well, I got into the idea of having a studio of my own on Wizard of True Star. Because I thought, if you're going to go musical exploring, you know, if you're going to go musical big game hunting or whatever, no, that's Paul Simon. If you're going to go musically exploring, you need to be able to do things sometimes that they won't allow you to do in a regular studio. Like I say, if we go into a regular studio, they say, but don't turn that knob past there, you know, but if I have my own studio.

The engineers always like being assholes to you? Well, that's, it's because they have to, you know, turn the studio over to somebody else when you're, you've got to protect the equipment. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's not just yours to do anything you want with. But when you have your own studio, that's exactly what it is. So we would put the knobs wherever we wanted. You know, in other words, we wouldn't even look at the meters. We would just listen, you know, and turn the knob until it sounded right, you know.

And sometimes, you know, the meters are just pinned in the red, but that's how you get that sound. And ever since- I love the national feel off that album. It sounds like that. I love that song, man. Oh, yeah. A lot of it is, you know, just us, you know, not being like you would be in a normal studio. Like in a normal studio, you would have somebody make sure that the noise reduction was in the right,

the switches on the noise reduction were in the right locations, depending on whether you're a recording or playing back. And we would find ourselves doing things like putting noise reduction on something and then bouncing it to another track, forgetting to put the noise reduction in the, to the decode part of it. So essentially, it would be like the most squishy limiter that you ever heard. And the highs would just be the highest highs because we were using DBX desoleneer compression. And I won't explain what that is now.

But essentially, accidents. You know, half of what happened on that record was accidents. I was wiring, I was on my back underneath the console, wiring it while the musicians are coming in for the first session. And we're just finding channels that work. You know, mark that one, I'll fix that later, but we just, we get enough channels to record everybody, okay. It was like that all the time.

It was just guerrilla recording because, you know, we had no studio manager, nobody ever paid anything to use the studio. It was just, we would contribute to each other's projects and stuff. It was a little musical, It was great. And your label, your label like Bearsville, how were they,

were they supportive? Because I mean, because a lot of stuff you were doing, I mean, it was really unorthodox. And, you know, a song like, I saw the light or, you know, cold morning light, you know, just which is some of my favorite songs by you. But like those are kind of just, you know, kind of easier to digest. But then on The Wizard of A True Star, you went really kind of heavy. Would they support? Have you ever got John Lennon's reaction to rock and roll pussy?

No, not that particular thing. And that wasn't about, it wasn't particularly about, I don't think it was about John Lenin, although I can't remember exactly when that press manufactured feud was. But yeah, some people at the label really freaked out. My friend Paul Fishkin, who later went on to found modern records, he was running the label at the time. And after something, anything that had like three hit singles on it, I give him a Wizard of True Star,

which doesn't even have spaces between the songs. It's just one long sweet. I love that record, though. I love that shit, man. I know, but then, you know, he is freaking out. You know, he's saying, how do I sell this? You know, this is the lost album now. Meanwhile, Albert Grossman is just tickled pink about the whole thing.

He says, oh, yeah, let's drop the bomb on this one. We're going to make this a double gatefold die-cut album cover. You know, we're going to do records in colored vinyl. Well, we did a limited run of colored vinyl or something, anything, but we're going to do some colored vinyl in there. We're going to get Patty Smith to do a, you know, a little poem on a piece of paper and shove it in there at a postcard so we can solicit. addresses from people and put their names in the next package. These were all his ideas. I never

had the guts to say, give me a double, you know, give me a gatefold die cut record to hold only one record. You know, it wasn't a double album. It wasn't a double album, yeah. But that record also was the epitome of that problem with too much program on your vinyl. And I think it's either on that record or another record. I put something on it. And the, company let it pass, but it was really sort of in violation of general policy. I said, this record, you know, there's a lot of music on here. I advise that the very first time you play it, you record it to tape. And then listen to it from tape after that.

Because you'll be lucky if you get through it once on the turntable. So with your album afterwards, just based on the lyrical content, and whatnot. What was, I mean, by this point, you were an established, you know,

an established start. Like how, how was it handling the success that you were gaining? Because I guess, you know, you said at the top of the show that you really didn't have any expectations to become like,

you know, a big star or those things. And now you're dealing with it. Like, what was it like to deal with it and to do these songs in concerts? And, well,

even with that. Like you're such a studio wizard. How were you able to kind of execute these ideas on stage by this point? Well, I had to learn how to sing in front of an audience. I was never a singer. I always delegated the singing to somebody else. The first time that I went out on the road was probably after, after we got to get to a woman. And I put a band together mostly of musicians called the Hello People who were.

a group of rock and roll mimes. And I couldn't make it 20 minutes into a set. And in those days, a set was like 30 minutes. I couldn't sing for more than 15, 20 minutes at a time. And it took me literally years to develop my voice to the point that I could sing a whole show. The irony being now that I can sing all night. It doesn't seem to affect me. Were there any of your peers that you look to to kind of get you doing it in a way like anybody else,

any other artists that you looked at and like, okay, what did it? My peers? You mean the ones that are still alive? No, at the time when you were trying to do this live thing, more than 15 minutes. That's what I meant. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it's not an uncommon thing. And what happens is most people, see, I always had, I guess I would write aspirationally.

I would write to the very ends of my range when I was in the studio, because all I I have to do is like hit the note once and then we'll punch it into that, you know, just punch in every freaking note, you know, but then you have to go out on the road and sing all those notes in a row. And, you know, I was just wasn't prepared for that. But what a lot of people will do, they'll just simply, they'll compensate, you know, they'll say, okay, I'll just lower the key, or I won't write into that range, you know, I'll, I won't, I won't I won't strange. I won't strain myself, put it that way. But I was still always aspirational. I just, you know, there were singers that I admired that I wanted to sound like.

And so I just kept trying to do that. You know, I was a giant Stevie Wonder fan. You know, I was always trying to sing like Stevie Wonder, which is an impossible thing to try and attempt in the first place. But I got just so much inspiration from his singing. And more importantly, it was a weird artifact of the way they recorded at Motown and particularly the way that his voice got recorded. They put so much compression on his voice probably because he's so loud, that you could hear every breath he took.

You could hear every breath he was taking in between the notes. And it taught me how to breathe when you sing. It's more about having wind than it is about your throat and trying to stretch it hard enough to get to those high notes. You know, so I just, I learn a lot from listening to other people sing, but that was, you know, a revelatory moment when I suddenly realized I should just go in, go in my car, drive around for hours screaming my head off. Just drive around screaming your head off.

And after enough of that, I started to gain stamina, you know, to be able to actually hit those notes. Is it possible for you to listen to music by other artists and not get in sort of the analytical mode of, I wonder what mic they used or what tubing or what the engineering was and it's too much compression and I would have changed this. Like, can you just, are you able to listen to music without dissecting it as you hear it as an engineer or as a producer? Well, like all things, you know, it really depends on the strength of the performance and the music. And this is in line with my philosophy as a producer. The audience at large doesn't give a damn about so-called sound quality. They think, when they hear it the first time, they think that's how it's supposed to sound.

They never think, oh, there's too much reverb on this or, you know, I can't hear this quite a lot. They may have some subjective opinion about it overall, but they don't know enough about the process to be able to pinpoint what it is. So for the most part, if it's a great song and if it's a vivacious performance, you know, if it's a great performance of that song, people don't care at all what it sounds like, you know, which is why I just can never get into these high fidelity arguments, you know, with Neil Young or whoever, you know, that you need, you know,

256,000 bits a second, you know, properly hear the sound. I store my Pono player. Yeah. Use it much, you know. I forgot about that. I don't know. The most hysterical part about it is that it's coming from Neil Young, you know,

who did an album of him standing in front of a stack of marshals making feedback, you know. So he's talking about, you know, the finer points of audio fidelity. But, you know, I've always always maintained that. That it's better to, you know, if an act comes in, which is one of the reasons why I learned engineering, because you don't want to waste a lot of time on that if an act is ready to make the music. That's my, you know, my number one priority. Before I go into the studio with someone, I want to hear the material. I want to know that we're not in there like pulling our puds, you know, over something,

or that we suddenly got to call a halt to the session because we have to write a bridge, you know. So I always want to hear the material before we go into the studio to have the confidence that we're going to be making music in there and not talking about non-musical issues. That's the most important thing. Second most important thing is, you know, is to get the artist in a mood to deliver that song, you know, to actually, you know, which is another reason why I like them to have written and ideally have performed the material before you get into the studio to record it. It makes such a difference because if somebody's reading the lyrics off of a piece of paper

while they're doing it, they're not really thinking about what it means. They're just trying to get the words right, you know. And what you really want to do is convey the meaning of the words with your singing. So, number one. And Kimmy Gamble said the same thing. Yeah, get good singing, good songs that really inspire the performers, get the performers to be inspired. Nobody really cares that much about the sound of it unless you've made it incredibly terrible. I had a question about can we still be friends, a lyric.

Your lyric, I don't know if it was a lyric or it was an ad lib, can we still get together sometime? That's like one, my favorite part in the song. That was an ad. Are you asking her like, can we, are we gone? Can we do it? Can we do it? Is it just can we hook up and we get some coffee or some shit? Like, how?

How did you mean that? Well, you know, it's kind of an open question. Okay. You know, the whole tenor of the song is, you know, a lot of people assume it's a romantic song. But I made a decision at a certain point that most people, when they use the word love in a song context, They're more often talking about either sex or ownership. And I at a certain point, decided I wasn't going to use the word at all. So for many albums, the word love does not appear.

Then I decided that it's okay to use the word love, but try and do it in a way that doesn't make things so specific that people always think it's romantic, that everything is always about a boy and a girl. And it's the same way about, like, can we still be friends? it's assumed that it's a guy and a girl breaking up or a guy and a guy or a girl, or a girl, whatever.

But it isn't necessarily about that. It's like, let's say you and a friend of yours work really hard, you know, to build a company up. And then you realize you've got to leave the company, you know. We can't do this anymore. I've got to move on to something else. Well, Fonte. That's, you know, it could be that, you know.

Right. Right. No, yeah. I always saw it from the standpoint of maybe, you know, a plea for kind of like a post-amical bull divorce situation or, you know, kind of after the fire has burnt out. Yeah, but it is a very, it is in, be civil. Yeah. Can we be civil is more like the, you know, it's like more like the overriding messages, you know,

can we go on? Because there are situations that are exactly not the opposite. You know, it's like there are people that you know you never want to encounter again, ever. So, and I have, I don't know that I've written that song, but I do have, you know, a philosophical thing about it, you know, which is, you know, certain people, it's, if you'll excuse the expression, I call it the tar baby syndrome. If you recall from the song of the South,

Brer Rabbit, yeah. The only famous thing, you know, it's all about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Bear and Bear and these are, you know, antagonists. They're always at each other, you know, messing with each other all the time. And so Brer Rabbit finds this big ball of tar and he says, I'm going to play a trick on Bear Fox and Brer Bear, you know, because I know that they were going to, they mess with strangers and stuff. So dresses it up and clothes and sticks it on a log.

And sure enough, Burr Fox and Brer Bear Bear Bear come around and start messing with it. And what happens is that, you know, all has to happen is you stick a finger in there and suddenly you got it on you and you can't get it off. And then it's suddenly, and the next thing you know, they're trying to get it off and they're just getting more and more of it on them. And, you know, the lesson to me was, you know, there are certain situations and certain people you should know beforehand. Don't even touch it.

You know, don't put a finger on it, you know, because you will be paying for it for a long time after. that. And so there have been people in my life, which, you know, they fall under that category. I say, don't even, you know, you can imagine, oh, everything is going to be fine. It won't be like it was before. And then the next thing, you know, it's exactly like it was before because you changed, but they didn't. They didn't. Oh, my goodness. Yes. That is universal. That's a word. Yeah, that's a word. Or at least a day when when the cover album is made, usually it's a period where like maybe people will run out of ideas and you run all the way up until,

uh, to faithful and not to say that you weren't still pushing the boundaries because we didn't even get started on the Acapello record yet, but with faithful, like what was the idea, uh, behind covering those, uh, to do those covers because, I mean, the idea of doing a cover album or conceptual cover half album, wasn't even a practically a thing yet. I mean, I know that in the 60s,

to make records, people would cover whatever, like a Beatles song or that sort of thing. But what was your whole ideology behind making that record? It was actually to demonstrate how much radio had changed in 10 years. Faithel came out in 1976. And every song, pretty much every song that I did,

on the cover side of Faithful was on the radio in 1966. Okay. And what I wanted to try and do was recreate what it was like to listen to radio then, where you would go from like the Beatles to Bob Dylan to, you know,

I didn't even cover the range of what was happening, but growing up in Philadelphia, you know, the DJs high lit and... Highlet. There was another DJ. I can't remember. remember who he was. But, I mean, the 60s liberated them and they would play, you know, Judy Collins, and then they'd play the Beatles, and then they'd play Bill Evans or some other jazz. And the radio

was just really interesting in those days and enable you to discover a lot more music than the kind of formatted radio that eventually happened. Like by 1976, everything is syndicated radio. everybody's playing the same playlist. So I just wanted to demonstrate, you know, how eclectic music could be on the radio. The other side was just kind of a handful of songs. But it's funny, a lot of those songs on the original side turned out to be standards that I do all the time,

even to this day. So my personal favorite album of your... Canon is the hermit of Mink Hollow, of which I, well, I know that you literally did everything by yourself, which... Correct. Yeah. Yeah, how nerve-wracking is that process when you are your own engineer and your own... Like, did you have a remote device for the tape, or did, like, did you... The thing is, I did not, unfortunately, did not have a remote device for the tape.

And my studio, I was using my personal studio, which was up in Lake Hill, a little bit past Bearsville. I had a house, and then I had, there was a little barn on the property, and the barn had a loft in it. And so I enclosed the loft and made that the control room. but that meant that, you know, all the instruments of any size, drums and such, would have to be downstairs. And so the most nerve-wracking part, of course, is recording the drums because I would get, you know, like into it a little ways and then screw up, and I'd have to run up the stairs.

I was always very stingy with tape. Wait, you were a record over? No, no, no. I would just, you know, if I would mess. up a take, I would just go back and a lot of people, they would buy many reels of tape and they would go through and make many takes of everything and then eventually maybe make a master reel or something. But I was always making a master reel. I was always like going for the one take. Then I would put a paper leader in and start recording the rest of the reel, you know?

And so I was just very stingy with tape and never really made a lot of outtakes. I mean, I either got the drums right or I didn't, you know. It's like it wasn't the kind of thing. Eventually, you know, if I got three quarters of the way through a take, then I would, I'd stop and pick it up from there and then do a splice in the tape. But I always felt that I had to get at least halfway through it before I would consider a splice. Otherwise, you know, I would just stop. Run upstairs.

Rewind the tape. Start put it and record again. Run downstairs. and count it in, start playing again. You know, it's one of those things like I'd learned during something, anything, the first time I played the drums, the drums have to be first. I started out thinking I could play the piano part,

and that would give me some guidance about where I was in the song, but I could never lock into the piano because the piano wasn't actually, you know, in any particular strict tempo. So I had to teach myself the song in my head, head and sing it in my head the whole song while I'm playing the drums. And no click tracks. And no click.

Because I couldn't play the click track. I couldn't play the click track either. You know, I couldn't lock to a click track. It would just, you know, it would be so obvious when I was trying to catch up to it, you know. But it also gives it more of a sort of natural, natural feel. You know, it's amazing, you know, a drummer can sound like he's totally locked in in time. but then you put a click track behind and you find out that it's

kind of all over the place. You know, it's feel. You don't notice so much you know, the exact timing of what the drums is doing. It's more about the feel. There's a little push and pull happening all the time. Yeah, I, you know, I use a click trek, but oftentimes I have to force myself

to figure out how to purposely sound like I'm not playing to a click trick. Yeah. So, you know, even though I consistently hear that pulse in my head, I have to now program myself to go behind it, go a little bit ahead of it, go behind it, go, you know, just so that there's, there's a human flow. Yeah, that there's a flow to it. Yeah, I discovered that when I tried to make a tempo map to Godiva Girl.

Really? Yeah. I discovered when I, you know, when you actually try and, you know, the tempo map essentially is, you change the actual speed of the recording as it goes along to match up to some something that may not be an, you know, might not be following a click track. Even though the song is mostly all the same tempo, it moves in and out in subtle little ways, which you don't discover until you try and lock to it. Right, right.

A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clipper Taylor the 4. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show.

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that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves.

Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft. And we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's

East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galko, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break what really matters when evaluating draft prospects, from hidden traits teams look for, to the biggest mistakes franchises make, to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else. If you want to understand the draft like an insider,

you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. So, okay, not knowing the history of it because, you know, well, there's no excuse to say I was 11 when it came out, but I purchased this record, you know, in the last 10 to 15 years, but assuming that the popular tortured.

The ever popular, the ever popular tortured artist effect. The popular tortured artist effect. Yeah. Can I assume that your relationship with the label sort of went sour by that point? Because usually with the album titles like that, those things happen. But what it also happens is I would assume that that is in your mind a whatever project. and then you mess around and actually have because I know bang on the drum is

bang the drum all day is on that record and so since that's your last record am I correct in saying that the relationship soured with Bearsville by that point? Things were not great with with Bearsville records it just Albert Grossman

was a peculiar personality and tended to go hot and cold in some things. And even though he had a label called Bearsville, he never really promoted anything on it. He expected Warner Brothers a distributor to do everything. So he would be constantly making deals for foreign distribution and then take all the money. And instead of promoting the records or anything,

he would build a restaurant or something. with it. So he was very much into land ownership. So almost anything that brought in income, he would buy something and build something on it. I felt that they, first of all, weren't taking the whole idea of records seriously, but also certainly not my records.

It's not as if I thought that, you know, there were a whole bunch of great hits on my records. I've never striven to do that, so I don't force the label to give me hits or anything like that. But at the same time, I did expect that they would take the record seriously because I did have an audience. And in the end, you know, it was not as if I was doing a spoof of a record. It was just that I didn't bother to develop any concept behind it. You know, most of the records that I do have got some over-exam. overarching thing that helps me figure out what fits in the overall picture.

But history will show that artists that, you know, and this is the case with a shout by the Isley brothers is the case with tequila. It's the case for even La Pamba. Like sometimes artists will, well, what I'm trying to lead to is that were you shocked at all at how the sports world took to Bing on the drum all day? and it was a funny weird kind of thing that happened with that. I think it started with the sports, but I'm not exactly sure.

And I believe it was first like hockey games that they started playing it. Then two football teams, the Packers, and what was then the St. Louis Rams started using it as their score celebration song because everybody seemed to know it for some reason. reason, but it was never a hit single. In fact, it was never released as a single. It was a B-side, I think, of something. And it was never in the technical sense written by me. It was a song that I dreamed. I was like asleep. I was totally asleep. And the song is, you know, playing in my

sleep. I have no idea what it means or why I should care, but I just immediately went down to the studio and recorded everything that I remembered from it and added words, but, you know, the bang to drum thing was all there. It was all complete. You know, all I had to do was write it down. Sometimes, it's not the first time that's happened. I've had other songs that have just come to me when I'm asleep completely formed, and then I have to go figure out how to remember and capture that. But it was like some mystical being. wrote that for me and said, you're not going to understand now why you're doing this,

but years and years from now, it's going to make a whole lot more sense. And then it actually happened. I mean, people started, aside from, you know, the public usage of the song, people started thinking, oh, this is a great party theme to use for our movie trailer or a party theme to use for our, you know, advertising something. And eventually peaked with Carnival Cruise Lines,

I'm getting six figures, big six figures a year, just for them to use that song. Right. And I would still be getting it, except they started sinking all those boats and decided they had to change their image. Yeah, I was going to say, that song is the sound of,

of a kid a kid's brain when he gets extra chicken fingers on his plate like extra chicken fingers. Yeah, that's the sound

of a 10 year old just in his happy place. You made a record called Arena and it has the song on it called Courage that I just really love. I just think it

just beautiful changes. Just a really great song. I was curious to know was arena, was that you kind of mocking the arena rock kind of thing? Was it like a parody or was it a sincere attempt? Because I just, I mean, I love the record, but I know just from listening to your music, kind of your sense of humor and stuff.

So I was like, is this him kind of, no, it was pretty, you know, I was pretty serious about it. Okay. It was, the record was essentially me reacting to the fact that I had not, played enough guitar. The last time, you know, the first time I had that sort of reaction was when I was sometime around something, anything. And I'm starting to write all my songs on the piano, less and less on the guitar.

And I'm playing less and less guitar. And so I said, well, how can I compensate for this? So I started Utopia, specifically as a project for me to play guitar. So I don't play any keyboards, any Utopia records. I play only guitar on Utopia Records. Essentially, around the period of arena, I started to get the same feeling. I spent a lot of my youth trying to learn how to play this thing,

and now I'm just kind of, I hardly pick it up anymore. So I decided to do something that would basically be all guitar written. You know, everything would be written on guitars, and it would be basically mostly guitars, occasional keyboards and other sounds, and to really explore, you know, what contemporary heavy guitar music could be like. And when we found a distributor for it,

they said, okay, well, you're so into playing the guitar. We just acquired the Robert Johnson's publishing catalog, and we want you to do a cover record of Robert Johnson's song. So I got like a double dose of guitar there. I did a record called Todd Robinson's song. Rungrins Johnson and did nothing but Robert Johnson songs on it in the sort of 60s white English

band style, you know, where you wouldn't recognize it as a Robert Johnson song because it's really just there to play guitar solos on. That's when he first came on the show, played with the roots for that to promote that record. The Johnson. The Johnson, yeah. Like literally, I got to ask about a cappella.

because that to me is your, I mean, there's a bunch of creative zines, but of a career of creative zonans, you leave the label, you make this album in 85, and you're basically using the tools that rappers will use. I mean, or you're one of the first people to use an emu...

An emulator, yeah. Yeah, yeah. An emu synthesizer, all these things. First of all, going into the 80s, what was your thought process? Did you feel as though like, wow, the world's my oyster now? Or were you worried or? Things are still pretty good for me. Utopia was still, by 1980, we were still playing, you know, arenas. And mostly on the strength of our shows and word of mouth, not on kind of like huge record sales, but we would do spectacular things, you know,

flamethrowers and falling off the pyramids and that sort of thing. So Utopia was still pretty successful, and I was doing okay, and there were still productions to be done. So, you know, it wasn't like what happened at the end of the 90s and what has happened ever since in that, first of all, the majors have, you know, kind of fallen apart.

So the kind of funding structure for records changed. changed a lot because I was making my living principally on advances for producing other people's records. And so that all, sorry. Yeah, that all started to like fall apart throughout the 90s. And then in the 2000s, you know, everything got different. You know, everything got bifurcated. You either produce your own records in your bedroom or you have five producers on one song, like Katie Perry or something like that, you know, six songs. songwriters and four producers, you know, because you want it to be perfect, I guess. But so, you know, nowadays I do hardly any production at all. There's no demand for it.

But yeah, the guitar. I miss it. So. But anyway, back to, back to Acapella. I had these concepts that I carry around sometimes, you know, every once in a while, get to one and follow up on it. And the idea of doing an a cappella record or a record where all the sound sources were from the voice or the body was a concept that I had had for a while. It certainly has its challenges, but there was, as you mentioned, some new tools like samplers and things.

So I could do that beatbox stuff that eventually became so popular, you know? In other words, overblowing a microphone, you know, to make a snare drum or a bass drum or something like that. I would do the noise into the sampler and then have, there was no MIDI yet, tying everything together. So I'd have to sort of like manually play the drum part,

you know, on the keys all the way through the song. And that's why the time is kind of like a little funny in some places because I'm really just playing the keyboard. There's no sequencer or anything. And then, you know, that, with that sampling capability, I could do, you know, things like, you know, make an instrument,

out of my voice and play chords with it, something that you couldn't do before. So the technology was an enabler. The technology evolved to the point that I could do more than just simply singing with myself. I could create a broader palette of sounds and make the whole thing more interesting. Man, we got to talk about bad out of him, Amir. Yeah, yeah. I totally forgot about that.

Right. One of the biggest selling albums like ever. How did you and meet? How did y'all hook up? Well, there are two people involved in Meatloaf, or there were two people involved in Meatloaf. That was Jim Steinman, who essentially wrote all the material, and Meatloaf, who was the performer.

And when they approached me, they had auditioned for like every producer in the business. And every producer in the business, I told them I don't hear it or whatever, which is not that strange because the song were all really long. You know, they didn't have traditional forms. Steinman tended to write backwards sometimes

from certain things. Like, he would leave big parts of the songs unfinished, but say to me, okay, I would like a giant choir to sing for the next 36 bars, and then I'd have to come up with something for it. You know, he wouldn't write anything. I just have to come up with some thing that played off the themes that he had already done.

So I go down to a rehearsal studio in New York City to see them. I knew who Meatloaf was. I didn't know who Steinman was. I'd seen Meatloaf on Rocky Horror Show on Broadway. So I was aware of the fact that, well, I wasn't going to be surprised about how fatty was. Put it that way. And they essentially performed for me, Meatloaf, Stein on the piano, and two background singers, Rory Dodd and Ellen Foley.

and they performed essentially all about out of hell with just the four of them. The entire album in front of you? Not everything on the album, but, you know, like good percentage of the album, you know. Jesus, like a moment with Kanye West. And I'm listening to this on saying, I want to do this record. And the reason why I want to do it is because it's a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen was like the biggest thing. He was on the cover of Time magazine,

the savior of rock and roll, you know. And to me, it's just retro music. He's, you know, it's music out of the 50s. He's singing about motorcycles and leather jackets and that sort of junk, you know. And that's exactly what Meatloaf is singing about, you know. So I thought, this is great. I'm going to do a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and this is going to be it. And I never told them that that's what I was thinking.

So they took it totally seriously the whole time, you know. and I was like, yes, yes, this is so Springsteen. This is break of my heart to you. Hold, I gotta stop right here.

So there's actually members of the East Street band on that record. So were they in on the joke? Or you just called them up like, no, they were not in on the joke. And Stein in the whole time

would claim that Bruce Springsteen had no influence on him at all, even though he wanted, he wanted Max. and he wanted Roy from the East Street band to play on the record. But otherwise, no influence, whatever. And so, you know, that's why it has all of that, you know, it's got Springsteen's drummer and Springsteen's piano player on it.

So, of course, it sounds like Springsteen. And after the record was finished, well, first thing that happened was, when I agreed to do it, he had a label, obviously, because I'm not going to go into the studio with somebody who can't pay for the studio. I, uh, we're about to go into, it's like the day before we're about to go in. We've been rehearsing up in Bearsville, so, because we want to do the album live. And, uh, and most everything on the album is live, not the vocals, but all the playing.

And, um, Meatloaf comes up to me and says, I want to get off my label. I don't think they understand me and whatever. I said, well, I'm not your manager. I can't tell you what to do, but, you know, that's going to, that's kind of a sticky situation. We're going into the studio tomorrow. So essentially, I go to Bears, and say, well, you know, if you will underwrite the cost of making this record and put it on my tab, you'll have write a first refusal when it's done. So we finish the record and Bearsville doesn't want it.

And neither does Warner Brothers who's distributing Bearsville. Wow. And they spend the next maybe four to six months looking for somebody to release the record. Nobody wants this freaking record. And they find a guy, a guy who runs like a label all by himself is called Cleveland International. subsidiary of like epic records. His name was Steve Popovich. He had one other artist. For some reason, he believed in the record.

And so he took the record on. They put out a single, nothing happened. Put out another single. Nothing happened. Put out third single and finally something started to happen. And that was because MTV came out the same time. Paradise by the Dashboard Light got played like once an hour because they didn't have enough music videos to, fill up, you know, all the time on MTV. So they're playing Paradise by the dashboard light once an hour, just like a regular

DJ would do, like put on dark side of the moon and go up to the roof and get high. But, you know, it's like seven and a half minutes long. And he's touring relentlessly. Meatlo was just touring his ass off. And the fact that Steve Popovich just believed so much in the record, you know, and wouldn't give up on it, like a typical record. executive that it finally broke and once it broke it you know went nuclear like a bad out of hill like a bad out of hail what was it what was it like to record phil risuto uh i didn't you know

i didn't know much about phil risuto except for the money store but you know i was not a baseball fan at that point and had no idea of his career accomplishments or those who don't he's the guy who's It's on the on Paralyzed by the dashboard light who's doing the baseball call. Well, he would essentially be the Yankees color commentator or something like that. So people who were in the New York area and listened to, you know, Yankees games would be familiar with them, but I was not. But Steinman said, okay, you know, we're going to get this guy to just read this thing and we're going to give him $5,000. And I'm like, what? Can't anybody read it?

Couldn't somebody else read it, you know, for like $500? Was he, so he was from New York? Like, how did Jim Stey? He was from New York. He had no idea what this was about. You know, he just read, but he read it, read it into a microphone and took his money and left. And I think years later, he found out the context of it and was very upset from what I heard. Yeah, I was going to say, what happens when the cat was out the bag?

And like, at what point did they realize, oh, we've been had or? What about the? They could have gotten mad because it's also one of the, it's the, one of the, it's the third, biggest selling album of all time. So it's yeah, it's up to around 40 million copies or something like that. And it's, you know, what do they care? It worked, right? If I hadn't thought that, they would have no producer at all.

How long was it until they caught on that, wait a minute. Well, I probably, I probably said it sometime, you know, once somebody interviewed me about it, I'd probably mention it, you know. Were you approached about producing bat out of hell too? I did produce bat out of hell too. Oh shit. I didn't realize that. Yes, we did.

We made the whole recording and then we went in to get his vocals down and Meatloaf suddenly went, uh, and said there's something wrong with my voice. I can't sing. He'd been like singing. He was a bet. Too hard and taking too much cocaine or whatever or something like that and permanently screwed his voice up, which, you know, lopped a couple notes off the top of is registered and made them sound really weird.

And the way that Steinman would write was, at least the way he wrote the first record was, what's the highest note you can hit, Meatloaf? Okay, all right, everything from there down. You know, in other words, you're going to hit that note. You're going to hit it a long time. Like a bell! You know, and so he wrote when he got to the second album, he did the same thing. He assumed Meatloaf could hit all those notes, and he wrote all those notes into it,

and then we get in to get Meatloaf to sing it, and he can't hit those notes. And Meatloaf is like so nearly suicidal at this point. And so I can't finish this record. You know, I don't care what you do with it. And so Steinman sang the record. And it became Jim Steinman's album. It was called Bad for Good. And it was, it's got Jim Steinman with, I don't know if you know who Corbyn is,

but he was a comic book illustrator, airbrush artist, you know. And he did the first cover, which was, you know, the demon flying out. out of hell on a motorcycle. He also did the second cover, which was Jim Steinman's head on top of what looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger's body with a semi-naked girl like hanging onto his leg. He's Googling right now. What in the hell, yeah. And that album went exactly no place, even though it was all, even though it was all kind

of like the same stuff, you know. Wow. But I was always curious to know how you and Dane Funk got together. Dane Funk is a buddy of mine. And he just always had nothing but great things to say about working with you. How did y'all hook up? I can't remember how I exactly found out that he was a fan. But when I was doing my first collab, you know, and I thought, yeah, let's get some funk in this thing.

And so I contacted him. And we just kind of, you know, struck up a real thing. relationship. And whenever I'm in L.A., I try and get out to his DJ gigs. Yeah, I got you, that's one of my favorite joints. I love that. Yeah, that was a, you know, was a fun song. He just, you know, he sent me what essentially is the chord changes and stuff like that and built a song around it. It was easy. You know, a lot of these things can be really challenging, you know, to figure out, you know, what will work for two artists who are just coming together cold.

but it was pretty easy. I was going to say, was that with your collabs? Was that kind of the same thing with you and Trent? Well, Trent Resner? How did that come? Well, I had actually done a remix for Trent a couple of years ago. So I worked with Trent before that. And so I thought this is a big, great way to sort of balance things out

to get him to contribute to my record. And it's amazing. He and his partner, Attica's raw. they do a lot of film and TV work. And so they'll just go into the studio and catalog a bunch of ideas. So he sent me like, you know, like 22, like musical ideas, you know, to pick one, you know. And that was the biggest challenge, you know, which one could I focus on, you know. I actually was sort of, for a while I was working on two of them at once and decided I should probably just focus on the one that we finished.

Not much is said about your work also in music video production. What made you even want to get involved in forms of media outside of recording music? Well, when I was living alone in New York City in the early 70s, one of my principal forms of one of my favorite shows that I watched TV, because I didn't watch a lot of TV. I would make music or I would go out. You know, that's in the old days when there were still principally just three or four TV stations. You know, a lot of it is just too vanilla, you know.

So, but there was some, a couple of shows on public television. One of them was called live from the Egg Factory. And another one was a VT, videotape review. And there was a movement to use video in more artistic ways at the time. started by a guy named Namjun Pike, a Korean guy, and he would do things like hold magnets up to the TV and warp the picture and things like that. And eventually they would develop devices that would do that

for shows like Electric Company and Sesame Street. But there were a lot of experimentalists in video, people doing experimental video, and I was very much into that. I wanted to do that, so I started buying video synthesizers, and built myself a little video studio, and started taking music that I liked and putting visualizations to it.

And it wasn't pop songs. It was like Tomita's, the songs from like Tamitas snowflakes are dancing, you know, or, you know, classical music, you know, Ravel, a song about a clown. I can't remember the Spanish title of it, but classical music and stuff like that and just do weird visualizations to it.

And I thought this could be, you know, legitimate art form and maybe someday, you know, be a real form of entertainment. And so through the years, I just kept accumulating video equipment until, like, I got my first check from meatloaf after, you know, like almost a year of them wrangling trying to get a label, finally getting a label, and then negotiating, you know, my participation and stuff. I remember being in the office and getting handed a check for $730,000 was the first check I got for meatloaf royalties. This was a project that I thought was just going to be a laugh, you know, and, you know, maybe. Now it backfired. Yeah, and when I, you know, and I didn't get my advance when I had to get Bearsville to finance the record like I usually would have done. So I did the record almost for nothing. and suddenly, you know, it's the biggest paycheck I ever got,

probably the biggest paycheck I ever got since, because it had accumulated so much royalties without being dispersed. So I took that check and I bought video equipment with it and built a real video studio, and we started doing what would be more recognizable as music videos, you know, videos to pop songs and stuff. There's one thing I forgot to ask. And we're going to wrap this up.

But could you please explain how you got involved in producing the New York Dahl's debut album? It was an interesting time in New York. New York was never known to have a sound. New York City didn't have a sound. There was the Long Island sound, which was very R&B influenced. But New York City wasn't known to have a sound. And suddenly all of these bands started forming. mostly of people who didn't know how to play that well.

So it was kind of almost like a Warhol. Andy Warhol inspired, you know, guerrilla art movement. And a lot of it was, some of it was good and energetic. A lot of it was just crap, you know. But I was about to leave New York City and move upstate permanently. I still kept a place in the city, but I knew that I was leaving.

and I thought, before I leave, maybe I'll pick one of these bands from this new scene and produce a record for them, you know, produce the New York Sound. And the band that seemed to have the biggest following and have it the most together, I guess, in a euphemistic way of speaking, was the New York Dolls. So it was pretty easy for me to just approach them and say, you want me to make a record with you? And they had by then gotten a record deal with Mercury. And I was probably as hot as I've ever been as a producer.

So they figured, yeah, you guys better do this. It was like managing a carnival. You know, the band had so many hangar-ons and, you know, groupies and press guys. The press loved the band because they played a level of music that rock writers could imagine playing themselves, you know, because it required... Wow.

Yeah, that's a quote for your ass, man. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was so unchallengal, they could understand it really well. So, you know, then rock critics started forming their own bands after that. But, yeah, we somehow managed to get through the record without anybody dying because soon after we finished the record,

they started dying. And yeah, it didn't really do anything when they released it. I don't think there was any precedent for, you know, how to sell this kind of sloppy. And what was mostly Rolling Stones inspired, early Rolling Stones inspired. Most people say, oh, they're a punk rock band, but they were really emulating the stones during their drag period, you know, Mother's Little Helper and that sort of thing.

That's why they all dressed up and kind of like semi-drag. the lead singer David thought he was yeah David Johansson kind of thought he was Mick Jagger you know even though he sounded like an angry Louis prima we uh one of the weirdest moments in my career was we opened for reunited New York dials at like a uh one of those music festivals oh wow here's the thing though when I saw David backstage I was like oh shit is Buster Point Dexter. Exactly. Had no clue.

Had no clue that Buster Point Dexter was in the New York Diles. And then they opened up the show with, you know, like I'm one of the biggest kids in the hall fans of all time. So they opened up with that. So I was like, wait a bit. Like my whole mind was, I had no clue. Like I knew. Did you just enlighten this dummy that the New York Dolls sang the same? same song for kids in the hall? Is that what you just enlightened this? Okay, thank you.

Yes, exactly. Well, I just learned that myself. I didn't know that either. Yeah, the theme of kids in the hall is New York Diles. But, you know, the thing is that I, I'm mostly new of New York Diles via all the critical claim they were getting, you know, Robert Krista gals, you know, year enlist and all that stuff in Rolling Stones, 500 of all time. You know, and I know that people cite them for like, at least, uh, them as a group and how ground, breaking they were, but I just never heard them or anything or just knew the members or any of that stuff. Well, essentially they were the inspiration for the sex pistols, and that's why people refer to them as a punk band, even though nobody used that term in the era when we did the New York Dolls record. It was, you know, if it was anything, it was the New York Sound. But when John Leiden heard the record, the accessibility of it, I guess, in

inspired him and the nasty attitude and everything about it. And it was, you know, it was the inspiration for the sex pistols, essentially. And that's how they got rolled into the whole punk rock thing, kind of by backwards inclusion into the movement. Has Malcolm McLaren ever reached out to you to ask you for tips or to get involved in? I don't know that I may have run into him in London at one point in like the, in the earlier mid-70s. but I've not really had much contact with him. You know, his attitude about this is kind of, you know, it is that punk rock thing, you know,

it's like, let's do something that'll just get people all wound up, you know. Right. And, you know, as a record producer, I had longer goals than that. Okay, I see. So of all your outside productions, not including your records or Utopias records, but records that you produced, like some we've mentioned,

some we haven't, XTC, Badfinger, Hall & Oates, Jules Shear, Patty Smith, just to name a few. Which of the outside production projects do you think was the most rewarding

in the sense that you learned the most on that project, whether it was technical, something you learned technically or something about how to be a great producer or an effective producer? Well, I, you know, I tend to cite Skylarking

as something, you know, I'm not a person that feels like a lot of pride because that's, you know, there's not much to be gained out of it. You know, I try and be sanguine about the things in the past and concentrate on the future. And so I don't think of things with pride except for my kids. It was an incredible slog to finish the record because I was getting so much resistance from certain band members. But I also can say that, you know, they never appreciated what was going on

because Andy went home, and before I had even delivered the record, he was telling people in the press it was the worst record they ever made because he was imprinting his feelings about the experience. And the reason why the experience was not pleasant for him was because I took it over.

I was a fan of the band. I was a big fan, and so I knew about their records. I knew about the evolution of their records, and I knew about what was happening in terms of the making of the records. And when the label approached me, the band was lost, and the label said, you have to have a real producer now.

We can't let Andy take over this project and turn it into an Andy Vanity project again because the records aren't selling like they used to. And so I guess one of the A&R guys said, you know, no go with Todd Rung, he's notorious for taking control of these things, you know. And so they acquiesced, you know, to that. And they came to record up in Lake Hill where I was in my studio, which they had never recorded outside of a British studio before. And we did, you know, like the basics up in Lake Hill. and then we went to San Francisco,

laid on drums and other instruments and things like that, then finished up the vocals back in Lake Hill. During the course of the record, the bass player quit the band, and Andy threatened to cleave my head into with an axe. So after all... It was a great experience, right? Yeah, it's a terrific experience.

But the reason why I look at it as, you know, as being maybe more rewarding than other records is that record saved their career. They got a hit record off of it, and they've continued to record, you know, album after album with no hit records after that. Did they acknowledge that now? They ultimately acknowledged it, yes. Hey, Todd, I want to let you in on something. That record also saves someone else's career.

Uh-oh, who says that? all right this is the this is the weirdest this is the weirdest twist to this story right here sky larking uh sonic sunspot

and oranges and lemons oranges and lemons yeah the three albums now you know we we at the roots had a hustle because we were on Gevin Records as well and we were absolutely starving between 1993

in 1996. And an instant hustle would be to go visit Geffen Records on a Thursday somehow create a diversion or you know, you would ask the receptionist

to go like, oh, can we get orange juice, the apple juice or water? And in those 20 seconds that she walks away from her desk to go to the kitchen, three routes would then ransack the entire

the record library yeah there was a CD closet right behind her of which we learned early that the only product that used record stores were interested in buying these records from from us

was the ecstasy records you know at first we were like all right all these guns and roses records all these Nirvana records or whatever and we couldn't give them away but somehow every cool used record store in the village only took the ecstasy records.

So it just became a weekly thing like to make a quick. You didn't even listen to them then. Yeah, no, but to make a quick 200 bucks, you take all the sky larkings, all the sunnics on spots, and all the oranges and lemons, and just go to every record store in the village. Dukes of the stratosphere too, right?

Yes. And then that's how I'd have money for the week. So thank you. Great. Hi, can I ask before because I know we're about to wrap up, but can you please tell us about what a virtual talk show is and Todd's honest truth? Like, what is a, what are you doing over there in Hawaii? There's been a lot of talk, you know, people doing, you know, virtual things, virtual tours and stuff like that. And I would have, I would be on a virtual tour now if our promoters had let me.

I was totally prepared to, you know, my tour was supposed to start May 1st and run to the middle of this month. fact, it would be almost over. A virtual tour, you said it. Yeah. In other words, we would rehearse the band and do the show, production and everything like we would normally do it, but then find a venue in San Francisco where we'd be rehearsing and do a live broadcast to every city on the night that we would have been there. So in other words, I would have done 28 shows, but all from the same venue, going to, you know, narrow cast it to all the people who had bought tickets to the show. Will each show still be different, too? Well, they would be different because it would be a different show.

I mean, the show is the same show in that. Well, they are different because on alternating nights, we would do either side A or side B of a wizard or true star, as well as the rest of the show. You know, I've been wondering what else I can do besides podcasts and things like that. And our merch company has, since they can't go out on the road and sell merch anymore, set up this whole sort of video broadcasting paradigm thing,

a pay-per-view thing, so that fans can participate in live events, video events with various people. I think Melissa Etheridge has done one. Most of the other ones, I don't recognize the names. There's a Fab Four thing, not the Fab Four, of course, but a Fab Four Beatle Tribute thing. And they said those things sell.

Like, people are really, you know, tired of being at home, so they want some kind of entertainment. So I had an idea for something where I would just spiel, you know, I would just get in front of a camera and start talking about something really commonplace but easily misunderstood, like money or something like that. I'm listening. But money is liquefied labor. That's the bottom line. But in any case. We pitched that idea and they said, okay, well, let's do something a little bit more than that. So the show is going to be me hosting live, but most of the show will be things that I recorded already so that I can be, so that I can make sure that they're like high quality.

Because a lot of the live events, you know, they're, you know, they lack scripting. They just, they don't have energy to them, you know, because you're not getting immediate feedback from the audience like you usually do. So it's, you know, fine line whether it actually qualifies as entertainment. And so I want to, you know, hedge my bets and do a lot of different sort of video productions that I will then host and do Q&As in between and not, you know, attempt to play an hour's worth of acoustic material from my couch. You know, it's too much of that. You listen to in the car? Yeah, I'm taking notes. I am taking notes.

Okay. Todd, we thank you. Nice, we did it. We did it today. We did it, Brooklyn. We did it. We thank you. We thank you.

On to off. I love it. We thank you so much for... Thank you. There's a major motion picture. No, we thank you for seeing your story with us. And, you know, we're all massive fans. And, you know, we've been trying to make this happen forever.

I kind of miss you guys. It would have been in New York, well, weeks ago for... I know, right? For about a week. So, you know, could have stopped by... Well, God willing, this mess will be over soon. For you, stuck in Kauai. Oh, yeah.

Boo-hoo. Willie Nelson and Chef Gordon. All right. We thank you for sharing your story with us, and we appreciate it. On behalf of Laia and Sugar Steve and Fon Ticolo and the great Todd Run Grin. You approve Steve? Thank you. You approved Steve.

Say it's just relax. It's a lot of pressure. Anyway, goodbye. This is Questlove, and we thank you guys. We'll see you on the next go round of Quest Love Supreme. Thank you. Questlove Supreme is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio,

visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey,

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