Day 358: Todd Rundgren – Runt
I saw something about Liv Tyler today and realised I’ve never listened to Todd Rundgren. If you don’t know the story, Liv Tyler’s mother is legendary rock muse Bebe Buell, who had a brief relationship with Steven Tyler and got pregnant. She and her ex-partner Todd Rundgren conspired to put his name on the birth certificate and have him be her father, since Steven Tyler was struggling with drugs at the time and didn’t seem fit to be a parent, and Todd Rundgren thought she shouldn’t grow up without a dad.
Album cover courtesy of Ampex Records
Liv Tyler figured it out when she went to an Aerosmith gig and thought “Steven Tyler and his daughter look just like me” and turned around and saw that her mother was crying. She did still call Todd Rundgren her father, despite knowing who her biological dad was. All of this to say, Todd Rundgren sounds cool, I thought I should give him a listen.
Todd Rundgren is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. He taught himself to play guitar as a teenager and said he became obsessed with it immediately. After graduating high school, he moved to Philadelphia to join a blues band called Woody's Truck Stop, but despite the band’s success, he left to start a psychedelic rock group called the Nazz.
The Nazz released two albums and had two singles that charted, but they decided to disband in 1969, so Rundgren went solo. He was feeling unsure about starting a solo career, so he released his first album under the band name Runt, but it was essentially a front for him going solo. All the players on the album were also remarkably young, with 21-year-old Rundgren providing guitars, keyboards and vocals, 16-year-old Hunt Sales on the drums and 19-year-old Tony Fox Sales playing bass.
I thought I’d go for Runt as Rundgren seems to have a tendency to make a long album, with his magnum opus Something/Anything? spanning a whole hour and a half – that’s far too much of a time commitment if I don’t even know if I like the guy, let’s just get to know each other first. And Runt seems like a great place to start anyway, he pivots into straightforward pop, avant-garde psychedelic rock and prog at various later points in his career.
I’m not sure what I expected of Runt, but it wasn’t this. It sounds way more mature than you’d expect from knowing that the oldest person by a mile was only 21, but you can definitely hear the lack of experience at times. And yet, even that doesn’t come off as particularly bad, it’s more just adding to its charm. There’s also a lot more of variety to the album than I thought there would be, from soft rock ballads to the prog-influenced and sarcastic Zappa-esque “I’m In the Clique”, to the more experimental tracks at the end.
It feels like starts as more conventional and gains more personality as it goes on, and while it’s good from the jump, the final two songs “Baby Let's Swing/The Last Thing You Said/Don't Tie My Hands“ and “Birthday Carol” are very clearly the highlights of the album – based on those two songs alone, I’d give this album a far higher rating. “Birthday Carol” especially is a bit of a marvel.
Alright, I’m in, I like Todd Rundgren. Based on this being his solo debut, I’d be more than happy to listen to an hour and a half of his later stuff, but I’m glad I started with this one. It’s a hard one to rank though – I didn’t like the beginning as much as I loved the end, so I’m giving it a very conservative 8.5/10. I’m now really looking forward to Something/Anything?