The song Todd Rundgren sings to avoid audiences getting “pissed off”
By this point, Todd Rundgren has earned the right to play whatever the heck he wants. The legendary American songwriter and producer has had the kind of career that is easy to underestimate – a few scattered singer-songwriter hits at the height of the genre’s power in the early 1970s, followed by some fluke novelty tracks like ‘Band The Drum All Day’ and a whole lot of general weirdness.
But that weirdness is where the gold is. His 1972 masterpiece A Wizard, a True Star is one of the most psychedelic and impressively dense records of all time. He produced classic albums like The New York Dolls’ 1973 debut and XTC’s 1986 opus Skylarking. His pioneering work with his band Utopia set the stage for more ambitious progressive rock and sci-fi odyssey to come. Rundgren was a restless innovator who just happened to sing ‘I Saw The Light’ and ‘Hello It’s Me’.
So you’ll have to forgive him if Rundgren isn’t especially keen to rehash his most well-known hits in concert. While being interviewed by Carl Wiser for SongFacts in 2015, Rundgren went into depth on audience expectations and which songs he still plays because audiences are expecting to hear them.
During the interview, Rundgren was asked if he ever played ‘We Gotta Get You a Woman’ from 1970’s Runt. “In one circumstance with the Metropole Orchestra in Holland. I usually don’t perform the song because I personally don’t identify with it anymore,” Rundgren revealed. “It’s from so early in my career that I have a hard time relating to it. As much as I realize that people enjoy hearing the song, people get more pissed off if I don’t sing, ‘Hello It’s Me’ with some regularity, or ‘I Saw The Light,’ or ‘Can We Still Be Friends’ with some regularity.”
“There’s probably still a lot of people in my audience who only came on board somewhere around Something/Anything? or even after that, so they’re not as familiar with the song as the really hardcore audiences,” Rundgren added. “I tell my audiences, I don’t take requests anyway, so there’s no point in yelling out things. But people are more likely to yell out ‘Hello It’s Me’ or even some other odd tune than they are to yell that one out.”
Rundgren also discussed how he managed to avoid playing ‘Hello It’s Me’ while touring with Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. Starr had a rule that each member had to hold up their end of the show by performing three of their hits. Rundgren was happy to pull out ‘Band The Drum All Day’ and ‘I Saw The Light’, but he baulked at doing ‘Hello It’s Me’ and instead went with Utopia’s ‘Love Is The Answer’, which later became a hit thanks to a soft rock cover by England Dan & John Ford Coley in 1979.
“The song still has meaning to me – I perform it every night with Ringo,” Rundgren said. “Ringo has his ‘three hit rule,’ and I’m taking advantage of a technicality in that ‘Love Is The Answer’ was a hit, but it wasn’t a hit for me or Utopia, it was a hit for England Dan & John Ford Coley.
“Originally, Ringo wanted me to do ‘Hello It’s Me,’ and I just felt that the song, in the context of what the rest of the band was playing, didn’t represent the message I wanted to convey,” Rundgren also said. “Because ‘Hello It’s Me’ is a kind of a selfish song. It’s me, me, me – it’s all about me. I’m in charge, and all this other stuff. I thought a better song, especially for Mr. Peace And Love – Ringo, himself – would be ‘Love Is The Answer.’ And people would know the song, because it was a hit. And they maybe even would just gloss over the fact that it wasn’t a hit for me and think, ‘Oh Yeah! Now I remember him singing this song.’ So for me it’s a high point of the evening, and hopefully the audience is getting the message.”
Check out Utopia’s version of ‘Love Is The Answer’ down below.
