Todd Rundgren thinks Bruce Springsteen set American music back by 20 years
“Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theater, I saw rock ‘n’ roll past flash before my eyes,” Jon Landau once wrote. He had been trying – and failing – to write music himself and was growing weary in his role as a critic, so he went to a gig searching out inspiration.
“And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” he went on with the vigour of a Born-Again religious zealot. “And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time”.
Landau soon became Springsteen’s manager, and along with his fateful review, this is seen as the turning point in the stuttering early career of The Boss. It was 1974, and he was about to explode as the beloved everyman of America, a rocker still upholding the old ideals, with a blue-collar soul and good old simple riffs, free from the new highfalutin ways of prog stars with their gratuitous sax, senseless violins, and ayahuasca epiphanies.
However, the notion of rock ‘n’ roll’s past suddenly transubstantiating into its future, as suggested by Landau, is an interesting take. Because Todd Rundgren looked at the exact same tenet of Springsteen’s work from another angle and saw it as largely laughable. He saw the past, but he wasn’t so sure that any form of future was truly being reflected.
At best, Rundgren saw him as a throwback to a bygone era, and at worst, he thought he was a pastiche of a time we had moved on from for good reason. He saw Springsteen’s output almost as a parody, and the fact it was hailed as a breakthrough, as a lie that set American music back a few decades.
This is why, when he was an esteemed producer with enough offers flying in to be choosy over his projects, he thought that a parody of Springsteen’s ‘parody’ was an interesting proposition. This is how he viewed Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell… when it arrived on his desk. “I saw it as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen,” he said.
Adding, “Because the songs were sort of very basic changes, the themes were all… [Laughs}… by the time it was the ’70s, the themes were kind of nostalgic.” You wouldn’t see Television in the CBGB singing about jumping in a Cadillac, driving out of a small town, and chasing down a nondescript dream of ‘success’ and ‘freedom’.
As Rundgren explained when it came to the “nostlagic” ideals in his songs, “Even though Bruce Springsteen would represent them as still being real, the iconography was still out of the ’50s, you know? It was switchblades and leather jackets and motorcycles and that sort of junk.”
Which led him towards the theatrics of Meat Loaf. “So I saw the whole presentation as being a spoof of Bruce Springsteen,” he explains, “and that’s why I decided to do it.”
The blue jeans James Dean ideals of Springsteen’s work were not only not to his taste, but he thought that they were actually damaging to music at that stage. “It was also so annoying to me personally that Bruce Springsteen was being declared the saviour of rock and roll,“ he told Billboard.
With punk rising, disco’s subversive age soaring, and hip hop on the way, Rundgren saw The Boss’ popularity as the mainstream’s safe bid ro preclude the success of America’s more radical avenues springing up at the time. “You know, he was on the cover of TIME magazine,” he said, “and I thought, ‘this music is going nowhere’. He may represent the image that people want, but from a musical standpoint, it’s going backwards. So I thought he needed to be spoofed.“
And perhaps there was a telling lesson in the fact that the spoof in question, Bat Out of Hell…, is one of the top ten best-selling albums of all time, and remains Rundgren’s most commercially successful project by far. Perhaps Landau might not have seen the future of rock ‘n’ roll, but rather, a semblance of what people want?
