Todd Rundgren and Dam-Funk on Their Joint Tour

Paste: As a longtime keyboardist yourself, do you ever take a break from the synths to play acoustic piano every now and again?
Dam-Funk: I love piano. The keyboards and drums are my main instruments when I’m doing the DJ thing. But that’s second—I’m a musician first, and that’s why I think it is cool to be a part of Todd’s project and why I think it’s been working so well. I didn’t come into this tour just messing around, not knowing what his catalog was; I’m an actual fan of his music. So if something had broke down on stage, I was able to fall in and continue onward with it, which I think was something that Todd appreciated as well.

Paste: What are some of your favorite albums produced by Todd Rundgren?
Dam-Funk: Production-wise, I don’t know about whole albums, but some of the singles that he’s done I really dig. Like some of the later stuff with The Tubes is good. I like some of the XTC stuff. I’m familiar with some of the Grand Funk Railroad stuff that he did, but that’s going way back. But my main thing has always been his own material, especially the side ventures like that “Video Synchrony” thing and that kind of stuff which he would experiment with; I just love getting into the more personal stuff of Todd’s as well.

Paste: Once the tour wraps, have you and Todd spoken about getting together in the studio at some point, perhaps?
Dam-Funk: Not yet, but that was one of the reasons my guy reached out to Todd’s camp. He told them, “Hey, next time you are out in L.A., you might want to check out Dam’s club night, Funkmosphere. But now that we were on this tour, there was really no time to discuss something because we’ve just been ripping through these towns. But I’m sure as time goes by, we will discuss something. Yeah, it would be great if we can make something happen.

TODD RUNDGREN

Paste: How did the collaboration between you and Dam-Funk transpire on your end?
Todd Rundgren: I was contacted by one of his reps back in December when I was in
the middle of finishing Global and he just wanted to make an introduction, because Dam was a fan and wanted to let me know if ever there was an opportunity to collaborate, don’t hesitate to call. So I had thought about it for a little while and figured I wanted to do something unusual and appropriate for this new record. A couple of years ago, I did an album called State in where I tried to sort of emcee myself, but I had too much singing to do [laughs]. I couldn’t really manage the music and the other responsibilities well enough and then focus on the directing. So I figured I’d let Dam take care of the music and I can concentrate on what I do.

Paste: Did you jump on the Internet to listen to him after his camp reached out?
Rundgren: That was the first thing I did was go online and check him out. I thought that this was definitely the kind of music my audience could get into. It’s old-school in a way, it’s not real aggressive and very melodic, so I thought Dam would be much better than having like Skrillex open the show [laughs].

Paste: And Dam comes with his own audience as well, not to mention this tour opens up a whole new crowd for him as well, I’m sure…
Rundgren: What we’re trying to create is a little bi-directional awareness for my audience, some of whom are maybe not aware of what’s happening recently in music and get a chance to hear somebody who is still creating new music. Then, at the same time, there’s his audience, who’s generationally younger than my typical audience.

Paste: Actually, there’s been a big resurgence of interest in your music amongst the youngsters lately.
Rundgren: That’s how I got into this Runddans thing and the remixes that I
did for Lindstrøm, Au Revoir Simone and Tame Impala.

Paste: You seem like the type of guy who is always up on things, who never stops listening to new music. Is that the case?
Rundgren: Well, for the most part, but I’ve actually fallen behind a little bit. It’s easy sometimes to be cynical about music that may be of a different generation. It’s always that old case of “You kids today! I don’t get your music, you kids!” [laughs].

Paste: Truth be told, I’ve been like that the last couple of years myself, but there is something about what’s happening today, especially in the Top 40, with producers taking chances on new sounds and rhythm patterns similar to what Dam is doing, that’s really exciting.
Rundgren: It’s kind of like there are two overlapping worlds of music. If you watched the Grammys, you’d think that music today is just horrible. But if you go on YouTube and start poking around, you’ll discover all of this really interesting, challenging, personal music being made out there that’s being promoted under the radar. If you think of music strictly in terms of mainstream, you’d be led to believe Imagine Dragons is this music revolution [laughs]. But the stuff that’s really happening is in that sidebar when you go on YouTube.

Paste: You mention Miley Cyrus on the song “Evr’ybody” that kicks off Global. But in all honesty, as polarizing as she is, she does seem like she’s the real deal. I mean, there’s a picture of her online hanging out with Patti Smith and Debbie Harry. But is it genuine, or is it a pose?
Rundgren: That is a legitimate question, whether or not it’s just reflective glory as opposed to real music being made. There’s always been that idea that music comes naturally with celebrity. And in some cases, that’s the reason people make the music, not because they cared that much about the music. For instance, Lady Gaga, who is an award-winning instrumentalist, came to the conclusion for her to be famous over being known for her music, she had to become a household name and therefore I will wear dresses made out of meat. Something like that, which has nothing to do with music. There’s always been that, and the same can be said for Miley Cyrus. She didn’t have to make any significant musical statement to become famous. But if she can hold an audience with Patti Smith, good for her.

Paste: Going back to YouTube, did getting into Dam-Funk on there send you down the rabbit hole of all the great instrumental hip hop going on in California these days?
Rundgren: I have to admit that for a while, like in the mid-2000s or something like that, I kind of got a little disenchanted, let’s say, with music in general because it seemed to be driven by American Idol at that point. We kind of lose track of the fact that technology has been on this sort of accelerated track where 10 years ago you’d still have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars if you wanted your own personal recording environment. But the exponential increase in the power of laptops, the amount of speed and storage that we have now and how the price of all that has come down, the existence of high-speed internet that’s permeated literally everything—there’s literally nowhere you can go without some sort of wifi—it’s made it possible for any individual with enough enterprise and enough interest in making music to go ahead and make that music. Ten years ago, an artist like Skrillex couldn’t have existed, because he wouldn’t be able to afford or have the resources that are now at everyone’s fingertips. For $40, you can get a full digital work station on your iPad; it’s called Aurea. It works just like ProTools—it’s got a whole mixing console on one page of it and a whole piano roll audio wave form thing with all the editing stuff that I had to pay $25,000 for in the ‘90s.

Paste: I can’t imagine how expensive No World Order was to create back in ‘93.
Rundgren: Um, yeah [laughs]. It was a lot of junk. Everything was still hardware pretty much. All the sounds came out of hardware devices, so I had to purchase each one of those.

Paste: Given your recent work with Lindstrom and the great beats you’ve constructed for Global in addition to touring with Dam-Funk, has all of this pushed your interest further into the realms of digital composition?
Rundgren: It always has. Musicians ideally are always some sort of synthesis of their influences. And the quality of the music that you make usually has a lot to do with quality of your influences. That’s kind of the great thing for me, this sort of revival of my older records among the younger generation in that I also inevitably get drawn into what modern musicians are doing, what they’re thinking about. Sometimes it gives me new ideas and sometimes it refreshes old ideas, things that I used to do that I’ve gotten out of the habit of doing or that I had even forgotten about [laughs], these approaches or ways of music I had let pass me by. That’s the great part of these collaborations for me is that it’s a constant reminder, especially to people who are in their most gut developmental phases of their careers, they’re starting to grasp the essence of their style, the refining of their sound, the building of their audience, of the stuff I was dealing with decades ago. And I get to relive that in a way by working with these artists who are moving through all of these phases.

Paste: Was this feeling similar when you were working with, say, The Tubes for Remote Control or XTC on Skylarking or even the first Dolls record?
Rundgren: Well, the hardest part I guess is learning to submit to somebody else’s idea of what music is supposed to be like. Sometimes a lot of producers have some sort of template and an act has to fit into this template somehow, even if it isn’t a natural adjustment for them. And I always felt that bands…it’s in there somewhere [laughs]. Whatever you are working with, the end result is already there, and often you would just have to get out of the way. For a lot of records, my job was removing obstacles for the final product. I can’t say that necessarily about Skylarking. Skylarking was a record where if I hadn’t taken a firm hand, the band would have lost their label deal and would have likely broken up. Well, they did break up eventually [laughs].

Paste: How did you come up with the set list for this tour and specifically the deep cuts you pull out in concert?
Rundgren: What we did is I had a list of songs that I wanted everyone to learn. We had about six days of rehearsal before the first gig. All of it, fortunately, was pretty much the whole production. So obviously we got used to the setup and things like that. But we rehearsed the songs without having any running order first, just to see how everything sounded. And then we sat down the day before the last day of rehearsals and everybody looked at the list and tried to figure out a running order, so we knew what we were gonna start with and we knew what we were gonna end with. But everything in the middle, people made suggestions. We did a couple of dress rehearsals with it, and it sounded pretty good. Then we realized there were some improvements to be made in the running order, so we changed it. And after two or three gigs, altered the running order slightly. But the thing we came up with was the best running order we could imagine, and it does include a lot of older material that we’ve reworked to sound like the rest of the material that we’re doing. But also it’s the idea that we’re giving people so much new stuff that we have to base it with some stuff that they’re familiar with, so it’s a combination of the new stuff and older stuff that has in a way the same musical and lyrical thrust to it.

Paste: With all the renewed interest in your catalog, have you thought about finally doing a massive overhaul of the Bearsville stuff?
Rundgren: I tell ya, it’s a challenge sometimes, because I don’t have access to the original masters and usually I would base it on the original tracks. But a couple of things, for one I had to rebuild everything from scratch because I don’t have access to these original tapes. I have a lot of that stuff available to me, but it’s in an intermediate format. In other words, it hasn’t all been turned into what we call stems, which are the individual tracks. And a lot of it is in an old version of ProTools, so it would have to go through an elaborate process to transfer. It’s something that I’d like to do, but it’s a bit of a no-brainer that the logistics of the project is pretty heavy. I could put my whole catalog on a little thumb drive these days, but I’d be spending the rest of my life trying to do it.