Take a load off, man. Todd Rundgren’s first major project as an engineer was for the Band’s third album, 1970’s Stage Fright, following the dissolution of his own group, Nazz. Rundgren was a valuable sounding board for the quintet and helped mold the album’s ten tracks, which included the standouts “The Shape I’m In” and “Stage Fright.” His solo career took off soon after, but his time in the booth with these Canadian American lunatics has mostly endeared him all these decades later, even if he didn’t love the music. In a new Guardian interview, Rundgren confirmed a rumor that Levon Helm was prone to chasing him around the studio. “There may have been an episode,” he explained. “I was a smart-ass kid, like calling Garth Hudson ‘old man,’ thinking he was too old to stay awake, not realizing he had narcolepsy. I wasn’t into that kind of music and not cognitive of the fact that the Band were one of the biggest acts in the world. They suddenly had all the money, drugs, drink, and sycophants available to them and it affected some of the guys.” Helm suffered from severe drug addiction at the time. “Levon got into opiates,” Rundgren said, “so while he may have chased me round the studio, he spent as much time underneath a pile of curtains, dead to the world.”
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An invite to The Last Waltz wasn’t extended to Rundgren — although it’s a fun thought exercise to think of how he would’ve commanded the stage if he got a slot instead of, say, the confused crooning of Neil Diamond — but he subsequently enjoyed a nice relationship with 80 percent of the Band’s members until their respective deaths. (Hudson was the final member to pass away back in January.) “In later years they all became my friends except Robbie Robertson,” Rundgren added, “who was kind of a snob.”
