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\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Matt Winkelmeyer\/amfAR, Tim Mosenfelder)\n <\/p>\n
Take a load off, man. Todd Rundgren\u2019s<\/a> first major project as an engineer was for the Band\u2019s third album, 1970\u2019s Stage Fright, following the dissolution of his own group, Nazz. Rundgren was a valuable sounding board for the quintet and helped mold the album\u2019s ten tracks, which included the standouts \u201cThe Shape I\u2019m In\u201d and \u201cStage Fright.\u201d 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\u2019t love the music. In a new Guardian interview,<\/a> Rundgren confirmed a rumor that Levon Helm was prone to chasing him around the studio. \u201cThere may have been an episode,\u201d he explained. \u201cI was a smart-ass kid, like calling Garth Hudson<\/a> \u2018old man,\u2019 thinking he was too old to stay awake, not realizing he had narcolepsy. I wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d Helm suffered from severe drug addiction at the time. \u201cLevon got into opiates,\u201d Rundgren said, \u201cso while he may have chased me round the studio, he spent as much time underneath a pile of curtains, dead to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n An invite to The Last Waltz wasn\u2019t extended to Rundgren \u2014 although it\u2019s a fun thought exercise to think of how he would\u2019ve commanded the stage if he got a slot instead of, say, the confused crooning of Neil Diamond \u2014 but he subsequently enjoyed a nice relationship with 80 percent of the Band\u2019s members until their respective deaths. (Hudson was the final member to pass away<\/a> back in January.) \u201cIn later years they all became my friends except Robbie Robertson,\u201d Rundgren added, \u201cwho was kind of a snob.\u201d<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Matt Winkelmeyer\/amfAR, Tim Mosenfelder) Take a load off, man. Todd Rundgren\u2019s first major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,128,88813,88812,88811,34510,84404,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-205617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-oh-hes-waltzing","12":"tag-producing","13":"tag-robbie-robertson","14":"tag-the-band","15":"tag-todd-rundgren","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}