![\"Todd](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Todd-Rundgren-Musician-Artist-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Todd Rundgren)<\/p>\n
Fri 17 April 2026 20:00, UK <\/p>\n
\u201cLast Thursday, at the Harvard Square theater, I saw rock \u2018n\u2019 roll past flash before my eyes,\u201d Jon Landau once wrote. He had been trying \u2013 and failing \u2013 to write music himself and was growing weary in his role as a critic, so he went to a gig searching out inspiration. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen<\/a>,\u201d he went on with the vigour of a Born-Again religious zealot. \u201cAnd on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Landau soon became Springsteen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n However, the notion of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll\u2019s 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\u2019s work from another angle and saw it as largely laughable. He saw the past, but he wasn\u2019t so sure that any form of future was truly being reflected.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u2018parody\u2019 was an interesting proposition. This is how he viewed Meat Loaf\u2019s Bat Out of Hell\u2026 when it arrived on his desk. \u201cI saw it as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Adding, \u201cBecause the songs were sort of very basic changes, the themes were all\u2026 [Laughs}\u2026 by the time it was the \u201970s, the themes were kind of nostalgic.\u201d You wouldn\u2019t see Television in the CBGB singing about jumping in a Cadillac, driving out of a small town, and chasing down a nondescript dream of \u2018success\u2019 and \u2018freedom\u2019.<\/p>\n As Rundgren explained when it came to the \u201cnostlagic\u201d ideals in his songs, \u201cEven though Bruce Springsteen would represent them as still being real, the iconography was still out of the \u201950s, you know? It was switchblades and leather jackets and motorcycles and that sort of junk.\u201d <\/p>\n Which led him towards the theatrics of Meat Loaf. \u201cSo I saw the whole presentation as being a spoof of Bruce Springsteen,\u201d he explains, \u201cand that\u2019s why I decided to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n The blue jeans James Dean ideals of Springsteen\u2019s work were not only not to his taste<\/a>, but he thought that they were actually damaging to music at that stage. \u201cIt was also so annoying to me personally that Bruce Springsteen was being declared the saviour of rock and roll,\u201c he told Billboard<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n With punk rising, disco\u2019s subversive age soaring, and hip hop on the way, Rundgren saw The Boss\u2019 popularity as the mainstream\u2019s safe bid ro preclude the success of America\u2019s more radical avenues springing up at the time.\u00a0\u201cYou know, he was on the cover of TIME magazine,\u201d he said, \u201cand I thought, \u2018this music is going nowhere\u2019. He may represent the image that people want, but from a musical standpoint, it\u2019s going backwards. So I thought he needed to be spoofed.\u201c<\/p>\n And perhaps there was a telling lesson in the fact that the spoof in question, Bat Out of Hell\u2026, is one of the top ten best-selling albums of all time, and remains Rundgren\u2019s most commercially successful project by far. Perhaps Landau might not have seen the future of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, but rather, a semblance of what people want?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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