By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
There is a feud developing between Taylor Swift and the musician and producer Todd Rundgren. For me, this is the equivalent of a fight between my beloved parents if Mom was the most popular musician in the world and Dad was the tortured artist that very few people have heard of.
As most readers know, Taylor Swift and I were born in the same hospital in Reading, PA., so she is now and forever my homegirl. Slag on Tay Tay and you will feel my wrath in column form or in a strongly worded Facebook post. My relationship with Todd Rundgren is more complicated because we were not born in the same hospital, so I am not as tight with him, but I do have a nearly 50-year history with Rundgren.
For those of you asking “Who the hell is Todd Rundgren?” allow me to provide some background. If you’ve ever seen a live professional or college sporting event, there is a pretty good chance you have heard the song “Bang The Drum All Day” from his 1982 album The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect. It is an arena rock anthem for anyone who would rather be playing the drums or sitting at a sporting event instead of in a cubicle.
I take partial credit for the popularity of this song at sporting events. In 1993, the Director of Media Relations for the Prince William Cannons, Kevin Heilbronner, asked his plucky young intern if he had any music that might be played at the minor league stadium between innings. I offered up several CDs––all of which he rejected except for “Bang The Drum All Day.”
Every so often, in that magical summer of Carolina League baseball, the strains of Todd Rundgren reached into the assembled masses at Prince William County Stadium and made them question the true value in working a job or an unpaid internship. The sporting world caught on soon after.
Rundgren also produced Meatloaf’s album “Bat Out of Hell” which has sold over 43 million copies worldwide. That means that its producer never has to work another day in his life and can say silly things like: “There’s an argument to be made that [Taylor Swift] ruined music. It’s just that, to me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity.”
Rundgren was not content to leave most everyone wondering what “apotheosis” meant (Oxford English Dictionary, abbreviated: The highest or most perfect development of something) and continued to minimize Taylor Swift’s impact and talent: “Taylor Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair. She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer.”
Rundgren opined that part of the reason for Swift’s rise to greatness—beyond her ability to grow hair––was that in the early 1990s, most boys in their late teens or early 20s were playing and spending all of their money on video games rather than buying albums by Todd Rundgren. Thus, only girls with money were buying albums which allowed for the emergence of Taylor Swift. As a boy of the era that Rundgren blames for the improbable rise of talented female singers, I would like to state that I plugged the occasional quarter into the video games, but I also spent some of my hard-earned money on Todd Rundgren’s Nearly Human album in 1989.
Taylor Swift has not responded to Rundgren’s slights, nor does anyone expect her to lower herself to his conspiracy theory of boys being the drivers of pop music. Besides, there have been plenty of male artists and boy bands since the early 1990s who have managed to achieve commercial success despite Todd Rundgren’s argument to the contrary. I would also argue that based upon my freshman year at Mary Washington College in 1988, many boys might have been playing video games in their dorm rooms, but they were also playing the boy band Guns N’ Roses at ear splitting levels for at least 23 hours a day.
So the question becomes why anyone cares what Todd Rundgren has to say about anything or anyone. More specifically, why does this columnist care enough about Todd Rundgren to write a column about him? The answer, my friends, is not simply blowing in the wind. It’s my sister Julie.
Julie is 10 years older than I am and as kids, she dictated a policy on important matters such as what time we were allowed to open Christmas presents, who could use the phone and for how long, and who was allowed to listen to the music that existed just behind her always closed bedroom door.
On one of the rare occasions when my sister was not on the phone and actually had the door to her bedroom open, I heard Rundgren’s album The Hermit of Mink Hollow playing as I walked to the bathroom. I paused and listened, but not for too long because my sister would have closed the door if she felt my presence any longer. The music was glorious and, for one song, educational.
I would argue that The Hermit of Mink Hollow is Rundgren’s finest album (certainly better than the one I bought instead of playing video games in 1989) and is stellar beginning to end. It also includes the song “Onomatopoeia” which is a toe-tapper and a must-listen for any English teacher hoping their students will learn enough to answer one question correctly on the SOLs or SATs.
Todd Rundgren will always take me back to the upstairs hallway of 211 Emerald Avenue where I first realized that my sister was not entirely evil and might, one day, be worthy of my brotherly love.
Rundgren’s words on my homegirl and her mediocrity will barely cause a ripple in the Tik Tok sphere, and will likely be forgotten by the time this column runs. Rundgren comes off as petty, which is disappointing in a man who is, by most accounts, a musical genius. My music collection features several Rundgren albums, and also many female musicians who are talented and not popular just because boys stopped buying CDs to play Super Mario.
Rundgren’s music will always be important to me because of the connection it helped forge with my sister. But I still needed help processing my disappointment and reconciling his music with his imbecility, so I turned to one of the great growers of hair for inspiration on how to shake it off:
But I keep cruisin’
Can’t stop, won’t stop movin’
It’s like I got this music in my mind
Sayin’, “It’s gonna be alright”
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FXBG Advance columnist Drew Gallagher’s book Funny for Nothing was released on July 28 by Long River Press. It’s available for sale in the Fredericksburg area at Novel Bookstore (212 William Street), Liberty Town Arts (916 Liberty Street), The Card Cellar (915 Caroline Street), Wren & Sparrow (807 Caroline Street), and Laudenbach Brewing in Stafford (45 Centreport Parkway, Unit 101). You can also buy it on Amazon.
Well, geez. Thanks for ruining my love for Todd Rundgren! Your column made me go back and listen to my six favorite Rundgren songs, where I just now discovered for the first time that "We Gotta Get You a Woman" contains this line: "They may be stupid, but they sure are fun."