Play that old cliche

My daughter and I were struggling to build a giant piece of IKEA furniture and it took way longer than we thought, so I got a late start for the Todd Rundgren show the other night. But I paid good money for that ticket, the Chapel is my favorite venue to see things in San Francisco, and Todd Rundgren is, well, Todd Rundgren, so I leapt in the car and began booking it up 280.

 It’s been 105 degrees this week in the valley, which meant the summer fog was pouring down the mountains, and the ipod shuffle came up with a song from a record I forgot that I had downloaded: Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoff’s “Under The Covers Vol. 3,” the third record in their series of recordings of other people’s songs. Volume 1, which was songs from the 1960slike “Different Drum” “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere” and “It’s Alright BabyBlue” was sublime. This one – the 1980s – was equally killer.

It was, in short, a beautiful drive, probably, I conjectured gloomily, better than the show could be. What could Todd do that would be superior to Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoff’s shimmering version of “Shaking Through,” or “How Soon Is Now?” I was once a Todd-head, with the songs of Runt and Hermit and Something/Anything burnt into my brain, but I lost interest in about 1981, and I could no longer remember why. What was good about him again? Well, I was about to find out.

Up in SF’s Mission district, my usual go to parking lot on Valencia and 21^st was full, god damn it, which meant I had to drive up and down the hills on the hunt for the elusive space…and when I found it I was later than ever. Todd’s voice was pouring out of the club by the time I got there, but they sure as hell weren’t carding anyone at the door: as soon as I shouldered my way in I had the glad realization that I was literally the youngest person in the room.

Of course, in part this feeling was heightened by the fact that I immediately went up to the balcony, where the people who can’t face standing for two hours were, but there is no doubt that many of  Todd’s fans are Todd’s age, i.e. in their 60s. (He’s 69). I was a spring chicken by comparison and may well have been the only person there who could name the writer and band of the song he was singing when I arrived: “When The Walls Came Down” by the Call.

That’s a weird choice, I thought. Did he produce them? Todd  Rundgren has produced a diverse lot of bands over the years – Bad Company, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Meatloaf, the Psychedelic Furs, to name just a few --  but the Call seemed not quite in his wheelhouse. The Call haven’t been around in ages, but that turned out to be one of the newer songs Todd was going to sing this evening: most of the repertoire was from the 1950s or early 60s. And not to put too fine a point on it: it blew.

I’m sorry, but it DID! It was awful. I mean, I love a wacky cover as much as the next person – that Matthew Sweet/Susanna Hoff record is my favorite thing I’ve heard all year; finding Easter eggs in Afghan Whigs sets is my life’s work, and I was bitterly disappointed at a show the evening before when the Filthy Friends didn’t play a Bowie cover – but this was insane.

 I mean, the Call are mediocre band at best, but he followed that up with this terrible song called “Little Dove and Running Bear,” by Johnny Preston, which is sung by the Big Bopper. I try not to be too doctrinaire about PC stuff in music but honestly, he might as well have been singing in a fake sing-song Asian accent, or been white-rapping about his riches. Anyway, nothing says “OLD PERSON WHO HAS NEVER HEARD OF WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE” more than singing a rude song about Native Americans because, you know, ‘it’s hilarious.’ NOT. Honestly. How hard is it not to be publicly racist these days?

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Todd seemed to think he was doing some riff on the Wild West, which made me have this sudden, ecstatic thought: “What if he plays “TheRange War?'” If he had played "The Range War," everything might  have been forgiven, but NO, he did not. Instead, it went downhill from there. I am not sure what I hated worse, his covers of “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown,”  the Proclaimers’ “Five Hundred Miles” complete with super fake Scottish accent, the endless blues-to-show-he-could shit show, the Frank Sinatra song, or “Hash Pipe” by Weezer. And that’s just scratching the surface.

It was fucking bananas. To make matters worse, about midway in it he suddenly played two of his own  songs, “Cliché” and “Love of the Common Man” and they were both so absolutely sublime they nailed me to my chair. I spent the whole rest of the time texting quips to my brother in North Carolina, as I breathlessly awaited “Hello It’s Me” or “Just One Victory” (or, said my brother wistfully, “Piss Aaron”) but no. The only other Todd song he sang was “One World” at the end, and I don’t care for that song.

It was so incredibly mean of him. But at least it was over early. When I got home, I flounced into my daughter’s room, sat down on her floor, and tried to explain how terrible it was.

“Imagine if, twenty years from now, you go see Damon Albarn solo and all he does is play songs by Taio Cruz and LMFAO.”

Her: “Did he play “Sexy and I know It?"”

“No, but the 1950-70s equivalents.”

I told her their names and she played them on YouTube, commenting, Beavis-like. Hence:

 “In the Year 2525.” C: “This sounds like the theme song  a really bad sci fi movie where a man falls in love with a robot and at the end the robot kills him.”

“Patches.” “Is this like old people’s idea of rapping?”

“Incense and Peppermints.” “No. Just…no.”

“I’m A Gun.” (Lorne Greene.) “You realize this is written infirst person from the point of view of the gun?”  

“I’m a Gun” IS a hilarious song, although I didn’t want to hear Todd Rundgren sing it: at its end, the singer/gun proposes to destroy itself, because it’s a murderer. When we finished listening, my daughter ill-advisedly started reading the YouTube comments, many of which were from NRA people objecting to this ridiculous song’s content (not its premise: its content). One read: “Owning a gun makes one as much of a murderer as the extremist feminists who say that being a guy essentially makes you a rapist

Another read, “The kind of people who like this song probably think abortion is OK, too.”

C: “Oh my god – self burn! It’s like they think they made a good point, and they DID – but it’s not the point they think they made!!”

I think the same can be said about Todd Rundgren’s show, somehow. I am not exactly sure what point he thinks he’s making, though I believe it has something to do with the showing off of his incredible talent. Because he IS so so talented, no question, and, more importantly, his own work is still so outstanding that he only needs to do a few lines of one song – “I Saw The Light,” for example, which he played early in the set, before it degenerated into toilet-ville – for one to go into rock shock. Indeed, after our trash-fest, I forced my daughter to listen to one Todd Rundgren song, and after the first five notes she sat up like a chipmunk and went, “Oh my GOD, I LOVE This song.” (It was “Hello It’s Me.”)

Is it false humility, to not play your great songs and play shitty ones instead? Or is it the height of arrogance? I think in this case it was the latter: to have that kind of power within you and withhold it from a paying audience. As he played all this stuff, I was reminded of the Replacements. They used, on occasion, to put in sets in which they would spin out into horrible covers – “Heartbeat It’s a Lovebeat,” “I Get Around,” “Roundabout” by Yes (Todd Rundgren has been touring with Yes, by the way, a circumstance about which I wish to know nothing about).  I always used to like those sets – though of course I preferred a set where they were ‘on’ and played their own stuff brilliantly. But I think the ‘mats reason for doing it was different. When they did those sets, they would occasionally start, and then stop, one of their own songs, and I think they stopped because they were so drunk they were about to butcher it, and they preferred butchering other people’s songs.

Or at least, that’s what they said. By contrast, Todd seems to be doing this just because he can. I can certainly see that it’s probably more fun for him to play silly music that makes him laugh than his own music, which he’s maybe sick of. But still! After one song, I forget which, he said, “that was like spending an hour on the toilet,” and indeed it was.

On my way home from the club, I put on “Under The Covers” again and thought about why it was OK for those 2 artists to cover other people’s work, but not for Todd, and it came down to one single factor: song choice. I downloaded “Under the Covers” without even looking to see what songs were on it, and when the song would change to the Bongos “Bulrushes” or  XTC’s “Towers Of London” I  practically shed tears of joy to hear them again, and to hear them done with this amount of love and care, and, in some cases, to hear new things in them that I had not heard before. In my car, under my own cover, I literally  shouted along with the words to “How Soon Is Now.”When I was young, Isabelle and I used to make fun it, we would say, in a fake “elephant man” accent, “I am not an animal! I am human being and I need to be loved!” But hearing it on this record, I was just slain.

It goes without saying that didn’t happen at Todd’s show, with “2525” or “I’m A Gun” or “Hash Pipe” (which was done, incidentally, exactly like Weezer do it themselves.) But it would have, if he’d played “Range War” or “Piss Aaron,” or “Real Man.”Self burn, Todd. Self burn.