Extract From Todd Rundgren Interview

Q: Do you have any favorite power pop artists?

T: I liked the Raspberries. I liked Badfinger. I also like Cheap Trick a lot.

Q: You took over the production on Badfinger’s “Straight Up” album from George Harrison. What was it like to work on that album?

T: It was pretty easy. It was one of the things that made me sort of a wunderkind. Once I figured out how to do the studio thing, I would really kind of get on to the performance. I was not somebody who would make you wait hours and hours in the studio and fart around with sounds constantly. I would kind of get in there abd do it pretty quick and worry about it in the mix. Badfinger had been working on their record for a year, year and a half. They’d actually done a whole album that just nobody was happy with. It just didn’t jell for some reason. They did some recording with Geoff Emerick and some recording with George Harrison.

Q :Did you have much exposure to Badfinger’s music before working with them?

T: Yeah. I liked “No Matter What” I thought it was a good record. I thought they were obviously ‘Beatles lite’. The band was a little dejected after all this time. Essentially they said “just take whatever we’ve got and we’ll record some new stuff and make an album out of this”. I could have started over and recorded everything over. Instead of doing that I evaluated the various tapes that they had. I think Geoff Emerick had done some stuff on eight track and the stuff they did with George was on sixteen track. I re-recorded stuff like the drums on “Day After Day”. On “Day After Day” Ringo and George were playing together and they were into the wet rag drum thing. They had towels all over the drums and that particular song I think sounded like shit. So I made them record all the drums over and various other things and remixed it. The reason George didn’t finish the record was because he got sucked up into the “Bangladesh” thing. I remember during the course of it meeting George for the one and only time I ever met him. They were having a listening party for the “Bangladesh” record at Apple Studios. Hes said “ Yeah, I just kind a gave up on it. i Didn’t have the time to finish it, so use the stuff or don’t use the stuff or do anything you wan’t to with it, I don’t care, I’m out of he project”. So I reworked and mixed it and he took one hundred percent credit including royalties (laughs). I’ve never had a high opinion about him since then. We diid about half the songs from scratch. We didn’t do any of the recording at Apple. We did other studios were we could get into-places like Trident and Morgan. I think there were about six original songs. We used two of the tracks that Geoff Emerick started as well but he got no credit at all.

Q:Do you remember recording “Baby Blue”?

T:Yeah, “Baby Blue” we did from scratch, that I remember. I liked the tune. They had a lot of great tunes like “Flying “ and “Name Of The Game” v Q:What was Badfinger like working with?

T:They were real easy to work with. No problems and we all got along.

Q:Are you happy with “Straight Up”?

T:Oh yeah, I was happy with it. I was actually kind of amazed after all of the different sources that we pulled it together. The thing that amazed Badfinger was I did the whole thing in two weeks. We recorded the new tracks and mixed the whole thing in two weeks.

The book also contains interviews with other great Power Pop groups like: Small Faces, The Move, The Raspberries, Big Star,Todd Rundgren(Nazz),Marshall Crenshaw, the Bangles etc. It's really a "must" for all Power Pop fans!

Link here to order.