Todd Rundgren - Todd [13]

Title: Todd Rundgren - Todd
Year/Genre/Sub-Genre/City: 1974, Progressive Rock, Pop Rock, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 10/26
Matrix #: 2BR 6952 (Bearsville, tan label, 2xLP); runout not legible in photo
Condition: EX (LM) | Members: Todd R (48' - ) | Producer: Todd Rundgren
Cultural Facts: [13]

1. Two Coasts, One Choir: "Sons of 1984," the closer on side four, was cut at a free show Todd set up at Wollman Rink in Central Park on August 25, 1973, where more than 5,000 fans were handed lyric sheets and rehearsed the chorus on the spot. Two weeks later he carried the tape to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and taught the song to about 1,000 more. The New York crowd sings in your right speaker and the West Coast crowd in your left, and the Central Park audience is the photo on the back cover.
2. Stuck With Meat Loaf's Tab: A couple of years later Todd agreed to produce Bat Out of Hell because he thought it was a hilarious Bruce Springsteen parody. When Meat Loaf's label deal fell apart the day before sessions started, Todd told Bearsville to bill the recording to him, and then both Bearsville and Warner Bros. turned the finished album down. After a tiny label, Cleveland International, finally took it, his overdue production royalties showed up as one check for $700,000 to $800,000, the biggest he had ever seen.
3. The Rock Star Who Coded for Apple: Todd got hooked on computer art at the New York Institute of Technology, where he met Alvy Ray Smith, who later co-founded Pixar. He bought his own computer and wrote one of the first paint programs for the Apple II, and Apple sold it in its 1981 catalog as the Utopia Graphics Tablet System, made to work with Apple's own graphics tablet.