John Lennon may have sung about giving peace a chance, but in the early to mid-’70s his, at times, drunken behavior during his separation from his wife, Yoko Ono, rubbed some people the wrong way.
One of them was Todd Rundgren, who tells The Guardian, “I met him at a party in the period he was drinking with Harry Nilsson and misbehaving all over Hollywood. He looked like a bundle of rags in the corner and as a Beatles fan I was disappointed that he had nothing to say. Later I was being interviewed by NME and I said something along the lines of that you can’t be a revolutionary and preach one thing if you’re behaving in another way, and that became the headline. John wrote a letter ostensibly to me but as an open letter in NME. There was a kerfuffle. Then one day I got a call and it was John, saying, ‘I think we’re being used here, so let’s bury the hatchet.’ I said: ‘Fine’ and that was that.”
Rundgren also had a way of rubbing some people the wrong way, especially the members of The Band when he engineered their third album, 1970’s Stage Fright.
He says, “It was my first major project as an engineer and I was a smart-ass kid, like calling Garth [Hudson] ‘old man’ thinking he was too old to stay awake, not realizing he had narcolepsy. I wasn’t into that kind of music and not cognitive of the fact The Band were one of the biggest acts in the world. They suddenly had all the money, drugs, drink and sycophants available to them and it affected some of the guys. Levon [Helm] got into opiates so while he may have chased me round the studio he spent as much time underneath a pile of curtains, dead to the world. In later years they all became my friends … except Robbie [Robertson], who was kind of a snob.”
Rundgren starts another run of dates on November 10th in Tucson, Arizona.
