The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

by Todd Rundgren

economics as a planet became addicted to carbon, and of course, the fetid atmosphere.

My only respite was recess because the school adjoined a wooded area with a stream running through it. This was my daily destination and afforded me a closer look at nature than the artificiality of Westbrook Park.

Randy Read. Simpatico.

I had picked out “The Christmas Song” by the Chipmunks,

the discovery of distortion, the effect that makes everything you play sound so damn heavy.

We are things that make things happen. Mike Cotten co-opted a sound sample of this fragment of brilliant thought from an unknown source that should bubble up regularly in the collective consciousness but has appeared thus far only on the Tubes swansong Love Bomb album.

anent

I’m not sure of his/her name I feel like I’m talking to the government. I think it’s best to let God do all the talking and the rest of us strive to shut the hell up about God.

Regardless of my results, I have a high standard of accomplishments that I have yet to prove I can accomplish.

Probably more friendships are based on mutual tolerance than anything else. Sometimes you just don’t want to be alone and will put up with almost anything to avoid it, even while your friend is annoying the shit out of you.

It’s not unusual to see a person for the first time and find their ephemeral presence a curiosity. Then they get stuck in your mind. Then, rarely, there is reciprocity and you get on each other’s wavelength. I had never met a person like Patti, yet we seemed to have been the most natural friends.

I would never do DMT again because it felt like I was being smothered by Navajo blankets. Then there was that shoebox of peyote buttons I had one summer, and that (hint hint) would make an ideal birthday gift, even now.

So why aren’t there those larger-than-life personalities like Wolfman Jack anymore? Because the Internet is all about choice. Listeners no longer tune in to hear the snappy banter and inside jokes- hell, they barely focus on a whole song. Some service figures out your habits and suggests everything you hear. And if you don’t care for it, skip to the next suggestion.

Her demure behavior soon gave way to a demanding and erratic personality, one that expected expressions of affection in exchange for sex and peace, and soon I am saying I love someone that I’m not at all sure I can fully tolerate.

Here is a thing you should know about cops: they lie. It doesn’t matter where in the world you encounter them. They don’t arrest you to see you go free. They lie.

I had already read Siddhartha twice.

For most, the world is myths and rumors, unproven facts and untested assumptions. The value of money is the collective faith that everyone has in it. Love is the belief that others really love you, something you hope never to have to prove. Religions demand we believe in personalities we have never met in human form. We cannot see the air that we breathe. To question all these things is an assault on one’s own personality, that network of assumptions that informs how you see yourself in the world. Rejection of apparent reality is not for the faint-hearted.

Inside a tiny stall is a rug maker. I’m told that his lifetime output will be about a dozen rugs because he will go blind from the wool dust by his early thirties, whereupon he would have presumably passed the time honored tradition down to his soon to be blind children.

The actual Casbah is more than the original shopping mall. It is the template upon which the internet was modeled. The archetypal battle, the incessant conflict of our species is between the guller and the gullible. What can one get away with, both as a provider and consumer, before the jig is up? Come away wiz me to zee casbahhh...

A full life is a balance of prudence and foolishness. You are never going to discover anything about the world or yourself through constant conservative prudence. Conversely, endless tomfoolery not only tries your friends’ patience but can tempt disaster with no reward. Choose carefully your flights of fancy and live to enjoy the memory of them.

When most people come into money they usually do something sensible like save or invest it, or something stupid like spend it on a boat. I guess plowing all that Meat Loaf money into a video studio could be interpreted either way. If only we had made the rent, I might have looked like a genius instead of a self-indulgent auteur. The truth is, I never seriously evaluated the commercial possibilities until after I bought all the stuff anyway. I just wanted to make video.

The only class I ever truly loved in school was chorus, odd because I wasn’t really that into vocalists at the time. I liked singing in the choir because nobody could really hear me but myself. The lessons I learned about breathing and pronunciation have been ingrained in me ever since. And what I thought was a very simple instrument turned into a lifelong fascination, something that, no matter how much I use it or think I know about it, keeps evolving.

‘progressive refinement’

I have always maintained that isolation is a good thing for creativity, the opportunity to block out the noise and immerse yourself in your own thoughts.

It took place at a Jewish summer camp in the hills of Saratoga. People would point at a distant peak and say “That’s Neil Young’s spread.”

When you witness some modern spectacle of imaginary interstellar conflict depicted in billions of pixels generated by trillions of calculations, it is still wondrous that a single mind turned streams of numbers into the equivalent of the mind’s eye flying through the solar system and establishing the foundation for all the pixels that followed, while also being a pretty good trombone player.

Soon the cops were at the door- and if you’ve ever met the Sausalito cops, they’re the fucking worst. No more Macworld parties at 69 Sunshine.

don’t take it well if someone commits something to me and then doesn’t deliver, especially if they give you no warning, no opportunity to find an alternative. I’ve held grudges for years, excommunicating the offender and avoiding situations where I might encounter them. Part of it is pettiness, I’m sure. But often I’m on some deadline- and if they don’t deliver, I can’t deliver. And I’m very anal about delivering.

In those days a lone hobbyist could get his head around the concepts enough to produce what looked like an industry standard piece of work. If I were to get into it today, I’d likely only be scratching the surface of concepts that were unheard of when the Video Toaster was new.

The coexistence of nature and technology is of course appealing, but feeling comfortable around people who speak a language so different from mine is something of a breakthrough. And I’ve always had loyal fans there who treat me like a family member, so that’s probably a big part of that soft spot. Yet...

For most of us there is no exact moment at which we pass into adulthood- it just sort of sneaks up on you. You wake up every day feeling as young as you ever did until the day you wake up feeling old and wondering where that came from. In a more kindly scenario you still feel just as young, but you look around you and everyone is decades younger. Then you realize you are the adult in the room, the one who’s expected to know what to do next. You always thought you would celebrate adulthood and now that it is on you you’re horrified at the responsibility and saddened that your youth is officially a thing of the past.

For some stupid reason we wound up premiering the NWO tour in Japan. With all the technological details and constant programming, the prep began to creep into my unconscious life and I started to have literal nightmares about not being able to put all the pieces together.

I had constant nightmares while mounting the NWO show. There was so much detail between the video and lights and computers all talking to each other that my mind never gave up trying to balance everything on the head of a pin-

compound that with the fact that I had never performed anything like this before and I achieve a level of anxiety that lasted literally years after that tour left the road.

But my nightmares of unpreparedness, almost always a variation of the living nightmare I experienced, are exactly what they seem- I am petrified of being caught with my pants down.

Music soothes the savage breast, but it doesn’t necessarily make the musician a nice person. The angry exploits of Miles Davis and Van Morrison are legendary. You could say that music redeems the savage prick, but that prick better be able to play his ass off.

Except for those lucky bastards who just go back to organizing next year’s Burn.

Family is the fancy name we use for brood colony, that complex connection of relatives that would otherwise be an ant farm.

because I needed a pied a terre when touring, we found an affordable loft off the Mission in a filthy dogleg alley haunted by a constant stream of junkies- but was otherwise a pretty good location.

It’s a different routine living in such a rural place but life is not boring and nature is spectacular in all its beauty and danger.

All things in the human realm exist as a result of a series of processes. First, the possibility of a thing existing has to be believed in, that there is the power for such a thing to be. Then, that thing must be visualized in ever more minute detail so that the thought of it is comparable to the real thing. That is when mystical laws take over and matter starts to take on the form of this thing. Why wouldn’t this be true, why can’t most people get what they want this way? Plainly: because as much as they want the thing, they don’t believe they can get it, haven’t really figured out what it is, and give up before it can become a reality.

After so many years I was not sure what to expect from Liv. She was a different person and it could have been a long, uncomfortable process to heal a protracted separation. But she needed to get over it as much as I, and when we hugged for the first time it’s like a fire is burning away the past. We hold each other for what seems like hours, heart to heart like when we fell asleep together on Annie’s couch. We are normalized, back to square one. It is remarkable how a wound that seems will never heal can be cured with a bit of penicillin. Closure is penicillin for the soul, literally closing the wound. Perhaps a scar remains but that will fade.

I have gone to great lengths to assure that I Do Not Take Requests.

Your first purpose in life is to become yourself, to decide what you want to be and commit all your efforts into becoming that. But at some point you will have to move on to another phase, in which you take what you have made of yourself and commit it to the service of others. That is when you realize how many connections you’ve made, the vast network you’ve become a part of. You are no less yourself. You are much more than yourself.