Crushing on the singer or rock star

Why we fall in love with singers, musicians, and rock stars and why that's perfectly normal, even for dudes (who pretend they haven't, but actually have)

A couple of readers have suggested that I have a crush on Todd Rundgren because I’ve done two weeks of posts on him.

I want to set the record straight, because they are mostly right, but just a teeny bit wrong.

Yes, I must admit — I have fallen in love with Todd Rundgren.

But then I usually fall in love with the rock stars and musicians I write about.

It doesn’t matter if they have obnoxious personalities or terrible flaws.

It doesn’t matter what background they come from, what they look like, or how they speak.

Male or female. Gay or straight. Human or alien. It doesn’t matter.

Even those who don’t strap on an electric guitar over their skintight pants. (Although, we must admit, that look is indisputably hot and should be a staple in every rock star’s wardrobe).

There are a few rock stars I refuse to write about — or fall in love with. Probably not who you think.

People who have crossed some lines with their behavior and violated my personal ethics. I don’t know if I can forgive and forget. ‘Judge not’ in certain cases just doesn’t seem possible.

Dr. Brenner would be one of these. (If he were real and a rock star.)

They make us fall in love with them

I think I can explain why I fall in love with them, and why many of you do too.

I’ve been doing interviews with people for forty years now as part of my “real” work, with many hundreds of people in places and cultures around the world, and I find myself during those interviews almost inevitably falling in love as they open themselves up to me.

As they reveal their true selves.

Quite a few of my subjects appear to fall in love back, developing a crush on me.

One time I even received a marriage proposal.

The problem for them is that I just move on to the next victim in my nefarious scheme to get them to open up their mind and heart to me, to allow me to plumb the depths of how they think and feel. To, if I’m lucky, connect with their soul.

People don’t feel listened to, and when someone comes along and listens to them, really tries to understand them, as I do during the interview, they love how it makes them feel.

And they project that feeling onto me, the person who made them feel that way.

This is the same problem that performers and creators of any kind — rock stars, actors, writers, and artists — have to contend with. They make people feel things they are desperate to feel — through their music, dance, films, TV shows, plays, stories, poems, paintings, or other creations — and some people confuse the creation with the creator.

They don’t realize that the creation comes through the creator. The creator is not the ultimate source. They’re crushing on the wrong thing.

In fact, we tend to mistake this soul rapture for sexual energy (which is, indeed, a part of it), and some of us try to act on that. Can we ever forget the screaming and fainting Beatles groupies?

Men of course experience that same degree of passion but are generally not allowed to display it. So they channel it through sex or becoming a veritable expert on their favorite bands and artists. It’s safer to “talk shop” and act cool than admit that you’re overwhelmed with feeling when you listen to someone’s music.

The other obvious problem here is that we aren’t paying attention and listening to one another enough. So when someone gives us the benefit of their full-on and whole-hearted attention, through an interview or a performance or a creative offering, or in the throes of a love affair, they have us eating out of their hand.

We feel seen, recognized, affirmed, and even loved in some important way. And we will do almost anything to keep feeling that feeling.

Enter the fraudsters, hucksters, gigolos, and escorts who have perfected the art of making us feel like the center of their universe and are able to take us for all we’re worth, or at least for a few pricey gifts.

I missed my true calling, it appears. Or at least a Bugatti and a diamond bracelet.

For me it’s a compulsion, not an obsession

The other thing I have to admit is that, during the time I’m in love with my rock star subject, I don’t know when to quit. I have a compulsive need to know everything and write about everything.

I have to force myself to focus or I will flood myself — and you — with everything I find out about that person.

You can take the girl out of psychology, but not the psychology out of the girl. (In case it’s not clear, I’m a psychologist.)

Or another way to think of it, you can take the girl out of a difficult childhood where she had to figure people out to feel safe, but you can’t take the need to figure people out to feel safe out of the girl.

Which is probably why I feel especially simpatico with Todd Rundgren. We had parents who outraged and enraged us.

I was sure a mistake had been made by the universe putting me in that crazy family I grew up with, and I get the sense that he felt the same way. We both couldn’t wait to escape.

And we’ve spent a lifetime learning how to deal with our tendency to be independent and not rely on others because, like our parents, they might let us down.

I am also, like Todd, an individualist.

But, ultimately, it’s all about the heroic journey

Which is why I have been so taken with his autobiography.

He starts as a kid who hates school and can’t get along with his family, to the point of leaving them in high school and moving into his friend Randy’s basement.

His parents don’t even show up for his high school graduation — even though he is back living at home and they have forced him to get an old guy’s barbershop haircut for the ceremony. A kid who just wants, more than anything, their love, attention, listening, and understanding, and they don’t show up. Heartbreaking.

How hard would it be to give him that? For some people, impossible.

Todd ends the book as a fifty-year-old man on the day of his wedding. It’s the first time that he’s been willing to make this kind of commitment to other human beings, despite having been involved in the raising of five children.

“When it was time to acknowledge this obvious milestone in front of about 200 onlookers… I confessed that I had withheld myself from my family for reasons that I might have justified, but that would not withstand the fact that I had coerced them into my world view and left them to simply deal with it. Yes I loved them and they knew that but they did not have all of me and they knew that as well. Whilst I proclaimed to love them above all, I glorified my work as justification for remaining aloof.”

He also lets us know that he made peace with his parents before they left this world. His own bankruptcy, and the feelings of inadequacy as a provider that they brought up in him, had helped him develop “great sympathy for my father who worked constantly but was unable to move the family up the economic ladder.”

Our Todd knows how to tell a great story. He became “ours” when he was willing to share this journey he’s been on, first in his songs and more recently in this book. It is that willingness to reveal his soul that has been his gift to us, and the reason why his early songs of heartbreak — “Hello It’s Me” and “Can We Still Be Friends” — resonate so deeply even today, fifty years later.

And also why his efforts to bring us the music of others as a producer have touched us so deeply as well (no matter how much money he made from doing so).

But perhaps what is so encouraging about his book is the lesson that he learned, and that he passes on as his final piece of life learning and wisdom:

“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.”

Goodbye, individualist. Hello, family man and ardent musical collaborator.

I look forward to reading about his heroic journey after the age of fifty, should he choose to write about it. I would love to know what other life lessons he has learned.

You have our love and attention, Todd. Do not doubt it.

In the meantime, we’ll cap this series with an article about his post-Nazz career — which I know will not do him justice.

And then I shall fall in love with another rock star. You can count on it. And I will revel in every nanosecond of it.