"Dancing Barefoot" by the Patti Smith Group (1979) with producer Todd Rundgren

Todd Rundgren Creator Series

Today is the eleventh post in our series about the legendary Todd Rundgren, with only a few more posts to come.

We’ve already reviewed his early years, up to and including The Nazz.

We’ve talked about his pop hits — “We Gotta Get You a Woman” (here), “Hello It’s Me,” (here), and “I Saw the Light” (here).

We’ve covered his first major gig as a producer, The Band’s Stage Fright album (here), and the record that appeared to cement his reputation as a hit-maker, We’re an American Band by Grand Funk (Railroad) (here).

Also his involvement in producing Badfinger’s hit singles off their Straight Up album, “Baby Blue” (here), and “Day After Day” (here).

Plus producing the first all-female rock group to release an album on a major label, Fanny (here), and rescuing Bat Out of Hell from never making music history here.

Today we end our examples of Todd’s producing chops with the incomparable Patti Smith.

Song of the day

In case you don’t know, Patti Smith has a self-titled substack and posts regularly from her home and while she’s on the road doing tours. Her daughter with her late husband MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, Jesse Paris Smith, is also a musician and has recently started up her own substack.

According to Patti, she met Todd Rundgren when he was making Stage Fright with The Band. As she tells it in Just Kids, her friend and mentor, the singer-songwriter Bobby Neuwirth, took her to see Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at the Fillmore East and then they drove up to Woodstock where the album was being made. While Robbie Robertson slaved over “Medicine Man” and everyone else went off to party, she sat talking with Todd until dawn.

They discovered that they had roots in the same part of Pennsylvania, as her grandparents lived close to where he was from, and that they “were also oddly similar — sober, work-driven, judgmental, idiosyncratic wall flowers.” She found as she hung out and went to concerts with him that she “knew it would be interesting because Todd usually gravitated toward the unusual.”

As we can expect from memories of happenings over forty years ago, Todd has a divergent recollection of their first meeting as being not at Woodstock but at a party in New York, where “there was this skinny androgyne bobbing wide-eyed around the room and somehow we settled on the stairs and jabbered for a couple of hours,” following which they left the party and wandered around the city together.

Todd had never met anyone like her. “We were both skinny and androgynous and smart and outsiders and kind of perfect for each other at that moment. We were generous with each other as no one else was with us. I had no better friend. We saw the world through a common lens. We were still raw and street and yet evolving. An evolution that would eventually throw us into different orbits… yet we seemed to have been the most natural friends.”

Todd came back into Patti’s orbit when she asked him to produce her fourth album, what he called a dream come true as he “had always wanted to do something creative with her.” He was also let in on her secret, that she was retiring from music for a while to settle down with Fred in Michigan and build a family.

It turned out to be an unusual producing assignment for Todd. “There was not a lot I could offer as guidance since the inner dynamic of the band, fragile as it was, didn’t need outside meddling. Fred never appeared at the sessions but was ever-present in that he was giving Patti constant feedback throughout the process, which did not bother me but didn’t help me understand any better what the target was. Still, I was happy spending time around Patti and helping out as much as I could.”

He also admitted that he “was somewhat torn how to approach it since [he] was always biased towards her poetics and she was just coming off a radio hit co-written with Springsteen [‘Because the Night’]. The presumed single was Frederick, a very uncharacteristic love song that kind of needed an uncharacteristic production in an album of mystical and sometimes angry and militant songs.”

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Oh, the challenges of working with a friend. You should have asked me, Todd. I would have said, “Don’t do it, dude. It’s an effin’ minefield.” Based on my own hard-won experience, of course. But you were getting paid a producer’s fee, so forget what I just said. You appear to have handled the whole ‘scene’ with a deft touch anyway.

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The album, called Wave, was released in May 1979 on Arista. We have it direct from label head Clive Davis — who devotes a chapter of his autobiography to Patti Smith and Lou Reed — that it “had some standout songs, including ‘Dancing Barefoot,’ which a number of artists, most notably U2 and R.E.M, have covered, and it did fairly well for an album without a big single.” As Todd admits, it had “mixed reviews, which probably didn’t bother her that much since soon after she retired from the biz and became a wife and mother.”

It was to be the Patti Smith Group’s final album, and Patti’s last album until she returned as a solo artist in 1988 with Dream of Life (produced by Fred Smith and Jimmy Iovine for Arista).

My own personal favorite from the Patti Smith Group is “Dancing Barefoot,” written by Patti and Ivan Král, and dedicated to women such as artist Jeanne Hébuterne, muse and common-law wife of painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani.

Let’s listen to one of the best falling-in-love-and-heaven-help-me songs ever written, “Dancing Barefoot”:

Song credits

Songwriters - Patti Smith, Ivan Král

Producer - Todd Rundgren

Patti Smith Group:

• Jay Dee Daugherty – drums, consultant

• Lenny Kaye – guitar, vocals

• Ivan Kral – bass guitar, guitar, keyboards

• Richard Sohl – piano

• Patti Smith – vocals

Additional musicians:

• Andi Ostrowe – percussion

• Todd Rundgren – bass guitar

Technical:

• Vic Anesini – mastering

• Todd Rundgren - engineer

• George Carnell – assistant engineer

• Tom Edmonds – assistant engineer