"Stage Fright" by The Band (1970) with Todd Rundgren as engineer/producer

Todd Rundgren Creator Series

Today is the fifth post in our series about music meister Todd Rundgren, but now we’re moving into his budding career as a recording engineer and producer.

It’s dedicated to my friend Hutch, with whom I shared a passion for the music of Cat Stevens in high school and who is about to run her first triathlon next week at age 68. Happy birthday, Hutch, and hope this inspiring tune banishes any stage fright!

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

We’ve also listened to “We Gotta Get You a Woman” (here) and to both versions of his biggest popular hit, “Hello It’s Me,” (here).

Yesterday we covered his other big hit on the pop charts, “I Saw the Light” (here).

Today is The Band’s “Stage Fright,” engineered and produced by Todd, which, if you were listening to the radio in 1970, you’ll recognize as soon as you hear it. It’s a fantastic song about something many artists experience and a rock ’n’ roll classic.

Here’s the story behind it…

Song of the day

One of Todd Rundgren’s first projects for Bearsville Studios was engineering singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester’s self-titled debut album, which Todd understood to be both a test and a gamble by Bearsville on him as a producer. The Band guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson had produced it and most of The Band members had participated in it, and according to Todd in his usual humorous and self-deprecating manner, “Things went well and I seemed to have a knack for mic placement so I was asked to engineer what would become Stage Fright.”

It sounds to have been a dream job for gadget and tech-loving Todd, as the studios they were supposed to use weren’t completed yet and they had to build a makeshift control room in a prop tent behind the Woodstock Playhouse, the alternative “facility” where the album was being recorded. (Note that the Woodstock Festival, at which The Band had performed the previous August, was not held in or near the town of Woodstock, but actually about 40 miles southwest in the town of Bethel, NY.)

If there was a project on which Todd earned his producing spurs, working on Stage Fright with The Band was the one. He had to deal with sound challenges and temperature extremes in the Playhouse — hot days and freezing nights — and numerous days waiting for band members to show up (including one time when Richard was discovered to have driven his car into a culvert).

But eventually the album was done and Todd flew across the Atlantic to mix the tracks with famous studio engineer Glyn Johns. Both Todd and Glyn had been promised the opportunity to mix the album, so they split the batch and mixed in different studios, then swapped batches, and once finished Todd brought the two mixes for each song back to The Band for consideration — who were not satisfied with any version! Todd helped them remix in the newly-opened Studio B at Bearsville, and the final tracks on the album are a combination of the three different mixes, with the attribution of final credit unclear to this day.

Todd admits that there was an age difference between him and the members of The Band, and that he was “a smartass with a short attention span.” Also worth mentioning is that his friend Randy had not yet introduced him to pot, whereas Robertson has said that the members of The Band were doing “a lot of drug experimenting” during the making of the album. Todd believes he would have gotten dismissed if not for “I was the only one who was sure to show up when everyone agreed to show up even if I was the only one to show up.”

Whatever the case, working on an album that surpassed The Band’s two previous albums, including The Band with its hits “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” going all the way to #5 on the Billboard albums chart, and which also became one of only three Band albums to achieve gold status, went far to cement Todd’s reputation as an up-and-coming producer with a bit of that magic touch.

Here’s the song considered by many to be the highlight of that album, one formally credited to Todd as producer, the title track “Stage Fright”:

Song credits

Songwriter - Robbie Robertson

Producers - The Band, Todd Rundgren

Recording engineer - Todd Rundgren

The Band:

• Robbie Robertson – electric guitar

• Garth Hudson – Lowrey organ

• Richard Manuel – piano, backing vocals

• Rick Danko – bass, lead vocals

• Levon Helm – drums

Mixing engineers - Todd Rundgren, Glyn Johns