Help Me Out Here...

Do people actually enjoy the music of Todd Rundgren? Really, do people park their butts on the couch and say, "Phyllis, fetch my slippers--tonight, I'm gonna re-cline and bathe in the bittersweet melodies of the Todd." Is there some joke that I'm not getting?

I've tried to listen to this clown for years, and every time I'm left to wonder, "What am I doing this for?" Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps it's because people (friends, writers, connoisseurs) whom I respect mention his name from time to time--and not as a punchline, either! (What do you get when you cut cocaine with hairspray, VD and the eyebrows of George Harrison? Todd Rundgren. Or: What's the difference between a bucket of poop and Todd Rundgren? Todd Rundgren plays keyboards. Not very funny, I know, but I'm not getting paid for this.)

Anyway, last night I gave this so-called pop music genius/studio whiz another shot, dropping the needle on his 1978 opus, The Hermit of Mink Hollow. Three songs into this slick-as-shit, pop-goes-the-fart crap fest, I yanked the LP off the turntable, returned it to its jacket, and tossed it in the box of castoffs about to make the final leg of their round-trip journey from the thrift store.

Maybe I'll have better luck with the Alan Parsons Project.

Kill the Queen

I found him: the single person who claims ownership of one of the worst musical mutilations in the history of the world—the live rock ’n’ roll travesty known as Return of the Champions, by Queen + Paul Rodgers. That person, as I was dismayed to learn the other night, is my spin class teacher (yeah, I get my rocks off wearing tight shorts and sweating on a stationary bike). And on that night he showed no shame (or mercy), only unbridled enthusiasm, in using arena-rock afterbirth as a means to motivate his troops: he allowed three songs of that shit rain down from the ceiling-mounted Bose speakers during the hour-long class. As if Queen with the flamboyantly histrionic Freddie Mercury wasn’t awful enough — hell, why wasn’t their music tossed into the coffin with Mercury’s rotting corpse and buried forever? No longer would our sensitive ear hairs be bulldozed by the high-decibel battering rams of “We Are the Champions,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and of course “We Will Rock You” at all kinds of public events—dog shows, football games, public executions. OK, there’s no dethroning Queen. Fine. But, Paul Rodgers and Queen? Who arranged this summit of shit? Have you heard the live album I’m talking about? Probably not. Hopefully not. Hopefully, we 15 unlucky pedal-pushers are the only ones (besides the thousands of stupid Brits who paid money to have their cheers recorded between songs) to have had our aural cavities violated by this crap. It’s enough to suffer on a bike. But to suffer on a bike while Paul “I Still Feel Like Makin’ Love But Require a Heroic Dose of Viagra in Order to Be Makin’ Love” Rodgers is pushing you up an imaginary hill farting out karaoke-style renditions of “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” is dreadful and depleting. Lucky for us, we were granted a reprieve — instead of Queen and Rodgers, we cooled down to “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

One footnote: I dropped in on Wikipedia for a little fact-checking. Curiously, the entry for Queen + Paul Rodgers does not credit my spin class teacher as the lone American owner of Return of the Champions. How could they have omitted this detail?