John Lennon Wrote a Scathing Letter to Todd Rundgren for Calling Him a ‘F***ing Idiot’
Many musicians have praised John Lennon for shaping their careers, but Todd Rundgren is not among them. After Rundgren made some less-than-flattering remarks about the former Beatle in an interview, Lennon lashed out. In a scathingly hilarious open letter, Lennon addressed Rundgren’s problems with him.
John Lennon wrote an open letter to Todd Rundgren
In 1974, Rundgren met Lennon at the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles. Lennon was in the middle of his drunken “lost weekend” — the 18-month period during which he was separated from Yoko Ono — and did not make the best impression. Several months later, Rundgren addressed their meeting and the lingering bad feeling it left him in an interview with Melody Maker.
“John Lennon ain’t no revolutionary,” Rundgren said, per the book The John Lennon Letters. “He’s a f***ing idiot.”
It didn’t take long for Lennon to discover the interview and respond to Rundgren. He noted he “couldn’t resist adding a few ‘islands of truth’ of my own, in answer to Turd Runtgreen’s howl of hate (pain).” After acknowledging that he liked Rundgren’s music, he addressed the interview.
“I guess we’re all looking for attention Rodd, do you really think I don’t know how to get it, without ‘revolution?’ I could dye my hair green and pink for a start!” he wrote, addressing Rundgren’s dyed hair and assertion that Lennon was attention-seeking.
He added that he believed Rundgren’s criticism was coming from a personal, unrelated place.
“I don’t represent anyone but my SELF,” he wrote. “It sounds like I represented something to you, or you wouldn’t be so violent towards me. (Your dad perhaps?)”
Lennon signed off the letter by guessing at the root of Rundgren’s anger and saying he still liked him.
“I think that the real reason you’re mad at me is cause I didn’t know who you were at the Rainbow (L.A.) Remember that time you came in with Wolfman Jack? When I found out later, I was cursing cause I wanted to tell you how good you were. (I’d heard you on the radio.) Anyway, However much you hurt me darling; I’ll always love you.”
What did Todd Rundgren say about John Lennon?
Years later, Rundgren reflected on the public spat with Lennon. He believed that Lennon’s behavior directly contradicted the messages he tried to convey in his music.
“My opinion at the time was that if you’re going to encourage people to change the world you have to have a certain amount of personal credibility, and if you start going backwards and abusing women when ostensibly you are supposed to be a feminist, it’s time to either be just what you are or drop the revolutionary shtick and clean up your act,” he told Louder Sound.
Rundgren said the feud was overblown but still found Lennon’s response frustrating. Rather than accepting it as a legitimate critique, Lennon tried to write it off as Rundgren’s projected personal issues.
“So this started a whole faux conflict between us,” he said. “His take on it – as his take was on just about everything in those days because he and Yoko were involved in this primal scream therapy which had gotten into his music – was that he attributed my commentary down to some issues I might be having with my father. Anything that happened at that time John attributed down to some infantile issues.”
More than one musician has criticized The Beatles
Rundgren’s problems were with Lennon’s personality less than his music, but there were other artists who outright disliked The Beatles. Quincy Jones thought the band were terrible musicians, The Who’s Pete Townshend said the band’s backing tracks sounded weak on their own, and Elvis tried to report the band to Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.
“The Beatles? I never liked The Beatles, I thought they were garbage,” Lou Reed said in 1987, per Blank on Blank. “I don’t think Lennon did anything until he went solo. But then too, he was like trying to play catch up. He was getting involved in choruses and everything. I don’t want to come off as being snide, because I’m not being snide, what I’m doing is giving you a really frank answer, I have no respect for those people at all. I don’t listen to it at all, it’s absolute s***.”
