...Todd's an easy-going guy, super nice and fun to chat to, and he's passionate about most things that concern him. Especially music. But in this case, Todd wanted to discuss a charitable pursuit instead.
You see, Todd Rundgren truly cares about the world and other people.
Todd: "I'll get home from this tour for Thanksgiving and then I have to deliver an album by the first of 2015. So my next couple of months are committed in one of two ways: either finishing this tour or getting my record done. But we have layers of things going on over that.
"Our non-profit foundation got its IRS 501(C)(3) certification, got it in record time too. It's called the Spirit of Harmony Foundation and it's actually kind of a roots-up thing. We were having a fan camp a year and some months ago on a plantation outside of New Orleans, you know, and I have this very peculiar fan base. They're not just like, 'play 'Hello It's Me' ... 'play 'Hello It's Me.' They have a more complete worldview, I guess.
"And they (the fans) decided they wanted to do something for New Orleans, since we were down there and something in particular which would assist a music program that had been affected by Katrina.
"And so we found this little program down in the Lower Ninth Ward and the fans all collected money without any exhortation from me; in fact I didn't know anything about it. They came up with more than $10,000 and we went down and the kids did a recital for us and then we presented them with the big check. And everybody had so much fun doing that and got good feeling from doing that I was approached later by some fan representatives and they said, 'we want to make this a permanent thing and you have to be the figurehead.' So we came up with the concept of the Spirit of Harmony Foundation. Our website is about to go live and our holiday fundraising letter is about to go out."
Ed Vigdor and Jean Lachowicz are those "fan representatives" who raised the money for New Orleans' Katrina victims, organizing three buses for the trip to the Lower Ninth Ward and so many other logistics. And then, these two impresarios pitched Todd on the foundation idea moving forward. Vigdor is now Chairman and Lachowicz is Executive Director of the Spirit of Harmony Foundation.
As Lachowicz told me, the whole foundation concept came about somewhat fortuitously and organically before the New Orleans' initiative. "I'd been doing non-profit work for 30 years," Lachowicz related, "when the earthquake and resulting tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, I was a little Todd fan on Facebook and put up a post about 'who's willing to help?' Then I wrote to Ed, who'd been a friend of Todd's for years and said, 'I can set-up a website.'" Apparently, it snowballed from there.
Vigdor had no experience whatsoever in the non-profit world, only the entertainment industry. So he and Lachowicz were a mismatched pair indeed. "What music education can do for our kids and our society is now a moral imperative," Vidor told me with certainty. "Not just to educate kids but to help make them better people and improve society. We are a grass-roots movement to make sure kids get to receive an education in music."
Todd continued, "The basic thrust though, is not to be raising money all the time and then be giving people piles of money. We're really in the synergy business in a way, and kind of like arming people who are trying to get music programs started in schools. Most of the programs we work with are independent from any school systems and therefore, they struggle for their funding all the time. And that's because, schools when there's something to be cut in the budget, Arts programs go first. We're not just talking about the conventional reasons of 'oh, it keeps kids out of trouble' or 'it gives them a reason to come to school' ... that's kind of the obvious, conventional wisdom. We're trying to leverage actual empirical data.
"We've got an association with Northwestern University, who's been doing studies of the effect of early music studies on the brain. And how it actually permanently changes the way that you think. So if you have two years of early musical education with an instrument and then you give it up after two years, you've already made your brain work differently and that will be useful to you for the rest of your life. Because people who understand music, listen to music and sound in a different way than other people do and sound is such an important part of our input. So if you have a different way of parsing sound, you're seeing the world in a different way. Or hearing the world in a different way.
"So what we want to do is arm people who have to go to school boards and things like that, either to start a program or because the program is facing cuts, we want them to have real ammunition, to say 'this is a critical part of education, especially early education.' This doesn't require us to raise gadzillions of dollars, it just requires us to package the data. We need to be slim, trim and as effective as possible, focusing away from constant fundraising and trying to build up our bank account, so we're just doling out the interest. We want to do whatever we can to start connecting people now; connect the need with the resource; monitor the results; and then hopefully, just stay out of the way of that."
Todd was obviously WAY into his Spirit of Harmony Foundation and was filled with hope and great expectations.
Todd has a new electronic dance album, "Global" that came out on April 7th and he is now touring to support it with a DJ and two back-up singers/dancers; no band. Jean Lachowicz told me about the difference in this Todd' album. "The reason 'Global' is so important is that every song is about activism. The lyrics from every song are such calls to action."
On Saturday, April 18, the Spirit of Harmony Foundation presented its Symposium on the Moral Imperative of Music Education at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
