Raphael Rudd may have gone to Julliard, but I get the feeling that his heart never left the humble halls of rock ’n’ roll. He’s played in bands, conducted orchestras, composed film scores, and built a richly diverse body of solo work. Emerging from the conservatory as an acclaimed young composer, he went on to make a name for himself as a top session player on both piano and harp. After enlisting the talents of Pete Townshend and Phil Collins for his 1980 album, the ambitious and spiritual The Awakening Chronicles, Rudd toured the world as keyboardist for the progressive rock band Renaissance. More recently, he continues to make his mark on music’s varied terrain, following his muse even into the land of grunge.
But it’s a set of rare live recordings from 1979 and 1980 -- the product of an acoustic collaboration with Pete Townshend -- that brought him to Rhino. Townshend and Rudd’s friendship and musical exchange grew out of mutual admiration and a common devotion to the Eastern spiritual leader Meher Baba. Just prior to the release of Townshend’s classic album, Empty Glass, they paired up for two benefit concerts, the recordings of which Rhino recently released as The Oceanic Concerts.
I had a chance to speak to Raphael Rudd about the new record and his musical and spiritual journey to date.
It must be incredibly exciting to have these concerts released. Why have they been buried for so long?
I’m thrilled. We didn’t really know they existed. I’m actually the only person in the world who had a copy of them on cassette. Pete must have had them somewhere in Eel Pie Studios, buried amidst a bunch of old stuff. By the mid-’80s he had taken that studio apart and redone it to record White City, and in doing so, a lot of tapes got misplaced or placed in different boxes. I was playing in a grunge rock band up in Portland with Jeremy Wilson, the singer from an old band called Dharma Bums. And Jeremy heard [these performances] and said, ‘This stuff really sounds great; it should come out.’ So I got a sequence, put it together, and sent it to Pete in England. Pete said, ‘Wow, I’d forgotten how powerful the actual performances were.’ So he got involved and remastered them on CD in a more final version, which is what Rhino has.
So we now have a beautiful remastered version of Pete Townshend and I performing pieces that were some of the first versions ever conceived. ‘Let My Love Open The Door’ he wrote a week prior to us doing it. ‘A Little Is Enough’ he must have written a day and a half before we did it. So they’re actually the first performed versions of those songs. And you also have pieces like ‘Bargain’ and ‘The Seeker,’ which were some of the earliest recordings of him singing pieces that he’d written for The Who with Daltrey. This is even before The Secret Policeman’s Ball.
With your and Pete’s compositions interspersed as they are on the album, how did you come up with the sequence?
Jane Brown, a very close friend of mine, worked on the sequencing with me, because she was at those live performances. They were interspersed live, where Pete did a couple of numbers, I did a couple, then we did a couple together, then I went back and played solo piano, and so on.
These shows were a benefit for a spiritual center. What’s its mission, and how was the guest list decided upon?
Meher Baba Oceanic is what it was called, and it was Pete’s center in England that honors and praises Meher Baba, who is our master. I met Meher Baba in 1958 as a baby. Pete didn’t have the fortune to meet him in the body, but has been following him since the late ’60s. Meher Baba was on the front cover of Rolling Stone in 1970, and the headline read ‘In Love With Meher Baba’ by Pete Townshend -- about a 13-page spread. So with the Oceanic center, Pete wanted to have an organized place where people could go and meet some of the old disciples of Meher Baba. And the downstairs was a recording studio, Eel Pie.
The guests were made up of Pete’s friends, my friends, a small group of Meher Baba people, and then some stars: Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues, Renaissance. There were about 100-200 people at each concert.
In a nutshell, who is Meher Baba?
Meher Baba is a spiritual master who came over [to the U.S.] in the ’30s, and whose main philosophy was, ‘I have not come to teach but to awaken,’ which means that, in his words, ‘All the books have already stated everything. Now it’s time to live the action of the words of truth, the words of God’ -- however you want to say it. Love with the heart. Act from the heart. Don’t just read books. It’s affected Pete and me very much in our lives, and is a very powerful influence on us musically.
Do you think that these performances offer up a side of Pete Townshend that maybe a lot of people don’t know?
Exactly. They’re hearing him sing these songs where he really does capture the essence of beauty and power, which is a mixture of what he is musically anyway.
These concerts happened shortly before the release of Pete’s Empty Glass, which came across as kind of a troubled album. But these concerts seem to be filled with a different spirit.
Empty Glass had a mixture of personal emotions. ‘Let My Love Open The Door’ is essentially ‘let Meher Baba’s love open the door to your heart.’ That was a clear-cut Meher Baba song. Same with another song called ‘A Little Is Enough’ -- a little of Meher Baba’s love. This is when Pete really stepped out and the albums became much more personalized -- an account of who Pete Townshend was, as opposed to who The Who were.
Pete enlisted you to arrange and conduct for Quadrophenia.
It was The London Symphony, The Royal Philharmonic, and The London Symphonetta, which were the three top orchestras. I was a kid -- I hadn’t even finished college. He had heard some orchestrations that I had done on a soft folk-rock album by my friend Bob Brown, who had introduced us. The next thing I knew, I got a call from Pete saying, ‘Come over. I’d like to record some of your music at Eel Pie studios. In exchange, whatever project I’m doing that I can use you on, I’ll have you work for me.’ That’s when Quadrophenia came up, and I did the soundtrack album and the final ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ sequence.
I was a kid and had never heard a note of my orchestration, nor had I ever conducted an orchestra in my entire life. I just said, ‘OK, I understand where Pete’s coming from.’ He gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I sat down at his piano at Eel Pie for about a week. I just sketched out what I heard in my head and said, ‘This is going to work. I can tell.’ And it did work. I was very pleased and quite relieved, and Pete and the orchestra were actually quite impressed.
That was one of my first experiences on a professional level with Pete. Then I grew in my style of music. I used his style of rhythmic guitar playing and adapted it to piano. He made a statement that, ‘Today we inspire each other on equal footing. I’m very influenced by Raphael’s piano playing.’ But it’s actually something I created based on his original guitar style.
What’s it like in the halls of Julliard?
A lot of competition. I like more melodic music, and they didn’t want to teach me that at Julliard, because they were not interested in stuff that was melodic in nature. So when I went to London and worked for The Who and Phil Collins and other people, I used the great melodies of pop music and combined them with my own more eclectic blend of music that I had somewhat learned in school, but in all frankness, the conservatory never proved to be a ground for me to write the kind of compositions that I wanted to write.
What would contrast with that environment?
Pete’s melodies were great. He was a composer himself. So here was someone I could relate to not only spiritually, but musically. He wasn’t your typical rock ’n’ roll composer, and I certainly wasn’t your typical classical composer.
What are you working on currently?
There’s possibly some video footage from these concerts. I think we’re going to try and get that released. There’s also the record of mine that Pete produced, called The Awakening Chronicles. I’m going to try and put that out as well. Pete also wrote the liner notes for that.
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