Rundgren had rented the home a year earlier, while recording his albums “Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren” and “Something/Anything?” In the book “A Wizard, A True Star,” drummer N.D. Smart recalled staying with Rundgren. “There was a grand piano on a white rug,” Smart recalls, “At one point there was this gallows thing he’d had built in there too. I think because somebody had said, ‘We’re going to give you enough money to hang yourself.’” According to Smart, he and Rundgren would leave the house in the morning and head down to Sunset Boulevard for breakfast. “Todd drove like a maniac down that hill each morning,” says Smart. “After breakfast, we’d go make records until about six or seven at night.”  

Before long Rundgren realized he needed a new location. “I had a lot of musical freedom,” he recalls. “But I was still using other people’s tools. This was the first time I had done any serious recording of my own, alone.”  After recording many of the songs that would later appear on “Something/Anything?” at the Astral Drive house, Rundgren had amassed enough self-recorded material and was ready to get back to the studio. “I had an album and a half,” he says, “and while I could have continued to do more, I thought I’d like to just do something a little bit more fun.” 

Rundgren had planned to book an LA studio and record the remainder of the album live, but that plan was not to be as he later recalled. “In early 1971 there was an earthquake. It was the first I’d ever been in and I hated it. I had finished the recording at the house and we’d taken that photograph,” Rundgren explains “After we took that picture, I went to bed and an earthquake happened five hours later. It really messed with my head for a long time and was of the reasons I decided not to stay in California.”

I’m sure this wasn’t the first earthquake to drive someone back to NYC, but Rundgren had another common complaint about the city. “You had to drive to do anything in LA, I was used to New York, where you can walk everywhere.”

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