AUGUST 13, 1980 – Four masked robbers broke in to Todd Rundgren’s home in Woodstock, New York and proceeded to steal Hi-Fi equipment and paintings after tying up the musician along with his girlfriend and several houseguests.The incident came at a time when celebrities were beginning to fear for their safety from overzealous fans; as People noted the following year after a would-be assassin credited Jodie Foster with inspiring him to try and kill Ronald Reagan, the list of rock stars who’d suffered the dark side of fame included David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and John Lennon, who was murdered just a few months after Rundgren was robbed.Fortunately, Rundgren’s brush with danger was relatively minor. Some reports even suggested the thieves even treated their captives to renditions of of his hits, with one of the intruders humming his hit “I Saw The Light.” Years later, Rundgren chalked it up to the mistaken belief that rock stars have a lot of stuff worth stealing, particularly drugs.During a 2013 interview with the Guardian, Rundgren claimed the criminals “threatened to cut all my fingers off if I didn’t tell them where I hid all my cocaine, on the weird presumption that anybody in the music business had a lot of cocaine,” and even though he escaped the ordeal with all of his digits intact, he scoffed at the idea that he’d have a bunch of blow lying around the house.“It’s the drug that has the least return for your investment,” noted Rundgren. “I’d be more interested in having another psychedelic experience. Because I would get something from it. But you could pile all the cocaine in the world in front of me and I wouldn’t care.”
