“Open My Eyes” / “Hello It’s Me” – Doyle’s Space: Music Hall of Fame – SOS Award

The Nazz’s “Open My Eyes” / “Hello It’s Me” was the group’s debut single, released in 1968 on SGC Records at the beginning of the band’s brief but influential career. The Nazz were a Philadelphia-area rock group formed around Todd Rundgren, who was already emerging as the band’s principal songwriter, guitarist and studio-minded musical force.

Both songs were written by Rundgren, and the pairing is especially interesting because the two sides show radically different aspects of his early songwriting. “Open My Eyes” was the official A-side, a hard-edged psychedelic-rock number built around distorted guitar, pounding drums and a forceful vocal, while “Hello It’s Me” was a slow,

wistful ballad that revealed an unexpectedly sophisticated melodic and emotional side of the teenage Rundgren. “Open My Eyes” was the more obvious choice for an A-side because it captured the sound of the Nazz as a young psychedelic-rock band. The song begins with a powerful guitar figure and develops into a compact, energetic performance filled with

the heavy guitar sound and dramatic production associated with late-1960s rock. Rundgren’s guitar work is particularly important to the recording, and the song demonstrates how strongly he had absorbed the influence of British groups such as the Who while already beginning to develop his own approach. Lyrically, “Open My Eyes”

can be understood as a plea for awakening or a desire to see the world more clearly. Its psychedelic atmosphere makes an altered-state interpretation possible, but the lyrics are sufficiently general that the song can also be understood as a metaphor for emotional or intellectual awakening. Despite its strong reputation among rock listeners,

“Open My Eyes” did not become a major national hit. It reached only No. 112 on the Billboard Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart. Its commercial performance was nevertheless enough to establish the Nazz as a band worth watching in the underground and regional rock scene. The song later became considerably more important through its inclusion on

Lenny Kaye’s landmark 1972 compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. That compilation helped establish “Open My Eyes” as an important example of the psychedelic and garage-rock sound of the period, and its reputation has continued to grow among collectors and historians even though its original chart performance was modest.

The B-side, “Hello It’s Me,” turned out to have the more interesting commercial history. Rundgren wrote the song as a teenager, and its lyrics concern the complicated emotions involved in trying to remain connected with someone after a romantic relationship has ended. Rather than presenting a bitter breakup, the narrator still expresses affection and a desire to communicate,

creating a melancholy but unusually gentle portrait of separation. The song’s sophisticated melody is striking considering Rundgren’s age when he wrote it, and it provided an early indication of the pop craftsmanship that would become increasingly important throughout his career. The Nazz recording of “Hello It’s Me” features Stewkey,

whose lead vocal gives the song a fragile, intimate quality. Musically, it is considerably slower and more restrained than “Open My Eyes,” making the two sides almost seem like recordings by different bands. One of the most interesting facts about the song is that Rundgren later acknowledged that its harmonic foundation was inspired by the opening passage

of Jimmy Smith’s recording of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Rundgren took the basic harmonic idea and developed it into his own melody and song. His songwriting during this period was also influenced by sophisticated pop writers and performers such as Laura Nyro. Although “Hello It’s Me” was only the B-side, some radio stations preferred it to “Open My Eyes.”

The song eventually reached the Billboard chart and peaked at No. 66 in 1969, substantially outperforming the designated A-side. It also reached No. 41 in Canada. Its success was an early example of a record-company A-side being effectively overtaken by its flip side because radio programmers and listeners discovered that the B-side had greater commercial potential.

The Nazz therefore achieved their best chart showing with a song that had originally been placed on the back of their debut single. Rundgren did not abandon “Hello It’s Me” after the Nazz broke up. Instead, he completely reworked it for his 1972 solo album Something/Anything? The new recording bears relatively little resemblance to the Nazz version.

Rundgren transformed the slow ballad into a polished, rhythmic pop-soul performance featuring piano, keyboards, horns, backing vocals and a fuller studio arrangement. A shorter edit was released as a single, and after being reissued in 1973 it became a major hit, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became one of Rundgren’s signature songs and is now much more familiar to the general public than the original Nazz recording. The contrast between the two versions of “Hello It’s Me” is particularly revealing.

The Nazz recording sounds like the work of a young psychedelic-rock band experimenting with a surprisingly tender ballad, while Rundgren’s later solo version presents the same composition as sophisticated early-1970s pop. The melody and lyrics survived the transformation because the underlying song was strong enough to work in radically different settings. Rundgren subsequently performed the song throughout his career, and it has been recorded or performed by a number of other artists. The two sides of the Nazz single therefore represent much more than a

straightforward debut-rock 45. “Open My Eyes” introduced the band with the aggressive psychedelic sound that most immediately identified them with the late-1960s rock scene, while “Hello It’s Me” revealed the songwriting talent that would ultimately carry Todd Rundgren far beyond the Nazz. The commercial history is almost perfectly reversed from what the record label originally intended: the A-side became a cult classic, while the B-side became a genuine hit and,

in Rundgren’s later version, one of his most recognizable songs. For that reason, “Open My Eyes” / “Hello It’s Me” is an unusually important debut single, capturing Rundgren at the beginning of a career in which he would move effortlessly among psychedelic rock, pop, soul, progressive music and ambitious studio production. The record is also significant because it demonstrates how quickly Rundgren’s songwriting was developing. “Open My Eyes” shows his ability to write a concise,

guitar-driven rock song that fit comfortably into the psychedelic climate of 1968, while “Hello It’s Me” shows that he was already capable of writing an emotionally subtle pop ballad. The two songs became the foundation of the Nazz’s reputation and foreshadowed the much broader musical career that followed. Although the Nazz existed for only a few years and never achieved the commercial success their talent might have suggested, this first single has endured as one of the most interesting documents of Todd Rundgren’s earliest creative period.