Initiation

Religion often makes people do silly things and Initiation was just about the silliest thing that Todd Rundgren ever did.

Todd Rundgren Initiation

Todd Rundgren: Initiation

First, the good news:

Todd beat David Bowie to the punch, by some 18 months, becoming the first mainstream artist to provide pop music on one side of an album and instrumental music on the other. Unfortunately, David Bowie's instrumental music on Low is passionate, moving, deeply humane and became monstrously influential to a generation of European popsters, while Todd's was mostly considered to be, well, self-indulgent crap!

The other good news is that the well-loved Real Man, opens the album:

"...I see with my heart
Hear with my heart
I feel with my heart
Sometimes it works better

And some so-called friends
Put me down
And they pity me for trying
Bad emotions push me around

But the vision shines on and on
It will shine when we all are gone
You can find it in the hole
Where I keep my soul

There it is
Deep down
Inside me
There's a Real Man..."

Real Man

Unfortunately, in trying to compress about half an hour of pop music so that it could fit one side of an old vinyl album, Todd had to pull all the grunt out of the bottom end, making the resultant sound seriously limp. He achieved this by using a pioneering technique that I believe he developed, called "super micro-groove".

If you're interested, you can find a much more muscly version on Real Man on Todd's 1978 LIVE album, Back To The Bars (see the Hermit Of Mink Hollow review).

After Real Man, Initiation starts to go seriously off the rails. Though some of the music is actually quite thrilling, the recording compression makes it sound very tinny and the words are...well...like his band Utopia's lyrics of the time, seriously and er...embarrassingly cosmic! In fact, if some hippy band wanted to re-record a few tracks from "Initiation":

Real Man
Born To Synthesize (acapella, treated by Vocoder)
Eastern Intrigue &
Initiation

...and then re-record the excellent but mega-cosmic new songs premiered on the Utopia's LIVE album "Another LIVE", Todd's other release from 1975...

Another Life
The Wheel
The 7 Rays

...they might have the best hippy album of all time...and possibly a hit, if they were marketed properly. As it is, though, the lyrical content for Initiation is just far too extreme for a Todd Rundgren album:

The vocoder acapella call-from-the-universal-minaret Born To Synthesize is utterly bizarre...

"...A handful of nothing is all that I need
It contains plus and minus everything
The odd combinations are what make up
The world that you see before you

In one hand I hold what people call good
The rest I hold in the other
But these are just symbols to the perfected minds
Of which we are but mere reflections

I was born to synthesize
Energize and catalyze
I was born to synthesize..."

Born To Synthesize

...and The Death Of Rock'n'Roll is downright pompous...

"...Just the other day I got a call from a friend
I heard what you been playin' and I think its a sin
Why can't you make a living like the rest of the boys
Instead of fillin' your head with all that synthesized noise?

Jackals wait nearby, watching rock and roll die...

...It must be the death of rock and roll..."

The Death Of Rock And Roll

but it does have some fairly aggressive maul-guitar attacks.

Eastern Intrigue, about the over-abundance of so-called "spiritual paths", though genuinely funny, is also more than a little ridiculous:

"...As the sun rises in the East
And the wind blows the fog across the bay
As the hand of man creeps across...
...the face of the world

Caught in a wave of glamor
Persian perfume and oriental eyes
Yogi in knots and Sufi wise
Master sublime and Swami high
Throw in some voodoo on the side
...And a dash of the old Kung Fu

Lord you've got me
Strung out on Eastern Intrigue..."

Eastern Intrigue

"...Eastern Intrigue is a bizarre mixture of lyrical exotica, quirky vocal harmonies and poignant musical balladry, not to mention some of the most complex jazz-based harmony you'd find..." Amazon reviewer samhot

Initiation, the title track is a surging pop-prog-rocker but should have never been considered for a Todd Rundgren album. Instead, it would have made a brilliant cosmic Utopia track!

"... Brilliant stars splash down across a crystal sky
And the moon and the sun and the earth are one
See the shining soul break the ring-pass-not
Spiraling upward and it shall be revealed
The spirit is free
The universe wants it to be, it calls you and me
Love has come, Love has come
Over under, it shall be revealed..."

Initiation

The final song, Fair Warning, is certainly a candidate for the worst track Todd ever released. Todd slows his voice down so he sounds like Barry White and speaks this intro...

"...You know, wishing won't make it so
Hoping won't do it, praying won't do it
Religion won't do it, philosophy won't do it
The supreme court won't do it,
The president and the congress won't do it
The U.N. won't do it, the H-bomb won't do it
The sun and the moon won't do it
God won't do it
And I certainly won't do it
That leaves you, youll have to do it..."

Fair Warning

So far, so good (?) but what follows is seven minutes of well meaning but utterly self-indulgent nonsense. B-l-a-h!

What was Side 2 of the vinyl album, A Treatise On Cosmic Fire, is half an hour of, I won't mince words, instrumental pap. That's not to say there isn't some fine guitar...but for me, the music is just so dull! Mind you, there seems a clique of Amazon reviewers who are convinced that A Treatise On Cosmic Fire is greatly under-rated, so my condemnation certainly isn't the final word!

Bookended by pyrotechnic guitar solos, most of the piece consists of a lengthy synthesizer solo that actually sounds like a lot of the electronica acts that appeared two decades later..." Amazon.co.uk blurb

"...A Treatise On Cosmic Fire", which was, and remains, a jaw-dropping-ly masterful work of musical expression. Perhaps by today's standards the electronic gadgetry used sounds a bit cheesy but back then it was an aural experience unlike any other. And that music! Absolutely beautiful. And rocking. And funny. And mesmerizing. But most of all, just plain ingenious..." Amazon reviewer Jeff Gower

"...Treatise On Cosmic Fire" (no, don't laugh) which was side 2 on the original record (now tracks 7 to 18 on the CD)...is a one-man tour de force where Todd played all the synthesisers, keyboards, guitars etc - though it's very unlike Mike Odfield's comparatively bland Tubular Bells! Some incredible soundscapes and surprising touches of Leonard Bernstein-style melodies. You'll just have to listen to it and make up your own mind!..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer "cpstanley101"

Incidentally, you can catch some of Treatise on Youtube.

Should you buy Initiation?

Certainly not, unless you're:

a Todd completist
a Todd fan who has wonderful memories to rekindle ("Power to you!" is what I say)
a hippy, in which case you may be thrilled to hear such cosmic music from the spheres
a recording engineer historian who want to hear what was and wasn't possible in the 1970s
very eccentric or
biased me, who hears snippets of a guy I love amongst a lot of dross

Todd Rundgren: Initiation

"...Todd Rundgren's Initiation is like a dream I never want to end. It might take a little time to get settled into this masterpiece, but you wont regret it...The last song is an album all in itself, it will bring you to planet Todd...." Amazon reviewer J. Coronado

N.B.: New Age fans of Initiation may also enjoy my movie review for Baraka.

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